Anil

My 3-minute presentation to the Mayor of Vancouver on why they must study #Bitcoin as part of their treasury strategy.

Just buy index funds they said. It will work out great they said. https://image.nostr.build/74646b6a6f9c70aff38aa7b53f9b17748f2366b05bc346413304e0c2b3ab00a7.jpg

1,000 songs in your pocket.

"The important things of tomorrow are probably going to be the things that are overlooked today."

—Andy Grove (Intel)

Giving this talk tomorrow in Nashville in the Enterprise stage: https://image.nostr.build/3ea276c5612bc1a0be34e7f263168d4d372f9b2a85159a74c969a6e1c46f7f9c.jpg

Bitcoin puts you on the map.

Banning it takes you off. https://image.nostr.build/21075622be6adbf7a959630a67d2bacaf415fea2f04eebee4232d49d33283c81.jpg

The money in your bank account is not yours, not money, and not there.

Bitcoin breaks the duopoly.

I spent 6 MONTHS building the most effective bitcoin course for visual learners.

All my best content in 2hrs of narrated videos. High-level, non-technical & self-paced.

Previously $99. Today it becomes FREE.

Enjoy🤙

*All previous students will be offered a full refund via email.

https://bitcoincourse.io

Michael Saylor is an intense guy.

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Knowledge deserves to be free.

From today, anyone can download 📕The Bitcoin Handbook as a free PDF.

Enjoy 🤙 www.thebitcoinhandbook.com

Want to really piss off the government?

Learn basic economics.

They spend a lot of their time and your money to prevent this.

Publisher just released a premium matte version of The Bitcoin Handbook.

Currently only available to 🇪🇺EU customers via the Konsesnus shop. I also have a handful of copies that I'll sign & ship within 🇺🇸&🇨🇦 (DM,⚡only, $40+📦).

If you don't know what this is, I want to follow you.

My understanding and appreciation of bitcoin has been shaped by a handful of essays that brilliantly capture its unique properties and potential.

Here's my reading list:

⛪The Bitcoin Reformation by Tuur Demeester "The 21st century emergence of Bitcoin, encryption, the internet, and millennials are more than just trends; they herald a wave of change.."

👑Masters and Slaves of Money by Robert Breedlove "An exclusive right to produce money without regard for competitive market pressures is an apparatus of enslavement"

🥇Bitcoin Obsoletes All Other Money by Parker Lewis "It does not matter how complex bitcoin is. At the end of the day, bitcoin becomes an A/B test. The need for money is real and individuals will converge on the form of money that best fulfills the function of exchange."

🏎️Economics of Bitcoin as a Settlement Network by Saifedean Ammous “Using Bitcoin for consumer purchases is akin to driving a Concorde jet down the street to pick up groceries: a ridiculously expensive waste of an astonishing tool."

💯The Bitcoin Central Bank’s Perfect Monetary Policy by Pierre Rochard "The BCB enforces the strictest deposit regulations in the world by requiring full reserves for all accounts."

🐂The Bullish Case for Bitcoin by Vijay Boyapati "If Bitcoin exists for 20 years, there will be near-universal confidence that it will be available forever, much as people believe the Internet is a permanent feature of the modern world."

🏴‍☠️Bitcoin Becomes the Flag of Technology by Balaji "Bitcoin is not about accomplishing change through folk activism. It's a network-based phenomenon which has accomplished a revolution in monetary policy through a billion private actions."

🛑Can Governments Stop Bitcoin? by Alex Gladstein "The rich and powerful will always design systems that benefit them before everyone else. The genius of Bitcoin is to take advantage of that.."

⏱️Bitcoin is Time by Gigi "if we want to have trust­less money in the digital realm, we must remove any entity that creates and manages timestamps and any single entity that is in charge of time itself."

😈Everyone’s A Scammer by Michael Goldstein "Long term investors should use Bitcoin as their unit of account and every single investment should be compared to the expected returns of Bitcoin."

🛶Bitcoin is Venice by Allen Farrington "Modern banking is the legacy of a problem that technology has since solved. [Bitcoin] is a foundation to scale the next great phase of economic progress."

🖨️Stone Ridge Shareholder Letter (2020) by Ross Stevens "You can stay on the Fiat Standard, in which some people get to produce unlimited new units of money for free, just not you. Or opt in to the Bitcoin Standard, in which no one gets to do that, including you."

📡Bitcoin Miners Beware by StopAndDecrypt "No matter who you are, or how big your company is, your transaction won’t propagate if it’s invalid."

🧩Bitcoin Is Worse Is Better by Gwern "The interesting thing is that all the pieces were in place for at least 8 years before Satoshi’s publication.."

🎓Why the Yuppie Elite Dismiss Bitcoin by Jesse Myers "When you’re in the ivory tower, you think the term 'ivory tower' is a silly misrepresentation of your very normal life; when you’re no longer in the ivory tower, you realize how willfully out of touch you were with the world."

🧰Decentralization: Why Dumb Networks are Better by Andreas Antonopolous "Bitcoin allows any application to be developed independently, without permission, on the edge of the network."

🐚Shelling Out: The Origins of Money by Nick Szabo "if money is not just coins or notes issued by a government under legal tender laws, but rather can be a wide variety of objects – then just what is money anyway?"

🪨It’s the Settlement Assurances, Stupid by Nic Carter "You can create something which looks cosmetically similar to Bitcoin, but you cannot replicate the settlement assurances which derive from the costliness of the ledger."

🦈The Greatest Game by Jeff Booth "The best way for people to understand how important Bitcoin is for the future, is to first understand how the existing system amplifies insecurity and how a change to a different monetary policy would produce infinitely better results."

⚖️Bitcoin Reveals Exchange Rate Manipulation and Detects Capital Controls by Gina Pieters "Bitcoin can approximate unofficial exchange rates which, in turn, can be used to detect both the existence and the magnitude of the distortion caused by capital controls and exchange rate manipulations."

🫂Bitcoin and Me by Hal Finney "When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs."

Links to all essays: https://www.teachingbtc.com/essays/

The government:

Precoiners are bitcoiners that just don’t know it yet.

Nocoiners are precoiners that just don’t know it yet.

The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous is one the most helpful books in exploring the relationship between the soundness of money & time preference.

“Sound money is chosen freely on the market for its salability, because it holds its value across time, because it can transfer value effectively across space, and because it can be divided and grouped into small and large scales..”

“One of the prime functions of the monetary unit is to serve as the unit of measure for economic goods, whose value is constantly changing.

A theoretically ideal money would be one whose supply is fixed..”

“[It’s] supply cannot be manipulated by a coercive authority that imposes its use on others.”

“Unsound money, being controlled by central banks whose express mission is to keep inflation positive, will offer little incentive for holders to keep it, as they become more likely to spend it or to borrow it." https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_ffcd700b37c6eb116a59584f2d0ff66e5524ba518cfb6aef4c14b6ba473342ec.jpg

Sound money "gives people a bigger incentive to think of their future..

[because] the wealth stored into it would not depreciate over time, incentivizing people to save.

Sound money is a prime factor in determining individual time preference: the ratio at which individuals value the present compared to the future.

Because humans do not live eternally...there is always a discount on the future compared to the present."

“Human beings' lower time preference allows us to curb our instinctive and animalistic impulses, think of what is better for our future, and act rationally rather than impulsively.”

Determinants of Time Preference:

1. Security of person (exposure to conflict or violence)
2. Security of property (exposure to criminal theft or govt expropriation)
3. Tax rates (does it incentivize working more or less at the margin?)
4. Expected future value of money (will it hold its value?) https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_8255553d2f24e02f640a32dd3ca06634db9d04c6ded935738142c83db184cd21.jpg

The essence of investment: "as humans delay immediate gratification, they invest their time and resources in the production of capital goods which will make production more sophisticated or technologically advanced and extend it over a longer time‐horizon..

The fisherman who builds a fishing rod is able to catch more fish per hour than the fisherman hunting with his bare hands. But the only way to build the rod is to dedicate an initial amount of time to work that does not produce edible fish, but instead produces a fishing rod.." https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_dabd1f74663b39c662b03e427af62319841d3ab503dc5e7161d61f6a0adf3a26.jpg

“A society in which individuals bequeath their children more than what they received from their parents is a civilized society: it is a place where life is improving, and people live with a purpose of making the next generation’s lives better.”

Bitcoin is kind of a big deal.

bitcoin enables the transmission of value at speed, size, and scale never before witnessed by humans

Don't trust, verify.

Greater fidelity. Greater finality. Greater certainty.

Bitcoin demands humility.

Protect yourself against the oncoming storm.

Money with integrity attracts people with integrity.

A finite unit for measuring value enables greater precision in economic calculation over long time horizons where fiat has proven unreliable.

Same shit.

Different day.

Capital allocators face career risk for betting on new technologies too early in their adoption curve.

But eventually this flips and it can then be career-ending to continue to ignore a permanent shift in consumer behaviour.

Ignore bitcoin at your own peril.

Through the process of innovation, we come up with ways to get more output from less inputs.

This naturally drives costs down over time.

A monetary system that requires ever-increasing prices is incompatible with the deflationary force of innovation.

In the digital age there will not be 100’s or 1000’s of different monies.

There will be only ONE.

At present, all logic is pointing to bitcoin.

Let’s start with exchanging one good or service for another is a process known as barter exchange.

Barter can work at small scales. Here’s an example with 6 unique items.

This economy of 6 items requires keeping track of 15 different exchange rates.

But an economy with just 500 unique items will have 124,750 exchange rates, making the barter system infeasible for a complex economy of millions of items.

This problem (known as a coincidence of wants) is solved by using a single common medium between all transactions.

Usually, the most tradable good in a society is termed ‘money’.

Previously, this was decided by the free-market, based on a good’s monetary properties.

Today, it’s a top-down phenomena, imposed on citizens by sovereign governments.

Money may differ in different places if there are significant enough barriers between them.

In the case of sovereign nations, a few things help create barriers and ensure a monetary monopoly: physical borders, capital controls, legal tender laws.

But we now have a global digital communications network (the internet). This is breaking down borders and creating a single market, enabling international commerce at the level of the individual.

We now come across a similar version of our barter problem, but this time with the currencies themselves.

And once again we'll converge, this time on a single global monetary medium.

The chosen medium to bridge this gap will need to be:

1. Neutral (no single group has seigniorage)
2. Global (accessible everywhere)
3. Transparent (anyone can verify & audit)
4. Indestructible (cannot be shut down)
5. Peer-to-peer (enable commerce at the individual level)

By assessing the relative properties of all monetary goods, a winner emerges and the market converges.

Right now, all evidence points to that being bitcoin.

But it doesn’t end at simply intermediating currency exchanges.

Ultimately, we end up with a global economy, bypassing jurisdictionally-restricted money, transacting through one common digital monetary medium.

Thanks for reading.

Download these slides here:

https://tipybit.com/anilsaidso/products/why-money-converges-to-one

Bitcoin is water.

Shitcoins are soda.

Bitcoin is the sum of many existing pieces.

The white paper lays out how they are woven together and what purpose they serve.

Many can identify symptoms. Some can identify the root cause. Few can identify the solution.

Stay humble, zap sats.

Without labor, nothing prospers. —Sophocles

"History has always been a series of pendulum swings, but the individual doesn't have to get caught in that." —Robert Johnson

The one certainty of fiat- it always ends on a high note.

Felt bad that we're single-handedly destroying the advertising model, so here's a Raytheon ad.

central plannoooors