While $LIBRA was dumping, I was cooking up a way to give every home for 8 billion people a Bitcoin node.
Most middle-class homes have TVs but suffer financial bondage. Imo, buying a TV before a Bitcoin node is like starting a relationship before getting a job, or having entertainment before securing your finances.
Poverty mindset. Reckless romanticism.
This is what fiat economics advises.
My hypothetical plan hopes to start from the bottom, with those homes having zero access to electricity.
The poorest people.
Wouldn’t that be something.
The answer, I realised, was cooking.
The numbers
700 million people live in extreme poverty.
At about 4 people per household, these are 175 million households.
They all cook lunch and supper. Releasing enough excess energy to charge a smartphone.
They may lack access to electricity, but if what they need in this hypothetical is a Bitcoin node, they shouldn’t worry.
Bitcoin does not need grid electricity from the city to function. It just needs electricity. The bare minimum anyway.
Firewood can create heat which can be turned into electricity using thermopiles and thermal diodes.
This could then be directly used to charge a smartphone.
A node on a smartphone is the best technological option for Bitcoin adoption. Because everyone and their mother (plus child) want smartphones.
They are a true human prosthetic. A third arm.
But today, no smartphone can run a full node no matter its advances.
(All people care about are cameras to take Instagram-worthy pictures of themselves. While their financial sovereignty suffers).
Let’s assume Physicists have stopped chasing chameleons, wimpzillas and majorana states, and are now dedicated to nano-scaling Bitcoin technology.
They stop whining over the state of Physics today, get their act together, and build humanity a company that churns out BTC smartphone full nodes.
Albeit smaller by the decade. Moore’s law.
At about $1000 for a full node that doesn’t pollute the climate anymore than a farting cow would, we’re on our way to liberating more economic power for our planet.
The Implications
While everybody hopes that Bitcoin adoption should start from the top — with this plan, it would start from the bottom.
From 100,000 nodes to 175 million.
Costing only $175 billion dollars.
Elon Musk alone could finance this and secure the financial future of the planet.
But I wouldn’t bet on it. He wants X payments. Like PayPal, he wants his own digital currency ledger which he can tweak to his satisfaction.
One long standing fallacy in human minds is that currency needs to be tweaked.
No. Currency needs to be used as we see fit, as we look for a ‘harder one’. Want to tweak something? Tweak your habits and your skills.
Leave the money of society alone.
For hundreds of years, humans in Europe e.g. Britain, tweaked gold’s price value making it go up and down with their tweaks, like the seas on which it was transported.
Trying to “stabilize it”. But it’s atomic structure is stable enough to make it the most alluring material we can all use and reuse to our heart’s content.
Gold was stable. What wasn’t stable was our greed.
What nobody knew was how much gold there was on earth.
And how scarce it was.
Alas, just as the (much loved) boom shocks from new discoveries were coming to an end, the beautiful experiment of the gold standard was crudely ended by Nixon.
Now we have Bitcoin.
We know it is capped at 21 million coins.
Alas, that desire to manipulate Bitcoin and “Crypto” has returned. Yet what Bitcoin asks is that we just use it, while channeling all our tweaking to build bigger infrastructure around Bitcoin.
(Imagine if Isaac Newton in his time was focussed on building devices made of gold or that need gold to function, instead of dogmatically thinking he could tweak its price and make Britain rich, wouldn’t we call him the greatest even more?)
Gold today has actual crucial use cases. Alas, we still care more about its speculative price tweaks. Grounded in zero utility for our species except NGU.
***
But what about the ROI?
How much do we get for that $175 billion?
Well well, firstly, the LN routing infrastructure of the planet will have grown from 100,000 to 175 million. A 1699% increase.
With such a ballooning of a good thing, suddenly, routing on the LN will be so cheap it will be free for most times of the year.
Transaction costs everywhere will drop!
Saving us all a lot of real money while allowing us extra cash to build new things. Like Mars colonies, perhaps.
Also, those afraid of spending will spend way more.
Transactions on the Bitcoin LN would grown to many more millions per day.
Would many payments rails be put out of business?
They would.
Evolution, baby.
They could evolve into teaching hubs, though. Ready to teach billions of people from those 175 million homes how to route satoshis.
That should be so net positive it compensates for the lost profits of routing a couple thousand transactions.
New “When I was Young” Stories
You know how older people say they had it better when they were young?
They can’t help lording it over us with videos like this ‘School before social media’.
With the plan I’ve shared, we can shoot back with ‘School after hyperbitcoinization’.
I would love that if I could see it.
To see kids talking of sats, arguing over what nodes mean or what they even do.
Meanwhile their clothes are cleaner, they aren’t so poor anymore, and their world is more tech savvy.
Their parents aren’t so afraid of poverty or fed up with contemporary politics, and neither are strangers.
I would love to see the village I am living in rather littered with waste Bitcoin nodes, and not plastic bags and bottles.
Yes. Make Bitcoin nodes free if you dare.
Especially you, believer in a benevolent AGI.
Now that would be capital C Capitalism.
