You are _supposed_ to buy and hold Bitcoin for a long time, because Bitcoin is most important where it gives you an alternative when government money is poor (or even just as a threat to governments that are making monetary decisions - they need to know that their population has a viable alternative if their currency doesn't add enough value).

That necessarily drives a big focus on price.

"The market structure is fundamentally built on layers of intermediaries and settlement of both securities and payments happen on a delayed net settlement basis. By contrast in crypto, the markets are decentralized, no layers of intermediaries, settlement happens on a real time gross settlement basis..."

That is, the size of the population at which the welfare/wealth of the median individual is maximized.

Given that, as you say, prime land, prime housing, prime infrastructure, prime tourist destinations don't easily scale, yet more people enable better technologies/more efficient production of other consumer goods and services.

Have too few people (in the extreme - a dozen), and you cannot have many nice things - not enough people to create nice art, build houses and cars and computers. Have too many (in the extreme - 100 billion), and there is too much competition for the same houses and tourist spots and what not.

There are quite a few fields you could at least slash in half overnight too. Bureaucracy is one: here (small European country) we have way too many managers and people that are only there to move boxes around and cause communication overhead to explode, offering practically no benefit whatsoever.

I look back at things you could buy 30,40,50 years ago, much of it sucks and doesn’t compare to what you find today. Back then you didn’t need much money because there wasn’t much to buy. I look at the ads and they’re garbage, not engaging at all and doesn’t convince me to want the product. And because people weren’t posting pics of things they purchased to some social media, seeing something cool that I might want to buy usually only happened when going over to a friends house, or seeing a random passerby in the streets. And that meant those people were usually close to your own economic class, so the items weren’t out of your league.

All this is actually starting to make me doubt global warming. The banks certainly never gave a damn about global warming before. Do I think that people in power suddenly became more altruistic over the past few years? No, from my experience, they became much more selfish! The whole timing with Greta Thunberg media hype followed by COVID19 then multi-trillion dollar bailouts followed by talks of 'green new deals' and the great reset (which is actually just a continuation of existing policies; not a reset by any definition of the word) is starting to all look a bit too convenient.

I've seen first hand how money can corrupt everything. So I'm wondering if it is the science which is attracting the money or the money which is attracting the 'science'. All the climate models are oversimplified and phony; it's pseudoscience... They have tens of thousands of different models and each year they cherry-pick the ones which guessed correctly... Then they keep switching to newer models which keeps proving them right claiming that they did so to keep up with technology (of course not because they were running out of correct old models to cherry pick from)... It's a joke.

It's a way to justify why we should all be playing the game of musical chairs instead of the game of 'make more chairs' or even 'make more chairs, but each person should only have one chair'.

It all stinks like corruption. If you really wanted to solve global warming, the best solution would be to limit population growth, you could just give people tax incentives to have fewer children. Could be implemented as UBI: You get less basic income if you have more children. That is a much simpler and fairer solution and doesn't require deceiving billions of people with an epic global monetary ponzi scheme. Also we could get rid of useless bureaucratic jobs which are making the lives of billions of people miserable.

You just need a handful of people to independently see a few opportunities to profit from different activities (which are related in non-obvious ways) and together they can effect great malice without any single individual being aware of their collective malice.

The Upton Sinclair principle ensures that the perpetrators of malice are not aware of it: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Only the victims of malice can see it as such, the perpetrators are the last to see it.

Just wanted to add that the track record of predictions about the environment doesn‘t shine a bright light on the (popular) science in the ways you mentioned. Just have a look at the club of rome report. When a part of science gets overly politicised you should get wary.