The root of all evil
For my whole life, to the best of my knowledge, I can remember one persistent narrative:
“Because the love of money is the root of all evil, therefore egoism must be the seed.” – MD Birmingham (an allusion to the quote from 1 Timothy 6:10).
In the last ten years of my time among the living, I have learned how this belief is utterly misguided. Allow me to defend my reasoning on why.
The ultimate currency
In the grand scheme of things, money has played an enormously important role in the development and progress of history. From the use of seashells as “money” to the gold coins of Rome or the first fiat currency – the Jiaozi of the Song Dynasty in China – to today’s US dollar, money has played a central role for humanity.
What money did, what made it so revolutionary, was that it allowed our species to give physical form to our time and energy.
Please take the time to ponder this thought.
Time.
The passage of time is one thing we can never get back. Once it is spent, there are no refunds. Time is the ultimate currency that passes forever without being able to go back to an earlier moment: always pass, ever spent, ultimately and clearly finite.
Whether you go to work every day or have a hobby that you can use to benefit from your efforts, you are monetizing your time and efforts that have gone into that job or hobby. That is exactly what a wage or salary represents – the opportunity cost of your time. Every hour you sacrifice on a job you make the decision that the time you sacrifice is worth the money exchange you deserve in return.
Let me make that clear: a wage is a bargain where you find that your time is worth the amount that you are being compensated for. Whether that amount appears low or high is something you need to address as an individual. Typically, however, individuals earn what is worth their time based on several factors: skills, specific knowledge, expertise, network connections, wisdom, etc. All of these qualifications represent time invested by the person. Time is again the real currency.
By giving our time an interchangeable vehicle in the form of money or purchasing power, we enabled our species to trade our own time for someone else’s time. Where you can spend hours of your day making a tool to use, say an ax, you can sell that ax to someone else for money, where you then go and use that money to buy bread – whatever hassle would have required your part to produce yourself (not to mention the time and energy it takes to learn, fail, and refine the process to produce the good).
Love of money
So I propose a … philosophical, maybe even spiritual question:
If money is “the root of all evil”, but money is only a representation of our time, what does it do to us and our use of time?
Money is not the root of all evil. Money is a tool like an ax. A tool is purely neutral; it has no philosophical or moral fidelity.
So if money is neutral, the root of evil must be elsewhere, not in the vehicle we use to physically achieve our desires.
Appreciating money means appreciating time, or rather the appreciation of an efficient expenditure of time. Save money by parking the time you spend on a major purchase at a later date or allocating funds in the event of unforeseen expenses or emergencies. While investing money is about sacrificing the immediate satisfaction of a purchase and running the risk of providing another person / group with money so that they can use your money (ergo, time) to carry out their plans or business, to achieve a higher return on your initial investment in the future.
Money is not evil. Money is time. What matters is how we spend it.
trust
Whether you want to spend your time, save, or invest, a variable is required.
Trust.
You have to trust that your time is in good hands, so the money in which you measure your time has to be free from the risk of devaluation, confiscation, censorship or fraud.
Otherwise, a large portion of your precious time will have to be sacrificed to protect your money – your precious accumulated time. Those who prefer not to spend this time spend the funds to compensate others for strategies and vehicles that protect their purchasing power from the forces of inflation and / or devaluation.
Enter Bitcoin, stage on the left.
Bitcoin is a force of human ingenuity and protects the time of the Hodler by providing a vehicle that is censorship-resistant, invisible, easily transportable, fluid and tradable worldwide 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. No breaks. No CEO. Tended by the people.
Maintained by a flotilla of free agent developers who work day and night sacrificing their precious time to make sure the open source network continues to provide services that so many people around the world trust and those of the Community (donations from individuals), organizations and companies that consider themselves members of the Bitcoin Legion).
I believe that if you really value your time, then if you really value your time, then you need to measure your time in trustworthy money. Bitcoin is the most logical means of protecting time value.
I trust bitcoin.
* PS Thank you Orville for your contribution, for being one of my most avid readers and a good friend.
This is a guest post by Mike Hobart. The opinions expressed are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC, Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
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