Bitcoin’s Potential to Make Craft Great Again
By Dug
On a Bitcoin Standard, I will fill my citadel with objects that, while neither flashy nor ostentatious, will exude beauty as ‘proof of work’ of the hours and skills that went into their manufacture, providing tangible metaphors for the consensus mechanism that made this future life possible. A life away from the fiat rat race; the continual overworking, chasing the ever-elusive fiat promotion that may allow you, but only in the short term, to outpace the onward march of money printer induced monetary, and the subsequent price, inflation. Having been told that as a relatively bright student, the logical option was to study hard, take on student debt and go to university, which would allow me to enter that rat race, earn more and pay off the debt, the value of which would hopefully be inflated away to nothing. Given this was almost the obvious ‘route to success’, it makes me wonder what were the routes to success before the fiat standard got its claws into our lives in 1971?
Not even a 100 years ago, maybe even closer to 40 or just 30 years ago, a smaller proportion of people went to university. Before this time, reaching back hundreds of years, a significant portion of individuals took up positions working with someone who had a trade, as their apprentice, whether father, uncle, mother, aunt or a trusted member of the community. Their aim could be to learn a trade so they could one day take over the family business, or alternatively go it alone and set up a new business, with this process focusing upon the transfer of tacit knowledge that could neither be written down nor communicated verbally (so couldn’t be taught in a classroom), but acquired through practice under supervision and inward focus on personal development. The apprentice would gradually accumulate a complex combination of explicit information about the process of doing jobs, combined with the physical skills required to put that knowledge into practice. Malcolm Gladwell has relatively recently become well known for his idea of the 10,000 hours required for mastery, but this is simply what masters of crafts have known for hundreds of years. The mastery of such skills is sufficiently valuable for individuals to take up apprenticeships, knowing that in the short term they would be underpaid, even given menial jobs, but being prepared to have their mistakes continually pointed out by their ‘mentor’, for years, in order to improve. Over the course of a traditional 5-year apprenticeship, working approximately 40-hour weeks, one would have likely completed 10,000 hours of focused, deliberate learning, necessary for mastering a trade. Interestingly, recent developments within the domain of apprenticeships have attempted to reduce the need for low time preference applicants, so students could more quickly become professionals that are in demand, without giving attention to the important learning that traditionally constituted completing an apprenticeship.
Taking this perspective to university, particularly an undergraduate degree, straight away introduces some inconsistencies with this traditional view. If someone goes to university in order to become an engineer, an economist or an accountant, from my own experience, very few students actually spend 40 hours a week learning their subject. Then, compared to continual feedback within an apprenticeship, university students will only likely receive sporadic, numeric feedback in the form of essay, report or exam marks, with no attention on whether a students’ process of learning took the right form for their future career. While there may have been some progress towards the accumulation of 10,000 hours for the student (maybe a couple of thousand hours if I’m optimistic), as the student begins their graduate role to pay off their loans, while they may have learnt a number of technical skills, they may still lack practice-based skills for the next stage of their careers.
Looking back to move forward
Traditionally, to ensure standards of apprenticeships and standards within trades or crafts, societies and associations became established (such as the City and Guilds of London Institute), defining accepted valuable practices, and in a similar manner to unions, aiming to protect their members from external forces. When new technologies are introduced that threaten established practices, trades and their associations may attempt to resist their introduction. A relatively well-known example of the Luddites resulted from the introduction of the spinning jenny and spinning mule, which were able to produce textiles (specifically lace) at a fraction of the cost and skills of handmade alternatives. The result was civil unrest, protests, the destruction of machinery and even capital punishment for the perpetrators.
Importantly, this isn’t simply a story from the ancient past of the 18th century, but rather a pattern that continually repeats across markets and industries, as new technologies disrupt incumbents, but usually without people ending on the end of a noose. Due to recent developments in artificial intelligence, it is now not only blue-collar workers who fear the rise of intelligent machines able to take their factory jobs, but also white collar web designers, accountants and software engineers, amongst others. The screenwriters’ strike was initiated by fears that algorithms would begin writing scripts, with actors also fearing both their likeness and voices could be reproduced without their consent or receiving payment for something they thought they owned rights to.
However, this may be at least partially missing the point. No farm labourer mourns the hours of toiling in a field that were replaced by a tractor in the 19th Century, unless they weren’t able to adapt and secure alternate employment. Similarly, only die-hard traditionalist accountants mourn the hours spent copying physical ledger entries or ‘working it out with a pencil’, when they were replaced by spreadsheets. Jeff Booth puts it so clearly, technology is deflationary, releasing people from the drudgery of repetitive, dull, tiring work. Sitting around on set, waiting for a call from a director for the next scene or spending hours in a sound booth, reading from a script could all be reduced. The only thing more scarce than bitcoin is our time, so why mourn having to do tasks that waste it? If we instead view work in terms of the application of craft skills, that require people to solve complex problems and interact with physical systems, the risks of being replaced by machines are greatly reduced. We are likely a good few years away from an AI generated avatar able to creatively interpret a script into the physical humour of Inspector Clouseau, Mr Bean or Basil Fawlty, these were individuals deftly drawing on their acting craft. The same is likely true for most white-collar roles viewed as at risk from AI, where those with expertise, tacit knowledge and creativity are still able to differentiate their services from low-cost accounting, website or coding apps. Let’s remember, even after the introduction of mechanised lace manufacturing, the most highly skilled lace makers were still able to make a living by offering higher value products to more discerning clientele that could not be satisfied by machine produced products.
This then raises the question of how we finance the 10,000 hours required for mastering a craft, or explain to school leavers the value of pursuing a low time preference apprenticeship compared to a higher time preference graduate position. Not having to choose a job for the money is a privilege of the historic elite (as is going to university without accumulating significant debt today); however, new avenues of mid-life career changes are opening up for bitcoiners, as the world gradually reprices to a sat standard. Bitcoiners may no longer have to sell their hours for fiat wages; even if they didn’t choose a trade at 16, they can now trade directly for sats, but they also don’t have to confront their own mortality by moving into the retirement phase of our lives immediately once they reach their stacking goal. Instead, the ability to buy back our time from the fiat mine can be enabled by bitcoin, to begin accruing the 10,000 hours of what you want to do. You may initially be a student, making mistakes, but if you’re not reliant on an income, you won’t need to quickly return to an old boss, cap in hand, in order to pay the bills.
Does University help us develop a craft?
In a word, no, unless you’re studying a practice-based degree such as medicine or nursing, where much of the learning takes place within the setting where you will ultimately work. During my undergraduate degree, spending 20 hours on university work was viewed as a heavy week – add in the fact that a large chunk of the year I was ‘on holiday’, I likely didn’t get close to reaching even 20% of the 10,000 hours of mastery. Adding into this, with an array of topics I was studying, rather than accumulating hours toward mastery of a subject, I was primarily becoming more competent at passing exams. Saying that, I appreciate there are many university students much more dedicated than myself, putting more hours in the library or lab, but I’m also confident there are students who are less dedicated. The result was that when I left university, I didn’t seamlessly move into a role where I continued towards achieving my 10,000 hours. Instead, I attempted to link what I’d learnt in classrooms to a practical factory setting, interspersed with a not insignificant amount of fiat duties, of spreadsheets and Word documents, that nearly anyone could have done. What I did bring to the role was a drive to learn more and being willing to take personal responsibility for the standard of the work I did. Given this shift in learning, I can imagine that those students who knew exactly what professional role they wanted to work towards, whether accountant, actuary or management trainee, would be starting from close to the same number of accumulated hours at 21, so they would be starting their graduate role with close to the ability of a 16 years old when they started an apprenticeship! A graduate would then need to dedicate 10,000 hours towards their new trade, to pass exams and achieve qualifications in their chosen field to formally join a profession, and only then, out-earn their school friend who started their apprenticeship at 16.
This is not to say that I would recommend all 16-year-olds ditch plans for further studies and move into practical fields, although this is something worth considering. After a number of years, I returned to university, and quickly realised that if I was going to be spending my own money on a degree (instead of money I’d borrowed), I should really put in the hours and draw from whatever experience I’d been able to amass from fiat duties. What I began to appreciate was the limitations of my previous approach to doing university, and instead began to focus upon what I could learn, which gradually led into realising how few hours I had spent on developing my learning, researching and writing skills. Skills of graduates that companies actually want to be employing need to be developing, to learn about business problems and then communicate their insight to others in the organisation. For students choosing to go to university, I would recommend thinking about the knowledge and skills they want to focus upon while they are working towards their degree. Is it just a box to tick before starting a desk-based apprenticeship or do you want to accumulate skills that can be applied to a range of challenging future aspirations? Understanding which it is will likely change the amount of time and level of focus they dedicate to their studies.
But why is this important? Why should anyone care? I’m some jumped up desk jockey, navel gazing in an effort to proclaim that my qualifications will still have value in a hyperbitcoinized world. As a university lecturer, I’m fully aware that I’m no longer the holder of all the valuable knowledge – I know that regurgitating material from a 3-year-old textbook on models developed 20 years earlier will be worth very few sats from anyone’s hodl stack. The challenge for me, and likely other professionals in the fiat economy, is ensuring we possess the necessary craft based skills to earn ourselves a place in bitcoin’s equivalent of Galt’s Gulch. If your aim is to earn sats with your skills, the need to direct time and effort to a fiat system, which requires you to earn your promotion to the next level of the fiat mine, Hierarchy of Doom, are likely both taking you away from why you initially joined the profession while also preventing further accumulation of valuable craft skills. Remember, the only person aiming to become the ‘plumbing department manager’ is likely the one least capable of actually plumbing.
Where I think the craft and graduate mentalities may overlap is their individual responsibility and integrity. The best craftsmen are those who do the best job possible, in the knowledge their customer has received the highest standard of work and good value for money. The best accountant will be someone who has provided information and guidance to their client, sufficient to ensure the long-term health of their business at a cost that is viewed as good value for money. I think the opposite is also true, everyone has heard about cowboy builders or accountants who cook the books to enable short term profit taking by unscrupulous owners (also see VCs, thanks Freddie). Within a bitcoin-based future, the risk of this will hopefully be reduced, not simply because scammers will be found out, but we will only deal with individuals who have a track record of being paid in bitcoin by other bitcoiners (that we can verify on chain). No one wants to use their bitcoin to fix a leaky toilet twice! An interesting twist on this situation is that it not only helps the buyer have more power to choose the best craftsman, but if the craftsman has been saving in bitcoin, they probably don’t need to be chasing the next job as hard as if they had to save in fiat.
MADEX provided one of 2024’s moments, when he turned down the offer of a whole bitcoin for an ordinal of a print of his the creature of Jekyll Island piece. Put simply, MADEX wasn’t prepared to put a price on his integrity, because he would never be able to buy it back. The same is true with other crafts, where traditional craftsmen would make amends if a job went wrong or an academic would withdraw work if it was found to be inaccurate, misleading or junk science (they wouldn’t want Margot Paez coming after them). Mistakes happen when we challenge ourselves, whether using new technologies (for a craftsman) or exploring new ideas (for an academic). However, this cannot and should not prevent risk taking, given the learning that can ultimately result from mistakes. If, on the other hand, it was not a mistake, but a high time preference act to make a quick buck or for eyeballs and clicks, the perpetrator may fight their corner, attempting to save what reputation they may have once had (please don’t worry about your bitcoin transaction using water, the BBC just did this for engagement). One would then hope that if so many people weren’t slaves to the fiat wage, they would also feel able to say no, if they were ever to receive a request from their manager or superior (or co-author) they didn’t agree with or believe was ethical. To quote Banksy, “The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules”.
Remaining within the fiat world, there is always a need to pursue a pay rise to counteract the “continuing process of inflation [where] governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens” (Keynes actually knew what he was doing). In comparison, if you’re working on a hard money standard, able to spend maybe 5 years developing your craft, you will hopefully be able to sell your skills, which cannot be imitated by machines or computers, for a currency that will hold its value over time. But, this does not have to mean we need to withdraw to our log cabins and deplore all those using the latest technologies, choosing to grow our own food or cut our childrens’ hair with pieces of metal we have sharpened ourselves. While we may be able to develop traditional skills, they don’t have to be defined by some ancient society with roots dating back to before the industrial revolution. Contemporary skills don’t need to be defined by particular tools, techniques or technologies, instead by the value they deliver. Not wanting to get above oneself, but I doubt Michelangelo or Leonardo de Vinci defined themselves as wielders of brushes and chisels – they made art with the tools and media they had available to them. They were polymaths and I can imagine they would have been interested in exploring what opportunities AI made available to them.
Back to my Opulently Furnished (as yet imaginary) Citadel
I’m a simple guy. If you came to my house, apart from the odd t-shirt or hat, you might not know I had an interest in bitcoin. My tastes require more than plastering a bitcoin “B” across it to earn my custom. I don’t think I’m alone in this view and believe others who appreciate the future value of their holdings can quite rightly demand more from their chosen bitcoin artist or craftsman. Not only do I want my craftsman to be able to demonstrate exceptional abilities when interacting with their chosen media, whether paint, pipes, circuitry, leather, wood, wine, farmland or business accounts, but importantly, these craftsmen need not feel constrained by traditional techniques or practices, but instead willingly embrace broader innovations so they won’t be viewed as Luddites. Just because I value a carpenter’s ability to shape wood with a chisel or drawknife, I’m not willing to pay for the time it might take them to carve a whole chair by hand. To return to Jeff Booth, technology is deflationary, so why should a bitcoiner part with more sats than they need to; rather, it allows for an artisan to maximise the value their ideas, knowledge and skills add to a piece of work.
Unless we are making preparations for our future lives, both developing our own craft skills and supporting those who have already developed these skills, who will we call to integrate a bitcoin miner into our hot water system or fashion a dining table ready for an extended family steak dinner? I, for one, don’t want to welcome a bitcoiner into my citadel, only to offer them an Ikea chair to sit on.
Note from Stackchain Magazine: No Bitcoin (or inferior monies) were exchanged for this article. This article was written by Dug, a simple man being the man his dog thought he was. You can find Dug on Nostr Dug@primal.net.
If you’d like to send Dug some 丰 for the article you can do so via LN Dug@primal.net