When @siggy47 wrote about the zen of stacking, I recall one powerful pahrase that came to my mind this week when I was reading Byung's book:
First, you'll learn about low time preference. Later, you'll understand what that really means. You will stop caring about the fancy house and the car. Soon, you'll be thinking more about the mother in some poor African country trying to feed her family. Without a bank account. With decaying fiat money. You start feeling all those We Are All One vibes from bad 1970's Coca Cola commercials. Except now you know it's true(...)
Byung said that inactivity is been seized by industries and businesses with one purpose: put it a price. There's no more inactivity as a way to express relief or just being in the zen mode, thinking about life and stuff. No. We say that inactivity is an irrationality inherent to the market, that if we're not moving, we're wasting time and money. Are we? Really? Losing money, really? And therein lies the crux of the matter: one way to lower your time preferences is precisely through inactivity, but what do I define in this case?
Do something to be happy
The great problem of the fiat market and its competent regulators is that they've ingrained in us the idea that doing nothing promotes a deficit, it's an illness cured by moving faster and faster. We need everything to be faster. And we forget that human contemplation, in doing nothing itself, is when human beings produce the best innovations.
And that's why people in the fiat market don't understand why we buy bitcoin and leave them in our cold wallets, away from the internet. They don't understand how we can just leave them there, as if they were stones, "bitcoin is boring" they said many many times. Instead of going to exchange houses in the form of casinos, with their buy/sell orders, demonic leverages, and excellent UX design, precisely to attract more people who, at the end of the day, like the money, it's gone.
Shitcoins are attractive not because they're memecoins or their price, it's because they give you a shot of joy (high preference) so that later you fall flat on the ground, broke and planless, only to climb back on the train again, because in the quick movements of finances, something is created. It's the broken capitalism that can't be combined with bitcoin, because my satoshis aren't made for that broken system.
Bitcoin is to contemplate life
We contemplate our financial activities and give importance to our money by sending it every 10 minutes, and those approximate 600 seconds allow us to reflect precisely while we wait on the blockchain for what we've sent. They're ten minutes we give ourselves to reflect justly, we've done what we had to do.
Fiat and shitcoins follow the same Keynesian logic from decades ago: move fast to stimulate the economy.
Bitcoin follows a new line of thought: inactivity shows us we've always made the right decision; in the rush of the day, we see speed as an answer, but when the body rests, we also see that we should have been more cautious about where we put our money. It's okay to do nothing, and bitcoin isn't a boring stone, it's an object of contemplation. Less YOLO, more reflection.