@Jeff Booth
This is not a prediction or a pitch.
It is afiatjaf of what could unfold if your deflation thesis continues to move outward. You have already helped people understand the monetary foundations. This explores how those foundations might shift our sense of power, identity, and coordination. Feel free to take from it what is useful, reshape what is not, and ignore the rest.
Your deflation thesis starts the clock. Two tech-generations pass and the last supermarket quietly closes. Not because food ran out, but because it is now abundant in two directions. A countertop printer produces a balanced meal in seconds. At the same time, local markets offer vine tomatoes, raw honey, hand-caught trout, and lamb raised in a solar-fed pasture. Survival is no longer the issue. Choice is. And just beneath that new abundance, power begins to reorganize itself. It shifts into quieter frontiers: watts, memory, and tempo. The people who learn to navigate those frontiers early will shape what comes next.
Energy becomes the new anchor of voice. Bitcoin mining, also called hashing, consumes electricity to keep a global ledger honest. Those who control large amounts of hash power act as deterrents. They do not need weapons to signal strength. They use electricity. Towns with access to cheap solar, geothermal, or wind energy begin to stream political weight into the global network. Communities without access to energy drift into what some already call Silence Zones. They are not excluded from the network, but their ability to participate in global consensus is diminished. A protocol like nostr becomes critical in this world. A signed message, relayed across thousands of independent servers, cannot be censored. Even in low-power zones, your ideas remain audible. In the energy-ledger era, electricity becomes a form of speech.
Perfect memory fixes corruption but destroys mercy. Every bad take, every youthful misstep, every moment shared in private becomes permanent. People begin to create rituals around forgetting. Some communities vote annually to blur or de-amplify old content. A redemption market forms. Investors back people with messy digital pasts, betting on their reputational recovery. Nostr already hints at how this works. Events remain cryptographically permanent, but each relay decides how much to surface or silence. In this model, data persists but fades in volume. Privacy becomes an economic skill, not just a moral one. The ability to separate personas or use expiring metadata becomes a way to avoid buying forgiveness later at a markup. We begin to remember that growth requires forgetfulness.
Time fragments into three political clocks. Microsecond minds, powered by autonomous AIs, execute logistical decisions faster than any human can blink. Heartbeat minds, made of people, move through social time: hours, days, seasons. Season minds, built for ecosystems, protect forests and rivers through multi-decade logic. Governance begins to split across these rhythms. One chamber moves fast. One moves human. One moves slow. Nothing passes unless all three agree. This model is not theoretical. Nostr already allows bots, humans, and slow filters to operate on the same stream. Each can express itself in its own rhythm. With lightning payments layered on top, even money speaks in multiple tempos. What emerges is chronological equity. Not everyone gets one vote. Each rhythm gets a veto.
None of this is guaranteed. There is another version of this future. It also looks clean and abundant. Food is still printable. Energy is still cheap. The interfaces are beautiful and effortless. But the power structure is different. All energy is metered by remote software. All purchases are routed through centrally controlled smart contracts. Your ideas are scanned, ranked, and filtered by models you did not train. Your reputation is preserved, but it is surfaced only when the system decides it is safe. You do not feel punished. You feel gently corrected. You do not feel censored. You feel curated. Life remains comfortable, but only if you stay within bounds. The borders are soft, and you stop noticing them.
This is the soft totalitarianism of convenience. You did not request it. It arrives through updates and feature rollouts. Everything still works. You just no longer steer. This is the likely future if no one builds the alternative.
By the time most people notice this shift, they will already be inside one system or the other. They will not debate protocol mechanics. They will respond to how it feels. Many will still hesitate to explore alternatives like Bitcoin or nostr, and that hesitation will not be irrational. These tools were dismissed for years as speculative, chaotic, or extreme. The scepticism is not ignorance. It is memory. We have all seen systems that promised freedom and delivered control.
Still, maybe it is worth asking what these tools actually do before they are needed. Not because you are aligned politically, but because retaining options may be the most practical kind of freedom left. These tools are not movements. They are fallback plans. Quiet infrastructure for a noisy age. They require no belief, just early curiosity.
For anyone who wants to prepare, the steps are simple. Learn to hold your own bitcoin. Lower your personal energy costs. Claim a censorship-resistant identity. Use expiration logic in your data. Balance your tempo between fast automation, slow presence, and at least one long-term commitment that spans years. Not because any of it is urgent today. But because one day, it might be.
The infrastructure is already forming. You do not need to be technical. Tools like Fedi allow communities to co-manage Bitcoin and identities without a central bank or platform. Apps like Breez let anyone send or receive lightning payments, whether through podcast streaming, retail, or peer-to-peer work. These tools are not theoretical. They are here. They translate protocol-level freedoms into everyday practice.
Survival may no longer be scarce. But agency is. And the ones who preserve their watts, their words, and their tempo will not just endure what comes next. They will shape it.
This write-up came out of my dialogue with an AI assistant. Not because the machine is wise, but because it let me think aloud long enough to stumble into something that might be useful. If any of this resonates, feel free to bring it into a podcast, a post, or just a conversation. I am not here to be right. I am here to think in public. But then again, maybe I was just hallucinating here with my assistant.
If you have thoughts, critiques, or questions, I would genuinely appreciate feedback. Especially from people building at the intersection of energy, memory, governance, and decentralisation.
@jack @Erik Cason @jack mallers @fiatjaf @preston @Lyn Alden
We've come a long way, brothers and sisters.
