Welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Academy. This is our course on my second book,
Bitcoin Independence Reimagined, brought to you by the Plan B Network and Bitbox.
I'm Knut Swanum and I'm here as always with Luke DeWolf. Today's chapter is the one-shot
principle in the always up point, which we already covered in Lugano, but we're going to go through
it once again here. How are you today, Luke? I'm great, Knut. Good morning. Yes, one-shot
principle and the always up point we we did this one in lugano uh but the the whole deal with that
was we were we were live from the plan b forum there and we streamed it on rumble it was a lot
of fun really cool but it's not exactly the the format of the the this particular podcast so we're
we're just doing it the the proper way so if you've already listened to us talk about this in
the past that's okay uh but but yeah we're just going to cover it again here with the nice book
visible and
you know us sitting in our nice comfy
chairs instead of in Lugano Switzerland
on the
tent stage where we later that
no where we the previous night had
played the Satoshi
Rakamoto and it's a miracle
that we were actually up to do the podcast
at 8 in the morning the next day
yeah that was
exciting for sure
this is probably the most
known chapter
of this book
The one-shot principle is the most famous quote from the book by far.
So yeah, let's dive into it and see what it is.
Shall we?
Let's do it.
And before we get started, just a reminder that the best way that you can get involved
with the Bitcoin Infinity Academy is to go to our Geyser Fund page, geyser.fund.project.infinity.
You can get all the details there about how you can get involved.
And that's one of the best ways that you can support the show.
So go check that out, geyser.fund.project.infinity.
And now, the one-shot principle and the always-up point.
Who am I to conjure up theories about macroeconomics?
I have no financial background, and even though I've probably studied mathematics more than your average Joe,
that was a long time ago, and I'm hardly an expert at anything, really.
Well, if there's one thing that Bitcoin has taught me, it's how scarce my time is,
and that I won't be able to excel at anything if I don't have skin in the game.
Everyone is new to Bitcoin, and everything in economics is speculative.
John Cleese, one of my favorite human beings of all time, has said that it seemed like the main
goal in life for everyone in his hometown of Weston-Super-Mare was to get safely into their
coffins without ever having been seriously embarrassed. This phrase struck a chord with me.
After having discovered Bitcoin, and in doing so also having discovered new ways to think about
scarcity and time, I've decided to not hold my brain back any longer, but to put my thoughts
out there, where they at least might ignite a spark in someone else's mind.
Standing on the shoulders of true giants, here's my take on an economic theory and an
explanation of the specific event that it implies.
And just to be clear, this was Knut talking the whole time, not me, even though I agree
with most of what you said, it doesn't all apply to me.
Yeah, okay. So before we get into here's my take on an economic theory, the actual take on it, let's discuss this a bit. Yeah, it's funny because I had a guy come up to me in Lugano when we were signing books who asked exactly this, like, what gives you the authority to tell me about things? Like, why should I listen to you? Do you have a PhD in this and that?
and the thing is uh bitcoin in my mind has sort of leveled that playing field this is one of the
things i fell in love with with this community in the beginning all that mattered what what you had
actually produced credentials didn't matter at all like people listened to ideas not to authority
and and that's uh i mean all i have to my name um in terms of expertise on this are my books and how
people like how much people like them like uh that's that's my proof of results that's that's
the uh that's my phd uh and take that as you will uh if you want to listen to me or listen to
a kinsian economist who has a paper from a school funded by the government that's up to you
but all I did in this was think and write
I was never paid by anyone to have a certain opinion rather than another
very good point and I think also the John Cleese quote is interesting
it's kind of yeah there's some inspiration to that right
like you should lean in to the things and not worry about being seriously embarrassed
No, it has, as I say here, struck a chord with me because so many people go through life without ever taking risks, and therefore nothing happens to them.
So life is not a rehearsal.
You have one go at it.
And just as I explained in the Praxeology book that hope is a rational choice because you're going to die anyway, so you might as well live as there's hope, even if life seems hopeless.
this is sort of in the same vein as that you might as well live life as if it was your last chance to
do so because it is your last chance to do so uh so go out there and uh be courageous like
not in the woke sense of the word but in the true sense of the word um what's the worst that can
happen uh i guess you can die a martyr or you're gonna die anyway so why not just speak your mind
Very good point. And so I think with that, let's get into that which you spoke your mind about.
The one-shot principle.
Absolute mathematical scarcity achieved by consensus in a sufficiently decentralized distributed network was a discovery rather than an invention.
It cannot be achieved again by a network made up of participants aware of this discovery, since the very thing discovered was resistance to replicability itself.
I forget if we pause there in the Lugano thing, but I think it's time to just let you explain that in your own words.
Yeah, that is the quote that has made its rounds around Bitcoin, Twitter and so on.
I recently talked to Max Keiser about this.
It's one of the reasons that I went to San Salvador last week, because this is one of Max's favorite quotes in the Bitcoin.
What's the word? The Bitcoin cannon, maybe.
And it hints at maybe if I wrote it today, I would have used slightly different words.
I would have replaced scarcity with finiteness, which is more accurate.
But other than that, I still think this is the case. It's very simple. The very thing that intrigued me about Bitcoin in the first place was the promise of something on the internet that couldn't be copied. And I could never get my head around, like, how can information not be copyable? All information can be copied. That's in the very nature of information.
but it's only like a decade later
I realized the depth of that question
and that the reason it can't be copied
or that ownership of a Bitcoin can't be copied
is because the Bitcoins are not on the internet at all
they're in our heads
and we are the thing
so this is sort of a pathway
a stepping stone on the path to that insight
yeah and I
I wouldn't mind
if more people spread this thing
what's your take on it Luke
what do you think when you read this
yeah well the quote itself
is really just distilling
a few ideas about
Bitcoin into this one
a couple of sentences
basically and I
really like how it does that
that's the way all memes work
right the simpler they are
And the more information that gets packed into them, the better. And I mean, that's sort of everything divided by 21 million is this to a whole other level, basically, right? And I think the idea here is that this is also probably something that people are maybe a little unintuitive about here. It's the answer to all of the, well, why is Bitcoin actually scarce if there's all these other cryptos? That's basically the answer to that.
Like it doesn't matter if you've got some other crypto that's got a fixed supply cap.
They still have like a pre-mine and they have all of these other things that basically they knew the game they were playing.
All of them.
But Bitcoin is the only one that didn't.
And so it's subtle, but it's important.
It's more like, yeah, Bitcoin is the solution to the double spending problem.
Like, either you can achieve digital resistance to replicability or you can't.
So if the other cryptos were to count, then they would sort of debunk their own theory.
They would be counterproductive to their own cause.
So it's very simple.
Finite amount of Bitcoin, infinite amount of crypto.
And you have to bundle them into their own thing, like all of them, because they're all an attempt at doing the same thing, which is replicating resistance to replicability, which by its very nature cannot be replicated.
So either it works once or it doesn't work at all.
And I happen to be in the camp that thinks it worked once and that's all we need.
Perfect.
I think let's cover the remaining conversational paragraphs on this so that we can dig even further into your questions.
Sure, one more thing before we do that.
You mentioned boiling down complex thoughts into a few sentences.
And that's why I fell in love with Twitter in the first place.
because you were limited to 144 characters,
which forces you to distill your thoughts
into the shortest amount of characters possible.
And that's absolutely helped my writing abilities.
And I really enjoy Twitter for that reason.
And I still do, by the way.
you can put more characters in a tweet now, but you can only still only see the
first 144 ones or whatever it is.
I don't know if it's exactly 144 anymore, but, um, still that's what Twitter mainly
did for me is is making me better at distilling ideas into fewer characters Yeah Very good point And yeah uncapping that for paid subscribers to Twitter maybe has had some effects
I certainly don't make super short tweets all that often,
but anyway.
All right, on to the next paragraph.
Absolute scarcity on the internet
was long believed to be impossible
because of the very nature of data.
Ones and zeros that could be copied
an infinite number of times
weren't believed to be capable of representing something as uncompromisingly finite as Bitcoin's
21 million coin issuance cap. That is, until Satoshi Nakamoto showed us that the double
spending problem could be solved by giving every participant in the network a reward for following
the rules and making sure that every other participant also did so. In doing this, and then
disappearing at an early stage of the network's development, he gave enough participants hope that
the decentralization experiment could actually work and created a living thing that feeds on
human incentives. The rise of Bitcoin was a true black swan event and it cannot happen again.
A competing token would need to be sufficiently different from Bitcoin in order to achieve
true decentralization because it would be trivial for any big player to completely dominate this new
coin and there would be no way to introduce it to the market without a skewed initial distribution.
a competitor would need to differentiate itself so much from bitcoin that when push came to shove
it wouldn't be a competitor at all i'll stop here i think that was mostly just covering a lot of the
points we've already discussed yeah except one point and that is the monetary maximalism point
here if uh this is so in order for anything else to it would need to be sufficiently different right
in other words it couldn't be money it couldn't compete on the money front which is also why
bitcoin needs to be money and nothing else if bitcoin is all all of a sudden all of these other
things data storage bullcrap then it is competing with the other coins on those things and we don't
want that kind of competition so so it's actually an uh uh inadvertent um argument for the monetary
maximalism case it's uh being money is what makes bitcoin different from all the other shit yes and
uh yeah i think digging too deeply into sort of the debates about you know arbitrary data on
bitcoin that's not really the point of this particular uh series but yeah bitcoin is money
and has to be money and has to be the thing that wins as money in order for us to do the things
that Bitcoin is promising, right?
Like Bitcoin is supposed to be the way out
of the fiat system
and the way out of the monetary spigot
having cantillionaires placed right up against it
and gaining power
just because they're closer to the money printer.
Bitcoin fixes this
and Bitcoin can't fix this as effectively
or as quickly if it is not money
and if it is not the thing that wins at being money.
I think that's all fair to say.
Yeah, paraphrased.
All it needs to do to win is be money.
Very good.
We should try to meme that.
I'll continue here.
More importantly, if a technically superior or more efficient token
one day renders Bitcoin a thing of the past,
the whole concept of absolute scarcity on the internet can be considered a failure
because there would be no guarantees whatsoever
that this new token wouldn't suffer a similar fate at some point in the future.
Users would no longer stand to gain anything from saving their Bitcoin, but contrary to this,
they would be incentivized to spend and acquire new alternative tokens. This would destroy the
only true value proposition of Bitcoin, its scarcity, and deprive any future attempt at
creating decentralized currencies of any legitimacy. This is the main reason that
blockchains other than Bitcoin's blockchain are counterproductive and confusing to a lot of
newcomers, especially since a lot of Bitcoin proponents don't seem to understand this fully
themselves. Hal Finney, the man who received the first ever Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi
Nakamoto, definitely understood though. He said the following in May 2011.
Any successful replacement of the Bitcoin blockchain will forever undermine the credibility
of any successor. How can an investor know that it won't happen again? Rebooting now may benefit
a few thousand early adopters. What happens when hundreds of millions use Bitcoin 2.0?
They'll be just as jealous and envious of you as you are of others.
Given the precedent you want to set, how will you argue against yet another reboot?
Very prescient words. I have my own thoughts as relates to ossification and this and that,
But yeah, what are your thoughts on these points?
Yeah, Hal was ahead of his time.
Hal was so right about so many things, and this is one of them.
I mean, my one-shot principle is just basically just paraphrasing whatever Hal said.
So yeah, you can't reboot it without setting a precedent for it being rebooted again.
So the ossification thing, though, if I'm going to make a comment on that, is that, first of all, Bitcoin cannot ever ossify. It's impossible since it's predicated on people doing things and people can just do things, as we know. So ossification is not a real thing. And it never was.
all that can happen is that Bitcoin can develop
more or less quickly.
And it's preferable if changes are slow
and thought through rigorously.
There's a lot of developers that want to move fast
and break things because they come from that kind of culture.
And in Bitcoin, that's not necessarily preferable
because people want, as soon as you do anything
to the code base, as soon as you do anything to Bitcoin,
you at least potentially change people's behavior,
meaning that people value the thing differently.
Meaning that the app, without
doubt, has some effect on the purchasing power
of the thing. Because it's all about how people evaluate it.
And the more you fiddle around with it, the less
convinced people will be of its robustness so that's that's the the best argument i think for
for not tampering with it unless it's absolutely crucial that we do so like fixing a bug that will
kill the whole thing of course we should address those things but uh fiddling around with it just
for the sake of fiddling around is never a good idea yeah totally agree with you there there's a
bit of a ship of theseus thing going on here right like uh uh the the the whole idea of that
bitcoin needs to sort of adapt and change to its to its conditions and and what happens if like
like a reboot would be totally getting rid of uh of bitcoin but we we don't need to do that that's
that's sort of the the point here and as long as the blockchain itself like the bitcoin blockchain
or the time chain, if you want to call it that, as long as that's still the thing. And Bitcoin is
still the same network overall, just changing slowly, deliberately, then we've still got Bitcoin.
But as soon as you grab a new thing, the funny thing is anyone can go say, hey, we've got the
Bitcoin blockchain, right? And now we're spawning off a totally new network based on that, right?
and we're going to run our own rules, right?
Bitcoin 2.0, et cetera.
And that's the thing that doesn't work
because it's not the same network.
So it has to be the same blockchain
and the same network.
And you can make little changes
and people can come and go from that network,
but it has to be the same one.
So yeah, that's how we avoid
the Bitcoin reboot basically.
And that's just a couple of subtleties there.
But on the ossification point, I think the thing that you mentioned that I specifically agree with why we can never truly ossify is just that there are things that could kill Bitcoin and there are people that want to attack it all the time.
We live in the real world here.
We live in a world where people who want to do bad things and steal people's money are going to be trying to do so.
and their tools are changing, their methods are changing, and the way things happen always changes.
So we do have to have the flexibility to be able to handle issues as they come up. We don't know
the future. We don't know all of the things that could eventually be a threat to Bitcoin. And only
so much can be done on the node level as well. Like many security features are developed by simply
patching in vulnerabilities to the Bitcoin Core software or whatever implementation you choose to
use. And those security features are good and useful. And it's not really the best thing to
continue to use a really old version of Bitcoin Core, because there are security vulnerabilities
that can literally, like you can lose your Bitcoin if you use that node as your Bitcoin wallet.
if you use too old one with security vulnerabilities.
So there's a balance to be struck here
between like, let's be careful and deliberate.
And also that we live,
the Bitcoin is connected to the internet
and therefore you get all the same people
trying to hack it and this and that
as anything else connected to the internet.
And Bitcoin having all of this money attached to it
or being money makes it an even better target, right?
But the other point is that there are some things
that have to be changed on a consensus level,
such as the game-breaking bugs and things like this.
And if we ever have quantum computing become a serious threat,
I don't think it is now, but who knows, in a decade, two decades, whatever,
we have to do something about it.
It's not imminent, but we have to do something about it eventually.
And so that means by definition that we can't truly ossify.
And that will be how Bitcoin stands the test of time, or not.
I'm hopeful that it can.
Yeah, a couple of points there I'd like to address because I think I have a slightly different view.
First of all, the reboot thing, Bitcoin cannot reboot.
A reboot would kill it because then the double spending problem isn't solved.
You could double spend.
A reboot definitely, from a certain viewpoint, is a double spend.
If this is not the thing, then the problem is not solved yet.
The other thing is with the quantum threat, for instance,
to make a point about that is that maybe we'll end up in a scenario,
I think this is what you mean when you talk about that the scenario would be that we were faced with a fork where you would have to choose whether the hacked coins are somehow saved and taken off the network or whether the hacker gets to take the coins
and I would quite firmly be in the camp that lets the hacker take the coins
because the rules you signed up for when you bought Bitcoin for the first time you bought them
they included this threat this threat was always there and it was up to you to evaluate
how big of a threat that was and what would happen if those coins ever moved same with
if just satoshi decides to come back one day and move all his coins that can also happen would we
stop him from doing that would we fork off i certainly wouldn't also what who gets to decide
what bitcoin is and the common thesis is that it's the longest proof of work chain right that
that is bitcoin when that's what we define as bitcoin but ultimately that's not entirely true
either because it's the market that decides if the market decides that the a fork that does not have
the longest proof of work is the thing that we're going to call bitcoin then the other fork would die
and die off slowly but surely and uh whatever the market decides bitcoin is is bitcoin and
this is a crucial point because it's up to you the individual user to define what bitcoin is to you
no one gets to tell you what bitcoin is except yourself and you you make this choice it's an
individual choice at the end of the day it's not a collective choice roger veer may think he
may think bitcoin cash is bitcoin as much as he likes i don't agree with him but it's not up to
me to decide for him what he thinks is bitcoin and i can't decide for craig wright what craig
right thinks is Bitcoin too, and they can have fun staying poor on their chain if they want to.
And this is how I mean that the market decides because they had another definition of what
mechanism decides what Bitcoin is and what it means than everyone else. And therefore,
they are now insignificant because they chose the wrong chain. So the real moral dilemma,
I think happens when there's a chain split where the biggest token after the chain split
is not the ethical one.
That's when we get into the real dilemma.
If there's a government coin that sort of takes over the chain,
if one part of the chain split is like OFAC compliant and all this crap,
then if that chain becomes bigger
that's the only case where I would
cling to the other side
not for personal monetary gain
but to just keep my soul intact
I still think this is a fight worth fighting
and I still think Bitcoin is the only chance we have
literally the only chance we have at taking this fight
so we need to defend it with everything we got
which is why I've been so adamant about spam being crap
and that we don't hate the spammers enough and stuff like that.
So regardless of if you're on the not so core side of that debate,
that's not that interesting to me.
The interesting thing is how willing are you to defend this thing in the long run?
And will there be a fight where you will be forced to show you true colors?
Who knows?
Right now, I tolerate Bitcoin as it is.
Core30 is released.
I'm not happy with that release, but I am willing to tolerate that people are running those nodes and I'm not going to abandon ship because that happened.
We would have to be in a lot more trouble than that for me to abandon ship for sure.
However, I do think that these things are...
The fact that we're debating them at all is very optimistic.
It's very hopeful.
More people are running nodes than ever.
And in my opinion, as a result of that, the network is more resilient than ever.
We'll just have to wait and see how this whole thing plays out.
I wasn't expecting to go that deep into so many things.
But yeah, I fully agree for the most part there.
The only point I just wanted to be clear about with the quantum stuff,
I wasn't referring to that if there would be like an eventual fork that has to deal with hacked coin.
I think that would for sure be a discussion if it starts to happen.
All of the lost coins are basically the ones that are vulnerable here.
If someone has lost their key or something, Quantum could eventually go grab that.
I don't want to go into the weeds of this, but what I was getting at was that basically Bitcoin would have to add new address types
that would not be able to be, in any foreseeable future,
hacked by a quantum computer.
And that's possible to do, and there's lots of things that prevent that.
Basically, if your public key isn't visible,
that's already a very good start for that.
But it's a future thing, but it's a thing that I do firmly believe
will need to happen eventually in order to react to the changing world
and the technological advancements.
That's the overall point.
Yeah, there's another bug, like the millionth block,
the internal clock will reset somehow,
and that's a bug we have to fix.
There's theoretically 21 million more Bitcoins at that point.
Anyway, where was I with this?
The quantum thing.
The event, I think, is comparable as the Ethereum split back in 2017
when Ethereum Classic was invented.
If I ever fell for the Ethereum scam,
I would definitely be on the Ethereum Classic side of that thing.
And I think that the fact that most of the network moved to the chain split
that's changed history is a testament to how centralized Ethereum is.
It's not resilient in the way Bitcoin is.
And I think if Bitcoin had a similar split, everyone would lean towards the classic thing.
Yeah.
Anyway.
I would hope so.
I think that's enough about that.
Let's end this section with a little bit of discussion about Hal Finney.
For those of you who don't know, Hal was one of the people closest to Satoshi and a monumental part of Bitcoin's early history.
He believed that the computer could be used as a tool to liberate and protect people rather than to control them.
and some people even believe that he was the man behind the pseudonym.
This would explain why Satoshi went silent in 2011
since Howe fully lost control of his locomotive functions
around the time of Satoshi's disappearance
because of the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis disease he suffered from.
The disease eventually bereft him of his life on August 28, 2014.
Howe's body is cryopreserved and poised for resurrection
as soon as this has been invented.
Any day now.
How funny.
uh yes rest in peace how um there's a funny thought experiment that what if hal memorized
a private key and when once he's resurrected 400 years from now he remembers that private key and
moves the coins more of a funny thought experiment than anything else uh and it sort of also points
to the difference between saving and hodling uh which in my mind are two different forms of human
action uh anyway uh yeah i don't i i don't personally believe that hal is satoshi i i
think there's sufficient evidence pointing to the contrary maybe if satoshi was a group of people
hal was one of the group but uh one one of the members of the group but uh yeah speculating about
satoshi and who satoshi was is not very productive in my in my no agreed but regardless hal is a
great early figure in Bitcoin and incredibly important to its spread. So yeah, as you said,
rest in peace, Hal. Okay, moving on to the always up point. The always up point is a highly
theoretical, albeit logical conclusion of what one deflationary currency competing with nothing
but inflationary currencies might ultimately lead to. The Bitcoin block subsidy, which is the newly
minted coins part of the block reward, is halved every four years, resulting in an ever increasing
stock-to-flow ratio of the asset. This concept is explained in the laws and effects chapter at the
end of the book. At some yet unknown point in the future, Bitcoin's unmatched stock-to-flow ratio
combined with enough people who aren't willing to ever sell their Bitcoin, also known as hodlers
of last resort, will make Bitcoin so hard to come by that it can't lose value. In other words,
a point in time from where the price of a Bitcoin can only go up. This might sound outlandish,
but keep in mind how far off in the future such a point may be,
and that all other currencies on Earth are inflationary, including gold.
The comparison to other currencies is sort of misleading in this case,
since Bitcoin's monetary properties are so vastly different from what we've seen in the past.
All right, the always up point.
Yeah, there's one sentence here which might be slightly unclear.
is like will make Bitcoin so hard to come by that it can't lose value.
Instead of the word value there, that is like that it can't lose value in fiat terms
is what I would add to that.
Because of course, valuations are subjective and dynamic.
And how many sets you're willing to buy a hot dog for can still go up and down.
the thing is though that all fiat currencies are not only inflationary but ever increasingly so
there is never enough money around or fiat around to pay off the ever increase in debts so the only
way to to pay them off is to issue more debt which leads to a compounding effect so that more debt
is needed to pay off the previous debt,
which means that all fiat currencies
are on this hockey stick trajectory,
especially as human beings get so much better
at doing things.
The price drops that should have happened
in terms of all goods and services on earth,
just since the mobile phone was invented,
are just staggering when you think about it
how much the prices should have fallen
should have fallen.
If you denominate in Bitcoin,
you can sort of see this reality that all prices are dropping extremely fast and faster and faster each year With fiat it the opposite way It the other way around They have to print faster and faster to keep up with the technological advancements
and add to that just simply the fact that there's never enough money around
to pay off the debt, so the debt needs to grow exponentially.
that is the conclusion of this always up point the the always up point is just uh being honest
about how destructive fiat currencies are and how how vastly different bitcoin is um so there is such
a point at somewhere in the future definitely and well let's see how far away we are from that
it might be in our lifetimes it might not be but regardless it's it's good to look at what these
natural conclusions are. I think we should finish off the chapter so that we can round off the
discussion. Yep. Absolute scarcity means that one day there will only be 0.00000001 Bitcoin,
or one Satoshi left in circulation. This Satoshi will probably be worth more than an original
painting by Leonardo da Vinci, of which there are about 13 left a day at this point in time.
It will simply be immeasurably valuable as a collectible.
Not for sale at any price.
The always up point would theoretically happen a long time before this.
Sometime between now and when all of the Bitcoin is lost,
there's a tipping point where it becomes pointless to talk about Bitcoin's price in dollars, euros, or yuan.
But the always up point would precede that event too.
These two points may be closer to each other than they are to the present,
or the point where there is no Bitcoin left.
but no one can know for sure how far off or close these two points really are.
The always up point may sound like total science fiction,
but try to think about these things without coming to these conclusions eventually.
I bet you can't.
There is, of course, always the possibility that Bitcoin may fail for one reason or another,
but if it doesn't fail, these events are bound to happen and are not fictional at all.
Yeah, so again, some interesting thought experiments
and definitely the point where there's only one Satoshi left
is very science fiction-y.
Well, at some point there will only be one Satoshi left to move.
It will have to play out that way.
Since once a private key is lost, you cannot get it back
and all of them will be lost at some point.
Then again, you could say that maybe that point doesn't precede
you know, the earth melting because the sun expands
and we need to colonize the stars
and we couldn't take Bitcoin with us
because of the hash horizon and stuff like that.
But still, it's a funny thought experiment regardless.
I think this also ties into, you know,
the sailor thesis that the most altruistic thing
you can do is die with your Bitcoins
so that no one else gets access to them
and thereby you increase the scarcity
rising every other boat with that the scarcity tide so to speak and i've been thinking about that
here in san salvador we had a great deep uh discussion about it after too many beers
with a couple of other bitcoiners and that is what's because the the thing that's left out of
that argument is that the entire economy would have one less player in it and having more players
in it is valuable because the Metcalfe's law. If money is nothing but communication, that means
money is a communications network, which means that the value of the communications network
is equal to its number of users squared. So this user at the margin and his value
will have to be greater than the value of the coins lost in relation to the total supply,
which is also highly theoretical and of course unquantifiable because you don't know how much
value another player brings because you don't know how useful that player is in terms of
actually adding more economic value to the entire pie but you can know that if all bitcoiners died
with their bitcoins in their heads there would be no people left to to give the last remaining
if there's only one bitcoiner left uh the satoshis are worthless because there's no one to trade
there's nothing to do with them you can't eat them you can't build a house with them
All you can do is use them for trading. So you need other participants. So there's a curve there somewhere. I'm not entirely sure what it looks like. It's probably something like the Laffer curve or something.
where if no one, well, I guess if no one ever died with their Bitcoins,
that doesn't matter because they're still capped.
But there's something to you not dying with your Bitcoins.
HODLers of last resort, the network growing as opposed to the network not growing.
Utility at the margin squared since you're another user of a communications network.
Yeah, there's a lot of brain farts to explore here if you want to.
well if you die you're no longer a part of the communications network anyway no that's the point
it's just a case of whether you've you've uh uh given your bitcoins if you have increased the
adoption of bitcoin over your lifetime you dying that hasn't decreased the the efficiency of the
network that would be my counter to that so uh what's the difference between dying and hodling
forever. Well, there we go. I think that's, that's sort of, you've, you've answered that if you,
if you are, yeah, interesting, yeah, hodling forever. So therefore this is, this is too
complicated and extremely out there and maybe not so, so useful. The, the only other point that I
would, I would want to make here is that I think the point of there only being one Satoshi left in
circulation is probably when we're post money, as in when, when Bitcoin is no longer relevant,
there's no such thing as scarcity. It's possible. Very, very science fiction. But I would suggest
that that would be the scenario. If you happen to like thought fart experiments like this,
I recommend all of my other books, especially the one I wrote together with Luke,
Bitcoin the Inverse of Clown World, because there is where we really do deep dives on all of these
thought 40 things uh i happen to like uh the the mental mental gymnastics for last of a
lack of a better word like using mental gymnastics to to exercise the brain that's uh that's what it
is more more than anything tangible uh still yeah the always up point is the sort of the
other point of this chapter
but the main point is the
one shot principle. If there's
anything that I wish you as the reader
would remember from this chapter is definitely
the one shot principle and
don't worry too much about the always up point.
Very good and I think with that
that's a good summary of this
chapter. The one shot principle is
very good and a very good
concept I think for
Bitcoiners to grasp.
I think with that
we should remind our viewers and listeners,
dear viewer and listener, you,
check out the Plan B network.
And actually this time now,
we can mention something specific from Plan B
that maybe you can do to get involved specifically.
There's their business school coming up.
So you can basically go check out up on planb.network
all the information about their business school in Lugano.
First of all, you can use Code Infinity for a discount.
So that's awesome. But Knut, you've been involved with the business school the last couple of years. Maybe you want to say a little bit about what that's all about and why you should check it out.
yes i i usually give one guest star lecture in the middle of the course which is uh mostly online
but also in front of a live audience in lugano and then the 21 top students i i don't know if
it's more this year actually but uh this last year was the 21 top students from around the world
they get to go to lugano for a week during the summer and uh and uh uh listen to lectures all
that week and get a diploma afterwards. It was a beautiful week this summer. I learned a lot from
all of the other speakers and the students were just awesome. I met a whole bunch of them here
in San Salvador. They were all helping out with both Bitcoin Historico and adopting Bitcoin
conferences. So great to see them again. I think all of these people have a bright future ahead of
them. If you want to get more involved, the business school is highly recommended. And this
year too, the business school and the technical school are sort of merged together as far as I
know. Giacomo has talked a lot about this. So you will not only be taught business skills,
but also technical skills and vice versa. If you're one of the more technical students,
you will learn some business tricks as well. So yeah, overall, becoming an overall more well-informed
Bitcoiner, and that's always good. Looking forward to all of this. Yeah, the idea right now,
this is not entirely fleshed out yet, but I will be doing an entire course on my Praxeology book in
Logano, not only one lecture. So we'll see when and where that is. More information about that later.
there are some details to be fleshed out before we go forward with that.
But highly recommend anything Logano related.
Very good.
And I'll just mention here that the discount code applies,
code infinity as always applies to both the Plan B Business School
and the Plan B Developer School.
And they actually have a separate link for this, planb.academy.
So go to planb.academy for information about that.
and of course we also want to tell you about our other sponsor Bitbox
and if you don't know Bitbox is our favorite hardware wallet manufacturer
and they're Swiss made everything is done in Switzerland which is fantastic
they have the latest secure element with their Bitbox 02 Nova edition
with a nice glass screen and full iOS compatibility and all this
so go check that out bitbox.swiss slash infinity
for everything you need to know about the Bitbox
If you need a hardware wallet, if someone you know needs a hardware wallet, it's fantastic.
The interface is easy to use.
Can't recommend it enough.
So go check that out.
Make sure you get the Bitcoin-only firmware.
Yes, I've heard through the grapevine that there's other types of firmware, but we don't endorse that at all.
What we endorse is the Bitcoin-only edition.
So make sure you get that.
Perfect.
and with that I think we can now say
that this has been the Bitcoin Infinity Academy
thank you for listening
bye bye