67 Comments

This is magnificently important!

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Are you doing okay, Jessica? Your earlier post (now removed) had me concerned. Please make sure you have whatever tools of self-defense are at your disposal (pepper spray at the least) and take every precaution to protect yourself 🤗

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Same here! I had been anxiously waiting to hear an update on the situation.

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I suggest some swear words in Hebrew needed.

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Mar 31, 2022·edited Mar 31, 2022

Jessica! There you are! Many have been worried about you after the “police” article you deleted. I just posted over at Dr Malones about my concern so you may get a phone call!

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I am sooooo happy you are okay!!! :)

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More like this, please!

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Thanks for this intro, Mathew. I’m just getting up to speed myself. Mike Fay was kind enough to prepare this Quick Crypto Crash Course upon my request if anyone’s interested:

https://faybomb.substack.com/p/the-quick-crypto-crash-course

Have you heard about this British fellow who accidentally threw away his hard drive with bitcoin now worth $350 million and has been searching for it ever since? Ouch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MBRgLEXLEE

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I remember this. He was searching on a rubbish tip for the discarded hard drive. But it makes me wonder what happens if I die, how does my executor access my bitcoin wallet without my password etc. this worries me a bit about online banks too, without paperwork, where does the executor start looking?

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Mar 31, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Thank you Mathew! Definitely need the Bitcoin 101 series. More helpful than you know.

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I sadly lost my keys to coin I bought back when it was 300 per coin. I was trying out different wallets. Back then buying Bitcoin was a little tough. You could only buy so much at a time, then only transfer X amount per transaction, per wallet- all manner of rules and not too many wallets. I wonder how much money I lost. It wasn’t THAT much- I certainly recalled the key to the primary wallet. I cashed that out when I thought it was going to crash. Speculation just ain’t my thing. My attention wanders too much.

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Sorry to hear that you lost some Bitcoin.

In your mind, what is the difference between speculation and investment?

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None, in any meaningful sense. I suppose I might have chosen that word with investment being associated (only in my experience) with the lower risk investment options. The “set it and forget it” portfolio options are what have been most recommended to me. BtC was different in that respect.

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Mar 31, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Matthew, I live to read and understand your thorough explanation of bitcoin! Thanks!

But how did you know I keep copies of your essays in my home safe?😳

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Etch them onto gold ingots?

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Mar 31, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Thanks for this. My biggest obstacle in getting people into Bitcoin is their belief that if crypto gets big enough, the government will just take or ban it, leaving us back at square one. Do you have a rebuttal to this argument? My line “ALL governments won’t ban it at once” gets no traction for some reason.

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India banned cryptocurrency. Now they have one of the largest adoption rates in the world. Enforcement is not easy. It also works against a nation to succeed.

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Mar 31, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Mathew, do you have a recommendation for where to purchase bitcoin (i.e. CoinBase, Kraken, somewhere else that you like)? Secondly, thoughts on other cryptos i.e. Ethereum, Solana etc?

Thanks so much for imparting the wisdom!

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Depends on legality where you are. And the conversation gets icky.

Some people sell phone to phone for cash. I've never done that, but I've seen it.

Coinbase is easy, but the fee is large if you don't know how to climb the wall to Coinbase Pro, which is like a different exchange.

Do not use Paypal. You never actually hold the private key (password), so you cannot withdraw it. It's dumb.

Have a cold storage wallet ready to withdraw from an exchange. Simple paper wallet will do. I lost one small paper wallet when my apartment flooded last year (sigh), so don't hold too much on any one wallet. I use a metal wallet for my primary holdings, but have several wallets including a Trezor.

Keep reading and asking various people questions.

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A great way to experience the true power of Bitcoin is to use a paymails like moneybutton or handcash, where you can send fractions of a cent. Try that with any of the other proof of work blockchains and you will be disappointed. Proof of stake is not worth mentioning due to its centralisation (despite what all anarchonuts claim)

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At some point, I will write an article on simple first steps in spending.

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Mar 31, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Awesome! You have done what few others are willing to do! Now I finally have an intro to send to my 77 yr. old father, who is warming up to Bitcoin after I introduced it over a year ago. The biggest barrier to getting his generation to adopt crypto is the lack of precise easy to conceptualize explanations. Excellent Matthew! Thank You!

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“They know not what they doodoo” 😂 I’m a simple person.

Last Monday I held two zoom sessions on “Entry Into Bitcoin Basics: from a noob to a noob” for some folks who didn’t know where to start. Interest is ramping up as some are seeing the writing on the wall with fiat, but the onboarding still seems to be the biggest hurdle.

I shared the bitcoin guide you wrote last year with them after the session was over as one of the resources to dig into. And since Monday, I’ve had enough interest from folks who missed it but had heard about the session that I’m planning another one. I will be using your house lock/key metaphor. It’s much better than the “it’s like your email (public key) and your password (private key)” that I was using.

Cheers.

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It's good for people to see multiple metaphores, too.

"from a noob to a noob" is often the best way for many to learn.

Cheers.

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Here is a neophyte question. At what point in the process are you likely to pay fees? Suppose one converts dollars into bitcoin, and sometime later bitcoin into dollars, can one expect to lose money to fees by those managing the tech in any capacity? Obviously this is not like using a bank insofar as no bankers own a bitcoin bank or the currency, so I imagine fees would be minimal compared?

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I may write up an article showing the step-by-step of a transaction one day, though you can probably find some of that elsewhere.

The basics of a transaction are easier than it sounds, just like most things in Bitcoinland. But the wallet software used can make that easier or ickier to a first time user. Developers are working on various UIs to make it easier without sacrificing security.

A fee is paid whenever a BTC is sent (as John points out, this pays the miners). There is something else to worry about for BTC-to-USD or vice versa, which is taxation. That's a pain in the ass, currently. If you buy 0.01 BTC for $430 ($43k price per BTC) then sell it at $470 ($47k per BTC), you pay tax on the $40 profit...but even worse, you're expected to keep track of that if you spend the 0.01 BTC at an online store.

Better to just hold BTC except for exceptional expenses or possibly "practice". I have transacted with BTC a scarce few times, mostly several years ago when I was learning the basics.

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Fees are paid for each transaction. They're what entices a miner to accept your transaction into his block. If you set a low fee, you can expect to wait days, sometimes weeks or months, to see your Bitcoin move to where you sent it. Current fees are at https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/, in satoshis per byte. Since a typical transaction is about (from memory here) 300 bytes, if you set 3 satoshis as the fee, that's roughly 1000 satoshis, or 1/100000 of a bitcoin (may be off by an order of magnitude here but I don't think so), so about 50 cents. And you'll probably have to wait a while to get it. Set a fee of 10 satoshis and it should go through on the next block or two, 10 to 20 minutes.

I think Rich is talking about markup on Bisq. It's not the same as the transaction fee.

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At the moment yes. The fees are very minimal in the cents in Fiat rather than $ or £. Albeit there are plenty of offers on Bisq for 10% or more above the prevailing rate.

I suspect they'll go higher. How much of the bitcoins out there do Binance own for example? Once adopted widely (if that happens) expect the normal shenanigans.

This time is an opportunity. The elites have dropped their shields to scoop up the coins on the ground. I suggest some sort of thrusting is needed.

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William, I'm sorry, I latched onto the word "fees" and didn't really grok your question. You're talking about conversion between Bitcoin and fiat, to which Ungovernable Rich's answer is more apropos: the bid-ask spread on decentralized exchanges like Bisq is often high, 10% or more, especially during times of high volatility. I don't use Coinbase or other centralized exchanges, so can't speak to those. Add to that you're paying transaction fees up to 3 times: (1) funding your Bisq wallet, (2) sending funds to escrow, (3) delivering funds to buyer or receiving from seller.

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I'm sure that I have a few bitcoins lying around. Just can't remember where.

Richie not so rich

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😆 See the YouTube video I just posted in my comment above.

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I think every crypto coin is subject to this law. That eventually you'll lose access.

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Mar 31, 2022·edited Mar 31, 2022Author

If there is a decay rate, there are still units in the system, and they absorb the value of the lost units. It is good to limit the decay rate, but when it's not enormous, it has little overall effect.

The dollar has lost over 95% of its value relative to gold. I suspect BTC holders will be happier with their new decay rate.

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That's the thing though, it's not an improvement on Fiat. It's actually a deterioration.

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You don't seem interested in giving warrants to your conclusions. Okay.

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Paper currency was a deterioration on an earlier use of gold and silver coins. In my view crypto coins are a far worse deterioration.

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i.e. eventually they'll all be gone. And then what do you do? Increase supply?

LOL - that's a QE encore that is.

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I hate crypto. I just hope that I get out at the top.

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Why do you hate crypto?

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It's unusable in many environments, not just when the power fails. For it to work in the real world requires too much work by those who have little time and it is too complicated for many. Private keys will be given away by those who can least afford it. And Governments are using them for enslavement purposes.

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Banking systems have many problems, but banks as intermediaries have some key benefits over this network system - first and foremost, they're liable and (usually) big enough to pay if they screw up. If you lose your password, you can validate yourself other ways and get to your money. If they screw up, there is a way to audit and correct. Absent court order, transactions are private. Many other things.

Main concern I have for bitcoin is not the math - it's the implementation (though there is and never will be a form of encryption that won't someday be broken). Even with a theoretically perfect encryption model, there is no perfect software implementation, and there will be an exploit to all software with sufficient motivations to find the exploit. Even so, bitcoin has numerous vulnerabilities for manipulation (by large enough entitites/consortia) that can't be solved. Not to mention the risk of all transactions being public and mineable.

Interesting and useful for trivial value transactions, but not for considerable wealth stores.

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The "liability" is also choosing your executioner. If somebody decides you're unworthy as a liability to them, you get unbanked and your life gets tougher very quickly. Bitcoin puts that control over your finances back in your hands.

"though there is and never will be a form of encryption that won't someday be broken"

That's unclear. The relative strength of trap door functions in each iterative generation of the game has favored the secret keepers. There is a non-public form of encryption that has a particularly special feature that I may write about someday that may be the next level for a very long time. But I would want to talk to the creator again before writing about it, and the last time I asked him, he did not respond. I worried that meant maybe the NSA sucked it up and classified it. Of course, in the Bitcoin era, that could mean nothing very quickly.

"Even with a theoretically perfect encryption model, there is no perfect software implementation, and there will be an exploit to all software with sufficient motivations to find the exploit."

Sure, and somebody may have hidden a camera anywhere, like on one of my cats' foreheads, and I wouldn't know about it, necessarily. Keylogging is real. But Bitcoin could be the thing that makes the cost of such asymmetric tech implementation untenable going forward. The primary reason we worry that the government can spend infinitely to spy on us is...that the government can spend infinitely.

I don't get why people are worried about a subset of their spending being public. We evolved together in tribes. Until recently, everybody knew when we took a crap.

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Cloudfare is being increasingly censorial. So are news sites here in NZ, if I'm on an Australian proxy I can't read them. I can't read the entertainment pages of one of them full stop. What happens when Twitter puts a stop to me accessing my wallet?

I agree banks are far from fair. We all know that. This crypto system is going to be even worse than that.

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Decentralized internet is in the works, and in multiple ways.

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How can Twitter stop you from accessing your BTC wallet?

You don't even technically need internet access to engage in Bitcoin transactions. Literally, if you were in prison with nothing but a cell phone (with no network access) containing your private keys, you could securely transact as long as you are still able to contact a friend on the outside that *does* have internet access -- and it doesn't require giving them your private keys.

You would just have to sign a transaction locally, and you could literally just write down the signed transaction's bytes on a piece of paper, hand it to your friend, and they could post it to the network for you. Next time they see you, they could prove to you that it's been posted to the network.

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How? When they're hooked into the social credit system and that anti-Biden tweet of yours triggers a 7 day lockout from your online access.

Your idea of writing down the bytes is naive at best.

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Lol, I like that you read my reply and thought I was *suggesting* that you do your BTC transactions with pencil and paper.

I'll go slower this time. No, even if Twitter had the super power to cut off your internet access, you can still both send and receive BTC completely securely. And no, it doesn't require a pencil, but yes, if it *did* require a pencil, you could still technically do it (observation, not suggestion).

Either way, in the same situation you're *obviously* better off with crypto than if you were using a traditional bank, which would not only stop you from accessing or using your funds, but could even seize them.

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I hope that in 'going slower' you'll eventually figure out that it's not Twitter per se but the whole establishment of which Twitter is merely part of. I'd suggest that you go and read up on CBDCs and Social Credit scores but I suspect that you already have and are in fool (sic) approval.

And good luck if you fall foul (sic) of that system in finding a cell phone that has your private key still on it. As they say in the crypto world (paraphrasing) your private key is quite safe until someone turns up at yours with a gun.

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Quantum computing, if it comes to be, will require completely different encryption. And will likely lead to the first mover having all the bitcoin.

Just wondering, has Jacob Rothschild sold out of Ripple today? It's dropped 8 cents.

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The improved encryption already exists. It's just not public.

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The main problem that I have with crypto coins is that the powers that be, the elites, or whatever you want to call them have decided to try and use this technology for dark purposes. I am therefore a supporter of total failure and in my view a Crypto Luddite movement is needed for the 7.8 billion, or more, targeted by this 'ideology'.

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You keep declaring conclusions with no explanation at all.

I would welcome an actual conversation about any of the points you make, but I get a sense of general untrustworthiness---like it's your goal to derail the conversation, not to participate. I'm considering banning you from posting for the sake of steering the conversation toward something educational. I'd rather not do that, but it seems like every one of your threads ends in a dramatic claim that strikes me as backward, and with no justificaiton.

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I'm surprised that you havn't banned me already. You don't want dissent except on your own terms. My POV is valid, I've given reasons for my views yet you continue to push the narrative that I'm disruptive only. I am disruptive, to the digital coins as our future narrative. Which you've obviously got some sort of investment in.

I do hold digital coins btw. As purely speculative investments. I hope to get out sometime before they all crash to zero.

They suck (all of them). But banning me isn't going to change that. And also I've paid a subscription to comment. That's the contract.

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LOL, "Which you've obviously got some sort of investment in". Now I think you're just trolling.

HMMMMMM, I wonder what sort of investment someone writing about BITCOIN might have in the cryptocurrency space. 🤔

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It's not just tech.

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Good tutorial. Well written.

At this time I prefer physical cash over BTC. It has great benefits - anonymity, ease and speed of consumer transaction (instantaneous), protection from arbitrary de-banking, power outages, digital theft, etc.

I encourage all my friends to use cash as much as possible. A cash clip is an excellent birthday present.

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Being able to explain the complex in simple language is the sign of someone who knows of what they speak. I'm going to have to start reading through your Bitcoin Wars series. Thanks for this!

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