• Bitcoin is changing the way people think, act, and live their lives.
• Fiat money has created a system of incentives that are detrimental to people’s well-being.
• Jimmy Song seeks to explore how these incentives have gone awry at the individual, company, national, and global level.

Bitcoin’s Impact on Mental Models

Bitcoin changes our mental model and we can see it in a lot of people that get into Bitcoin. Many Bitcoiners start saving and not living paycheck to paycheck. Many start taking their lives more seriously and quit drinking alcohol and playing video games. Still others start investigating their diet and quit eating sugar, carbs, seed oils and other things they’ve been eating their whole lives. Some even get married and start having children. There are even some who start taking religion seriously.

Questioning Incentives

These results are pretty puzzling. What does a digital money have to do with any of these things? Yet, to even ask this question is to ignore the environment that we’re in and the reality of fiat money. It’s difficult to see how the dirty water we’re swimming in affects us because we’re immersed in it. Only when we’re out of the murky water can we see objectively what was happening. Fiat money has some terrible incentives at all levels and it’s the cumulative effect of these incentives that creates the self-destructive behavior that we see in so many people. We shouldn’t be asking why Bitcoin is getting people off of alcohol, we should be asking why people are drinking too much in the first place. We shouldn’t be asking why Bitcoiners are having more children, we should be asking why people are having fewer children under fiat money.

Exploring Solutions

These are the questions I am seeking to answer in this series of essays. Where did the incentives of the modern world go awry? Spoiler: It’s fiat money.

In part one of this series, I’m going to look at individual incentives and how those incentives change how we live at a personal level. In further essays, I’ll explore this question at the company/group level, the national/country level and finally at the level of the entire world . This series will be built from the bottom up, and I’ll start here with the incentives at