Book: The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (Part 3/3)
The invention of digital scarcity.
Here is the third and final post on the book The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous. Today we’ll bring this home by finally identifying what Bitcoin is, and how it has been created to be the hardest money ever invented.
Digital Money
Bitcoin is the first digital solution to the problem of money that presents a viable solution to the problems of salability, soundness and sovereignty.
Metallurgy provided solutions to money superior to beads, seashells and other historical artefacts. Gold and silver coins improved salability over lumps of metal. Gold-backed banks then allowed gold to dominate as a global monetary standard. With the centralisation of gold came government money backed by gold, and then eventually not backed by gold at all. This fiat currency was prone to expansion and control by the government, destroying the soundness of the operating currency of the economy and the sovereignty of the individual. Each step, technological advances shaped the use of money, and the impacts were massive. Societies that adopted sound money flourished. Societies that pushed unsound money were economically, socially and morally destroyed.
Bitcoin is a new technological solution to the money problem, utilising innovations developed over the preceding decades, and combining them in a new way to create the hardest money that has ever existed.
Bitcoin as digital cash.
Prior to Bitcoin there were essentially two payment methods:
Cash payments: these were carried out in person between two parties. They were immediate and final with no trust required and no delay. The main drawback is that you had to be physically located at the same spot.
Intermediated payments: these required a trusted third party. Think bank transactions, credit and debit cards and any money transfer service. The main advantage is you don’t have to be in the same location. The drawback is you must trust a third party, which brings with it the risk of the third party being compromised. There are also additional costs and time to complete and clear the payment. These type of payments can also be subject to government constraints.
Digital objects have historically not been scarce. You can copy and paste files endlessly for virtually zero cost. All digital payments prior to Bitcoin were intermediated by necessity. You needed to trust a third party to ensure the money wasn’t being spent multiple times. After years of trial and error, Bitcoin is the first digital solution that allows for payments without a trusted third party and is verifiable as scarce. It is the first instantiation of digital cash.
The motivation of Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was to create a “purely peer-to-peer form of electronic cash”. No trust would be required of a third party and the supply was to be hard-capped. Bitcoin would bring cash into the digital realm. It would achieve this through:
A distributed peer-to-peer network
Hashing
Digital signatures
Proof-of-work
Bitcoin is built on proof and verification, through a distributed, shared ledger. Every member of the network has a copy and can verify every transaction ever made. When transactions are made, nodes compete to be the first to update the ledger. To commit a block of transactions to the ledger, the node must expend significant processing power to find a valid block. Once a valid block has been found it is easily verified by all other nodes in the network. This proof-of-work process is critical to the operation of the network, as it is a costly process that incentivises nodes to only include valid transactions. Once a valid block is found the node will broadcast the transactions to the network. Other nodes vote on the validity of the block and once there is a majority consensus, nodes begin working on the next block of transactions to be appended to the previous block. The node that commits the valid block of transactions to the network receives a block reward, which is new bitcoins added to the supply, along with the transaction fees paid by users to have their transaction included in the block.
This process of finding a valid block is known as mining. The new money created only goes to those who commit resources to updating the ledger. The network is designed to produce a valid block approximately every 10 minutes, with the block reward halving every four years. The total quantity of bitcoins is programmed and cannot be changed. This is achieved through the difficulty adjustment mechanism, one of the most amazing innovations of Bitcoin. As more people choose to hold bitcoin, this pushes up the value, which incentives people to mine as new coins become more profitable. More miners means more processing power which would result in valid blocks being found faster and faster, increasing the rate of issuance of new bitcoins. This has been addressed by adjusting the difficulty of finding a valid block every two weeks, to ensure a valid block is only found approximately every ten minutes, no matter how much processing power is thrown at the network.
This difficulty adjustment makes Bitcoin the hardest money ever invented. With any other money in history, if you dedicated more resources to its production it would result in more money being created. With Bitcoin, more processing power does not yield more bitcoins. As the price increases and it attracts more processing power, it makes the network more secure and difficult to compromise, but does not increase the stock-to-flow ratio.
The security of the Bitcoin network resides in the asymmetry between the cost to find valid blocks and the cost to verify. It will cost ever increasing quantities of electricity to find valid blocks, but the cost is almost zero to verify. Fraudulent transactions are expensive to produce and cheap to reject, denying the bad actor the block reward of new bitcoins. Further to this, if there was collusion on a large scale to commit fraudulent transactions, it would cost a fortune and it would destroy the value proposition of Bitcoin, thereby making the loot worthless. Bitcoin incentives all players to behave in a way that strengthens the Bitcoin network.
The shared nature of the Bitcoin ledger means that everyone can verify how much bitcoin is located at any public address. Access to the coins at an address is secured through the ownership of private keys, which is basically just a long string of characters similar to a password.
There can only ever be a maximum of 21 million bitcoins. Each bitcoin can be divided into 100 million satoshis (or sats), thereby making Bitcoin highly salable across scales and time.
Ralph Merkle, inventor of the Merkle tree data structure, which is utilized by Bitcoin to record transactions, had a remarkable way of describing Bitcoin:
“Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of life. It lives and breathes on the internet. It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. It lives because it performs a useful service that people will pay it to perform. It lives because anyone, anywhere, can run a copy of its code. It lives because all the running copies are constantly talking to each other. It lives because if any one copy is corrupted it is discarded, quickly and without any fuss or muss. It lives because it is radically transparent: anyone can see its code and see exactly what it does.
It can't be changed. It can't be argued with. It can't be tampered with. It can't be corrupted. It can't be stopped. It can't even be interrupted.
If nuclear war destroyed half of our planet, it would continue to live, uncorrupted. It would continue to offer its services. It would continue to pay people to keep it alive.
The only way to shut it down is to kill every server that hosts it. Which is hard, because a lot of servers host it, in a lot of countries, and a lot of people want to use it.
Realistically, the only way to kill it is to make the service it offers so useless and obsolete that no one wants to use it. So obsolete that no one wants to pay for it. No one wants to host it. Then it will have no money to pay anyone. Then it will starve to death.
But as long as there are people who want to use it, it's very hard to kill, or corrupt, or stop, or interrupt.”
Bitcoin survives and thrives because it benefits all who use it. Users, miners and node operators all have incentives that align. Due to the decentralised nature of Bitcoin no one is essential and everyone is dispensable. Block after block. The network keeps going. There is no management. All decisions are automated and preprogrammed. On top of this it is exceedingly difficult to make any changes to Bitcoin. Volunteer coders can propose changes but nodes need to vote almost unanimously to implement any changes, and as the network grows this becomes harder and harder.
Beyond the incredible invention of digital scarcity, Bitcoin is also the first instantiation of absolute scarcity - the only liquid asset with a fixed quantity that cannot conceivably be increased. With block rewards halving roughly every four years, there will be no more bitcoins issued by around the year 2140.
Market demand for Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin network began operating in January of 2009, and was a small obscure project only used by a few people on a cryptography mailing list. Soon though, in October of that same year, the tokens on the network gained economic value, when someone was willing to buy bitcoins for the price it would have cost in electricity to mine the bitcoin. At that time this was $0.000994. In May 2010, the first real world purchase was made, with someone paying 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas worth $25, valuing bitcoins at $0.0025.
The market demand for a bitcoin came from the fact that it was required to operate the first functional and reliable digital cash system. Bitcoin became monetised as more and more people demanded it as a store of value. Today, the overall value of the Bitcoin network has grown to exceed the value of most nation states and national currencies.
The conservative monetary policy of Bitcoin, and the resultant increased value of the network tokens is critical to the success of the network, as it incentives miners to expend electricity to verify valid transactions. Had there been an easy money policy, where supply was increased as more people used it, there would have been no incentive to mine for new bitcoin, as the supply would be expanded and devalued as more people joined.
The price of bitcoin has been exceedingly volatile in the early years. This derives from the fact that the supply is completely inflexible to demand. There is no central bank to manage the supply in response to demand, and there is no way to increase the issuance of bitcoins. As the network grows and matures, and as more and more people choose to hold bitcoins as a store of value, the price should become relatively stable and it will behave as a normal monetary asset, expected to appreciate slightly each year.
What is Bitcoin good for?
Store of value.
Before Bitcoin, the only truly limited resource was human time. This is the only true scarcity we deal with. More of any good can be mined and manufactured if only we have more time. This means the real cost of a good is the opportunity cost in terms of goods forgone to produce it.
In all history we have never run out of a single resource, and the price of almost all resources is lower today than in the past due to technological advances. Reserves and stockpiles have gone up even as our consumption has increased. The driver of human progress is not consumption of raw materials, but technological progress. The more humans there are, the more creative and productive thought we can draw on, which leads to higher productivity and the ability to support a larger population.
So how do humans store the value they have created with the one truly limited resource, human time, through into the future? For the first time in the history of humans we have a commodity that is strictly limited. There is no way to increase the supply of bitcoins past its 21 million cap. The only way to meet the increased demand is through increased valuation of the existing supply. This makes Bitcoin arguably the best store of value humanity has ever invented.
Individual sovereignty.
For the first time since the emergence of the modern state, individuals have a technology that allows them to send value anywhere around the planet without requiring permission from anyone. The value does not rely on anything physical in the world and can therefore never be completely destroyed, impeded or confiscated by governments or criminals.
The process of subverting the control of nation states through the development of new technologies has been underway for several decades now. We can see this with the rise of the Internet and the democratisation of information, with virtually all of human knowledge available to all individuals. This information is allowing businesses like Airbnb and Uber to sidestep traditional forms of government regulation. It is also allowing individuals to work remotely, decoupling the need to live in specific jurisdictions for work, thereby reducing the government’s power to exact arbitrary taxes on the individual. The last step was to take back the money for the individual, taking control away from the government. This is what Bitcoin does.
Bitcoin is a defensive technology, making the cost of defending the technology very cheap compared to the cost of attacking. It can provide an escape hatch from the tyrannical government for the individual. It is built on voluntary participation and is incentivised towards peace.
If Bitcoin succeeds, and society again operates under a hard money, this will reduce government impositions on the individual, as any government spending will need to be paid for through taxes, and any restrictions that are not economically productive will not survive.
International and Online Settlement.
Bitcoin allows an individual to run their own node, and send money to anyone in the world without permission and without revealing their identity. This is a significant advantage over the traditional means of settlement through gold, third-parties and fiat currencies. The private keys that determine ownership of bitcoins do not need to be stored on a computer. They can be stored in a person’s head as a series of words, allowing for easy transport around the world, without risk of seizure.
As Bitcoin grows, on-chain transactions are likely to become prohibitively expensive for individuals, so transactions will likely be handled by Layer 2 technologies, like the Lightning Network. Bitcoin can be seen as a new global reserve currency, with the equivalent of online banks emerging to allow for cheaper transactions, and also allowing the individual to audit the supply of Bitcoin and ensure the bank has not engaged in fractional reserve banking.
Bitcoin’s advantage lies in being able to settle cash transfers quickly and with finality, usually within tens of minutes. The traditional network of banks and floating currencies usually takes days, costs a significant amount and is subject to the whims of the intermediaries it passes through on the way to its receiver.
Bitcoin is a direct competitor to the central banks that manage monetary policy. It is the disruptor the industry so desperately needs. It allows individuals to store value across time and space, and transact with anyone in the world without permission.
Global unit of account.
This may be some time off yet, but Bitcoin does have the chance to become a global unit of account due to its unique properties. Under the gold standard it was simple to transact across borders and be able to conduct economic calculations due to gold acting as a global unit of account. With the end of the gold standard we’ve witnessed the highly inefficient mess that is the foreign exchange market, with currency values shifting continuously due to currency manipulation and political decision making. This has hampered people’s ability to conduct accurate economic calculations across borders. If Bitcoin is widely adopted, its value should stabilise and eventually allow for bitcoins to be the unit of account that all other economic goods are valued in.
Bitcoin questions
Well that all sounds too good to be true right? Surely there are attack vectors on this thing. Why won’t the government just shut it down? Why does it have to suck up so much electricity? Don’t terrorists and criminals use it? Calm down. Have a cup of tea. And let’s get into answering some of those pesky questions I’m sure you’re chewing your bottom lip over.
Is Bitcoin mining a waste?
Bitcoin uses a system called proof-of-work (POW) to solve the double-spend problem without trusting a third party.
Here is an outline of how the proof-of-work system works:
All verified transactions in a ten-minute interval are bundled together into a single block.
Nodes compete to find a valid block. This is sometimes referred to as solving mathematical problems but it is more akin to guessing a number within a given range. Lots of guesses means lots of CPU cycles, the node having to commit the cost of electricity to try and find the solution.
Once verified by the majority of the network, the block subsidy (new bitcoins) and transaction fees are rewarded to the node that found the solution. These together are known as the block reward.
Proof-of-work is the only reliable method for making a digital good reliably expensive, thereby allowing for hard money to be created. Due to the high cost, there is a strong incentive to not include invalid transactions into a block. It makes the cost of writing a block high and verification of its validity extremely cheap. Bitcoin converts electricity to truthful record via CPU cycles. As a result there has been no examples of a successful double-spend on a confirmed transaction. Through proof-of-work, Bitcoin incentives honesty and removes the need to trust any party.
For an attacker to insert fraudulent transactions they’d need to control more than 50% of the mining power of the network. As previously mentioned if they were somehow able to do this, the value of the stolen loot would be destroyed as the value-proposition of Bitcoin was invalidated. If they were still inclined they would need to invest billions in hardware and even if they succeeded once, the honest nodes could just revert to the chain prior to the attack and continue on. The attacker would need to continuously attack the consensus of the honest nodes, incurred massive costs in the process.
In the early days, when bitcoins had little value, it would have been relatively easy to gain control of the network to commit fraudulent transactions. Now though, with the distribution of processing power around the world, with dedicated hardware developed specifically for mining, with the strong resistance to changes in code, it is near impossible for any attacker to succeed. And each day, the network grows in processing power, making the chance of such an attack being successful vanishingly small.
Can’t someone just change the code and create more bitcoins?
“The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.”
—Satoshi Nakamoto, 6/17/2010
Nobody controls Bitcoin. Your option is to use it, or not. The extreme difficulty of getting the majority of nodes to agree on changes means that it becomes a very long, drawn out and almost impossible process to implement even the slightest, almost trivial change. Any node is free to download the software to run Bitcoin, and they can make whatever changes they like. Changes however are only accepted via consensus with the rest of the network. For a node to be part of the network it must accept the consensus rules. If it tries to break any of these the rest of the nodes will just reject their transactions.
Over the years there have been improvements made to the code, which essentially are improvements to the way nodes interact with the network, but there have been no changes to the Bitcoin network or the consensus rules.
Therefore coders can only provide software for nodes to use. They don’t control the network. Similarly miners don’t control the network, in that no matter how much processing power they can control, if they operate outside of the consensus rules their blocks will not be validated by the majority of nodes.
Individual nodes have control over their own implementation, but have a strong incentive to maintain consensus with the network so that their transactions are not rejected. Based on this, we can say the consensus parameters of Bitcoin are sovereign and cannot be altered as long as Bitcoin exists.
Bitcoin’s ultimate value does not lie in its speed or convenience. It lies in its immutable monetary policy.
Antifragility.
Antifragility is an idea coined by Nassim Taleb, to describe something that grows stronger from adversity, rather than just resisting or being degraded by disorder. Bitcoin can be said to be antifragile on both a technical and economic level.
Any technical weakness that is found, attracts coders to propose solutions, have them debated publicly, tested and adopted, strengthening the Bitcoin network. Since coders can own coins they are financially motivated to protect and strengthen the network, and work to ensure the security of the network into the future to secure their own financial future.
There have been hundreds of articles announcing the death of Bitcoin over the years. These articles are usually written by people steeped in Keynesian economics, believing the inelastic money supply of Bitcoin could not be a sustainable model for economic success, or by people who believe that Bitcoin needs to change to survive, and consequently when the changes were not implemented, lamented that Bitcoin will now die. These articles all led to a wider audience of people engaging with Bitcoin, thinking about Bitcoin and learning about why it has value. No matter whether it was the shut down of the Silk Road, the website that was used to buy illicit drugs using Bitcoin, or the many bans of Bitcoin by China, the Bitcoin price would rebound each time and reach greater and greater heights as more people contributed hashing power and demanded access to the network.
Is Bitcoin for criminals?
There is a wide-spread misconception that Bitcoin is somehow a currency for criminals, who are able to transact without traceability. The Bitcoin ledger is globally accessible and impossible to change. It is not so much as anonymous, but pseudonymous. There is the potential that at any point in the future a Bitcoin address could be linked to a real world identity. This is part of the reason why so many drug dealers have been identified and captured through analysis of the Bitcoin ledger.
Bitcoin increases freedom for individuals while not necessarily making it easier for them to commit crimes.
What differentiates Bitcoin from the plethora of shitcoins on the market?
Since the creation of Bitcoin, and the economic value the Bitcoin tokens have achieved, there have been thousands of alternative coins created, copying the code of Bitcoin with minor modifications. None of these altcoins, also known as shitcoins, will ever have the properties that make Bitcoin functional as digital cash and sound money. For a currency to function as digital cash it cannot be prone to control by any third party.
Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, who released the project to an obscure cryptography mailing list. After several months of working on the project with other programmers, he disappeared citing that he was “moving on to other things”. He owns around one million coins that have never moved. He took extreme caution to not be identified. This leaves Bitcoin with no central figure who can dictate how the project should evolve. As described earlier it is impossible to change the consensus rules of Bitcoin even if there were a central figure. It is this sovereignty of the Bitcoin code, backed by proof-of-work, which solves the double-spend problem and creates effective digital cash.
And this is the reason every altcoin is at a significant disadvantage to Bitcoin. Every altcoin requires a team to nurture it, to market and protect it, and to tell the world how it is better than Bitcoin. By their very nature, these altcoins will have a party with sovereign control over the currency and therefore cannot ever be considered digital cash. No altcoin has been able to demonstrate something approaching the immutability of the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin only achieved this status by surviving for years on the internet as antagonists came and went, unable to alter how Bitcoin functioned.
Isn’t the important innovation the blockchain technology, and not Bitcoin?
The concept of the blockchain that Bitcoin utilises, putting transactions into blocks that are then chained together, has been misconstrued as an invention that will revolutionise economics, banking and society at large. Blockchain technology is slow, expensive and inefficient. Centralised solutions are far faster and cheaper to implement. The only reason you would use blockchain technology is to eliminate the need to trust a third party. The need would have to be so great as to justify the cost and inefficiency of the technology.
This is why we have not seen any real use for blockchain technology outside of Bitcoin. Trustless digital cash has been the only successful implementation because it is a simple process to run, with a ledger that is growing slowly over time.
What makes Bitcoin special is how it combines the blockchain technology with other innovations, such as hashing, digital signatures, proof-of-work and the difficulty adjustment, to achieve digital scarcity without the need to trust any third party.
I want to kill Bitcoin. How could I do it?
So you are feeling threatening by the existence of Bitcoin and the return of sound money. Here are some of the more high-profile potential threats against Bitcoin that you might consider in your attempts to kill the Bitcoin network. But be warned - the odds are stacked against you. Many have tried. All have failed.
Hacking
By design Bitcoin is resistant to attack: the simplicity of software design, the huge processing power protecting the software and distributed consensus all reduce the number of potential attack vectors.
Bitcoin at its core is a ledger of ownership of virtual coins. It operates under the assumption that all nodes are hostile attackers. All transactions to be committed must be verified through proof-of-work. This means that the security of the network is dependent on brute processing power, and so is invulnerable to attack vectors involving access or credentials. So to hack Bitcoin you would need to corrupt the ledger of transactions. As previously discussed to do this requires the attacker to incur the high cost of committing fraudulent transactions to a block, but then these are easily and cheaply verified to be fraudulent by the network and rejected. This asymmetry means the economic incentives are stacked against a hack attack.
The 51% attack
This attack is based on the idea that an attacker could control sufficient hashrate to be able to generate fraudulent transactions by spending the same coins twice, defrauding one of the recipients. The attacker would spend the coin on the public chain, but then start using his processing power to make a second chain that is longer than the first, attempting to get this second chain accepted as the new public chain. If the recipient is willing to wait at least one confirmation (a confirmation meaning that the next block has been mined and attached to the ledger) then it reduces the chance of a double spend to almost zero. There have been no successful double spends on one confirmation.
There is the potential that an attacker may not be motivated by profit, such as a state. They could try and procure sufficient processing power to execute such an attack, but this would only serve to drive up the price of hardware, leading to more profitability for miners in the short-term, allowing them to buy more hardware, and it would lead to manufacturers entering the industry to produce more dedicated hardware for mining, ultimately driving up the amount of processing power in the network, making the 51% attack more and more difficult to achieve. If a state were to take over an existing mining infrastructure, this would also most likely fail due to the geographically distributed nature of the network.
Hardware backdoors
Another potential attack vector could be malware that allows an attacker to take over mining hardware for a coordinated attack. While there are still only a few mining hardware manufacturers the number involved is growing as the price of Bitcoin increases. While any exposure to a malware attack would destabilise confidence in Bitcoin in the short term, ultimately it would go on operating, as it is not dependent on any one hardware manufacturer.
Internet infrastructure attacks
You may think breaking connections within the internet, or actually shutting it down, may stop Bitcoin. There is no single failure point in the Bitcoin network. All it needs is a computer with access to the network, able to transmit only one megabyte every ten minutes. To stop this small amount of data from transmitting, all of the world’s connectivity would need to effectively be destroyed. There is no way this can feasibly occur without destroying the global economy.
Rise in the cost of nodes and centralisation
If it becomes more expensive to run a node, this could threaten the distributed nature of the network and make an attack far easier. At the moment, blocks are less than one megabyte, so a node can be managed with a one terabyte hard-drive to store the entire chain, and an internet connection that can transmit one megabyte every ten minutes. This makes it incredibly cheap to run a node at home. If the economics associated with this changed somehow, and it became far more expensive to run personal nodes, there could be a drop in the number of nodes, reducing the distributed nature of the network and making it vulnerable to an attack. With the costs of computer hardware continuously dropping and access to the internet for all the world’s population expanding every day, this does not seem likely to occur.
Breaking of the SHA256 hashing algorithm
The SHA-256 hashing algorithm is used in Bitcoin to take a stream of data and transform it into a fixed size, known as a hash, using a non-reversible mathematical formula. With the increase in processing power, it may become possible to one day reverse calculate this hash. If this were to happen, while it would be messy and could involve potential chain splits, all nodes would be incentivised to move to a stronger form of encryption to secure their coins.
A return to sound money
If you attempt to kill Bitcoin in the ways mentioned already you will almost certainly fail, as the economic incentives are stacked against you. It has utility so people will use it. In theory, the attack vector most likely to succeed would be the entire global economy returning to a gold standard of sound money, obviating the need for something like Bitcoin. Gold may succeed over Bitcoin in this scenario as it has the first mover advantage and a more stable price due to the established stock in existence. In practice though, for a world run by politicians and economists steeped in the government control of the creation and distribution of money, there is little chance that we will see this return to sound money.
So when your grandmother says explain to me this magic internet money, you can now respond succinctly and bravely with the following:
Bitcoin is the first digital solution to the problem of money. It presents viable solutions to the problems of salability, soundness and sovereignty.
Bitcoin is digital cash, allowing anyone in the world to transfer value immediately without any permission or oversight for a third party or government.
Fraudulent transactions are discouraged by the proof-of-work system, which involves expending a high cost in electricity to find a valid block, which is then easily and cheaply rejected by everyone in the network if found to be fraudulent. This solves the double spend problem.
There can only be a maximum of 21 million bitcoins. Bitcoin is the first asset in history to not only be digitally scarce, but also absolutely scarce. This makes it the hardest money ever.
Due to the limited supply, Bitcoin is the best store of value ever invented.
No one can change the rules that govern the Bitcoin network. Many have tried and failed.
There is Bitcoin, and then there are shitcoins. They are not the same. Bitcoin is the innovation. Shitcoins are the imitators controlled by marketing teams.
Blockchain technology has no proven use outside of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has been declared dead hundreds of time by legacy media. Bitcoin does not care. It just keeps going. Tick tock. Next block.
Action.
If you’ve enjoyed this go get the book here, read it and share it with your friends. If you don’t want to buy the book, Saifedean also encourages people to pirate it from Library Genesis. He is that serious about trying to educate people on why Bitcoin is the monetary technology we so desperately need.
If you’ve got any questions on this book or suggestions for any books you’d like to see summarised here hit me up on twitter @thedavidhart.
Next up in the Self As Lab series is “The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels”, by Alex Epstein - a book that dispels the myth that human consumption of fossil fuels is a bad thing, and shows how as humans have consumed more fossil fuels our quality of life has improved drastically. An eye-opening book that will ground your thinking on the climate change debate in the physical reality of energy production and human flourishing.
Thanks for reading.