Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Regulation System
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Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Regulation System
Regulation works, if and only if, the regulation is user activated AND user enforced.
It’s not about east or west. It’s about overlords and peasants, decentralized regulated money, riders and punks.
Which side are you on?
— Bomb First, Makaveli, The Don, Killuminati, on Bitcoin, probably
A LOT LIKE GAMBLING (but with other peoples money)
This girl knows about as much as most; about how Wall Street and the global financial industry at large actually functions. She aint wrong neither. Matter of fact, she nails it.
Listen in and then, we’ll break it down, line by line.
There’s this giant pile of money, but it’s not his money …
The money comes from the customers of banks, clients of brokerages, and retirees of pensions whom unknowingly and non-consensually lend their bank deposits, brokerage securities, and pension funds to the galaxy brained financial wizards whom use the borrowed money to gamble.
They pay him an amount that sounds fake, but it is real. One time they took some of it back, which, that was crazy …
The smartest people in the world are pulled into the destructive financial engineering world from constructive infrastructure engineering careers by obscene salaries and bonuses made possible because of a system intentionally designed to socialize losses.
Our living room looks like mission control for the Pentagon, we’re not putting a man on the moon …
Some of the smartest people in the world spend their most productive years engineering zero sum short term financial arbitrage bets rather than engineering long term miraculous positive sum feats for humanity.
It’s not just that he needs to be right about what’s gonna happen in a company’s future, it’s also that everybody else needs to be wrong, yeah our anniversary is in the middle of earnings season so we’ve almost broken up like three times …
In the financial engineering world, the game is adversarial, it is competitive, there is a winner and a loser, the engineers are pitted against each other, and their personal relationships pay the price. Contrast that with the private engineering world, where engineers collaborate to build stronger, longer lasting works, with long term thinking and planning that allows time for growing and strengthening personal relationships in the community with friends, and at home with family.
To be honest, it sounds a lot like gambling … why is his job important to society? I have no idea.
It sounds a lot like gambling, because it is gambling, where there is a winner and a loser, and where, at best, the outcome doesn’t produce anything of value for the whole of society, a zero sum game. But at worse, a negative sum game, where relationships are destroyed, and losses are paid for by the unwitting masses, those that unknowingly and non-consensually lend their bank deposits, brokered securities, and pension funds to the financial wizards. The jobs of these financial wizards are in fact, less than zero sum, they are destructive.
From the movie Margin Call, which looks at the 2008 financial crises from the perspective of Lehman Brothers, there are a couple clips that help to showcase where some of our best and brightest engineers go to work.
The junior associate that finds the “math error” in Lehman’s risk analysis of the mortgage backed security vaporware, was literally a rocket scientist.
This is a great clip:
And the junior associates’ boss, was a bridge engineer before he was a financial gambling engineer. His bridge saved 1,531 years of sitting in a car. What did his financial engineering do other than destroy lots of lives?
Here he is, reflecting on his career choice. Watch as humility washes over him:
Oh sure, they will fiat-splain to you how important their job is, that they are “making markets” and “adding liquidity” to allow modern society to thrive, but that’s just them deceiving themselves, with their galaxy brains.
During the after math of the 2008 global financial crises, the galaxy brained financial engineers underwent congressional hearings where everyone promised to do better, and help develop better regulations. Here is the then CEO of Goldman Sachs getting lectured to by the then Montana Senator Jon Tester on how the financial activity they do is just gambling, and it doesn’t provide any value to society.
What’s revealing about this clip with the Goldman CEO is how willing he is to help craft new regulations. It’s telling because he knows that whatever regulation is crafted, it will be in his favor, as it will help to build a taller stronger regulatory moat around his business, and it will guarantee he has built in loop holes to allow him to continue his financial gambling, at the expense of the masses.
For unless there is a system where bank depositors, brokerage clients, and pensioners can opt out of non-consensual lending, there will always be rampant financial wizardry, with socialized losses. You can’t add regulations to an already corrupted system and improve the system.
The only solution is a new system, with independent regulation, opted into by its users, and enforced by its users.
A LOT LIKE FREEDOM (but with your own money)
The galaxy brained financiers think their smarter than everyone, but the reality is they are short sighted opportunistic bookies. Nothing more, probably less, but certainly nothing more.
Here is the final scene from Margin Call where the Lehman CEO, “John Turd” discusses the cold realities of the world as he sees them, to his sales manager, Sam Rogers, who just destroyed the global economy.
Listen in and then we’ll break it down, line by line.
If this is all for naught, then so is everything out there …
Here is the deceit, where the galaxy brains deceive themselves, suggesting that their work is not a zero sum game, that what they do is just as important as anyone else’s work. As if to suggest that we are all just spinning around aimlessly on a rock in the middle of an inconceivably large empty dark and cold universe and that winning and losing bets is just as relevant as mastering the arts, or discovering the laws of physics. It is the height of nihilistic masochistic fiat hubris to believe your zero sum bookie game is somehow equitable with the tailor that designed the suit, the glass maker that engineered the wine glass, or the construction workers that built the magnificent tower in the sky where the pompous galaxy brains perch themselves, smugly pontificating about the fate of the masses they look down upon.
It’s just money, it’s made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat …
No, it’s not just made up. Money is an emergent phenomenon based on actual physical realities including scarcity and durability to move value through time, portability to move value across distances, and divisibility to trade value. These characteristics are not made up, they are hard rules of reality that humanity has discovered in the short time we left the Neanderthals behind some tens of thousands of years ago. Just a blink of an eye, in the grand time scales of life on this planet.
And no, made up money doesn’t solve killing each other, John. In fact, it is the very idea that money can be “made up” that has killed more people than anything else in all of human existence. It wasn’t until humanity began “making up money” with its inflationary money printers in the 1900’s that we experienced not one but two world wars, the greatest of depressions, and yes, a declining life expectancy in the global super power, the United States of America. All of it fueled by the misguided mid-wit notion that money is simply made up, that debt is money we owe to ourselves, that we can solve our problems with more money printing, not identifying that it is in fact the money printing that it is causing the problems in the first place!
It’s not wrong, and it’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1884, 1901, 1907, 1929, 1937, 1974, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2000, and whatever you want to call this. It’s all just the same thing over and over. We can’t help ourselves. And you and I can’t control it, or stop it, or even slow it, or even ever so slightly alter it …
We just react. And we make a lot of money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been, and there will always be, the same percentage of winners and losers …
You see, in the deceit of the galaxy brains like John Turd, the world is a zero sum game. And in their world, it is, more or less. In sports betting there is a winner and a loser, and that’s it. But since the Bank of England began their ponzi scheme in the 1600’s, the house never loses, it’s always the non-consenting public that takes the majority of the loss, through debased money, because there has never been a bank, or a brokerage, or a retirement account that the masses could opt into, that was free from these galaxy brained bookie shenanigans, gambling with other peoples money.
The reality is, the galaxy brains must be dumber than the average person, because if they had more intelligence, they would understand the harm they do to the general public by gambling with their funds and pushing the losses onto everyone else.
John Turd was right, fiat money has always been that way, a game for the mid-wits to play, betting against each other, with the masses absorbing most of the losses, and the winners keeping most of their winnings, giving crumbs to the masses whose money was lent in the first place to conduct the trades.
The reason there are no more Neanderthals left on the planet is because they couldn’t figure out how to use money, how to mentally abstract a socially centralized regulatory consensus to solve the local coincidence of wants with a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value amongst sovereign states.
There are many financial wizards that don’t have the capacity to understand Bitcoin, to mentally abstract a socially decentralized regulatory consensus to solve the global coincidence of wants, with a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value amongst sovereign individuals. And just like their distant cousins, these galaxy brain mid-wits are going to end their lineage in the same fashion, by missing out on the next mental abstraction, self regulated sovereign individuals.
The only regulation humanity needs is a self enforcing regulation that maintains a fixed supply of universally acceptable, unconfiscatable, permissionless, and uncensorable money. Through this regulatory framework, humanity votes with every unit of that fixed base money they spend and earn. What humanity prefers, is what humanity will build more of, through individual self interested spending, and through individual self interested goods and services production.
The greatest trick humanity ever played on itself was to convince others that they were too stupid to know how best to spend their own money. Bitcoiners have already figured out that this is a ridiculous premise.
The only “government” that Bitcoiners need is the regulatory governance that their monetary system provides, a system that has been in research and development for over forty years by some of the most intelligent humans ever to walk the planet.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Regulation System.
