Good Morning Everyone,
I’ve had the phrase “you catch more bees with honey” floating around in my mind for a couple of weeks after listening to a pod with Robert Breedlove on What bitcoin did. As a kid growing up my mum used to say this to me from time to time. It’s a common turn of phrase and is essentially referring to incentives, and the fact that it’s most effective to focus on properly motivating humans toward the ideal outcome as opposed to always reaching for the stick.
As humans operating in hierarchical structures we typically default to the carrot and the stick design framework when trying to guide and incentivise decision making and human behaviour. Something to deter you from doing the wrong thing and motivate you toward the preferred option. The thing with this is it’s extremely simplistic, and the implementation often tends to leave a lot to be desired.
It’s typical that whoever is higher in the hierarchy tends to operate on more of a “do as i say, not as i do” type model. The fiat model. Because of their position in the hierarchy they have an increased level of influence over the protocol. This is true in shitcoins like ethereum, and it’s true in fiat. Meaning that the quality of the incentive structures are null and void because we will see the people above us operating in opposition to these desired behaviours. This corrupts the system as it’s obvious that the system is essentially disingenuous and trust ceases to exist. It also creates different unintended incentives and thus myriad potential unexpected and unwanted higher order effects as a result of this broken incentive structure.
It also on some level tends to corrupt us psychologically in respect to meaning. Specifically how meaningful the work is to us. When we see the system is essentially built on lies, and cease to trust it, the entire business and intention is also corrupted and we struggle to find meaning in the work and performance suffers as you would expect.
I feel like this is the state of play for 80-90% of businesses these days. The most basic of tasks can be profoundly important for a community, a country or the world more broadly, and it’s easy to forget the pivotal nature of a given task, job or business when the incentives are broken and we’re distorting reality within markets (which are really just human societies).
This in my opinion is really what bitcoin, and moving to a bitcoin standard promises to fundamentally change and hopefully improve dramatically. That’s not to say everything would be perfect on a bitcoin standard, but it seems obvious at this point, that the central banking and fiat standards corrupt our minds and thus human society on the deepest of levels.
It’s really a fundamental output of a monetary system - To incentivise and optimise our allocation of finite resources (energy) that supports and facilitates humans to innovate and flourish.
We’re never going to optimise for this when our core governance structures around the world (central governments) are predicated on lying and deceiving the public (nodes in the network) given they only need to the slightest margin of a majority to push things in a specific direction. Which is essentially a 51% attack on the network.
We can do better. We must do better. The separation of money and state and the adoption of a truly decentralized monetary protocol for the world is a major tool to help us better organise the incentives of our complex modern society and move in a better direction for our kids, and for the future of humanity.
Fix the money, fix the world.
Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
AK
