Yes, many questions left to be asked and need to be asked. Which is frustrating in the #bitcoin world to see capitalism protected by its few religious followers.
Discussion
Bitcoin made me start to question everything, and I literally mean everything. We have to go back to first principles to really understand the structure.
“Capitalism” and “socialism” are not analytical terms anymore.
They are rhetorical weapons. They are used mostly to identify what tribe someone is in, and who the enemies of that tribe are. They no longer describe systems, which is how they started. They signal allegiance, not alignment.
An -ism does three things at once:
1. Collapses multiple variables into one label
2. Smuggles moral valence into description
3. Freezes inquiry by pretending the system is already defined
We've been given a gift, an exit from the cage that we've been locked in. But the only way to see the path is through inquiry and critical thinking, questioning everything.
I agree with that. I’m okay with throwing out all preconceptions of any -ism. It’s a little odd that this happens when we are literally at the end stages of capitalism as we know it from previous understandings, but hey let’s move forward.
So why don’t we throw the term capitalism away because capitalism and free markets have never existed together and never will.
Capitalism should mean any system that uses capital (stock x velocity) to do work. And that's every single system process ever, going back through 4 billion years of evolution. It's functionally meaningless. I don't think we are at the end stage of capitalism. I think we haven't defined it properly yet. Ownership and who owes what to whom is debt based thinking. That's what I want to throw into the trash.
So you are saying capitalism has nothing to do with property rights, self interest incentives, or profits?
I'm not saying what it means, I'm just presenting the question. What SHOULD it mean?
Oh, lol, honestly I don’t typically use the word “should”. I can only assume we would use Adam Smiths defining tenets of Capitalism.
He wrote Wealth of Nations in 1776. We have learned a lot since then.
He defined capital as "that part of a man's stock which he expects to afford him revenue."
Notice the framing: capital as a subset of **stock**.
Smith wasn't wrong—he was emphasizing one component. He divided capital into "fixed capital" (durable goods like machines) and "circulating capital" (consumable goods like raw materials and wages). Throughout his analysis, he understood capital as active—stock being deployed toward production, not sitting idle.
But by anchoring the definition to stock—to accumulated things rather than transformation rate—Smith inadvertently set economic thinking on a path toward emphasizing accumulation over velocity.
**The focus began shifting from "how fast can you convert resources into value" to "how much do you possess."**
Yes, but I believe the focus of Smiths tenets was really the self interest and profit incentive…those being the main driving force. Do you agree?
Are we dependent on his motivations in 1776 to decide our actions in 2026?
I know I'm not.
No, not at all but we need a baseline and not a moving target.
To you, is profit and self interest incentives key tenets of capitalism?
No. I find them to be distractions. But then I reject the debt based framing of capitalism that you are using, entirely, so that shouldn't be a surprise.
That is very interesting. So capitalism to you is just the transaction between two or more people?
The current definition of capitalism—profit motive plus self-interest—describes participant behavior, not system architecture. It's like defining a bridge by how drivers behave on it rather than by the load paths that keep it standing.
What we call 'capitalism' today is actually debt-based extraction wearing capitalism's name. It optimizes for profit by borrowing from future capacity—inflating stock through credit creation, degrading velocity infrastructure through deferred maintenance, and preventing exit to hide insolvency. The accounting equation 'revenue minus costs equals profit' measures extraction efficiency, not capital function.
Wealth-based capitalism means systems where capital actually works: Stock × Velocity → Work. Capital isn't money to be extracted. Capital is the multiplicative relationship between accumulated capacity and conversion rate that produces sustained output. Profit isn't the goal—it's a signal that work is being produced efficiently. Self-interest isn't the engine—it's what exit rights harness to discipline conversion systems.
The difference is geometric, not moral. Debt-based systems can generate massive profits while destroying capital. Wealth-based systems generate sustainable returns because they maintain capital. One optimizes the accounting equation. The other maintains the multiplication that makes the accounting possible.
Economics is the study of transactions. Politics is the study of human interactions. Civilization walks on two feet, one is economics and the other is politics. If we study what these things actually are, the picture becomes clear. If we distract ourselves with the hype of 300 years of extraction memes, we trip on the language and get nowhere.
Rand got the incentives right but missed the architecture entirely. Self-interest doesn't automatically produce good outcomes. Self-interest plus exit rights produces selection pressure that forces systems to serve rather than extract. Remove exit and self-interest becomes extraction. Maintain exit and self-interest becomes optimization.
We're not arguing about whether self-interest should drive economic activity. We're arguing about what system architecture channels self-interest toward building rather than consuming.
I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring this comment. Will respond when time allows.
I don't know what he wanted, I only know what he wrote. He was trying to describe what he saw from his investigations. He did a pretty good job. Now the world is in our hands to shape.
I also greatly appreciate the dialogue and conversation so far. Thank you for your time.
Yeah, people are at different points down the rabbithole. As nostr:nprofile1qqsd7pkjrm98cxwgn5z5je9jm83stfp9a00rgspukrnev6589v3strcpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqprdmhxue69uhkummnw3ez6vfwde3x7tnpdenkzmnf9e3k7mg4yqp is saying, part of what nostr:nprofile1qqsg86qcm7lve6jkkr64z4mt8lfe57jsu8vpty6r2qpk37sgtnxevjcpz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqzrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqaktkhj was saying in the video too, people end up meaning very different things.
I don't really use the isms much anymore because they're just trigger words. Ideologies are just programs that keeps us fighting and puts a frame around our minds so we don't see the system for what it is.
Fiat is word magic, at its core. And words have become increasingly shallow and meaningless during the fiat age.
I've found that going back to old sources and clear thinking from before these spells were cast has helped me see things from the outside more. Words are thinking tools, and they have effectively been nerfed--they used to have much clearer, deeper meanings.
I think the schools have had big role in taking away the deeper meanings of words. Even civil war letters from regular farm boys in the 1800s are humbling to read now.
Take the word "literacy" itself. (Kind of an interesting example.)
It used to mean deeply knowing history and the source texts of our culture. The Bible, Aristotle, Homer, Seneca... Now it means just the basic ability to read and write.
Now everyone is "literate" but nobody knows what anything really means. That makes us useful but not dangerous to the system and more programmable.
I do the same thing, but then I dig down to the etymological roots of the word and question whether even they had the right conceptual framework for what we need. Frequently the answer is no. Clearest example in this case is Capital.
Capital did not begin as an economic term. Its roots lie in the Latin _caput_—head, source, origin. The word shares ancestry with "cattle," and this etymology is revealing.
In agrarian societies, a "head" of cattle represented something more sophisticated than modern accounting captures. The animal was simultaneously:
**Stock**: Physical asset, tangible wealth, something owned
**Velocity**: Transformation engine converting grass into milk, meat, muscle, and more cattle over time
The language carried both components naturally. When someone spoke of their "capital" in cattle, they meant the productive system—both the accumulated animals AND the rate at which those animals generated value through reproduction and yield.
Current uses of the word either focus on either stock OR velocity, infrequently both at the same time, and our entire use of the word in language flows back and forth between them. Makes it really difficult to nail down exactly what someone is talking about.
The way I use the word, capital is both stock and velocity.
Stock x Velocity -> Work
Good example of exactly what I mean. (And that is the Austrian sense of capital or capital structure.)
I truly believe that capitalism has run its coarse and it is unsustainable mainly do to its profit incentive and its centralization. Now, Bitcoin put the final arrow through capitalisms heart.
The solution will be property rights that are compatible with life essentials being freed from profits. Everything else will fall into place.
Sure, I get that but we can agree with what profit means.
Profit is the difference between what something costs and what it returns. But today's profits generate tomorrow's costs if the transaction doesn't serve the long term.
Correct. You can run a successful company where all bills are paid, and labor is paid with little to no profits.
I think you may be using the word profit where many of us would use the term "rent seeking". The old term is "usury". All human beings seek benefit. The question is donlmination and exploitation.
Entrepreneurs and competition are not evil, and are timeless and fundamental to human nature too. Entrepreneurs seeking margin bring tremendous good to the world. Deflationary money causes prices to fall to the cost of production and forces them to constantly innovate. The wealth created is naturally distributed to everyone by deflation.
When someone uses property as leverage to exploit others, that's wrong. We agree on that. But banning all profit or collective ownership would impoverish us in a tragedy of the commons. Property is natural and good.
You would ban all sex because some people misues it to hurt others, right? It is procreative and good, even though it can be misued.
I noticed that you are still pretty focused on capitalism ending, etc.
Ideologies don't exist. They are just figments of propaganda. They don't run the world and we don't fix the world by having the right one run it. That's all a psyop we've been sold. Usury, as a runaway process, is running the world. Or running away with it, you might say.
Bitcoin kills that process and we can just go back to being healthy.
Ideologies are just a distraction.
We can't let our anger and frustration distract us from coordination. Focus on signal, not noise.
I would need a breakdown in definition between profit and rent seeking.
Profit is just margin. The difference between what you pay for something and what you sell it for. If I travel to a far off land to buy spices, bring them back and sell them to you for a price that is worth more to you than the money you trade, both of us win. The margin is what you were willing to pay for someone to go get those spices for you.
If my neighbor can find a way to make the trip more efficient, he can give you a better price.
We compete and prices fall to the marginal cost of production. The world gets more efficient and thus we are all better off. Everyone's money is a little more useful and so we all get richer.
Rent seeking is I have a thing you need, or I can get the government to force you somehow, so I use my leverage over you to extract the maximum I can take from you. Often that will be more than you have, by a bond ("loan") so I take your freedom and then I can sell my claim on you future work and set up enforcement, regulation, etc.
One is a freely negotiated exchange of value, the other one is extortion.
We live in a world where these waters have been intentionally muddied. They have pretended that rent-seeking is fair play, called it "profit". Some people have reacted, understandably, by saying "well profit is evil then." But it's not. Profit is good. Usury is evil. There is a reason why that word is old and strange to us.
Profit is not margin. Profit is what’s above cost and labor.
Why do you consider labor to be separate from cost
Labor is a part of cost, all labor included. Most people complain if I don’t include labor because they believe with no profit the “owners” make zero money. Which is educated and self employed people like ourselves know these things but not everyone does.
If your goal is to reify something called capitalism and blame it. Go ahead, but it doesn't mean anything. That's just ideological programming. If you want to engage in real terms, but ideological checkers is boring and will never solve anything or get you closer to the truth.
Arguing over maps while ignoring the territory is pointless.
Is there a point you'd like to address that you can express in non-ideological terms?
If you have something I need to live, is it a negotiation on price? Who has leverage? Sounds like a paywall for something you know I need. Surely you can agree with that?
So if we have something that you need to live, we should give it to you without a price, ignoring the cost?
Absolutely not, it would operate just like co ops operate now. My power company is a co op.
I love cooperatives. But just because they don't focus on earning additional profits that they can provide to shareholders doesn't mean they don't try to lower their costs and manage their business operations in the exact same way as any other type of business entity.
Unfortunately we disagree there and there is mountains of historical evidence to back up that “for profit” leads to exploitation.
I think we're just talking past each other now. I'm talking about cooperatives, you might be talking about for profit companies, I can't even tell anymore.
The best way to prevent any change is to keep using the old language of debt based systems.
Moving on.
I agree with most of this but this is where my frustration begins. Adam Smith actually spells out what capitalism is and warns what it CAN and probably will become. Yet, it’s like he is forgotten and the excuses start.