307 sats \ 3 replies \ @davidw 30 Nov 2023 freebie \ on: Cycles and inevitability bitcoin
From interactions I have had, and I’m not sure if there is some human psychology involved here, it usually takes 3 strikes before people appreciate the value of Bitcoin or at least are able to start doing some research into it.
- Dismiss it
- Intrigued but forget about it
- Dragged into & buy it
The 3rd stage, the bubble-top, is a key part of the journey for most. It is when people get excited and hopeful of a world takeover and increasing returns.
Following the declines it is when people teach themselves more about sound principles and are now ‘pot committed’. During that final top formation, I would say adoption is probably 5x in sheer numbers what they would be in any other period. Typically the last week of the bubble top, but certainly the last few months.
During the depths of the bear market, maybe it’s about 0.5x a regular adoption curve. But in general I think these cycles accelerate adoption, not hamper it. We just don’t see the rapid appreciation and depreciation in other technology, because they tend to be one-time purchases. Their numbers accumulate on top of another. Once you’re into Bitcoin, it’s rare you get out of it and never enter again, but you may trim your position. You don’t ‘trim’ back your tv once you buy it.
The 2nd stage people may buy too, but will never find the motivation to understand the technology or be compelled to. There is a certain amount of apathy and ignorance. And so the 3rd stage is really actually fundamentally an important human educational experience.
I may try and find data to support my argument but I would take the opposite opinion and argue that adoption would be slower without these boom and busy cycles. Money needs momentum, and periods of strong appreciation. otherwise people won’t think they require it. They’ll treat it like the average lawn-mower, something they can do without. Until they need it most.
The way you put it makes me think there's cycles within cycles: the macro cycle that I described, and the micro-cycles you described within the hearts of each [pre] bitcoiner. Like epicycles, maybe, that interact in complex ways with the larger rhythms of the world.
I may try and find data to support my argument but I would take the opposite opinion and argue that adoption would be slower without these boom and busy cycles.
I didn't mean to imply otherwise -- I, too, think the cycles are probably, on net, accelerents of global adoption. I think of it like dandelions: there's some accrual, then someone stomps on the dandelion, and the seeds go airborne. There's a period where it looks like all is ruined, but a bunch of the seeds take root, and now there are twenty dandelions.
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Exactly. In time terms, we’re probably looking at 4 year cycles within a 16 year cycle, within a ~80 year cycle. But as we layer technologies on top of one another, the cycles for new technologies arguably get shorter in length.
Perhaps previously those would have been 8 year cycles within a 32 year cycle (for example: for gold that’s likely more accurate).
And in the future we’ll have adoption cycles that look like yearly cycles within a 4 year macro cycle.
In some ways I don’t think we are prepared for the pace of innovation to come in the future. Either we go back to cavemen living in the wilderness and are set back a century…or we start operating and innovating at a new level of productivity. A step-change. It’s only natural in that latter scenario for us to draw the conclusion that cycles get compressed if productivity gains also do drastically.
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It's interesting to think about decreasing micro cycle times by the resources that are available.
In 2010 there were certain resources, certain ideas dominate the narrative; certain amount of ambient flow of discussion is happening. In 2023 all of these are profoundly different -- it's one thing to assemble your understanding from bitcointalk, it's another to hear it being discussed publicly, as part of his platform, by a Presidential candidate. The elements of btc understanding start with very different intellectual and cultural capital formations.
This evolution in the ideaspace seems super important. I bet it radically changes the aspects of the micro-cycles within a single person.