Time Preference

Some true plebs won’t sell at all, knowing their bitcoin is more valuable than any material thing they could buy with it. Providing generational wealth in a scarce asset that will gain value over time.

**But what is time preference?**Simply put, it’s refers to the value people place on consuming a good sooner or later. High-time preference is the inclination towards immediate gratification. Low Time Preference is the inclination to delay reward, and to place more value in consumption of things later on in life or at all. Many behavioural psychologists and self-help guru’s advocate for low time preference thinking to help plan for the future, promote consistency, mental clarity, stability and order – slower in execution but greater in quality, the antithesis of impulsiveness, overconsumption and chaos. A person with low time preference thinking is usually as humble as he is consistent and unwavering, very much aligned with the bitcoiner mindset of stay humble, stack sats. Along this line of thinking, we can identify a distinct difference in the mindsets of bitcoiners and shitcoiners.

**Nearly all altcoins lack the staying power of bitcoin.**Peaking in value over the course of a bull market, these tokens disappear into obscurity with crypto winter, and those that were previously happily throwing their money around the crypto casino, pick up their empty bags and vow to never invest in crypto again. Due to the short shelf-life of these projects, profiting requires very short-term, high time preference thinking and impeccable timing, to sell at a high enough price while there’s still suckers on the other side of the trade. Most will miss this fleeting window. Altcoins also bear the risks presented through centralisation — founders and early investors often hold disproportionate slices of the supply pie and could dump the price in seconds through co-ordinated selling. Or become corrupted or co-opted by powerful entities, leaving token holders nervously hovering over the sell button. All in all an unhealthy state of being by anyone’s reckoning.

**Bitcoin on the other hand, rewards low time preference thinking.**A bitcoiner can stack sats and self-custody, safe in the knowledge that bitcoin does not have any controlling entities. A person who holds 100 bitcoin has as much authority over the network as a person with half of one. There’s no active founder* no single human point of failure who can become corrupted by forces around them or their own greed. With the supply cap and difficulty adjustment baked into the code, ensuring non inflationary issuance and scarcity, Bitcoin crucially has value over time. Being a rock-steady protocol, rather than a high performance fad, a foundational tool that other things can and will be built on, ensures bitcoin will become a multi-generational truly low time-preference technology.