In order to understand what bitcoin is, you have to understand what money is.
Money is a technology to move value across space and time. Money stores your time and energy to be used in the future.
For example you can build cabinets and trade that for a day at a spa.
Money allows for complex exchange, trade specialization, and is fundamental for civilizations with advanced economies.
Money is in fact one of the oldest inventions of civilization itself, it even predates writing. In fact the first forms of writing were credit spreadsheets, of who owed what to whom. Money was so important in society we had to invent writing to keep track of it! it’s such a primal tool that we have even taught animals how to use it.
And it’s so ubiquitous that many of us take it for granted.
Money is by far the most important good in an economy. It’s half of every single transaction. Not only is it extremely important on an individual level, but it’s one of the fundamental technologies in the development and sustainability of society itself.
Everyone intuitively understands that it’s always about the money. Always has been.
Money is a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account. You save dollars in your wallet to buy something for dollars which has it’s price listed in dollars.
This definition is good for telling us which things are used as money but money is also a spectrum. It’s location dependent, just because you can’t buy a soda in Pittsburg with Mexican pesos doesn’t mean they aren’t money. And money sometimes specializes in one of the three functions (think of gold as a store of value and Pesos as a medium of exchange).
There are two types of money – money can either be physical, like a coin, seashell, salt, cigarette, necklace bead, or paper bill. Or it can be a list of transactions and debts owed like a bank account, clay tablet, or credit card.
On the internet, money HAS to be information, since it’s the informational realm, and therefore money has to be a ledger.
The very nature of information is that it can be copied indefinitely, and before bitcoin there was no way to limit someone from just counterfeiting digital money without repercussion.
Sure you could trust a 3rd party like a bank or a corporation to keep track of your digital money, but debasement/counterfeiting of money has always been commonplace…and it’s the reason bitcoin was invented in the first place.
The true innovation of bitcoin was inventing a way for digital money from being spent twice in an automated system without human control. Replicating the scarce nature of physical matter within cyberspace.
This makes Bitcoin a form of digital property.
Property where you can build applications because it is programmable. One where you don’t need permission to launch an application. Where there are no gate keepers or barriers to entry, and where ingenuity is financially incentivized, and an open market of ideas will flourish.
Bitcoin is programmable money, with so many use cases we haven’t even thought of yet, due to its open source, permissionless nature, it will inspire innovation at the edges and the free marketplace of ideas will flourish innovation
Bitcoin is commodity money
Bitcoin is designed money
Bitcoin isn’t just any money, it’s the best money ever made
It’s sound money, it’s powerful money, it’s unstoppable money.
It’s a payment tool, like visa, venmo, or paypal. It’s an electronic peer to peer cash system.
It’s bank, but it’s more than that, it’s a banking system.