Dear @EricRWeinstein,

Regarding what's been happening in our society since the early 1970s, many of us see the same problems that you do but attribute them to a different cause.

I want to give you a Portal that will illuminate our ideas.

I'm talking about #Bitcoin .

We agree that since the early 1970s, we've veered off from the course of progress into a world of increasing unreality.

When I and other Bitcoiners hear you or your employer, Peter Thiel, talk about this period, your message finds strong resonance.

However, while we agree about the problems we seem to have a different view on the cause.

You have spoken about a pause in innovation and discovery within physics, while we'd talk about the decoupling of our currencies from an objective standard of value.

Bitcoin is a meme, a vector for the transmission of a specific set of ideas:

-- the forced obsolescence of our failing institutions through technology
-- transparency, not trust
-- pseudonymous collaboration
-- open-source innovation
-- people, not experts
-- anti-consumerism

The propagation of Bitcoin the meme is reaching a critical mass at a point in time when Bitcoin the technology is most needed

- "There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come" - Victor Hugo

Bitcoin's time has come.

On JRE (#1453), you highlighted the difference between GDP growth and median male income as symptom of what's been going wrong since the early 1970s.

Here are some others, borrowed from the brilliant @wtfhappenedin1971, none of which will surprise you:

The above describe an economic phenomenon, but this is cultural too.

-- safe spaces
-- microaggressions
-- cancellations
-- checking our privilege
-- political correctness superseding public safety
-- the policing of gender pronouns
-- the behaviour of the US President.

Our culture is in decay.

You'll understand that this is not a rail against progressives or the left, whose meaningful contributions to public life are many and varied.

It's a suggestion that we live in a land of unreality.

As a society we've taken our eye off the ball to indulge ourselves in a decadence of ideas.

These cultural phenomena, together with those economic indicators I presented above are, I believe, symptoms of the same phenomenon.

What we agree on is that, since the early 1970s (at least) our economy has been stagnating.

So here's the Portal, my attempt to explain the Bitcoin 'sense-making structure' of the last 50 years.

In decoupling our currencies from an objective standard of value, which they did in 1971, govts assumed full control of the value of our currencies.

Doing so gave them the power to avert economic pain via monetary tricks.

When we flip this around, we can see that this rendered our institutions fully responsible for every instance of economic pain suffered from that moment on.

This is clearly too big a burden to bear, and creates a philosophy of intervention, usually via central banks.

Specifically, our institutions:

-- attempt to 'deflate bubbles' before they occur
-- effectively ban recessions via central bank policy, including the long-term suppression of interest rates and quantitative easing

We propose that the sum of central bank intervention has been to insulate us from the consequences of our actions, both economic and cultural.

The result is that thing we agree on: that our economy is stagnating and our culture is in decay

When we are insulated from consequence, the ideas and the culture of the day don't matter too much.

We don't reckon with the consequences of our economic decisions or cultural priorities - we don't bump up against reality so for decade after decade we never correct course.

We treat our economies as problems of simplicity when in fact they are problems of complexity.

We use crude tools to intervene in organic processes, the complexity of which we can only understand by abstracting to such a degree that we destroy information.

Stock prices, for example, should be signals containing information about individual companies, sectors and the economy at large.

Recent years have seen govt and central bank intervention destroy the validity of these signals, muddying the waters and robbing us of wisdom.

According to our Portal, the continual decline in the value of money forces normal working people to put their wits against Wall Street professionals, simply to protect the purchasing power of their savings - the stored value of a lifetime of work.

Or simply to succumb, and fritter away their money on 'avocado toast', pursuing hedonism and a high time-preference life.

Millennials have been reckoning with this our whole adult lives, Gen Z will too.

At the societal level, our monetary and financial paradigm robs us of our wisdom, encourages mindless consumption and keeps us racing toward ruin on the wrong cultural and economic track.

We propose that our monetary order is the cause of the problems that you describe.

Those are the problems. What solutions do we propose?

We propose the disintermediation of those institutions causing our unreality through technology.

We propose that signals such as stock prices, and the price of money, should exist as an emergent property of the interactions of free and self-interested individuals, and thus contain the full richness of data contained within the interaction between them.

We propose that the only way out of economic suffering is to reckon with reality.

To fix the problems we see in front of our faces and to ask ourselves difficult questions about our priorities.

We propose that being robbed of this process for almost 50 years is the cause of the unreality we're living, and the stagnation in our society.

We propose that working men and women should have access to an easy savings mechanism which respects the value of their work, serving as a reliable store of value over time.

In Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto has provided us with the tools to force the institutions causing these problems into obsolescence.

What the internet did for information, Bitcoin will do for value.

What the internet did to legacy media, Bitcoin will do to legacy finance.

We believe that Bitcoin is the solution to the problems you've described.

An objective standard of value, untamperable money, the removal of monetary policy from the hands of well-meaning idiots.

We believe that an era of sound money is coming, that will provide our society with the course-correction mechanism it was robbed of.

But we're not naïve.

As the new world develops it will need the attention and the scrutiny of honest, thinking men like yourself.

I hope you've found this Portal useful, and that I might've done enough to encourage you to consider another perspective on that same phenomenon.

For further reading, I'd recommend absorbing the work of @NickSzabo4 @parkeralewis, @TuurDemeester, @nic__carter and @breedlove22

Feel free to reach out for any more specific recommendations, but amongst the noise I believe those writers generate real signal.

Keep fighting the good fight.

Chris