The cheap, abundant energy and open trade enabled by Bitcoin will make humanity significantly more peaceful.
The below is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1150: “The path to peace and prosperity.” Sign up for the newsletter here.
As the protective quilt of the war drums gets ripped off and the steady thumping of war cries begins to get louder and louder I thought it’d be appropriate to remind you freaks that a more peaceful planet is attainable if the bureaucrats who are ruining the world would be rendered powerless and the free market were allowed to deliver individuals across the globe the ability to peacefully trade amongst each other. Luckily for us, Bitcoin enables this to happen by incentivizing the exploration and production of cheap energy while simultaneously providing humanity with a censorship resistant peer-to-peer distributed cash system.
Energy is the base of our modern society. Without our ability to extract, transport, and convert energy into the electricity and fuel sources that combust to power engines we would not enjoy the quality of life that we do in our modern world. Writing this newsletter from my kitchen table in Austin, Texas and blasting it out through the interwebs to all of you freaks spread across the world (we’re an international rag) would not be possible. Being as productive as we are (or rather, can be) today would not be possible. This is something that should be celebrated and cheered on by all humans. It’s pretty cool that we have evolved to a point where we are able to do these great things. However, for some reason or another, there seems to be a great shame that is pervading much of our society because of the belief that this process is somehow destroying nature.
In reality, we humans are a part of nature. We are evidence that nature has the ability to be aware of itself and can use that awareness to do great things. This isn’t to say that some humans aren’t wasteful and destructive, there are many wasteful and destructive humans. A majority of those wasteful humans can be found in the halls of governments across the Earth where they attempt to centrally plan nature, which leads to its perversion. These centrally planned missteps are acutely highlighted in popular energy policy that has taken the world by storm. By thinking that they can centrally plan environmental stewardship, politicians and zealots have successfully set humanity’s progress back by stupidly forcing large swaths of the global population to ditch very reliable energy dense fuel sources like uranium, natural gas, oil, and coal for unreliable less energy dense sources like wind and solar. The product of these misguided policies has led to less and more expensive electricity production, which has affected poor people the worst.
By attempting to energy shame the world, the bureaucrats who slither through the halls of the UN are actively trying to shame emerging economies from providing themselves the same quality of life we enjoy in the West that has come with abundantly cheap and reliable energy. This is one of the driving forces of conflict in our modern times.
What the bureaucrats should be doing is allow the free markets to go about their business unabated so that innovative and ingenious entrepreneurs can get to work at solving our biggest problems. Many of which revolve around providing markets with cheap and abundant energy resources. When people are able to easily and cheaply leverage electricity to do things, they are able to increase productivity dramatically. Imagine how much innovation we’d see in emerging economies if their citizens had reliable and cheap electricity and were able to use that to power computers and machinery to do great things instead of being forced to spend their time traveling for clean water and doing manual intensive labor that cannot be replaced by much more productive machinery because of a lack of reliable power sources. Imagine how much stress would be lifted off many people’s shoulders if they didn’t have to weigh the opportunity cost of turning on the lights versus paying for food.
With that in mind, how much potential economic progress has been prevented from materializing because of the bureaucrats from the UN’s penchant to “punish” the leaders they don’t like by cutting their countries off from the global monetary system and the ability to access particular markets? How many innocent civilians who have the minds to produce the necessary innovative ingenuity to push humanity forward have been prevented from doing so due to their inability to access a global market? An obscenely high number of people.
By providing the world with a very strong economic incentive to locate, extract, and convert stranded and underutilized energy sources into cheap electricity Bitcoin produces a free market bounty on abundant energy for the masses. By providing the world with a distributed peer-to-peer cash system that cannot be controlled by any government or centralized third party, Bitcoin provides innovative entrepreneurs the world over with the ability to tap into a global market and get paid for their services. Thirteen years into life after the Genesis block and we are still very early. Most humans do not recognize this potential yet. Do not fret though. There are many who do realize the opportunity and are actively working to ensure it gets brought to fruition.
In time and at scale, this should lead to a much peaceful world as we are able to focus on more productive uses of time and are not induced with stress that leads to the increased potential for direct conflict.
