Years building in DeFi. Mechanism design, money and markets. Writing about why three is a crowd. ⏳
Joined October 2020
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My money is too hard.
Not a complaint. A thesis.
The harder the money, the further ahead a society can plan. Soft money can’t keep it up for long. Hard money stays up for generations. 🧵
The faster money is created, the shorter every promise becomes.
No money: you plan for today.
Hyperinflation: days.
High inflation: a few years.
Fiat: 30-year mortgages, carried by debt.
Gold standard: perpetual bonds.
How far ahead you can plan depends on how hard your money is.
My money is too hard.
Not a complaint. A thesis.
The harder the money, the further ahead a society can plan. Soft money can’t keep it up for long. Hard money stays up for generations. 🧵
40
Marx would lose at Balatro.
He’d stack blue chips (labor) and call red mult (capital) exploitation.
50 chips × 1 mult = 50
50 chips × 20 mult = 1,000
Same workers. Different capital.
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Socialists hate dollar millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires, for dark reasons.
Good news: on a Bitcoin standard, there will never be a Bitcoin billionaire, and probably not even a Bitcoin millionaire.
Rejoice!
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There will be more dollar trillionaires than Bitcoin billionaires.
A Bitcoin billionaire is impossible. There can be 20 Bitcoin millionaires at most, and we may never see even one.
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The US has something most countries don’t: 50 states competing for you.
Bad policy? Move. Good policy? Grow.
Every new federal tax or regulation removes that choice. Stop squandering America’s best feature.
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How far ahead can you plan with your money?
1 day? 1 year? 1 generation?
Your answer tells you how hard your money is. 👇
My money is too hard.
Not a complaint. A thesis.
The harder the money, the further ahead a society can plan. Soft money can’t keep it up for long. Hard money stays up for generations. 🧵
48
Full essay: no money, hyper-soft, soft, hard, and why the line points to bitcoin.
timelordeth.substack.com/p/m…
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Why can’t taxation be simple? Why not just tax a fixed cost per person and a fixed cost per land? Why do something something so stupidly complicated?
#PJL2027 Adopté par l'Assemblée nationale : la "taxe assise sur les flux de données numériques émises par les fournisseurs de contenu et acquittée par ces derniers"
Selon les députés PS, "au taux de 0,055 € par giga, un rendement de 10Md€ est attendu".
assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/1…
62
We live in a debt-ridden world. Imagine a savings-ridden one.
Governments that can’t borrow have to pay for everything today. Every war, every bailout, every program, priced in full, in front of voters.
No debt means no reason to print money. Savings hold value. Homes cost a few years of income. Families plan in decades, not paychecks.
Debt lets the present spend the future. Savings let the present build it.
47
How much tax is the right amount? Nobody can calculate it. It has to be discovered, just like any price.
Governments will charge as much as they can get away with. Taxpayers will pay as little as they can get away with. That’s fine. It’s how every market works.
The only thing that keeps it honest is competition: being able to take your money, your business, or yourself somewhere else.
Right now, that choice is limited for most people. But it’s growing. Let’s make it real for everyone.
48
Two people can make a fair trade. Both agree, or there’s no deal.
Government adds a third mind to every trade. It taxes it, regulates it, and decides for both of you.
Two minds can be fair. Three can’t. That’s the Three Mind Problem, and it’s why the state always tilts the deal.
59
Some people can only see a situation from their own eyes. Fewer can see it from the other side. Fewer still can watch it like a neutral observer. Almost nobody steps back far enough to see the rules of the game itself.
Most arguments are just people stuck at different levels.
There's a strange thing that happens online and in real world conversations, where understanding or explaining an idea or phenomenon is interpreted as SUPPORTING it.
As a result, people pretend to not understand things, lest they be seen as advocating them.
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Bitcoin runs on sunk cost and loss aversion: our worst biases. Normally they ruin us. Bitcoin turns them into security. Weirdly beautiful.
75
Run the Robinson Crusoe test.
Crusoe catches 3 fish a day by hand. He eats less, saves fish, and spends days building a net. Now he catches 10.
Friday shows up. Crusoe hires him to fish with the net and pays him 5 fish a day. By hand, Friday could only catch 3.
Friday gets paid every day, even when the catch is bad. Crusoe keeps whatever is left, and he’s the one who went hungry to build the net.
Friday’s income almost doubled. Crusoe profits from his own labor and sacrifice. By your logic, Crusoe is an exploiter.
That’s the whole story of capital: someone goes hungry first so everyone eats more later.
Wages go to workers and those wages can be more than the profits that go to capitalists but the difference is the workers are spending our lives working -- our bodies, our time, our pain, our work, our opportunity cost -- and the capitalists are doing nothing but getting profits.
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