Introducing the "mid-time preference" person

In bitcoin we're used to the ideas of "high time preference" and "low time preference" personalities.

The high time preference person is someone who is more concerned with the needs of the present moment. This can be by choice for someone who simply prefers instant gratification, but it can also be a result of circumstance.

The low time preference person is someone who places more emphasis on future needs and who has the luxury of being able to delay gratification.

What's interesting is that it's entirely possible for someone to have a low time preference mindset but who is limited by circumstance to acting in a high time preference manner. There are folks who simply don't have the luxury of being able to delay gratification for a number of reasons. Maybe they are currently stuck in a low-income situation where their obligations meet their income levels exactly. Or maybe they're in a situation where viable mechanisms for savings simply aren't available. We often see this in places like disadvantaged communities that have poor access to banking services where persons have to rely heavily on cash for day-to-day activities.

For these folks, the challenge is either getting access to opportunities to improve their earning potential, or access to facilities/technologies to allow them to save, or a combination of the two. Where these are solved, we start to see folks being able to get off a high time preference way of operating, and to start adopting more low time preference habits and behaviours. An interesting example of this are communities like El Zonte in El Salvador that have been supported by initiatives like the Bitcoin Beach project.

Folks like these find themselves in an interesting position where they have begun to save and delay gratification, but they still might have obligations to meet from their current savings. They have the luxury of not having to spend immediately, but they still have the restriction where they will have to spend some portion of their savings at some point. They have to spend, but they can choose when to spend.

This type of behaviour sits between high and low time preference behaviours. It almost represents someone who is on the journey of readjusting high time preference activities to be more in line with a low time preference mindset.

It can maybe be described as a mid time preference approach to dealing with their finances and obligations.

Existing tools for high/low time preference behaviour

The bitcoin landscape has gotten to the point where there are now tools to support both high and low time preference ways of managing finances.

For the low time preference folks, there are tools to support long-term saving like hardware wallets and multisig schemes. These tools are geared towards folks battening down for the long hodl.

For high time preference folks, there are new tools like stablesats that help folks weather the day-to-day volatility of bitcoin to meet their near-term obligations.

But what about mid time preference folks? Who's building for them?

Imagining the tools for mid time preference behaviour

What are the needs of someone who is mid time preference? For someone like this, their focus would be on being able to maximize their existing savings to escape the rat race of using all income to meet obligations. They may still need to spend savings occasionally, but they would ideally like to know when the best time is to spend, and when the best time is to top up their savings with idle income.

These folks have an entirely different set of needs, and they represent an interesting new subset of bitcoin users to build and design for.

How do we meet their needs?...