Recently, Bitcoin developer Peter Todd gave a talk in favor of tail emissions, and it raises a question that I'd love to hear more Austrian econ perspectives on.

Link to the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmAAeEm1nIE&pp=ygUZcGV0ZXIgdG9kZCB0YWlsIGVtaXNzaW9ucw%3D%3D

Around the four minute mark, Todd first makes the point that if Satoshi had implemented a fixed block reward (for instance 50 BTC each block indefinitely, instead of the halving schedule), it would still be upheld as sound money by Austrian economists, since the inflation rate approaches 0% eventually.

So with that in mind, I have the following questions. From an Austrian econ perspective (or various competing schools of thought within Austrian econ):

1. Is there a meaningful difference between a hard monetary supply cap, vs. a technically infinite supply cap that's mathematically guaranteed to approach 0% monetary inflation?
2. Would Hayek, Rothbard, Mises, etc. have different perspectives on the topic? If they had the ability to design their perfect system of digital money, would it even look like BTC, or would it look completely different?

Fundamentally, I agree that eliminating overhead costs like rent, property tax, etc. will help to reduce the cost of groceries. If it's enough to guarantee 30% discounts on a core basket of goods without direct subsidies from tax revenue is a whole other question.

I think the tactics Mamdani are using to implement this are incredibly inefficient, and could be way more substantial if he wasn't set on a socialist implementation.

He's starting with five stores, which will incur about $70 million in upfront costs. With a different approach however, you could achieve substantially more scale with a fraction of the investment.

Imagine an alternative policy that gives grocers a property tax rebate if it's O&O, or other city tax write-offs for rent expenses, if they agree to pass on overhead savings to consumers through lower prices.

Maybe you would need some funding for a compliance regime, but this could scale much much faster at a fraction of the cost.

One possible wrinkle here is that landlords who rent to grocers might be encouraged to jack up rents because the tax write-off would be seen as a demand subsidy, so there would need to be an additional measure to protect against that. Not that big of a hurdle though since more blanket rent freezes have precedent and this would be targeted and more niche.

Hypothetically, let's say a location close by to you becomes an attractive draw for Bitcoiners.

Merchants move in who want to accept BTC payments. Open source developers or BTC companies moved in. Miners, plebs, etc.

Would you consider moving there, if it meant you were surrounded by more Bitcoiners, and gave you more opportunities to interact with and adopt BTC?

If yes, how far would you consider relocating for an opportunity like that?

What important fixtures do you think a citadel needs to be effective in attracting Bitcoiners?

You save a man's life, and this man happens to be an absurdly wealthy mad scientist. He offers to build you a secret base anywhere on Earth, along with easy transport back and forth.

It can be in the deep ocean, above the clouds, in a remote mountain range, literally anywhere. It could be mobile or stationary.

It can be as large as the biggest football stadiums, and needs to be outside of major population centers. Basically, you can't kick a bunch of people out of their homes to make room for your base.

Besides that, it can include anything you want. You can invite whoever you want there, and all political entities will respect it's existence without giving you trouble.

You won't have to pay for upkeep, or to restock anything you want available there for consumption, as long as the mad scientist has a workshop and free access to chill there or stop by.

Where is your secret base? How big is it? How does it operate, and what is included? What architecture style or features? How are you getting to and from the base?

Now that the novelty of LLMs has worn off, AI has a fairly significant negative perception due to AI slop, data centers, etc.

I think a similar shift in perception is going to happen with robotics, but to an extent far more amplified.

Sure, people hate AI now, but at the moment it's contained within the online domain.

Imagine in a few years once we have walking, talking clankers with AI brains. They will be everywhere in public before we realize how fast things have escalated.

They'll come in all shapes and sizes, and will be carrying out all kinds of menial tasks. Drones, vehicles, androids, insects, etc. They may significantly streamline various things that need to be done, but I predict they will be hated because

1. They'll be seen as mass surveillance technology. Basically walking, talking flock cameras

2. They'll be completely insufferable to interact with

I think George Lucas was onto something when he made all the bartenders in Star Wars super discriminatory to clankers, we're headed in that direction before too long lol

There's a kind of deadweight loss that exists when an economic exchange can't be fully peer to peer, anonymous, or without a paper trail. We often focus a lot on how to replace normal fiat transactions, but there are so many cool, entirely new things you can do with BTC.

Essentially, whenever you have reservations or artificial barriers in place for completing a transaction, Bitcoin enables a cut and dry value exchange minimizing or even erasing this deadweight loss. No tracking, no security leaks, no authority breathing down your neck, no middle man taking a cut or dictating terms, etc.

First of all, you can buy things online without creating an account, sharing card info, etc. That in itself removes a pretty significant attack vector in case of data breaches.

Several times my CCs have rejected random payments, whereas no one or nothing can stop me from paying a Lightning invoice.

You can pay for completely private and encrypted AI inference, where no one but you sees your input / output.

Other necessary privacy infra, especially VPNs which are seeing massive pressure from governments recently, can now be accessed more securely and anonymously.

We have completely anonymous and censorship-free tipping, crowdfunding, etc. to prevent cancel culture or regulatory burdens from silencing controversial projects, individuals, protests, etc.

While obtaining non-KYC Bitcoin is a challenge, Lightning is fairly private for payments. There are even better privacy solutions that integrate into Lightning as well, such as Fedimint or Cashu, although they have a temporary custodial tradeoff in order to achieve premium privacy.

I think over time as we continue to build out the Bitcoin economy's infrastructure, more and more of these use cases will become apparent.

I'm interested to hear others' thoughts on potential areas where paying with fiat is untenable, but would be viable with BTC.

Immigration policy has tradeoffs, with varying optimal states depending on the context.

At some points, it makes sense to open the gates to more and more people. At other points, especially when the foreign born / immigrant population gets too big as a share of total population, it makes sense to shut the gates.

Some diversity and variety is good, but if you shove too many new ingredients in the melting pot, they don't assimilate and end up creating a whole bunch of social and cultural divisions.

I would literally try to track the percent of our population that's foreign born and try to keep it within a specific range. Maybe 5 to 10 percent, since most of our current and historic issues with immigration occurred once their population share reached the double digits.

That way we can optimally grow our economy without radically transforming the culture, and we don't have to fight about it every few generations.

A genie grants you the ability to implement one micro transaction on almost any activity you can think of, to be paid by everyone who engages in it. The micro transaction is unavoidable.

There are a few caveats. You can't charge people for anything they must do to ensure immediate survival. People will always be able to walk, breath, eat, go to the bathroom, etc. for free.

You can make it incredibly inconvenient to avoid the fee, but you can't make it impossible.

When people engage in the activity, funds are automatically transferred out of whatever money or assets they have. If a person has zero funds available, a super natural barrier prevents them from engaging in that activity.

You don't collect any of the proceeds. The money disappears, because we're all absurdly wealthy, hypothetically speaking, anyways.

What are you going to charge? What chaos unfolds and how do you take advantage of it?

Imagine instead of getting annoyed at all the junk mail that clutters up your mail box, the people who spam you with it are required to pay you a dollar for every piece of paper they send you.

Junk mail would be cut down substantially, and the junk mail you still received would likely be more valuable, since the sender would have to pay a higher cost to grab your attention.

Do the same for email, too. If we integrate some kind of 402 gateway, we could massively simplify spam mitigation with micro transactions.

In general, there should just be more mechanisms for paying people directly if you're a complete stranger and you want to grab their attention.

We are trying to find a color animated video from the mid 2010s. In the video, it begins with a little kid in a grassy environment with cliffs and a path. He finds some "entity" (some abstract humanoid figure) and asks "where do we go when we die", and the entity answers "THE VOID!".

After talking to the entity, he continues along the path and eventually finds his way into a cave. Inside there's a band playing an upbeat jingle. One of the lyrics is "you know what I'm getting at, you exist".

It takes a wild turn where they start screaming at the kid "you don't exist", with a gruesome ending with everyone dying, which may be why it's difficult to find on YouTube.

You have offers for two different work opportunities:

Option 1:

• 120k salary, full benefits
• Corporate / HR bureaucracy
• Boring and unfulfilling work, requiring 60 hours per week
• Hybrid remote / in office schedule

Option 2:

• 60k salary, no benefits
• Max autonomy, no bureaucracy or corporate politics
• Your dream job on something you're passionate about, 30 hours per week
• Work UTC hours from anywhere in the world, no questions asked

While Skyrim is a game where you as the player can be who you want to be, at least in my head canon, the Dragonborn is a heroic Nord who slays Alduin, reforms the Blades, resolves the Civil War in favor of the Empire while obtaining the rank of Legate, and becomes public enemy number one of the Thalmor.

Everyone in Skyrim knows that you are Dragonborn. They know you were summoned by the Greybeards. They know you were instrumental in bringing peace to Skyrim. Half the Jarls have you to directly thank for their position. Elisif the assumed High Queen has you to thank personally for avenging her husband's death and clearing the path for her coronation. Potentially hundreds of people are a direct witness to you trapping and riding Odahviing in Dragonsreach. They know you bested a literal God in combat.

Many see you as the reincarnation of Talos himself.

Word of your exploits will spread like wildfire not just through Skyrim, but throughout all of Tamriel.

To me, it seems obvious then that the Dragonborn becomes Emperor. You have the classic meteoric rise in your military career that Napoleon had, alongside a convincing divine claim on the right to rule. This is how I think it plays out.

Pre-Moot Call to Arms

Coinciding with the Moot to name a new High King, you set up a larger meeting just before it with the Jarls, along with:

• ambassadors from High Rock, Hammerfell, and Cyrodil
• ambassadors from Houses Redoran and Telvanni, who you assisted during your time on Solstheim
• ambassadors from the Orcish strongholds
• representatives from the Companions and the College of Winterhold
• Elenwen and the Thalmor
• General Tullius and the Penitus Oculatus

Aura Farming Entrance

You absolutely mogg everyone there with your grand entrance:

• You arrive on the back of Odahviing
• You bring a small army of blades in full Akaviri armor, and housecarls / followers sporting full dragonbone and dragonscale sets.
• You yourself are wearing a unique set of Imperial armor infused with dragonbone or dragonscale.
• You carry at least one Elder Scroll with you, if not all three, alongside an additional contingent of Dawnguard soldiers.

Ysmir, Dragon of the North, Emperor of Tamriel

Once everyone is there, you quickly remind them of all your heroic deeds, and declare yourself Emperor. You go down the line with everyone there, specifically stating what you did to help them. You call out the weakness of the Mede dynasty, and how the Thalmor have sought to prolong Skyrim's Civil War as long as possible, in order to weaken both Skyrim and the Empire.

Declaration of War

In front of everyone, you immediately declare war on the Thalmor, and unalive Elenwen / any Thalmor agents right there on the spot using the Thu'um. You then demand everyone there to swear fealty to you as Tamriel's new emperor, or else they will suffer the same fate.

Once you're finished there, your first Imperial decrees are to completely eliminate all Thalmor presence in Skyrim, and to make your intentions known all across Tamriel. All of the continent's powerful figures would be faced with a decision:

• Do I side with the Thalmor supremacists who want to wipe out our people, traditions, and way of life?
• Do I side with a weak empire that abandoned Hammerfell, horribly mistreated countless others, and placated the elves who hate me?
• Do I side with the guy who revived the Blades, killed a literal God, saved the lives of countless innocent people, and may be a God himself?

Either Titus Mede II, his successor if his assassination is canon, or the Elder Council in general are offered clemency and a promise to maintain high status in the newly formed Empire, assuming they recognize your claim.

The Dragonborn would have absolutely zero issue getting basically all of Skyrim on board. Even many of the old Stormcloaks would join up, since you're promising an Empire that restores legal worship of Talos, and is ready to fight the Thalmor.

Now I'd like to ask everyone who graciously read all of this a few questions:

• What player choices would make this easier or more difficult? What about any choices that would alter the path you take to become Emperor from what I've laid out? For instance, I don't know if anyone would go along with it if you're a Khajiit with known ties to the Thieves' Guild, or if you're flashing a bunch of Daedric Artifacts.
• What provinces would be easier or more difficult to convince or conquer?
• Even if the Dragonborn could successfully reform the Empire, would he be powerful enough to guarantee a more decisive victory against the Thalmor in a second great war?
• What followers are you rolling deep with into the pre-Moot gathering?
• Do you think anyone at the pre-Moot gathering would oppose the Dragonborn, openly or secretively?
• The Greybeards would be unlikely to get involved directly with your political aspirations, but how do you think they'd respond to all this?

That's pretty much it. I think it's fairly straightforward for the Dragonborn to be capable of all this. The reign of Talos II has begun :)

The world we live in now is such a far cry from anything resembling Ancapistan; spending too much time, thought, or energy focused on imagining how it would operate is premature.

However, I do appreciate anarcho-capitalism as more of a deconstructive thought experiment. My line of thinking can be boiled down to:

1. I start with the premise that free markets are the most superior form of governance when they work properly.
2. I soberly acknowledge the reality, that we don't have free markets in X for reasons 1,2,3, etc. Maybe it's because of negative externalities, maybe the markets could be completely free but there's no available path to subvert State authority at scale.
3. I ask myself, "what does it look like to absolve State control over X specifically? How could we shift the dynamic of X to keep it resilient as a purely free market?"

I'm ultimately interested in an incrementalist approach that strategically chips away at State control or regulation.

Whether or not total abolition of the State is the end goal, there are far too many barriers in place ahead of it to fully grasp that outcome, but at least we can do something about the immediate barriers in front of us.

The most prominent example of this IMO is Bitcoin.

1. The focus is on separation of money & state, a specific goal that would drastically reduce government scope and control.
2. Previously, free market money has failed because we lacked the means of avoiding custodial risk (large institutions had to physically mint or custody commodity money for the system to scale), but Bitcoin innovates with proof of work, blockchain, etc. to address these deficiencies and remove corruptible trust assumptions.
3. Money itself is the most important component of any economy, and it's basically impossible to achieve anything close to an ancap society without addressing it first.

With that in mind, I'd argue it's important for ancaps to think practically in terms of how we can 'Bitcoin' more things piece by piece, and then spend our time actually building / using them.

Imagine for a moment, that the fork was just invented. Everyone's mind becomes inculcated with the perception that forks are a utensil to eat soup with, while staying oblivious to its use in stabbing and picking up solid food. Any time someone says you can use a fork to eat steak, they lose their minds and think you're some fork grifter.

This is what the discourse around AI is like right now lol

Most people's exposure to AI consists only of bad social media posts, slop art, or sycophantic chat bots. They are incredibly hostile to any mention of AI use.

Meanwhile, anyone who works in tech can attest to the massive transformation that's occurred with the introduction of agentic workflows / frameworks.

AI is now being used to generate more than half of all code. AI is being used meticulously to review and QA. Almost every dev I know has a team of clankers doing everything for them, and they spend most of their time orchestrating agents and reviewing their output. The devs I know who intentionally avoid AI are increasingly falling behind.

All your favorite games, all the websites you visit, every app you install on your phone will be developed and maintained with AI-generated code.

Hey r/Georgism, I recently posted the following in the Bitcoin sub, and I'm curious what you all think.

While I suspect most Georgists would have a neutral or even a negative view of Bitcoin, I still see these two communities as potential allies. I consider myself both a Bitcoiner and a Georgist, and the benefits of Georgism for Bitcoin are obvious to me.

I don't know if these arguments will catch on or be persuasive with others in the Bitcoin community, but I'm curious what others here think about my attempt at a Georgist + Bitcoin alliance.

As to why I'm not more of an orthodox Georgist on the money and banking issue, I'd say it's for two primary reasons:

• I would be in favor of sovereign money / the Chicago Plan over our current system today, but am not convinced we can trust the government not to waste money on BS resulting in inflation.
• I see many of George's critiques of Wildcat free banking, for example, as anachronistic when evaluating Bitcoin.

The core question is then, if Bitcoiners are convinced that an LVT works in their favor, is it worth it to collaborate? And of course if you think I misrepresented LVT, please chime in.

Here's my post:

TLDR: Georgist LVT would accelerate the store of value use case shift away from real estate, and toward Bitcoin.

Intro

Most of you here reading this likely agree with me, that Bitcoin is the greatest store of value asset ever created. With that in mind, I think it's interesting to consider the store of value use case as it exists throughout the entire economy, and how different policies could increase Bitcoin's share against competing assets.

Gold is the most obvious direct comparison. It has an order of magnitude larger market cap, and Bitcoin perfects its monetary qualities. On a long enough time horizon, you can see how through technological innovation, custodial issues, etc. that a lot of savings currently in gold could shift toward Bitcoin. At some point in the future, gold may even lose most of its scarce qualities if we get really good at asteroid mining or hydrometallurgy (although to be fair, this is bordering on sci-fi given current tech).

I bring up gold first, just to clearly illustrate with a more direct example the core assumption behind my argument: Bitcoin is competing in a store of value marketplace, in which it has a massive opportunity to gain in market share.

The core of my argument, however, applies the same principles to the real estate market.

The Monetization of Real Estate

Real estate's market cap is roughly $55T in the US, and almost $400T globally. The monetization of real estate is talked about frequently in Bitcoin circles, alongside speculation that capital from real estate could flow into other asset classes like BTC under the right conditions. In this case, "monetization" basically means that people treat real estate as a store of value.

Although it's obvious real estate has intrinsic qualities that BTC can't fully replicate (you can do stuff on it like touch grass, and collect economic rent), I do largely agree with that sentiment; it's obvious many individuals and companies hold real estate as a way to park wealth or speculate on appreciation.

Apart from real estate's inherent qualities, a non-insignificant portion of real estate owners would sell or downsize, if it didn't function properly as a store of value asset.

This leads me to why as a Bitcoiner, the Georgist LVT is something I find very intriguing, as land value tax radically undermines real estate's ability to store wealth.

Quick Primer on Land Value Tax

The goal of a land value tax is to fully capture the rental value of a piece of property, without taking any private improvements into consideration. As a very simple example, let's say a plot of land with nothing on it could attract a rent of $1,000. Alice purchases the land, and builds an apartment complex that generates $3,000 in total rent. A 100% LVT would tax the initial $1,000, leaving her with $2,000 profit.

Bob purchases an identical parcel right next door, but doesn't want to build anything on it, since he's only using it to park wealth. The LVT still taxes him the same $1,000 for his exclusive right to use that land.

You can see how with a traditional property tax system, Alice is punished when using her land for its intrinsic qualities (doing stuff, touching grass), and rewarded with an LVT. The opposite is true for Bob. By purely owning land for its monetary qualities, Bob is rewarded in a traditional property tax system (he doesn't build anything that hikes his taxes), and punished in an LVT system.

LVT Impact on Real Estate & BTC

Under an LVT tax scheme then, if Bob was only interested in holding land for its monetary qualities, he will sell the land and shift his capital toward other store of value assets. Granted, it isn't a guarantee that 100% of that is flowing into Bitcoin specifically, but it is still true that Bob's capital is looking for a new home.

He could very well put the money into bonds, stocks, gold, artwork, etc. but if there are a million Bobs out there facing a similar situation, I think a significant portion of that misplaced capital flows into Bitcoin instead. Grant Cardone himself, whatever you think about the guy, is just one obvious and public example of a real estate investor who has already pivoted millions into Bitcoin, away from his personal real estate portfolio.

Conclusion

Bitcoin is already a far superior store of value when compared to real estate. In regards to liquidity, portability, divisibility, fungibility, and even scarcity, it isn't a competition. The reality of our legacy economy though, is that far more value is stored inside the inferior asset class.

I'm a Georgist and LVT supporter for many other reasons beyond the potential it has on strengthening Bitcoin, but it's obvious to me that an opportunity exists to accelerate capital flows toward the superior store of value.

Anyways I hope you enjoyed the post, please let me know what you think, or if you see any flaws in my line of argumentation.

TLDR: Georgist LVT would accelerate the store of value use case shift away from real estate, and toward Bitcoin.

Disclaimer: To keep the conversation on topic, we should prevent the discussion from delving too deeply into Georgism for its own merits, and instead focus on its potential implications for Bitcoin.

Mods if you could provide some guidance here to keep the post live that would be most appreciated!

Intro

Most of you here reading this likely agree with me, that Bitcoin is the greatest store of value asset ever created. With that in mind, I think it's interesting to consider the store of value use case as it exists throughout the entire economy, and how different policies could increase Bitcoin's share against competing assets.

Gold is the most obvious direct comparison. It has an order of magnitude larger market cap, and Bitcoin perfects its monetary qualities. On a long enough time horizon, you can see how through technological innovation, custodial issues, etc. that a lot of savings currently in gold could shift toward Bitcoin. At some point in the future, gold may even lose most of its scarce qualities if we get really good at asteroid mining or hydrometallurgy (although to be fair, this is bordering on sci-fi given current tech).

I bring up gold first, just to clearly illustrate with a more direct example the core assumption behind my argument: Bitcoin is competing in a store of value marketplace, in which it has a massive opportunity to gain in market share.

The core of my argument, however, applies the same principles to the real estate market.

The Monetization of Real Estate

Real estate's market cap is roughly $55T in the US, and almost $400T globally. The monetization of real estate is talked about frequently in Bitcoin circles, alongside speculation that capital from real estate could flow into other asset classes like BTC under the right conditions. In this case, "monetization" basically means that people treat real estate as a store of value.

Although it's obvious real estate has intrinsic qualities that BTC can't fully replicate (you can do stuff on it like touch grass, and collect economic rent), I do largely agree with that sentiment; it's obvious many individuals and companies hold real estate as a way to park wealth or speculate on appreciation.

Apart from real estate's inherent qualities, a non-insignificant portion of real estate owners would sell or downsize, if it didn't function properly as a store of value asset.

This leads me to why as a Bitcoiner, the Georgist LVT is something I find very intriguing, as land value tax radically undermines real estate's ability to store wealth.

Quick Primer on Land Value Tax

The goal of a land value tax is to fully capture the rental value of a piece of property, without taking any private improvements into consideration. As a very simple example, let's say a plot of land with nothing on it could attract a rent of $1,000. Alice purchases the land, and builds an apartment complex that generates $3,000 in total rent. A 100% LVT would tax the initial $1,000, leaving her with $2,000 profit.

Bob purchases an identical parcel right next door, but doesn't want to build anything on it, since he's only using it to park wealth. The LVT still taxes him the same $1,000 for his exclusive right to use that land.

You can see how with a traditional property tax system, Alice is punished when using her land for its intrinsic qualities (doing stuff, touching grass), and rewarded with an LVT. The opposite is true for Bob. By purely owning land for its monetary qualities, Bob is rewarded in a traditional property tax system (he doesn't build anything that hikes his taxes), and punished in an LVT system.

LVT Impact on Real Estate & BTC

Under an LVT tax scheme then, if Bob was only interested in holding land for its monetary qualities, he will sell the land and shift his capital toward other store of value assets. Granted, it isn't a guarantee that 100% of that is flowing into Bitcoin specifically, but it is still true that Bob's capital is looking for a new home.

He could very well put the money into bonds, stocks, gold, artwork, etc. but if there are a million Bobs out there facing a similar situation, I think a significant portion of that misplaced capital flows into Bitcoin instead. Grant Cardone himself, whatever you think about the guy, is just one obvious and public example of a real estate investor who has already pivoted millions into Bitcoin, away from his personal real estate portfolio.

Conclusion

Bitcoin is already a far superior store of value when compared to real estate. In regards to liquidity, portability, divisibility, fungibility, and even scarcity, it isn't a competition. The reality of our legacy economy though, is that far more value is stored inside the inferior asset class.

I'm a Georgist and LVT supporter for many other reasons beyond the potential it has on strengthening Bitcoin, but it's obvious to me that an opportunity exists to accelerate capital flows toward the superior store of value.

Anyways I hope you enjoyed the post, please let me know what you think, or if you see any flaws in my line of argumentation.

As an American very interested in Georgist ideas, I can get behind the idea of a CD conceptually, but I see it as unrealistic in today's environment, given our current revenues and spending obligations.

For those of you who do advocate for a CD, how do you square this circle within the context of the modern American fiscal situation?

Even discarding a CD altogether, if we agree it's unrealistic, do you think Georgist ideas have any promising insights on effectively managing the emerging debt crisis? How would any Georgist policy prescriptions tie into the current driving factors of deficit spending, such as entitlements, defense, federal taxes, etc.

I think the answer is quite obvious on the state or local level, where shifting taxes away from property to land (with proper assessment) can improve revenue and economic productivity, but it could be trickier at a federal level.

A CD would be fantastic, especially in a world with people developing all kinds of employment anxiety over AI and robotics, I just fail to see how we can actually support such a policy without inflating the dollar into nothing, faster than we already are.