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.

• Follow @WhatIsBitcoin On X/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 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.

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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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The post 21 Tools To Orange Pill Your Friends And Family appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

What Is Hyperbitcoinization?

Not to be confused with hyperinflation, hyperbitcoinization refers to a predicted future event in which bitcoin becomes the dominant global reserve currency. It’s the flip-side event of what takes place alongside the hyperinflation of all the world’s fiat currencies.

Hyperinflation occurs when new money is flooding a country’s economy so rapidly that its value collapses relatively instantly. Its purchasing power shrinks exponentially faster as governments simultaneously try to print new money and pay off old debt.

Don’t believe me? Then why has every major fiat currency of the last century depreciated more than 90% against “stable” reserve assets like gold? It’s because inflation devalues the purchasing power of whatever is being inflated. If it’s a money supply, then all its holders suffer the consequences.

Hyperinflation leaves its victims seeking a safe haven. That’s where hyperbitcoinization occurs.

It may sound like a pipe dream, but as appreciation for an immutable, decentralized ledger emerges due to the increasing rate of failures in the fiat system, more and more people will find bitcoin as a safe haven from counterparty risk. That benefit may become highly valuable to the world as counterparty risk spreads due to wealth consolidation among the largest financial institutions like BlackRock, central banks, governments, and the like.

In the fiat system, wealth trends towards the top as large banks swallow up the bankruptcies of smaller regional banks throughout the world. Our economy becomes less efficient over time as a result, as capital becomes increasingly tied up in financial instruments as opposed to the people who generate all the productivity.

Instead, a world post-hyperbitcoinization flips the script so that productivity gains accrue at the base layer — in our money itself — leading to greater purchasing power for everyone to work with and put to use.

To achieve hyperbitcoinization, however, it will take a lot of work. While developers may be implementing the technology, it’s ultimately up to the users to give that technology a purpose.

How Can We Achieve Hyperbitcoinization?

If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’ve already completed at least one of these eight steps to hyperbitcoinization — but one isn’t enough. In order to achieve true hyperbitcoinization, we need a globally distributed contingent of truly convicted Bitcoin plebs engaging with all of these steps. The sooner we all complete these steps and build a Bitcoin standard in our own lives, the sooner we can all enjoy unprecedented human prosperity.

1. Stay Humble. Stack Sats.

An important lesson on sat stacking
byu/SleepyChino inBitcoin

Stacking sats is the first step to hyperbitcoinization. Until you have actually stacked sats, you have not truly begun to venture down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and set out on your own personal journey toward hyperbitcoinization.

Manually buying bitcoin on a recurring basis can be time-consuming and require a level of understanding that new users are not yet familiar with. This is where auto-stacking sats comes in. By setting up a recurring Bitcoin purchase, hodlers don’t need to worry about Bitcoin price volatility because they buy at every price prices without constantly monitoring the market. It’s a low time-preference strategy, perfect for those who want to build their wealth over time. The higher the Bitcoin price goes, the more slowly you accumulate bitcoin. The lower the price goes, the more quickly you accumulate more bitcoin.

The majority of people will get their first sats via a KYC platform like a KYC Bitcoin exchange or Bitcoin ATM. After you have spent some time in the Bitcoin space, you will inevitably discover ways to obtain them without undergoing KYC, including taking them as payment, receiving donations, earning them for publishing content online, routing payments over the Lightning network, and of course, mining them.

There are countless unique ways you can stack sats with bitcoin. Depending on your circumstances, you may be able to use more than one.

Buying Bitcoin

Buying bitcoin is how almost everyone stacks their first sats and it’s an incredibly important part of the Bitcoin ecosystem, because ultimately, buying bitcoin is what determines the price.

Without buyers, the price never goes up. In fact, without constant buy pressure, it’s easier for the Bitcoin price to be manipulated downward via derivatives and fractional reserve Bitcoin banks.

If we want to see true hyperbitcoinization and not a fractional reserve Bitcoin system, it’s incredibly important that bitcoiners buy all of the sats on exchange order books and withdraw them to our own wallets. Whenever you buy bitcoin, you are either directly or indirectly filling an open sell order somewhere. As soon as all of the open sell orders are filled at the current price, the price moves up to the next sell order until all of the bitcoin is purchased at that price. Buying bitcoin once may put minimal upward pressure on the price of bitcoin, but a but buying bitcoin on a recurring schedule puts sustained upward pressure on the price over time.

Unfortunately, this means buying KYC’d sats but there are ways to gain some privacy once you withdraw to your own wallet. If everyone is using bitcoin with the best privacy practices and avoids selling back to KYC off-ramps (which I discuss in greater detail below), then it becomes much more difficult for chain analysis companies to attach real-world identities to Bitcoin addresses and transactions.

If you truly want to help the world achieve hyperbitcoinization, it’s incredibly important that you continue buying bitcoin and de-dollarizing, one way or another.

Accepting Bitcoin

If you have the ability, accepting bitcoin is the best way to stack sats for several reasons:

• You don’t have to surrender any of your personal information.
• You don’t need to invest in expensive mining equipment.
• You don’t need a bank account.

All you need is a simple Bitcoin wallet, and you can accept Bitcoin payments from anywhere in the world.

When you accept bitcoin, not only are you stacking sats, but you’re also helping to grow bitcoin’s circular economy (which is another one of the steps to hyperbitcoinization mentioned below) by enabling someone to use their bitcoin as money to buy goods and/or services in the real world.

If you’re accepting bitcoin directly to your own wallet, you are increasing privacy for yourself, the sender, and also making it more difficult for chain analysis companies to break down Bitcoin’s privacy by associating transactions and addresses with real-world identities.

In order to accept bitcoin, all you need is free open-source software between peers and that’s exactly what bitcoin was made for. It’s a beautiful thing.

Mining Bitcoin

After you’ve ventured so far down the rabbit hole and have an understanding of the trade offs between buying bitcoin vs. mining it, you may decide that mining bitcoin sounds like a good way for you to stack sats.

Mining bitcoin is an excellent way to auto-stack without surrendering your personal information to a third party but it still requires some due-diligence. Even though you’re not dealing with a counterparty, you still need to be vigilant in order to preserve your privacy when mining. High electricity consumption can be a dead giveaway with your electric company.

Mining is a form of DCA by converting electricity into bitcoin on a recurring basis. If you have access to mining hardware and cheap electricity, mining is absolutely one of the best ways to auto-stack sats.

Earning Miscellaneous Bitcoin

Beyond these three fundamental ways to stack sats, there are countless other opportunities to earn bitcoin with certain services, tools, and apps. These include simple online engagements like spinning the Fold wheel (US only), routing payments on the Lightning Network, generating ad revenue on a website, contributing on Stacker News, etc.

Not all of these options are available everywhere in the world so you will have to do some research to see what services are available in your own country. The crucial part is that you stack sats and send them to your own wallet so that you are in control of your own private keys.

2. Secure Your Seed Phrase

Seed phrases make all the difference when it comes to making bitcoin truly sovereign technology. Because your seed phrase is simply your private key in human-readable format, securing it is one of the most important steps to taking full ownership of your bitcoin and ushering in hyperbitcoinization.

Anyone who knows your seed phrase has access to all of the bitcoin in your wallet, so keep it safe. There are numerous ways to secure your seed phrase, including paper, specialized seed phrase storage devices, as well as some DIY options available at your local hardware store.

While paper offers the least level of protection, it may be the perfect medium for you to initially write down your seed phrase and then transfer it to a stronger medium when you have the opportunity to sit down and stamp it into metal.

A number of different Bitcoin businesses have created specialized seed phrase storage devices. Each has its own pros and cons, but the most durable appears to be the steel plates into which you stamp/engrave/punch the first four letters of your seed phrase. One of the simplest options is the PunchPlate which is at a very reasonable price point.

DIY methods are especially popular since you can buy all of the essential equipment and supplies at your local hardware store without compromising any of your personal information.

Certain do-it-yourself methods will require specialized power tools, such as a rotary tool (Dremel), while others will simply require hand tools, such as a letter/number punch set and a hammer.

Finally, ensure that you can properly recover your Bitcoin wallet by testing your backups.

You need to think very carefully about how you come up with your seed phrase, what medium you will write on, stamp on, or engrave it on, how you store it, and how easy it is to recover in case of emergency. There’s a lot to proper seed phrase storage that you may haven’t thought of before, so do thorough research to determine which strategy is right for your situation.

3. Control Your Private Keys

To be certain that you have complete control over your bitcoin, you absolutely need to control your private keys. If you bought any sats from a Bitcoin exchange, you need to withdraw them to your own wallet.

You cannot hold any bitcoin on exchanges. You cannot use bogus Bitcoin vendors such as Robinhood or PayPal. Bitcoin needs self-sovereign private key holders for hyperbitcoinization to unfold.

Not your keys, not your bitcoin. Period.

Any sats on an exchange can be used to (temporarily) suppress bitcoin’s fiat price via a fractional reserve bitcoin. When you withdraw sats to your own wallet, those sats can no longer be used to suppress the price. If you’re auto-stacking sats with a DCA purchase from a Bitcoin exchange, auto-withdrawals are an incredible compliment. The combination of DCA auto-stacking and auto-withdrawal is a powerful combo. Automatic recurring purchases from exchanges ensure constant upward pressure on the price, while automatic withdrawals assist to prevent price suppression via fractional reserve Bitcoin banking.

4. Run Your Own Bitcoin Node

Don’t trust. Verify. It’s yet another commonly used saying amongst the Bitcoin plebs. When you stack sats, self-custody, and run your own full node, you become part of the Bitcoin network itself and not just a Bitcoin owner.

Running your own node means that you have a complete copy of the entire blockchain and the UTXO set. You don’t need to ask a third-party server about the balance of your addresses. You don’t have to trust someone else to tell you how much bitcoin you have.

You have your own node that you can VERIFY how much you own.

Not only does running your own full node mean that you can verify your own wallet balance and UTXOs, you can also open payment channels on the Lightning Network if you choose to.

As soon as you are stacking sats on a recurring basis via some sort of auto-stacking method, secured your seed phrase, regularly withdraw them to your own wallet, and run your own node to verify every blockchain transaction, you have achieved a high level of Bitcoin skill.

All you need to do beyond this point is just use your bitcoin efficiently, effectively, and privately as you help educate your friends and family about bitcoin.

5. Practice Good Privacy

In order to best preserve the privacy enhancing feature of bitcoin, you need to practice good privacy. When you use bitcoin privately, you increase your own privacy by a large amount but you also increase the privacy of other Bitcoin users by a small amount. The more of us who follow the best Bitcoin privacy practices, the more safety and security we can all enjoy.

If you take special care, you can actually learn how to use bitcoin anonymously and without a bank account, proof of address, or national identification number.

Here are just some of the most important things you can do to practice good Bitcoin privacy.

• Run Your Own Node (see previous step).
• Mix your Bitcoin stack with CoinJoin to make it difficult for bad actors to follow the flow of sats on the blockchain.
• Maintain proper coin control for basic control over which fractions of a bitcoin you use when you send and receive bitcoin.
• Use burner wallets to occasionally erase transaction history.
• Use Lightning for small payments that settle in seconds rather than minutes.
• Avoid sending to large “compliance first” exchanges. Whenever you send bitcoin to a platform that performs chain analysis, they look at the history of the bitcoin you deposit. They use this data to break down bitcoin privacy.

The more bitcoiners that practice good privacy, the more privacy we all have as a network, which helps all of us achieve the steps to hyperbitcoinization.

6. Grow The Bitcoin Circular Economy

Rather than selling your sats for fiat on any sort of platform, try to grow the Bitcoin circular economy by using your bitcoin as money with other plebs like you. When you spend bitcoin as money, you make it more difficult for chain analysis companies to link real-world identities to transactions and addresses, and you help other bitcoiners achieve the first step of stacking sats and thus step closer to hyperbitcoinization.

Remember when I said that accepting bitcoin as payment is probably the best way to stack sats? That’s because everybody involved benefits in that situation. The sender gets exposure to learn and use bitcoin, the recipient gets to earn bitcoin, the Bitcoin network benefits from greater adoption, and privacy wins as more people opt out of a KYC-driven system.

If everyone practices good privacy and is actively working on growing their own local circular economy, KYC becomes less relevant, chain analysis becomes much less effective, and we get the world one step closer to hyperbitcoinization.

7. Orange Pill Your Friends & Family

Now that you have secured your own financial freedom and completed all of the above steps towards hyperbitcoinization, you have a responsibility to orange pill as many others as possible and help them to complete the above steps.

Send your friends and family Bitcoin books. Point them to other articles on WhatIsBitcoin.com. Send them some bitcoin yourself just so they can get their hands on it!

Orange pilling can come in many forms. It can be writing blog content, producing infographics, making memes, printing stickers, publishing a newsletter, launching a podcast, creating YouTube videos, or even starting a company that helps nocoiners to stack their first sats. It can just be sharing existing Bitcoin content and tools to help others understand. The important thing is that you’re bringing others into the best Bitcoin practices that build a robust Bitcoin ecosystem.

This Is How We Achieve Hyperbitcoinization

I understand that not everyone has access to the tools and services to make all of these a reality all at once. Some may not have the ability to make all of these a reality at all. What’s important is that there’s a continually growing number of people around the world who are actively working toward achieving as many of these as possible.

This is how we stack sats, secure our private keys, combat price suppression, verify that we actually OWN our money, impede financial surveillance, build independent micro-economies within our communities, and help others do the same.

If we all complete even the first 4 of these 8 steps to hyperbitcoinization, it’s only a matter of time before a Bitcoin standard takes over as the global store of value and more.

Thank You For Reading

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Now, one quintillion operations per second does sound like a lot – but have these reporters ever heard of bitcoin?

Visualizing The Bitcoin Hashrate

Centralizing your data processing to a singular location limits your computer’s full potential, but that relative size could also make it seem larger and more powerful than its actual scale of impact on the world.

Who have you ever heard talking about the Illinois Aurora supercomputer that made their lives so much easier?

On the other hand, when you decentralize these data facilities around the world, but combine their efforts to support a singular protocol, you end up with a global force that can make an impact on more people’s lives.

That’s exactly what the Bitcoin network is doing with its decentralized mining infrastructure.

Compared to Aurora’s one quintillion operations per second, Bitcoin miners process more than 650 exahashes – or 650 quintillion hashes – per second.

Quintillions = 10^18. 650,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per second.

And as mentioned, Aurora’s computer is the size of four tennis courts combined, as opposed to the laptop that sits on your desk, or your hard drive tucked underneath. That’s a pretty big computer.

But relative to Aurora, if we were to consolidate all of the Bitcoin mining facilities around the world into one location, we’d need more than 2,600 tennis courts of surface area.

What would a Bitcoin superminer conglomerate of that scale look like compared to Aurora?

Imagine a computer about ~12% larger than the largest parking lot in the world at the West Edmenton Mall in Alberta, Canada.

If tennis courts and parking lots don’t help, consider the difference vertically.

If we were to assume that the Bitcoin hashrate was an object the size of the world’s largest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, towering at 0.51 miles in the air, then the Aurora supercomputer would be about the height of a standing desk inside the lobby – just over 4 feet tall.

You wouldn’t even be able to see the desk in a visual comparing the two.

The Bitcoin mining network is very, very powerful. Entirely unstoppable, unless an asteroid impact or some other extinction-level event wiped humanity and its inventions off the face of the planet. Realistically, generating enough computing power to override Bitcoin miners and change the rules of the protocol would require a global collaborative effort among superpowers to conduct a hostile takeover of all the computers on earth – an effort far more expensive, destructive, and less productive than simply adapting to the rules of the network..

While obviously the goals of each computing network are quite different, it’s clear that bitcoin’s is the most powerful to exist, and probably the most powerful to ever exist long into the future.

Visualize Bitcoin Nodes

Have you ever seen a map of bitcoin’s node distribution?

You’ll want to bookmark bitnodes.io if you haven’t already. And refer to mempool.space for a map of Lightning node distribution.

As of July 2024, there are 19,381 active Bitcoin nodes, present in 91 different countries and every continent besides Antarctica. (Who’s going to be the first to set one up?)

The United States and Germany, interestingly enough considering its government just sold off its entire Bitcoin stack, make up the largest percentage of nodes. Despite the attacks on Bitcoin each of these country’s respective governments have made, the people have made it clear that bitcoin won’t be leaving their countries anytime soon.

Furthermore, nearly 64% of nodes are running over the Tor network, so trying to trace nodes back to their origin IP address is a futile effort.

If you want to enhance your Bitcoin privacy, utilizing Tor is a very good idea. Learn why.

Visualize Bitcoin Holders

More important than any other metric shared here is the number of users actually incorporating bitcoin into their lives. Whether that be as a passive savings vehicle or as an active payment channel for small business, nothing else works in bitcoin if people aren’t using it.

Now first off, let’s set the record straight: It is impossible to know the exact number of unique Bitcoin holders in the world. There are simply too many unknowns, such as determining how many wallet addresses each person owns, which addresses represent full companies or government bodies rather than individuals, etc. With uncertainties like these, the best we can do is estimate how many individuals own bitcoin.

Based on current estimates based on a collection of different data points, there are more than 106 million Bitcoin holders worldwide, making up 1.3% of the Earth’s population. And with each passing cycle, this number only continues to grow. Let’s call it 100 million for the sake of simplicity.

1.3% may not sound like that many people. Relative to the world population, it’s true that it isn’t. But have you ever seen a crowd of 100 million people before?

Consider the highest-attended sports event in history: The World Cup Final of 1950 – Brazil vs. Uruguay. *Only* 199,854 in attendance at the Maracaña Stadium:

Not even 0.2% of the Bitcoin network’s user base. If you wanted to fit 106 million people into an appropriately sized stadium, it would have to be as large as the city of San Francisco, or twice the size of Manhattan.

Or, consider in 2019, when India hosted its famous Kumbh Mela, which hosted 50 million people in one day, the highest-attended human gathering in recorded history.

At least for me, trying to visualize at this scale simply breaks my brain. All of the lights you see illuminate the streets below to accommodate the millions of people packed in for the event.

There just aren’t any images that encapsulate what all 50 million, let alone 100 million people, looks like.

Now what if bitcoin’s estimated 100 million owners were a country of their own?

Consider the top 15 countries with the largest populations:

• China: 1,420,000,000
• India: 1,410,000,000
• United States: 334,000,000
• Indonesia: 278,000,000
• Pakistan: 236,000,000
• Nigeria: 223,000,000
• Brazil: 216,000,000
• Bangladesh: 172,000,000
• Russia: 145,000,000
• Mexico: 129,000,000
• Japan: 125,000,000
• Ethiopia: 121,000,000
• Philippines: 118,000,000
• Egypt: 109,000,000
• Vietnam: 98,000,000

With ~100 million owners, the Bitcoin network would currently be the 15th largest country in the world, knocking Vietnam down to the 16th spot.

If we were to scale things up from the nation state level to the planetary level: Assuming a ~1.3% global adoption rate, the Bitcoin network would be ever so slightly larger than planet Earth relative to the Sun if we were to scale things up.

It’s interesting to note that despite Bitcoin owners making up a tiny relative size compared to the whole of the Earth’s population, hashpower tells a completely opposite story. The decentralized hashpower generated to protect this small sliver of humanity’s wealth is already 650x more powerful than our most impressive centralized supercomputers.

All this means is that there’s still plenty of room for growth. In both users and hashrate. Despite the unimaginably large hashpower numbers that Bitcoin already puts up, they too will grow larger and larger – into figures that we can’t even pronounce.

No Such Thing As A Rich, Low-Energy Country

If bitcoin’s shockingly high energy usage is of concern to you, understand that there is no such thing as a rich, low-energy country. If a nation is to acquire resources and generate wealth for its citizens, it must equally consume a higher amount of energetic resources to support economic growth.

Burn this image into your mind, put together by user Thomasjam from data based on Wikipedia’s Social Progress Index.

The most affluent nations on Earth consume the most energy on the planet.

What’s more important than our carbon footprint is how efficiently we use our energy. And as explained by many bitcoiners, our money is the purest form of energy that we have. If we’re trying to enrich the world while simultaneously using money that is designed to leak energy over time, we’re losing efficiency at the very foundation of the economic engine we’re trying to build for the world.

In terms of ROI for making progress towards a cleaner planet, we need to be pushing for bitcoin’s growth so it can more effectively reallocate energy that’s currently being spent on outdated infrastructure upholding a flawed monetary system.

What Is Bitcoin Capable Of?

What does the world look like when the entire population is using bitcoin as the de facto settlement layer for all of its transactions?

• Property rights for the world: What was once a novel framework that led to the United States’ greatest burst of wealth creation in history is now possible worldwide with bitcoin. As long as you have some form of compatible device to store bitcoin, and even without an internet connection, you can have property of your own that isn’t subject to debasement or other forms of manipulation.
• Global abundance: This breakthrough in property distribution is one of the key stepping stones needed to create global wealth and abundance, that previously only a handful of countries enjoyed.
• Financial freedom: There are no wait times, account holds, or processing periods on a Bitcoin standard. Transactions settle instantly and immediately reflect in each holder’s wallets, as if a hand-to-hand cash transaction took place. Not only does this create financial independence for billions of people, but also for the millions of businesses that currently have to account for time-incurred costs of holding cash for too long.
• Reestablished trust: Ironically, relying on a trustless system for economic exchange results in greater trust between parties. Requiring trust in any exchange inherently exposes the exchange to risk – risk that either party can (and does) take advantage of. Instead, having each party mutually rely on the same trustless network for payments enables both instant settlement and 100% transparency, both of which instill trust between parties.

Final Thoughts

Despite bitcoin’s nascency, the network has already grown to become a powerful and unstoppable global force. If you think that hash power generated from a computer the size of 2,600 tennis courts is impressive, just wait until full-scale hyperbitcoinization. The world on a Bitcoin standard will be nearly unrecognizable from our world today; just as unrecognizable as how we look back on life prior to the advent of free information and technological dominance.

Of course, as Bitcoin adoption grows, so too will the savings you have stored in it. Be sure that you’re being mindful of what you hold, and protect your growing wealth with all of the various tools that bitcoiners have created over the years.

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.

• 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 Visualize Bitcoin: Putting Its Power Into Perspective appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.

What does all of this mean for the future of the United States? How might each outcome unfold, if the US keeps selling bitcoin, versus establishing it as a critical component of the nation’s asset reserves?

Bitcoin Stockpiles By Country

To get a better idea of where the US stands in the Bitcoin race, first take note of how much bitcoin the US holds compared to other nations around the world.

• United States: 203,000 BTC
• China: 190,000 BTC
• United Kingdom: 61,000 BTC
• Germany: 4̶9̶,8̶5̶8̶ B̶T̶C̶
• El Salvador: 5,853 BTC

You’ll notice that Germany has been crossed out from the top Bitcoin holders among countries, and that is because they recently sold off the nearly 50,000 BTC they once held. According to BitcoinTreasuries, Ukraine now holds the #4 spot, with 46,351 BTC.

How The US Acquired Its Bitcoin

You may wonder where the US is getting all of their bitcoin from. Despite the fact that there is an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve, the US isn’t using that printed money to buy up bitcoin. Instead, the US government acquired the vast majority of its bitcoin through law enforcement and criminal confiscation.

• In 2013, the US government seized 144,336 BTC from the Silk Road dark web marketplace.
• In 2017, the US government seized 38 BTC from the BTC-e exchange, which was involved in money laundering and other criminal activities.
• In 2020, the US government seized 69,370 BTC connected to a hack of the Silk Road marketplace.
• In 2021, the US government seized more than 50,676 BTC from James Zhong, who unlawfully obtained the bitcoin through exploiting a vulnerability in the Silk Road marketplace.
• In 2021, the US government seized nearly 64 BTC from the DarkSide ransomware group.

How Much Bitcoin Has The US Government Sold?

Taking a look at data from Dune Analytics, you can see the selling trend accelerating into 2024.

After stockpiling over 236,000 BTC, throughout the drawdown of 2022, the US government has been methodically selling that bitcoin back onto the market throughout 2023 and 2024, coinciding with bitcoin’s bull market recovery.

The US government is quite literally trading their bitcoin.

Despite still holding more than 200,000 bitcoin, the most recent sell off in late July put the US government’s Bitcoin balance below 1% of the total supply. An utter long-term strategic failure, and here’s why.

The Risks Of Selling Bitcoin

While the US government sells its bitcoin in order to uphold the strength of its own fiat currency, that opens the door for other countries to capitalize on the US’s short-sighted decision making by bolstering their own Bitcoin reserves, enabling them to gain relative financial strength against the US over the long run. It’s a concept called game theory.

1. Game Theory

Game theory is based on the assumption that players in a competition behave rationally and seek to act in their own best interests to maximize their own benefits. You can also think of it as “zero-sum theory” because it assumes that there is a fixed amount of resources available, meaning that one player’s gain will come at the expense of another player.

In the context of a fixed supply asset like bitcoin, one nation seeking to acquire bitcoin comes at the expense of other nations being unable to acquire that bitcoin for themselves. We saw this play out live between China and the US in 2021. As bitcoin had grown since 2009, China historically emerged to become the top Bitcoin-mining nation in the world. But in the midst of the 2021 bull run, China cracked down on Bitcoin mining, banning it within the country. As a result, we saw a flood of Bitcoin miners migrate to the United States, which made the US the world’s largest miner of bitcoin, dropping China down to the #2 spot.

Given that bitcoin is a fixed supply asset poised to disrupt traditional centralized payment networks that today’s world relies on, the US government’s selling of bitcoin demonstrates weakness to other nations, and an opportunity to close the gap of financial dominance that the US has long enjoyed over other nations.

2. Opportunity Cost

Purely looking at the potential fiscal losses the US is incurring against itself, it’s clear that selling bitcoin today could prove to be a very, very costly decision.

Since January 2023, the US government’s Bitcoin stockpile has dropped from 236,000 BTC to 203,000 BTC. Selling 33,000 BTC may not sound like a lot relative to the total amount, but consider this amount if bitcoin were to become more valuable than today’s largest asset classes.

Take a look at the data from Savills World Research to get an idea of the difference in scale we’re dealing with:

• At $12.2 trillion, flipping gold, 33,000 BTC would be worth ~$19.2 billion.
• At $98.9 trillion, flipping equities, 33,000 BTC would be worth ~$155 billion.
• At $379.9 trillion, flipping the total real estate market, 33,000 BTC would be worth ~$597 billion.

The entirety of the US government’s 203,000 BTC would be worth more than $3.6 trillion dollars, compared to its value today of just $13 billion.

Given that bitcoin carries *infinitely* superior store of value properties to real estate (and all other asset classes), there is no reason to think that bitcoin couldn’t one day surpass the value of real estate.

And if the government were to empty its Bitcoin balance prior to it flipping the real estate market, that’s trillions’ worth of lost capital that could have been stored in 21st century digital capital.

3. Loss Of Global Dominance

The ultimate consequence of choosing to sell off the US’s remaining bitcoin: the US, and its currency, lose financial dominance over the rest of the world.

As inflation becomes more pervasive, a nation’s economy slows down. In the event of hyperinflation, the country and its citizens are no longer able to effectively conduct trade as their currency is rapidly outpacing the true value of any goods and services. The end result being that its economy comes to a grinding halt.

The US dollar is already in the midst of great threat to its dominance as the BRICS movement grows larger and less international trade relies on the dollar. How then will the US effectively balance its status as a global superpower while upholding its economic integrity?

What Should The US Do Instead?

One of the leading presidential candidates in the US has publicly suggested that instead of selling the US’s Bitcoin reserves, the country should actually commit to holding 100% of its bitcoin long term and adding even more as part of its strategic asset reserve.

This candidate was Donald Trump.

He’s got the right idea, and while other candidates have openly demonized Bitcoin holders for threatening the US dollar’s integrity, any chance of maintaining its strength requires doubling down on Bitcoin ownership.

Taking The US Strategic Reserve A Step Further

There is a choice that our political system will have to make moving forward into the 21st century. Real estate capital, financial capital, and all other forms of money currently tied up elsewhere are all migrating to digital capital.

Like the movement towards online businesses after the emergence of the internet, companies and countries alike will not be able to keep themselves afloat if they don’t adapt to the competition. If the US really wants to stand apart from other nations, it would take a hint from El Salvador and legalize bitcoin as a valid currency to use for transactions, alongside the US dollar. Staying true to the principles of freedom that bitcoin upholds: Let it compete with all other currencies for trade. If it proves to be useless, let the free market determine it. But if it proves to be a great improvement to the lives of those who choose to use it, then let the free market raise it up to its fair value in the economy.

The more that governments try to place regulations around bitcoin, the more difficult it will be for society to adapt and seamlessly integrate it into their lives. Trying to prevent it from competing with the USD or any other currency for that matter only adds more friction, and inevitably won’t stop bitcoin from doing what it’s designed for. The US and all other nations need to embrace bitcoin’s innovation and lean into the disruption it inherently creates.

Final Thoughts

What’s more American than clinging to its old ways of monetary policy is leaning into the future that humanity’s innovations create for us. Taking the training wheels off of our inflationary monetary policy for the sake of a better, more prosperous, hyperbitcoinized future is what the true American spirit would want. Freedom above all else.

Of course, admitting and adapting an inferior monetary policy to a permissionless, nationless network requires a great deal of humility and nobility for any world leader. Not to mention handling the great deal of work, legal restructuring, and inevitable societal backlash that will arise from such drastic reshaping of society. But just as the bravery it took for pioneers to sail across the world in search of new beginnings, so too will humanity need that same bravery to venture into and embrace cyberspace.

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 Should The US Government Really Be Selling All That Bitcoin? appeared first on What Is Bitcoin?.