I spoke at a big bitcoin-adjacent company this week and one of the best questions was from someone who asked what the downsides of bitcoin adoption might be.

I always do appreciate these steelman questions, the skeptical questions, the ones where we challenge ourselves. Only when we can answer those types of questions do we understand the concept that we are promoting.

So the classic example is that in modern economic literature, "deflation is bad". This, however, is only the case in a highly indebted system. Normally, deflation is good. Money appreciates, technology improves, and goods and services get cheaper over time as they should. Price of Tomorrow covers this well. My book touches on this too, etc. The "deflation is bad" meme is still alive in modern economic discourse and thus is worth countering, but I think in the bitcoin spectrum of communities, people get that deflation is fine and good.

My answer to the question was in two parts.

The first part was technological determinism. In other words, if we were to re-run humanity multiple times, there are certain rare accidents that might not replicate, and other commonalities that probably would. Much like steam engines, internal combustion engines, electricity, and nuclear power, I think a decentralized network of money is something we would eventually come across. In our case, Bitcoin came into existence as soon as the bandwidth and encryption tech allowed it to. In other universes or simulations it might look a bit different (e.g. might not be 21 million or ten minute block times exactly), but I think decentralized real-time settlement would become apparent as readily as electricity does, for any civilization that reaches this point. So ethics aside, it just is what it is. It exists, and thus we must deal with it.

The second part was that in my view, transparency and individual empowerment is rarely a bad thing. Half of the world is autocratic. And half of the world (not quite the same half) deals with massive structural inflation. A decentralized spreadsheet that allows individuals to store and send value can't possibly be a bad thing, unless humanity itself is totally corrupted. I then went into more detail with examples about historical war financing, and all sorts of tangible stuff. In other words, a whole chapter full of stuff. I've addressed this in some articles to.

In your view, if you had to steelman the argument as best as you could, what are the scenarios where bitcoin is *BAD* for humanity rather than good for it, on net?

One thing I worry about is if Bitcoin completely takes over as a store of value it would work rather too well to transfer wealth across generations, to the point where it starts to lead to very long lived dynasties.

Let's assume hyperbitcoinization already happened - I can just hodl, and get a safe, boring 3% real return by my Bitcoin appreciating. As long as you can live on less than 3% of your net worth a year, you are now financially independent. Not only that, but so are your children, and their grandchildren.

In the current systems fortunes have to be invested to keep their purchasing power, so you face *some* risk of loss. But if you hodl, as long as you use a good vault for the storage, there's very little reason any value will be lost to the family stack almost at all.

Not only that, but a relatively small amount of people mostly in the western world have cornered 70% of the supply of Bitcoin. What about if we're correct and this hodler controlled supply is the future capital stock of humanity? Now you have less than 1m people globally who control 70% of the liquid wealth of the world, that's horribly in-egalitarian.

Now maybe we as early adopters of Bitcoin deserve to get filthy rich for launching a new monetary system. But what about your heirs 3 generations down, should they control 70% of all liquid capital in the world?

Fast forward a few generations and you could have a new neoreactionary "noded nobility" class, hoarding most of the wealth, unironically telling the rest of society to have fun staying poor.

Man i really used to like Nic Carter but seeing shit like this 1 of 1 NFT orb is ridiculously stupid. Crypto bros desperately trying to find a product market fit for their garbage tech.