If it is to succeed, the Right needs to take Risks. Not retarded risks, like dressing up as Hitler for your office Christmas party, thereby nuking your social capital from orbit – we live in a Progressive reality simulation, and performative compliance has a certain camouflage value – but productive risks, like converging on a spontaneously coordinated Schelling point for capital investment. Ideally, one with the capacity for parabolic growth.

And we just missed a big one – the big one.

Bitcoin.

Successful investment in a possible future is an evocation of that future – a fork in the Real. Experiential (i.e. lived) reality goes one way, or another. It is a form of demonic summoning, which actualises belief via the cybernetics of hyprerstitional praxis.

Bitcoin is a Black Swan event. But from our unique spatio-temporal position within the Sphere, we could see it coming over the horizon – like a marauding crypto-digital-army, with the potential to destroy fiat money, the printing press and centralisation.

It threatens to do so by constructing an alternative to the current system – the system we collectively oppose. The innovation of a post-libertarian, cypherpunk genius, Bitcoin was the perfect Schelling point upon which the technomic Right – at least – should have coordinated investment to invoke a fork in the Real.

Right now, the Right needs to find patrons. We could have been our own patrons.

Progressivism is the UX through which we collectively experience “reality” and simultaneously occlude the Real. It is an ideological-perceptual layer or filter, which is superimposed on top of reality and mediates our experience of it. This is true of all higher-order cognitive constructs, but not all of them have fallen out of sync / into conflict with underling reality to the same extent as progressivism.

Progressivism, properly understood, is the denial of underlying reality in an attempt to break free from its gravitational field. It is a Neoreligious programme to extricate humanity from the Real. It revolves around disbelief in the Real via enforced belief in progressivism, and its capacity to destroy / invert historical compound knowledge, aka tradition.

However, since the Real can be occluded but never abolished, progressivism has transmuted into a pure ideological mechanism for the maintenance of Power. It realises this function via the coercive enforcement of systemic patterns of belief and disbelief – all in the service / interests of Power.

Perversely, Bitcoin – a digital crypto-currency – promises a return to the Real.

Of course, for many within the Sphere, one thing which didn’t encourage risk-taking, was the fact that initial exposure to a sustained critique of Bitcoin’s potential was couched in terms of its inevitable failure.

Across a series of posts, Moldbug’s analysis of the incentive structures at play was perfect, but his conclusion that Bitcoin was doomed was – with the benefit of hindsight – dead wrong.

Subsequently, in private, he has recognised that you just need to “jump onto” opportunities which have the capacity for exponential growth, irrespective of the odds.

But reading at the time, how confident could you be that Moldbug’s conclusion the USG would kill Bitcoin was correct: 100% confident? 99% confident? 75% confident? 50% confident…

Buller? Buller? Buller…

Let’s revisit one of these posts and see if our confidence was misplaced. In order to adduce whether investment – or at least some degree of exposure to what was effectively an open-ended lottery ticket to a potential phase of geoeconomic transition – would, indeed, have been prudent.

Moldbug begins ‘Bitcoin is money, Bitcoin is bubble’ by compounding the concepts of ‘money’ and ‘bubble’:

If Bitcoin is money, Bitcoin at $150 is absurdly cheap.  Otherwise, it is hilariously expensive.  Bitcoin will go to zero or infinity – almost certainly the former.

…

When I say that Bitcoin is money and Bitcoin is a bubble, your mind grows nervous, as if forced to contemplate a car that is orange and green.  Sure, it’s all waves and particles at the bottom – but, really.  Physics is one thing, accounting is another.

He goes on to point out that Bitcoin is a protocol standard, and that in our era everyone knows how protocol standards play out – winner takes all.

This is a consequence of the effects of scalability on socio-economic relations, and because we have transitioned from the domain of the Mediocristan (i.e. the predicable) to the Extremistan (i.e. the unpredictable) and entered an epoch in which butterfly wings create tornadoes.

Another of Moldbug’s key insights, is that there is no essential relation binding the medium of saving to the medium of exchange:

Indeed, it is logically possible to imagine an economy in which the medium of saving and the medium of exchange are different assets, and the medium of saving is overvalued but the medium of exchange is not.

But what about the dollar…?

The dollar is already the global monetary standard – what creates any incentive to switch to Bitcoin?  If the dollar was financially perfect, there would be no such incentive.  The dollar is anything but financially perfect.

And now we proceed to the dark heart of Moldbug’s analysis, which should have made anyone reading – including the author – invest in a possible future, which could be actualised via the magnetic power of Bitcoin as a Shelling point to cohere upon a post-fiat world order:

Suppose Bitcoin is money?  At this point, I can guarantee it.  Either USG will kill Bitcoin, which it can and probably will, or Bitcoin will be the new monetary standard…

In a world in which the entire pool of savings energy has moved to Bitcoin, what is a dollar worth?  On the one hand, enormous dollar debts exist.  On the other hand, those debts themselves must be valued as securities in Bitcoin.  As the BTC price increases into the millions, the purchasing power to pay off all the dollar debts – simply by cashing in a few Bitcoins – appears with it.  There are no significant Bitcoin debts, and nor will there be any until the transition has completed.

This is a scenario in which no one wants to hold either dollars, or dollar-denominated debts, because the purchasing power of these assets in Bitcoin is constantly decreasing… The dollar is now the bubble, and devil take the hindmost.  The savings pool evacuates this bubble, but it does not evacuate evenly or all at once.  Rather, those who get out first […] become much wealthier than they were before.  Those who get out last, however, can see a fortune shrink to a pittance.  This is classic hyperinflation.  A currency never hyperinflates by itself – it always hyperinflates relative to some other medium of saving.  There is always a savings pool, and always an overvalued asset.

This is, in fact, the situation we could be rapidly approaching…

Or not.

But if we are – the devil take the hindmost.

There may still be time / opportunity to utilise this moment, and catalyse the outer Right to become a financially self-sufficient, post-political entity.

But if it is to do so the Right needs to embrace Risk.

Cold calculated Risk.

In which the prize is a seat at the table of the future.