DireMunchkin's avatar
DireMunchkin 1 month ago
Bitcoin will reduce various statism by defunding it - It's not magic, it's just that without a money printer to pay for the state, you get a smaller state, just by virtue of the real tax intake going down. As for what happens afterwards it's hard to predict, but I see only good things coming of people being able to keep their wealth instead of getting it debased. @Saifedean Ammous took a stab at predicting what a Bitcoin standard society would look like: He guessed it would resemble The Belle Epoque, e.g. a extended period of peace and prosperity and a renaissance of science and the arts. The Belle Epoque not coincidentally took place on the classical gold standard. Another post-Bitcoin hypothesis comes from the book *The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.* The books authors predicted that we would get a gradual shift to competitive minarchist government with the spread of digital technologies. This would culminate in some people becoming legally sovereign, that is acquiring something similar to diplomatic immunity. Notably this book actually predates Bitcoin, it was published in 1999.

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Short term I see a whole lot more pain. Take your average western country; the economy is 30-55% the government. 15-30% of people are employed by governments of various levels. If you pull the rug on that with a Sovereign debt bubble, a lot of people with ZERO free-market transferable skills are now competing with grafters who will do anything for a dollar. That’s Mandibles stuff. What is the Government funded 55-yo Keynesian economist going to do? What’s the 45-yo climate change scientists living off research grants going to do? What’s the 35-yo DMV worker who never had a real job going to do? Saif’s prediction is more bleak than mine. I’d go Venetian renaissance for a Bitcoin-led era. Both were merchant led aristocracys but Venice lasted a good 400 years and wasn’t humiliatingly crushed like the frogs were after 40 years of good living. The Sovereign Individual is a great book but it paints a future, not a path to get there. I’m interested in the path. The path is where we are; we won’t get to bask in the glory, we’ve got to get our kids there and make sure they can hold on for more than 2 generations!