The text below is a direct excerpt from Marty’s Bent issue 1150: “The Way to Peace and Prosperity”. Sign up for the newsletter here.
As the protective duvet of the war drums is ripped off and the steady pounding of war cries begin to grow louder and louder, I thought it would be fitting to remind you that a more peaceful planet is achievable if the bureaucrats who are ruining the world would be rendered powerless and the free market would be allowed to offer people everywhere the opportunity to trade peacefully with each other. Luckily for us, Bitcoin enables this to happen by encouraging the exploration and production of cheap energy while simultaneously providing humanity with a censorship-resistant peer-to-peer distributed cash system.
Energy is the basis of our modern society. Without our ability to extract, transport and convert energy into sources of electricity and burning fuel to power engines, we would not enjoy the quality of life we have in our modern world. Writing this newsletter from my kitchen table in Austin, TX and broadcasting it across the interwebs to all the freaks scattered across the globe (we are an international rag) wouldn’t be possible. To be as productive as we are (or rather, can be) today would not be possible. It is something that should be celebrated and encouraged by all humans. It’s pretty cool that we’ve evolved to a point where we’re able to do these big things. However, for some reason there seems to be a great shame that permeates much of our society because of the belief that this process somehow destroys nature.
In reality, we humans are part of nature. We are proof that nature has the ability to be aware of itself and can use that awareness to do great things. This is not to say that some humans are not wasteful and destructive, there are many wasteful and destructive humans. A majority of these wasteful humans are found in the halls of governments across the Earth where they attempt to centrally plan nature, leading to its perversion. These centrally planned missteps are acutely evident in the grassroots energy policy that has taken the world by storm. Thinking they can centrally plan environmental management, politicians and fanatics have succeeded in stunting human progress by mindlessly forcing large swathes of the world’s population away from high-energy fuel sources. highly reliable energy density such as uranium, natural gas, oil and coal for less unreliable energy. dense sources like wind and sun. The proceeds of these misguided policies have led to increasingly cheaper electricity generation, which has affected the poor the most.
In an attempt to shame the world, the bureaucrats weaving through the halls of the UN are actively trying to shame emerging economies into affording themselves the same quality of life that we enjoy in the West, with abundantly good energy market and reliable. It is one of the driving forces of conflict in our modern age.
What bureaucrats should be doing is allowing free markets to go about their business relentlessly so that innovative and resourceful entrepreneurs can get to work solving our biggest problems. Many of them are aimed at supplying the markets with cheap and abundant energy resources. When people are able to take advantage of electricity easily and cheaply to do things, they can dramatically increase their productivity. Imagine the amount of innovation we would see in emerging economies if their citizens had reliable, cheap electricity and could use it to power computers and machines to do great things instead of having to switch their time traveling to get clean water and doing heavy manual labor. a workforce that cannot be replaced by much more productive machinery due to a lack of reliable energy sources. Imagine how much stress would be lifted off many people’s shoulders if they didn’t have to weigh the opportunity cost of turning on the lights versus paying for food.
With this in mind, how much potential economic progress has been prevented from materializing because of the penchant of UN bureaucrats to “punish” leaders they dislike by cutting their countries off from the global monetary system and the possibility to access markets? How many innocent civilians who have the wits to produce the innovative ingenuity needed to advance humanity have been prevented from doing so due to their inability to access a global marketplace? An incredibly large number of people.
By providing the world with a very strong economic incentive to locate, extract, and convert stranded and underutilized energy sources into cheap electricity, Bitcoin produces a free market premium on abundant energy for the masses. By providing the world with a distributed peer-to-peer cash system that cannot be controlled by any centralized government or third party, Bitcoin offers innovative entrepreneurs around the world the opportunity to tap into a global marketplace and get paid for their services. . Thirteen years after the Genesis block and we are still very early. Most humans do not yet recognize this potential. Don’t worry though. Many realize the opportunity and are actively working to ensure it materializes.
Over time and on a large scale, this should lead to a much more peaceful world, as we are able to focus on more productive uses of time and are not induced by stress which leads to increased potential for direct conflict.