Human Ingenuity

If this concept is not the absolute ruling stick for all future projections I’ll eat my hat. The first time it clicked for me was when my brother told me about Malthus. He was studying economics and was wild about learning new paradigms to tool his mind. We would often get lost in a dreamscape of argumentation together. My take away from this wasn’t necessarily that we could use paradigms as a tool, but there was a hunt for debunking paradigms such as the ridiculous assumptions Malthus used to try to “prove” his theory. What is commonly known as the Malthusian ceiling is the theory that while population growth is potentially exponential, it is limited by the amount of food that is available. The debunk here is that human ingenuity made it possible to produce orders of magnitude more food per unit of surface area cultivated. New harvesting technology, irrigation methods, greenhouse tech, it will never end. Malthus completely ignored human ingenuity. So in my opinion Malthus is now famous for being a presumptuous moron, incapable of seeing beyond his own frame of mind.

I hear so many still echo Malthus, now long after he’s been disproven, it worries me. Not only his own theory, but many take a “Malthusian” stand in describing limitations of progress. A modern example is that in order to have battery technology development you need mass production of the most scalable version of battery to date. People who think lithium ion is the end product are fooling themselves. There needs to be a market for innovation in order to see progress. Selling millions of lithium ion powered cars will enable the development of more efficient batteries that weren’t going to be produced otherwise.

Same goes for Bitcoin. We saw how base layer (on chain) transactions could easily be used for an entirely different function than most at first thought. Lightning Network transactions are the first step away from this limited concept, and I can tell you there will be more innovation you could simply not make up now. Imagine getting a million more engineers on board to come up with better ways to use Bitcoin, where we now have maybe a thousand devs working full time on Bitcoin. So stop saying full self custody is the end solution, don’t be presumptuous like that moron Malthus.