What if we had had Stone Age Cold Wallets?


Homo Erectus roamed the earth for over a million years with as his one and only tool a hand axe, glued to his hand like our mobile phones are today (let’s presume the females were carrying babies around). Then homo sapiens came along with plenty more tools and talents. What if an alien civilisation, let’s call it ECONOMIA, had girded that primitive world with a skyline satellite system and given each out of 21 million homo’s a simple smart phone with a hot wallet app and 1 Bitcoin each?

Our experimental setup needs a few more ingredients to make it believable. Let’s say the aliens where so intently curious to learn about the powers of Bitcoin that they first launched a 1000 satellites, with full Bitcoin nodes running, each owned by a different alien family. Also they put 20 immense Bitcoin mining centers in 20 fully solar powered space stations in high orbit. They pre-mined all Bitcoin between 50.000 BC and 49.850 BC and then had all the smart phone wallets made with each 1 Bitcoin on them.

Inflating the price of a smart phone to zero

The ECONOMIA biologists responsible for the experiment were very keen to avoid one mistake. They had seen many civilisations bloom and wither and some go up in nuclear smoke after the planet creatures had started fighting large scale wars over money and resources. They knew that in the primitive culture on earth the mere artefact of a smart phone would immediately be considered like a gold bar in and of itself, before people even would have understood the elegant inner workings of their wallets. So they made sure to first flood the planet with zillions of identical but fake smart phones, thereby inflating the price of a smart phone to zero.

Straight into their sleeping brains

Then they put every earthling in a deep narcosis, laid a functioning smart phone in their hand and beamed the instruction manual of how to send and receive satoshi’s straight into their sleeping brains. The smartphones were given biometric security: they could only be opened by the smiling face of the owner and never with a face under duress. Also every earthling was imprinted upon that they would always get a personal replacement if theirs was lost or stolen. Always in their sleep, always such that other earthlings could never touch the money of another earthling as kept perfectly for everyone on the blockchain.

This is a tough to do mental experiment, a very unlikely “what if”-history. Why does it make sense to do it nonetheless? Well everybody does it. Each economist presupposes a much simplified history of how it all came too be in order to justify their economic theory and to highlight their point to prove. Kevin Carson of the Center for a Stateless Society argues this in his brilliant study “Hayek’s fatal conceit”. He quotes Hayek:

Most of the assertions to which [socialist history] has given the status of “facts which everybody knows” have long been proved not to have been facts at all; yet they still continue, outside the circle of professional economic historians, to he almost universally accepted as the basis for the estimate of the existing economic order.

Friedrich hayek, Capitalism and the Historians

Then Carson goes on to show that Hayek in his defence of capitalism likewise abuses history to first create a Disney-like version of how capitalism and freedom came about, and only then tries to prove his economic theory with it. So if everybody does it, so can we. Let’s do this thought experiment and see how our Bitcoin-powered prehistoric society evolves.

Another a priori reason why it is allowed to let our thoughts roam freely is that there is such interplay between the economy, and history and the people who live it and procreate in it, that it is not justifiable to presume a kind of pure and pristine man who is always bent but never formed by an economic system even it it lasts for hundreds of years. I would argue that a feudal society over a number of generations also produces a feudal people. And so will socialism. And so will capitalism. It’s not perfect. Most systems still need a gulag to lock the unfollowers away, but it’s perfect enough that it is always necessary to ask a double question: which system is good for which man and which man will thrive and procreate in which system?

Also shape a new man

If Bitcoin fixes this, then it will be over a long time period. It’s not simply freeing and curing an unchanging human substrate from the tyranny of state power and state money. It will also shape a whole new man. And so the whole Bitcoinisation of society might take hundreds of years in a subtle continuous dance between homo sapiens and the new tools he makes. And that’s a good thing. Trying to move quickly towards that a new man was both on the agenda of the fascists and the socialists.

So let’s take the long route and not force what God will do peacefully when the time comes. With mental diseases like burn-out, there is a rule of thumb that curing from them takes as long as it took to get it. So if we and our whole society got mortally ill from state run money printing and state owned gold over the course of a few thousand years, it might take a few thousand years to cure us. Ample time to run the thought experiment of what would have happened to us if we had had bitcoin straight from the start.

Catch some women and cattle

How would our economies have evolved? We can apply Ricardo’s lessons of comparative advantage and let all the trade resulting from it play out. What would we see in a situation where every craftsman can get paid in a way that his of her money can’t be stolen and doesn’t need any central or even decentral protection? Raiding neighbouring clans might still be going on to catch some women and cattle, but it would never result in a homecoming with a bunch of gold and silver to be stored in the house of the strongman who led the fight, who would then be king, keep the soldiers under arms to protect his treasure, build a castle, let’s his children intermarry with other strongmen’s families building up a feudal world.

Stone age business tycoons?

And what if one of our Stone Age bitcoiners manages to organise mass production of arrowheads for hunting by let’s say 100 of his compatriots whom he provides with free food and drink and a few satoshi on Sabbath. Let’s imagine in that way ov er the years he manages to acquire 100 Bitcoin in his hard wallet, while the average stone ager has 0,9, wouldn’t that lead to feudal arrangements as well? Not necessarily! Firstly our Stone Age arrowhead tycoon wouldn’t need any private security. No castle, no army, no body guards. Nobody could ever steel part of his fortune. He could retire if he wanted, he certainly can share his wealth, he might get “services” from several females as well as from a male masseur. He could enlarge the tribe with a host of children. Feed and ride a few extra horses. Start some other businesses, maybe dog breeding on the side. Get more Bitcoin… he could do evil… like buy a child form poor (lazy?) parents and abuse it…. so laws and a judiciary would need to emerge. OK, bribing officials could happen. But could it get out of hand Caligula style if you can get rich but can’t steal and rob? A lot could happen. But no money printing! No large scale wars… people could hate the rich pervert and even try to kill him.. he may need body guards after all, not because he’s rich but because he’s a pervert.

Body guards give you away

Amazing result: whereas in our world it’s obvious that even a pious billionaire needs body guards to protect his assets, in a bitcoin world only a pervert billionaire would need body guards. So the body guards would give him away the minute he hires them and the chances that he would get killed increase the more body guards he adds. A pious billionaire in a Bitcoin world would do without body guards: nobody can steal from him anyway and having no bodyguards would be a way to communicate that you are not hated by anyone. If he would start to give parts of his fortune away, people might start to protect him voluntarily… making sure that no jealous nutter or psychopath gets a chance to kill the benefactor.

Voluntary body guards

Would we ever have seen pyramids jumping from the stone age straight into the bitcoin era? There would never be a pharaoh leading vast militaries. There would not be masses of slaves since for a rich man it would be easier to give every worker just a few satoshi. Everybody would just live and be happy with their skill and their hard earned satoshi. Rich benefactors would have voluntary body guards and who knows some super benefactor would inspire his contemporaries to spontaneously build him a nice and worthy mausoleum. If a tycoon would start to pay hundreds of workers to build an insanely huge mausoleum, let’s say a pyramid, then some contemporaries might start to resent such a waste of resources and the tycoon might get killed for being so useless.

Only if they feel in love with you

In general the Bitcoin world seems to increase the benefits of moderation and prohibit the chance that wealth concentration takes on quasi religious forms. In wartime a tribal leader might temporarily lead a somewhat bigger group of fighters to fend off another. They might win their war and teach a rivalling tribe a lesson, but they wouldn’t come home with a bunch of loot. And even the females they captured…. let’s say the daughters of the business tycoons from the other tribe – only if they fell in love with you, they would and could unlock their inherited satoshi’s for you.

Make love not war!


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