But do those claims hold any water? With a bit more depth of analysis that the French government cares to allocate, you’ll quickly realize that no, bitcoin is not even close to unproductive. In reality, it may be the key component to unleashing a historic boom in productivity, greater than that of the Industrial Revolution or post-World War economic expansion.

What Are Unproductive Assets?

As defined by traditional terms, unproductive assets are items that don’t produce income for the holder, like collectible art or your personal vehicle. While these things may help you liven up your home decor, or get you where you need to go, nothing about them fundamentally generates you income. Their “value” comes from personal satisfaction rather than delivering tangible capital to spend on future endeavours.

Is Bitcoin An Unproductive Asset?

The French government used the term “unproductive asset” to justify a bill that would enforce taxation of unrealized gains. Specifically, they proposed replacing a real estate wealth tax with an “unproductive wealth tax” on dormant assets like Rolex watches, vacant real estate properties, and the other thing they consider unproductive: bitcoin.

Sticking to the rigid technical definition of “unproductive assets” may concede that bitcoin is not generating direct or indirect income on its own in the same way an Airbnb or a landlord’s apartment complex would, but using that stiff definition to impose taxation on an asset like bitcoin is like shooting yourself in the foot just before the race starts.

If the French government proposes that greater taxation of “unproductive wealth” will lead to greater quality of life, they are either dangerously misinformed or nefariously incentivized.

Unfortunately, the reality is probably a mixture of both.

How Bitcoin Is Productive For The World

It’s actually fair to argue that bitcoin is the most productive asset in the world, and it’s earning that title because it’s designed to address the three most important facets of human life: time, energy, and autonomy.

Bitcoin Saves You Time

When you understand that bitcoin is a perfectly-optimized vessel for personal savings, treating it as such reveals how it’s actually helping people reclaim the time they lose to fiat money’s ever-decreasing purchasing power.

When the average person allocates money to investments, they generally have one goal in mind: for it to grow their wealth.

People want their wealth to grow because they want more time. Time is ultimately the scarcest thing we have, and having more of it gives us freedom to pursue whatever is meaningful to us.

Understanding this, we must consider that bitcoin is actually the quintessential tool for saving time and maximizing the world’s productivity. When we work, we’re investing time in the present to earn more time in the future, for retirement, time spent with family, etc. Prior to bitcoin, the people’s desire for time was fundamentally at odds with the design of our money. Of course, if you allocate your time wisely enough, it still pays off in the end. But with the exponential rate of inflation that all fiat money inevitably experiences, it’s becoming harder and harder for the average person to earn the same amount of time that they once were able to. What that looks like in practice is higher prices, lower quality products, greater reliance on multiple income streams, fewer opportunities for ownership, and all the downstream negative effects to our long-term health, wealth, and time that evaporating money fosters. Our money was working against our incentives, forcing us to focus energy that could have been spent on our personal pursuits instead on money management.

However, bitcoin now aligns our incentives with reality. When you save in bitcoin, you store the time and energy spent at your job in a vehicle that’s perfectly scarce, impossible to coerce, and free from manipulation. No tinkering with interest rates or government debt creation can affect the fundamentals of bitcoin. And as long as the fundamentals remain intact, the demand for such an asset is infinite. In turn, what flows downstream from bitcoin is the inverse of fiat: lower prices, higher quality products, less reliance on multiple income streams, greater opportunities for ownership, and ultimately more time. Bitcoin’s fiat-denominated price volatility may swing violently in the short term, but it’s always trending upwards in the long term as the world’s money printing sends the value of fiat currencies downwards.

Bitcoin Focuses Your Energy

In a fiat-denominated world, we are constantly fighting two financial battles: earning enough money to support our lives, and earning enough to outpace inflation. As the rate of inflation increases, the difficulty of this battle grows.

Think of it like rowing a boat on a river, except the finish line of financial independence is upstream. If you don’t row at all, the river sweeps you further and further away from that finish line. If you only row at one speed, you’ll make better progress. But the thing about this river is that the current is getting faster and faster. Therefore, if you don’t improve your rowing technique, your efforts will still fail in the end and you’ll never reach the finish line. And depending on where you live, your country’s current may be flowing two, three, or even ten times as fast as another nation’s. So the battle isn’t exactly fair for all people either. Some are disproportionately disadvantaged over others.

In a bitcoinized world, however, we eliminate the inflationary battle entirely, leaving us to focus solely on supporting our livelihoods. Since inflation is not a consideration any longer, think about how much energy that frees us to focus on more worthwhile pursuits. You no longer have to be an employee and an investment manager, or a business owner and a hedge fund manager. You can just be an employee or a business owner. You don’t need to worry about diversified baskets of investments and devising portfolio strategies to offset inflation. You can save money effectively, trusting in a vehicle designed to do that heavy lifting for you. Bitcoin helps you focus your energy on what matters, whether that be cultivating a strong family, exploring personal pursuits, or developing greater skills to improve your life even further.

The river’s current remains at a steady pace on a Bitcoin standard. As long as you’re rowing properly, you’ll eventually reach your destination. You have the option to improve your rowing technique and get there faster, but it’s no longer a requirement that redirects your focus on what matters to you.

This river analogy isn’t to say that you can just coast on a Bitcoin standard either. If you’re lazy and don’t work at all, the river will sweep you away just as it always has. Competition still exists, and improving your skills is always important to remain valuable in the marketplace. But what this river analogy demonstrates is that bitcoin levels the playing field to be more equitable for everyone to compete in.

Bitcoin Offers You Autonomy

When you have more time saved, and less energy fragmented, you have greater autonomy to move forward freely in the world. Bitcoin helps people get up out of the inflationary ditch and gets them back on the open road. No matter what it is you do for a living, bitcoin provides an environment for greater productivity on all fronts. You no longer have to allocate your productivity to combatting the reality of fiat money – you can use bitcoin as money to propel you forward in your pursuits. On a Bitcoin standard, productivity skyrockets, competition sharpens, costs fall, and quality of life rises for everyone. Even without direct access to bitcoin of your own, you still benefit from its downstream effect on society at large. By removing the drain of inflation from the world, we get to enjoy higher quality companies, safer living environments, cleaner facilities, stronger communities, and all the fruits that come with greater autonomy. We get to where we want to go faster, and free up our mindspace to grow our ambitions further and achieve more than we possibly could have otherwise.

The Productivity Boom Will Be Unprecedented

If we take a look back through history, there is one major period of time that stands alone in its impact on modern day life.

As highlighted by none other than Neel Kashkari’s Minneapolis Fed, the world reached an inflection point in productivity following the 19th century Industrial Revolution and back-to-back world wars. It was the point at which our productive capacity began to exceed the world’s population. With new innovation under our belts, humanity created the tools necessary for explosive growth, making our processes more efficient than ever before.

For example, the engine revolutionized our modes of transportation, which as a result made international trade more efficient, thus improving our economies of scale. One “small” innovation led to an outpouring of economic advancement for the world. Put multiple of those “small” innovations together, and you get a world that looks mythical to the societies that came before it.

Today, a new concoction of innovation is ushering in another productive leap forward. But the world that it creates will come with drastically more advancement than what an industrial revolution could ever offer.

“You have less in common with an average person from the year 2123 than with a Roman citizen from the year 23, even though the future person is 20x closer to you in time.”
– Luke Broyles

Bitcoin and artificial intelligence. Both are innovations that go beyond merely isolated advancements in one niche. What these technologies represent is essentially the emergence of digital organisms. Not only do these innovations come with major productive capacity – they have the ability to carry out that productivity without any human application. An engine is great and all, but if no person decided to attach it to four wheels, nothing would have changed for the world. The same can’t be said for things like bitcoin or AI. As previously described, the mere existence of bitcoin instills the action within humanity. It’s a technology that works on us rather than having us work for it. Artificial intelligence takes human actions into its own “hands” (whether robotic or software-based), so that instead of a person screwing bolts together in an assembly line, or filling out an Excel spreadsheet, they can devote that saved productivity elsewhere in the economy.

The end result of both is people having more time, energy, and autonomy to focus on greater heights of achievement. The impacts of digital organisms on the world’s productive capacity are so profound that if anyone living today were suddenly placed 100 years into the future, they probably wouldn’t even recognize that it’s planet Earth they are still standing on.

If only the legislators of today’s world took the time to understand the assets they are trying to regulate, then they too could see how absurdly counter-productive the notion of taxing long-term Bitcoin holders is. But hey, cavemen quite enjoyed their caves too.

Final Thoughts

Bitcoin is not a Rolex watch or a fine piece of art whose beauty only lies with the beholder. It’s a technology and a force that’s alleviating the world from the inflationary pressures of a monetary system that works against the interests of everyone. Even the state actors who uphold this system have sacrificed their own fulfillment for personal enrichment, enslaving themselves just as they do their citizens.

Bitcoin is not just a monetary reform; it is equally an intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual reform that shifts our incentives away from humanity’s worst desires – greed, power, and control – towards abundance, liberty, and humility. Bitcoin has no bias. By taking the humanity out of our money, and allowing the confines of mathematics, physics – truth – to govern us, the vessel we use to store our time and energy now works for the benefit of all people.

Your non-productive luxury watches, cars, and art collections can’t do the same. And they certainly can’t save the French government from its own destruction. Trying to impose taxation on the citizens’ bitcoin only ensures that destruction comes sooner. After all, how can anyone expect that money that’s designed to self implode wouldn’t naturally incentivize the same thing for its owners?

Think about what’s truly productive for your life, and opt out of the destruction with bitcoin.

Thank You

If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it on social media. You can also help us out with any of the following.

• Follow us on Twitter and Nostr.
• Support one of these Bitcoin businesses.
• Make a value for value donation so that we can continue to publish more Bitcoin-only content.

Any support we get from bitcoiners is what keeps this project alive.

The post Is Bitcoin An Unproductive Asset? appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

What Is Bitcoin Lottery Mining?

Bitcoin lottery mining is a way for the everyday person to get involved with Bitcoin mining, no matter how little power they have personally available to devote to it. With lottery mining, you can participate in the chance of mining a solo block of bitcoin without having to rack up a huge electricity bill or spend a ton of money upfront on Bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin lottery miners are small desktop devices that you can connect to your everyday computer and run. It leverages the computing power you already have available at home to enter the mining pool, giving you a small (but not impossible) chance of mining a solo block – which currently pays out 3.125 BTC based on the 2024 block reward!

Understanding The Bitaxe Miner

The most popular way for people to try Bitcoin lottery mining is with the Bitaxe.

Bitaxe is a compact, DIY miner device that sits on your desk and passively mines bitcoin. With very little setup involved, you can test your luck at the Bitcoin mining lottery. Thanks to its small design, its relative draw on your power consumption will be a much lower cost compared to a traditional full-sized Bitcoin miner. However, the lower power consumption also means that your chances of mining a block are significantly lower, hence why the Bitaxe is considered a “lottery miner.”

You shouldn’t purchase a Bitaxe expecting to become a significant competitor in the mining space. At best, you can get very lucky and score a massively outsized reward relative to the initial investment. However, the focus of the Bitaxe shouldn’t be placed on the potential earnings you can make from it. It’s better framed as a fun and engaging piece of hardware to learn and interact with the Bitcoin network.

How Hard Is It To Solo Mine A Bitcoin Block With A Bitaxe?

While the Bitaxe is capable of mining an entire block all on its own, the chances that your Bitaxe will be the mining device – out of hundreds of thousands of miners worldwide – to mine the next Bitcoin block are infinitesimally small.

The good news is that you can increase your odds of success depending on the Bitaxe model you purchase. There are four available, each of which output greater levels of hashpower:

• Bitaxe Max (100 series) – BM1397 ASIC chip
• Bitaxe Ultra (200 series) – BM1366 ASIC chip
• Bitaxe Supra (400 series) – BM1368 ASIC chip
• Bitaxe Gamma (600 series) – BM1370 ASIC chip

So how difficult is it to solo mine a Bitcoin block with each Bitaxe model? To determine your probability (P) of finding the next block, you need to divide your specific miner hashrate by the overall network hashrate​. Here’s what the equation looks like:

Let’s break the numbers down.

• The Bitaxe Max outputs 400-450 GH/s (gigahashes/second). With a current network hashrate of 800 EH/s, your probability of mining a block with the Bitaxe Max model is 0.0000000531%.
• The Bitaxe Ultra outputs 500-550 GH/s. With a current network hashrate of 800 EH/s, your probability of mining a block with the Bitaxe Max model is 0.0000000656%.
• The Bitaxe Supra outputs 600-700 GH/s. With a current network hashrate of 800 EH/s, your probability of mining a block with the Bitaxe Max model is 0.0000000813%.
• The Bitaxe Gamma outputs 1.0-1.2 TH/s (terahashes/second). With a current network hashrate of 800 EH/s, your probability of mining a block with the Bitaxe Max model is 0.0000001375%.

For reference, the odds of winning the actual Powerball Lottery are about 0.000000333%. There are a lot of zeros here, but to put that into perspective, these odds make you ~2.4x more likely to win the Powerball than solo mining a block with the most powerful Bitaxe model. As you can clearly see, your expectations of successfully solo mining a block should be quite low. However, just because you most likely won’t see a real return on your investment in a Bitaxe doesn’t mean that it’s a waste of time or money! For bitcoiners at any stage in their journey – whether you’re brand new to the space or a seasoned veteran who’s held through multiple boom-bust cycles – the Bitaxe serves as a great opportunity to get hands on with bitcoin, while enjoying the off-chance that your curiosity will be greatly rewarded one day.

Get Started With Bitaxe

Setting up a Bitaxe is relatively straightforward. After purchasing your device, setting up is a simple 7 step process:

1. Attach the display to Bitaxe’s printed circuit board (PCB).
2. Power the Bitaxe using the included power supply.
3. Connect your Bitaxe to your local WiFi network by using your internet-connected device to search for a “Bitaxe_XXXX” WiFi access point.
4. After connecting, you should be redirected to the AxeOS portal. Alternatively, visit http://192.168.4.1 to access the configuration page. Once there, click “settings”.
5. Set your SSID and password for your local WiFi network. Be sure to save it somewhere in case you need to reconfigure in the future.
6. Update the pool URL, port and user to your preferred pool. There are many pool options available, but ckpool or publicpool are good options for solo mining.
7. Save your settings, then restart to apply changes!

Assuming a proper setup, your Bitaxe should start mining!

Will Bitcoin Mining Ever Get Easier?

Don’t let the low odds of solo mining a Bitcoin block discourage you from Bitaxe if it’s a product you’re genuinely interested in. Unfortunately for the solo miner (but fortunately for the network), Bitcoin mining will never get easier and will only increase in difficulty as time passes and the halving continues to reduce the block size reward.

If you take a look at the Bitcoin supply schedule, you’ll notice that every four years, the mining reward drops by half as part of bitcoin’s programmed disinflation. At the same time, Bitcoin mining becomes more difficult as more miners start participating, which raises total network hashpower, forcing Satoshi Nakamoto’s ingenious protocol to automatically adjust the difficulty to account for the increase in energy being directly towards Bitcoin mining.

That’s the beauty of bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment. It’s a mechanism that ensures how hard bitcoin is to mine is based on maintaining 10-minute mining intervals. So instead of requiring manual, human intervention to set rates on the hardness of our money, like our Federal Reserve does with interest rates today, the difficulty adjustment ensures that no matter how little or many people are trying to mine bitcoin, the protocol will maintain a ~10-minute threshold (on average) of computational effort before letting a random miner secure the block reward. This takes the human hands out of bitcoin and actually forces the hands of people around the world to adapt to Bitcoin’s network rules, instead of trying to create them ourselves.

Mining gold is only as hard as it is to locate, so as our technology, capabilities, and processes become more efficient, gold becomes easier to mine over time. In other words, gold’s “hardness” is determined physically, by its location in space. Bitcoin is a breakthrough in money because Satoshi used the difficulty adjustment to determine bitcoin’s hardness in time, rather than in space. No matter how much more powerful our computers become, it will always require the same amount of time to mine bitcoin.

How Else Can You Acquire Bitcoin?

For the everyday person, mining bitcoin is not the most efficient way to earn bitcoin. Since mining is only getting harder with each passing year, solo mining becomes increasingly difficult to manage, making Bitcoin lottery mining a fun alternative to include alongside your other stacking efforts.

Those other stacking efforts should first come from the fruits of your labor. There’s no better way to preserve the time and energy you spend at your daily job than by storing it in bitcoin for the long haul. Whatever savings rate you can afford for your personal situation, bitcoin is proving itself to be the best vehicle in history to secure those savings and ensure you get the most out of them. As is becoming evident with gold mining, the historic “gold standard” of savings is evolving beyond physical gold to digital gold. Framing your labor in the context of this new emerging reality is the best way to get the most out of your long-term savings.

Besides pure saving in bitcoin, all new kinds of novel methods for acquiring bitcoin exist online. The Lightning network opens up new possibilities to stack sats through online games, social media, web extensions, and more. You can use these innovations to incorporate passive sat stacking into your everyday online activity. If you like social media, consider getting on Nostr or Stacker News to earn sats for your posts instead of likes. If you like mobile games, there are tons of Bitcoin-based games on your phone’s app store that offer small sat payouts for playing. If you’re annoyed with constantly seeing ads as you navigate the web, install the Slice web extension to redirect the ad revenue going to advertisers’ pockets to your own in the form of bitcoin. All of these methods and more are possible thanks to Bitcoin developers around the world working to spread financial sovereignty as far and wide as possible.

If you’re a business owner, consider accepting bitcoin for payment! This option is especially powerful if you run an e-commerce business. As bitcoin becomes more widespread and the preferred choice for online payment, accepting bitcoin not only helps you acquire it for yourself, but also gives you leverage to broadcast your business as a part of the Bitcoin movement. It’s a great way to market your business to a brand new audience that takes pleasure in spending bitcoin whenever they get the chance.

You can earn sats back on your everyday purchases by adopting Bitcoin rewards apps like Fold (affiliate). Fold is a Bitcoin-back debit card that enables you to earn sats for buying groceries or gift cards, paying off bills, or any other expense that you’d normally use a credit/debit card for. Tools like Fold truly bring you one step closer to a fully-hyperbitcoinized world. While society gradually transitions to a Bitcoin standard, you can use Fold to start living that standard today and get ahead of those waiting for the future to come to them.

As the years go on, bitcoin is enabling all new kinds of ways to earn money that you can rely on for the future. Stacking bitcoin makes all the difference for your financial future. While the payouts for mobile gaming, for example, might be small, they could prove to be infinitely more valuable than if your time had been spent earning fiat currency that’s being devalued with each passing day. A few cents here and there each day can add up to become a significant chunk of change as bitcoin redefines our monetary system. While nothing is guaranteed, the low-lift changes you can make today to acquire bitcoin is well worth the small effort.

Final Thoughts

Bitcoin lottery mining with devices like Bitaxe are a prime example of the world of opportunity bitcoin presents us with. No matter where you’re located geographically, with an internet connection and a computer or mobile device, you can access a brand new monetary network that’s eating away at the legacy system day by day. Billions of people unfortunately have no access to today’s modern banking networks, but a large majority of those billions thankfully have access to the basic devices necessary to interact with bitcoin. Even a simple text message, without any internet at all, is capable of delivering bitcoin to a person.

Start doing what you can today to take advantage of these opportunities, and if you choose to start lottery mining with Bitaxe on top of those efforts, you may wake up one day to a nice bonus for your efforts to pioneer a new financial future.

Thank You

If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it on social media. You can also help us out with any of the following.

• Follow us on Twitter and Nostr.
• Support one of these Bitcoin businesses.
• Make a value for value donation so that we can continue to publish more Bitcoin-only content.

Any support we get from bitcoiners is what keeps this project alive.

The post Enter Bitcoin Lottery Mining With Bitaxe appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

Bitcoin began from nothing. It didn’t have famous and wealthy backers promoting it in the media. It didn’t have funding. It didn’t have anything or anyone demonstrating its value, other than an anonymous individual (or set of individuals) speculating on what it could be. A vision to decentralize control of the world’s economic engine. A movement to amplify the individual and suppress the controlled collective. An evolution of money that could finally spare the world from history’s most pernicious financial struggles.

And as the years pass, bitcoin is no longer just a “could be”. It’s realizing all of those wishful aspirations, and going far beyond them.

Naturally, there are some humans who don’t like the loss of control that Satoshi Nakamoto alluded to.

Breaking Down Bitcoin’s Four Stages Of Evolution

If you observe bitcoin’s perception in the public eye over a long-enough time period, you begin to understand the prescient wisdom of those aforementioned words. We’ve witnessed bitcoin being ignored for the first several years of its existence. After it continued to defy the logic of traditional finance and kept rising in value, naysayers came out of the woodworks to laugh, scoff, and mock its rise. Today, the fight is on. Bitcoin is facing active efforts to work against it, coming from all of the most powerful political entities in the world, whether that be the United States government, the European Central Bank, asset managers like BlackRock, and many others.

Don’t believe me? Let’s examine the evidence.

First They Ignore You

When bitcoin first launched in January 2009, virtually no one was interacting with it beyond its initial contributors. There were no payments being made in bitcoin. No social media influencers talking about it. No one was diving into its ideals and promises for the future of money.

It went a full year and five months after its launch before the first purchase with bitcoin took place in May 2010. A US citizen, Laszlo Henyecz, offered bitcoin to a British resident to purchase a pizza and deliver it to him. This moment marked the first point in history when one can truly say that bitcoin was no longer being outright ignored. People realized that bitcoin isn’t just some abstract digital organization of numbers – it was a tool that can facilitate trade entirely trustlessly.

And that’s when Silk Road took off.

Naturally, a tool like bitcoin could come in quite handy for people looking to exchange illegal goods over the internet. Up until this point, facilitating trade of illegal goods was impossible on an internet entirely captured by legacy payment rails. If you wanted to buy something online, you needed to give identification information to third party processors.

When people recognized that with bitcoin, you can finally transact online without doxxing your personal information, the transactions started taking off. Silk Road was essentially one of the first guerilla “marketing campaigns” for bitcoin:

Yes, drugs were some of the first goods widely exchanged on the Bitcoin network. And yes, pornography was one of the first forms of content distributed on the internet.

Now that bitcoin was picking up traction and could no longer be ignored, that’s when the laughs came.

Then They Laugh At You

If you’ve been around in the Bitcoin community online or have been outspoken about it in person over the past several years, you’re probably well aware of the overwhelming amount of ridicule that bitcoin receives.

Whether it be rolling eyes at the idea of a global reserve currency, or the promise to protect your wealth from deflating currencies around the globe, despite all time high after all time high. Many people simply do not want to deal with the reality of our inflationary economic policy, no matter what the personal consequences may be.

And it’s not just the average Joe thinking this either.

• The mainstream media historically and continually ridicules bitcoin. Take a listen to Bill Maher’s words from the 2021 bull run, associating bitcoin with the likes of dogecoin and…”cumrocket” coin.
• In 2017, the vice president of the European Central Bank was comparing bitcoin to the Dutch Tulip market bubble of the 17th century.
• In 2022, Bill Gates and Yahoo Finance attributed the value of the space to mere “Greater Fool theory”.
• Prominent economists and geopolitical strategists like Peter Zeihan smugly called for bitcoin to go negative in value…at the bottom of the 2022 bear market.
• Billionaire Mark Cuban used to say that bitcoin was less valuable than a baseball card (he now owns millions in bitcoin).
• Funny enough, Michael Saylor once said that “Bitcoin’s days are numbered. It seems like just a matter of time before it suffers the same fate as online gambling”…way back in 2013.
• In 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called bitcoin nothing more than an index of money laundering…yet today oversees the most successful spot ETF launch in history, all thanks to bitcoin.
• JP Morgan head Jamie Dimon repeatedly ridicules bitcoin, saying he doesn’t care about it at all, calling it fraud, and being outright confused and visibly frustrated when people bring it up to him (nevermind the fact that his bank is now actively buying it up).
• Online social forums have been built up entirely around the premise of bitcoin being a scam…Reddit’s r/Buttcoin has been attempting to smear bitcoin since its 2011 founding, when a single bitcoin cost ~$15.

These examples are but a small snippet of the endless mockery bitcoin has received over the years. To this day, the laughing continues. Even the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari – who notoriously told 60 Minutes about the infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve – still compares bitcoin to beanie babies.

However, while many of the uninformed keep laughing, smart money is starting to pay attention…but not exactly in a good way.

Then They Fight You

As the mocking becomes less and less effective the more that bitcoin rises, the active efforts to fight against it grow larger and larger.

As touched on in our article, “The War On Bitcoin Is Here”, governments around the world are colluding to create invasive chain analysis tools that essentially enforce KYC/AML restrictions that break down Bitcoin privacy.

• This year, the Department of Justice arrested Samourai’s co-founders, shut down Samourai Wallet, and blocked CoinJoin, a privacy-protection tool that allowed bitcoiners to prevent future tracking of previously KYC-linked bitcoin.
• After a long history of clamping down on bitcoin, in 2021, China decided to ban Bitcoin mining in the country after historically leading the world in hashpower output. The ban merely shifted that hashpower elsewhere, primarily to the US, which is now the #1 Bitcoin-mining nation in the world.
• The battle against proof-of-work mining is ramping up, with lobbyists like GreenPeace, US senators like Elizabeth Warren and Brad Sherman, and plenty of cryptocurrency apologists like Ripple or the Ethereum Foundation spouting endless propaganda to distract and divert from bitcoin’s efforts to make the world more efficient, equitable, and environmentally-friendly.
• For the past several years, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has repeatedly tried to suppress bitcoin. The SEC’s SAB 121 essentially prevents financial institutions from acting as Bitcoin custodians, all in the name of “safeguarding” investors. After Congress proposed new legislation to overturn this ruling, President Biden vetoed the bill. This is why watching politicians’ actions matters much more than listening to what they say. These efforts demonstrate the hostile legal environment the current US government wishes to uphold to stifle bitcoin’s growth in the nation.
• In the past month, the European Central Bank outright claimed that early Bitcoin adopters are effectively stealing from latecomers and no-coiners. They use this projective excuse as a means to warrant legislation aimed to prevent bitcoin’s price from rising further. Not only do these statements demonstrate their authoritarian motives, but also show how they simply do not understand what bitcoin is or how it works. And remember Neel Kashkari? His bank came out to rally behind the ECB’s words, and advocated for legal prohibition and harsh taxation on bitcoin. Most notably, the bank suggested that without having to contend with bitcoin, they can uphold permanent, unlimited deficits. At least they admit that they want to spend with impunity and increase the debt forever.

From multiple different angles and agendas, there is a coalition of people working against bitcoin, not because they think they have a better solution, but because they want to maintain control. Their efforts to fight against it are evidence of how powerful bitcoin must truly be. Many are not prepared to deal with bitcoin’s decentralizing effect on the world, and many demonstrate their own misunderstanding by trying to centralize it through legislation and prosecution.

Despite all the attacks, bitcoin continues to work exactly as designed, producing block after block every ten minutes.

The logical deduction, based on this trend, is that victory comes next. But the fight certainly won’t be easy.

Then You Win

One of the greatest evidences of bitcoin’s impending success that you can observe today is seen in its trending popularity (or notoriety, depending on who’s looking at it).

Bitcoin began from basically nothing, only being espoused by an anonymous online forum user. Today, both sides of the political aisle are actively seeking out votes from the Bitcoin community. As inflation becomes increasingly important to the everyday person, politicians are realizing the important role bitcoin plays in combating it.

When you look at where bitcoin came from, to seeing the people who are talking about it today, it’s clear that bitcoin isn’t going anywhere. If anything, the trend suggests it will only become more integral to everyday life.

Besides this high-view observation, the anecdotal evidence of bitcoin’s success is stacking up day after day. This is how bitcoin wins.

• Pennsylvania, a key swing state historically, recently passed the “Bitcoin Rights” bill, which embraces bitcoin at the state level, setting into law the right to self custody bitcoin and use it as payment (if vendors so choose).
• One of the largest stories of 2024, after BlackRock’s $IBIT ETF went live in January, it not only shattered historical records of success, but also signified a greater sign of approval for bitcoin in the mainstream financial world. Nevermind the custody issues that arise with ETFs, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s change of tune towards bitcoin sends a message around the world for other financial giants to get on board or get left behind.
• In 2021, El Salvador became the first nation in the world to make bitcoin legal tender in the country. You can spend it on Starbucks and groceries, just like any other currency. When talking about the trend of success that bitcoin is on, it’s the events like these that should ring loudest. Again, bitcoin started in someone’s basement. Now it’s a legal form of currency in one of the most rapidly developing countries in the world. Who’s to say it won’t start being legalized elsewhere?
• Suriname is proving that last point to be true. Presidential candidate Maya Parbhoe announced that she would also make bitcoin legal tender on day one if elected.
  Of course, US presidential candidate Donald Trump is speaking up about bitcoin as well. While he hasn’t talked about ending the Federal Reserve and making bitcoin the de facto currency of the world, his presence at the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin conference speaks volumes to the positive trajectory that bitcoin is on.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

If you look to the mainstream media to take note of the trend being discussed here, you’ll get nothing but radio silence. While media outlets report on all of these individual successes, the voices speaking up about bitcoin’s rise to overturn our fiat-based financial system are far and few between. Bitcoiners online are gaining a louder and louder voice, but governments and federal institutions are still doing all they can to keep the public distracted and turned away from the story unfolding in front of us. Bitcoin’s success is growing by the day, but it won’t be realized until there’s no incentives left for fiat proponents. Unfortunately, the fiat-financialized world is reaping economic devastation for itself, and the time that reaping comes to sow remains unknown.

As the money printer speeds up and the deficit continues to grow, now is the time to leave fiat behind and seek refuge in bitcoin. Just as the internet grew to become a digital nation state of its own, uplifting freedom of speech with its own rules, its own voice, and its own set of citizens, so too is the Bitcoin network uplifting economic empowerment for the world.

Final Thoughts

Remember that the mere fact that people are out there attacking bitcoin at all is evidence of the positive path it’s on. The fact that it came from nothing, to now being something actively debated on among US presidential candidates, legal tender in one country and proposals coming from others, and the general positive shift in mainstream coverage tells you everything you need to know.

Bitcoin’s design doesn’t enable any one person or political entity to talk down an idea that supercedes government entirely. It’s a new rule of law outside of any one government, akin to the laws of physics or mathematics. We don’t get to decide policy on those things. Policy arises based on those fundamental realities.

Don’t rely on political authorities to tell you what bitcoin is and how it will interact with the world. See the evidence for yourself and adapt to the world you want to see for yourself and future generations.

Thank You

If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it on social media. You can also help us out with any of the following.

• Follow us on Twitter and Nostr.
• Support one of these Bitcoin businesses.
• Make a value for value donation so that we can continue to publish more Bitcoin-only content.

Any support we get from bitcoiners is what keeps this project alive.

The post The Four Stages Of Bitcoin’s Evolution appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

The world is in need of a newly restored sense of trust in institutions – but how is that done with a foundation built on infinitely-printable money?

It isn’t.

What companies across all industries need to implement is a Proof of Reserves system, backed and verified by bitcoin: the only immutable asset on the planet.

What Is Proof Of Reserves?

Proof of Reserves (PoR) is a cryptographic auditing process that allows financial institutions to demonstrate that they hold sufficient assets to back customer deposits. So if I had 30 bitcoin (unwisely) custodied by my bank, I could have greater confidence in the bank to keep the bitcoin secured if I could verify that it was in fact being held and not being loaned out or used for anything else.
Proof of Reserves provides that transparency that our current financial institutions lack.

Be honest: Can you confidently tell me where exactly the money in your bank account lies today? Can you know, without a shadow of doubt, that your money is and will always be available for withdrawal from the bank in case of emergency, and that it won’t be wound up in lending products being used by other institutions around the world?

One of the key breakthroughs in understanding bitcoin is understanding that for the first time since digitizing our money, we can know exactly where our money is. It’s not floating around somewhere in the ether of a central bank database. You can take self custody and keep it wherever you want it to be.

Companies apply this breakthrough to their financial services through Proof of Reserves, ensuring to their clients that they have the money ready and available, and that any movement of this money is well documented and provable through the Bitcoin ledger. For honest-acting companies, there would be no incentive to move that money whatsoever, making it easy for potential customers to verify which institutions truly keep the customers’ needs first.

Don’t Forget Proof Of Liabilities

Proof of Reserves is essentially “Proof of Assets”. But as any good accountant would tell you, along with disclosing assets, you also need to disclose liabilities. Otherwise, how can we be sure that the assets a company acquires aren’t coming from irresponsible or downright fraudulent fiscal activity?

Proof of Assets and Proof of Liabilities thus need to coexist alongside one another to get a full picture of a company’s true financial status.

Proving liabilities isn’t as straightforward as proving assets. Unlike with assets, where, in the case of bitcoin, you can simply point to the company’s Bitcoin address, giving users public access to the real-time holdings, as well as former and future movements of those funds, liabilities are more private in nature. Custodians may not be able to legally disclose who they owe bitcoin to, so in order to prove what they owe without revealing to whom it belongs, companies can use a Merkle-Sum tree.

The top of the tree represents the total liabilities held by a given company or custodian. Each branch of the tree represents the individual entities and what they are owed. The given example only uses four accounts, however you can imagine a larger company having hundreds or thousands of clients. The Merkle-Sum tree demonstrates the holdings of each individual client totalling the equivalent amount of liabilities a company holds. By matching this number to the number of assets, we get the company’s reserve ratio. Ideally, a fully reserved company should have a 100% reserve ratio, meaning they have 100% of assets available to cover liabilities. If, however, a company’s Proof of Reserves showed that they only held 4 BTC for every 10 BTC they have in liabilities, that means they only have 40% of assets available to cover liabilities. Not so ideal.

When you take this concept and apply it to the legacy banking system, which managed to operate on a mere 10% reserve ratio – and even lower today – you can see how the dangers of a fractional reserve system become a lot more apparent.

How Proof Of Reserves Differs From Traditional Banking

Today we operate on a fractional reserve banking system. Prior to 2019, banks with more than $124.2 million were required to keep 10% of customer deposits on hand, while being able to loan out the rest. For banks between $16.3 million and $124.2 million, they needed a mere 3% reserve ratio. This practice works on the assumption that not all customers will demand to withdraw their money at the same time. However, as history has demonstrated through fallouts like Mt. Gox, or FTX, when there’s no money left to dish out, the people who didn’t act quick enough to withdraw are left penniless. The cryptocurrency space runs rife with stories like these, however, the real-world banking system suffers from the same fate.

What’s very concerning to understand now is that following the 2020 pandemic, the Federal Reserve dropped the reserve ratio requirements to literally 0%. Banks simply do not need to have your money on hand for you any longer. Put another way: The central banking system is drunk at the wheel with fractional reserves, and has no plans to park the car until it crashes.

The logical evolution of our reckless banking infrastructure involves radical change: a Proof of Reserve standard. An institution operating under PoR is required to hold 100% of customer deposits in reserve. Otherwise, the customer may not be able to build trust in the institution for not doing so, and may instead opt to store their money with a competitor.

Unlike fractional reserve banking, which inherently erodes trust without allowing the people to do anything about it, bitcoin enables the financial world to restore trust through positive-sum incentives. By establishing verifiable transparency at the forefront of every customer interaction, financial institutions now have an incentive to earn customers through trust retention rather than blind faith. The free market inherently creates a much more virtuous competitive landscape for people to decide where their money belongs.

The world today doesn’t play by these rules, but as bitcoin continues to grow, as companies continue to adopt PoR, and fiat financial institutions continue to break trust in the people, the tide is shifting faster every day towards a market that demands Proof of Reserves upfront.

Who Is Carrying The Torch Today?

It’s crucial to understand that “Proof of Reserve companies” are analogous to “internet companies”. Today, we don’t call any companies “internet companies”. They are just called “companies”. The internet became a de facto standard for every business that wanted to successfully operate in the modern world. In the same light, “Proof of Reserve companies” will hopefully just be called “companies” in the future, as the global market demands PoR upfront in order to be viable for business.

To get there, a select few companies are spearheading the movement.

• River is a US-based Bitcoin financial services company known for its emphasis on transparency and security. You can verify the company’s Proof of Reserves here.
• MicroStrategy, a publicly traded business intelligence company, is another entity carrying the torch of transparency. MicroStrategy made a name for itself by spearheading corporate adoption of bitcoin. In August 2021, CEO Michael Saylor announced that the company converted 100% of its cash reserves to bitcoin in order to stop the inflationary bleed of holding fiat currency. Today, the company is running arguably the most innovative business playbook of the 21st century, issuing convertible debt of its own inflationary shares in order to stack cold hard, deflationary bitcoin. You can verify MicroStrategy holdings here.
• Metaplanet is a Japanese financial firm that followed in Microstrategy’s footsteps. You can verify the holding of Metaplanet here.

Along with these companies, Hoseki provides a free dashboard for viewing the balances of Bitcoin custodians, enabling you to verify their holdings and not simply trust what they say. Most major exchanges also implement PoR, however, one of the largest in the space – the only publicly-traded one – is still slacking.

Coinbase’s Proof Of Reserves – Or Lack Thereof

As River points out, if we don’t normalize Proof of Reserves, we are inevitably going to be left with paper bitcoin.

The largest exchange in the US, Coinbase, recently came under fire following the announcement of its wrapped Bitcoin product, cbBTC. Without Proof of Reserve to verifiably show that they have the BTC on hand to support backing an Ethereum-native altcoin masquerading as BTC, investors worried that Coinbase is tapping into their customer deposits or otherwise inflating their real Bitcoin holdings. This concern escalated even further when BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, whose Bitcoin Spot ETF Coinbase is the custodian of, directly responded to the rumors by mandating a 12-hour withdrawal requirement from Coinbase.

Coinbase’s CEO tried to use his words to settle the uncertainty, however, those mere words unsurprisingly stirred up greater distrust.

If Coinbase wanted to address these concerns and settle the uncertainty, implementing a Proof of Reserves standard would not only accomplish that, but as the largest publicly-traded company in the “crypto” space, it would also set the precedent for other companies looking to go public. “Why would I keep my bitcoin with XYZ-smaller company if Coinbase is proving their reserves and has much greater backing behind it?”

Proof of Reserves is not only a trust-building mechanism, but also a competitive angle for companies to leverage.

Why Companies Need Proof Of Reserves

If a society is built on false premises, how can one expect anything to work?

If 2 + 2 ever stops equalling 4, then we have a serious problem. Nothing that we use mathematics for to construct would function properly. Everything would collapse. Buildings would crumble. Education would crumble. Then society crumbles.

If we’re operating under the premise that banks can spend more than what’s actually available to them, we inevitably create a world in which we don’t have the resources to support the “abundance” we’ve created. As the Cantillon effect demonstrates, the value instead flows up to the top 1% who are closest to spending, at the expense of the bottom 99%.

That is the reality we live in today. While it allows an advantage for financial institutions in the short term, in the long term it’s destructive to the civilians who rely on these institutions, and inevitably creates distrust that leads to the destruction of those institutions as well.

History is a non-stop loop of civilizations building themselves up and tearing themselves down. Humanity hasn’t been able to support a civilization that lasts longer than a few hundred years. The false premise that’s baked into our monetary system – that a currency needs inflation (i.e. value debasement) over time – makes it impossible to reliably sustain any economic progress that we make in the short term.

Rather than working with a human-led system that’s inherently biased to our own greed and selfish interests, bitcoin, for the first time in history, sets the world up for a sustainable long-term future. By having an immutable, verifiable ledger that’s immune to human intervention, people, companies, governments, and nations alike can opt into a system that instills trust from the very foundation. Proof of Reserves is one manifestation of how a trustful society operates. No longer do the people accept guesswork when it comes to our own money – our energy – and how it’s allocated. A Proof of Reserve standard is a verifiably true statement directly from institutions that we don’t have to trust them at all. We can see for ourselves whether a company is financially ethical or not.

Final Thoughts

Proof of Reserves sets the stage for a major shift in today’s financial landscape. Fiat-driven incentives have allowed large institutions to take advantage of public trust, without verification, but PoR flips the script so that before we trust, we verify.

For truly ethical companies, Proof of Reserves is an obvious improvement to their playbook, but for dishonest companies, they will likely do whatever they can to avoid it themselves. The mere existence of Proof of Reserves is a major step forward for the public, as it helps us to better identify who’s really here to support the people, and who is here to take advantage of us.

As pioneers like River set a new standard for transparency, we can expect to see more and more companies adopt a similar strategy to stay competitive in the evolving financial space. Yet again, bitcoin is proving its world-changing value to the world by checkmating the bad actors who’ve kept their lies hidden for years, decades, and centuries. It’s certain that governments who notoriously spend what they don’t have will not welcome this change, but as long as Proof of Reserves continue to grow among our institutions, the noise will only get louder and more difficult for them to drown out.

Beyond the tangible change to company structures, Proof of Reserves represents an intangible shift in society towards an emphasis on trustworthiness, integrity, and honesty. I’d bet any amount of money that a civilization built on these principles will outlast any that clings to the skewed incentives of fiat, and you should too. Buy bitcoin today and become a part of the movement towards Proof of Reserves.

Thank You

If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it on social media. You can also help us out with any of the following.

• Follow us on Twitter and Nostr.
• Support one of these Bitcoin businesses.
• Make a value for value donation so that we can continue to publish more Bitcoin-only content.

Any support we get from bitcoiners is what keeps this project alive.

The post How Bitcoin Restores Integrity With Proof Of Reserves appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

As is the case with the founding of many new countries, national currencies emerge from them as society organizes itself economically and politically. Money makes the world go ‘round as they say, and in the digital world, bitcoin is becoming a nation state of its own.

Framing Bitcoin As A Nation State

No single analogy fully does bitcoin justice. There are always nuances that set it apart from anything that humanity has interacted with. People often compare bitcoin to gold, but what about comparing it to other countries?

If bitcoin behaves in a similar fashion to the countries of this world, then what are the components of a nation state that bitcoin tends to replicate?

You can break a nation down into these six critical components:

• Its discovery
• Its territory
• Its population
• Its government
• Its culture

1. Discovery

The first aspect that every new nation throughout history shares in common is its discovery. Someone had to stumble upon the land and claim it as their own. Throughout history, however, pretty much any new nation that arose brought violence with it. History is a tale of civilizations conquering one another, a story no different than today’s.

Bitcoin, however, arrived entirely peacefully. Satoshi Nakamoto happened to put the conditions together necessary to “unlock” bitcoin from the internet. While on one hand you can consider bitcoin an invention, in reality it is closer to a discovery. Just as Einstein discovered the equation behind the theory of special relativity, Satoshi Nakamoto discovered the equation of bitcoin.

Unlike the theory of special relativity, however, bitcoin is a tangible good we can acquire and interact with.

2. Territory

Once you’ve discovered a new nation state, it needs defined territories for others to understand its boundaries.

If you look at any country on a map right now, you can see a clear outline marking its territory. Once you cross those boundaries in the real world, you enter into the nation/or exit into a neighboring one.

Rather than being placed in the physical space, however, bitcoin is defined by the confines of cyberspace. Given there are no physical limitations to cyberspace beyond the receptivity of devices that can interact with it, bitcoin is a nation that could theoretically stretch beyond Earth and onto other planets, given the right infrastructure in place for nodes and devices to sync up between planets.

Bitcoin’s territory is infinitely scalable and can accommodate an infinite amount of people, without having to worry about housing or other accommodations.

3. Population

Bitcoin’s population is rapidly growing, faster than the rate of early internet adoption.

In comparison to other physical nation states, it’s not even close. Take a look at the world’s overall population growth throughout the past two millennia:

Bitcoin adoption is on a similar trajectory. While it has yet to spread to all eight billion people on this planet, the adoption rails are already in place thanks to technology that bitcoin was built on, like the internet, which already has a nearly 70% penetration rate worldwide.

As internet adoption grows, so does Bitcoin adoption. As bitcoin adoption grows, so too does the amount of businesses and individuals accepting bitcoin as payment worldwide. Extrapolate this trend long enough, and eventually no one wants fiat currencies any longer, as their value rapidly decays towards zero indefinitely. On the other hand, bitcoin becomes widespread enough that the global economy can support Bitcoin-denominated trade. Just as no one will step in to sell bitcoin and buy up fiat from other people, no one will offer to sell their bitcoin in exchange for fiat. The buyers of last resort for fiat currencies are their governments, but even governments have been hedging against themselves as they wake up to this reality.

This trend is what global adoption of a new currency looks like. It’s not pretty, fair, or accommodating to those who ignore the trend. Just like the internet, the people who fail to adopt and adapt get washed out.

History is not kind to laggards, typically speaking. The population residing in bitcoin today are the early adopters. Consider becoming one yourself.

4. Government

Now how do you manage the ever-growing population of a brand new nation state?

While most national governments abide by a federalized code of law that’s written, re-written, and swapped out routinely by legislators, Satoshi implemented a consensus mechanism known as “Proof of Work” to enforce the rules of the network. Rather than relying on fallible, fickle humans with inherent bias towards themselves to manage policy that changes depending on the administration in charge, bitcoin’s code is an infallible set of laws that are unchanging no matter who joins the network. Instead of centralized leadership determining what’s best for the network, the decentralized majority of the network must come to consensus over changes to the network. This design is critical to uphold certain rules that should never be changed, like a fixed supply of 21 million, but offers enough flexibility to make adaptations that help to improve aspects of the network, like Taproot or SegWit. This way, bitcoiners can be sure that the foundational elements of the network never change, and that new updates to the ruleset only come by the approval of the majority.

If Satoshi’s consensus mechanism were to be a written legislative document, it would behave similarly to the US Constitution. The Constitution’s authority rests outside of the government’s, which historically created the necessary conditions for the United States to become the most free and flourishing country in the world. However today, even the Constitution is facing contention from authoritarians looking to overthrow it. You can burn paper documents, but you can’t burn code.

5. Culture

Countries create national identity through the standards that their governments impose on its people. It’s why you see the United States breed an eclectic, diverse culture of multi-culture, made up of people coming from all parts of the globe. Whereas a country like Japan places great importance on courtesy, cleanliness, and order. The parts of the world where you don’t find much culture at all are the ones struggling to get off the ground due to entirely broken legal structure. Where there are no guidelines to work within, it becomes difficult to create any identity at all.

Unfortunately, national culture inevitably breaks down over time. State-imposed trust can only last for so long before greed, pride, and thirst for power takes over. The human condition.

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.”
– Satoshi Nakamoto

Like any nation, bitcoin fosters its own cultural identity, founded on core principles of freedom, individuality, privacy, and autonomy. It’s a thermodynamically sound system that respects the conservation of energy, unlike inflationary monetary policy.

Satoshi understood that stripping the individual of personal autonomy inherently limits people and degrades trust in society over time. Ironically, if a nation wants to preserve trust among its people, it starts with a trustless foundation that everyone accepts without personal or political biases.

The culture of the Bitcoin nation state is unique in that there is no risk of human bias. The rules were set in code, unchanging and eternal. It’s a set of rules outside of human imposition, making them ideal for building a culture that can last, and sets the tone for everything else that comes out of it. Just as we see the fiat standard inherently breed distrust and division between people, nations, and their governments, on a Bitcoin standard, we can expect the world and its systems to gravitate towards freedom and individual autonomy.

The Bitcoin Network Vs. Physical Nation States

So based on these characteristics, it’s clear that the Bitcoin network operates similarly to any other nation state.

A lone computer engineer stumbled upon bitcoin after a deep dive into the unknowns of the online landscape, building on past innovations to discover something entirely new. Bitcoin has its own unique territory and an army of miners defending it around the globe. Bitcoin fosters its own culture through the foundational attributes of freedom and individuality that it was founded on. The Bitcoin population is growing rapidly as more and more people are forced into refuge by an oppressive fiat regime.

The primary difference between bitcoin and other nation states is that the land of bitcoin is not physical. But despite its presence only in the digital domain, the inherently advantageous network effects that bitcoin enjoys means that it can gain outsized geopolitical influence in the world. With a nation of people being empowered to abide by a different monetary policy, it forces the hands of physical governments to compete and offer incentives to keep people within their monetary jurisdiction. But as their currencies continue to dwindle, those incentives are becoming harder and harder for people to desire.

How To Immigrate To The Bitcoin Nation State

One of the quintessential perks of the Bitcoin nation is that it’s permissionless; There’s no need for green cards, Visas, or other forms of personal identification in order to join.

Bitcoin allows anyone with a wallet address to receive, store, send, and spend bitcoin as they would any other currency, without the overhead risk of evaporating purchasing power over time, since no government, central bank, or other national entity is quietly diluting the supply of bitcoin over time.

If you want to join the Bitcoin nation state, it only takes four simple steps (and is much less complicated than migrating to an actual country, we promise):

• Acquire a hardware wallet from a reputable vendor and set up according to its instructions.
• Sign up with a trusted centralized exchange like Swan (affiliate) or learn how to use RoboSats for non-KYC purchases.
• Buy bitcoin on the platform of your choosing.
• Withdraw the bitcoin to cold storage by copying and pasting the address provided by your hardware wallet.

Once you’ve moved your bitcoin to cold storage, you officially have taken self custody of your bitcoin, and are a citizen of the Bitcoin nation state. Now, you have the freedom to interact with the global network of refugees who’ve also fled from fiat oppression. In this nation, no one is able to coerce or manipulate the supply of your currency. The cost of living in this nation state decreases over time.

Of course, not everyone is able to go all in on bitcoin at a moment’s notice. Most of us still have our hands tied in the fiat world to some extent with our bills, salaries, and other financial commitments. But the more that you park your money, your flag, your stake in the Bitcoin nation state, the more you reap the benefits of it.

Thank You

If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it on social media. You can also help us out with any of the following.

• Follow us on Twitter and Nostr.
• Support one of these Bitcoin businesses.
• Make a value for value donation so that we can continue to publish more Bitcoin-only content.

Any support we get from bitcoiners is what keeps this project alive.

The post Leave Fiat Behind. Bitcoin Is The New Nation State. appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

How To Start Your Own Bitcoin Meetup

Starting your own bitcoin meetup is easy. All you have to do is find a dedicated venue to meet up with other human beings at a specific time on a recurring basis and talk about bitcoin. The question is “how do you actually do that?”

Every single bitcoin meetup I have ever attended has either started or ended at a brewery/pub/taphouse and had food available. I took the necessary steps to find a venue near me, spoke with the owner to schedule the best time to meet there every week, and then I posted all of the details online and started my own bitcoin meetup. It was honestly one of the easiest things I have ever done but let’s go into some of the details on how I made it all happen.

Launching My Meetup With Geyser

When I first thought of starting a meetup, the most obvious thought that I had was to use Meetup.com but after looking closer at their site, I discovered that it costs $59.99 per month to host a meetup group. Yes, that’s $59.99 every single month even if nobody attends your events. I’d rather have $59.99 in sats so that’s not possible for me right now. I am just trying to get off the ground and for the sake of this article, I want to show normal bitcoiners like you how easy it is to start your own bitcoin meetup with $0 at your disposal.

Since Meetup is too expensive, I decided to look for alternatives that have a free plan for bootstrapping events.

All I really need is a place that I can post…

– A Backstory
– Meetup objective
– Code of conduct
– Publish posts for each new event.
– Calendar

I was thinking of getting started on Eventbrite but after a little research and consideration, I decided that the best place to start your own bitcoin meetup is on Geyser. Not only does it provide me with all of the things I’ve mentioned above but it’s a bitcoin-native platform that also enables me to do several other useful things that I hadn’t really given much thought until I was looking for a place to launch and manage a successful bitcoin event.

– I can set targeted goals
– I can sell an array of rewards
– I can collect bitcoin donations from users if they want to pitch-in towards a specific goal.
– I can accept zap payments via lightning directly to my unique lightning address.
– I can network with other meetup groups, plebs, and influencers to market via affiliate links.

Why would I pay $59.99 to Meetup.com when I can create basically the same thing but with $0 in recurring monthly fees and built-in bitcoin donations that grow the circular bitcoin economy. For me, it’s a no brainer. Geyser is one of the absolute most important projects in the entire bitcoin ecosystem and I intend to show just how powerful it is by using it to launch my own bitcoin meetup.

Meetup Objective

In order to have a Meetup, you will probably need an objective or agenda otherwise you’re all just sitting around doing nothing while you maybe talk a little bit about bitcoin. Since my ultimate focus is to get people to achieve the 7 steps to hyperbitcoinization, I shortened those 7 steps into the most succinct sentence I could think of.

We are a bitcoin meetup focused on educating new bitcoiners, running bitcoin nodes, maximizing privacy, growing bitcoin’s circular economy, and orange-pilling new users.

The first 4 steps are the most important for bitcoin to achieve global dominance but the final 3 are still very important for ensuring robust growth within local bitcoin communities.

Code Of Conduct

Something that has frustrated me with bitcoin meetups and events that I have attended is that there’s no clear code of conduct and I have almost been asked to leave a couple meetups because due to some misunderstandings. I want people to have a clear understanding of what is allowed and what isn’t. Controversial opinions are welcome but degrading toxic insults aren’t.

To avoid any problems with my attendees, one of the very first things I did was make a list of bullet points that outline how people should behave at the event. I’ve established a code of conduct that is built around the non-aggression principle, privacy, and mutual self interest. I gave my list of bullet points to ChatGPT and it gave me a complete code of conduct. I tuned some things and then published it on my Geyser page.

If you decide to start your own bitcoin meetup, I strongly encourage you to have a firm understanding of how you expect your attendees to conduct themselves. Here’s a summary of my code of conduct.

– Bitcoin Only
– No Photos Of Attendees Without Deliberate Consent
– Respect The Venue
– Non-Aggression Principle
– Free & Open Discussion
– Respect The Confidentiality Of Discussions and Identities
– Report Any Concerns
– Continual Improvement

I will make any adjustments if necessary but I think most people are pretty calm and collected.

Finding A Venue

Now that I have a clear objective for my meetup, I need to find a place to actually meet. Like I said before, every single bitcoin meetup I have ever attended has either started or ended at a brewery/pub/taphouse and had food available so that’s where I am going to look for a venue.

I did some searching on Google maps and found a number of venues that I think are a good place to meet for a happy hour. As soon as I refined my search a bit, I went and visited one of the venues and asked the owner if he was ok with me hosting a meetup there. He was a little hesitant at first because he thought that means that he needs to provide a PA system, or a TV, or projector, or literally anything.

After I assured him that its just a bunch of bitcoin nerds who want to get together once a week for food, beers, and a place to discuss bitcoin, he was totally fine with it. If we grow, then we may need to find somewhere else but I think a brewery is a great place to get started. If things go well, we will have to pool some funds to rent a venue. I asked which night is the least busy so we are able to get seated without any hassle and Tuesday night it is. Hopefully my meetup can be the weekday boost that he needs in between Monday night football and thirsty Thursdays.

Setting Funding Goals

I don’t have any lofty funding goals for the meetup but I wanted to show that Geyser is a great place to start your own bitcoin meetup. I can accept bitcoin donations from the beginning which can help with any minor startup costs like renting a venue, hiring a guest speaker, or ordering books for a book club.

I set up a couple goals like raise $250 to rent a dedicated meetup venue for a few hours. I used a service called PeerSpace to find some work spaces that can be rented by the hour. I found several good venues but a few really stood out to me. One looks really good for a workshop like building SeedSigners while the other one is better suited for more of a panel discussion or presentation to a medium sized room of about 40 people.

Venue rental is currently the primary goal for the project so all payments default to this goal unless they select a different goal to contribute to. As these funds are used up, we can raise more for larger scale venues for larger events like parties and maybe even a small “conference”.

I want to focus less on just talking about bitcoin and more on people doing things at events like building their own SeedSigner, generating your own seed phrase, learning how to calculate the final checksum word, and reading QR codes with physical devices in people’s hands. I want to have a book club for reading through some of the best bitcoin books as a group. I want to focus on educating new users and getting them to take some of the steps towards hyperbitcoinization.

I also set a goal to raise $200 to buy a Bitcoinize machine to orange pill our first venue by showing them how easy it is to accept bitcoin payments directly to their own wallet with little to no intermediaries. I don’t expect a whole lot of donations for this for a while but I think that over time more people will be interested in a larger selection of goals to donate toward. I kind of wanted to show the value of receiving donations for both a service and a physical product.

Collecting Donations

I am primarily focusing on just having a good time with the locals and growing everyone’s understanding of Bitcoin. I don’t think the Geyser page will ever yield a large sum of revenue but I think it is a good way to get attendees to signal how they would like to see the meetup grow. If someone wants a workshop, then they can put their money where their mouth is and donate towards that targeted goal. If they want to orange pill a local business, then they may want to donate to buying a bitcoinize machine. If they want to contribute to something else, they can suggest that we add a new targeted goal and contribute toward that.

I will start off with some very simple goals and collecting donations but as time goes on, I will develop Geyser into a tool that enables me to manage large events like a party with digital tickets all paid for with bitcoin.

I donated some to my own cause as a test but I have also received some other donations from London’s finest plebs. I have received at least 1 anonymous donation from someone who might not have the ability to prove their national identity or provide a proof of address. That’s an incredibly powerful tool for launching just about any idea or cause. It makes starting your own bitcoin meetup about as easy as it can be.

The First Meetup

As soon as I had everything ready to go, I created this post with the date, time, location and then published it. Now the event is public to the world and when I share events, anyone can contribute some sats to help fund the growth of the meetup.

Once my event was live, I added it to the events page on the Orange Pill App and shared it in a couple of Telegram groups with local bitcoiners. The first event had a total of 4 people attend. Myself plus 3 other bitcoiners from the local Las Vegas Bitcoiners group. It was great to see some familiar faces but my objective is to branch out and bring new people into our meetup so that’s my next objective.

As long as I continually host this event at the same time and place on a consistent basis, the number of attendees should grow but we are going to have to get creative.

Final Thoughts

Starting my own bitcoin meetup has been something that I have wanted to do for a long time. Since I just recently relocated to a new city, I thought it would be a good idea to meet some of the established bitcoin locals, network with them, and help them propel their own bitcoin projects further. So far, I have met a few people who would benefit from using Geyser to launch their own projects/causes and I intend to show them just how powerful Geyser is for bringing an idea into reality.

I am very excited to use Geyser to start my own bitcoin meetup because I see Geyser as the most powerful tool available today for launching an idea and accepting bitcoin payments on day one. I can publish posts, set targeted goals, offer rewards, accept bitcoin payments directly to my own wallet, and even market my project with affiliate links. Geyser is without a doubt one of the most powerful bitcoin tools available today. If you’re trying to start your own bitcoin meetup or any other bitcoin related project, make sure that you’re not ignoring the potential of such an amazing tool and community.

Thank You For Reading

If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it on social media. You can also help us out with any of the following.

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The post How I Started My Own Bitcoin Meetup appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

There’s been a lot of debate surrounding this question in recent weeks due to this image getting shared around:

What you’re seeing is a flowchart demonstrating just how much BTC that Coinbase has under its own custody. With 2,275,123 BTC in Coinbase’s hands – nearly 11% of the total supply, and 11.5% of the circulating supply – it certainly begs the question: Will Coinbase kill bitcoin?

To understand the gravity of what we’re looking at, let’s first get an understanding of previous Bitcoin honeypots and what happened to bitcoin following their unraveling.

Previous Bitcoin Exchange Hacks

While there are plenty of dangers to leaving bitcoin on an exchange, historic exchange hacks have actually done little to “kill” bitcoin.

• Mt. Gox hack: One of the most notorious hacks in bitcoin’s history, the Mt. Gox hack of 2011 was essentially the first major wake up call to teach bitcoiners “not your keys, not your coins”. A security breach led to an eventual loss of 850,000 BTC, as revealed years later after its 2014 bankruptcy filing. At the time of the hack, 6.7 million BTC were circulating, meaning that 4% of the total supply, and nearly 13% of the circulating supply had gone missing.
• Bitfinex hack: In August 2016, Bitfinex, one of the major exchanges of the time, experienced a security breach that resulted in 119,754 BTC vanishing from the platform. At the time, this sum represented slightly less than 1% of the circulating supply. But despite how much smaller of a hack this was compared to Mt. Gox, that didn’t stop the Bitcoin price to plunge by more than 20% following the news.

Although these historic hacks ruffled the feathers of Bitcoin holders, observing the price action that followed these hacks just goes to show the strength of the Bitcoin network. No matter the circumstances, huge losses of bitcoin do little to suppress the network over the long run.

So could an attack on Coinbase change things?

How Large Is Coinbase By Comparison?

As mentioned, the Mt. Gox honeypot jeopardized almost 13% of circulating bitcoin at the time. The Bitcoin network hasn’t since had to deal with any stress tests nearly as large as Mt. Gox, but the 11.5% of circulating supply held under Coinbase management should ring the alarm bells for bitcoiners around the world.

At the time, that 13% held by Mt. Gox represented $27,000,000 in potential sell pressure on a $672,000,000 asset. If that supply were to hit the market all at once, the huge influx of new supply coupled with relatively low liquidity at the time could have easily and instantly slashed the BTC price by more than 50%. What happened in reality, however, was arguably worse: The uncertainty of the Mt. Gox hack nixed bitcoin’s historic first bull run, leading to a cascade of sell pressure over five months, collapsing bitcoin’s price by more than 93%.

By comparison, Coinbase currently sits on 11.5% of the circulating supply, wrapped up in the centralized exchange (CEX) itself, exchange traded funds (ETFs), custodians, funds and over-the-counter (OTC) dealers, companies, as well as miners.

Let’s break down these numbers:

• CEX: 1,105,318 BTC make up the bitcoin held by the everyday people who have yet to move their funds to cold storage.
• ETFs: 808,619 BTC make up the balance sheets of companies, 401ks, pension funds, and investment accounts of people all throughout the United States, managed by major asset managers like BlackRock, Grayscale, Ark, and the rest.
• Custodians: 137,947 BTC are sitting in Coinbase vaults.
• Funds/OTC: 106,541 BTC make up the bitcoin used to facilitate Coinbase’s OTC exchanges.
• Companies: 99,091 BTC belonging to major corporations like MicroStrategy, Tesla, and SpaceX.
• Miners: 17,609 BTC belonging to miners with Coinbase partnerships, like CleanSpark, Cipher Mining, and Bitfarms.

Is Coinbase A Threat To Bitcoin?

The short answer is yes. Coinbase poses a real threat to the Bitcoin price that could dismantle a lot of confidence in the network if someone were to hack all of its custodians at once and dump the bitcoin onto the open market. During the second week of March in 2020, the mere panic of the coronavirus pandemic tanked bitcoin by more than 50% in just two days – no hacks involved.

Such an attack would have much larger ripple effects than either of the aforementioned like Mt. Gox or Bitfinex. At the time of those attacks, neither exchange was nearly as intertwined with the mainstream financial system as Coinbase is. Today, however, there are publicly-traded companies and trillion-dollar asset managers relying on Coinbase for custodianship. It’s not just niche tech enthusiasts and early adopters losing out on their bitcoin – it’s grandparents, college-aged citizens trying to outrun inflation, and small business owners that would get hit the hardest by a Coinbase hack.

Potential Dangers Of A Coinbase Hack

If history were to repeat in a similar fashion to Mt. Gox or Bitfinex, Bitcoin could easily experience a 50%, 60%, or 70%+ drawdown in no time at all. Coupled with a potential global crisis that places stress on Coinbase, leading to the hack, and that percentage drop could go even higher.

On top of the price collapse, the market-wide realization that no entity is too large to fail – even one that’s in bed with governments, mainstream corporations, and the largest asset managers in the world – would likely initiate a wave of harsh regulations to crack down on bitcoin. It’s the perfect storm in the eyes of authoritarians to leverage catastrophe and spin it into a “need” for a “savior” to “protect” investors. Custodial restrictions, invasive financial surveillance, and outright forks of the network itself would all be on the table.

In a similar fashion to a prominent shitcoin’s notorious hard fork following a 2016 DAO hack, BlackRock or some other entity could propose a hard fork in the Bitcoin chain to reverse previously-made transactions that would enable them to recoup the lost funds. With the major political influence that these entities have, along with the millions of people who would have lost money in the hack, they could certainly muster a lot of momentum behind the fork.

Despite all of this, however, there is no way to know whether such actions would kill the real bitcoin itself. If history suggests anything, it’s that bitcoin has an uncanny ability to absorb attacks and recover like no other asset. How many assets do you know of that have gone through more than four consecutive 70-90% drawdowns, only to breach new all-time highs within two years?

Would A Coinbase Hack Kill Bitcoin?

While Coinbase certainly poses a great threat to bitcoin in the short term, a major Coinbase hack that saw 11.5% of the supply dumped onto the market would only affect the Bitcoin price, but not the security of bitcoin itself. If anyone wanted to kill bitcoin as we know it, it would require a change in the actual code of the protocol that compromises its internal security.

A hard fork scenario like the one suggested above could start another “civil war” within bitcoin, much like the Blocksize war that resulted in entirely new Bitcoin forks like Bcash (BCH) back in 2017. But this time around, with backers like the United States government and BlackRock behind it, they may have more power to sway the actions of the public in their favor and bring over the masses to their own hard fork.

Again, however, history has proved bitcoin’s ability to remain resilient throughout these civil wars. BCH and BSV alike are down ~98% against bitcoin since launching. So there is no data to suggest that the real BTC would lose to yet another off-shoot chain, even if governed by the embedded political and financial giants of the US.

How Would Bitcoiners Respond?

True bitcoiners understand that any hard forks to the original Bitcoin protocol are fraudulent attempts to capture the network. Governments and all others in power understand the unique position bitcoin is in to oust them from their financial supremacy, so they are incentivized to fight against bitcoin however they think possible.

The first major tactic we’ve seen them employ to capture bitcoin is through the array of spot ETFs launched for the public. They figure that with enough of the supply under their control, they can gain outsized influence over the network. But bitcoin was created precisely to end that function of our current flawed monetary system. Instead of gaining influence through stake, bitcoin enforces proof of work, which balances the playing field so that no matter how much bitcoin you own, your voice has no more say than the humble stacker sitting on 0.01 BTC or even less. Miners pushing out quintillions of hashes per second bulletproof the network from outside attacks. If governments want to control bitcoin, they’ll quickly realize that it’s much more cost efficient for them to join along and play by the rules, rather than try to change it for themselves.

I’m afraid that many won’t be able to put the pride in their own currency aside, however, and the fighting will continue until they financially destroy themselves in the process.

As a bitcoiner, respond to the fight by staying true to the real Bitcoin network. Don’t sacrifice your slice of the most freedom-enabling protocol on the planet for convenience and acceptance by society. A society built upon broken money is not one you want to be a part of in the end. Contribute to the future by educating others and being a pioneer for the new world that bitcoin offers.

Final Thoughts

It’s important to realize that there are real bad actors out there who are directly incentivized to kill bitcoin. World leaders with all their wealth and power tied up in local currencies see the “threat” that bitcoin presents, not only to their currency, but to their own power and control over the population.

What’s also important to realize is that bitcoin is not the actual “threat” to authoritarians and their currencies. Their own actions threaten themselves; Bitcoin is just the escape vessel to avoid the monetary debasement that results from their greed. It’s a fundamental flaw plaguing all fiat currencies today: With no backing, infinite ability to print more, and thus virtually zero ties to reality or the laws of physics, hyperinflation is the inevitable outcome of the money that society uses today. Just look at the performance of any currency against gold over the long term to see what I mean. Coupled with a position of power and a direct incentive to enrich themselves by sitting on a basket of scarce assets, and you have a recipe for financial disaster waiting to happen.

Coinbase’s Bitcoin stockpile puts themselves in a very dangerous position. They are a prime target for other bad actors to break in and steal from. Given that it’s a centralized institution, they must expend infinite energy over time updating and staying on top of vulnerabilities, and there is no full guarantee that they can prevent a hack in the long run as cyber criminality becomes more and more advanced.

The only guarantee to own the money we have comes from taking self custody of bitcoin. By storing your bitcoin in your own cold storage device, you not only know where exactly your money is, but also that it will never end up somewhere else against your will.

Thank You

If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it on social media. You can also help us out with any of the following.

• Follow us on Twitter and Nostr.
• Support one of these Bitcoin businesses.
• Make a value for value donation so that we can continue to publish more Bitcoin-only content.

Any support we get from bitcoiners is what keeps this project alive.

The post Will Coinbase Kill Bitcoin? appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

For the first time in history, real estate, the long-time king of resilient and reliable asset classes, is being challenged by a digital asset that’s forcing us to rethink the very foundation of our economic system. Bitcoin vs. real estate. It’s a debate that most investors aren’t prepared to have, or even consider, in 2024.

That doesn’t make it irrelevant, however. If you want an actionable plan for how to adapt and allocate your money in a world where our idea of “value” is being flipped on its head, then this article may be transformative in the way you approach investing – or even convince you to avoid it entirely.

Understanding Bitcoin Vs. Real Estate

It’s safe to say that next to no one in the 21st century is arguing for real estate to be a form of money. I’m not walking into the grocery store with a house in my pocket. But for the sake of clarity, and in similar fashion to our Gold Vs. Bitcoin article, let’s first start by breaking down the fundamental properties of money and applying them to both assets.

Scarcity

• While real estate is relatively difficult to produce, as we’ll discuss later, it’s still inflationary and is becoming easier to produce over time.
• On the other hand, bitcoin is perfectly scarce. Satoshi coded the 21 million coin limit and implemented a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to create physical restraints that enforce this limit, along with an ever-decreasing inflation rate as bitcoin becomes harder and harder to mine over time.

Divisibility

• You can’t divide real estate into more real estate. Sure, you can turn one house into a duplex, but that cuts the living space in half to be divided up between two people. At scale, real estate’s lack of divisibility is an obvious reason why real estate can’t be considered money, among other reasons.
• On the other hand, since bitcoin is entirely digital, we can divide it infinitely into as many units as we’d like. “Satoshis” or “sats” are the socially agreed upon unit of division today, with 100 million sats equalling one bitcoin. However, there is no saying that we can’t denominate into even smaller units one day if needed. If bitcoin’s purchasing power became so great that a loaf of bread only costs you 0.01 sats, the protocol allows for further denomination to make the measurement easier to understand.

Durability

• While real estate can be built extraordinarily well, no building is immune to destruction. A tsunami can wipe out a coastline home (and thus its value), just as fault engineering can topple a building in the middle of Los Angeles. No matter what combination of materials a construction team uses, there’s no guarantee that the value stored in real estate can’t be wiped out, by chance or by deliberate action.
• On the other hand, bitcoin is the first technology ever created that could theoretically store value perfectly for millions of years, in the same way that the internet could theoretically store our information indefinitely. As long as there are people (or artificial intelligence) here to make use of them, distributed networks like the internet or bitcoin are more resilient than any physically constructed building.

Portability

• Real estate is anything but portable. Once that skyscraper goes up on Miami Beach, it’s not moving anywhere. Recreational vehicles (RVs) are the best argument for real estate being “portable”, but RVs come with many other significant tradeoffs and limitations that make them undesirable as a form of money. The obvious one being that you can’t drive your RV over the Atlantic Ocean to pay for a service that your friend in Europe provided.
• On the other hand, users can send bitcoin to one another over its decentralized network freely and instantly. If you store $1 billion in bitcoin instead of an array of real estate properties, now all you need to move it is a device that’s connected to the Bitcoin network, be it your phone, computer, tablet, or something else.

Fungibility

• Obviously no single house is the same as another. Sure, there are cookie cutter neighborhoods that are filled with identical homes that may make you feel like you’re living inside a Black Mirror episode, but each of those buildings still have small, unique identifiers that make them different from each other, be it the chip in the siding, the interior paint color, etc. Real estate is not fungible. If I trade my house for my neighbor’s nextdoor, we will get fundamentally different products.
• On the other hand, every bitcoin was designed to be the same as any other. With a quick reference to the blockchain using a block explorer like mempool.space, you can verify an authentic Bitcoin transaction on the Bitcoin network the moment that it takes place. Whether you’re holding freshly-minted Bitcoin UTXO from a miner in Iceland or a UTXO that previously came from Satoshi’s wallet himself, neither one of those UTXOs offer something different or more valuable than the other.

Transparency

• You can see on the surface what you’re getting when you purchase real estate. You can take a tour of the interior and ask real estate agents for information about the build, its previous history, or any other details. But no matter what level of transparency they may offer you, you can’t know without a shadow of a doubt whether the real estate is safe to enclose people within, or whether you’ll be able to continue paying for it in the future without risk of being evicted and having the government take it away from you. You have to place trust in the system that your real estate will be yours indefinitely.
• On the other hand, the Bitcoin protocol is fully open source and visible for anyone to see. The ledger organizes each and every transaction with time-stamped details of the amount, recipients, and costs to facilitate the transaction. You know for certain that when you spent or received bitcoin, it was authentic. You know for certain that even if the government comes to evict you from your house and throw you in jail, they still can’t get their hands on your bitcoin.

There are many obvious reasons why we can’t use real estate as a form of money. It’s not very durable, it’s not very portable, and it certainly isn’t scarce compared to bitcoin. So when it comes to treating real estate like an investment, what has made it such a historically great choice?

It’s fairly simple. It comes down to supply and demand. Dollars are simply easier to produce than real estate is. When something is harder to produce, assuming equivalent demand, the more difficult-to-produce items will always be more “valuable”. Just as there is infinite demand for money to circulate through the economy, so too is their relatively infinite demand for more housing.

The end result is that the real estate market rises in “value” over time, relative to fiat currency, like all other “assets”. But the reality that bitcoin reveals, however, is that real estate truly isn’t an asset at all.

Real Estate Is A Liability, Not An Asset

The fact of the matter is that real estate is a liability, and 21st century technology like bitcoin is revealing this truth. It actively requires taking money out of your bank account after you’ve purchased it, to be spent on maintenance, property taxes, utility bills, renovations, etc.

If you ask for the mainstream perspective on real estate, you’ll be told that it can be either an asset or a liability, depending on your situation. And this framing is correct in a fiat-based economy. Since the design of fiat currency inherently requires its value to drop over time, relatively scarce things like real estate rise in price over time and preserve your purchasing power. But on a Bitcoin standard, real estate does nothing but drop in value over the long run.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the numbers.

The average home cost in January 2017 was roughly $212,000. Today, the average cost of a home is $362,000. That’s a ~71% increase over ~7.5 years. Sounds like an appreciating asset, doesn’t it?

Well, consider that cost measured against bitcoin. In the same time frame, bitcoin went from $970 to $60,000. That’s a ~6,088% increase. Or in other words, the house was worth ~219 BTC, to now only being worth 6 BTC. That’s a ~97% reduction in value over 7.5 years.

In the world of asset investing, why would anyone choose to hold real estate long term vs. bitcoin? Unless you are planning to use and live in that house, you are much better off storing your capital in bitcoin than you are a home, or any other form of real estate.

Adapting To The 21st Century

One glaringly obvious but overlooked trend taking place in the world is the increasing amount of abundance we enjoy as the world progresses.

Think from first principles: As our technology improves, why wouldn’t our ability to produce goods and services also improve?

As we’ve seen over the past century, the world population has skyrocketed post-WWII:

This sheer explosion in the birthrate obviously called for more production of everything. And while certain countries are better off than others, as our efficiency improves, so too will our ability to create housing around the world for people who don’t enjoy it today.

Think about how much more arduous home-building was for landowners in the feudal age. Today, we have construction teams using machinery to put entire neighborhoods together in the amount of time it once took to build a single house by hand.

Think about 3D printing, and our increasing ability to produce more and more impressive structures with it. Do you earnestly believe that we won’t be able to streamline the production of housing to the point where we’re essentially printing it with very little overhead?

Companies are already using 3D printing to produce concrete houses and other buildings for dramatically less costs and much more quickly.

And it’s not just housing and commercial buildings. Land itself is also becoming easier to create. Just look at the Palm Islands of Dubai. By the time we “run out of land” on Earth, we will probably have expanded our reach to other planets within our solar system. Whether or not that’s realistic doesn’t dissuade from the reality here: We can *always* produce more real estate.

What we’re seeing is a trend taking place. Houses, land, and virtually everything else on the planet are becoming increasingly easier to create. Just as the internet created digital abundance – the ability to create copies of information for infinitely cheaper than doing so physically – so too are we now reaching that same ability in the physical domain. What becomes evermore valuable in times like these is true scarcity.

Bitcoin is the answer to financially protect ourselves in a world where supply has no cap. When supply can dramatically outpace the demand for any given item, the value of that item drops significantly. In the context of real estate, what makes you think this long-term trend is positive for real estate value?

On a broken fiat monetary standard, it’s true that real estate prices may still rise – because cash is easier to print than anything else. But their true value is actually falling in a world where cash and real estate are easier to create. It’s only against a proper measure of value – Bitcoin – that you can see this reality.

Final Thoughts

Real estate properties are designed to hold people within them. Bitcoin is designed to preserve purchasing power stored within it. Inflationary “assets” meant for holding people shouldn’t be used to hold money over the long term when there’s already a perfectly scarce asset designed for that specific purpose.

Up until 2009, we never had an optimized asset built for purchasing power preservation. So we used the best tools we had at the time. Real estate, gold, index funds, and every other investment all served that demand for monetary preservation. But now that we have bitcoin, the world has to rethink its strategy for maintaining capital over time. And for the first time in history, we have an asset that’s completely indestructible, no matter how long the time frame. Even if your family owned a block of real estate in Manhattan, there’s no guarantee that block of real estate will continue to exist one hundred, one thousand, or one million years into the future. Only the Bitcoin network can make that guarantee. Unless an asteroid or some other black swan event knocks humanity off the face of the planet (in which case you don’t need to worry about money preservation whatsoever), bitcoin will always be around, doing the same thing it’s always done.

Bitcoin simplifies investing for the world. Before you consider your next investment, price it against bitcoin over the past several years. Make the calculation, and ask yourself if it’s still a good choice to park your capital. As the data suggests, when it comes to bitcoin vs. real estate, there’s really nothing that comes close to bitcoin in terms of capital preservation over the long run. So act accordingly!

Thank You

If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it on social media. You can also help us out with any of the following.

• Follow us on Twitter and Nostr.
• Support one of these Bitcoin businesses.
• Make a value for value donation so that we can continue to publish more Bitcoin-only content.

Any support we get from bitcoiners is what keeps this project alive.

The post Bitcoin Vs. Real Estate appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

How Far Bitcoin Has Come

Before diving deep into the nuance, let’s appreciate how far bitcoin has come in its 15-year history.

Satoshi Nakamoto was probably literally working on bitcoin out of their basement, with no guarantee of success, and no validation from the outside world about its creation. Nowadays, bitcoin is becoming a key talking point from both sides of the political aisle, as inflation and the economy stand at the forefront of voters’ minds.

How can we deal with our rapidly rising debt?

How can we fend off the massive inflationary surge caused by excess money printing during the 2020 pandemic?

It appears that both presidential candidates are having to face the realities of monetary action taken in past years, but as you’ll see, it’s clear that only one of them is making an effort to define specific policy points regarding bitcoin.

An Important Caveat To Understand

No matter what either presidential candidate tells us, the reality is that politicians at large can’t be entrusted to “solve” deeply rooted problems, like a fundamentally broken monetary policy. It requires drastic reorganization of society, driven by technological innovation, to achieve real prosperity for the world. History is full of examples of this. I like looking back to the Catholic Church and the printing press. No matter what the church (the state) tried to do, meaningful progress for society never came until Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press to the world. Its creation inevitably broke the church’s monopoly on information, and empowered the people to simply acquire the information they wanted without having to ask permission from the state to do so.

The separation of church and state was a fundamental breakthrough that distributed freedom to the world. Today, that next breakthrough in freedom that humanity is working towards comes from the separation of money and state.

The important question is: Will any political candidate have the courage to make that separation themselves?

Stated Bitcoin Policies From Kamala Harris

Much like her lack of presence in the public eye since entering the presidential race, there has been little to no policy or semblance of a plan to federally incorporate bitcoin into US policy.

There’s been talk of getting more acquainted with bitcoin, however, we have yet to see any defined policy. What we’ve seen so far are promises to develop relationships with people in the space, but so far, none of that has become public or acknowledged directly by Harris.

One not-so-great policy that she’s stated is her plan to appoint the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who notoriously delayed Bitcoin Spot ETFs in the US for years, as Treasury Secretary. And other decisions she’s made suggest that her administration will likely be hostile towards bitcoin.

• She supports Biden’s budget proposals, which includes a 30% tax on cryptocurrency mining and applying the wash sale rule on cryptocurrency sales. In the context of bitcoin, despite the fact that it is a commodity, this ruling legally treats it as if it’s different than any other commodity, like gold, oil, or wheat. Put simply: If you tried to sell bitcoin at a loss, but then bought back your same position within 30 days,  you wouldn’t be able to deduct that initial loss from your taxes. The only way to get that deduction is if you acquired a “significantly changing your market position”. So this policy is yet another attempt at throttling and controlling Bitcoin holders’ decisions.
• Kamala’s economic advisor picks don’t exactly scream “bullish bitcoin” either. Brian Deese & Bharat Ramamurti are former Biden economic aids with hostile rhetoric towards the industry. Ramamurti, titled one of the White Houses’s “top crypto critics”, also has more than six years of experience working on economic policy under Elizabeth Warren, one of the most notorious anti-Bitcoin senators. Deese put out “The Administration’s Roadmap to Mitigate Cryptocurrencies’ Risks“, a White House roadmap that repeatedly synonymizes bitcoin and crypto at large with fraud and risk mitigation in an attempt to justify governmental overreach on what people do with their money.

One major example of the overreach I’m talking about is the shutdown of Samourai Wallet, which provided Bitcoin users with open-source privacy tools. This move cramped down on people’s ability to retain financial privacy online, and drove other freedom-promoting Bitcoin tools like Phoenix Wallet to shutter business in the US in order to avoid legal persecution.

No matter what policies Harris does end up putting forth in regards to bitcoin, we cannot forget the outright battle against freedom and privacy that the Biden-Harris administration enacted against Bitcoin privacy through weaponization of the FBI and the Department of Justice.

Stated Bitcoin Policies From Donald Trump

It’s been fascinating to watch Donald Trump slowly fall down the rabbit hole. He’s gone from a complete skeptic to an enthusiast in the span of five years. However, that doesn’t mean he’s going to revolutionize the world by ushering in hypebitcoinization into the US and throughout the rest of the world. We’re not out of the woods yet.

If we take a look back to his thoughts on bitcoin back in 2019, you can read about his negative perception of bitcoin:

However, now, in 2024, having done more homework, it’s clear that Donald Trump is rightfully seeing what’s actually threatening the supremacy of the US Dollar: rampant money printing that debases the currency’s purchasing power and erodes the savings of its holders over time.

“Those who say that bitcoin is a threat to the dollar have the story exactly backwards…Bitcoin is not threatening the dollar. The behavior of the current US government is really threatening the dollar.”

While most of his commentary today is likely driven by a desire for citizens’ votes, there’s no denying that he’s ushering in a wake up call for the rest of the world that bitcoin is an essential component of any functioning nation’s balance sheet. At Bitcoin 2024, Trump pledged to form a strategic Bitcoin reserve that would keep 100% of the US government’s now 203,000 BTC.

Despite the recognition of reality, however, it’s not clear that Donald Trump has an outright mission to drastically reduce our spending, let alone end the Federal Reserve. In a lot of ways, the attitude being taken is that of throwing in the towel, and using our money printing system to try and “fix” broken federalized institutions and patch holes with band-aids wherever possible.

For example, take a look at the top 20 agenda items Donald Trump posted to social media:

Maybe some sound good, to others not so much – but what I take note of here are items #3 and #13:

• “End inflation”
• “Maintain the US Dollar supremacy”

On paper, both of these sound pretty good to a presidential candidate deeply entwined in the political system. However, the reality is that these two statements are not congruent with one another.

We can either end inflation or maintain the US Dollar supremacy, but not both. And focusing on the latter outcome would only result in dramatically worse conditions for the US and the rest of the world.

The problem is that killing inflation effectively is only possible through uprooting and ending the Federal Reserve and central banking network entirely – and thus the government’s control over the monetary system. It requires a relinquishment of power that, based on his other statements, Trump is not prepared to make. If you want to maintain US Dollar supremacy in the world, that requires keeping the money printer going, but that in turn results in inevitable hyperinflation of the world’s strongest currency, followed by a plunge into economic catastrophe around the world.

It’s a choice between the lesser of two evils. Does Trump want to make the correct, but societally challenging decision to end the Federal Reserve and embrace bitcoin’s newly engineered economic model for the world, or does he want to maintain pride in the American dollar, only for it to inevitably drive the US and the world into complete economic breakdown. On the dollar’s current path, that’s where we are headed anyway. What’s necessary is a complete restructuring of monetary policy – the “policy” being to rely on bitcoin and give up on humanity determining monetary policy entirely.

The World’s Dilemma

Humanity has a very difficult choice to face in the 21st century. Do we recognize the flaws in our way of economic life and put in the hard work necessary to reorganize society around a Bitcoin standard? Or do we keep our eyes shut and push on with inflationary monetary policy, in hopes that the laws of physics magically decide to redesign themselves? The former decision is more painful in the short term, while prosperous in the long term, while the latter decision offloads the pain for the long term to enjoy “comfort” in the short term.

What the economic world needs is a cure to its chronic illness. The illness being inflation, or a requirement to debase value over time in order for things to “work”.

The Bitcoin Standard author Saifedean Ammous framed this idea perfectly in a response to skepticism about bitcoin:

“Life is not supposed to have such easy shortcuts. But [saving in bitcoin] only seems spectacularly easy because we’ve spent a century using money that’s optimized for government criminals to rob you & getting gaslit into believing life just has to get more expensive & saving is futile. You must keep working harder forever AND become a part-time hedge fund manager just to keep the wealth you’ve already earned from work. If it wasn’t for fiat larceny, everything would be always getting cheaper & saving would be an effective way to provide for your future. It isn’t that bitcoin is too good to be true, it’s just that it kills fiat parasitism and that is the world’s biggest problem.

If you & everyone you knew spent your entire lives sick from parasites, an antiparasitic pill will seem like a magic pill. If parasites could write your textbooks & newspapers, they’d call the anti-parasitic pill an unworkable utopian fantasy.”

Everyone understands that curing chronic illness is no simple feat. And on a global scale, eradicating it inevitably leads to social unrest and confusion in the short term. Unfortunately, millions, if not billions, of people are unprepared for a world that revolves around a neutral, trustless monetary layer. Our civilizations have been built around outdated monetary architecture – how can we expect an uprooting of that to go over smoothly with the people?

It just goes to show that life is not fair, equal, or decent to humanity. A lot of the time, the best decisions are painful ones, and if inflation proves anything, it’s that people will sacrifice what’s “right” for comfort and security in a heartbeat, at the expense of getting repeatedly caught in traps that this mindset inherently creates.

Ultimately, however, the pain that ridding the world of fiat monetary policy causes will be dramatically less than the systemic pain that society at large endures today. It’s time to rip the bandaid off.

Final Thoughts

Bitcoin breaks the cycle of economic turmoil that civilization has always lived with throughout history. It offers a world in which we don’t have to design our way of life around volatile business cycles with booms, busts, bubbles, and crashes. If we can achieve more stability in the bedrock of our economy – the money we use to lubricate it – then we can achieve more stability in the working lives of everyday people within that economy.

While each of the presidential candidates have their own vision for how to fit bitcoin into today’s political and economic standards, there still lies a problem in them trying to make it “fit” at all. What the world needs is a movement from the complete reverse mentality: We need to “fit” everything else around bitcoin, not try to incorporate bitcoin into an already broken system.

There are plenty of ways to go about this, and it starts by orange pilling your closest friends and family around you. The more localized communities we have operating on a Bitcoin standard, the quicker we can expand these communities out to the rest of the world.

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Orange Pill Your Friends And Family

As soon as I had my orange pill moment and came to the realization that Bitcoin is inevitable, I naturally felt the urge to help my friends and family come to the same realization. Unfortunately, they all seemed to be content with the way things work (which is incredibly common in the US) but I didn’t let that get in the way of my conviction.

Over the years, I have done everything I can to get others to realize that fiat money is designed to depreciate in value over time and the only way out is to stop using fiat altogether. Instead of constantly repeating myself over and over and over again, I found that sharing some simple tools has been the most effective way to show others how bitcoin fixes real world problems. Showing my friends and family concrete data like this helps them to understand how bitcoin can actually help them solve real-world problems.

After years of effort, some of my close friends and family have taken the orange pill and begun their own journey down the bitcoin rabbit hole. I hope these tools are as helpful for you as they have been for me.

Orange Pill With Simple Data

One of the very first objections that you will run into when trying to orange pill your friends and family is that “bitcoin is risky” or ‘bitcoin is too volatile”. To alleviate these concerns, you can start off by showing them some of the basic tools that show the simple value of bitcoin over a long period of time and that volatility is actually more of an advantage for buying over a long period of time.

Store Of Time

Store Of Time is a great tool to easily show how bitcoin is a useful tool to store the value of your time or maybe more importantly the time they spend working. Store of Time has a few drop-down menus to choose from to select how well 1 day of work traded for money would compare to bitcoin as well as multiple other assets commonly used to store value.

Since we all work hard for the money that we use to purchase goods and services, we naturally want that money to hold its value long into the future. Unfortunately, fiat money doesn’t do that very well. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is the best tool for mid to long term savings and this tool can prove it. Naturally, if you buy and hodl for at least a few years, 1 day of work traded for bitcoin is worth a lot more than your local fiat currency is in that same timespan.

When To Use This Tool: If you’re trying to orange pill your friends and family from a labor perspective, Store of Time is a great way to show how much the value of your time is being eroded by fiat currency and how bitcoin is a superior store of time.

Bitcoin Magazine Pro

Bitcoin Magazine Pro (formerly Look Into Bitcoin)is a website that offers a wealth of information on the bitcoin blockchain, mining, profitability, and much more. Some common charts that I use to orange pill my friends and family are the bitcoin profitable days chart which shows whether or not someone would be profitable based on what price they bought bitcoin at.

Another great tool to help others to better understand bitcoin is the number of addresses holding more than x bitcoin per year. In a simple chart, you can easily show your friends and family the increase of individuals and businesses alike who are using bitcoin as savings.

When To Use This Tool: Bitcoin Magazine Pro is a great tool for showing your friends and family exactly how many days that bitcoin has been “profitable” and if they had purchased any amount of bitcoin in the green zone, it would be worth more than when they bought it.

DCA BTC

DCA BTC is an excellent tool for quickly showing the value of buying bitcoin slowly and consistently over the course of months or even years with a simple dollar cost average purchase on a fixed schedule.

When To Use This Tool: DCA BTC is an excellent way to show that bitcoin is not a get rich quick scheme like a lot of people want it to be. It shows the value of making small bitcoin purchases over a long period of time and just hodling. It might not be as glamorous as smash buying the bottom of a bear market but it does show the merit of a very reasonable purchasing strategy to reduce the risk of buying a volatile asset.

Wen Moon

Wen Moon it a tool to calculate when you can retire based on how much bitcoin you have and how much fiat you want to live off of when you do. Instead of making random “predictions” and trying to orange pill your friends and family with hopium and obscure “number go up” memes, you can use Jimbo’s tool to present some actual long-term calculations on when somebody can retire on their bitcoin holdings. This tool can be used to calculate your “moon date” based on your bitcoin stack size, your desired income in today’s dollars, annual USD inflation, and annual bitcoin price appreciation. Filling out these 4 basic fields can show you “Wen Moon” based on these calculations.

When To Use This Tool: When you use Wen Moon with some of the other tools mentioned above, it can give you a pretty good understanding of when you will be able to stop stacking and live off of your bitcoin stack for the rest of your life. Wen Moon is a great tool to orange pill your friends and family who are looking for some more tangible set date in the future to look forward to. I have had good success with my older relatives who want to retire soon.

Bitcoin Or Shit

Bitcoin Or Shit shows the value of buying bitcoin instead of cheap goods that ultimately don’t offer any sort of long-term benefit or value. When you buy bitcoin instead of cheap fiat junk, you will have a while lot more to show for it in a few years time. If you still decide that you want to buy something after a few years, then you will have a whole lot more purchasing power if you buy bitcoin first and then hodl for a few years and then spend it on some dumb fiat shit.

When To Use This Tool: Use this tool to orange pill your friends and family that buy lots of fiat consumer goods. If they would just buy at least $100 worth of bitcoin and hodl it for a few years, they would have a whole lot more purchasing power than if they bought that fiat junk that is now sitting in their garage, attic, storage unit, or even in the trash.

Satoshis Per Person

Satoshis Per Person shows how many sats there are per person in the world. By dividing the total number of sats in circulation by the number of human beings on the planet, you can see approximately how many satoshis per person are possible.

When To Use This Tool: Use this tool to orange pill your friends and family who don’t understand that you can own a fraction of a bitcoin and that they can own more bitcoin than most people in the entire world if they just buy some bitcoin and hold onto it. This can be a useful tool to get people to buy their first fraction of a bitcoin and keep an eye on it.
 

Orange Pill With Technical Data

Some of your friends and family are naturally going to express technical concerns about why Bitcoin can’t be trusted or it isn’t secure. These tools are best suited for providing all of the most relevant technical data about the bitcoin network, bitcoin mining, the lightning network, the blockchain, and other technical aspects of the inner workings of the bitcoin network.
 

Timechain Calendar

Timechain Calendar is one of the best tools in the industry to show all sorts of blockchain data in more of a clock format instead of a more linear format like many other block explorer tools use. Timechain Calendar provides users with an intuitive and visually engaging way to track essential milestones in the bitcoin ecosystem. As the clock “hands” move, users can observe the timing and correlation of significant events, such as halving cycles and difficulty adjustments. Timechain Calendar not only offers an aesthetically pleasing interface but also provides a practical tool for new users to comprehend the temporal dynamics of bitcoin.

When To Use This Tool: Use this tool when you need to explain bitcoin in relation to time and how every new block moves everything one step closer to the next halving and difficulty adjustment. Showing some of these metrics can help your friends and family understand how bitcoin works on a more technical level by using an analogy of time instead of a bunch of new buzzwords that they are unfamiliar with.

Mempool Space

Mempool Space seems to be the block explorer of choice by the bitcoin plebs and for good reason. It shows a lot of valuable technical data about the mempool and blockchain in real time like the current block height, the current fee rate based on confirmation time, a colorful chart that makes it easy to understand how the mempool works and so much more.

Mempool Space also has some other valuable data for better understanding bitcoin mining, the hashrate, difficulty adjustment, and some other important mining data that can be a valuable educational tool.

If you want to show your friends and family how bitcoin works from a more technical level, Mempool Space is a great tool to take a bunch of the mystery out of things in a clean and inviting interface that will leave your friends and family wanting to know more.

Bitfeed

Bitfeed is another colorful website that can be a great tool to orange pill your friends and family. With Bitfeed, you can sit and watch new bitcoin transaction pouring into the mempool waiting to be added to the blockchain.

When To Use This Tool: Bit Feed can be a great way to show people that bitcoin is actively being used to send payments right now. Bitfeed is a great way to explain metrics like the fee rate and the size of bitcoin transactions in vbytes. It’s not only used occasionally by a small group of nerds living in their mom’s basement.

TimechainStats

TimechainStats is another great dashboard that shows a bunch of different technical metrics of the last bitcoin block, the bitcoin price & hashrate overtop of each other, comparison of the fees vs. subsidy in the block reward, as well as comparing bitcoin to a number of fiat currencies, and links to dozens of other bitcoin resources.

When To Use This Tool: If you are having trouble orange pilling your friends and family who are more data driven, you might find some useful touch points here on TimechainStats.

Bitnodes

Bitnodes provides real-time insights on the global distribution of Bitcoin nodes with a comprehensive and interactive map of the global Bitcoin network. Bitnodes offers users a unique perspective on the decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network by visualizing the geographical locations of active nodes on clear net.

When To Use This Tool: Use Bitnodes to orange pill your friends and family who think that bitcoin can be shut down, censored, or centrally controlled. Knowing how distributed the bitcoin network can prove to be a valuable learning tool to better understand how bitcoin is anti-fragile and immune to centralized attacks on the network.

Orange Pill With Market Data

Some of your friends and family won’t want to know all of the technical details of how bitcoin works nearly as much as how it compares to other “investments” in traditional finance.

Fiat Market Cap

Fiat Market Cap shows the current market capitalization of bitcoin as well as all of the fiat currencies in the world (or maybe just most of them).

One of the more common arguments that you’re likely to hear while trying to orange pill your friends and family is that “Bitcoin will never surpass fiat currency” or something like that. Well, that’s when you drop this amazing tool on them to show them that Bitcoin actually already has surpassed ~80% of fiat currencies in the world by market cap (as of today’s price of ~29k). With each and every new buy order placed by the truly convicted bitcoin plebs, we grow one step closer to surpassing the next fiat currency.

If your friends and family are interested in knowing how Bitcoin’s cumulative value is stacking up to all of the fiat currencies in the world, Fiat Market Cap is the tool to use.

Priced In Bitcoin 21

Priced In Bitcoin 21 is a great tool to quickly show the value of a number of different fiat currencies, precious metals, commodities, equity markets, bond markets, and even the price of housing against the price of bitcoin in the past day, week, month, 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years.

Priced In Bitcoin also has a feature that displays bitcoin parity in relation to a number of other metrics such as sat/cent parity, gold, silver, and many more. Showing all of this data in a simple view can be a great way to orange pill your friends and family who are looking at a long term store of value against a bunch of other common assets that are often considered a safe place to put money for long periods of time.

When To Use This Tool: Use Priced In Bitcoin to orange pill your friends and family who use any of the assets listed on this site as a store of value. This can be a great way to show that bitcoin is a superior asset class for storing value. After looking at these charts, it’s easy to see that the longer you hold it, the greater the disparity between all other assets.

CBDC Tracker

CBDC Tracker by is an interactive tool that enables you to see all of the CBDCs that are being tested and launched all around the world. You can view the entire world and click on any country to view the current status of CBDCs in any given jurisdiction.

When To Use This Tool: CBDC Tracker is best used to show people who don’t know enough about central bank digital currencies and where they are being researched, piloted, and fully launched. This simple tools takes all of the mystery out of it with clear and tangible data in a clean interface. Use this to educate your friends and family about the dangers of a currency that is completely controlled by central banks.

Orange Pill Your Boomer Friends & Family

If you want to orange pill your boomer friends and family, you are going to need to use some tools that they are more familiar with. They tend to use a lot of older means for portfolio diversification so showing them how bitcoin compares to all of the traditional investments like gold, stocks, bonds, and even real estate can be a much more effective tool that showing them the best bitcoin memes or using the latest bitcoin slang. A more traditional audience requires a more traditional set of tools and data.

Bitcoin Treasuries

Bitcoin Treasuries is the single largest repository of all of the largest companies and governments that hold bitcoin on their balance sheet.

When To Use This Tool: Use this tool to orange pill your friends and family who are not convinced that any meaningful companies or governments are using bitcoin as a reserve treasury asset. This is a great way to show bitcoin’s value with just a single chart of all of the confirmed bitcoin treasuries in the world.

They Own Bitcoin

If you’re having trouble orange pilling your friends and family with pure bitcoin facts, you might try to use celebrity influence to show them notable people who own bitcoin. Among the bitcoin rich list are thought and industry leaders such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Robert Kiyosaki, Peter Tiel, Joe Rogan, Edward Snowden, and dozens of other people they have likely heard of.

Sometimes people don’t want to be taught or lectured about bitcoin. Sometimes they just want to know that someone famous has some bitcoin and that might be enough for you to move them one step closer to taking their own plunge into the bitcoin rabbit hole.

WTF Happened In 1971

WTF Happened In 1971 is a great tool for helping others to better understand why so many things in today’s economy and financial world are as bad as they are. Why is everything more expensive since 1971? Why is housing so expensive? Why is the value of the dollar going down? Why is college so expensive? Why is the cost of living so high?

Well, as it turns out, 1971 is when the US government “suspended the convertibility of US dollars into gold” when the federal government effectively defaulted on its debt obligations and the gold standard was abandoned. It was in 1971 that the US dollar became pure fiat and the value of the dollar became entirely dependent on the supply and demand of one fiat currency against all of the other fiat currencies.

If you want to take a more economic data based approach, WTF happened in 1971 is an excellent tool to orange pill your friends and family.

Orange Pill Your Friends & Family With Bitcoin Culture

Sometimes all that is necessary to get a conversation started about bitcoin is for someone to see something a bit more physical and start to ask questions about it. Once the conversation has begun, you can figure out some of their needs and then help them to understand how bitcoin fixes real world problems.

Bitcoin culture is full of all sorts of art, music, memes, hardware, books, clothing, slang, documentaries, sculptures, comics, and more. Use all of these great cultural tools to orange pill your friends and family in subtle ways that are much less likely to offend.

Bitcoin Hardware

Bitcoin Art

All throughout history, art has been one of the ways that new ideas have spread and old ones have been challenged. Bitcoin art is no different. Displaying something as simple as the bitcoin whitepaper on your wall or a framed tweet from Hal Finney, Elon Musk, Edward Snowden and other well known minds can be a great way to orange pill your friends and family.

If you have some bitcoin art hanging on your wall, you can better believe that it will start some very insightful conversations with your friends and family who are open minded enough to learn more about bitcoin and how it can help them.

Bitcoin Clothing

Bitcoin clothing is another way that we can orange pill our friends and family in subtle ways that they won’t even notice at first. They can be subtle like a shirt that says “21” or they can be a bit more thought provoking like shirts that are all about the many reasons to use bitcoin. No matter what you decide to wear, bitcoin clothing is a powerful tool to start conversations about bitcoin.

Books About Bitcoin

If you enjoy reading all about bitcoin, then having a collection of all of the best bitcoin books is a great way to orange pill and start the conversation all about bitcoin. Since bitcoin is so many different things to so many different people, having a collection of books that can answer questions or any kind is a great way to help educate new users and begin them on their own journey down the bitcoin rabbit hole.

Final Thoughts

Getting your loved ones to understand and care about bitcoin is an uphill battle and it will definitely be frustrating at times but you are not alone. There are a multitude of pleb powered educational tools that are here to help orange pill your friends and family. If you focus on the specific concerns that you are faced with the most, you are more likely to show them the path to freedom. For some, they might be concerned about bitcoin’s ability to store value over time. For others, they might not fully understand the technology that makes it work. Others might just need to see that they would have a whole lot more money if they didn’t buy a bunch of unfulfilling fiat crap.

No matter who you are trying to educate, you are bound to find at least one of these tools helpful as you orange pill the next wave of bitcoiners.

Thank You For Reading

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