Bitcoin Developers Must Do What Investors Want, Long-Term or Short

There are snotty people who claim to be long-term thinkers and want me to treat their plans seriously. The problem with long-term thinkers is that there is an ambiguity between them and people who are living in a fantasy. For you cannot plan beyond your ability to survive, and no one really knows how long their current investment strategy will keep them alive. If you are planning beyond your ability to survive, then you are not a long-term thinker. You are a person in a fantasy world.

Also read: Your Stupidity, Your Responsibility

Long-Term Fantasy

The first step to convincing me that you are a long-term thinker is to convince me that you can survive long enough for your plan to be realized. Furthermore, you must learn to survive for five minutes before you can learn to survive for ten years, so I will first look at your short-term thinking before I would even bother to listen to your long-term plans. Long-term thinking is built on top of short-term thinking, so short-term thinking is more fundamental.

That’s not to say short-term thinking is inherently better than long-term, but if you cannot handle short-term plans, you might as well not bother with long-term plans. If I could only take one person with me on an adventure, I would choose a person who knows how to survive for the next five minutes over one who has long-term plans but does not know how to survive. I would need to have room for two companions if I wanted to bring the long-term thinker.

In order to convince me that you are a survivor, you must prove to me that you have a good investment strategy. People who think strategically think of the future as something chaotic that could throw anything at them. They have made abstract decisions about their behavior so as to promote their own safety under a wide variety possible futures. When they predict the future, they do not choose lightly.

Order Out of Chaos

Survival is a matter of creating order out of chaos. Thus, when I am looking for long-term thinkers, I begin with those who can maintain homeostasis in the short-term. Not all of these people will be long-term thinkers, but they are the only ones who can plan ahead without living in a fantasy. Everyone else is a mayfly.

The second step to convincing me that you are a long-term thinker is to show me that your plan is actually good. Of course, we cannot really know the future without waiting to see what happens, but there is something that you can do today, and that is to put your head on the chopping block! You make a bet and you say, “I think the future will look like my plan and I lose bitcoins if it does not.”

Now you are committed! Maybe you are still in a fantasy, but if you are then at least I won’t have to deal with you anymore once your plans fail. If you are willing to put your survival on the line for your plan, then you are either someone good enough at surviving you can afford to take the risk, or someone who will not make bets in the future.

My assessment of you as a long-term thinker has nothing to do with your skills as a programmer or cryptographer. It has everything to do with your skills as an investor. Someone who thinks that Bitcoin developers don’t have to do what the investors want is someone who does not know that survivors must come first in order for any plan to be enacted reliably.

But anybody can make bets. So if you want to be a long-term thinker, you can compete with everyone else willing to make bets. If you do not want to do this, then I don’t believe you are a long-term thinker. If you don’t want to, then I think you look like a mayfly to me. You look like someone who is distracting yourself with a fantasy instead of learning how to survive.

What are your thoughts about long-term thinking? Tell us in the comments!

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