My Note
My highlights
278 highlights from Kindle. These are the lines I stopped at.
So coming to digital gold versus gold: physical gold is not fast enough.
Every good technology is smarter, faster, stronger.
We patent things, we brand things, because we want to avoid the inevitable result. The result is: as soon as something is commoditized and open to the public and anybody can produce it, its value goes to the variable cost of production and then it goes below.
They will produce down until the variable cost equals the price,
So gold is a more efficient way to move large amounts of energy for short distances. What if I want to move $100 million of gold 10,000 miles? Well, that’s about 3,000 lbs of gold, 1.5 tons.
Let’s say that I have a battery which loses 20% of my power a year, well my half-life on my energy that I pulled off the plant is 3.5 years in 10 years.
Hyperinflation is 100% inflation a year.
Okay, that means you’re gonna lose 24% of your energy a year. Well what does that sound like? It sounds like 24% inflation a year.
So let’s say I put a battery in your house. And you pull energy into your house. Well, you’ve lost 6%. Now a typical battery — a good one — is gonna lose 2% per month.
And by domain I mean perhaps governmental domain — like how do I move my energy from New York to Tokyo?
Because the challenge of humanity is: how do I store energy and transmit energy across time and space and domain?
what’s the most efficient energy network in the history of the world? Well it’s about to be Bitcoin.
humans prosper by channeling energy.
And when we mastered fire, we channeled chemical energy. And when we mastered missiles we channel kinetic energy. And when we master water and hydraulics, we’re actually channeling gravitational energy.
So if I look back through time, human beings as a species prosper by channeling energy.
Money is the highest form of energy that human beings can channel.
I want to replace monetary network with energy network, because monetary energy is energy. And money is energy. In fact, money is the highest form of energy.
this is just the first time in human history that we see this creation of pure digital monetary network.
when you have these massive dematerializations of value and they get on a network with a network effect,
What we have in each of these networks is: we have the collapse, a dematerialization of some product or service or virtue or some ineffable quality be it friendship or mobile devices or information.
when I think of Bitcoin, I think: this is the first digital monetary system in the history of the world.
“Being a cynic and being a pessimist about technology is generally a losing trade,
It’s the tinkerers and not the theoreticians that bring about breakthrough.
We don’t need nation states to honor the property rights of money anymore. That entire function of trust and security has fallen to distributed software.
digital space is the ultimate high ground.
Bitcoin has dominated the digital space for monetary networks. It’s impossible to compete with it as money because it’s already perfected all the properties of money, and it’s done so in this digital terrain that all other competitors would be competing for: it’s a very low friction domain, so you can move things at the speed of light in the digital space.
Defensive attributes tend to be even more important than offensive attributes.
Arthur C. Clark writes, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Generational change will drive it faster. People keep trying it, and then just because it’s failed 1,000 times doesn’t mean it won’t succeed, but when it does succeed, then it’s probably unstoppable for a while.
War has a way of opening your mind because when someone drops a bomb on your head and you’re burning or screaming, then the pain causes you to take a more open-minded attitude.
— and then all the professors crap all over it, and they all swear it’ll never work. And the tendency is either to reject it — people don’t like change — or it doesn’t get embraced until everybody dies, or until there’s a war.
So you see lots of examples in history where people try to do something and they either accidentally discover it like Penicillin, or a tinkerer discovers it, and not the educated
It was a tinkerer’s solution to a problem everybody else wanted to solve with star charts and tables and complex math. But of course, ships’ captains in the middle of the Caribbean or in a storm, they can’t do complex math. They just wanna stay alive.
Aircraft weren’t designed by professors of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering and fluid dynamics and mathematicians — they all failed miserably. The Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics. They had a bicycle shop — tinkerers.
And the thing about these paradigm shifts is, oftentimes it’s not the learned individuals that make the breakthrough.
So you see over and over again people pick at technologists and they’ll say, “Oh it’ll never work. It’ll never work. It’ll never work.”
Technology fails until it succeeds
But one of the lessons of history is: it’s very difficult to figure out when the curve starts, and it’s hard to stop it once it starts, but it’s a lot easier to invest in it and to forecast it once it starts.
You see that a lot.
A lot of times you’ll see an S-curve where it’ll start slow and it’ll accelerate until it reaches diminishing returns, and then all of a sudden it’s not an interesting technology anymore.
When I was at MIT I studied the history of science and I read about the structure of scientific revolutions and I studied all different types of technology diffusions.
Yeah it’s more and more things dematerializing to software and they move into cyberspace. It seems like it gets harder for any one government to assert control over the things that take place virtually. So there’s a lot of virtual empowerment going on, but there’s a lot of other things going on too.
technology is empowering the individual and giving them more sovereignty.
You can move things with the least energy on the seas, once you can conquer them. So whoever controls that domain sort of controls the world.
And one of the things that was interesting there is that they compared digital space to the high seas, basically saying the reason why whoever controls the high seas controls the world is because that’s the most frictionless environment.
And how do I channel it in a network to achieve something harder, smarter, faster, stronger?
All through human history — from a million years ago to today — it’s really the story of intelligent people looking around for where the energy is coming from.
And of course the lesson is: it’s humans channeling energy, but they’re channeling gravitational energy — and a lot of it. And there’s a lot more energy than the stuff that we have.
You can take out every port, every power reactor, every generator, every serious building, they’re all gone. Death from above. There’s nothing you can do. You’re at the bottom of the gravity well.
The United States, especially the United States air force, could pretty much bomb any country back to the Stone Age in a matter of a week, once you lose your air supremacy, once you lose control of your air space.
The first order driver is: is the hardness infinitely hard? And then adoption and utility and inflation in the fiat reference frame that it’s operating in.
And as for the rest, if you’re an open software protocol, someone’s gonna code an extension to your protocol to give you every other cool power that anybody wants.
Being indestructible in the here and now — pretty useful superhero power. Being indestructible and never aging — double useful superpower.
I just have to be indestructible. If I’m indestructible — the indestructible man goes and buys a machine gun and he’s the most powerful superhero in the room, right?
What is important is that it not break. If I’m indestructible, I don’t have to be the fastest, the shiniest, the whatever anything.
Now, that in and of itself is the reason that security is so incredibly important to the Bitcoin network.
If you just say, “Here’s someone that you couldn’t kill who could kill you.” I had the option to fight on your turf, but you would never have the option to fight on my turf.
It’s really hard. It explains the culture of the U.K. It explains the culture of the United States. It explains a lot of other culture. It explains the balance of power, I think.
There’s only one guy that ever pulled it off—William the Conqueror in 1066. Nobody else managed to cross 13 miles. That’s your hydraulic moat.
This is the citizen population being ravaged by a war. And that destroyed their economies, right? Destroyed their culture. Same happened in Russia, Italy. It’s happened in China, and the Chinese fought a war in China’s soil. The Japanese fought sort of a portion of a war on their own soil with the atomic warheads. On the other and, the US hadn’t fought a war on US soil since 1865. Okay? So who’s hard?
When you’re dropping bombs in the middle of suburban Germany, you’re attacking the soft underbelly of the citizens in Germany, or the soft underbelly of the citizens in France, or the Battle of Britain.
Why did we win World War I, World War II? Why is America America? Well, there’s two narratives. One is that we’re more patriotic and we’re righteous and we’re better. The other one is: the Europeans were fighting in Europe and we were fighting in Europe. So we were fighting where they were soft.
You see that theme through history: the really successful governments, empires, organizations, they’re continually fighting, they’re continually absorbing — the Romans absorbed the Carthaginian’s navy in 90 days.
It’s the one that absorbs your power and plays it back at you. You know, pretty soon it’s like, I am indestructible and I have every other power and you just better get out of the way. And that’s antifragile, right? I’m looking for the fight. I’m looking for people because I’m just gonna absorb their thing.
So the superhero that’s good is the one that you hit him and you can’t hurt him.
It’s pretty easy to win the war if you’re indestructible. And it causes you to come to a conclusion about history and who wins in history: unbreakable is better, antifragile is best.
Defensive attributes overcome all the offensive attributes in a battle.
the most powerful ones were the ones with defensive superpowers.”
everyone that’s succeeded — every empire, individual, company — they all found a way to be harder, smarter, faster, stronger.
The general theme is: human beings marching toward being harder, smarter, faster, and stronger.
If you want a great vignette on why it’s important to have capital that’s mobile, study or just read any history of the Warburgs and what their family went through, and what all the Jewish families went through in the 30’s in Germany.
So we need to optimize society for free exchange and experimentation — that’s how we create the wealth in the world, solve problems and increase life expectancy.
One of the most important discoveries in the history of man, penicillin, came from an accident.
Bitcoin is this leaderless institution that just runs the rules of the protocol, and it doesn’t change, it doesn’t bend.
Bitcoin is the best branded asset in history, because Bitcoin does do exactly what it says it will do.
By contrast, fiat currency is a high-entropy storage device. It leaks a lot. It suffers from spoilage over time, whereas Bitcoin could be considered the deep freeze, the absolute zero of storing monetary energy.
The freezer and refrigerator enabled us to suck the entropy out of food and store food energy over extremely long periods of time.
Kraft, Hersheys, and Post foods were in the business of selling stabilized energy.
Bitcoin fits into that picture because its #1 value proposition is security of your time and energy in a medium that cannot be compromised.
The #1 export of an empire is security.
We collapsed fixed costs by standardization.
Money is a network of trust,
Yeah, half of science is accidental. And half the stuff gets discovered but the issue is no one decides to commercialize it or they don’t engineer it into the solution.
It’s more like people working and tinkering all over the world and communicating that lead to these breakthroughs.
This tinkering impulse that people naturally have, versus this image of the inventor alone in a room laboring for 20 years straight and all of a sudden he has a breakthrough.
Taleb makes the point that the vast majority of our innovation occurs through trial and error.
the impact of technology, of modern medicine and antibiotics and networks and cheap energy and sterilization and sanitation so dwarfs every political thing that took place in the century
If you were weighting the text based on the significance of what happened, something like half of all the history of the 20th century ought to be just about Penicillin, antibiotics, and sterilization — half.
A billion people — more than any war. And of course, in this particular case, if you look at history books on the 20th century, they give it like 2 paragraphs.
understanding that you need to be sterile. And then the second is antibiotics. Those two things together were extraordinary. Antibiotics alone and Penicillin is responsible for the defeat of tuberculosis, and tuberculosis killed a billion people.
And then the food networks. The result of all of them is, there are large corporations and huge opportunities for wealth creation, if you get to the node of the network.
The airplanes — another energy network — moving high frequency cargo around, and information around. And each one of them build on another one.
By the way, no railroad — no tanker car with energy on it, right? The railroad is the energy network moving the oil around.
And they all kind of come down to networks that move energy around. Standard Oil was an energy network. The railroads are energy networks.
And then we have to think about how much commerce is actually conducted through the city and through the aircraft. I mean it’s foundational to global civilization as we know it.
It’s so interesting that these raw material breakthroughs then have so many follow-on consequences. Like first and second order consequences, and to the point that you were saying: no steel — no city. No aluminum — no aircraft.
So in the world of strong — this is the strongest of strong materials. It’s strong, it’s cheap, Carnegie figured it out — they built every bridge with it. No steel — no bridges. No bridges — no Manhattan.
So these are really difficult technologies, but really elemental,
When you mishandle crypto, you lose some money. When you mishandle nitroglycerin, everything gets blown up
Or the DuPonts handling nitroglycerin. Like, what do you think happens when you mishandle nitroglycerin?
today. Nobody deals with technology that’s as dangerous and as tricky as what Carnegie and those early steel refineries were dealing with.
In order to create New York or London or any great city, you need steel and you need of course, an elevator. Straightforward things, but of the two of them, steel is the harder development.
It’s important at this point for us to just look at the impact steel and aluminum through this entire era. Carnegie created an empire based on steel, and Andrew Mellon’s empire was substantially based on aluminum.
So relatively speaking they had extraordinary power, but they were all technology capitalists.
He got to be worth $1 billion I think. So he probably was worth $200–250 billion in our money, and that was in a day where you didn’t have access to all the deflationary tech services that are effectively free.
In order to grow a non-technology company, you could then make the assertion that you’re gonna need to do financial engineering, like roll-ups — like I’m gonna buy every McDonald’s or every restaurant across the country with debt, maybe that’s a way to grow it.
There are those kind of businesses. But the growth companies — Standard Oil was a growth company, U.S. Steel, Boeing, IBM — in that period when they’re growing, they’re a technology company.
There are other businesses that are more like rent-seeking businesses, or they’re concessions.
And eventually, almost by definition, they stop growing when they’re no longer cutting-edge technology companies, right?
Now with regard to businesses, I would say that all of the great businesses, the growth companies, were all technology companies—in their time.
Robert Breedlove: I love the perspective you have on all investment being an investment in technology. Because that is what we are doing, right?
You go to Hershey, Pennsylvania, they got a factory — it’s a work of art. It’s more complicated than most computer programs. They wrote a computer program in steel. Like, don’t eff that up, right?
And because of that, the brand became important, just like the Standard brand was important — the kerosene’s not gonna explode — it’s clean, right? Is the gasoline clean? Is the ketchup clean?
A store of value that would not decay or bleed due to bacterial infestation or spoilage.
no one had ever frozen food before. You think they’re not technologists? It’s a food energy company.
The #1 value proposition wasn’t that it’s good ketchup. Or it’s good tomatoes or good soup or good whatever. The #1 value proposition is it’s not gonna kill you.
Everybody has to clean up, scrub down, sterilize, get the bacteria off, I have machines to load the can, to seal the can, to seal the bottle. I stamp it with my brand.
the origin of branding is I make it in a clean room, hermetically sealed.
it into a container that didn’t bleed the energy, that didn’t leak energy.
Kraft and Post figured out how to box corn flakes, and what they did is they stabilized food energy and put
But if you go on to some other industrial-era robber baron networks — here’s an interesting one: Kraft, Hershey’s, and Post Cereal. They’re technology companies.
Oil was originally all about kerosene and lighting, and then heating, and then of course the automobile shot it up by a factor of 10 and that was the killer app.
In fact, just a general theme you see everywhere where there’s an explosion of innovation and an explosion of vitality, somebody tapped into a 1,000x more energy or figured out how to deliver the energy.
If there’s no scarcity, there’s so much volatility that the market is chaotically destructive.
He did it all. He gave away the razors to sell the razor blades, he’s the first guy to realize that you have to form a cartel or you have to form some kind of understanding of scarcity.
They did a Jeff Bezos thing. You know — Amazon Prime. People think Jeff Bezos invented it? He didn’t invent it. He read the biography of John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller invented it all.
They refined the oil, they stored the oil, they bought up all the tanker cars, they bought up all the tanker ships, they locked down all of the networks, and they basically had an energy network.
It was also an energy network. Standard Oil, they bought up all the — they didn’t actually buy the fields, they bought the refineries.
So then along comes oil, and oil is 1,000x more efficient way to get energy, and what Standard Oil was, was it was first an energy producer, but it was also an energy storage device.
And that takes us to John D. Rockefeller. Before Standard Oil comes along, people are actually hunting whales — they’re getting in wooden ships, chasing around in the Indian Ocean to kill a whale, boil down its blubber and make kerosene and burn a lamp. Not a very efficient way to gather energy.
I give you 5 tons of stuff — carry it from New York to California. Count the amount of energy it’s gonna take you. Now put it on a railroad car — try again. You think that’s not faster? And stronger? 1,000x faster? 1,000x stronger? Something like that. Orders of magnitude.
Don’t bother to do it unless you’re gonna break through this 100x. Well, all these things were 100x better, but a railroad we take for granted.
What is it, 1,000x more expensive to move stuff over land than over water? And Google is very good at saying, “We don’t do anything that’s not gonna be 10x or 100x better” — I mean it’s a Silicon Valley trope.
And if you read it through the modern view, it doesn’t necessarily leave you a good taste in your mouth. But it’s a reminder that a lot of times, the difference between winning and losing, and living and dying, is via railroads.
The other fascinating thing about the railroads is they became really instrumental to logistics, movement of armies, and they drove economic and political power.
If we think about the Steel Age, these rail networks are another network to deliver energy faster, stronger, smarter, harder.
And at least with Bitcoin, you could pay the guy with the gun half the money when you started, and the other half when you got there, and the worst he could do is blow your head off, but he’s not getting the money.
one of the most compelling use cases of Bitcoin would be if I’m a refugee trying to flee a war zone. Because it’s either that or gold, and the problem with gold is there’s a lot of people with guns — they’re gonna take it from you.
You can’t pay for anything to protect yourself, and you can’t get out, or you can’t pay to get out.
And so if you don’t have your monetary power or your assets secured virtually, then your physical security is always at risk
all the Jews had their money locked up in Germany and so the way the system worked is they operated as bankers and they allowed people to launder their money out of Germany and they would take a hair cut of 10, 20, 30% initially, then 50%, then 70%, then 90%, until pretty soon it was like a 90% hair cut to get your value out, and so consequently, people didn’t want to leave.
if I secure your life force — money is energy, is life force, money is power — if I secure your power, that can be converted into physical security either by allowing you to travel away from the threat.
And in that regard, it provides an important right and empowerment to the individual.
It’s security of energy. If energy is translated to money and money is translated into Bitcoin and you store it on the Bitcoin network, you’re securitizing your assets in a cloud of — behind a wall of — encrypted energy.
Bitcoin is security, and Bitcoin’s #1 value proposition is security.
Now most of these empires generally provide this kind of security for their citizens, not always for the non-citizens or the aliens or the slaves or the whatever — the underclass. But they do manage to establish them.
don’t eff with the system.
They have that saying about Genghis Khan: “When the Mongols controlled all of Asia, a virgin could’ve ridden from one end of the empire to the other with a pot of gold on her head and not be molested.”
Yeah, a traditional empire is producing security. The #1 export in the United States is security. Like literally, I can live in Miami Beach and I don’t worry about someone shooting me across the intracoastal waterway.
You don’t need government to enforce your right to hold private keys.
Bitcoin is it’s kind of the first private property right that is agnostic of government completely.
we’ve always needed this monopolist on violence to sort of honor private property rights within their jurisdiction.
Standardization once again.
And the cost and the transparency of that was cut maybe by an order of magnitude with that innovation.
Which is the same principle as: put all your stuff in the container ship, and then the container goes onto a ship, they get standard loading facilities into a port, they’ve got standard train cars and standard trucks — everything’s standardized.
By the way, the biggest rage and technology in service today is containerized software via Kubernetes and Docker.
Ultimately it’s a low-energy, componentized way to move things around. The most efficient to move anything on Earth is modern containers.
And that takes us really to the Steel Age, the 19th century, the robber barons and the like, and you can see — with shipping networks, those canals gave way to free ports and eventually gave way to container ships, and container ships totally remade everything and they shifted power to Singapore and Hong Kong and companies like Maersk.
what are the empires of the future? Where do they form?
Here’s the general principle: everywhere on Earth where you see a big city, it was the center of an empire. Paris, London, Hong Kong, New York, Venice, Rome. Everywhere.
why do they call it Roman Catholic if there weren’t other Catholics? How many different branches of the Catholic church do you think there were? Like, a thousand. They just kind of coalesced over time.
And so that drives a lot of stuff throughout the Renaissance and you can say that Northern Europe broke off from the Roman Catholic Church for religious reasons, or you could say the Northern European powers that be created the religion for political and economic reasons, to break off from the Roman Catholic Church.
And when you get to Martin Luther’s time, you realize one of the key drivers is there’s no way that we can rise or elevate our civilization if we have to send all of our money to Rome.
It takes us to the Reformation.
So does this somehow connect the actual connections between money and religion?
You know there are a lot of securities on Wall Street where there’s only two market makers: there’s the one bank and the other bank and they trade with each other, and if you’re buying, you’re buying at the top of the spread and you’re selling at the bottom of the spread.
You can’t afford 100-story buildings in Manhattan unless you’re the center of a financial empire.
At the end of the day, they start sinking, because you can’t afford to maintain those buildings.
So the church and the mercantile empire and the power to tax migrates from Rome to Venice. When did Venice start to decline? When they lost control of the church.
So the Roman consuls were the high priest of Rome for 700 years. If you’re elected the general, you’re also the priest. You run all the religious ceremonies. They didn’t separate those two.
It’s all about energy flow. And the energy is flowing — by the way, the Pontifex Maximus originally refers to the Roman consul, to the head of Rome.
You can’t have an empire, unless the person at the top of the empire is also in control of the religion, because if you don’t control of the religion, then someone else takes half your money, you see?
But it gets you thinking: why were they all killing each other in the first place over the Med? And you realize it’s because they’re fighting over control of the mercantile network.
The definition of a smuggler is someone who doesn’t want to give me half their stuff. So, how do I stop that? I have to have a navy that goes to kill them.
But invariably, it’s the people at the center of the network that are actually getting 10, 20, 30, 50% of all the commerce. Which is all the energy.
So the way that works is, you have a hub and spoke system, and there’s always one central city, and there’s always one set of families or companies, and they intermarry and they trust each other, and they just agree,
The only way you generate enough money to make a great city, you have to scrape a tax off of all the energy, all the commercial value, in a large place.
all the great cities grew as nexus, as the central node of an empire.
“don’t bring your horse into the middle of the village because he’s gonna crap all over everything and you’re going to get sick.” In the absence of all those orderly rules, then you have just a degradation of the human condition.
The Romans were healthy as long as they kept tension and dynamism and this incredible competition in their ecosystem, and when they lost it, they lost their edge. And then when you look at the classic Guns, Germs, and Steel-type narratives like, the Europeans, they got hardened and tougher because they were always fighting with each other,
“What if I just do that with that and I start this fire. Rub two sticks together, or maybe we just never think to rub two sticks together.”
The blockchain and Bitcoin is a wheel. I can use this stuff if I turn it this way, you know?
there is the possibility of significant civilizational regression if we ignore those learnings that we’ve accumulated over time.
And if they hadn’t ripped his statue off the column 1,000 years earlier or whenever they ripped it off and buried it somewhere, they would’ve known the world is round, and it’s so ironic that you could learn and then forget such a basic thing.
It’s amazing to me how certain things can be just right in front of a civilization and they just won’t grab ‘em.
And then of course we take a hard left-turn into the Dark Ages and stuff just starts to break down. And it’s a reminder that nothing is certain — if you miss a key insight, you could waste 1,000 years.
“We need to optimize society for free exchange and experimentation. That’s how we create wealth in the world, solve problems and increase life expectancy.”
That would be the healthy approach. That’s the Paleotheory. That’s the theory of antifragility. That’s the theory of Austrian economics and capitalism properly understood, and Darwinian evolution and natural equilibrium.
There’s a good reason you can’t compromise nature’s protocols, and we should mirror that through natural law.
Try to suspend gravity? Well good luck with that.
QE, or an appeal, or a lawyer, or a bribe, or whatever it is you avoid paying the price or the consequences for your misstep.
the pain is a feedback and it’s information.
Taleb and also by the Paleotheorists about the importance of pain in life. Pain is a natural feature, and you can learn a lot of things by pain,
when society forms all of these appeals and excuses and they let everybody off the hook, it’s like, well, if you make a market in accepting excuses and lawsuits, you’re gonna get a lot of lawsuits and a lot of excuses.
gravity doesn’t care who you are. Nature doesn’t care.
You can see they’re all related and at some point the integrity of the society broke down, and when they lost their integrity across all of these areas, the collapse of the political system begat the collapse of the military system.
I’m not going to be a victim of circumstance. I’m going to actually change my circumstances with my intellect and that might mean build a bridge. It might mean build an aqueduct, build a road, build a ship — whatever it is, just like the beaver builds the dam, the engineer builds the world.
The basic credo of the engineer is, I look at nature, and I look at the circumstances that I’m surrounded by, and I use my intellect and every material and technique at hand in order to construct a better world for everyone and everything that I love.
What is engineering?
And Romans — if anything — they’re engineers. And they elevated engineering, above all.
So engineering the roads, the aqueducts, it’s the rails upon which the entire Iron Age civilization was built.
The Romans understood the importance of hydraulics, and they took it to a new level.
if you don’t have them, it’s impossible for people to cooperate.
People talk about protocols being important, right? Well TCP/IP wasn’t the first protocol. Roman roads probably weren’t the first protocol either, but the point is, protocols matter,
Yuval Harari concept of our ability to abstract our learnings into symbols like language or whatnot, and then pass them from generation to generation such that the most successful strategies take advantage of the collective learnings up until that point. Versus trying to just do something from scratch on your own. Like we all stand on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.
It points towards path dependence too. The fact that a technology already took a certain path, it kind of has an inertia that’s carried the width of the gauge of the wagon wheel to the width of the modern rail.
There’s an analogy with this in the Bitcoin world too. When you come up with a different feature it’s like, “It would just be 10% better, you know, if you made your wagon 10% wider: it would hold 20% more and you would need 10% less and your transaction costs would be less.”
You can’t have it any way you want it. It’s not that every civilization figured this out. It’s just that every civilization which insisted upon doing it a different way with different bells and whistles got crushed to death.
if you want to know how wide a Roman chariot was, or a war chariot or any chariot, just go stand on a railroad anywhere on Earth — the Roman’s gave that to you.
That gauge has to be standardized, you can’t just make any wagon, you have to make it exactly the same.
Roman roads. The Romans had standardized parts, a standardized gauge for a wagon wheel — every Roman wagon rolling on the road is carving ruts in the road.
if you want to win wars, you don’t just make ships. And you don’t just train hard. And you don’t just make wagons, right?
it’s not that the Romans invented everything, it’s just that the Romans stole every good idea from every civilization from the Greeks, from the Carthaginians, from the whatever that they crushed. And because they lasted, we’re able to read their histories.
War has a way. War has a way of quickening your activity.
You think these guys were screwing around? They’re not screwing around. It’s like, everything’s, “Oh you know, I’m gonna take my time to figure this stuff out.” No.
The Romans had a military industrial complex.
It was always going to be: find a way to get an advantage.
It’s like, there’s none of this “Let’s just charge into battle and fight it out with our sword,” right? Never happened that way.
Romans maneuvered to get the high ground, the Romans maneuvered to get the enemy out on the plain, the Romans unleashed the artillery onto the enemy while they stood and obliterated 10% of them.
The Romans manufactured ballistas, catapults, every sword and shield to be the same length, every soldier took the same step the same length, everything was the same.
The Romans weren’t fighting fair. They would’ve laughed at you.
700 years as a republic. Find me another republic that lasted 700 years.
from age 3, this is the way it is. And Rome comes first, and everybody else’s interests are subjugated. And when you look at that, they started with that system — a good system. — I mean people forget about it.
Roman political system, it bred harder, stronger, faster, smarter individuals.
The monopolist doesn’t have to give two shits about his customer’s preferences, because they have no other choice.
You’re a miner, and they cut off your electricity, well your mining rig stops and the mining shifts somewhere else.
when you know that everybody’s watching you and that you can be replaced and will be replaced next year and your future is uncertain, it brings out a higher degree of professionalism, and that’s the competition in the market.
If that general was lazy, drunk, cowardly, or stupid, it got reported back by the officer corps to Rome and to the Senate.
We have to have a constant flow of new talent, new leadership. Someone drops the baton, someone else picks up the baton. That’s what made the Romans great. They suffered no kings among them.
That respect. And that’s what the Romans had in those 700 years — the height of the republic.
“You know, one day you’ll have your turn at this. You and I are comrades. You’re as good as me. You’re the future of the navy.” That’s what will cause people to lay down and die for you.
This is why, again, these decentralized organisms like Bitcoin are superior to a company,
if you want people to love and fight and die and cherish your institution, you’ve gotta get out of the way and give ’em their chance.
there’s a lot of really, really good people coming out of the academy every year. And everybody needs their turn.” Everybody needs their turn.
Antifragile. Romans are antifragile. They’re always going off to fight, always, always, always. It’s just a history of war after war after war after war.
there’s always another Roman. Always another one. From a very early age.
the Roman Empire is a great model for the way that human beings interact with technology and the way that they interact with a competitive world and become both antifragile and get harder, smarter, faster, and stronger.
3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 months without food.
Tell me, how do I move things around cleanly? I need a clean energy source that is not going to foul my sanitary system, that it’s not gonna actually kill me. And of course it’s a boat.
So most ancient cities, if you wanted them to work, you would have to have them human-powered, and now you’ve got this dilemma of how do you move goods around?
The problem is if they allowed anybody to bring a horse into the city, it would be so unsanitary as to render the city uninhabitable.
What it meant to be rich and powerful was: you had the right to bring a horse into the city.
You can’t actually bring together a bunch of human beings unless you work out the sanitation problem.
And when it gets dry and this stuff desiccates and it blows through the air, you’re going to be breathing it, smelling it, it’s just going to be awful.
Awful. But also unsanitary. I mean, fly-invested typhoid-infested, germ-infested.
what’s it like to live in the city using animal power to move stuff around?
water can be used for farming, for fishing, it can be used for security. It can be used for sanitation. In fact, without understanding water and the dynamics of water, there is no cradle of civilization in the Aegean or anywhere.
Water is elemental to life. We underestimate how important it is. Until you start paying to create it.
People think oil is money. They think oil is power. And let me tell you: oil is not really power, it’s not wealth. Water is wealth. Water is the key to life.
But another source of energy is buoyancy.
wave action is incredible energy.
hydraulics, which is power from water, and water is a network.
missiles are just a tool but they’re illustrative. Fire is an energy network and an energy source. It’s a battery. An energy source and you can deliver it in a certain way.
That’s why the natural creature — gold is a rock, a bear is a bear, a mastodon is a mastodon. They’re not getting harder, faster, stronger, smarter, they’re just doing what they do.
That’s why digital gold is thousands of times better than gold. Because you’ve got all those dimensions to work on.
Technologies that are dominating today, they’re dominating because they’re able to deliver force faster, harder, stronger, smarter.
“Terrain is the most important aspect of any battle.” It’s almost like the smart general only goes into battle essentially knowing that he’s won based on these preparations that you’re describing,
Risk of ruin. You can never take that on.
people invented bullets thousands of years before guns. Guns were just the latest idea putting bullets together with gunpowder.
human beings harnessed fire and it made all the difference, and then along comes the next set of thoughts.
Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain is a fire. We don’t want it to go out either. We talk about feeding the fire of Bitcoin and we talk about feeding the fire of faith and simply being the keeper of the flame. It was an old idea thousands and thousands of years ago.
what makes human beings unique is, as far as I can see, they’re the only animal that plays with fire.
Fire is intrinsic to all sorts of manufacturing processes.
Animals that don’t cook food have small brains.
This idea of heroic hand-to-hand combat is a great idea in the movies. It’s an awful idea in reality.
Bitcoin’s a fire. It’s a fire in cyberspace.
And that’s why Prometheus has such an incredible mythic place. Prometheus is to Satoshi as fire is to Bitcoin.
You’re going to have to tap into and channel energy.
Fire’s a chain reaction where we’re releasing a latent energy in matter — we’re converting matter into energy.
fire is like the prime energy network of the human race. It all started for us with channeling energy.
One of them is fire. One of them is missiles. One of them is hydraulics.
If I look back at Stone Age technology and you ask, “How do we even emerge from this incredible, terrifying scrum?” There are just key technologies that you decide you kind of like in a hurry.
how do we survive in a hostile universe? We have to figure out how we can get harder, smarter, faster, and stronger. And that takes us to the beginning of Man.
So when you think about that 3 million years ago the first question is, How did we even make it here?
This is nature. It’s not fair.
“There has never been such a thing as a fair fight.”
this year we launched one war on COVID, and another war on currency. And so we were caught up in kind of two wars, in two dimensions.
we’re going to start from the first principles of energy, of anthropology, of technology, and really build a solid foundation for really gaining a deep understanding of Bitcoin’s potential impact on the world.