A World Without Custodial Banks: 1 of 2
A world of limited government spending, enforced by your veto power.
We like to keep our articles short and sweet. So we have decided to cut this up into two parts, with the second and final part hitting your inbox next week.
For now, enjoy part 1.
A SELF CUSTODY INNOVATION
What we need is a self custodial banking system. But you don’t even know how the banking system works in the first place, so you wouldn’t know a self custodial banking system if it slapped you in your face.
You don’t care about Bitcoin, because you don’t know what money is in the first place, or how gold was money for 5,000 years up until 1913.
You don’t know why the government doesn’t just print money rather than impose taxes or borrow money, because you have no understanding of the functions of money in an economy.
You don’t know that banks don’t actually have any physical cash. Or at least to the extent they do, it is a small fraction of what is “on their books,” that more than 99% of money in the system is just numbers in a computer record, a digital ledger of who “owns” what. That less than 1% is physical paper cash or coins.
You don’t know that when you “transmit money” to someone, it is nothing more than one bank sending a text message to another bank to increase the balance on their books by such and such an amount.
You don’t value money as a technological good, and therefore, you don’t value Bitcoin as the latest technological advancement, because you don’t know that the banking system is nothing more than a closed source, permissioned tally sheet, updated with censorable text messages, that they charge you to use, Monday through Friday, from 9am to 5pm. And then they harass you if you try to send a wire, when it is literally nothing more than a text message. Lol.
Amazing.
FIX THE WORLD?
Amongst those outside of bitcoin there is a quaint trope, what the proponents of bitcoin refer to as their rally cry;
Fix the money, fix the world.
This rally cry assumes; (A) that the money is broken, (B) because of the broken money, the world is broken, and (C) if we can fix the broken money, then (D) we can fix the broken world.
That is an awful lot to unpack.
But we can do it rather simply, by beginning with the end; by understanding how exactly the world is broken.
Or is it?
As far as most anyone can tell, at least within the developed world, at least in the “western world,” everyone is getting by fine enough. There’s jobs for most everyone that really wants one, and everyone has got their sports-ball to watch on the weekends, there are cold brews to drink, friendships to enjoy, maybe a little sex life, maybe even some kids or at the very least some pets to entertain as is more likely the case in these “progressive” end times, and hey, it’s looking like another nice hot summer on the way with plenty of global warming for everyone to relax at the beach and do some barbequing on the grill.
Life ain’t half bad.
What could possibly be broken in this world?
Ok sure, the politicians are senile out of touch crooks, but that’s always the case.
And yeah fine, the trans and the furries are mentally ill, and the war mongers are homicidally unhinged. But what’s new?! I mean the retards are gonna retard. Am I right, or am I right? Besides, if it weren’t them midwits, it’d be some other terrorists, or aliens, or immigrants, or migrants, bird flu, or swine flu or whatever the hell else. Look the world is crazy, and that’s just the way it is. Right?!
By the way did you catch the game last night?!
Lol.
You see, the turbo normies are locked into the way things are. These 80 percenters aren’t going to get bitcoin the way the 20 percenters are going to latch on to it.
And that is fine.
FIX THE CUSTODIANS!
Unless those turbo normies are starving, because of their hyperinflating currencies, they are just going to continue to go about their daily lives.
And even if hyperinflation is happening in the western world (and it definitely is), as far as they can see, the world is what it is, you gotta make do with what life throws at you, they’ll tell you.
It’s the 80/20 Pareto distribution.
Eighty percent are the turbo normies. They are going to follow the path that the other twenty percent of the population establish. And that’s fine, it works well. You need good leaders to lead and you also need good followers to follow.
You might not like it, but that’s humanity. So deal with it.
And how do we deal with it?
Well, unless you fall into the twenty percent camp and see how the world is broken, you’re gonna have a real tough time explaining to the other eighty percent how to fix the broken world, because as far as they are concerned the world is the way it is, and that’s all there is to it. Eighty percent of the world have no idea how a car engine works, they just drive it out of the technological superiority to a horse and buggy.
So let’s just focus on the twenty percenters. And there are a lot out there left to onboard. Let’s hone our message, us early adopter twenty percenters, so we can help roll out the red carpet for the remainder of the early majority twenty percenters to get on board.
Once we’ve got the first twenty percent the next eighty will flood in.
And just like us early adopters were originally blind to Bitcoin, the early majority are also blind to it, busy with their Fiatnam shit. So it is up to us to understand how the world is indeed broken, and convey that message more clearly, how broken custodians are in fact the cause of the broken world, and how fixing the custodianship of money will actually fix the world.
It’s a tough sell though.
Although we are all living through the tail end of Fiatnam, there sure is a lot of creature comforts and high standards of living in most of the developed world so it is hard to separate those points for the noobs. Trying to convince folks of the broken world in this environment can be a challenge. But we need to stay vigilant in our obligation to show them the facts.
Try a technological angle.
TECHNOLOGY IS DEFLATIONARY - PART ONE
Technology has vastly improved most of the developed worlds standard of living, at least in terms of material things.
So trying to tell someone that the world is broken, while they have a giant television with one thousand channels of on demand rom-coms, sports-ball, or whatever dystopian new Disney hellscape flick is programming them, while they have an amazing automobile with power and luxury everything, while they have the world at their fingertips with their smart phone, and a seemingly endless supply of steak, bacon, fruits, vegetables, and enough seed oil snacks to drown the whole family in at their local grocery store, or even better, with on demand same day delivery, it’s nearly an impossible task to convince them the world is indeed broken.
It’s difficult to get these early majority folks to see the short comings of the world, the unfairness of the world, the destruction in the world, caused first and foremost by the custodial monetary system, which has slowly and silently coiled itself snuggly around everyone and everything over the last 110 years or so.
WHAT NOBODY IN THE WORLD UNDERSTANDS — is how central bank number three setup shop in the United States back in 1913, with a silent private/public governmental/banking industry partnership, which created a sly round about way to steal the financial veto power of endless government spending from the citizenry of the world.
First of all, it’s complicated trying to explain the mechanics of this, and second of all trying to convince people that this is in fact the reality of the world, and most importantly third of all, that there is a much better path forward, takes time to explain. You don’t need to get everything across in one shot. Just get them interested. Meet them where they are at.
Until folks are starving, we’re going to be hard pressed to incentivize them to learn in one sitting, to understand, and to choose the alternative noncustodial solution, a noncustodial solution that is symbiotic to the fundamental fact that technology is deflationary.
What we need, besides negative incentives like starvation, are positive incentives to get these remaining twenty percenters onto a self custodial mindset.
And there really isn’t anything better of an incentive than the number go up technology that self custody provides. Just getting them off zero bitcoin on their journey to getting on zero fiat is all that is needed.
Just buying a little helps to incentivize more learning about what they now own.
Help them understand that for every dollar of technological deflationary innovation that human creativity births into reality, that dollar of value is permanently etched into the market cap of the scarcest monetary asset that will ever exist, the bitcoin they now own.
Bitcoin and the future capacity of human innovation is a match made in heaven. But what is miraculous is that we can all claim some portion of it now, here on this very Earth, and take full advantage of it for the rest of our families lifetime, for the entirety of our lineage into the deep future.
And what is really mind boggling is that in doing so, we add value to everyone else in the world that takes the same approach. Through our individual bitcoin hoarding we give value to everyone else in the world taking the same savings approach.
Low time preference is indestructible.
And by practicing this self custodial savings art, we reclaim our financial veto power over excessive government spending.
How is it all possible? This can’t be true!
Oh but it indeed is, dear reader.
Find out more, in Part 2, next week!
Cheers!