Bitcoin Minimalism

Bitcoin Minimalism is a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives. An article by Conner Brown and myself, with other Bitcoiners providing input.

Create more, consume less

Bitcoin reduces your time preference and enables you to look long-term at saving and investing. It’s not about consuming, it’s about saving and investing that makes our world a great place.

By consuming less, you allow others to access good and services more cheaply currently. It’s a way to escape the excesses of the world around us — the excesses of consumerism, material possessions, clutter, too much debt, too many distractions, too much noise.

Discover purpose in our lives

Bitcoin Minimalism is about finding truth in yourself and your beliefs rather than in material possessions. Freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture we’ve built our lives around which has been fueled by Keynesian economic policies.

Bitcoin minimalism is about making decisions more consciously, more deliberately… a flight to quality. Clearing away all of the frivolous arguments and only focusing on what matters. In stark contrast to the ICO bubble in which consuming, waste, and fraud were prevalent.

Minimalists search for happiness not through things, but through life itself; thus, it’s up to you to determine what is necessary and what is superfluous in your life. The pursuit of knowledge through Bitcoin Minimalism is about better understanding the world around you.

Minimum Viable Product

Building a product is about fighting the insidious disease of more. Bitcoin’s community and core dev team have focused on being the most efficient, or minimal, they can be in regards to building Bitcoin.

Developers: Working with one chain reduces mental bandwidth for developers. Working with many is a near impossible task.

Security: Using just one Blockchain enhances the security of the ecosystem through more rigorous exploit analysis and PoW building the “largest” wall (instead of hundreds of little walls)

Code: Satoshi chose a non-turing complete language so that it can provide predictable outcomes and facilitate trust minimization. Adding more complex loops creates unpredictable scenarios (DAO, parity) that requires you to trust the script without knowing the outcomes.

Scalability: Bitcoin is about being hyper-efficient with Layer 1 (Schnorr/Segwit) while also pushing innovation on Layer 2 (Lightning) which is an exponentially more scalable solution, thereby enabling Bitcoin to be more usable by the masses. We want to maximize the value/byte transfer. While we could easily increase the block size, it would the least efficient way to scale. And being efficient with our limited block size is the utmost importance as it enables us to become decentralized/censorship resistant.

Economics: By rebuilding the capital markets stack from a sound money base, we can then be confident that our foundation is structurally secure.

Bitcoin Minimalism is rooted in libertarian philosophy

Libertarian political philosophy follows the idea of minimal government intervention and respect for the sovereignty of the individual. As Thoreau said, “Government is best which governs least.”

A government should be a minimalist system that protects individuals from threat of violence or coercion, enforces contract and property rights, and reasonably provides for the national defense.

By separating the monopoly on money from the state, we are guaranteed that any seizure of wealth must be through direct taxation rather than through silent inflation or deficit spending.

Those who opt-in to Bitcoin, are trading something abundant for something scarce, trading the past for the future, trading financial dependence for financial sovereignty.