/1 I have an idea I'd like to start a thread about, brought on by listening to way too much @Breedlove22 and @adamcurry.

/2 So Adam is working on a platform for podcasting 2.0 that is based on the #LightningNetwork. I'm interested to take the ideas and potential he's brought up and merge them with other ideas about what humanity is capable of with good money from Robert's work.

/3 Bitcoin - A Language of Value. Imagine being able to communicate value as easily as we are communicating right now. If we think about money as a tool to communicate value with each other, then we can imagine that some tools are better than others at achieving that goal.

/4 Now that we have discovered absolute scarcity of an incorruptible bearer asset with #Bitcoin , we have a finite supply of something valuable, and are free to abstractly compare it to the rest of the universe in order to communicate with each other what something means to us.

/5 Some of the FUD no-coiners spout is "Actually inflation is a good thing! If the money is deflationary people will just stop spending altogether and the economy will grind to a halt!" As if people don't have different time preferences, unique needs, or situations that come up.

/6 The way I see it, what better expression of value could there be than to give some of your oh-so-precious sats away. Connected with the #LightningNetwork's ability to turn those payments into a literal stream of payments and we have something truly magical to look forward to.

/7 The money we've been using so far on this planet has been crude approximations of communicating value with one another. Imagine how difficult it would be to communicate something before humanity had invented the right words, and you can start to see where I'm going with this.

/8 So far with communcating value, we are these caveman passing shiny rocks and colored paper to each other in a crude attempt to communicate "Thank you exactly this much for the value you have brought to my life"

/9 Whenever a form of money becomes the reserve asset, especially for the entire planet, your buying power can be thought of as a fraction = how many tokens of that money you hold ÷ how many tokens there are.

/10 With your life force you control the numerator by creating value for other people, while the hardness of the asset you choose determines the denominator, how easy it is for others to get that same amount of tokens. Price signals are our way of communicating changes in value.

/11 But it's hard to be precise about exactly how much someone's time and energy really means to us when the denominator of our money is tied to a money printer going brrr, and the price signals get corrupted.

/12 At an even more fundamental level, our tools for communicating value are so poor that we generally pay only once, at the beginning of a value transfer no less, before we have even had a chance to enjoy the product or service!

/13 You see, it's completely backwards from our experience of value! Because we are relegated to using the crude tool of inflationary physical money, we transfer a constantly dwindling amount of buying power as payment for something before we know how much it means to us.

/14 We invented 5-star reviews to pick up some of the slack of communicating value to each other that is not conveyed by our money, but it's far from enough. Without a good way to communicate value to eachother we are doomed to misunderstand eachother.

/15 Humanity is quickly racing forward towards a new day and age where we will no longer be bound by the limitations of making single payments in a debased currency, and instead can change to a stream of the hardest money known to man.

/16 Consider how many business have switched to a subscription model in recent years and you can see this happening already in our lives; payments are getting smaller and spread out more, to more closely approximate the value something brings to our lives over time.

/17 To get way out there for a moment, imagine how different payments will look like when we bridge the brain-computer barrier. We could start to do some crazy sounding things to better communicate value, like connecting our payment of something to our emotions about the thing.

/18 It keeps us going in the same direction of smaller and spread out payments. Perhaps we will live in a world where everything is available to download free to begin with, but as you use and enjoy it more and more, it costs you fractions of a sat in real time.

/19 Along with Adam's work on the #LightningNetwork making it possible to rethink royalties for digital goods, this could lead to value communication as nuanced as every time you look fondly at a favorite armchair, the creators or their heirs benefit immediately.

/20 Imagine what value communication like that would do for time preference on a worldwide scale, where the more quality you pack into your work, the better it will be for your entire bloodline.

/21 Back to the present moment, my point is we cannot rely on the crude forms of money we've been handed by our forefathers anymore, because they are impractical to use in a way that best communicates value to each other.

/22 Long before we bridge the brain-computer gap, we already have #Bitcoin as a truly finite supply of something to compare to the universe of possible things we could buy and transfer a precise amount of value to someone.

/23 Further, with the #LightningNetwork we can begin a stream of sats to communicate that value in real time. I believe that nuanced, continual communication of value like this is what will bring about a new renaissance for humanity.