Daniel's notes on What is Money?

The phrase that runs through my head is, "There has never been such a thing as a fair fight." Humans have been struggling for millions of years, right? In order to rise, first to become the apex predator in nature, but if you look at our struggle against nature, there's never been such a thing as a fair fight. I remember seeing eagles fly along a mountainside that'll hone in on a goat, and it focuses on a baby goat, not the parent goat - catches it from behind, grabs its foot, and drags it off a cliff, and then backs off and waits while the goat goes bang, bang, bang, and hits rocks every fifty feet and is smashed to death five-hundred feet below, where the eagle circles down, lands on the goat, eats it- leisurely. Nothing fair about it. You know, you feel sorry for the goat, and then you realize, this is not a human being. This is nature. It's not fair.

Then you see lions — and it's not like one lion chases down one gazelle — it's eight lions chase sixty-seven gazelles into a channel with three other lions waiting. And one gazelle is forced to take the right side because it gets crowded out by the other sixty gazelle, and that one-bam. — it's dead for no reason other than that it just happened to be on the right side of the herd, and there's nothing fair about it. Nature's not fair, and when you think about the plight of Man the amazing thing is we actually evolved to be the apex creature on this planet.

So when you think about that 3 million years ago the first question is, How did we even make it here? It's pretty obvious that, in that circumstance, if you're alone - you're dead. You're gonna have to have someone guard your back. And my heart goes out to that Adam and Eve wherever they were - you needed two, three four - you needed a tribe. You needed someone to watch, because when you fall asleep, something is going to eat you.

Watch a pack of wolves hunt. The one that kills you? It isn't attacking from the front. You're not going to get to fight it off. It's gonna be an asymmetric attack from the rear, while you're asleep. And so, the importance of human beings using their brains and thinking is incredibly important. And you start to think about - how do we survive in a hostile universe? We have to figure out how we can get harder, smarter, faster, and stronger. And that takes us to the beginning of Man.

Fire is like the prime energy network of the human race. It all started for us with channeling energy. Fire's a chain reaction where we're releasing a latent energy in matter - we're converting matter into energy. Which is like the stored sunlight that we're releasing. You're that human being, and you want to rise above the tigers and the packs of wolves and the other creatures and the snakes in the jungle. How are you gonna do that? You're going to have to tap into and channel energy.

And that's why Prometheus has such an incredible mythic place. Prometheus is to Satoshi as fire is to Bitcoin. Bitcoin's a fire. It's a fire in cyberspace. And most people don't realize it, but it has its antecedents, right? And fire came along first, and when you think about what it means — and most people don't necessarily think very hard about it, you always had it.

If you're an individual, what can you do with fire? Well, you can start by starting a fire so you don't freeze to death. That's pretty useful. The fire will scare away the animals. So I start the fire, I can sleep around it, I cannot freeze. I can also put it around my camp and maybe like a snake that would've slithered in and eaten me will go away. I can scare away insects and smoke away insects with it— that's useful. I can hunt with it. I can start a fire, and I can drive the prey away from the fire. And if I'm smart, I drive the prey from fire off the cliff. I wait for them to trip, I go to the bottom of the cliff, I find one that broke its neck.

Fire. I hunt with it — I cook with it. There's a lot of biologists and the paleotheorists that make a very compelling argument that human anatomy actually evolved because we mastered fire. And when you're cooking something, you're pre-digesting it. And if you pre-digest something, not only do you increase the scope of the foods that you can consume, you also accelerate and you also increase the efficiency with which you can convert that food into calories by a factor of 10:1 or 20:1. And if you can actually metabolize the food 10x more efficiently, your digestive tract shortens, and the energy that your body expends in order to digest food can be redirected - probably to your brain. Right?

Animals that don't cook food have small brains. A human being that can cook food can have a very short digestive tract, can eat anything-we're omnivores - we can go anywhere, we can metabolize calories that are very efficient. It only takes us 10 or 15 minutes a day to get all the calories we need. There are animals that have to graze all day to get the calories they need. So fire is critical for that.

It's critical for seeing. You channel your fire and you can light up a cave, a camp, a tent, you can light up anywhere. And with seeing comes communicating. You ever travel through the ancient world you see they have all these watchtowers. The Romans built watchtowers. You put a fire in the tower, you can see it for miles and miles away. You create a signal system. A certain presumptive arrogance or ignorance among modern men — we think kind of everything worth doing was done in the past 2,000 years or 3,000 years. I kind of figure 100,000 years ago, people were doing all of this stuff. We might not have the writings of it, but they were pretty smart.

So I'm gonna use the fire for all of those things and eventually for communicating, but once I figure that out, I can use it for hardening, right? I can cook things, I can harden the tip of a spear, I can use it to work metals - eventually we used it to work metals, and that ushered us from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Fire is intrinsic to all sorts of manufacturing processes.

I see these discussions: "Well paleo-man, they're all hunter-gatherers and they're all just like walking around chasing after things that are running away from them." | doubt it. Like if I dropped you into 100,000 B.C., I don't think you would've - solo— chase after a bunch of stuff with four legs. I think you would start by finding a canyon and start a fire on one end and dig a trench on the other end and let a mastodon trip on it and break its neck.

It's sort of life's way to take the most energy-efficient strategy, right? That's why the eagle drags the goat off a cliff and lets gravity do its work. Instead of trying to fight it out. And it's interesting that you bring up fire and it's almost as if we were using it to energize our strategies in the world. I think as you put it earlier, channeling energy through our intellect. I think the one piece that maybe we didn't hit on as much is the intellect itself developed through trade and interaction. That's how we are more than the sum of our parts is through our cooperation. And that's at the kernel of all economics, right? We have these ideas, we swap them, they become better over time, and we get to energize better and better strategies.

Michael Saylor: [You know] the phrase, "You're playing with fire — be careful you might get burned"? And what makes human beings unique is, as far as I can see, they're the only animal that plays with fire. And from the point we started to play with fire, we started to evolve at a very rapid rate. Genetically, intellectually, sociologically we evolved.

It's like the keeper of the flame. The keeper of the flame really means something when you have a city, a village, a civilization, a tribe, and you've got a fire and it goes out, you might very well die. You don't want that fire to go out, at all. Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain is a fire. We don't want it to go out either. We talk about feeding the fire of Bitcoin and we talk about feeding the fire of faith and simply being the keeper of the flame. It was an old idea thousands and thousands of years ago. I suspect it's the difference between life and death for humanity for a million years.