I was thinking about exactly this the last couple days. It's a little nerve wrecking to consider dipping into the stack, but even if you're spending, your purchasing power is still likely increasing. On top of that, if the venture you're pursuing with the capital adds value back to the ecosystem, the virtuous cycle can get greatly magnified. A civilizational hack indeed!
Being too early is just as deadly as being too late.
[Thomas Edison's concrete houses](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Portland_Cement_Company), any startup with a novel product society isn't ready for yet, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", etc.
What if Bitcoin - in this accumulation stage - is the first viable backstop to that problem? If an early innovator holds enough bitcoin and the price appreciates just more than their overhead, they can stay "disastrously early" for however long it takes to flip over into "just in time!". And society reaps the rewards of an invention it may never have seen or seen much later.
Bitcoin appears to be providing this service _to itself_ as well. That's combinaton is a goddamn civilization hack right there....
If this is true, we're playing with an **innovation tractor beam that drags the future towards the present unlike anything else** we've ever seen.
GM
Discussion
you can get GPT to do some monte Carlo simulations for you on this topic. It's called Perpetual Withdrawal.
this one had relatively bearish parameters wrt Bitcoin adoption:
a solo founder with low overhead and a small-ish investment might be able to stay in business for ~forever as they bring their freaky idea into reality.
I look around nostr and lighting and wonder sometimes if that's not exactly what's going on...
Anyone claiming to have a 95% likely infinite money printing machine is selling you a bridge.
do you think it's 95% likely that a billion dollars today could buy you a sandwich a day for 15 years?
15 years is not "indefinitely."
A billion dollars beating out devaluing of the currency and buying you a sandwich a day on top of that indefinitely, with 95% certainty, no, and anyone that can promise you that with 95% certainty is lying to you. Spending a little piece of that billion a day for a sandwich, losing some purchasing power over time, sure, but now you're just talking about spending the money. Anyone can spend little pieces of a billion dollars and not really feel it, quantify it and you'll find something different.
add purchasing power growth to the "spending little pieces" picture (and keep the spending under the growth).
To maintain purchasing power, best case scenario, you have to beat out the "risk free rate." Of course, it isn't actually risk free, so you have to go further than that in reality. And then, on top of that, you have to gain purchasing power to afford your sandwich, indefinitely, with a 95% guarantee, that is, with almost no risk at all.
What you're essentially saying is that bitcoin is immune to risk. You're describing a perpetual motion machine.
I'm not saying that. I'm talking about probabilities and historical performance.
You're talking about a >95% guarantee of a 2% average monthly return on something indefinitely, on capital that isn't producing economic output. On top of that, it's just chatgpt telling you that. I'm just pointing out that one ought to be highly skeptical of such a claim.
At best, bitcoin can preserve purchasing power indefinitely. In the short term, it can siphon wealth off late adopters as hard money, or give the older a cantillion effect like benefit in times of population growth. It cannot (and nothing short of a fleet of robots that make you everything you desire and maintain their own fleet can) preserve it's purchasing power and give you an additional return, especially not of 24% annually (ignoring compounding for simplicity) indefinitely.