Bitcoin teaches. It's definitely helped me better understand economics. That means a new, different, and accurate way of looking at the world and how things work. It's as though you see things as they are now and you never see things the same again.
A most basic economics lesson, probably the MOST basic, is that everything, EVERYTHING is about choices and tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a free lunch, TINSTAAFL.
Mempool
With bitcoin, there is the "mempool"...transactions waiting to get put into a bitcoin block on the chain. The normal way of processing the mempool is that it is a waiting room of sorts. Google's Gemini literally called it that when it wrote:
The Bitcoin Mempool (The Waiting Room) The Mempool (short for "memory pool") is a decentralized queue where your transaction waits before it is officially added to the blockchain.
Imagine a line of men and women duded out in their best clubbin' garb, waiting in line, trying to get past the large, formidable bouncer and into the club. That line is the mempool.
It's an easy and cliched imagery, but it is wrong.
The mempool is not a waiting line, it is a market.
The transactions in the mempool do not wait in a single file line and get into a block in order, like in the lunch line in a school cafeteria or at Space Mountain at Disney World.
Instead, it is a market. There are buyers and sellers. The buyers are the bitcoin users who will pay a fee to get into a block. The sellers are miners who will receive payment to include your transaction in the block. The more you offer to pay, the greater the chance the seller/miner will accept your payment and get you in.
Returning to the folks waiting in line to get into the club. If someone 50 people back in the line suddenly hollered to the bouncer, "I got one grand here if you let me and my date in!" The bouncer just might say, "You're in, let's go," and wave them up to the front of the line. They pay and they're in. Market in action, voluntary transfer, both sides (buyer and seller) are happy.
Screens
We hear a lot about "screen time." Platforms and apps and sites all vie for our time. This is a market. The platforms are the sellers, we are the buyers. Platforms provide their product (posts, memes, vids, etc.) and we pay with our time and attention. Even though it may be "free" in the sense that we didn't send any money, we paid with our opportunity cost...we gave up the next best thing we could have been doing with our time and attention.
When the Brave browser came out (looks like it was 2017), I was intrigued and eventually made it my go-to browser. The privacy side of things was appealing, but the idea of earning BAT, Basic Attention Tokens, was neat as well. The Brave people got it: when we spend time on sites or dapps, we sell our time (and privacy info) in exchange for whatever the sites or dapps provide. But, maybe we're getting short-changed. Maybe our time and privacy info is worth more than whatever they're providing. We should get more.
In essence, the buyer/seller roles are switched with Brave and BAT. Rather than the site/platform selling content in exchange for the end user's time and attention, now the end user on the screen becomes the seller and the sites or platforms become the buyer. They can buy ads that users click to view. The site/platform is paying the user for his or her time and attention. The user is paid in BAT. At least in part, the roles are reversed when using Brave.
To be fair, I moved away from Brave and this model may no longer apply. I don't recall exactly why I cycled away. Part of it was that I never was actually able to get any of the BAT tokens I'd accumulated. There was some snag about needed the correct wallet, likely KYC issues, tokens in wallets or browsers here and there and it was hard to keep them straight, and basically just hurdles that had to be jumped over. The process undermined the goal. Again, markets: my cost of using Brave outweighed the benefits of getting paid in BAT which I couldn't access.
I just looked at BAT on CoinGecko and am surprised that it's at $0.22; that's pretty good. I'm happy for this. That tells me that it's providing a product that users finding value in. Also, the market cap is at number 192; again, pretty doggone high. I need to go see if I can dig up those coins I have somewhere, maybe the process is better now for getting them and doing something with them.
Nostr
As I was thinking of this "everything-is-a-market" topic, I stumbled upon this meme and note from the developer of the Amethyst app on Nostr:
Source: https://njump.me/nevent1qqsxu54fgxkw9mpjgh9gazpkm0lfgxfja4hsn5ek2p6jq9vkfcjz52qpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7q3qgcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqxpqqqqqqzftdefw
I believe what it is saying is that developers, who have limited time, must choose how and what to create. They create things that the consumers (we the users), will purchase with our time and attention.
This meme is actually directed toward Nostr, however, which makes it a bit different from the normal platform-user market like a Facebook or X. On Nostr, users can send "zaps"...literally send bitcoin as money. So, devs (or anyone who posts on Nostr as a creator) can vie not only for time and attention, but for bitcoin sats (money). Devs and creators are incentivized to produce what sells...what captures users' time and attention as they buy the product. The seller/buyer market is even more clear in this way.
Everything
But, let's go further. I titled this "Everything is a market," so, let's think of something mundane and seemingly marketless. I'll use my plans for today: clean the car, laundry, maybe some American football.
None of these seem like a market situation. Markets have buyers and sellers. As far as cleaning the car and laundry, I am the buyer...I buy with my time. I pay with opportunity cost...the next best thing that I could be doing otherwise. I would likely be watching a movie if not car cleaning or laundering; that's my opportunity cost. The seller in these cases is nameless, is the "unseen", but it is selling the product of cleanliness. I can purchase cleanliness at the expense of my time (the cost of NOT watching the movie).
And oh, as far as American football, I looked it up and evidently there are two games today. The first is on the NFL Network and the second, which I would actually like to watch, is on Peacock.
I'm and old-school, over-the-air, "free" TV person. I receive TV via "rabbit ears" from the networks selling programming. I pay for it by giving my time/attention during the commercials. (Which, by the way, the networks sold the ad air time to companies acting as the buyers; another market.)
The games today are yet another market, they are not over-the-air broadcasts. The NFL Network and Peacock are trying to sell me the games in exchange for subscription money. The cheapest plans for these are $6.99/month and $7.99/month respectively. In this market, I'll "vote with my wallet" and I'll pass. The cost outweighs the benefit and therefore football is out.
And...everything
Need more? Here are some more examples of how everything we do involves a give-and-take:
- You get shorted 8 cents in change. You point out the error, you show where the mistake was made, you go line-by-line over the receipt and, sure enough, you were right. You just purchased "being right" by paying for it with your reputation.
- Someone goes out-of-turn at a four-way stop. You berate the offender with horn, hollers, curses, and fingers. Again, you get the satisfaction of letting it out and punishing the offender, but you paid with your reputation. This, especially, if you then notice it was your grandmother who was the offender, or your boss, or your pastor. And, oh, not to mention that you are now the one making the intersection dangerous with your hostility and you actually might get ticketed by police for careless driving in the intersection...football fans know, the second person in an altercation is always the one who gets flagged.
- Someone posts something online that you think is idiotic. Or, they post something with the opposite view on a political/religious/social topic that you're passionate about. You impolitely "correct" them and set them straight. Maybe you were actually right, but you paid for setting them straight, again, with your reputation.
- To close with a positive, let's invert this. Suppose user A is railing away online about user B and their thoughts and opinions. Instead of taking the easy route and piling on, and even though you may disagree with what user B wrote, you change the discussion to find something, anything positive to say about user B. You "paid for it" by holding back the thought that user B is wrong, but you were paid in that you just gained respect for your kindness, your reputation is bettered.
Everything is a give-and-take, everything is a market.
Thomas Sowell on Wikipedia