Exploration of Value

Beyond Money and Time

Oct 28, 2023

Preface

This exploration has given me tremendous hope for our future, the technology makes possible a future of abundance, prosperity and serenity not yet imaginable from the current paradigm. “What would your ideal future look like?” Take a moment to seek that positive feeling, where does it originate? What steps would take towards that ideal, if you knew they existed?

I am not an optimist by nature, I am an optimist by choice, and an opportunist when I maintain discipline. I am every day choosing to maintain hope and optimism because the alternative is heinous destruction, suffering, of self and of others. Since I am integrated with my family and now you. If I waver, I could lose you. I love you, and I do not want to lose you, so I will fight for our life and liberty, with my life. I regularly operate the theater of my imagination to peer into the potential, and it peers back into me.

I constantly remind myself to maintain a mental state of informed optimism, through continual learning about what is possible. So that I may build a future of abundance; despite constant digital feedback of death, doom, gloom, and chaos emanating from online media. We get to choose what to watch, read, and perceive. Tools are wielded by people. More on that next week.

Today I have taken on the overly ambitious task of value exploration, having thought and explored this topic for nearly a decade. I have probably written 100k words on the subject, mostly journaling and video lecture notes, now filtered and distilled into this article. Constrained by my weekly timeline for publishing, deep into Friday night.

Cosmic Interconnection

Value is an elusive topic, at its core, it's about understanding the depth of interconnection which arises from the pluck of a guitar string. Having learned what a guitar is, having one in your hands, deciding to plucking a string, causing a vibration you can hear. At first it’s loud, then it quiets according to the laws of physics. Realizing you can play the guitar, first imagining, and then plucking the string. Your first scream. “I’m here!”

Everything is the observable cosmic symphony, chord after chord of interconnected resonance, emanating through the unified cosmic fabric. We are not separated, we are inter dimensionally linked, constrained by the speed of light as a unified field: space-time.

“what you are,

basically.

deep deep down,

far far in.

is simply.

the fabric, and structure, of existence itself.”

- Alan Watts

Energy is Concentrated Vibration:

Even though I love the concept of energy, the musical note reminds me that it is the difference in air pressure which facilitates audio transmission, there can be no valleys without hills. Every observable thing is a discreet wave at every layer and level. Energy is more akin to the amount of vibration which is temporarily concentrated and has the potential to emanate from any particularly concentrated source.

The ability to re-direct and wield the transference of energy dispersion is what we are really referring to when we discuss energy. Fire becomes useful when it cooks meat, boils water, and lights the darkness. We take the risk of being burned because we value the results of intentionally directed energy dispersion.

Exploring Human Values through Observation:

It is easier to think about value by first observing someone else’s actions. Mirroring their experience in your imagination abstractly. Why walk, why throw a ball, why climb a rock, why eat food, drink a drink, or take a deep breath? Why do that?

People are essentially motivated by their feelings, the feeling of community, the feeling of belonging, of contributing, of being right, being moral, feeling an itch. These feelings are extraordinarily powerful, we spend time thinking about how we feel a lot, about how someone else might feel, how to transfer our good feelings to someone else.

How can we examine the value of feelings?

I like to use the indicator of time spent to make sense of a persons subjective value of feeling because time is not fungible. If I spend my time, energy, and imagination seeking a feeling, I must find it inherently valuable, or else I would not spend my time and energy aiming towards it.

When we become conscious of a feeling and recall the conditions which produced it in an attempt to find it again, we can assume there is value in that pursuit. This is a delightful source of joy during youth. Discovering new feelings is highly motivating for young men and women. They spend a lot of time seeking these feelings, day dreaming about them, positioning themselves to feel them again and again. They find this so valuable they are willing to take extraordinary risks to obtain such experiences. Often to their own decrement, myself included.

This isn’t only true for the pursuit of emotional feelings but in every succeeding moment our symphony plays. When we are young, our parents take care of trading and spending so we may focus and spend our time learning the multitude of valuable actions which are not directly linked to trade and monetary exchange. Exercise is particularly tough to value because it’s returns are slow incremental increases in health, mobility, and well-being. These are not purchasable with money, but only through physical exertion.

When we start to become conscious of value, it is usually through the lens of money. Since counting money is one of the first ways we are introduced to math, it is also one of the first ways we get introduced to value. Counting, adding, subtracting, and trading cookies, apples, oranges, and other grocery items are common in educational material.

While value can be tricky to define, given its semi subjective nature, it can be most easily examined through the lens of trade and barter. When a voluntary trade is made it is a snapshot of the traders perception of value. The most common trades being money for goods and services. A win win for both people involved in the trade.

The question: “What is Money” can facilitate a lifetime of exploration. “What is Value” will take generations of exploration. Read my article on Money for more about Money.

Civilization is built on the presumption that money(currency) facilitates the free exchange of goods and services everywhere all the time. There are over a thousand years of trades written and carved into the ledgers of history. The trust that facilitates modern trading ought not go unnoticed.

If someone handed you counterfeit money, you’d have a lot harder time trusting the next trade, if it was common occurrence, your rate of trade would decline in kind. Especially if it was your labor you traded for counterfeit money that could not be spent.

The Relationship Between Time and Money

For most of us, our first encounter with value was tied to time, in exchange for money. When you're paid an hourly wage, it's easy to equate money with time and value. Assuming you earn $15 an hour and spend $15 on lunch, that lunch cost you one hour of your time and labor.

If you buy 5 gallons of gas for 15$ and your vehicle can travel 30 miles per gallon, you can directly translate your hour of labor to 150 miles of travel. The same is true of every commodity, good or service you can freely purchase.

A wonderful experience every young person should have! Since it allows them to begin deferring their labor into a form which can be accumulated to obtain anything the free market offers. You would not likely be able to save enough grains and chickens or eggs enough to purchase a horse.

However, there is a fundamental flaw in directly linking time to value alone forever: it infers that the value we can produce is finite, limited to the hours we can work. There are forms of labor which can escape this, such as building a dam with a waterwheel for grinding grain. Still, an hourly laborers goal should be to decouple their earning power from time, a task easier said than done.

There are now vessels of value not like those of the physical labor era, they are labors of thought and resource allocation. Suppose you purchase a share of stock for 15$ it still costs one hour of labor. If you held it for one day and it doubled in value to 30$, you’d be able to sell it and your hour of labor would have appreciated over the period it was stored. You can then calculate the value gained from differing its difference in deferred re-allocation(15$/1day). This doesn't have to be stock, it could be any good or service which increases in value over time and can be traded back into money.

The importance of this cannot be overstated because it reveals that labor can be allocated into a format which appreciates over time. A sign that labor can be reallocated retroactively to increase its value.

The Root Value of Money

The value of money is not the paper cash itself but as a facilitating medium for exchange, and as a measurement tool. Its ability to defer labor for future exchange into goods and services. This necessitates enduring trust from the individuals who store their labor in it today, coupled with their belief that it will enable a seamless exchange for the goods and services they need tomorrow. Money, then, is more like a reflection and measuring stick for value than the value itself.

A good question to ask might be: “What makes a good ruler” (Measurement device) The one we seek in physics is one that works in all reference frames.

We can then go on to imagine the ideal form of money. Money should be easily traded from anywhere, universally trusted, have a stable value across time, and be easy to safely store for long periods. You can read my previous article “What is Money” to further explore ideal money.

The point of money is to be able to defer todays labor for tomrrows’s benefit. In my case I would really like to build a Thorium Reactor to power everything. A herculean task, it requires a lot of resources to purchase the goods and services of innumerable people to build a productive Thorium Fission Reactor.

Finding Value in Passion Projects

Why would anyone allocate their resources to such a task? Because: they think that their labor in the form of time and money is positively allocated and will be further increased in value as a result! Even if the value placed there doesn’t provide monetary return, it could be worth the feeling obtained from contributing. Even though today we usually think of monetary return people used to seek spiritual returns first.

This demonstrates the dichotomy of value in human endeavors. As explored earlier, there are many things we do out of passion or fulfillment. I find joy in learning about and designing thorium reactors, even though it currently doesn't bring in any monetary value. Likewise, I write, not for money, but for the fulfillment and value aim to I provide to you, my optimistic readers.

The Business of Value

In the business world, the concept of value is even more multi-dimensional, because the more people get involved, the more variety the individuals look for in return for their resource allocation. It takes a lot of thought and energy to build, run, or operate a business, especially at scale. Generally, business is thought of in terms of profit. Which can simplify the way businesses evaluate the value they provide because it is a uni-dimensional measurement of value. Capitalism is the concept of money as the primary measuring stick for resource allocation.

For entrepreneurs, it's about identifying a gap in the market and filling it, thereby creating value for customers and reaping the rewards. From small digital products to larger longer timeline ventures like a thorium reactor, the underlying principle remains the same: invest time and resources, so your labor can appreciate become decoupled from time to earn more for your labors. You must sow the proper seeds, care for them, and prepare to reap the harvest if you wish to survive the winter.

Return on investment is rarely immediate. The thorium reactor business plan takes years to break even, but then produces value for up to a century. My solar battery system has an upfront cost, and then saves money in the long run, but the batteries eventually fail and need to be replaced. Anything with instant gratification should be deeply examined with suspicion. Essentially all of the get rich quick or feel good now options are not sustainable. A slow and steady pace towards the ideal always wins against the rapid but chaotic bursts of progress over the long run.

I use the theater of my imagination to simulate the potential pathways we can take. Then I use our nearly limitless tools of calculation to quantize the value allocated against the potential returns. I have thought about selling various products, building them myself, or building them for others. Calculated costs and time required to succeed at over a dozen potential ventures. I think I will present you my business plan for the Thorium reactor this year, to see if I can get some feedback on the subject.

The point of the Thorium reactors is to reduce the cost of energy, increase its availability. To make clean drinking water, electricity and fertilizer at as large a scale as needed for everyone on earth. This is a resource allocation optimization problem, there are not enough dedicated teams designing, building and running these technologies here in America. The time and money have not yet reached critical mass to produce a viable product available for purchase.

Money as a Resource Allocation Optimizer

When we looked at what ideal money would be, it purely facilitates an individuals ability to wisely allocate his labor resources over the course of their life making as many or as few transactions as needed because it provides a measuring stick of value against the public market of goods and services.

You as an individual laborer must earn your money from other people. Decide if it is worth spending your time for a particular amount of money. Or whether your skills can provide a higher return for your time from someone else. You’ll always be making someone else more money than you earn because that is the equation and it is reasonable that both parties must always benefit. If you do not benefit, you should not make the trade.

There is a deeply embedded problem with money which I will briefly mention. The United States Federal Reserve has the ability to print money… They do not need to exchange their labor the same way you do for money. They only need to maintain the printers, fabric, ink, and accounting for which produces the dollars. Now that things are digital they only need the hardware and electrical energy to maintain their digital ledgers. They spend a minimum amount of energy to produce maximum US dollars.

This corrupts the value of your money, because it is not subject to the labor you and I must exchange to obtain our money. Their printer distorts the value and provides an incentive structure for spending ever increasing amounts of printed dollars, as fast as the politicians can allocate the funds through congressional bills and budgeting. Corrupting the value of your money and thus your labor allocation.

As troubling as this is, and destabilizing as it is, there can be a more ideal resource allocation ledger. Ray Dalio wrote a book I recently read called the Changing World Order. He found that the history of money is a repeating history, one which follows the arc of empires. From the romans, the dutch, the British, and now the United States, their currency’s value follows a reasonably predictable arc.

While he predicts China is the next rising power, I am of the opinion, they have as many if not more problems than the US despite their larger population and cheaper labor. They print their currency and issue debt even more fervently that the United States. My prediction is that Bitcoin will be the next world reserve currency because of the age old Econ 101 principle of scarcity.

The Digital Scarcity of Bitcoin

In our rapidly advancing digital age, a new form of value storage and exchange has emerged, artificial, digital scarcity. Bitcoin, has grown exponentially in value because of its limited supply and decentralized nature. Unlike traditional currencies, which governments can print at will, leading to inflation, Bitcoin relies on encryption algorithms and the proof of work digital mining process. This built-in scarcity, easy storage, global transact ability is what gives it value as a medium of exchange.

No individual, nor group on earth has enough digital power to exert control over bitcoin. This cannot be said for its counterpart copycats in “crypto”. None of which have the same level of security and longevity which Bitcoin possesses. Though, like the British pound which still exists, the dollar and crypto currencies will remain for a long time to come, they will ceed transactional power to bitcoin for the foreseeable future.

Despite the technical and traditional norms of currency Bitcoin breaks among those who are unfamiliar with its functions and features. Rest assured that it is superior money to fiat dollars and gold. Or at least my research and exploration into value provide me with extraordinary confidence to make these claims.

This is in fact a hopeful sign, that war can be alleviated because the governments of the world will have to go back to taxation to spend their budgets where dollar printing and bank borrowing previously worked. A population made poor by inflation becomes a lot more sensitive to wasteful spending and taxation than one with easy loans and quantitative easing. Which should lead them to choose their politicians more wisely. A better incentive structure.

Conclusion: Creating Your Own Value

In the end, value is not about money or commodities. It's about recognizing opportunities, making informed decisions, taking risks, and choosing long term fulfillment over short term pleasure. Whether you're investing in Bitcoin, Stock, your family, pursuing a passion project, or starting a business, remember that you have the power to create value for yourself and for others.

So, be an optimist by choice, prepare for and seize the opportunities that come your way. The world of growth and wisely allocated value is vast and plentiful with room for everyone willing to see.

“Let’s suppose, that every night,

you could dream any dream you wanted to dream.

you would naturally, fulfill all your wishes.

you would have every kind of pleasure.

then, after a while, you would think,

well, that was pretty great.

but now.

let’s have a surprise.

let’s have a dream which isn’t under control.

each night you would become more and more adventurous,

you would make further and further out gambles as to what you could dream.

and finally.

you would dream.

where you are now.”

- Alan Watts

Maclaine’s Map

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