To me it sounds very similar to art patronage, in that it doesn’t matter at all how much money people have. What matters is that there is a culture of people who know what to do with the money, and that they are the ones who have a lot of money. Maybe they can’t rise to the top in the current world, but they can certainly stack sats and get there by other means.
Discussion
Could Scaled Composites have been funded privately by Bitcoiners instead? Could it be funded privately by Bitcoiners 10 years from now?
There are similar sorts of things that bitcoiners could fund today, better, in fact. There is a latency to people realizing what is possible in hardware and the world is not what it was 1-2 decades ago.
Yes but Bitcoiners want to see skin in the game, and I would imagine it’s very expensive to see “scale models” or samples of what can be done.
I agree. I was reading the other day about how Poincaré observed the aesthetic nature of physics models and was able to use it as a reliable, overarching meta-heuristic.
This is also why I put together the website Civilization Metrics, so that anyone who is concerned with honest pursuits in science and engineering could have a reference framework for how to know if something actually matters.
It’s a very helpful site, thank you!