Buying, holding, transacting, and trading Bitcoin is a mind-manifesting experience. It changes the way we think and also causes intense insight. It is immaterial money put into focus by the human mind. It is Money governed via code and algorithm. With Bitcoin, the boundaries of finance and economics are dissolved. It is the ultimate hallucinogenic expression, intended to meet humanity’s needs and desires for economic self-fulfillment.
Bitcoin is helping people that are trapped in poverty with little chance to climb up the social ladder. Research suggests that economic inequality contributes to these negative views of money, and wealthy people are likewise painted as evil scrooges who do not give a damn about the poor. This is the consensus attitude. It betrays an underlying hatred of finance. However, it is true that wealth can corrupt a person. It would be unfair to say that money corrupts only the wealthy, though. Even poor people suffer the psychological pitfalls of money.
Bitcoin is borderless like the hallucinogenic experience. It is sprawling and immersive. Bitcoin can navigate its way over any geography, across water or land, and bypass any government-controlled checkpoint. While on mind-manifesting drugs, a person undergoes the sharing of consciousness with others, transferring memories, dreams, fantasies, thoughts, and emotions. People essentially open-source each others’ minds and engage in true peer-2-peer intimacy. Bitcoin hijacked this property. It is open-source and peer-2-peer for all to experience, as people can share and alter it in a myriad of ways, for an ongoing and unending sublime creation; it is the true democratization of money.
Bitcoin is also decentralized, which is a primary characteristic of the psychedelic experience. Once boundaries are dissolved, the individual becomes decentralized as well. Bitcoin takes advantage of this fact and dissolves all boundaries regarding how money should be perceived and defined. Therefore, bitcoin represents the start of mind-manifesting finance.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Bitcoin advocate said “Bitcoin is so much more than money. It is an experience, a celebration of humanity’s determination to strive for innovation in every aspect of life, to turn the physical into mental. It is a testament to where we are going. It is psychedelic in a purely symbolic sense because it has the power to change and expand minds. Bitcoin as a technology is an exhalation of what it means to be human. It is absolutely amazing and will lift innovation to towering new heights, as will any blockchain-based technology to come.
The idea is that money highly impacts the way people think and feel. But this is likely the result of the kind of money people use, how that money is acquired, and how various influences warp people’s beliefs. Cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is a different animal. It is a currency that does not require faith in central bankers or megalithic governments. A person just needs to gain knowledge of the protocol from which Bitcoin runs, and they will have a basic understanding.
Knowledge and experience of cryptocurrency are already altering the psychological principles regarding how people view money and the wealthy. It has likewise created a new generation of millionaires, who made their Bitcoin riches from starting businesses or similar endeavors. And those within the community do not harbor ill will toward the wealthy. As a matter of fact, the Bitcoin community is so tight-knit that they revere entrepreneurs as heroes.
Social platforms can also drive behaviors. From celebrities who invest in bitcoin to a highly-engaged bitcoin community on Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit, social media feeds into bitcoin’s popularity. Research has shown that when people talk about their investments in online social environments, they tend to become more risk-seeking in the types of investments they make.
Bitcoin provides hope
Money is a technology that allows us to imagine futures. The bitcoin excitement, particularly among young people, illustrates that people feel locked out of the ability to have the kind of assets that would let them generate any form of wealth. Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, controlled just 4.6% of U.S. wealth through the first half of 2020, according to data from the Federal Reserve.
When we look at the fever around bitcoin, we really need to see it in part as a demonstration of the fact that this is happening because there are no reliable, non-speculative mechanisms whereby people who don’t already have access to a chunk of wealth could produce wealth over time. And that’s a real indictment of the way things are currently set up for younger people.
But it is clear that cryptographic currencies bring in a new psychological perspective from which to view money, simply based on the cultural and systemic differences in the ecosystem. Indeed, this new construction of money is an innovation that could alter the course of neuroeconomics, behavioral economics, and humanity itself. It could certainly begin to diminish the pauper effect and help treat the various biases toward money and those who harbor them.
