Weekend Thoughts
Bitcoin ETFs, Napoleon, and how the speed of information transfer defines how free your society can be.
I read recently that adults will trust someone with their money — or will trust that person’s opinions — after only 3 hours of successful interaction.
Traditionally, this meant meeting someone … being impressed with their office or clothes or the language they use … etc …
3 hours is not a lot of time. Most of us wouldn’t let a stranger housesit for us after knowing them for only 180 minutes, yet when it comes to money, we’re more hairless monkeys looking for an alpha to guide us through the treetops and less strict logicians.
What’s interesting here is that it doesn’t need to be “traditional” interaction. After reading someone’s tweets for 3 hours, or watching their YouTube videos, etc. you are under the same form of influence.
How many young people held onto their Bitcoin because they watched long videos of billionaires like Michael Saylor and Bill Miller reminding us — with logic and heaps of social status — why they believe in BTC.
Another idea I toy with is how us moderns benefit from a speed of information transfer that literally no other generation has been able to benefit from.
I watched Napoleon in theatres and although I wasn’t very impressed with Ridley Scott’s treatment of Napoleon’s life (I prefer Scott as a sci-fi director), if you ever get around to watching the movie, you may come away with a sense of how much SMALLER and SLOWER everything used to be.
Almost emperor of Europe — and he relied on messages via horseback, handwritten, as did Europe’s other leaders.
An important message or order regarding troop movements could take weeks to arrive, if it did at all. “Scouts” were sent ahead on horseback.
Today we have drones, email, and HD video. A Napoleon with 125,000 troops could be neutralized by a handful of National Guard weekenders, just about.
Our world is so different from how it’s always been and there is opportunity in seeing that before other humans do.
Structurally, financially, and culturally … although entirely different from Napoleon’s time … we as people are identical.
The same wants, fears, and needs.
Today it’s not some frozen battleground where disputants are waiting days or weeks for messages from their commanders.
It’s a 24/7 information orgy where any new idea, fact, or asset can be understood — shared — assimilated, if necessary, on the same day or next day at the latest. Our world has T+0 information settlement time.
As individuals realize there are real problems — lack of opportunity for young workers, lack of support for new families with children, stagnating transportation technology, rising taxes, pollution, the culture war, WEF elities enacting policy without the requisite votes or support of the people they’re dropping these policies on… the oppression is real, but today it doesn’t come from a Napoleon or Prussian emperor or anyone like that.
The problem is more complex, and the solutions are out there … if only we could get everyone on the same page for once.
Jesus knew the money changer table needed to be flipped.
Muslims knew it, too, in their own way: “usury” — most of the modern banking system — is forbidden. Collecting interest is seen as grave sin.
Bitcoin, interestingly, recently gained approval from influential Muslim clerics. This allows the vast oil wealth in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and elsewhere to explore blockchain finance in ways they couldn’t — at least not vocally and publicly — before this determination was made.
Perhaps most interesting of all, though, every Bitcoin user knows other people. Chances are, most people (if not all) have relationships that meet the “3 hour rule,” meaning these people would trust their friend’s decision, and may even mimic their decision out of respect.
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