This fictional story grew out of thinking of a reply to last weeks question of the week. It pertains a bit to this weeks question too. I have a one word answer to this week: fear. More on that later. For now, please enjoy the story, any similarities to actual events or people is purely coincidental.
Once upon a time someone had a brilliant idea. “Let’s make a big pile of cash and start playing with it,” he thought to himself. “Wouldn’t it be fun if we could watch it grow over time?”
He setup a process on his computer to give himself a little bit of coins every ten minutes. Not wanting to wait forever for his pile of virtual cash to grow, the coin numbers were pretty high at first.
Having a big pile of coins all to yourself is not much fun, “Wouldn’t it be fun if I could get my Counter-Strike buddies in on this?” he thought. Counter-Strike was a popular first person shooter game at the time and they all enjoyed playing it after plugging all their computers together on a LAN (local area network.)
So the next time they all came over he got them to run his program in the background while they were playing on the LAN. Pretty soon they all started getting into growing their little piles of virtual cash.
“Wouldn’t it be fun if we could run this thing somewhere else besides the LAN?” someone suggested. “It would be nice to go home after the party and keep growing and trading my stash.”
With that the friends agreed to open things up to the WAN (wide area network). Other people started taking notice of it.
A while later at one of the LAN parties someone got hungry. “Let’s get some pizza. Who wants to get it? I’ll pay 10,000 of these hashed coins. Any takers?… Satoshi?”
They all looked around somewhat irritated at having the game action interrupted in this way.
Satoshi said, “Not me man, my bags are full... besides this thing is starting to creep me out a little bit.”
“Alright then I’m posting this on Bitcoin Talk. I’m sure someone will take me up on it. We will have pizza here soon, I bet ya”
Things started to grow like crazy from that point and even governments started to take notice. “Look at all the pretty babbles and infrastructure we could buy with that kind of cash. We need to tax the heck out of that,” Uncle Sam thought to himself.
Question: When is appropriate to start taking direct action and begin taxing someone?
Things take time to mature and future outcomes are hard to predict. If you take too many apple tree blossoms off in the spring you might not get any apples in the fall. If you give something too hard a time when it is just starting out, it may never reach its full potential.
You can try taxing at two years old, “Hey Johny, parent tax, Daddy wants half your ice cream cone.”
Or maybe five years old, “Hey Johny, give me half the cash you made on that lemonade stand, I need to pay for lemons you know.”
Or ten, “Hey, you push the lawnmower half the time, Daddies back is sore.”
Or maybe twenty, thirty,… “How about helping out a bit more around here?”
Johny replies, “My friends are all over and were having a LAN party playing Counter-Strike and hashing coins. Can we have this conversation later?”
The point I’m trying to make is that taking things by coercion or force is never really all that effective. The digital economy or Web 3 is abundant and will not require the same kind of tactics that we are used to using.
At any age the best action to take starts with, “You can share your ice cream or not. Daddy loves you just as you are and wants to see you grow up and reach your full potential.”
Oh course getting a bite of the ice cream cone would be nice, lol.
I think that real effective action on a social level has to start by convincing each other that we are loved. Very deeply loved just as we are.
The author admits to playing waaay too much Counter-Strike back in the day and not taking life “seriously” enough. :D
