Putting Bitcoin into Perspective

[dballing]

I have a real world story for you guys that really opened my eyes as to why humanity needs Bitcoin. So a few years ago I was living homeless in the jungle in a third world country. It was always a dream of mine to see if I was capable of living in the wild like that 100% completely on my own.

For one month I lived a mile away from the most secluded town in the country on the beach/jungle. In the beginning it was great until I ran out of food and I had to do everything myself. You’d be surprised how easy modern life is compared to living like this. From sun up to sun down the easiest tasks took hours and I had to always be thinking ahead and planning out my day. From washing my clothes, starting fires, sourcing/storing food, building my shelter after the tent fell apart etc etc. However, I no longer had to worry about bills or being on time for business meetings, but I had a different type of stress in my life.

This went on successfully for awhile, but then I started to get scared considering the noises I would hear at night from predators. By that time, I felt like I had proved to myself that I could survive in the wild if I had to. However, I wasn’t ready to move back into civilization just yet because I was enjoying this new lifestyle (and figured since I was here I would keep it going for a while).

I ended up abandoning my camp and relocating as close as I could to this secluded town. The locals started to take notice of me and decided to reach out which ended up in a friendship. After they observed my process for living day to day they had many opinions and thought I was an idiot for the way I did things. For example, I was climbing palm trees and cutting down the coconuts with a pocket knife, but they suggested cutting down a stick of bamboo and shooting them out of the tree as if they were playing a game of pool. This strategy worked incredibly well and was 10x more efficient! Another example, was when I was collecting beach wood and these wood fibers to start my fires, but they suggested gathering trash to get it started. As toxic as that sounds I was able to start my fires within seconds as opposed to 30+ mins. Then Ironically, we started bartering for things with each other which made my life even that much easier.

Ultimately this level of improvement was applied to all my strategies in living from day to day. It actually became so efficient that I had an immense amount of free time. It was at this point I had an epiphany while relaxing under a palm tree. My entire life I’ve always been a lone wolf and very stubborn not wanting help from others or wanting to be involved in a team (such as sports as a kid). However, when comparing my lifestyle to living alone in the jungle as compared to living amongst the locals the amount of abundance and prosperity was eye opening.

These thoughts then jumped to other things I’ve noticed. By looking at the most basic needs of life vs living in a complex massive global society there are things we can extrapolate out. What I’m referring to are the efficiencies and abundances we can all share by working together. By going from a lone wolf in the jungle to working as a team with 5 other people I was able to have a 10x increase in my standard of living. I then thought if my group of 5 then interfaced with a group of 50 how much more efficient and abundant we could all live. From there I thought, “Oh my god” now imagine if we all worked together in this manner with millions of people then on top of that include the industrial revolution and then technological revolution. Right now in this exact moment of time based on all these inventions, innovations and massive societies we should have so much abundance it would be ridiculous.

Okay then, why don’t we have that quality of life and abundance/leisure time? Well, you’ll notice when I was working with these 5 other people we were bartering and sharing our knowledge without the use of a third party to exchange our physical and mental energy. We were the sole beneficiaries of this value and because of it lead to a direct impact in our lifestyle. That is the key!

Unfortunately, that is not the system we currently live in. All of these efficiencies in working together as a society and all the inventions and innovations of our ancestors are not being directed towards humanity. This energy/efficiency is being siphoned off through the means of inflation, taxation, third-party financial services, corporations, banks, governments, etc etc. These institutions are in place to steal your physical and mental energy and to rob your grandchildren (and their grandchildren) of their economic prosperity (forcing you into a perpetual state of work/enslavement).

I don’t want to make this too long, but I hope this story puts everything into perspective and stresses the importance as to why the world needs Bitcoin/Cryptocurrencies. We are talking about the future of humanity and whether we live in a free society full of abundance and leisure or a technological dark age/prison. I chose to live in a future where we are the direct beneficiaries of every ounce of our mental and physical energy starting right now and as we move forward.  

Please never forget this and what’s at stake.
 

[Milkduds]

Kind of suprised you did not get any responses to this story because it does draw on some interesting concepts.
The living off the land has always been a part of life I plan to develop,drives me nuts that I would not know what to do with a deer once I had shot it.
My cousin goes hunting all the time and the stories of how they pack the meat out always amazes me and makes you think about how far you may have to travel.
About the idea of people grouping up in this manner and cutting out the other parties that leach off the system,it is being done on a smaller scale.
Usually based off a common thinking,such as religion.

Check out how the Amish move a house:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fRy89iN7cA

Its not the video I wanted but it serves the purpose in showing how machinery is not always needed when you have a bunch of people with the same goal.

Bitcoin community is quite fragmented imo. We have people that want to get government out of the way of finances,some want government gone completely and others just want to profit off it. So we may seem united due to the use but you branch out and see we are all coming from different fields of thinking that usually stop discussion dead in its track.

[Kakmakr]

If people were not so lazy to read, they would have enjoyed this life lesson you have shared with us, just as much as I did. Thank you for sharing that. I think our life has become so busy and fixated on wealth and profit, that we do not appreciate the things that gives us the most pleasure.

We seem to live in the moment, and everyone for himself and that manifest into people not thinking about the legacy we leave behind for our kids. < The current debt legacy in the fiat system, will be the worst legacy we would leave behind for generations to come >

I have had a similar epiphany, when I had some quite time during a week long hunting expedition, where I shot nothing but learned the most valuable lessons, by just sitting down and watching Ants. We can learn a lot from nature.

OP, thank you for the effort you put into that post, and I hope more people will take the time to read it, and grasp what you are saying. ^smile^

[ObscureBean]

First off, let me say that I've enjoyed your story, at least the beginning, I read the whole thing and I very rarely read texts this long  I, myself, did a similar thing while I was backpacking across SE Asia on my own, so I can totally relate to some of the things you describe here.
Beyond that, however, I have to say that you have no clue what you're talking about, no offense. Your so-called epiphany is heavily biased towards your own perspective and the pool of data/experience you're drawing from is ridiculously small (this in itself shouldn't be a factor provided objectivity is maintained). Because you're not being objective, you don't notice that the system you're examining is not self-contained and this leads to warped extrapolations that don't hold true in a bigger picture.

[Kprawn]

Humans are made to socialize and also to share knowledge and to pass knowledge onto the generations after them. Going solo in the

Bitcoin space, would lead to failure. This is not just a network of money, but rather a network of people, combining efforts to go up

against a even bigger system. If you exclude yourself from people in this network, you will end up doing things the hard way. {like you

did, climbing the palm trees to get to the rewards} Bitcoin makes the hard things simple, once you get pass the things you did not know,

and that is taught to you, by this community.   

[thejaytiesto]

What's at stake is financial freedom. Bitcoin is the last opportunity for us to remain detached from the new world order/world government and totalitarian state of absolute financial control. The pressure is on Bitcoin developers to keep developing the software as robust and privacy friendly and decentralized as possible, that is why Core devs have the mentality of slow and solid rather than rushing things out and they are doing a great thing. In the end we will win.