1870 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 30 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: Technological determinism and splitting the atom of cause and effect bitcoin
A related idea that your link made me think of. (I don't think I've talked about it here, but I may have, bc I'm obsessed about it.)
Littering drives me out of my fucking mind. I have a pretty expansive morality in general, and try to be empathic (see my bio), but I think if there were no consequences to killing people, I would fucking murder people who litter. Like, on occasion someone will be driving through my neighborhood, roll down their window, and just toss garbage into the street. I would seriously pump that driver full of buckshot if I were 100% sure of not getting caught. The "fuck you" that such a person is saying to all of creation is something that drives me out of my mind.
In recent times, I had the thought: how would you behave if you felt absolutely no ownership of the world? That you didn't have a stake in reality or anything that unfolded there, including the needs of your fellow beings?
You might behave like that littering asshole. And what might lead a person to feel such a nihilistic lack of ownership in reality? Do I have the seeds of that in me? Ah, that was quite the look inward.
Point is: some of this same vibe is caught up in this question. If you have a visceral feeling that you're part of something, you behave in one way. If you have no such feeling -- or you feel only a hazy echo -- other things ensue, some of them pretty heinous, worse than littering (gasp).
Is there something to be done with that insight? Is this a truly giant thing that bitcoin could meaningfully help with? If so, man, that would mean something. What about Keynes's quote, though?
There is something here. Ownership is a major input to behavior. In the context of SN, I tend to frame it as private property (ownership) vs a commons. Part of SN's mission (I think) is to inject more ownership into the digital commons. Private property just scales better.
I loathe litterers too. I loathe all chronic externalizers though. I find it disgusting. We used to live next to a party AirBnB and I would spend at least an hour of each day plotting revenge.
The owner of the airbnb had ownership, but her ownership had boundaries and she would knowingly "litter" outside of the boundaries. If her property were instead a commons and she were merely a member, all things being equal she would probably litter more.
It seems ownership makes people behave better but only to the extent that they internalize the costs of their ownership. Does bitcoin make people internalize its costs? Not all of them, but it does couple ownership with its benefits so bitcoiners are at least internalizing some costs of ownership. We might also argue owning an appreciating asset invests us in the future such that bitcoiners are more averse than average to future costs.
It's interesting to imagine increasing internalized costs further. Perhaps if bitcoin could only be acquired by personally mining it we'd have more end-to-end ownership. The tradeoffs of that are unclear though.
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We used to live next to a party AirBnB and I would spend at least an hour of each day plotting revenge.
God I wish I did not understand so totally what you mean. I used to live downstairs from a similar thing and the amount of murder fantasizing would have me institutionalized if anyone could read minds.
Does bitcoin make people internalize its costs? Not all of them, but it does couple ownership with its benefits so bitcoiners are at least internalizing some costs of ownership.
I like this idea, and I like trying to think about ways that btc adoption could be incremental on some of these weirdly philosophical points. It makes me weirdly optimistic, that there are these forces that are subtle, but at the scale of billions of people over decades, incredibly consequential. Just a modest internalization of costs could result in something dramatic.
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It's comforting sometimes to know others share our experiences.
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