I agree with the principle of Mike's response below. The real benefit of Bitcoin seems not to have been spotted much, I tried to highlight it in the Bitcoin Kardashev Hinge story, which still stands, though Bitcoin appears to have been kidnapped, to an extent it is no longer on the path to becoming the Kardashev Hinge, maybe it has done enough already to help us see what needs to happen, with or without Bitcoin.
To understand it, we need to get out of the mindset of capital preservation, which ultimately leads to extinction, it is physically unsustainable in terms of energy, and we have almost depleted all capability of it, despite still astronomical numbers being put on some folks wealth, it is all an illusion, they are worth nothing, in a dying world. All we are doing there is preserving everyone's stash, those who have any that is, pandering to their / our greed.
We have got so used to doing that, we don't really see any other way of doing things, despite it being completely unsustainable, ending with total depletion of the energy needed to sustain life on Earth, including ours.
Not a good outcome, it was even warned against by religions with the end of days ultimatum. Things will either go very good, if we successfully abandon capital, which is just plain old greed, or very bad if we don't, literally burning on a barren planet.
We think we need to be greedy to survive, when actually it is the exact opposite that is true.
I still say we have already seen a tiny glimpse of the world we could have, after we go fully solar powered, when 4Tn stimulus was handed out, and the dollar value went up, not down, and oil prices went negative, for the first time in history, the only commodity ever to have done so, what a resounding result, it should never be forgotten.
It happened because we had free money, so much of it that ordinary people for the first time saw enough of it to have a say in markets to place their votes there, on what they liked and didn't like, and it had nothing to do with conventional financial viability. And the physical reason the value stayed in that freely issued currency can be attributed to Bitcoin, as it was at that time largely monetised sunlight, minted from solar energy, which is an undeniably valuable physical product, added to Earth, the only actual energy which is added to Earth. There was enough of it in circulation to maintain the value in the freely issued cash.
We only need to assure our sustainability by installing a critical mass of solar power infrastructure, to create a runaway adoption curve, with everyone generating valuable monetised sunlight, and hydrogen fuel which functionally replaces fossil fuels with none of the pollution, whilst additionally acting as backup in fuel cells.
The only thing preventing it, is the will of those with most to preserve the value of their capital, as they know with more desirable freely issued money, there can be no value in capital.
But what do we want, survival and infinite free money for all, or a little personal privelige for a few, for a very brief time, in a dying world?
