Accepting Scarcity: A Bitcoin Meditation

The concep­tual world is governed by scarcity. This scarcity is most evident in the physical realm: there is a physical limit to the size of our universe, the width of our solar system, the diameter of our Earth, the length of your street, the height of your spouse, and the size of an atom.

Any physical object, no matter how large or small, neces­sarily ends. While some things may appear more endless than others, their apparent limit­less­ness is merely a trick of perspec­tive. You may be tricked into feeling that large, numerous objects like galaxies are less scarce than small, more intimate objects (like pet fish). Still, in reality, all physical things are scarce. You may have two kids, and your neighbor has ten kids. While you have fewer kids than your neighbor, you and your neighbor have scarce kids. All physical things are limited in the binary choice between unlim­ited and limited.

Non-physical objects (in Buddhism, we call them mental objects) are also equally limited and scarce. While it is clear your cat has physical bound­aries (its organs don’t spill out to infinity), it is equally true but less obvious that your concep­tion of “cat” is also bounded. “Cat” has a limited meaning. Although people may argue about the breadth of its defin­i­tion, and each person may hold a slightly different mental boundary of what consti­tutes a cat, for each person, “cat” means something and neces­sarily implies some category of “non-cat.” While we may convinc­ingly disagree about whether a dog-fox hybrid is indeed a cat, we would still be arguing about whether one concept fits into the bounded category of another concept. The truth would remain that those categories have edges, even if we disagree on where those edges are.

So all physical objects and all mental objects are inher­ently scarce and limited. As much as you’d like any single concept or object to be infinite, it is not. Your body is limited, and the concept of your body is limited. Even words that attempt to point toward the noncon­cep­tual world (words like Love, G‑d, Nirvana, Sublime) are limited and, there­fore, have the bound­aries inherent to all concepts. The limita­tion of concepts is well-known within Buddhism: Buddha once reminded his followers that his teaching was the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself.

So the reality of the concep­tual world is that it has limits. When we accept this scarcity, we accept reality as it is. When we ignore this scarcity or trick ourselves into believing it is infinite, we delude ourselves.

According to Buddhism, ignorance or delusion is one of the three causes of our suffering (the other two are attach­ment and aversion). So when we are deluded about reality, we perpet­uate suffering. When we are aware of reality as it is, we avoid suffering. We all have stories from our lives of people who suffered because they have not accepted reality as it was: they did not accept a break-up and kept pleading to be taken back; they did not accept a death and kept wishing for their parent to return; they did not accept their current reputa­tion and kept bragging to any who would listen. And likewise, we all know of people who can handle surprises and tragedies with tranquility and aplomb.

So accepting reality as it is, in this very moment, is paramount to avoiding suffering. This is not to say that life won’t change, that you are resigned to an inevitable fate, or there is nothing to be done, quite to the contrary. We must just accept reality as it is now and start here rather than fanta­size about it.

And the reality is all things are scarce.

Unfor­tu­nately, we repeat­edly and routinely delude ourselves about scarcity. We make hyper­bolic state­ments about our physical objects — “The mountains are endless, ” “There is always another fish in the sea, ” “The Fed has infinite cash” — and about abstract concepts too — “his love is eternal” or “his compas­sion knows no bounds.”

However, all those concepts are misleading — even the infinite cash state­ment! While they may provoke the intended emotional response (a sense of vastness) given enough time, life forces people to learn that their previous concep­tion of infinity was wrong. They get to the end of the mountain range, finish the dishes, or see their compas­sionate lover squash an ant. And at that moment, if they still cling to the concept of infinite­ness, they suffer through the process of letting go of their wrong view.

To avoid deluding ourselves and the neces­sary suffering that arises when the reality of scarcity smacks us in the face, we should never conceive of anything as infinite, even if it appears very large. Even Murray Rothbard, my favorite writer, suffers from this slight delusion in his opus Man, Economy, and State. He writes,

“In the first place, all means are scarce, i.e., limited with respect to the ends that they could possibly serve. If the means are in unlim­ited abundance, then they need not serve as the object of atten­tion of any human action. For example, the air in most situa­tions is in unlim­ited abundance. It is there­fore not a means and is not employed as a means to the fulfill­ment of ends. It need not be allocated, as time is, to the satis­fac­tion of the more impor­tant ends, since it is suffi­ciently abundant for all human require­ments. Air, then, though indis­pens­able, is not a means, but a general condi­tion of human action and human welfare.”

But it’s not just “means” that are scarce. Every­thing is scarce. Nothing is in unlim­ited abundance, not even the “general condi­tions” of air. Even if the air is so numerous that each molecule holds little value to humans, it only appears unlim­ited due to our narrow perspec­tive. And if we hold this perspec­tive for too long, we eventu­ally cause suffering when air pollu­tion begins to build up in cities, the buffalos go extinct, the frontier closes, or passenger pigeons disap­pear from the skies. Even if something is so vast that you die before you ever discover its scarcity, eventu­ally, someone will reach its end. They’ll have to suffer when waking up from the lie of infinity you told them was true.

Fortu­nately, you can train your mind to accept scarcity, which has innumer­able benefits. Namely, you are better able to see reality as it really is, less likely to be deluded, and less likely to suffer the discom­fort of waking up from your delusion.

Paying close atten­tion to anything effec­tively trains your mind to see scarcity (one minor benefit of atten­tion-training). So the closer you pay atten­tion to a tree, the more you recog­nize that it is not like any other tree. The closer you pay atten­tion to your lover, the more you see how no one could replace her. Still, this scarcity is a felt sense. It is not verifi­ably nor logically valid. It arises from a deeper place of intuition and is only sustained by consis­tent attention.

As soon as your atten­tion drifts off the present moment aware­ness of the object, the object can delude you into believing its infinite­ness. For instance, you can intuitively sense dollar bills are scarce by staring at a dollar bill for long enough.

Still, you are not logically convinced of its scarcity. As soon as your mind drifts slightly, you start imagining loggers clearing the forests to run dollar printing presses full-steam or the images of the Weimar Republic hyper­in­fla­tion when people used dollar bills as fire-starter. Suddenly you’re caught in an internal story where the sacred dollar bill in front of you trans­forms into just another dollar among infinite dollar bills.

Thus, all objects, fiat included, don’t force you to see their logical scarcity unless you maintain strict attention.

That is all objects except Bitcoin. For Bitcoin repre­sents a new object of medita­tion that can train one’s logical mind to accept scarcity. Bitcoin is the first time a concept has such a clearly defined incon­tro­vert­ible boundary: 21 million. Whereas I could imagine copies being made of other scarce objects (multiple Mona Lisas or Hope Diamonds), with Bitcoin, I cannot. No such copy can ever be created. The block reward schedule and incen­tive struc­ture assure that. So staring deeply at Bitcoin protocol can train one’s mind to accept scarcity not just as an intuitive truth but as an abiding logical truth.

As a medita­tive tool, Bitcoin medita­tion most resem­bles death medita­tions — both harness the concep­tual mind to teach a concept, and neither transcends the concep­tual realm. While many medita­tors grow comfort­able with death simply by culti­vating present-moment aware­ness, some find it helpful to train the logical mind to accept death by focusing on it directly. Then later, when their minds drift to other topics, they can still remember their impending death and the death of all things. Bitcoin medita­tion is similar. By focusing on Bitcoin, you see absolute scarcity deeply. Then, even when your mind drifts to other things, you increas­ingly know the reality of scarcity everywhere.

So for me, it has provided a compelling medita­tion object, aside from giving a long (though not endless) intel­lec­tual rabbit hole, contem­plating Bitcoin has, more notice­ably, anchored my mind from drifting into delusions of infinity in everyday life. It has grounded me in concep­tual reality. Even without sustained atten­tion on Bitcoin, even when I lose my atten­tion and get caught up in the stories of Bitcoin, those stories are not based on, nor have allusions to, infinity. (Bitcoin is just going to the moon, which is a set distance away).

While many other medita­tion objects (namely my breath) have provided me even more profound medita­tive training, Bitcoin has helped me under­stand the scarcity of concep­tual reality more clearly. I believe it allowed me to sidestep a little suffering arising from my own delusions.

In the coming years, I look forward to watching Bitcoin train my logical mind even more, but for now, it’s back to my breath.