What if Bitcoin would not have been invented for the next 100 years?
That is a question that I am growing more and more curious about, recently. With all other freedom technology invented, like Nostr as social media, local runable LLMs, and high privacy peer to peer messaging - without Bitcoin being there, what are the first and second order effects that are taking place here?
One immediate difference would be all the people, who would question the legitimacy of the state , of how things run, and of themselves, those one’s would still be out there, either settling for a necessary evil, giving up and not chasing, or stay in circles that do question the system, without a monetary commitment to those claims. So, most likely, those would just be smaller fringe groups. Which would have to do those thought experiments more as a hobby than a way to increase their conviction to Bitcoin.
Almost 4 generations of people would just have to live in the system that they are stuck in. Revolts, changes and further tries to trust a middlemen would probably tried again and again, however would fail in privacy or censorship. All these people, running with skepticism through their lives about what could be, with no denominator as a shared base. They probably end up in very different communities, like freedom cities, spiritual circles, bunker builders, off grid self-sustainables. Whatever ideology it might exactly be - it is clear those people would have landed around these targets, with another probability to find a community of cypher punks. Most people probably just follow the system & society without questioning it, because they are morally deincentivized to do so. And those are not just the hobbyist, but also the talented programmers, content creators and inventors.
Another aspect would be regarding the geographical footprint of mining facilities as well as personal mining. While no ASIC machines need to be used, there are just a lesser amount of data centres around the world, although it could be argued that AI-GPU would take over that part anyway.
The weight of metal and CPUs that would be somewhat in other production different parts of the world over production of energy in certain areas of the world would be exactly that, [scribble] some data centres might help with that, but they are nowhere near as easy to maintain.
The question is would society even be there at all! Of course, the possibility is there, however society might need to go into bigger hard ships before things might turn around for the better world to come. A group of mad people that were also in a tinkering profile would need to come together to create the thing again, possibly with different set economic rules and outlook, to see what is needed for other participants to join the network.
So what if? Well a lot of ifs and thens, the multitude of complexity would branch into an almost infinite amount of possibilities, however if one would just narrow the things down to one different thing that would have happened, the outcome of both scenarios are actually completely unpredictable, but nonetheless fascinating to think about.
A more interesting topic that came to the authors mind is, however; what if Bitcoin would have been invented today?
