On Civilizational Maximalism

The merging of the bitcoin and energy industries is giving me hope for our civilization

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent Talen Energy’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

This post is the first in what will become a string of related hypotheses that I will be testing over the next few years in my new role at Talen Energy. Some will be philosophical, others will be technological, but all will be related to the way bitcoin is changing our world. I’m making this public because I’ve seen the value in steel-manning new ideas through public scrutiny. I think that bitcoin mining is going to fundamentally reshape the entire global energy system, and I’m going to test out the ideas I have for how and why here with you as I attempt to test and implement them in real time with Talen and its 13GW energy generation portfolio. Thanks for reading and engaging.

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What is maximalism?

There’s been a lot of Twitter chatter recently about how to define bitcoin maximalism. Most of it has been attempts at dunking back and forth between bitcoin maximalists and their supposed opponents, but some of the discourse has been thoughtful engagement with the philosophical underbelly of bitcoin as a nascent technology and cultural phenomenon of global significance.

According to Merriam Webster, the word maximalist is defined as “one who advocates immediate and direct action to secure the whole of a program or set of goals.” Using this, you could say that if you are a _________ maximalist, you are someone who advocates immediate action to secure the goals of __________. 

Bitcoin, as a decentralized, permissionless global financial ledger and associated commodity token, has over time become a lodestone for individual freedom and sovereignty for people around the world. Many accept that the “goal” of bitcoin is individual freedom to store and transact energy without censorship or debasement. It would follow then that the definition of a “Bitcoin maximalist” is one who advocates immediate and direct action to advance bitcoin adoption in order to secure individual freedom to store and transact energy without censorship or debasement. 

Similarly, one might argue that the “goal” of energy is to enhance human flourishing through thermodynamic efficiency and abundance, which would mean the definition of an “energy maximalist” is… you can probably see where I’m going. 

Civilizational Maximalism - A sign of our times

Bitcoin- and Energy-Twitter are two relatively niche online domains that have plenty of maximalists within them - folks who are passionate about bitcoin or energy (or both) for a variety of personal and professional reasons, and who exchange passionate ideas back and forth extolling the virtues of bitcoin or of a particular type of energy technology or policy 140 characters at a time. These are not just avatars though - there are (mostly) very serious, very passionate people who use Twitter as a tool to engage with their community and instantiate their ideas in the real social world.

Of late, I’ve realized that I’ve learned much from each community, both technically but also philosophically. Notwithstanding the recent row over “toxic bitcoin maximalists,” I follow and am friends with many thoughtful bitcoin professionals who I would characterize as bitcoin maximalists in the way that I’ve defined it - they are people who believe in the goals of bitcoin and are doing their level-best to help spread the word and build exciting new products and companies in the bitcoin space. I’ve also realized that each community on its own feels incomplete. But together, the two worlds make much more sense to me. The Bitcoin and Energy industries are starting to merge before our eyes, and within that merge the seed of a new type of maximalism is being sown.

Bitcoin maximalism combines with energy maximalism to enable civilizational optimism, and is spawning a new kind of maximalist: The Civilizational Maximalist. Were it any other period in recent history, the concept of a “civilizational maximalist” would seem somewhat silly. But it is safe to say that we are all feeling some kind of existential dread in the last few years, and sober intelligent people are having sobering intelligent conversations about the potential for civilizational collapse now in ways that would have felt like science fiction lunacy just a few years ago. Recently, however, world events have conspired to make some things pretty clear.

Namely, without abundant energy and the ability to convert, store, and transact that energy freely, human quality of life and the civilizational complexity that relies on that energy both suffer. Our monetary technology and institutions are thoroughly decayed and collapsing, and this is wreaking havoc on our societies - notably in the realms of financial stability, individual liberty, sovereignty, property rights, and energy/industrial policy. Over the course of 50 years, central banks have collapsed the value of our currency and irrevocably distorted the global price of money. Over the last decade, fintechs enabled by Big Tech have collapsed the privacy and liberty preserving aspects of our money. And since the 1990s, irresponsible ESG policies and investment mandates have contributed to the collapse in the reliability of nearly every aspect of our global energy system, from electrons to nitrogen. We are seeing the early results of global ESG energy policy play out in energy and inflation-related protests across much of the developing world right now. Sadly, we are likely just at the beginning of the period of energy-induced mass socio-political upheaval – Germany is where most are watching closest for the next evolution

Bitcoin is a serious approach to thermodynamic balance

To be a civilizational maximalist is to advocate for a return to the sober and serious acknowledgement of the thermodynamic relationship between our physical and social worlds, and to advocate for technologies and policies that maximize economic and social surplus within the constraints of these two interacting systems. We cannot create or destroy energy, and it has now become abundantly obvious that in attempting to violate this thermodynamic law through the creation and allocation of capital by fiat, we have jeopardized both our physical and social worlds. Our globalized world is now so thermodynamically unbalanced it can reasonably be said (and in fact is being said) to be at risk of imminent collapse. How that collapse may manifest or what may finally trigger it is anyone’s guess, but there is broad consensus that it would probably not be fun.

Bitcoin as both a monetary technology and an infrastructural technology is having a profound impact in both our physical and social worlds. As a money, it is changing the way we understand and measure time and value, incentivizing longer term planning and forecasting, and providing a programmatic check on the human propensity to cut corners and attempt to create something from nothing but decree. As an infrastructural tool, it is enabling a faster and much less volatile transition from a fossil-fuel based grid to a stable decarbonized grid, in a manner that will be far more cost effective and be far less socially disruptive. 

It is on bitcoin as an infrastructural tool that most of the blog posts that follow this will focus. I will discuss bitcoin’s role in our energy system at a global scale, while also spending some time doing deep dives on technological and market innovations currently happening specifically at the intersection of bitcoin mining, nuclear power generation, and deregulated energy markets. In my humble opinion, some of the most exciting and impactful innovation in the world is going to happen right here.

Bitcoin aligns our world’s layers

Together, bitcoin the money and bitcoin mining the technology will enable the world to rebalance and align itself. It’s helpful for me to think of our world in layers:

Layer 0: The Laws of Thermodynamics are the layer 0 constraints that most shape the interaction between Layer 1 and Layer 2. Layer 0 dictates how living things survive and thrive (or suffer and die), depending on how Layer 1 and Layer 2 are aligned.

Layer 1: Our Physical Order is the layer 1 physical realities of our world that our Social Order is built upon. It has real world physical constraints that are derived from certain universal physical laws.

Layer 2: Our Social Order is the layer 2 legal and social programming of our world - it’s the way we interact and be with one another as a global society, and is built upon and within Layer 1.

Over the past 50 years, we have come to believe as a society that our Social Order can operate by fundamentally different thermodynamic laws than our Physical Order. The idea that we can create financial energy by fiat is perhaps the most prominent and most egregious example here, and it is certainly the most impactful.

Bitcoin’s technological and social layers, and all the programmatically constrained incentives therein, combine to give us the ability to deliberately re-align all three of our world’s Layers for the first time in over 50 years. It is also quite possible that it will allow us to align these layers to an extent of efficiency never before seen in human history.

Bitcoin is going to fix the broken price signal for money and it’s going to give us cheap clean abundant energy, but these are just the inputs. The truly profound result is that Bitcoin is going to allow us to develop, for the first time in human history, a mechanism for global energy price discovery and exchange. And insodoing, it’s going to allow us to move into the next epoch of human civilization with far less suffering and disruption than we would otherwise experience. It sounds too good to be true, but I’m betting my entire career that it’s not.

Put bluntly, Bitcoin is fixing the money and fixing our energy systems and _that_ may just be enough to actually say it’s “fixing the world.” For the first time in a long time, I am once again optimistic for the future of our civilization, and without Bitcoin that would not be impossible right now.