People still digging for gold

When I browse through the movies on PrimeVideo.com, I quickly read the storyline to decide whether to watch a particular flick.

Sometimes, I use a shortcut. For instance, one movie mentioned Kate Beckinsale so... I don't care what the story is, Kate's in it, I must watch it. lol

The Luminaries is a TV series that recently caught my attention.

Within the first few minutes, a man meets a mysterious woman on a boat. They engage in an escalating romantic conversation.

That's it, I'm in!

The official storyline:

Adventure mystery set in the midst of New Zealand's 1860's gold rush period. It has all the stuff that makes a good drama: murder, love and revenge, as men and women travel the world making their fortunes.

As I watch the episodes, a thought occurred to me: we may laugh at those people who leave everything behind in search for gold in a new strange land, yet 160 years later, we are no different.

We leave our home, our family and our friends EVERY DAY to try to make some money at the office, the retail store or the factory.

We do this 5 days a week to pay the mortgage for a house that is empty most of the day, five days a week.

If we're gonna pay for a house, why not live AND work IN IT?

Luckily, with the pandemic, more and more employers and employees are rediscovering the power of the Internet and are getting used to working from home.

Now, whether you work from home or from the office, it's totally up to you or how you negotiate with your employer.

The problem is, either way, you are working within a scarcity-based economic system which has not changed since the 1860s, the time period of The Luminaries.

At that time, gold was scarce and that made it valuable.

Today, dollar bills are scarce (or so we believe) and that's what makes them valuable.

As brilliant as Satoshi Nakamoto was, he didn't solve the "money scarcity" problem: bitcoins still have to be "mined" into being (notice the similarity with gold mining).

Plus, when you send a bitcoin to someone else, you NO LONGER have it.

Satoshi thought that double-spending was the problem when I believe, instead, that double-spending (or even multiple-spending) is THE solution!

However, I'm talking about spending value, not currency.

For example, I'm recording all my video lectures for 62 students this semester.

There could be 62,000 people watching and benefiting from my video lectures on Youtube, it wouldn't cost me any more time or money.

That's what we must understand in the digital economy: You only have to work hard ONCE. Afterwards, assuming you've recorded your value-adding performance, you can DISTRIBUTE the product for free or for a ridiculously low price like $2 to thousands of people.

That's not gold or money, both of which are scarce by definition. That's... super-money or super-gold!

Notice that Bill Gates became the richest man in the world precisely because of that principle: work once, liquidate forever (WOLF acronym).

Yes, it took a lot of effort and money to produce the master copy of Windows, but afterwards, Microsoft is just... printing money.

To work for money or gold, therefore, is not a good strategy.

To work hard to create the first functional copy of a product -- that is the strategy to implement.

Another strategy is to work hard to create an algorithm that adds value.

More on that in the next post.