Look, money ≠ wealth. Confusing the two is a perennial problem of Bitcoiners and precoiners alike. Makes me think economic illiteracy will be alive and well even under a bitcoin standard.
The monetary system isn't neutral, we all agree; the fiat system is a drag on the world's productivity, most brutally put by Knut Svanholm and Luke de Wolf in their new book, Bitcoin: The Inverse of Clown World:
Having said that, wealth is a real economic variable; it can be amassed and achieved under any monetary regime, fiat or not; sound or not; bitcoin or not.
That's why Seb Bunney's book doesn't work; it's all predicated on criticized insufficient wealth by pretending that better money fixes that:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/monetary-systems-and-economic-outcomes-yes-they-are-related
The money itself can of course be more or less conducive to making the economy work better. If the economy works better (transaction costs, information, cross-border liquidity, payment processor s, bank failures) then of course in aggregate we are all wealthier and more people are somewhat better off.
What I find disingenuous with takes like HODL's here is that it implies just getting on bitcoin makes you rich, and it would therefore be a panacea for the world.
A panacea for the world bitcoin might be, but the more people make this wealth journey by riding bitcoin's monetization phase, the less far that journey will take you and the fewer people it can carry.
Getting on bitcoin isn't a universally applicable fix for getting the whole world rich. The reward gets smaller and smaller for each additional person until all the monetary premia is drawn from every other asset (#830458)
Not repeatable.
HODL is rich because, among other things, he gave up real goods and services for bitcoin before most others—and more importantly, managed to HODL it over time without having to sell. In no way does every human being magically get to spend tons of times with their kids just because the world switched to a better money.
Looking at a btc/usd chart (or a BTC/eggs etc) tells us a person in 2025 has to give up a lot more of those things than before. At some point in bitcoin's (near?) future, it won't yield generational-wealth type improvements in a person's wealth; at some point even Elizabeth Warren has to hold her money/portfolio in BTC, and there'll be no more fiat fat cats to drain.
Long before then, we will have expropriated and/or impoverished a lot of innocent people who had no idea they were part of a dying monetary regime.
While innocent, they don't deserve what they have so I care only a little for their suffering. But Bitcoin's success is wrapped up with a lot of people seeing their fiat money balances dwindle to nothing, their fixed-income streams dwindle to pittances, their overleveraged real estate holdings collapse in (real) value.
It's not pretty. Every new HODLer that bitcoin's stratospheric success makes of each and any of us, there'll be precoiner fiaters greatly suffering.
Has to be this way, but no need to celebrate it.
Basically: Just don't fucking dance.
That's today's (very) little money lesson
Peace
/J
apologies for typos and brevity etc; wrote this on the phone.
- Also, Stop zapping me CCs. Real sats or nothing, please.