Good Morning Everyone,
The concept of saving is likely something few people give much thought to. It’s somewhat intuitive. If we eat all the food in the fridge and have no money saved, then we cannot buy anymore food until we get more money, and if we get hungry in the interim this poses an issue and will likely cause us some discomfort. Suboptimal. So we have to either save some food or save some money to maintain some level of certainty about the future in this very small example.
The concept of saving is predominantly linked to our time preference, which is our ability, and the extent to which we prioritise delaying gratification. That is the extent to which we prioritise the future over the present or vice versa.
Saifedean talks extensively about time preference in his book the fiat standard, and identifies it as the primary negative externality of being on a fiat standard as opposed to a hard money standard. That as a society we have less certainty over the future and our time preference increases, whereby we begin to discount the importance of the future and shift out preference to prioritise the present.
This is the fiat disease. A modification of our time preference from a low time preference or a low sensitivity to time (ie: prioritising the future), to a high sensitivity or high time preference whereby we prioritise the present.
As a result of inflation via a corrupted and flawed monetary system our ability to save value across time diminishes. This leads to a number of undesirable higher order effects, but one of the primary symptoms of the fiat disease is that it perverts our risk tolerance and pushes people further out on the risk spectrum in an attempt to preserve wealth.
“This has manifested to produce what many of us would refer to as clown world. Where lying is the norm and deception has become a core business tenant.”
It used to be that if you gave a bank $100 of your money to store, that they would then be able to leverage that capital and earn a yield. For this opportunity they would pass on a small amount of this yield and you would earn $5 on your $100.
Nowadays if you place $100 in a bank in many parts of the world where negative interest rates have become the norm, not only are you getting killed by crippling high inflation, but the bank does not only operate in opposition to your best interest invading your privacy, your rights and facilitates a full scale surveillance racket which targets you and every person or entity you interact with in a population and around the world, the bank will also charge you $5 of your $100 for the privilege of using their service and storing your money within their predatory establishment.
Insane right?
Only in a clown world could something so clearly absurd and absolutely mental be normalised and accepted. Where a large swath of the population have been fed so much fiat information (read: lies) that they have lost the ability to disseminate the truth from the fiat noise, and infact many of which actively defend the nonsensical mind sludge.
Thankfully, Bitcoin fixes this.
Jack Mallers gets it right in this little rant. I’ve included a clip below.
“The federal reserve has perverted risk tolerance across all assets; and here’s what i mean by that. No one knows the price of anything any more. No one even knows the true rate of inflation right now, and no one can now save in dollars - whether you know that; or whether you’re on Tiktok and you’re seeing the guy with the nice car as the one that bought AMC at the right time.
It is implied through human behaviour, through societal behaviour and just through mathematics that you have to hold other assets if you want to preserve and retain wealth.”
The fiat system is going to continue to try and deceive you into remaining a slave to their centralized and predatory surveilance system which masquerades as a monetary system - and they will apply force to do so.
If you are ok with this, it’s probably wise you unsubscribe from this letter as it’s almost guaranteed that the content here within will trigger you and you’ll blame me for hurting your feelings and dissolving your delusional sense of certainty provided to you by this system of slavery.
On the other hand, if the fact that your sovereignty as a human being born into a human body is being violated, and attempts are being made to further enslave you and to trap you within a predatory system does not sit well with you, and you generally oppose the clown world, then you would welcome the fact that a mechanism, a technology, a tool now exists whereby you can peacefully opt-out of the madness and cast your vote as a human being on the planet of earth that you believe in-order for humanity to survive and thrive across time, and the fundamental behaviour that has led us to the present moment right now is our ability to maintain a low time preference and prioritise the future over the present.
On one hand you have closed, centralized hierarchical network that preys on the many to benefit the few. That opposes neutrality as a core value. That enables censorship and refutes your right to privacy.
On the other you have the most pristine iteration of money to ever exist. That is open, public, available to anyone, is censorship resistant and perhaps most critically that is completely neutral, flat and that no one owns or controls.
It’s literally a decision between slavery and freedom, and it’s my belief that with enough information to counter the fiat-information the decision becomes very easy.
Clown world is no match for an open, decentralized network that no one owns or controls and that anyone can peacefully join.
Join the peaceful resistance.
Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
AK
The Fiat Disease