Hmm. These are great questions.

So what are a bad incentives?

Big pharma/medicine is only incentivized to sell drugs. If you aren’t sick or they develop a real solution to your problem they have no business. Bad incentive.

Grain farming is subsidized by the government so farmers make more money from industrialized, mono crop farming rather than regenerative agriculture involving holistic animal husbandry. Bad incentive.

Social media algorithms encourage more engagement from violence or sexuality. In order to get views and clicks, you’re gonna want to find a way to include those in your posts even if you’d rather post something meaningful. Bad incentive.

Solar energy is helped paid for by the US government even in states where it wouldn’t be efficient or useful to do so. This leads to unreliable energy and unstable power grids. Bad incentive.

What are good incentives? To me, good incentives are problems that are fun or meaningful for you to solve and if you can get paid to solve them then you’re winning at life. This is where entrepreneurs come in and fix the problems of the world through creative destruction.

There’s more to unpack but I need to go to bed now! GN! I’ll write more tomorrow.

Good incentives require consistent frameworks that apply to everyone, like the laws of physics. This is what makes bitcoin so special. It’s digital money based upon the laws physics. Fiat is pure fiction which is why it’s prone to manipulation and changes to the policy to suit one’s (the governments and banks) own needs. Playing a game with a child who keeps changing the rules so they win, that’s fiat. Who can run the fastest between two competitors, that’s bitcoin. The better performer wins and there’s no disputing the fact of that. There’s no way to manipulate and change the outcome by telling a different story. In the economic sense, using bailouts (money manipulation) to prop up dysfunction in the market, is telling a different story.

The level of manipulation is so high it’s difficult to comprehend the signal in all of the noise. But run with me on this: imagine that public health is left up to the free market on a bitcoin standard. There’s no credit in the system. Uncensored freedom of speech via Nostr is the norm. What would happen? I believe, the free market would organically decide through creative destruction (trial and error, entrepreneurship, technological innovation, etc) what the best solution to the problem of public health. Marketing and self funded “studies” can only go so far in a system without money or speech manipulation. You have to deliver REAL VALUE in a truly free market. So if a doctor is giving bad advice over and over, the free market will run them out of business by the market looking for better doctors who provide real, tangible value to people. Word of mouth spreads that doctor xyz is helping people. No censoring getting in the way. No excessive marketing campaigns built off of lies. You have to deliver what you promise because there’s no lender of last resort. You can only grift so hard before you run out of people to take advantage of.

I hope that makes sense. Thank you for allowing me to play out this thought experiment, I learned a lot. I might be wrong so please rebut me. I appreciate you engaging in discussion!