The world’s first public digital payments infrastructure. By public, I mean available to all, and not owned by any single entity. Other examples of public infrastructure include email and the internet. It lets you send and receive value to and from anywhere in the world, using nothing more than an internet connection. It works without the need to trust a middle man. The first globally accessible public money. Is it perfect? No. Neither was email when it was invented in 1972. It's not always a stable store of value. It's not yet always to use. But I believe it will be as significant for freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing as the internet.
Governments aren’t willing to live within their means - when politicians are faced with the hard long road of reducing spending for the sake of tomorrow, or keeping their job and making people's lives easier for the sake of today, they will always choose the latter. Eventually, they will default on their debt and the shit will hit the fan. Bitcoin is a potential solution to this problem.
The US abandoned the gold standard in the 70s, leading to excessive money printing, an ever-expanding $32 trillion debt (as of this writing), and an inevitable default - as individuals prioritize immediate ease over long-term fiscal responsibility.
This necessitates a decentralized, global, non-governmental, internet-based currency that combats central bank interference and functions as a digital reserve asset, particularly valuable in developing countries plagued by corrupt authoritarian regimes.
Speaking of corrupt regimes - almost everyone that’s likely reading this is living in a place of financial privilege (dollar, euro, pound, yen, etc.), but there are billions without that privilege. Bitcoin is a potential answer to places in broken financial systems - providing a solution to exorbitant cross-border transfer fees, lack of central control, transparency through open ledgers, and instant transaction speed.
This ultimately renders Bitcoin as one of the safest investments over the next decade, when considering factors like inflation, adoption rates, and expected value growth, and the late-stage debt cycle we are arguably currently in.
But don’t we need to pay our teachers more? Yes and yes.
Where does all our money go when we pay our taxes? One place, is the military industrial complex - more on that coming soon in a separate post, but wars are funded by printing money. If we someday switch to a bitcoin standard, it will reduce war, because bitcoin makes war unaffordable, because money cannot be manipulated and printed.
Maybe not, no. But we do live in an inter-connected globalized society, with over 160 different currencies. When those currencies were created the internet didn’t exist. Now it does. Bitcoin came as fast as it could have. Even with wealthy countries like Norway - if I go around the US trying to pay with Norwegian dollars, no one is going to take it. Bitcoin fixes this (eventually).