Man’s Search For Memeing:

I wrote this to meme you into believing what I want…

Growing up, I loved cartoons. It made me who I am today… a sarcastic smart-ass!

I grew up watching things like The Simpsons and reading Calvin & Hobbes. They base themselves on deep truths and use humour to soften their painful blows.

The world has some deep seated issues that need a little attention, more than ever lately.

What if I told you that I could make you laugh, solve the world’s problems, and make you rich at the same time?

Just remember… it’s better to have laughed and lost your time than to have never laughed at all!

To solve a problem… you must become the problem!:

That’s only true with enough time and hard lessons, but understanding the problem is much quicker. Let’s make a list of the world’s problems. Did I forget to mention that I’m a lazy millennial. I’ll go find someone else’s list👌.

https://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-report-2020/shareable-infographics/

There you go! Kinda depressing ain’t it. Now how do you fix a problem? Duh, you look for a solution or an expert that would have one. If you can’t find an expert, become one. This is where I want to point out the secret to getting rich. Solve a problem. The bigger the problem, the richer you will be. That’s how the world rewards people and how economics works.

Let’s use an example. Who is the richest person in the world? Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are currently neck and neck over the last month (depending on their stock prices). Both of them are solving major problems for humans, and have been rewarded with massive sums of money.

People that live on welfare don’t solve many problems for others (usually) and therefore, aren’t rewarded very well. Everyone in between Elon Musk and bums, solve specific problems and are rewarded in kind. That’s the idea of a free market capital system.

If you had to pick one person with the best chance to solve all of the worlds’ problems the fastest, I’d have to put my money on Elon Musk. The reason why is because of how he thinks. He understands memes. You must think I’m joking right? What I mean by this, is that he understands the power of psychology, incentives, and the speed of information.

WTF is a meme anyways?

noun

noun: meme; plural noun: memes

an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation. Another way of saying it is, sharing ideas efficiently.

Memes are ideas and they are why social media is so successful. They are how we communicate. TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. are all methods of communicating by competing with good memes for attention. To solve a problem, you must have an idea for a solution. Then you must believe it is possible and convince enough other people that it is possible.

The key to Elon’s success is trying to accomplish what others first thought was impossible. This is actually what defines all success. To be the best, you must accomplish what others could not. It’s truly amazing when someone breaks a record and soon after, everyone else follows suit. This is the power of memes.

Elon understands incentives also.

When you use memes and incentives, you can accomplish great things.

One other principle that Elon understands, is speed of information. Speeding up the transfer of information is the backbone to success. Every single technology proves itself because of this. It accounts for network effects. Combining these principles is why He and many others are rich. The reason that people use social media over newspapers, the internet for shopping or education, and any other technology is because it speeds up information that makes things cheaper, easier, faster, stronger, better…

What makes anyone do anything?:

Incentives are the key to solving problems. You may experience the stick or the carrot, but you will react. Doing nothing is the act of not doing something. Psychology explains that for long term happiness and efficient results, carrots always work better than sticks.

The economy is the worlds’ incentive system, that ultimately decides on what humans accomplish. The carrot is money. The stick is rules, regulations, taxes, and laws. This is important because if there are important world-wide problems that need solving, the incentive system is what will get us there.

One powerful concept in life, is called the “butterfly effect”. It’s very well known and there is even a movie about it (called The Butterfly Effect). One small change creates a butterfly/domino effect, that creates even larger changes.

This effect is real and very important when solving problems. Ignoring this effect causes most people to fix symptoms of problems, rather than the problem itself.

This domino effect goes back much further than a bad batch of bat soup. It goes right back to the human incentive system and the type of carrot that we use. That’s a big statement, but hear me out.

Watch what you meme!:

Memes are just a fun and powerful form of language to pass around ideas with. That’s the same as spreading joy, with good deeds. It can be like using a love language (a language that resonates with our own perception of love).

These kind memes or words, are a type of value that we cherish. They make us feel good and create incentives. They are a type of carrot. Money is no different. It is another form of value expression. Whichever language that we choose to use, actually changes our incentives. This actually shapes our personalities and affects our choices in life.

What I’m saying is that the characteristics of what language (whether it’s memes, texting, english/french, types of money, etc.) that we decide to use, has profound effects on our own decisions and psychology. It’s kind of a big deal when you consider the butterfly/domino effect.

Don’t just take my word for it. It’s backed by science and it’s called, “linguistic relativity”.

So what’s the big deal? It’s just money and language, right?… Wrong!

Let’s use exaggerated examples to explain why. Back to a powerful person like Elon. The other day, the power of memes was truly noticed around the world. A Reddit group called Wallstreetbets, started a movement that caused hedge funds to lose billions of dollars.

To avoid the complexities, I’ll summarize it with memes! The online group saw an opportunity that would expose the hedge funds costly mistake, as long as they all worked together. As it was over social media, many memes were used.

This worked and other well known entrepreneurs on twitter took part and supported the “noble” act. At one point, Elon Musk posted as a joke, about a cryptocurrency called Doge Coin that he has been know to make fun of, by saying that it could become a global currency.

His meme the other day, caused the price of Doge Coin to rise over 800%. This just shows how powerful a language can be.

When someone decides to use a type of money, and understand its’ characteristics, they actually will take on the traits of the money itself. This happens with language as well. Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky explains this effect in a Ted Talk on YouTube.

In this talk she explains that having the words, that imply blame when describing an accident, actually causes a person to blame the person (changes how they think). This can have unrealized effects (like sending someone to jail unjustly).

When you realize that this happens, you can imagine the potential downsides and how important the language/money you choose to use is. There is a strong connection (that determines characteristics of us and the language/money), to what languages and money we use. If you have certain traits, you will attract a certain type of money. Inversely, what money you use and how well you understand it, will change your characteristics.

This is a strange concept, but very important because it creates the domino effect, that is causing the major world issues. This concept is why the type of carrot, matters.

Let’s talk about gold!:

Gold has been deemed precious by just about everyone in the world. It’s value is subjective (like anything with “value”) because of its characteristics. Like language, it is only valuable if somebody else believes it is. The more people that want it and use it, the more valuable it is. Language is useless if you are the only one who speaks it, right?

Gold started out as a collectible in history, when only a few people had it. This is similar to when you go to the beach and save a pretty rock. When enough people found gold and deemed it precious, it became a store of value (like a savings account). When even more people deemed it precious, it became a medium of exchange (like exchanging pieces of it for other goods).

When the majority adopted the belief, it became a widely accepted currency (like gold minted coins). This value adoption curve happens with everything. Valuable ideas follow this same pattern and spread through networks in this manner. This is what Bitcoin continues to do since its origin.

This means that as long as an idea is valuable enough for everyone to benefit from, it will form an adoption curve.

This can be seen with language, types of money, new technology, or good ideas. Consider telephones. When only two people have them, they are only valuable to them. As more people adopt them, they become more valuable. This is why they follow the value-adoption curve.

All things that we use today, are just adopted ideas and by using these ideas, we change who we are. They are tools that serve a purpose, to the people that use them. Like any tool, it can be used for its’ purpose or for something else. You can use a baseball bat for playing baseball, or to damage something. You can use a gun for hunting, or to kill someone. You can use a meme for a laugh, or you can bring down a hedge fund.

People are realizing how powerful memes are, very quickly and now they are trying to put the genie back in the bottle. This is leading to censorship and de-platforming (shutting down social media).

What does this all have to do with gold? Well, gold was adopted as a tool for storing value and some other uses like jewelry, electronics, art, etc. It was used for a medium of exchange and currency but it fell short because of its’ shortcomings.

This is the difference between a tool that is engineered for a purpose (for a specific job), and one that works okay with certain limits. It’s like picking up a rock to use as a hammer, or using an air nailer instead of a hammer.

Where gold was lacking, paper money became the fix to its’ shortcomings. This is where the problems really started. It allowed governments to create paper money out of thin air. This was done when they wanted to fund wars, like the Vietnam war. President Nixon stopped backing paper money with gold so the US could afford a war in 1971.

The printing of money never stopped though. Now all money isn’t representing anything scarce. We continue thinking paper money is valuable because everyone else does- it’s subjective.

This works until we all realize why this won’t continue working. It’s because we are putting are trust in politicians and bankers.

When the banks and governments tell you that inflation is around 2% every year, they are hoping people don’t realize that the costs of the ignored items like housing, education, retirement, or assets are actually inflating much more than 2%.

Gold was only good as a store of value, that could represent all of the paper money, but when that stopped happening, the evil dominoes started to fall!

Check out the website, https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ to see the graphs of all the effects from coming off of the gold standard. They keep the system very complex to avoid attention from the general public. An economic system built on fake value, creates the wrong incentives for people. This actually creates carrots that benefit powerful people, that hoard more carrots and use more sticks to make everyone else farm more carrots.

Once people realize that they will never get the carrot that they were expecting, they stop believing in that type of carrot altogether. This actually happens more often than you’d think. It’s amazing that we haven’t learned our lesson yet. This graph shows the history of different types of carrot beliefs.

Do you see the pattern? What happens between those periods, isn’t very pretty, unfortunately. Wars or revolutions.

What does all this have to do with the world problems? Well all of the incentives are out of whack. This causes a trickle down effect and it causes everything that we are experiencing.

Don’t lose hope. There’s a bright side to this story. It may seem bleak, as if the world is going to shit.

Remember that domino effect? It works against the trickle down effect. The only way it works is by realizing the issue, and pushing the right domino. I’m happy to say that the smallest domino was already pushed in 2009. It happened shortly after the US housing bubble crisis.

Now its just a matter of enjoying the ride and making a choice to benefit as well. Essentially the Titanic is sinking, and all you need is to hop on a life boat, instead of watching the band play.

Remember how gold was lacking in traits to be a good global currency? Well Bitcoin was engineered to do a better job. Those that don’t understand why or how, will tell you otherwise by using FUD (Fear and Doubt).

I can assure you that it is in their best interest to keep you doubting it. Bitcoin is built like the internet. It’s a monetary network that anyone can join, with a connection (smartphone or device). You can’t shut down the internet without catastrophic results, even if you did, you wouldn’t completely stop Bitcoin though. Bitcoin (capital B) is a network and bitcoin (lowercase b), is the value that is exchanged over that network. The “downfalls” that everyone points to, as why it will fail, are usually the reasons why it will succeed. When people use the internet, they don’t need to understand everything about it or how it works. Just like any other technology (cars, phones, or anything else).

You do need to understand how to interact with it though. Driving a car or using a smartphone, is a struggle for some people.

Bitcoin is in its early stages and therefore still “clunky”, when it comes to being user friendly. If you look at the adoption curve, you will notice that the price follows the curve. This is where getting rich, comes in. By adopting earlier than the other 98% of people, you will enjoy the price rising when they finally decide to do so. This comes with the challenge of using the clunky user interface. It’s like using an old car when they used reigns like horses for steering.

This time it’s more like a Tesla that can have software upgrades after you buy it, which makes it even more valuable. The key is to buy bitcoin and use it only as a store of value until it’s adopted enough to become a medium of exchange or currency. For a long time, all other currencies that we use today, will start to travel through the Bitcoin network. This cuts out middle men that charge money for exchanging between currencies. This saves everyone money and speed things up. It sounds complex, but people already have it figured out.

All the other kinks will be worked out, as Bitcoin is the meme that will not die.

The traits of Bitcoin are all traits that humans strive for. It embodies human rights and freedoms. It forces truth, punishes lies, aligns incentives, is incorruptible, punishes irresponsibility, makes itself available to the world, and more. It changes people that use it and understand it, for the better. Its’ value is going up as people are losing faith in all other stores of value. It’s the chain reaction that solves those world problems, one domino at a time.

It sounds too good to be true, which is counter intuitive for most people. If you were to describe any new technology to 98% of the people during it’s early stages, you would have gotten the same reaction too. Early adopters of good ideas, reap the most rewards.

How can it solve our incentive problems?:

For this, I like to use monopoly as an example of the system that we use now. Monopoly always ends badly with one winner, but our system is even worse.

The banker has the ability to make more money, the cost of houses/hotels keeps increasing (because of this), and all the utilities and taxes keep rising as well. As the players lose, their kids enter into the game at an even further disadvantage.

So how does Bitcoin change the game? Well, it removes the bankers ability to make excessive amounts of money (it actually removes many bankers in real life too). This keeps the costs of housing low (in real life it actually makes the cost decrease, as buildings should get cheaper when they are more efficiently produced). It makes things cheaper as technology creates more efficiency.

It makes it so the money (bitcoin) represents all the valuable things that we all want, so as we invent more things, the value of all our (earned or saved) bitcoin increases (in proportion to how much bitcoin we own). This becomes fair, so people get what they deserve, depending on their contribution to society.

This creates a society where everyone has access to see how much money is produced. With bitcoin, the production is cut in half every four years so it becomes worth more, when you compare it to every other currency and to world improvements. The rules are open and transparent because it runs on open source code. It runs on something that everyone can agree on- science. We need something that we can trust these days, more than ever.

If we all use a currency that we trust, resentment among people, decreases instead of increasing all the time. As the price of bitcoin reflects things that humans value in the world, the incentives align with solving world problems. This is much different than the incentives that are, just to make money. For example, an investor would be more likely to invest in companies that they thought would accomplish solving a large problem, instead of ones that they thought would exploit a world issue, short term.

This is because they know that the value of their own bitcoin would go up as well long term (not just their investment). This connection isn’t experienced with an inflating money supply and many other global currencies. You just don’t feel it.

Because the government isn’t silently reaching into your pockets by inflating the money supply, you would start respecting them more. The wealth gap would shrink and billions of impoverished people, would have access to bitcoin and the global economy. This is proven to raise the standard of living and increase happiness. Bringing economics to third world countries is something that charity organizations already try to do. This just accelerates it and makes it much easier.

This also gives a tool for citizens of authoritarian countries to potentially transact or store wealth without government intervention (30% of the world- 2.8 billion people according to Human Rights Foundation www.HRF.org). Bitcoin reduces incentives for political collusion and corruption. It would push people towards tracking government spending and provide the tools, to make it possible.

The amount of wasted energy from much of government spending, banking, gold mining, gold recycling, and paper money production is astronomically more than enough to solve most of the world problems (if not more).

It would free up those people that spend their lives dealing with bureaucracy, to solve real problems too. Bitcoin would be the obvious solution to reduce and remove most of these excessive costs to taxpayers. The only thing stopping this from happening, is everyone changing where they choose to store their money. The government was created to serve everyone’s best interest and we are always reminded to vote for the changes that we want. Bitcoin is a way to peacefully vote with your money.

When people say, “won’t the government try to stop this?” It seems insane to think that people believe that governments actually own us and that we’ve lost all freedom. Governments exist because of people working together to create them. In the end, it’s is up to us how free we want to be.

Bitcoin is a belief in value and a digital list of who owns what. It is literally written code. Free speech and language go hand in hand. It’s not illegal to keep a digital list of ownership. If you want to live in a world where that is illegal, then you should start to question whether the government should let you open your own mouth and even make a sound. It is in their best interest to allow bitcoin and they are embracing its acceptance to this date. It’s happening.

Bitcoin gives everyone access to a savings tool, that is a global digital list of ownership. (In Canada) In times where we are taxed around 30% on earnings, 12% on purchases, and experience over 10% inflation loss of purchasing power (depending on if we want to have a house, education, assets, and retirement- I think most do…), it’s important to find a way to hold on to what you can.

If you can earn over 200% on your savings per year, just by saving with bitcoin- that is a big deal! You spend your life working for money and your time should be valued.

Here is how bitcoin has stacked up to other investments.

I mean, C’mon!

So why are memes so important?:

Memes are the evolution of idea transfer. They are one step closer to the singularity or global consciousness- hive mind. Every time humans take a step closer to this, the standards of living improves.

Elon Musk is working on something called, “Neuralink”. That is another step closer to the ultimate meme. He said that they have a monkey with a Neuralink chip in its brain that can play video games just by thinking😲, just the other day.

We are all after the same thing. More efficient memes. To grow our consciousness. Our true purpose has become “Man’s Search for Memeing".

How does Bitcoin fit into all of this?:

Well, money is the ultimate meme. It is the idea itself, that acts as a value measuring stick, for everything else in the world, that we think has value. Money itself isn’t actually “valuable”, but it doesn’t matter because we all act like it is, so it can serve our purpose. It is a meme that is built around trusting other people’s beliefs. That’s why we found the element that best suited the purpose of acting like a currency (gold), except it wasn’t perfect. This time we used technology to engineer the ideal currency by using pre-existing memes.

Bitcoin is a bunch of memes that are organized to form an ideal monetary network that suits our digital world. It was literally memed into existence and continues to be online. It realigns incentives and pushes humanity back into a symbiotic relationship with earth.

It uses incentives through mimetic desire, to change human greed into altruistic innovation, creating a positive sum game. Bitcoin is the ultimate meme- money that brings our economy towards the singularity. As information transfer gets more efficient, violence decreases because people feel more connection.

What makes a lasting meme?:

The memes that are built on a base layer of truth, last the longest. The ones based on lies spread quicker, but also die quicker. You can see this with many fads that just never stuck.

Gold has succeeded as a meme for over 5000 years, but now it’s time has come. We now live in a digital age, so we need a digital gold.

“He who has a why to live for, can bear with almost any how”- Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)

In this book Viktor Frankl (a holocaust survivor and psychologist/creator of logotherapy) explains that everyone needs hope. Incentives give people a “why” to live for and Bitcoin has been described as “hope” to many.

“Go to www.hope.com to learn more, as Bitcoin is Hope”- Michael Saylor