This is a great post and an important issue to dig into.
Here's an attempt to steelman the degrowth people, who overlap greatly with the deceleration people -- I don't think they can reasonably be treated separately, given the forces at play. Note that this isn't a definitive steelman, because I think this is a big tent group. But it's one particular type of steelman.
The capitalist system, whose most foundational (or perhaps only) axiom is that profit must be produced above all else, is doing great harm to the world because its basis in economic calculation renders invisible things that are non-economic, or that poorly fit into a property rights paradigm.
For instance, when a beautiful drive has been ruined for hundreds of millions of person-hours, this loss is unseen. What is seen is the advertising revenue. The suffering of billions of creatures in the factory farm system is also unseen -- it's worth nothing. The only relevant factor to the system is the profit that can be realized by selling chickens. The turmoil that climate change will wreak on billions of people, most of them poor, is likewise irrelevant. Even property ownership, in this case, won't protect their interests.
For all these reasons, the system must be reformed or changed; since this system is a natural expression of the pursuit of profit and growth, and an expression of technology, we need a new set of foundational assumptions, and we need to turn back the dial on the state of civilization, including its attitudes toward growth and technology.
A lot of Saylor's Bitcoin concepts, I see originating in a set of ideas that were prominent around MIT in the mid 1980's at the intersection of tech/engineering/operations industry and was adjacent to the failed "cybernetics" project. In this intellectual framework, a key opportunity for the future firm was by collecting and analyzing data at the individual level, corporate outlays and decision would be more efficient. The computing power necessary for this was just beginning to be feasible. I think Saylor was influenced by this view given he is the ceo of a business intelligence vendor doing just this.
As his own firm's product offering hit a ceiling to the value it would deliver from micro-economic measurements (e.g. trying to track inventory level changes) I think he became influenced by the idea of Bitcoin doing something similar, but in the invisible hand manner of pricing in changes and shocks to energy cost, risk preference etc across time and space into one number. In Saylor's view, no firm, of business intelligence software could outcompete the Bitcoin protocol for discovering information and properly factoring it a fair market value.
It's a good sign when people take the idea of Bitcoin, and see in it another idea that they admire and trust. I think the problem you mention is that Saylor's school of thought and lingo are not exactly a well known or admired idea by the vast majority of people considering buying bitcoin.
In my opinion, Saylor is onto something insightful with his "wall of energy" hypothesis, but he hasn't been able to quantify it. The analogy I would make is just as the finance profession prices firms by a discounted set of projected cashflows, a blockchain token could be valued by its projected future hashrate. Stated another way: A bitcoin has value 1.) if and only if producers continue to mine it in the future, 2.) the growth in value is proportional to the growth in the hashrate in the long run.
these are the glory days I have had a blast of a week - new space, new ideas, old friends, new friends, writing, traveling to new meetups, reviving a podcast. how lucky I am to take part in some of this bitcoin stuff
This is a great post and an important issue to dig into.
Here's an attempt to steelman the degrowth people, who overlap greatly with the deceleration people -- I don't think they can reasonably be treated separately, given the forces at play. Note that this isn't a definitive steelman, because I think this is a big tent group. But it's one particular type of steelman.
The capitalist system, whose most foundational (or perhaps only) axiom is that profit must be produced above all else, is doing great harm to the world because its basis in economic calculation renders invisible things that are non-economic, or that poorly fit into a property rights paradigm.
For instance, when a beautiful drive has been ruined for hundreds of millions of person-hours, this loss is unseen. What is seen is the advertising revenue. The suffering of billions of creatures in the factory farm system is also unseen -- it's worth nothing. The only relevant factor to the system is the profit that can be realized by selling chickens. The turmoil that climate change will wreak on billions of people, most of them poor, is likewise irrelevant. Even property ownership, in this case, won't protect their interests.
For all these reasons, the system must be reformed or changed; since this system is a natural expression of the pursuit of profit and growth, and an expression of technology, we need a new set of foundational assumptions, and we need to turn back the dial on the state of civilization, including its attitudes toward growth and technology.
Thanks for that!
The source of that is:
https://twitter.com/preston_vanloon/status/1572958754395811841 [Nitter]
https://preview.redd.it/c0qrfpdckr631.jpg?auto=webp&s=6f5e2471f1ac0d098053a96e08c87a2b2f12ce1e
HOLY SHIT IT ACTUALLY WORKED
WE ACTUALLY KEPT SOMEONE FROM GETTING REKTED BY SHITCOINS
A lot of Saylor's Bitcoin concepts, I see originating in a set of ideas that were prominent around MIT in the mid 1980's at the intersection of tech/engineering/operations industry and was adjacent to the failed "cybernetics" project. In this intellectual framework, a key opportunity for the future firm was by collecting and analyzing data at the individual level, corporate outlays and decision would be more efficient. The computing power necessary for this was just beginning to be feasible. I think Saylor was influenced by this view given he is the ceo of a business intelligence vendor doing just this.
As his own firm's product offering hit a ceiling to the value it would deliver from micro-economic measurements (e.g. trying to track inventory level changes) I think he became influenced by the idea of Bitcoin doing something similar, but in the invisible hand manner of pricing in changes and shocks to energy cost, risk preference etc across time and space into one number. In Saylor's view, no firm, of business intelligence software could outcompete the Bitcoin protocol for discovering information and properly factoring it a fair market value.
It's a good sign when people take the idea of Bitcoin, and see in it another idea that they admire and trust. I think the problem you mention is that Saylor's school of thought and lingo are not exactly a well known or admired idea by the vast majority of people considering buying bitcoin.
In my opinion, Saylor is onto something insightful with his "wall of energy" hypothesis, but he hasn't been able to quantify it. The analogy I would make is just as the finance profession prices firms by a discounted set of projected cashflows, a blockchain token could be valued by its projected future hashrate. Stated another way: A bitcoin has value 1.) if and only if producers continue to mine it in the future, 2.) the growth in value is proportional to the growth in the hashrate in the long run.
these are the glory days
I have had a blast of a week - new space, new ideas, old friends, new friends, writing, traveling to new meetups, reviving a podcast.
how lucky I am to take part in some of this bitcoin stuff
https://m.stacker.news/7309
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcY9bmKXEAUHEaK?format=jpg&name=900x900