Nat Cole distinguishes Spotify's closed-loop 'ecosystem' from a 'new music economy' built on permissionless, direct participant interaction.
Cole's 'New Music Economy' vision uses Bitcoin's settlement layer to give artists economic access without platform permission.
Modern value-for-value tech revives the Napster-era peer-to-peer model, but replaces BitTorrent with instant Lightning Network micropayments.
The bottleneck for Bitcoin-backed music is curation, not tech, requiring a fan base and digital 'radio' networks to surface quality.
Apps like Wave Lake and Fountain have proven the concept, but a killer app with Spotify-level UX is still needed for mainstream adoption.
Aaron of Essex notes the supply side is ready, with protocols built and artists across genres uploading tracks to permissionless platforms.
Cole argues the 'New Music Economy' term distances the movement from the reputational baggage of 'crypto' and 'NFTs.'
Kent Halliburton argues the shift from producing to consuming food and money has cost us sovereignty.
Early Bitcoin acquisition required running software and contributing energy, forging coins through production.
Halliburton says the community split into 'purchasers' and 'producers' when buying Bitcoin became easier than mining it.
Halliburton describes the mining side as 'hashpunk' and the decentralized ledger side as 'cypherpunk'.
With electricity, hardware, and internet, you can generate sats with a decentralized money printer, says Halliburton.
Halliburton sees solar power and Bitcoin mining as structurally similar, decentralized, hardware-driven industries.
Both solar and mining rely on hardware from China and are constrained by energy network realities.
The first rooftop solar panels in the 1970s were sold to off-grid cannabis growers, making sovereignty the core feature.
Falling battery costs are making true energy sovereignty possible again, providing a model for mining.
Halliburton views Bitcoin mining as a 'zero to one' innovation enabling a full exit from the fiat system.
Solar makes sense to Halliburton because it's the only way to make electricity without moving anything.
Halliburton finds the politicization and tribalism around solar a distraction from the sovereignty it provides.
A community that produces its own money holds a different kind of power than one that merely accumulates it.