Alan is killing Bitcoin
Firstly. my solicitor has forced me to read out the following legal disclaimer.
No Alans were harmed in the making of this presentation. Any resemblance to any Alan, living or dead, or sitting in seat G21, is entirely coincidental.
With that out of the way we can now ask who is Alan?
Alan is a staunch stacker of sats. He diligently swaps a portion of his fiat income into sats every month and his increasing balance in his bitcoin wallet puts a warm glow in his heart every single month knowing his hard earned wealth is secure for the future. I think a lot of you here today started like Alan or are just like Alan, which is a good thing. You were disciplined in your stacking, hopeful of the future and early to the game. I’m going to assume that there is no one here or very few of you who have no bitcoin at all so I want to congratulate you all for doing the work, making the leap into the unknown and becoming what really is an early adopter into the new financial world. But Alan’s journey—our journey—is only half complete.
Alan however, has no plans of using his bitcoin, only stacking. And this is the paradox that leads to the death of bitcoin. Alan’s strategy feels safe, the ultimate expression of the low time preference philosophy, saving his energy in the hardest form of money. But this behaviour doesn’t help build the new financial system, all it is doing is taking energy from the legacy system without putting it to use in the new, creating a digital ghost town. This ghost town creates fragility and will lead to the system failing in a number of ways.
To examine why this is a problem, we first have to ask the deeper question of what is money? Money is simply a tool. A tool that is used to store your energy, time and value today and redeem it for freedom in the future. In the context of bitcoin, I consider each sat a direct encapsulation of the energy used in the mining industry every 10 minutes so truly is a representation of energy expended in that process. Alan is swapping the energy he expends, whether that be from his mind or his hands, into a token that equally represents energy.
Right now, miners rely primarily on the block subsidy to pay for their operations that provide the security to all our coins but this will over time become less and less and the reliance will switch gradually to the fees contained in the transactions. No transactions lead to empty blocks which leads to no transaction fees to be collected, and without fees where is the incentive for miners to continue securing the network for us all? An analogy is that we have access to the most secure vault in a Swiss mountain ever created and we all decide to stop paying the guards protecting the vault door. Eventually mining operations will become unprofitable leading to equipment switch off and the hash rate will drop, potentially to a point where it becomes viable for an entity to perform a 51% attack on the network. A successful attack, even only one time, would shatter confidence in bitcoin forever. Our collective inaction would starve the very security model that protects our wealth and by trying to preserve our sats with an iron grip would inadvertently but inevitably lead to them becoming worthless.
Money is also a messaging network, the messages or transactions between parties convey value. Imagine for a moment if everyone who created a Facebook account went and connected to their friends but no one posted any messages. Where would the value of that network be? The value proposition comes from the regular updates or constant messages just as transactions create value of sats when they move. When Alan only hodls he is actively starving the network and prevents the network from growing.
Alan then watches the “price” on a daily basis. Who here celebrated the All Time Highs along with everyone else on social media? If that sounds like you, what were you actually celebrating as you watched the number going up? I will answer this later.
I’m here to advocate for spending your bitcoin as it was intended to be used as a peer to peer electronic cash system and moving beyond using it only as a store of value. I’m here to say that what you use as money, as your message of value, is the strongest vote you have in this existence we collectively call being human. It is your personal statement to the world of what you consider to have the greatest value to you as an individual. If you value the freedom aspects that bitcoin imparts on your energy stores then you need to use it as freedom money. One of Alan’s drivers to move his wealth into bitcoin in the first place was his desire to escape the central bank controlled fiat clown world. By continuing to use fiat all Alan is doing is validating the very system he is trying to escape.
When you have the option of paying with bitcoin or fiat from a forward thinking merchant to buy something you need, and you choose to pay with fiat, you are signalling to the merchant that you believe that fiat is the superior form of medium of exchange. What is the incentive for the merchant to continue to offer bitcoin with the overheads that incurs as a method of payment for their goods, if the market is signalling that fiat is still the better choice? The network effects of bitcoin as a medium of exchange will only grow through active use of the network. The lightning network is the best tool we have today to facilitate spending – full and final near immediate settlement for basically no fee. What is the incentive for node operators to continue locking up sats, or you for that case as you can run your own node too, if those sats are not moving around the network providing value? By spending your sats for goods and services you are not selling your sats, you are validating bitcoin as money, and every transaction you make is an conscious vote for a parallel economy and a small act of civil disobedience to boot.
By choosing to use fiat in this scenario Alan is telling the merchant who has invested time and money, talking to bridge2bitcoin, shout out to Chris and his team working tirelessly to onboard merchants, put in the POS devices, trained their staff on how to use them that their efforts are largely wasted.
Who am I to be up here saying all this? I’m someone who has lived on a bitcoin standard to the best of my ability since 2021. Someone pays for his families weekly food shop with bitcoin via Bitrefill vouchers. Someone who has bought a coffee farm in El Salvador with bitcoin. Someone who pays for a team of workers and builders on the farm weekly with bitcoin.
I stayed in Berlin for one full month, which is the closest city to Finca La Cruz and was at one point the hottest place in the world for bitcoin adoption according to the heat map on BTCMaps, shout out to Nathan Day for his teams great work, and I only had to spend dollars twice in that time. Everything else was paid for directly to the merchant over lightning.
Is it perfect, no not yet. Does it work today? Absolutely!
OK so enough theory, how can you put this shift into action? Firstly move a small portion of your stack into a spending stack. This can be a custodial or non-custodial lightning wallet, a decision you have to make for yourself but I’d be happy to guide in both at the bar later. Next choose one service in your life that you are already paying for that you can either buy a gift voucher for with bitcoin or pay directly with bitcoin. A real no-brainer while you are here at the conference, today, is to pay at the bar for food and drinks with lightning. Once paid for, and here is the important part, use the fiat that you would have used for this transaction yesterday to acquire the same amount of bitcoin you’ve just spent on this transaction and add back to either your spending or hodl stack using the same conversion rails you use right now to stack. Once you’ve got that workflow in place, choose one more thing every month for an incremental move to a better world.
But that’s more work I hear a bunch of you screaming, ain’t no one got time for that! There’s a reason that proof of work is an often touted phrase in this space and it’s not just a consensus mechanism, proof of work is a culture shift, it is a mindset shift. You’ve already done a bunch of work unpicking a lifetime of indoctrination to get to a place where you consider it a valuable use of your time to be sitting in your chair listening to random plebs talking about stuff so taking the less trod path is not as foreign a concept to you as you may initially think it is. Your very being here today is proof of that and again, I congratulate you on that. So spend freely, and replace and by doing so you are both signalling that bitcoin is better money and getting rid of your weaker currency for the betterment of the network. Practically, lets say you assign half a million sats to your spending wallet. When you buy vouchers or spend directly, you can make multiple transactions and you don’t need to keep track of how many sats you spent each time, only when you want to top the spend wallet back up see how many sats you need to add to get from the balance back up to the half mill, or more if you wish. Simples.
What do you gain by executing on this method? Operational sovereignty. And once you’ve got the habit you’ll find it’s really not that much effort at all for the benefits gained. Benefits that will compound over time.
Change your yardstick: Escape the fiat matrix
I mentioned earlier watching all time highs. So what are you celebrating? Its the weakness of fiat, not the strength of bitcoin. Obsessing over how many dollar you can get for a whole bitcoin only serves to anchor you to the very central bank controlled system we are seeking to replace with a better form of money. Most of us here are based in the UK, so why do we even care about the dollar exchange rate? Why are you not at least interested in the exchange rate to the pound? It’s like choosing to build a house on quicksand when right next door is a granite base you could be building on.
I know the answer will be “convenience” from a lot of you, but as mentioned before, we here are not allergic to reversing a lifetime of indoctrination and what I want to try to do here is plant a seed in your minds as to the benefits of shifting your unit of account. The yardstick you use internally to measure your wealth by.
Time for an unpopular opinion that is going grate a good percentage of you: If you’re in bitcoin for the NgU tech, then you are simply a fiat speculator because you are focused on what I consider to be the wrong number as your base measure.
If your picture of wealth is based in something other than bitcoin which we probably all here consider to be the hardest form of money ever created, why is it measured against the softest form of money, which isn’t even really money, it is a currency. An important distinction.
If you’re going to measure against anything else, at least measure the value of a hard money with another form of hard money. The obvious thing to use following this argument is gold which has been used as hard money for thousands of years. If you measure the average price of a home in ounces of gold since at least the 1950’s and by certain measures as far back as Roman times, you’ll find that the number of ounces needed has remained remarkably stable over those time periods. Surely that makes for a better value yardstick?
The volatility you may or may not see when watching the bitcoin fiat chart needs to be recognised as a fiat problem and stems from the volatility that fiat imparts onto real world goods through devaluation, market manipulation and the soap opera that is world politics.
So how to flip the script?
In place of “what is the exchange rate today?” try “I can buy 7 weeks of groceries to feed my family with a million sats”. Instead of “OMG bitcoin is up 20% last week” try “Woo hoo! I can now buy those 7 weeks of groceries with 15% less sats!” or “I can now get an extra week of groceries with the same milly”. Quote your energy in energy terms to clients. Go from “my daily rate is £x” to “I’ll do this project for 2 million sats”.
Bitcoin isn’t about getting rich in fiat—it’s about rendering fiat irrelevant to your decision making processes. Every time you check the USD exchange rate, you are giving fiat power over your mind and you put another brick in the fiat prison walls around you rather than removing one. Break the habit. Internalise the Bitcoin standard.
Your new yardstick? Make it the purchasing power of a satoshi. Measure your wealth, your labour, and your future in the hardest money in history… or stay trapped in the matrix.
I started learning Spanish as a necessity to communicate with the wonderful folks in El Salvador not wanting to be another gringo expecting everyone to talk to me in English. For around 9 months as I was having lessons I was constantly trying to maintain a lookup table in my head to formulate what I wanted to say in English, then trying to translate that into Spanish before actually saying it. Then after months of trying I found that I didn’t have to try anymore. I was having natural conversations and was actually thinking breathing and even dreaming in Spanish. This only happened by immersing myself in the culture and placing myself in situations where I had to keep speaking in Spanish. I actually berated a store manager, very loudly, who was trying to rip me off right at the tills with a bunch of customers watching on! The point is with practice the currently foreign concept of measuring your wealth in sats will eventually become second nature, and I’m trying really hard to not say proof of work at this juncture.
We stand at a unique moment in history. We hold in our hands the tools to build a more free and equitable financial system, yet many of us treat these tools like lottery tickets. Tools kept in a drawer don’t change the world, usage does.
So we have a clear choice before us:
To remain digital serfs, tied to the central bankster controlled infrastructure, refreshing price charts while funding our lives with their inflationary debt instruments.
Or we become architects of the future, our own futures, using Bitcoin as intended – as a tool for daily freedom and resistance against the centralised theft and tyranny.
Every transaction is a vote. Every sat spent is a brick in the foundation of the new economy. Every time you change your yardstick, you reclaim a piece of your mental sovereignty.
The revolution will not be televised. It will happen in the millions of small transactions between sovereign individuals who choose usage and participation over speculation.
Change your yardstick. Open your wallet. Be the revolution.
