The Time Battery
Bitcoin changes our relationship to time
Why do we work?
The answer seems pretty obvious…We work so we can put food on the table for our families. We work so we can put a roof over our head at night. We work so we can buy clothes to stay warm in the winter.
Lots of reasons, and each one would be correct. To each their own.
But, why do we work?
We work for money. We expel energy and time as labor in exchange for money.
What is money?
If we work for money and we exchange our time and energy for money, then money is a technology to store our time and energy. We exchange time and energy today so we can have more time and energy for other things tomorrow.
Time for vacations. Time for our kids to go to school. Time to take care of the sick and unfortunate.
Everything we do is measured in time, and money is simply the measuring stick or unit of account. Human beings use measurements to understand our environment to help us act accordingly.
We measure speed to understand how fast we’re going. We measure distance to measure how far we’ve gone. These units of measurement stay the same and for good reason.
Can you imagine driving a car down the highway, and the speedometer read 65 mph, but you were really going 165 mph?
This would make driving super difficult, not to mention, extremely dangerous.
With that said, units of measurement should stay the same because it makes life easier to operate and less dangerous.
Back to measuring time with money.
Measuring time with fiat
Fiat currency — a type of money that is not backed by any commodity and declared by a decree from government to be legal tender.
Fiat currency is an inflationary currency. There will always be more tomorrow than there is today.
If the money supply is designed to increase by design, then prices are designed to increase by design. The increased supply of money is chasing fewer goods and services.
As prices of goods and services increase, the amount of money or time we have to spend on other items decrease, therefore we have less overall time.
In order to keep up with rising prices (units of time), we need more money, which requires more of our time.
When you pay attention, you can actually feel time slip away. The following might sound familiar.
“This year flew by…”
“I can’t believe it’s already the weekend…”
“I still feel like a kid…where did the time go…?”
This is an unfortunate part of existence. Time or at least the way we interpret time exists and has a dramatic effect on our lives. Our relationship to time is absolutely scarce, finite.
Fiat is infinite.
Money is a battery
We work for 8 hours in exchange for 8 more hours of time in the future. When we borrow money, we pull time from the future and now we owe a debt in the future.
Fiat is debt based money. There’s always more debt than equity. It’s constantly pulling time from the future and that time has to be repaid with interest or increased amounts of time.
If there’s no growth, then the model breaks and our relationship to time is reset, only we’ve defaulted on our debt to the future and therefore the future becomes the present, effectively speeding up our relationship to time, but we have nothing to show for it.
Productivity was misallocated and lost because we weren’t measuring time effectively.
Our fiat based monetary system doesn’t make sense over the long run, it always ends up breaking because you can’t manipulate time forever.
Using this analogy, fiat doesn’t store time, in fact, it leaks or even steals time from its users.
We need a better time battery.
1 bitcoin = 1 bitcoin
There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.
It’s finitely scarce, just like our time. In fact, our time and bitcoin are the only finite resources of value that we can actually say that about.
Bitcoin is a deflationary currency. There will always be less supply tomorrow than there is today. This means over time, the prices of goods and services decrease against the price of bitcoin.
A better battery
When using bitcoin as our unit of account or our measuring stick, our purchasing power or time increases.
For this reason, bitcoin is a better time battery or money than fiat currency.
Our time and energy used in exchange for money is preserved and doesn’t leak. In fact it grows, and therefore we have more time in the future for less work today.
Bitcoin changes our relationship to time. Instead of pulling time from the future with debt instruments, bitcoin pulls time from the past forward.
Therefore, bitcoin not only changes our relationship to time, it reverses time.
As global adoption continues to exponentially increase, and the price of bitcoin continues to exponentially increase, this means that the individuals who choose to store their time and energy in bitcoin will have exponentially more time in the future.
Matt Verklin, Founder & CEO, MAJR
This is not financial advice. Please do your own research. Investing in bitcoin and cryptocurrency comes with risk. The information presented here is for information and entertainment purposes only.
