BTC vs BCH: The World Is Going Crazy, but Utility Remains Golden

In a world of spectacle, bread and circuses, and Hegelian dialectic power plays, what can really be trusted?

Elon Musk oddly forgot that Bitcoin uses energy. A strange slip of memory. I wonder who benefits? Max Kaiser has been enjoying Bitconnect-esque moments of mania onstage and BTC baptisms in parking lots. There are literal races to the moon being proposed for physical crypto coins.

All the while the world reels from a glorified Washington administrator's FOIA-released emails, hyper-polarized debate about a global mystery virus, and the destruction of economies and lives everywhere as bankers, bureaucrats, and shadowy think tanks attempt to 'reset' the world.

The point is, it ultimately doesn't matter what you believe, think, feel or know about any of these things. Reality doesn't care. What may indeed matter to you though, are the results of holding beliefs not in line with reality.

False beliefs, propaganda and narrative can be compared to a financial bubble. There is a lot of hype, but underneath really nothing there. When the bubble bursts, then there is pain. Things that are useful, however, show themselves to be all the more so in these times of real hurt and capitulation.

Beliefs and practices, in other words, that will not be useful to you in coming months and years, as the crazy yarn-ball of official cracked narratives, historical fallacy, propaganda and hype of the modern world unravels further.

What will be of use to you then? What things will have that one thing we're all really after at the end of the day?

Utility: A Gold Standard for Survival When Aligned With Principle

Dogmatic adherence to the so-called greater good of utilitarianism as a philosophy is not a good thing. Reason being, that which is deemed to have utility always depends on the subjective evaluations of the observer. Mao Zedong, for example, thought it useful to cause the deaths of anywhere between 20 and 50 million people with his Communist "Great Leap Forward."

Granted, that is a very extreme example. Maybe it is in bad taste to jump from that to talking about crypto. If so, I hope the reader will forgive. It was just the first thing that popped to mind. The greater good ain't always that great.

What is useful to one person is not necessarily useful to another. Further, what is deemed useful to a large group of individuals may bring extreme harm or death to others. This is why the voluntaryist property norm, which puts the individual first, is a necessary prerequisite for policies of utility to rest upon.

All that said. Max Kaiser's screaming fit of mania at the recent Miami Bitcoin 2021 conference was a telling sign of the times. "We're not selling! We're not selling! Fuck Elon! Fuck Elon!" High-level discourse to be sure. What utility is being praised here, I wonder?

Nothing against having a good time and being passionate, but I can't even buy a coffee on-chain anymore using BTC. People tell me that's a silly expectation. Use a credit card. But why? I could do it just a few years ago. I don't want to use a credit card. I don't care that mega banks and governments are becoming "supportive" of crypto. The Lightning network is still riddled with fees, bugs, is off-chain, and unnecessarily complicated. It requires trust in third parties.

I care about shit I can use in my everyday life to survive what politicians, bankers and bureaucrats are doing to money supplies and economies globally: destroying their power to help the average individual. The smallest minority.

Nor Is BCH a Golden Cow — Things That Are Useful, Are Useful

It is entirely possible there could be a cataclysmic schism in the BCH community somewhere down the line. A shift in the general ethos and views of developers, miners, and holders.

Should the day come when I can't use bitcoin cash as purely peer-to-peer electronic cash without the need for a financial institution,

I hope to God I am not shouting about it from a stage somewhere like a nut job — as if it is the second coming — or even talking it up on social media.

Things that are useful, are useful. Context and situation also change what is useful. A bottle of water in the middle of a desert will fetch a great deal more value than a Playstation 5. Not so likely the case once back in civilization, however. Where there is demand and utility, there is great value. BTC is great while the 'number go up,' but it sure as hell isn't going to help folks that want to trade in it and spend it and use it to escape the iron fist of the state.

So many are actually begging banks and the state — the very entities it makes unnecessary — to accept and regulate it.

Similarly, blindly accepting narratives surrounding the cultish practices of mass-masking, vaccination, and forced closures of economies everywhere, divorced from scientific rigor, logic, and intellectually honest discussion, is going to get people into a world of hurt. It already has. Reason being ,these narratives are a bubble that may pay off for some now, but will be totally useless in a future economy where the bubble pops, and reality once more becomes the consolidated starting point.

Uncensored, largely unbiased information is becoming more and more scarce in this bubble. Growing in value. It has great utility. Because I know about the actual lack of long-term testing, Fauci's lies, flip-flops and omissions, I am less likely to put my trust into untested medical interventions. This is good for my health. Useful indeed.

I know that supply lines will be (already are being) interrupted. Attempts will be made at segregation and to block travel of the unvaccinated. Thus, the utility of a close network of friends, self-sufficiency in attaining food and supplies, and self-defense tools and systems gain great value.

Thanks to knowledge of the U.S. Federal Reserve's devaluation of the money supply, I see that crypto may increase my chances of economic survivability (whether people will have the balls to make it last long-term, and keep using it in the face of legislation aimed against free trade, is another story, granted, but I sure as hell hope they continue to resist with direct spending and permissionless action.)

BCH vs BTC Is the Wrong Question: The Real Test Is Usefulness

I honestly hope the price of BTC continues its long-term trend of rising year after year. I guess my whole point in writing this wandering thing is to point out something that many of the big-time shit talkers and influencers seem to be taking great pains to avoid: What gave Bitcoin value in the first place was the innovative idea that people everywhere, no matter their position in life, could have access to a money that was sound, not controlled by states or banks, and with great promise for growing in value because of that.

Max Kaiser's shouting and Fauci's shouting are similar: they both depend on a gassed-up, unsustainable narrative.

The junkie-esque gambling mentality we witness now sure is exciting. I'm just not sure it is going to last. That boring little thing called utility turns out to be pretty important to most market actors, long run. And of course a shot at big wins in gambling is a shot at a stack of cash that is indeed very useful.

But the boring utility argument acknowledges that where the casino controls things, the house always wins.