Humanity is millions of years old.
Still,
Our money is not yet fully ours at the individual level.
Our computing power is ever more outsourced to machines.
No wonder ya’ll fear they’ll take over.
For those who build the future start out with a computation.
But,
The dominance of fiat money susceptible to political whims, has only been for a few hundred years.
AI systems with the ability to spotlight our cognitive weakness, have only been smarter than us for few decades.
We are still early.
Fast forward 10,000 years.
Mentats
Mentats in Frank Herbert’s DUNE fascinate me.
The story goes that they evolved after many thousands of years, as a human rebellion against computers.
Humans started as computers, outsourced the power to machines, then took it back for themselves.
It is hard to imagine, though, how they navigated the cosmos to find the planet Arrakis.
Must have taken some genius mind computing skills. Juiced up with melange.
Indeed.
The story is profound.
Mind Bitcoin
You’ve read Dune, I hope.
It is only the greatest sci-fi novel out there.
In it is a sisterhood of long suffering, mind-powered individuals called the Bene Gesserit.
The Bene Gesserit can plant century-long ideas into people’s minds.
Imagine planting not a word, but a system of thought itself.
Not a meme but a meme complex.
One that directs the course of human nature.
Propaganda on steroids.
The Bene Gesserit are also mentats aka human (super) computers.
I guess they can crunch for Bitcoin nonces without need to run energy guzzling PCs.
Afterall, the mind is a super efficient thermal computer.
A Mentat mind navigating the cosmos must be a super thermal computer.
Like a heat seeker, planets like Dune show up like hot spots in its cosmic map.
Then the humans zero in. Alien immigrants, but they don’t care.
***
Memetic seed
The idea of Muad’dib, like Bitcoin, is seeded in a decentralized way by the Bene Gesserit.
Seeded into as many Fremen minds as is enough to make them Paul Atreides’ men through and through.
Long before he is born.
Long before he proves himself the Kwisatz Haderach.
Why do all this?
To outsmart the empire in the battle for the spice rich planet.
Taking over DUNE is the game.
Spice melange, like Bitcoin sats, is scarce.
The Gesserit have made the calculation.
It requires patience, among all else.
Even as every volatile thought, like a red candle, says attack NOW.
Wait.
Don’t dump.
Take the pain.
Take the dip.
Now inside your mind and no more your phone screen.
Take the FUD, survive it. Live on it.
Emerge stronger.
You are a mentat.
The calculation is simple.
If Bitcoin is capped at 21 million, the floodgates of its financial power can only be held back for so long.
Be patient.
The paper bitcoins will hyperinflate to visible uselessness.
Super Patience
What does it mean to run Bitcoin in one’s mind?
Let’s leave DUNE behind and come back home.
Hop onto the time machine.
I dial back from 10,191 AG. Back to 2025 AD.
You might think it is some boggling stuff.
Nah.
Just memorise 12 words. You’re well on your way.
Now, it isn’t enough to hodl Bitcoin.
Bitcoiners who want to lead the way to Mars, then Arrakis, will need to hodl everything.
Be MAXI to the tee.
Through BTC.
That is the game.
Indeed, not everyone can be a Bitcoin Maxi at the start.
Just like very few people in 100 BC could read or write.
But if evolution has anything to say, it is that those memes that can hodl into the next generation will survive.
Like genes, memes spread from one human to another.
Moreover, memes are easily successful.
Genes, goodness.
It is almost Valentines Day.
A lot of wealth is being shored up by men so that they can transfer it to women.
Forget communism. This is the greatest capital reallocation experiment humans carry out.
From the males to the females whether they (female) have or have-not.
Money, flowers, cars, houses, flamboyant vacations to Paris, they’ll give it all to them.
All in the hope of getting laid.
And if the chemistry is right, then together, they will carry over their genes into the child they will bear.
It is some serious stuff.
The calculations are massive.
The work to do impressive.
The years of tender loving careful nurturing – decades.
It is the original startup. The stakes have never been higher.
But a meme,
Pssh.
All it requires is that two people talk to each other, listen to the news, absorb some information into their mind computers.
Let it sit in the subconscious for a while.
They’ll start to transform.
***
Eventually, they transform.
Then they start saving up BTC.
Now that’s the point where the meme is most powerful.
When people start saving BTC every day.
When, like Michael Saylor, they stop trying so hard to convince people.
Let their actions make news. The news will speak on their behalf.
No spending fwaa.
Then from saving BTC to saving knowledge, saving gold, time, resources, … until the consumerist system of fiat has no choice but to copy them.
We’re not far from multiple orange-pilled governments.
Not far from when interest rates will not faze people.
I mean, interest or no interest, I gotta eat everyday.
No more drugs.
No sorry.
Fast forward 100 years, 12 seed words are no longer enough.
People now memorise 365 sets of 12-seed words. One for each day of the year.
Transactions = Speaking magical words.
These are the grand parents of the Bene Gesserit.
“garment”
MARS is Hard
To conquer and terraform Mars successfully will require the most elaborate human economics orchestration on the planet.
An economic dance shoring up more than 10x, 100x more resources than we are doing today.
With the current system of Master – Slave economics, we cannot make it happen.
Not even if we gave Elon Musk 1 Trillion dollars by fiat decree.
We don’t yet love him that much.
Look at the US government. It has burnt through $35 Trillion on loan and people are still sour.
The game is letting people own seed phrases.
Get Mentat while they can.
It’s mental stuff, but so is controlling a barren, dark and deadly planet 140 million kilometers from Earth.
If you can’t handle it leave it to robots.
And prepare for a war in a few hundred years time.
The Butlerian Jihad, “also known as the Great Revolt as well as commonly shortened to the Jihad, was the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots that began in 201 BG and concluded in 108 BG
– Source
After Mars, and our war, we’ll seek out Arrakis.
One Meme to rule them all
Try and forget that Bitcoin is a currency.
Think of it as a meme.
A market driving meme.
A meme that says, “I want to listen to your 12 words of power”.
Like the rings of power, the words of power make whoever holds them powerful.
How?
Think of it like this.
Everybody can now be a banker.
From a few thousand bankers to 8 billion bankers.
How much money will this move?
Well, a lot.
Bankers move money.
Absent money to move, they’ll come up with some money to move.
If it requires redundacy they’ll redundacy alright.
Still abstract?
Like the internet, those who understood it are few.
But those who can use it are, well, everybody.
***
The Bitcoin blockchain, 10,000 years from now, will be all over the cosmos.
With it, we shall navigate to other planets.
For it will be spice melange.
Perhaps, with atom-sized Bitcoin nodes we can inhale!
Forget the days of merely 100,000 nodes. Try 1 billion billion billion atomic ones.
They hit your mind and boom, take you higher than Rogan’s mushrooms.
Nano-nodes. Connecting minds to places across space-time.
It will be our compass.
A powerful meme is a compass.
Pointing the way to greater insight.
