This is just temporary. The social media conglomerates are still centralized entities and will continue to be so until they eventually die out. I see no realistic opportunity for any of them to make a U-turn into a more decentralized model - there’s just too much big company bureocracy around these companies and of course lots of financial incentives to keep doing what they are doing - produce profits to shareholders. They can (and will) be forced to comply with government policy, it’s just a matter of time. When the political landscape and narratives are aligned in a way that it’s useful for the government to do so, they will.
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AI is to humanity what alcohol is to the individual. They both enhances the charasteristics of the underlying person or country.
A calm person tends to become more calm with alcohol, while an aggressive person tends to become even more aggressive.
Countries that remain on a fiat standard will get more centralized and more corrupt with the rise of AI, while countries on a bitcoin standard will become more decentralized and corruption-resistant.
Nowadays, I think it’s more effective to use chat-gpt to summarize the key content and conclusions of a book, if you want to read it through quickly.
There is this old saying that ”If you don't have a life, you can always read books to live a thousand lives.”
I guess the saying can be interpreted both ways - in other words, if you live a rich life, you won’t need to read a thousand books.
”The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”
Thucydides 460 B.C. – 395 B.C.
Building a family is a low time preference commitment. In retrospect, I regret not having embarked upon it earlier than I did. Strong families are truly underappreciated by our fiat world.
I want an apple to be an apple and I want money to be money. If such thinking makes me a bitcoin puritan - then so be it.
When large paradigm shifts have occured historically, it is a rule rather than an exception that the incumbents fail to adapt and instead the new leaders emerge from the periphery. It happened so many times from the roman empire to the brittish empire.
With regards to a potential hyperbitcoinization - it should be viewed as a similar historical paradigm shift - and as such - it would be wise to assume that the liberal democracies of the west will not promote and facilitate such a paradigm shift. In fact, it is indeed clear that they are doing the exact opposite - they are resisting the change.
So from a historical perspective, the west would be the wrong place to look for, if you are looking for signs of hyperbitcoinization. Instead, the global south is likely the place.
It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but it is a rule rather than an exception that a diverse (and fragmented) base layer protocol leads to less diverse and innovative outcomes than a unified base layer protocol. This is a generally accepted phenomena within the field of complex systems.
AI and robotics will gradually take care of more of our daily routine tasks. Inevitably, this will eventually involve monetary transactions, including the management of some of our wallets and private keys.
Just like servants have managed the wealth of royals and nobility of the past, our robots will do so for all humans in the future.
This will massively transform how we relate to usage of money. Things like UI of LN apps won’t be as important as it is today - possibly sooner than lots of people realize. Instead - the robot will be the UI we interact with. The wallet is just a protocol that the robots communicate with, and this means that the wallets can instead be designed to maximize security and privacy, even sacrificing some degree of usability.
And this charts tells only the story about government debt. A country might appear to have a healthy amount of debt (which this charts seem to suggest about the green countries), but the truth is that many times the debt is just outsourced to corporations and citizens themselves in the form of mortgages and other types of credit.
Most people are followers rather than leaders.
Based oldies like the Warren Buffetts and Charlie Mungers who refer to crypto as ”rat poison” are basically toxic bitcoin maximalists who just haven’t realized it yet.
If we assume human life itself will always be limited by our lifetime - ie life itself is scarce in terms of time - it means humans will always have a need to guard their time, to trade their time, to spend their time. This just means that we need some type of absolute and standardized measurement tool to measure all of this with. Thus, there will likely always be a role for bitcoin.
Bitcoin tx fees - ”The last tax”
In a hyperbitcoinized world where money and state are separated, Bitcoin transaction fees will emerge as the last form of mandatory payment, replacing traditional taxes.
The reason is the following. As governments lose the ability to print money and rely on national debt, the inefficiencies inherent in centralized government and the public sector will become transparent. Frankly - the money printer can no longer be used for cover up. This transparency will lead to a gradual privatization of various areas, and financial incentives will favor privatization which eventually eliminates the public sector all together.
Consequently, the payment of transaction fees on the Bitcoin or Lightning networks will be the sole mandatory fee for participation in both local and global economies.
Hence - it will be the last tax