Wealth is important and necessary, but I’ve met far too many rich people who are unhappy.

Usually because in the pursuit of wealth they neglected their health or relationships. Sometimes both.

You should strive to max all three of these variables as best you can.

If I was to give life advice to someone just starting out in life, I’d say prioritize your health in middle school, high school and college. Focus on eating right and getting in amazing shape. You’ll build the habits that will carry you through the rest of your life and you’ll look your best during the years when dating and sex matter a lot. Providing you more ability to find a high quality life partner, because long term high trust relationships are crucial for sustained happiness contentment etc…

Then in early adulthood go hard on the pursuit of wealth. Your twenties are the time to work your ass off and put yourself in position to own your time down the line. Better to give up 5-10 years now and own the next 30, rather than goof off in your twenties and end up stuck as a wage slave for 30 years. Save and invest aggressively, take risks, embrace sacrifice. Allow your peers to make fun of you, knowing you have a plan. Let compounding work for you.

Retire in your 30’s sometime around the time you’re starting your family and spend the rest of your life devoted to your kids, spouse and interests. Refocusing all efforts on health and happiness. Don’t take a single action unless it brings you more in either of those dimensions, while simultaneously tending to and growing the wealth you built up to this point.

People think for whatever reason that this sort of life path is not attainable, but it’s very much within the reach of the average college educated westerner. Most just have a defeatist mindset, which ultimately lead them in the wrong direction.

As developed nations continue to enter sovereign debt crises akin to the 1940s, there are a few main outcomes.

Option 1) In a world without bitcoin, or if bitcoin fails, central banks and their governments recapitalize themselves with gold, devalue the people, and do another cycle of this inflationary policy for the next few generations. The Treasury/Fed handbook literally has a written option for this, although it is stated more opaquely. It can be done in the US (and probably many other countries) based on current laws if shit hits the fan. Denmark's central bank and China's economic ministers have also written similar things regarding extreme outcomes. It's pretty straightforward based on the past.

Option 2) We go into a centralized technocratic future. Centralized AI and CBDCs win. People have cuck money that the AI+government control. It's like Brave New World, 1984, take your pick. Hard to say, but not free.

Option 3) Open source money wins. Bitcoin and its ecosystem win. Governments get defunded from their fiat printers, and have to be more honest with their ledgers or default and get reconstructed since they can't print what their people hold as savings, or in the hegemon's case, can't print what the world holds. Probably a world of chaos for a time during the transition, but also an opportunity for peace and building the next era. Keeping track of the nukes would probably be a big deal, like when the Soviet Union fell. It's actually kind of remarkable that they collapsed economically and politically but in an orderly enough way to keep track of and secure most of the nukes.

I don't know which one will win, but I consider Option 3 to be the honorable method; the path of transparency. That's the one I am rooting for and building for.

If I fail, I would like it written that it's the method I tried for, but realistically the AI+government will probably delete most of the records of all of the failures anyway, since that is how history works, without any sort of objective truth keeper. Our best hope is to hide records in a distributed way and hope they can remain undisturbed for a while. At least bitcoiners have a tendency to write stuff in steel and make low time preference things. Some psychopath will hopefully carve a life work in steel in a cave or something, but who knows, lol.

And ironically, if Option 3 wins, any of the losing factions could still insert their ideas and paths into the Bitcoin blockchain, now or in the future. It's the most immutable database that we know how to build, and would preserve their ideas as it does our ideas. Like, you know what? I *want* the Communist Manifesto to be in the immutable Bitcoin blockchain, because I want people in the future to know how *bad* it is. It might already be in there; I don't know. I wouldn't want people centuries from now to think about those ideas and believe they came up with something new; I want to preserve my enemies' texts because I believe I can win through markets, force, virtue, and truth.

I think that's almost always what determines the winning side. Losers want to burn their enemies' texts to ensure that their good ideas don't spread too much. Winners want to preserve their enemies' texts to ensure that their bad ideas are never repeated.