The truth is, bitcoin doesn’t give a fuck about you. It is software, it operates automatically and asks no human for praise. It already has over a hundred million adopters, is one of the largest assets in the world, and settles trillions of dollars in value annually.
Bitcoin doesn’t need you, and bitcoin doesn’t ask for your approval.
So why should you care at all?
Let me start off by saying my objective here is not to get you to buy bitcoin. I leave investment advice to the finance bros. This is a common misconception — bitcoin’s main purpose isn’t to be a speculative investment. What you have to understand is that it’s not about making money, it’s about fixing money.
Why bitcoin? is more like:
- “Why is bitcoin important?”
- “Why was bitcoin invented?”
- “Why will bitcoin win?”
WARNING: The passages that follow are only for the intellectually curious.
Digital Money is Dangerous
Most bitcoiners would disagree that I start the bitcoin story here — I’m kind of skipping to the best part. But this needs to be said, and in my opinion, said right at the beginning.
I bet you didn’t know this, but bitcoin is by far the most important project in the world for securing our freedoms in an increasingly terrifying digital world.
Digital money is a whole new evolution for how money can be exploited for political ends. Never before in history could you turn off someone’s money at will. The ability to control people’s money — and therefore controlling all of their actions in society — is an ultimate power unique to digital money.
The power to freeze someone’s life savings, to stop a donation to a protest movement, or prevent someone from buying food, is the power to control all of society, forever.
We’re entering a new technological age, one where a few economic elites can have extraordinary power never before dreamed of by dictators of the past. The ever growing bureaucratic state, combined with unlimited debt financing, trillions of data points from surveillance technologies, and AI to process it all — it’s a science fiction nightmare coming to life before our eyes.
Money is a system of control. Those who control money have great power over the people who use it. As a result, kings and governments have historically kept tight control over money, just as they used to keep tight control over religion, and for the same reasons.
— Andreas Antonopoulos
Without monetary freedom and the securing of property rights, there can be no freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, of self-defense, of privacy. Democracy itself is at risk of collapse.
This was actually my personal lightbulb moment which led me to devote my life to bitcoin.
Bitcoin Fixes This
Bitcoin is the encoding of human rights into software. Rights which are enforced and protected for the first time ever, not by humans, but by machine.
Bitcoin is a techno-economic experiment to provide an escape hatch from the monopoly of corruptible centralized money. The separation of money and state. By creating apolitical, transparent, and open-source digital monetary infrastructure, bitcoin protects human freedom in our new digital age.
It’s a defensive technology to fight back against the greatest tyrannical power the world has ever known.
I bet no one has ever told you this, but this is what bitcoin is really all about.
They Invented a Better Money
Ok to kick things off, let me dispel a common myth right off the bat. A lot of people are skeptical of bitcoin because they don’t really understand what it brings to the table.
Bitcoin is the first accounting innovation in over 0 years. The last time there was any big revelation in bookkeeping was double-entry accounting, popularized by the Medici and Florentine banking families, setting off an explosion of wealth and the Renaissance.
Bitcoin is the invention of the decentralized ledger, of full accounting transparency, and of digital scarcity — which in our internet age will result in a similar explosion of prosperity.
What you have to understand is all government money is not sustainable in the least bit. What we’re building is a new global digital money which is completely neutral and can’t be corrupted by human beings. Bitcoin was designed based on the Austrian economic sound money principle. It fixes all the problems with gold — which, by the way, was voluntarily chosen by every society on earth independently of one another for over 5,000 years.
Bitcoin’s monetary properties are designed from the ground up to be superior to all other forms of money. It is extremely portable, perfectly scarce, highly divisible, easily verifiable, durable, fungible, and extraordinarily resistant to censorship. With its 0 coin supply cap, hard coded issuance schedule, and immutable protocol design, bitcoin was created to be the soundest money in history.
Bitcoin is pieces of super-gold flying inside an unstoppable PayPal. It is the best money we ever had.
Sound Money is a Human Right
Everyone deserves the right to save their money in a way that’s protected from seizure and debasement.
It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights.
— Ludwig von Mises
Bitcoin is the result of a fundamental breakthrough in computer science, economics, and cryptographic systems — discovering immutable scarcity. The result of which enables the freedom of humanity from the oppressive monetary exploitation of the state.
Bitcoin is money for our 21st century digital economy. It’s fully programmable and integrated with the internet. It can be transported around the world at the speed of light, completely permissionlessly, and is available to all of humanity. Its monetary policy can’t be captured by elites in any way, shape, or form. It’s a completely neutral third-party technology that was built by an anonymous programmer who left the project as a gift to humanity.
Bitcoin offers immutable private property rights, a savings account, and peer-to-peer money to every person on earth. Money which no one can censor, confiscate, debase, or otherwise steal.
Money is the Bedrock of Society
Everyone intuitively understands this — money runs the world. It’s all about the money. Always has been. If money were to stop functioning, the fabric of society would break down.
Money coordinates practically all economic activity, and economic activity coordinates practically all aspects of life. Food, water, shelter, energy, and all of our supply chains — literally everything that requires human coordination. Money came before writing. The first forms of writing were actually ledgers of who owed what to who. You could make the case that money brought about the invention of writing. That’s how important it is to civilization.
Many civilizations throughout history have crumbled under monetary collapse — hyperinflation, where the value of the currency is quickly destroyed.
Bitcoin is important because it is insurance for the global economy. It’s money that can’t be debased and won’t hyperinflate. It isn’t subject to political whim and it can’t ever be destroyed. In finance terms, you could say bitcoin is a credit default swap on fiat currencies.
The truth is, we are in the largest economic experiment in human history. Never ending deficits, artificially low interest rates, and debt-to-GDP levels soaring. This is the most important problem facing humanity, and no one seems to understand or give a shit.
Bitcoin offers a way out. It’s like Noah’s ark — a parallel economic system that could absorb all of the wealth on the planet and still function as money in case of a global systematic monetary collapse.
Bitcoin Has No Competition
People have been calling bitcoin a bubble since it was worth $30 in 2011. It refuses to die, continuously hitting all time highs. Major international corporations, sovereign nations, and billionaires have bitcoin in their portfolio, and global regulation has only gotten increasingly favorable.
If you’re still ignoring bitcoin or calling it a bubble, maybe it’s finally time to ask why you’ve been proven wrong again and again.
Bitcoin can’t be copied. It is a path-dependent invention in a winner-takes-all environment. Every other money, blockchain, or crypto can be changed by some powerful special interests, and therefore isn’t a trust machine. Bitcoin is the only immutable, unchanging, immortal, and invincible network in the world.
Unlike every other cryptocurrency, there is no central point of failure. Bitcoin has no CEO, no foundation, no team of lawyers, no governance token, no VC-backing, no pre-mine, and no whales able to manipulate the system. No matter how much bitcoin you own, you can’t change the rules, print more, censor, steal, or prevent others from using the network.
Bitcoin’s competition is actual gold, fiat currencies, and CBDCs — all of which are flawed. Gold isn’t easily transferable. Fiat currencies are debased at will. CBDCs are surveillance tools. The world would prefer neutral bitcoin to Chinese CBDC yuan.
It’s a disservice to the genius of Satoshi Nakamoto to conflate Bitcoin’s unique value proposition with the childishness of the crypto industry. We won the culture war — everyone refers to “bitcoin and crypto” now as two separate things.
Bitcoin Solves Several Immense Problems for Civilization
Bitcoin protects property rights for 0 billion people and banks the underprivileged classes of the planet.
It solves financial crises, inflation, and debt slavery. It defends civil rights in a future surveillance state. It solves the shortcomings of gold, returning financial sovereignty to the individual. It puts the spending power of state actors and large corporations in check.
Bitcoin — decentralized money — will be as important and transformative as:
- The printing press (decentralized production of information)
- The separation of church and state (decentralized religion)
- Three-branch republics and federalism (decentralized government)
- The internet itself (decentralized information)
The Manhattan Project for Human Freedom
Just like the Manhattan project to build the atom bomb, some of the brightest minds all around the world have come together to work on this extremely powerful technology. However, instead of an ultimate project for destruction, bitcoin is an ultimate project for freedom.
Thousands of core developers, tens of thousands of node operators, merchants, corporations, investors, software engineers, human rights activists, keyboard warriors, and money nerds have all come together to work on the Bitcoin project.
Bitcoin isn’t just money. It’s an enormous, globally coordinated research and development initiative. An open-source software project aimed at building an unstoppable internet-native monetary system. A tech stack which implements fair, neutral, digital money available for all of humanity. Fighting back against authoritarianism and the encroachment of a digital Orwellian surveillance state.
There’s a lot more to bitcoin than you might realize.
Why You Should Care
Once you study it, once it clicks, once you fall down the rabbit hole, you’ll realize that bitcoin is extremely powerful, extremely unique, and extremely important.
Bitcoin is the best money in history while also being a reinvention of money itself. Its digital, decentralized, global, free-market, and open-source programmable economic infrastructure will obsolete our antiquated fiat-based system. And its platform of inalienable human rights will safeguard liberty and the principles of the enlightenment for all of humanity for generations to come.
To be honest, I don’t think you should be allowed an opinion on bitcoin if you can’t explain what it is, who made it, and why. Our egos are a major barrier preventing us from taking that initial step to study bitcoin.
Either bitcoin succeeds or the human race irrevocably falls into a technocratic dystopia.
The stakes are that high.