Emily this is a cool analysis, thanks for posting, but I think you only scratched the surface of something much bigger happening under the surface of events like the GameStop affair.
I believe what we are seeing is a new kind of democracy surfacing, and it is funded by free money.
We first saw it in the US when the equivalent of 10,ooo dollars stimulus per person was issued in the first month of covid lockdown.
Oil prices went negative for the first time in history, gold and Bitcoin prices (fixed assets) languished, and shares in bankrupt companies still offering known, loved products and services first soared.
Figures like Warren Buffet exited, crying foul, and the courts changed the rules of trading to allow it to continue.
The truth is, the new traders were not trading with hard-earned cash for profit, they were trading with free money.
They were donating, to the things they decided had value, the things they wished to keep in existence, despite the financial world declaring them “Losers”.
What we are seeing when these things happen, is pure fine-grained, non partisan democracy, people at last allocating power and support where they want to put it.
We have to conclude that in a fair world, all people would have free money, and all individuals and organisations wishing any kind of power or support would have shares, or some kind of token like Bitcoin, representing them, which could be bought and sold in the markets.
That might seem unsustainable. For sure, the elites in control of money issuance will claim so.
After all, where could the free money come from, if they stopped issuing it?
We see some clues when we look at how Bitcoin works.
Several countries worth of solar power consumption now drive bitcoin generation. This is continuously growing, with the increasing work demands of printing Bitcoin, as long as they are in production.
And they are directly exchangeable for conventional money.
So money is being printed from sunlight.
That money evidently has value, which grows with the amount of sunlight consumed to produce it.
That is the thing that is new, something never seen before in our known history.
Bitcoin is winding free wealth into the world economy, which previously was something fixed, from an extraterrestrial source, the single source of all energy, the sun.
Whilst that is happening, the world economy is actually expanding, hence the reason why free money is sustainable.
What happens after the last Bitcoin is printed remains to be seen.
By then, again in a fair world, all humans should be equipped with their own personal solar powered free money generation facilities, to complete the picture of our transition from the old world of controlled scarcity, to a new world of directed abundance.
Watch out for the appearance of personally encoded proof-of-work distributed ledger free money generation apps in the very near future.
