Beyond Bitcoin (2140)

What if Bitcoin were the last form of money? The terminal monetary asset for the terminal phase of scarcity economics.

Consciousness and spiritual traditions across millennia have held abundance as a foundational truth, a natural law that governs reality beyond the fiat distortion. Fiat money has us operating from an alternative timeline grounded in scarcity.

Bitcoin is restoring baseline reality.

Because what happens when prices fall to the marginal cost of production from a foundation that cannot be debased?[1] What happens when money no longer needs to be stored in assets like homes to hold value, and basic necessities become abundant and free? What happens to money itself?

As prices fall over time, purchasing power increases, basic necessities become affordable, and then abundant. The scarcity we believe to be fundamental is largely created by fiat; required for the system to sustain itself.

Energy is a clear example: The sun produces more in an hour than civilization uses in a year. It's naturally abundant. The institutional scarcity layered on top of it (title deeds, water rights, access fees) is unnatural policy rather than fundamental physics. Follow that trajectory far enough and the unit of account becomes redundant.

Human trade does not disappear, the distortion does.

Bitcoin is a transition system into a world "Beyond Money" (2140, when the last bitcoin is mined). The last monetary system before we no longer need one. The need to denominate exchange dissolves: When everything costs nearly nothing, keeping score loses its function. This may seem absurd or impossible from our current fiat-based reality, but that does not change the first principle fact that prices fall to the marginal cost of production in the free market Bitcoin is imposing.[1]

Having been conditioned to use fiat as a medium of exchange for 5,000 years, the disappearance of it would lead us to vote for a new form of money by decree all over again. A sound base-layer transition mechanism is certainly necessary to chip away at generations of learned attachment to a zero sum game designed to extract from us all.

A fiat-funded path, including UBI (Universal Basic Income) and UHI (Universal High Income), cannot get us there because they require printing money which produces the Cantillon Effect rather than abundance. Treasuries, ETFs, and other fiat-products built on top of Bitcoin only work to sustain the zero sum game by being Cantillon Effects on top of Bitcoin. But every sovereign individual who runs a node, who holds their own keys, who spends Bitcoin as money, and who refuses to outsource to a custodian, is pulling that future closer.

And this is where the individual layer is key in the transition.

The systemic architecture of fiat is well understood by anyone deep enough in the rabbit hole to be reading this. What is harder to see is the degree to which it shaped us: Our beliefs, our actions, our desires. The system subconsciously conditioned us even if we are aware of some of its programming; our systemic beliefs do not automatically dissolve when we adopt Bitcoin or when the monetary base changes.

The transition beyond money requires each of us to unlearn the fiat world we inherited by virtue of being born on Earth at this very time. How deep does the conditioning go and what does it take to unlearn it? Beyond Money: Regaining Sovereignty, Rediscovering Humanity is where I walk through actionable tools and my experience on this journey. Jeff Booth provided the foreword and his thesis on technology and deflation laid essential groundwork. If this resonates, listen to the first 2h of the audiobook on the Extracts page or grab a copy over lightning at book.daniella.io.

My work is v4v only, consider supporting with a zap: [email protected] | https://daniella.io/v4v

Sources

[1] Booth, J. (2020). "The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future." Stanley Press