One side effect of this system is that the money supply will be elastic, but creating money will require effort. No one would be able to print money. Another will be that the baskets will compete with each other to maintain stable value, which crowd sources the problem of measuring inflation across all the people negotiating employment contracts / wages in those baskets.

I have been listening to your discussion with Pascal on the bitcoin enlightenment. I am in the section about using bitcoin as a ruler and you ask when that will happen. I think once bitcoin checkmates central banks so that they can't print money anymore, there will be a period where the value of bitcoin stabilizes, and other forms of money that require trust rise and start to compete with bitcoin to be used as money. One obvious form of that is tokenized commodities and baskets of commodities chosen to have stable value or chosen to match what people typically consume in a given region (electricity, gas, local apartment rental, food, ...). . Bitcoin would enter that system as one commodity among many, except under jurisdictions whose legal apparatus refuses to enforce the redemption agreements for tokenized commodities. In those, bitcoin would be the only acceptable form of money.

Hope you are feeling better soon, Nat. I *love* your podcast. You bring such joy, enthusiasm, and insight to the space of bitcoin commentary.

What would this world be without arithmetic, but a scene of horror?

I think the timestamp server use case might be very useful in reforming the financial / legal system, by proving who knew (or agreed to) what when. It would both compete with, and support bitcoin's use as a currency.

CN you just quote your npub in your Twitter bio?

Changing the question to: what problems might the transition to Bitcoin bring that could be very challenging to solve?

A country with a fiat currency can wage war for much longer than a country that didn't print it's own money. It has the ability to gather more wealth and resources from the population during times of crisis.

I think the solution to this will require more willing shouldering of responsibility for keeping society safe by the bulk of the citizenry. I don't really know what form it will take.