Is there way to quantify how much of the economy these days is "bullshit" (purely speculative assets), and if we are at peak bullshit now as a percentage of total economic activity?
Unless you see gold as bullshit as well. I think it should now be consensus that Bitcoin isn't acting as a transaction tool, but as a store of value, just like gold. There are pros and cons when comparing it to gold as a store of value. But the main thing that keeps up the "value" of Bitcoin is just the belief that "it is a store of value" itself. As long as people continue to believe this, it doesn't need to have traditional value. This is the same as gold. Bitcoin in this sense is even more pure, because gold still has some industrial and consumer uses, while Bitcoin has zero. This belief may or may not persist in the foreseeable future, but it is what it is now. Thinking this is "bullshit" just doesn't really matter.
I'll add that if gold wasn't so impractical to transfer, store and verify we would most likely still be using it as a currency way more frequently (even in our inflatuonist systems, it would likely be seen as a more sound money).
Bitcoin improves a lot on all of these properties while introducing other properties (open/public network, borderless, public ledger, etc.). Its supply/issuance has also been much more stable than Gold ever was (and ever will be if we're to believe the predictions of giant mines and even future asteroid mining).
The entire economy outside of agriculture and real estate is basically "bullshit", if you really think about it. The ratio of bullshit to everything else seems to increase over time, though, as a general trend. It's probably correlated to technology.
Real estate can be speculative as well. A better way to state that might be "things outside of productive assets and services" are increasingly speculative.
The bright side of this that has me excited is what seems to be a growing sense of optimism about the future, driven by AI entering the public conscious, Space X's "rocket catch" etc. There seems to be a growing belief that the future can and will be better, more so than a decade ago.
For countless millennia, humans didn't need anything more except food, some very basic tools, a place to live, and other humans. You could argue that everything since then is layers and layers of bullshit. Bitcoin is just another one.
Humans did also need fuel(wood mostly). Often this was reasonably easy to get. But still involved labour. As such storage of energy that can be released at will do have value think of coal, oil and gas. These as such are not "bullshit".
Water might be other one. But now that is cheap enough, even with desalination.
I'm arguing the general point is shallow and not useful.
IMO BitCoin is designed to fail as a currency with it's mining costs, and a bad idea as an investment since exchanging it is such a house of cards. Never mind that holding any significant quantity invites dangerous people with wrenches.
Agriculture and real estate would not exist in their current forms without the mammoth apparatus of the entire economy surrounding them. Maybe you mean food and shelter are the only non-bull parts of the economy. Nomadic bands might find them bullshittish. And grain stores require soldiers to guard them, soldiers require weapons, weapons require metallurgy, mining, surveying, transport, etc. Pretty soon there’s a whole lot of something but I don’t know that it’s bullshit. It feels more like layers of increasing abstraction away from the source of the value: energy.
Even with nomads, they had territory they could live in or not live in, based on the existence of other tribes. I was clumping that in with real estate. Even animals do this (for example wolves). And obviously in the feudal system land was a big deal.
And yes technological arms races exist but they are often power games between governments, although in some cases a tribe could become a genocide victim if nobody wants to participate in the military effort. So in that case I agree it's maybe not bullshit, but it depends on the behavior of the neighbors.
Energy is a free source of energy from the sun plus it gets stored for free in various ways (such as vegetation). So that doesn't really have to be factored into the discussion.
