Seems to me that the fact that something requires stacks of books and hours of videos to explain, is a sign that it isn't ready for prime time, and may never be. It's just way too geeky and complicated.
Nobody ever had to explain cash or gold to me, they were concepts one could grasp immediately.
I hear you, but I'll make this point: having worked in the bond markets on Wall Street, I wouldn't trust 5% fo the people at the highest levels of finance to properly explain how the monetary system really works. Think on that a bit.
Now, how about the general population?
How many high school kids understand the student loans they might take out?
How many...we could go on for a while.
There are a few important things for people to understand:
* The money supply has been largely digital for decades now.
* Hard scarcity is the key to currency value. The censorship resistance and cryptographic protection just mean that people remain in control of their money.
There. That's the simple list.
Want to rise above slavery to the financial oligarchs? Learn finance. I'm here to help. I wish I had more time for it.
Bitcoin itself is as simple as gold and in many ways, better.
There's a limited supply of Bitcoin. It's not controlled by any central government or authority.
It can be sent to from anyone to anyone. The only requirements are electricity, an internet connection (or even a data wire, if in person) and the receiving wallet address.
The above requirements are essentially true of all crypto assets.
It can be complicated to explain the details of the technology, functional uses, etc, but explaining how modern monetary/economic policy works is at least as complicated if you start digging.
*Edit to add: One incredibly important feature of crypto assets is no one can take it from your wallet unless you give access. That's the complete opposite of the vast majority of currencies and assets.
The way I see it, few people will just trust something they don't understand. While it's certainly possible to get deep into the weeds on monetary theory, the practical aspects of securing and using cash and gold for one's everyday transactions are immediately understandable, while those of securing and using a Bitcoin wallet are not.
Some things are easy to understand. The government can freeze your money, they can restrict who you send it to, they can penalize you for using it to support your free speech rights (ask the Canadian truckers,) they can tax it to whatever extent they want, they can arbitrarily tell you that you can't own it or use it (gold), they can debase it by printing whatever amount they want, thereby stealing your wealth, and when push comes to shove, they can shut down whole economies and nations just because they feel like it.
Argue against BTC all you want, and there are many good arguments, but not learning why it is a viable option that could resolve a lot of problems is a poor excuse.
Please, friend, don't take offense, I mean none. But if your argument is that BTC is too hard to understand, that applies to everything related to finance, including stocks, bonds, ETFs, derivatives, mortgages, mortgage backed securities, annuities, pension funds, universal life insurance funds, etc, etc, etc. Still, they form the entire basis of our financial system and everyone just accepts them because, well, foolishly, they just trust that they are what they say they are. Honestly, they are all untrustworthy, they can all collapse, they are all reliant on the "full faith and credit" of a government that is $31 TRILLION underwater in promises.
There are few option. Gold is an asset, it is not backed by any promise or debt. Silver and maybe copper are the same. BTC is a digital version of that. You can argue what you want, but arguing that it's too hard is manifestly shortsighted.
I agree with everything you wrote there about what the State can do to money and to the people who use it.
What I question is the current practicality, for ordinary people, of using Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. Heck, it's hard enough to get "normal people" to use antivirus software and to keep it up to date; how can we expect them to properly maintain a Bitcoin wallet and to keep it safe? The process sorely needs to be made both easy and simple enough to be used safely by our neighbors down the street.
When they shut off the Internet, those of us with durable goods can barter. Cryptocurrency hoarders will be out of luck.
In practice, you can't pay for much of anything in BTC without converting it to fiat first. It's not especially private, either, unless you go to extra lengths to obfuscate your transactions.
I understand the technology behind it, and I am deeply unimpressed. It's a fad at best. For most people, it's just a scam.
Who is "they" who have control over the whole internet?
"I understand the technology behind it"
Hrm. The deepest Bitcoiners I know are constantly learning. I've never encountered a deeper topic. I recommend being humbled by the topic and by economics in general and technology in general. Deciding that you have mastered it all (which should require some dynamite writing!) seems like a sure way to miss the changes in the world. People said things like this about every new major technology.
It does not require any real work at all to own bitcoin. Just download an app on your phone, have someone with bitcoin scan your QR code and send you bitcoin. Or download the app of an exchange, verify and buy bitcoin (just like any other banking app).
However, if you want to understand how *truly revolutionary* this thing is, you of course have to put in some work to understand how it works and how it fixes most of todays issues related to inflation, corruption and abuse of power.
I have been buying bitcoin for the past year. I have been using DCA approach, but I made some bigger buys -- I thought it was going to continue to rise. I am down over 40%. No more big buys, just to continue to DCA. I will be a HODler. I just don't know how this is going to buy food!! or how to spend it. I have been using SWAN Bitcoin for DCA purchases. Is this a good approach for DCA purchases?
Don't expect a reply from Mathew on this. He's much deeper in the hole than you are. I think he's blinded by his idealism and all the majestic theory. Read his other articles: it's all pie in the sky.
You can't buy food with crypto. You can't pay your rent with crypto. It's all speculation and ideology and theory. Bitcoin in particular has lost close to 2/3 of its peak value, and continues to drop: and this is during historically high dollar inflation. Most of the other hopeful fad-coins from 5 years ago have lost even more. Most of them are technologically superior too: as a distributed information system design, BTC is... pretty cringe. That doesn't matter much. The SWIFT systems we actually use for processing payments are an eldrich horror. Almost anything would be better if we could start fresh. We can't.
Finance is a very old and very powerful system of social control. Finance is the invisible government. Bitcoin will not overthrow it. Sorry.
"he's blinded by his idealism and all the majestic theory"
That's quite a conclusion on little warrant.
"You can't buy food with crypto. You can't pay your rent with crypto."
Of course you can. I know people who do.
"Bitcoin in particular has lost close to 2/3 of its peak value"
So has every network in history while it was inflating. Have you ever looked at Facebook's pre-public valuations? If you take similar points on Bitcoin's price chart, I bet you can't tell the difference.
"Finance is a very old and very powerful system of social control. Finance is the invisible government. Bitcoin will not overthrow it. Sorry."
The financial world is in full on collapse. No industry in the history of the world has shed so many high paying jobs in a five year span. The Treasury Department has to back the entire world's repo markets for them to function.
It's great that you have alternative views, but it's better to focus on warrants than conclusions---particularly when shifting to write in personal combat mode (which isn't necessary for the discussion at all).
Of course, if you're willing to shape your life around it, you can probably buy food and pay rent with cowrie shells. I think you might have missed my point there.
My warrant is having read all your Bitcoin Wars articles. I find them long on theory and short on evidence. But that's just me. Certainly, compared to some of the intro material circulating on the topic, especially a couple years back, they are restrained and well-informed. (Yes, it's a back-handed compliment. I think you can handle it!)
Your comparison of Bitcoin to Facebook is quite interesting, and deserves a longer response than I have time for... but I'd love to see this analogy taken to some depth. Alternative network comparisons would also be prudent, given what we both know about Facebook's origins. Just to be clear, I'd love to see Bitcoin succeed, and all your HODLing pay off so you can buy that 300-acre ranch or whatever. I'm just not expecting that outcome.
I'd argue that finance is in an engineered (or controlled) collapse, and that its eventual rebirth as crypto doesn't logically follow at all. I sure hope we don't get CBDCs, but I think it's likely that we'll just end up with new fiat. Have you read David Graeber's book "Debt: the first 5000 years"? Recommended.
Thanks for the reply. After some of our previous exchanges, I was half-expecting to get cancelled. This is much nicer.
Have you looked what‘s happening to bonds right now? Pension funds are cratering, already need to be bailed out, even Blackrock UK! Given that your pension is probably going broke right now, bitcoin has been holding up excellent these past months.
For ways to spending bitcoin, I recommend https://btcmap.org/ which maps thousands points of acceptance worldwide. Also, just ask in restaurants, farmers markets, etc. if they accept bitcoin. Some probably will!
I am thinking that at this moment of just accumulating more bitcoin. I generally spend cash at farmers market. But I will inquire some of the vendors I use. I am beginning not to trust banks. What intrigues me about bitcoin is have access to currency that they can’t touch.
Well... BTC is cheaper now, in dollars, than it's been since late 2020.
If you want to buy a bag of crisp fall apples, and the farmer at the stall says something to the effect of "Sure, I'll take Bitcoin -- that's five dollars worth plus a five percent transaction fee" then you may as well have used Venmo or CashApp or whatever. I think you can trust these folks better than you can trust Mt. Gox (or their ilk).
I recommend shopping around for a nice local credit union.
Folks, if your are genuine "beginners" in this space, do yourselves a solid. Sure, absorb the boosterism being peddled here. Understand what's being claimed. But for goodness sake, don't stop there: think critically, and seek out good-faith criticisms of cryptocurrency. Understand equally well the best arguments against it before you hitch your wagon to this shooting star.
It is certainly good to continue doing your own research. Without a doubt. In fact, the degree to which Bitcoin is strong is how it can solve critiques and attacks along the way. It needs to be beat on!
And there may yet develop a better solution.
This is just part of my bimonthly drip of information for beginners. It would take a thousand page effort to open the door. But that makes the door look scarier than it ought to.
Have you seen Theory of Bitcoin on Youtube by Ryan X. Charles and Craig S. Wright?
Going back to the original Bitcoin protocol rather than duct tape solutions like LN etc. Especially like the 2015 panel with Nick Szabo on Turing completeness in Bitcoinscript, something considered alien at the time, but been proven several times by CS phds. Clemens Lay and Xiaohui Lui.
Currently an ongoing trial in Oslo, Norway, regarding defamation for Faketoshi campaigns. The drama is not that interesting, but going back to origins is.
You could do a debunk the funk with the Bitcoin historian Kurt Wuckert jr if that would be of any interest.
Thank you for the vids. Saved. Im a newbie. Gotta nonviolently noncompliantly decentralize. ; ) Go local too! catherine austin fitts solarireport.com
Newbies rock
Seems to me that the fact that something requires stacks of books and hours of videos to explain, is a sign that it isn't ready for prime time, and may never be. It's just way too geeky and complicated.
Nobody ever had to explain cash or gold to me, they were concepts one could grasp immediately.
I hear you, but I'll make this point: having worked in the bond markets on Wall Street, I wouldn't trust 5% fo the people at the highest levels of finance to properly explain how the monetary system really works. Think on that a bit.
Now, how about the general population?
How many high school kids understand the student loans they might take out?
How many...we could go on for a while.
There are a few important things for people to understand:
* The money supply has been largely digital for decades now.
* Hard scarcity is the key to currency value. The censorship resistance and cryptographic protection just mean that people remain in control of their money.
There. That's the simple list.
Want to rise above slavery to the financial oligarchs? Learn finance. I'm here to help. I wish I had more time for it.
Bitcoin itself is as simple as gold and in many ways, better.
There's a limited supply of Bitcoin. It's not controlled by any central government or authority.
It can be sent to from anyone to anyone. The only requirements are electricity, an internet connection (or even a data wire, if in person) and the receiving wallet address.
The above requirements are essentially true of all crypto assets.
It can be complicated to explain the details of the technology, functional uses, etc, but explaining how modern monetary/economic policy works is at least as complicated if you start digging.
*Edit to add: One incredibly important feature of crypto assets is no one can take it from your wallet unless you give access. That's the complete opposite of the vast majority of currencies and assets.
The way I see it, few people will just trust something they don't understand. While it's certainly possible to get deep into the weeds on monetary theory, the practical aspects of securing and using cash and gold for one's everyday transactions are immediately understandable, while those of securing and using a Bitcoin wallet are not.
Some things are easy to understand. The government can freeze your money, they can restrict who you send it to, they can penalize you for using it to support your free speech rights (ask the Canadian truckers,) they can tax it to whatever extent they want, they can arbitrarily tell you that you can't own it or use it (gold), they can debase it by printing whatever amount they want, thereby stealing your wealth, and when push comes to shove, they can shut down whole economies and nations just because they feel like it.
Argue against BTC all you want, and there are many good arguments, but not learning why it is a viable option that could resolve a lot of problems is a poor excuse.
Please, friend, don't take offense, I mean none. But if your argument is that BTC is too hard to understand, that applies to everything related to finance, including stocks, bonds, ETFs, derivatives, mortgages, mortgage backed securities, annuities, pension funds, universal life insurance funds, etc, etc, etc. Still, they form the entire basis of our financial system and everyone just accepts them because, well, foolishly, they just trust that they are what they say they are. Honestly, they are all untrustworthy, they can all collapse, they are all reliant on the "full faith and credit" of a government that is $31 TRILLION underwater in promises.
There are few option. Gold is an asset, it is not backed by any promise or debt. Silver and maybe copper are the same. BTC is a digital version of that. You can argue what you want, but arguing that it's too hard is manifestly shortsighted.
I agree with everything you wrote there about what the State can do to money and to the people who use it.
What I question is the current practicality, for ordinary people, of using Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. Heck, it's hard enough to get "normal people" to use antivirus software and to keep it up to date; how can we expect them to properly maintain a Bitcoin wallet and to keep it safe? The process sorely needs to be made both easy and simple enough to be used safely by our neighbors down the street.
When they shut off the Internet, those of us with durable goods can barter. Cryptocurrency hoarders will be out of luck.
In practice, you can't pay for much of anything in BTC without converting it to fiat first. It's not especially private, either, unless you go to extra lengths to obfuscate your transactions.
I understand the technology behind it, and I am deeply unimpressed. It's a fad at best. For most people, it's just a scam.
"When they shut off the Internet"
Who is "they" who have control over the whole internet?
"I understand the technology behind it"
Hrm. The deepest Bitcoiners I know are constantly learning. I've never encountered a deeper topic. I recommend being humbled by the topic and by economics in general and technology in general. Deciding that you have mastered it all (which should require some dynamite writing!) seems like a sure way to miss the changes in the world. People said things like this about every new major technology.
It does not require any real work at all to own bitcoin. Just download an app on your phone, have someone with bitcoin scan your QR code and send you bitcoin. Or download the app of an exchange, verify and buy bitcoin (just like any other banking app).
However, if you want to understand how *truly revolutionary* this thing is, you of course have to put in some work to understand how it works and how it fixes most of todays issues related to inflation, corruption and abuse of power.
I have been buying bitcoin for the past year. I have been using DCA approach, but I made some bigger buys -- I thought it was going to continue to rise. I am down over 40%. No more big buys, just to continue to DCA. I will be a HODler. I just don't know how this is going to buy food!! or how to spend it. I have been using SWAN Bitcoin for DCA purchases. Is this a good approach for DCA purchases?
Don't expect a reply from Mathew on this. He's much deeper in the hole than you are. I think he's blinded by his idealism and all the majestic theory. Read his other articles: it's all pie in the sky.
You can't buy food with crypto. You can't pay your rent with crypto. It's all speculation and ideology and theory. Bitcoin in particular has lost close to 2/3 of its peak value, and continues to drop: and this is during historically high dollar inflation. Most of the other hopeful fad-coins from 5 years ago have lost even more. Most of them are technologically superior too: as a distributed information system design, BTC is... pretty cringe. That doesn't matter much. The SWIFT systems we actually use for processing payments are an eldrich horror. Almost anything would be better if we could start fresh. We can't.
Finance is a very old and very powerful system of social control. Finance is the invisible government. Bitcoin will not overthrow it. Sorry.
"he's blinded by his idealism and all the majestic theory"
That's quite a conclusion on little warrant.
"You can't buy food with crypto. You can't pay your rent with crypto."
Of course you can. I know people who do.
"Bitcoin in particular has lost close to 2/3 of its peak value"
So has every network in history while it was inflating. Have you ever looked at Facebook's pre-public valuations? If you take similar points on Bitcoin's price chart, I bet you can't tell the difference.
"Finance is a very old and very powerful system of social control. Finance is the invisible government. Bitcoin will not overthrow it. Sorry."
The financial world is in full on collapse. No industry in the history of the world has shed so many high paying jobs in a five year span. The Treasury Department has to back the entire world's repo markets for them to function.
It's great that you have alternative views, but it's better to focus on warrants than conclusions---particularly when shifting to write in personal combat mode (which isn't necessary for the discussion at all).
Of course, if you're willing to shape your life around it, you can probably buy food and pay rent with cowrie shells. I think you might have missed my point there.
My warrant is having read all your Bitcoin Wars articles. I find them long on theory and short on evidence. But that's just me. Certainly, compared to some of the intro material circulating on the topic, especially a couple years back, they are restrained and well-informed. (Yes, it's a back-handed compliment. I think you can handle it!)
Your comparison of Bitcoin to Facebook is quite interesting, and deserves a longer response than I have time for... but I'd love to see this analogy taken to some depth. Alternative network comparisons would also be prudent, given what we both know about Facebook's origins. Just to be clear, I'd love to see Bitcoin succeed, and all your HODLing pay off so you can buy that 300-acre ranch or whatever. I'm just not expecting that outcome.
I'd argue that finance is in an engineered (or controlled) collapse, and that its eventual rebirth as crypto doesn't logically follow at all. I sure hope we don't get CBDCs, but I think it's likely that we'll just end up with new fiat. Have you read David Graeber's book "Debt: the first 5000 years"? Recommended.
Thanks for the reply. After some of our previous exchanges, I was half-expecting to get cancelled. This is much nicer.
Have you looked what‘s happening to bonds right now? Pension funds are cratering, already need to be bailed out, even Blackrock UK! Given that your pension is probably going broke right now, bitcoin has been holding up excellent these past months.
For ways to spending bitcoin, I recommend https://btcmap.org/ which maps thousands points of acceptance worldwide. Also, just ask in restaurants, farmers markets, etc. if they accept bitcoin. Some probably will!
Also, payment processor NCR is working on a collaboration with Strike which should bring bitcoin payments to hundreds of thousands of merchants in the US, like Aldi, Starbucks or McDonald‘s (but the release date for this is still unclear). https://www.pymnts.com/blockchain/bitcoin/2022/bringing-bitcoin-firmly-into-payments-strike-partners-with-ncr-shopify-blackhawk/
I am thinking that at this moment of just accumulating more bitcoin. I generally spend cash at farmers market. But I will inquire some of the vendors I use. I am beginning not to trust banks. What intrigues me about bitcoin is have access to currency that they can’t touch.
Well... BTC is cheaper now, in dollars, than it's been since late 2020.
If you want to buy a bag of crisp fall apples, and the farmer at the stall says something to the effect of "Sure, I'll take Bitcoin -- that's five dollars worth plus a five percent transaction fee" then you may as well have used Venmo or CashApp or whatever. I think you can trust these folks better than you can trust Mt. Gox (or their ilk).
I recommend shopping around for a nice local credit union.
Folks, if your are genuine "beginners" in this space, do yourselves a solid. Sure, absorb the boosterism being peddled here. Understand what's being claimed. But for goodness sake, don't stop there: think critically, and seek out good-faith criticisms of cryptocurrency. Understand equally well the best arguments against it before you hitch your wagon to this shooting star.
(No, I won't link to any. Do it yourself.)
It is certainly good to continue doing your own research. Without a doubt. In fact, the degree to which Bitcoin is strong is how it can solve critiques and attacks along the way. It needs to be beat on!
And there may yet develop a better solution.
This is just part of my bimonthly drip of information for beginners. It would take a thousand page effort to open the door. But that makes the door look scarier than it ought to.
Have you seen Theory of Bitcoin on Youtube by Ryan X. Charles and Craig S. Wright?
Going back to the original Bitcoin protocol rather than duct tape solutions like LN etc. Especially like the 2015 panel with Nick Szabo on Turing completeness in Bitcoinscript, something considered alien at the time, but been proven several times by CS phds. Clemens Lay and Xiaohui Lui.
Currently an ongoing trial in Oslo, Norway, regarding defamation for Faketoshi campaigns. The drama is not that interesting, but going back to origins is.
You could do a debunk the funk with the Bitcoin historian Kurt Wuckert jr if that would be of any interest.
There's nothing wrong with becoming wealthy by one's creativity and labor.
The key variable is the disgusting behavior of destroying the ground in front of all peaceful rivals.