Bitcoin’s Absolute Scarcity Is Changing Your Life – Bitcoin Magazine
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast”, hosted by P and Q. In this episode they are joined by Knut Svanholm to talk about how Bitcoin can improve every facet of your life and the way Bitcoin works as a weapon for peace.
Watch this episode on YouTube or Rumble
Listen to the episode here:
Knut Svanholm: I realized yesterday while surfing YouTube that Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” film had a huge impact on how I see the world. I saw it when I was 16 and it was pretty deep. I thought it was quite profound at the time. If you remember that movie, I like them because it was like no other movie. The storytelling is very different from a linear film, but it starts with this guy whose father died in the war. And there’s a strong line about: “That’s when Her Majesty’s Royal Command took my father away from me. It’s so tough; some institutions have the right to take someone else’s life and order them to die for a higher price and what it does to the generations that follow. Of course after that there’s the whole school system where you have this meat grinder factory that mashes people together into voting cattle. So I think, in retrospect, that movie probably had a big impact on how I see the world and how I detest collectivism.
More than that, I grew up in the country with a freedom-minded father. I sailed the seven seas. I worked on a boom ship for eight years and I saw many different countries. Even when I was little, I lived abroad a couple of times: half a year in Mozambique when I was 10 or 11 and in Tanzania and a few other places. I guess I was less inclined to believe what national lies there were at the time.
Remember the 1980s in Sweden; we had no commercial TV channels and no commercial radio channels. It is all state-owned, and still is today, to a large extent. It is a subsidy system that big media companies get the money from the state, and of course they don’t bite the hand that feeds them. So that’s it. But in the 80s it was really cut off from the rest of the world. We got to see cartoons once a year during Christmas Eve. It was then that we got to see Donald Duck once a year. So that was what growing up in Sweden in the 80s was like. It was nice, quite dark afterwards. I guess all of these things influenced my thinking.
Question: I want to talk about time preference. For our audience who may not understand this, can you help them understand the difference between high and low time preference?
Svanholm: A high time preference is when you prioritize quick gratification, when you don’t delay gratification. So if you’re robbed of everything you own, you take a holiday preference because you need it, because you need food to survive and you need shelter because you don’t—most places—you need shelter because you don’t freeze to death at night. So you become a holiday preference person who prioritizes short-term gains which also makes you prone to crime and bad decisions, short-term decisions.
And a short-term preference is the opposite of that. That’s when you think about the future and you think about future generations. You plan ahead and build something for the future. I think that a holiday preference and a low season preference are on the same scale as fear and love because a holiday preference to me is a fearful state. And what is the opposite of fear? The opposite of fear is love. So adopting a lower time preference or being able to adopt a lower time preference because you have more capital and a more secure future that allows you to be more loving not only to your fellow human beings but to yourself.
I think this is the killer app of Bitcoin, is that it makes us better people. It makes us kinder to each other and also kinder and more loving to ourselves. We can afford to take care of ourselves and take care of others to a greater extent. My lecture was largely about this.
It ties into something my grandfather said, which is, “What you can live without, you own,” which has been stuck in my mind ever since I first heard it. It’s the flip side of “Your possessions end up owning you.” Because if you can control your mind to the point where you don’t long for things anymore, then you kind of own the things you don’t want. For example, I would never buy a Lambo regardless of how much bitcoin I have or how rich I become. I don’t fancy Lambos. In a way, I own all the Lambos because I control my drives. I think Bitcoin is like a gateway to that insight.
Sooner or later, Bitcoiners realize that they don’t need so much crap in their lives. Material things mean less and less the longer you are in Bitcoin. And it’s going to be very interesting to see how this plays out, because in fiat countries, as we know, to get rich, or when you get rich, you buy a bunch of crap and crap that you don’t need, and I think this reverses on a post hyperbitcoinization. We want an abundant future without overconsumption because we don’t want as much crap as we do now. I think that’s the real killer here.
Q: I want to try to unpack it a bit. There’s a question behind all of this, and I’ll start with a question, which is: Do you think people realize that when they use fiat money, it gets inflated so regularly that they have to use it all the time? Unlike bitcoin, I think we all recognize the value of using our bitcoin today is far greater than if we were to hold it and then use it in the future.
Svanholm: I don’t think they realize it on a conscious level, but that’s what it does to people. People who acquire assets and take out large loans win the fiat game. That’s how you win. You buy a lot of crap, including houses, for example. Real estate is a shitcoin. I saw some calculations from the US that over half of the property bought in the US last year was not for people to live in per se, but for Airbnb use.
So it starts to become this, “You don’t want to own anything and you want to be happy” unfolding before our eyes. But I prefer the “You won’t owe anything and be happy” future of Bitcoin because just replace one letter and you get the Bitcoin future, which is you accumulate capital first and then consume – if you’re willing to part off with bitcoin. The longer you hold bitcoins, the more you realize how valuable they really are.
This is where I come to the second prediction about the future. I’ve experienced it myself now because I’ve partnered with a whole bunch of Bitcoiners and they’ve given me stuff. They have given me their services and physical things like FractalEncrypt’s artwork, for example. They’ve helped me with translations and proofreading and editing and animations and voice-overs, everything – absolutely free. We very rarely exchange satoshis with each other. That sort of leads me to the conclusion that being nice to each other is just Gresham’s Law of a bitcoin standard, because we think our stacks are so valuable that we’re willing to stake our reputation capital instead. It is the less valuable coin if you compare the two. So I think there’s a connection there, and that’s why I think the need for money at all is going down in a hyperbitcoinized world.
It is the real scaling solution. Fewer transactions are required. Ironically, this “don’t trust, verify” attitude of Bitcoiners is leading to a world where we can trust each other more. If you compare it to how you interact with friends and family, you very rarely exchange money there as well. You help each other without even asking.
This is where I think Bitcoin is going, or people in Bitcoin are going towards the state where we are always encouraged to help each other. Not only is it the time preference thing, but it also pumps our sacks. We want Bitcoin to succeed, therefore we want other Bitcoiners to succeed.
This is the main reason we are having this conversation right now. We all love Bitcoin and we want others to get on board and enjoy it too. And in the process we enrich ourselves if we have some bitcoin, so we are encouraged to help each other and exchange favors for free.
The funny thing is that it doesn’t go away just because we hyperbitcoinize; we still have. Bitcoin private key is a key to your heart, literally. We run this mathematical experiment in the back of our minds, and we only become better people.
I just find it endlessly fascinating. I can’t stop thinking about it. It gives me hope.
