Drunk freshman economics students are smarter than Blockstream devs.

Every British economics student of a certain age should be familiar with the 'little green book'. Introductory Economics by the late GF Stanlake has stood the test of time as the ultimate rudimentary introduction to the dismal science, tatty, bedraggled old editions are passed down the generations at Universities to this day.

Bitcoin at it's foundation is a global economic system, as such one would hope those charting the roadmap for it's future development would have grasped the fundamentals of economics. Unfortunately, one of the most elementary principles taught to heavily inebriated freshman on freshers week, seems to have eluded them...       

Stanlake: Chapter 1, Section 1...

"A large percentage of the human race still lives in very small, self-sufficient peasant communities. These people experience great poverty, but they can provide, on an individual basis, for their own survival. They have a degree of economic independence. If we turn to the inhabitants of New York, London, or any other great metropolitan area we must observe the opposite situation - a high standard of living together with an extreme economic dependence... The richer the nation, the greater is the inability of its citizens to survive unaided and alone. Such people depend, each and every day of their lives, on the efforts and cooperation of many thousands of specialist workers... In the economically developed countries we are rich, not as individuals, but only as members of a complex economic organisation."

The peasant communities described by Stanlake operate under a system of 'subsistence economics', whereby individuals produce their own food, shelter and clothing. Typically such communities are small in scale, and maintain social cohesion through mechanical solidarity (Durkheim), largely as a function of homogeneity and corresponding high levels of social-trust.

In stark contrast, industrialised nations operate under a system of 'division of labour', famously illustrated by Adam Smith, whereby individuals and firms specialize in a narrow field, facilitating enhanced productivity, and fulfilling most of their economic needs through trade. As specialization increases in an economy a new source of social cohesion emerges, organic solidarity the economic inter-dependence between participants.

Both the subsistence and the specialist approach to social organisation, represent trade-offs. In an era of ever accelerating hyper-global-capitalism, living off the grid in small scale Schumacherian social-cooperatives to escape the atomisation and social pathology of contemporary life is an increasing appealing prospect to many. 

Human beings are not insects (despite the best efforts of Silicon Valley) and there is far more to life than economic efficiency.

Bitcoin, as a global network, is the absolute antithesis of a small-scale social cooperative. It's massive, heterogeneous user base could not be further from the close-knit, homogeneous, high-trust community of the peasant commune, and only persists as a function of shared economic incentives.

Every network user running their own tiny node represents the subsistence model of peasant communes. 144 Megabytes of data a day represents economic penury.   

Specialized miners investing in industrial scale inventory and data storage whilst network users focus energy and resources on building applications, infrastructure and commercial enterprises (facilitated by the massive scaling of said specialized miners) represents division of labour. Terrabytes of economic activity a day represents industrialised civilisation. 

If only 1 Meg Greg had read Stanlake.