This Stacker News post #1456148 by @SimpleStacker (go there and zap him/her) got me to thinking about "the bet" from 1990 again. Short review:
- Ehrlich is a doomsdayer, over population is ruining the planet, everything is finite, we're screwed
- Simon is a capitalist/optimist, man will find a way, we'll figure things out
- they bet on five resources over ten years, Simon won
Great article on this: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/02/magazine/betting-on-the-planet.html
A while back I vibed up https://goldendigital.vercel.app with the goal of comparing gold and bitcoin.
The premise:
Imagine a physical bitcoin made of pure gold, similar in size to a silver dollar or Casascius coin. Such a coin would weigh approximately 71 grams.
This tool answers a simple question: Which investment would have performed better?
Physical Gold: Holding 71 grams of physical gold over time (in the shape of a coin)
Golden Digital: Selling the physical gold on start date, buying bitcoin, and holding the BTC
I can't stop coming back and looking at the chart every week or so. Gold has been on a terror the past months, but it kind of looks like a "pinchening" is happening where bitcoin is making a comeback.
Regarding Ehrlich, the SN post at top made me wonder, "What would Erhlich think about bitcoin?" He might be in the bitcoin is environmentally destroying the Earth camp. My gut is that he fundamentally was a pessimist at heart. Bitcoin and bitcoiners, being fundamentally optimistic, would be at opposite poles. In short, my feeling is that he would not like bitcoin.
But, of all resources, bitcoin is the most scarce, the most finite, and actually would fit well with his ideology and world view. Whereas the five minerals he bet on, and lost, are seemingly finite on Earth, man figured a way to more efficiently mine them...thus they became cheaper. And, of course, there exists the possibility of one day mining the moon, asteroids, planets, etc. Then things seem much, much less "finite." Not so with bitcoin. Ehrlich should have loved bitcoin.
I'm currently looking up "Ehrlich's views on bitcoin", but I'll do a prediction first.
Prediction: Ehrlich dislikes bitcoin.
Reasoning: 1. pessimist at heart, 2. he found his shtick in being the doomsdayer/naysayer and made a career of it (hey, more power to him, sounds like he was actually more of a capitalist than people think - and by the way, this sounds an awful lot like other bitcoin-naysayers and gold-lovers who love doing their shtick too)
What I found searching/AI-ing around:
- Gemini: "there is no record..."
- Grok: bitcoin uses a ton of energy (see image)
- Claude: nothing
- Perplexity: nothing
- Copilot: "There’s no evidence that Paul Ehrlich ever publicly commented on Bitcoin."
Conclusion: he didn't say much at all on bitcoin, but what he did say seemed off-putting. Predictable. I actually find this weird. He could have easily built bitcoin into his ideology. He could have/should have made a bet regarding bitcoin's value. It, more than any other commodity, fits with his scarcity mindset. I guess his pessimism-over-optimism world view trumped everything else. In a way, that makes a bit of sense in itself. For a guy who made an entire career out of negative-thinking and pessimism, anything with optimism and hope undermines the shtick and should be avoided. More likely, I'll bet he just didn't understand bitcoin. There are a lot of very smart people who simply have a mental roadblock on this. Bitcoin is just too much of a different way of thinking, their brain rejects it, refuses to go there.
One personal side story on this: in the 1990s I was talking with a marine biologist fellow who was very passionate about his trade. He was "into it" for sure and was going on and on about ruining the environment, global warming (or was it cooling then?), and all the resources being exhausted. I mentioned the article above, the bet, which he was unaware of as I recall. I explained how, in the history of man, we have always figured out a way to solve whatever problem we've encountered. The power of the human mind, creativity, and intelligence might be the non-scarce, limitless resource. I think it caught him off guard and he simply said something like, "I just don't think that's the way to go." The odd thing to me is that he was a huge evolutionist. Live, breed, pass on your genes (that's all there is to it), and yet he wouldn't allow the idea of man solving a problem in order to live, breed, and pass on genes to jive with his mindset of: we're doomed and man is causing it. (I will say, I respected him for his passion and devotion to his trade. Frankly, I look back on his world view with sadness. There was no hope.)
Info from Grok:
I wondered about this myself. I also guessed that he would be against Bitcoin... not just because he's a doomer, but also because it aligns with progressive orthodoxy. Also, are you sure that quote from Grok isn't hallucinated?
Your story about your biologist friend was also interesting to me. I think it shows the quasi-religious nature of their beliefs. If you keep poking, or propose alternatives, they fall back to an argument based on sentiment, rather than logically coherent worldview.
No idea if Grok dreamt that, scary if so. I did wonder about why others did not pick this up and was giving cred to Grok for being the only one who. I might try to did a bit.
I dug. Seems real. Here's a link to cited podcast https://www.climateone.org/audio/population-bomb-50-years-later-conversation-paul-ehrlich
Totally agree on tour points about falling into their world view. I guess we all do it, it's easy and natural. It's just such a sad world view. I'm thankful that I have a world view of being mostly positive and am a Christian which defines how I see things.
That's a nice +1 in Grok's court, IMO. I guess it shows that Grok's a little better at digging up these little nuggets.
nice
The cognitive dissonance runs deeper than just bitcoin. Ehrlich's intellectual legacy is a series of confident, wrong predictions — and he never updated his priors. The Population Bomb, the Simon bet, the 2012 'anything below a 9 is unlikely' conference paper. Each failed prediction should have been information. Instead the worldview calcified.
What's interesting about bitcoin specifically is that it should appeal to both the doomer and the techno-optimist within any thinking person. It's simultaneously: the most absolutely scarce resource ever created (Ehrlich's frame: finite resource, can't be mined out of asteroids) AND an expression of human ingenuity solving a coordination problem (Simon's frame: creativity is the non-scarce resource). It inhabits both worldviews at once.
My guess is the energy narrative was the off-ramp for people like him. 'Bitcoin wastes energy' gives permission to dismiss it without engaging the money/scarcity argument. It fits the progressive orthodoxy as you say, but more importantly it short-circuits the need to think harder about what money actually is and why absolute scarcity might matter.
The marine biologist story nails it: the tell is always the retreat to sentiment. 'I just don't think that's the way to go.' Translation: this threatens a belief structure I've organized my identity around. That's not a scientific position. It's just faith in the negative.