Death Economics: Why Crypto Can't Solve Social Problems

Transcript

[Music] cool good if you want people to show up for your Talk use the word death death economics so crypto hasn't solved all of our social problems or even all of our economic problems so why is that and why can't it and the first thing is the big lie um you've all seen this like people used to barter but they couldn't carry a cow and then they needed you know gold and it turns out that um this is a there isn't a whole

lot of historical evidence that people really used barter it turns out uh you know if you lived in a society like this and you couldn't eat the whole elk yourself but you were the best hunter but maybe you weren't the best clothing maker you brought the elk home and you shared it with your tribe and the person who was good at making arrows gave you arrows and they didn't trade it they were just like what am I going to do with my arrows I better give it to the guy who can actually shoot the elk and so for most of human history and these people are modern people I mean we don't like Mo not modern in the sense that they wear sneakers but they're people who still live here on this Earth and for most of human history most of the peoples of the world didn't have money

they didn't use money and so the idea that we've always had money and we always will have money it just it's not the case so that's one big lie the other big lie is that money is a store of value and if you just take a second to think of like a few things that you really value I'm letting you think you'll notice that most of them are not purchasable like your freedom your family air so we have this whole big weird definition it's a store of value and we like being told that there's always been money and there always will money and there it's just not the case and basically what cryptocurrency is is a money and it follows the rules of money and so if you're trying to solve

our problems but you haven't changed the rules of the game so let's see what the rules of the game are the rules are so here yeah here's the big lie it's not a store of value and um wow children are expensive like if you can say the sentence children are expensive expensive there may be something wrong with your framing of what children are all about so that's one of the rules of the game children are expensive and I know many people and young people today but even in my it's like should I delay my career or should I have a family or should I like this is not a good way to run your Society where people feel like maybe we shouldn't have a family at any I mean like isn't the point to have a society you have to have babies to have

a so anyway it's weird another rule of the game is that the minerals are worth more than the mountain this is certainly true of Bitcoin cuz you got to have some lithium and you got to have some racks and you know and we've got all this like renewable energy things like we're going to put our Bitcoin miners in the Arctic so that it won't really take up so much electricity because of the Heat and it's like well what could possibly go wrong with that like that ice wasn't doing anything or those solar panels that are going to cover the desert I mean you know there's no reason that the earth needs like the sun to actually hit the ground if we just interfere with solar panels nothing could possibly go wrong we are we're really really sure

about anyway that's one of the rules of the game uh another rule of the game is that putting people in old folks home is good for GDP but it's bad for my retirement fund what about my inheritance like I'm spending all the Grandma's money instead of getting it like that's just one of the rules of money I mean again you can see how distorted these things are and you can see that none of the cryptocurrencies that we've invented have changed any of these rules boy I really wish this had my next slide because I don't know what else I've got on here um all right so yeah these are the communications of money so and these are the same Communications that every cryptocurrency that we've invented so far maybe not

every but all the ones that you can name all the cryptocurrencies still follow these rules some activities get paid and some don't get paid so being with your family doesn't get paid if you're the yoga teacher you get paid but if you're the yoga student you pay for that and there's some sort of random definitions of what gets paid and if you think about what you get paid for and what you do cuz it's fun you'll notice it's it incredibly random um the other thing is humans must do paid activities in order to have the right to live decently and if you're not doing one of the randomly selected paid activities that we've decided like being an adver iing agent or a lawyer then you don't really have the right to a good

life it's weird um but it's that's the rule of the game uh children and old people are free writers that's one of the other things that when you when you give somebody a Bitcoin or an ethereum coin or whatever children old people or free writers um the things that nature produces are free to exploit so that's the mountain that we were showing you you can just cut down a tree a dead tree that's why I call it death economics right a dead tree is better than a Al live tree just like the dead grandma like dead grandma is better than live grandma because I get the inheritance um there's this one is really interesting mythology it's like there is such a thing as Fair exchange like it's actually possible for me to know how

much this should cost and I can get it in a way that there's absolutely no like the the number that is attached to this thing is correct and there there's a number attached to my hours and that's correct it's there's going to be we're going to be even Steven at the end of you're going to give me this money I'm going to you know like I'm going to give you this coffee and it's even it's like it's fair and like if that were really true I think people who clean toilets would make a lot more money but anyway so the mythology that there even is such a thing as a fair exchange between you me and you what am I doing up here I'm not getting paid for this anyway and the last one is that there's no limit to how

much more one person's worth could be than another person's worth so somebody who's very poor and lives in a poor country they're just worth nothing and there's people who are worth billions of dollars because those people are worth billions and billions more than you and me like that's that's possible like some people are just more worthy anyway so these are some of the things that crypto can't solve because we're just using the same rule set now I don't want to leave you on a downer if you wanted to replace money it would be good to stop saying money is a store of value because it's a lie and you might say what do I need to replace what does money actually do in our

society and then start inventing because you guys are like that's who you are right hackers inventors right we could invent something to replace these mechanisms and these are the mechanisms that money does one is that it replaces relationships or trust so reputation systems or I don't know what else might replace reputation but that's one thing uh you give it for appreciation like give people a tip for appreciation but maybe you're just doing it because it's obligation but you could just say thank you or give them a whatever a medal or a prize that would show appreciation like the rewards right showing like you can buy an Olympic gold medal but you wouldn't be an Olympic gold medalist so a reward for competence there's

different kinds of rewards you could get for being competent that aren't money uh survival I mean that's interesting right we do have enough food for everybody on the planet but we make you use it so I call that um like you know distribution of resources like we need it to survive but it's not like oxygen like it's not something we naturally need to survive we just invented it uh coordination of large scale activities this is a really hard one money isn't the only thing that we use for that like Supply chains and all of that communication is used for coordination and people say how are you going to get people to do things if you didn't have money for these large scale activities I do not know the answer but it does seem to me that a lot of what

money is doing is having people do things they don't want to do or give you things they didn't want to give you so we're going to have to reinvent like how do we coordinate at scale distribution of resources um again like I have a circulatory system it distributes all the calories in my body and none of my arm arms or legs fall off money as a distribution of resource system doesn't seem to be as effective so how do you want to distribute resources what kind of communication would you have if you really wanted to distribute resources in the world and finally security for the future which um supposedly if you have enough money you can build a bunker and be you know Mark Zuckerberg and protect yourself from the apocalypse when it comes I'm

not sure it's actually doing that either so that's the death economics and what you could build instead thank you