What’s The Deal With Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a subversive protest against a corrupt financial system that’s wrapped in the veneer of a get-rich-quick scheme.
What is Bitcoin?
The world’s first public digital payments infrastructure. By public, I mean available to all, and not owned by any single entity. Other examples of public infrastructure include email and the internet. It lets you send and receive value to and from anywhere in the world, using nothing more than an internet connection. It works without the need to trust a middle man. The first globally accessible public money. Is it perfect? No. Neither was email when it was invented in 1972. It's not always a stable store of value. It's not yet always to use. But I believe it will be as significant for freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing as the internet.
Bitcoin and Government TLDR:
Governments aren’t willing to live within their means - when politicians are faced with the hard long road of reducing spending for the sake of tomorrow, or keeping their job and making people's lives easier for the sake of today, they will always choose the latter. Eventually, they will default on their debt and the shit will hit the fan. Bitcoin is a potential solution to this problem.
Bitcoin and Government:
The US abandoned the gold standard in the 70s, leading to excessive money printing, an ever-expanding $32 trillion debt (as of this writing), and an inevitable default - as individuals prioritize immediate ease over long-term fiscal responsibility.
This necessitates a decentralized, global, non-governmental, internet-based currency that combats central bank interference and functions as a digital reserve asset, particularly valuable in developing countries plagued by corrupt authoritarian regimes.
Speaking of corrupt regimes - almost everyone that’s likely reading this is living in a place of financial privilege (dollar, euro, pound, yen, etc.), but there are billions without that privilege. Bitcoin is a potential answer to places in broken financial systems - providing a solution to exorbitant cross-border transfer fees, lack of central control, transparency through open ledgers, and instant transaction speed.
This ultimately renders Bitcoin as one of the safest investments over the next decade, when considering factors like inflation, adoption rates, and expected value growth, and the late-stage debt cycle we are arguably currently in.
You’re saying we need to spend less money?
But don’t we need to pay our teachers more? Yes and yes.
Where does all our money go when we pay our taxes? One place, is the military industrial complex - more on that coming soon in a separate post, but wars are funded by printing money. If we someday switch to a bitcoin standard, it will reduce war, because bitcoin makes war unaffordable, because money cannot be manipulated and printed.
Do we really need an internet-based global currency?
Maybe not, no. But we do live in an inter-connected globalized society, with over 160 different currencies. When those currencies were created the internet didn’t exist. Now it does. Bitcoin came as fast as it could have. Even with wealthy countries like Norway - if I go around the US trying to pay with Norwegian dollars, no one is going to take it. Bitcoin fixes this (eventually).
What makes me confident that bitcoin will go up over time?
Put simply, math. Why do home prices rise, year after year, decade after decade?
It's because the supply of fiat currency increases, exponentially, decade after decade.
The richest people in America back in the late 1800s were millionaires, then in the mid-to-late 1900s the richest people were billionaires, and soon, probably in the next 20 years, the richest people will be trillionaires. That's not because the trillionaires are literally providing a million times more value to society. But, the value of the US dollar has also depreciated by about 100x since the mid 1900s.
So... it's not that Bitcoin's value will necessarily grow, per se, but rather that the value of the US dollar will continue to depreciate, and scarce assets like gold, real estate, and bitcoin will retain their purchasing power, so the value of these scarce assets will rise when measured in that depreciating dollar.
In other words, the price of BTC in USD terms has no limit, because USD devalues over time, and BTC amounts are limited to 21million.
As long as BTC holds it properties it will rise against fiat in the long run.
Money vs Currency
We think of cash as money but really it's debt.
"Money" is an asset that exists in the absence of a liability. The only thing that has done that in the last 5,000 years is gold. Ultimately the only thing that is money is gold. All of the other stuff that we think of as money is currency.
Currencies ultimately devalue and inflate away.
Out of the 775 currencies that have existed, 3/4 of them no longer exist. The same thing is happening in real time to the dollar.
The absolute certainty that bitcoin will succees lies in the absolute inadequacy of any alternative.
Is Bitcoin a good investment?
That’s up to you to decide - it wasn’t really started as an investment vehicle, and in many places around the world it’s used more as a currency than an asset. But if you want to look at it as an investment, which I’d suggest you consider, then I’d recommend you zoom out and look at the price on a logarithmic scale like this one here. When should you buy? How much should you buy? What if the market is up? What if it’s down? The answer is this: DCA a consistent amount that you’re comfortable with (and able to lose).
I heard that bitcoin is dead. Is that true?
Bitcoin has famously been proclaimed dead every single year since 2010.
Is Bitcoin a currency or a store of value?
Depends on which country you live in (i.e. in the West = store of value, developing world = currency).
Is Bitcoin crypto?
No.
Is Bitcoin a scam?
Bitcoin the protocol is not a scam.
Some crypto currencies are scams.
Just like some people try and scam you out of US dollars, some will try and scam you via Bitcoin.
What if I have more questions?
Sure, you can email me or chat with an AI called ChatBTC to learn more about bitcoin.