Bitcoin Will Find Success Via Ultimate Utility – Bitcoin Magazine
Below is a direct excerpt from Marty’s Bent Issue #1257: “Success via ultimate utility.” Sign up for the newsletter here.
I am currently on a flight from Newark to Oslo, Norway while traveling to Riga, Latvia for the Baltic Honey Badger conference hosted by HodlHodl. Please excuse any typos as I’m stuck in my seat like a sardine with my laptop screen half open because the lady in front of me has her seat stuck all the way back.
I wanted to touch on something that Pete Rizzo said on the What Bitcoin Did podcast recently that really stuck with me. He submitted that bitcoiners should lean into the use of bitcoin and the fact that it is a far superior monetary and settlement network compared to the incumbent monetary system by any objective measure rather than hoping that the world burns to the ground and bitcoin succeeds as a product of fiat’s failure. Here is the clip for those interested.
The dichotomies of these two frameworks are interesting to think about. First, I don’t think they are mutually exclusive. It is clear from Satoshi’s writings that he believed the current system to be inherently flawed and doomed to failure due to the history of fiat currencies being controlled by central governments that had the ability to print at will.
“The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is littered with violations of that trust.” – Satoshi Nakamoto, February 11, 2oo9
I don’t think it’s crazy to think that Satoshi created bitcoin after recognizing that the fiat system was doomed to failure. I’m almost certain he did. But the only way he could produce a tool that would act as an effective escape hatch from the failing system is if he produced something that was 1.) an incremental functional improvement on that system and 2.) sufficiently resistant to attack by the failing system. system that doesn’t really want anyone to escape. Fortunately for us, that is exactly what Satoshi and those who came after him to help improve the protocol have given humanity.
Thank God for Satoshi. Standing on the edge of a cliff with unstoppable forces pushing us toward a deadly flight into chaos and disorder, we’ve all been given the opportunity to grab a paraglider that allows us to jump off the cliff and glide to safety. What Pete puts forward is, “should we focus on telling people as much as possible about the unstoppable force that is about to push us to certain death or the technology we can use to avoid this outcome?”
Personally, I think both tactics should be used. The only way to fix a problem is to recognize that it exists in the first place. This is what the warning about the unstoppable force that leads people on the edge of the cliff does. Only when people understand that power can they begin to find and understand the solutions at their fingertips.
That said, I think Pete makes a very good point. Bitcoiners may over-index to highlight the impending failure of the fiat monetary system while under-indexing the incremental improvements bitcoin brings to the world of monetary goods, settlements and payments. Bitcoin enables things that were simply not possible before it was launched. It is something to celebrate and highlight as often as possible. In an ideal scenario, the death of fiat is dragged out over many decades, and during that period the tools and products built around the bitcoin network prove to be so far superior to the current system that people naturally adopt them en masse because they is simply better. This would be the ideal “soft landing” that you hear the buffoons at the Federal Reserve talk about.
I pray that’s how things end up. However, it is hard to believe that the compounding mistakes made by unproductive central planners over many decades do not rear their heads. If one really believes this, it’s hard to beat them for over-indexing on the doom side while trying to warn others and point out the hideous insanity of the system.
