fnew on Nostr: Remember, it's never ‘time to gamble on Bitcoin', as you may have seen in the ...
Remember, it's never ‘time to gamble on Bitcoin', as you may have seen in the papers over the weekend.
🚨A health warning🚨! We’re going to see a lot of these headlines as the price spikes. Unfortunately, the price is almost always what attracts attention.
By all means, get curious. But I’d exhort you not to dive in because of price euphoria, without having read around the subject first, and understood a little more deeply what might be going on here.
I’m writing with the perspective of more than a decade in the space, and the more I have learned about Bitcoin, the more ignorant I feel and the more I realise how much I still have to learn. To steal a line from Newton, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
If you are beginning to discover Bitcoin for the first time, I can offer you only three pieces of advice with any certainty (and these are my firm opinions, not financial advice of any kind):
1. At some point, the Bitcoin price will drop.
2. When it does, there will be a flood of articles from journalists, from governments and from central banks, all declaring that Bitcoin is dead.
3. Bitcoin will not die.
It is the last of the above points that is the most important, and where I would suggest you begin your journey. It’s absolutely crucial to ask “Why won’t Bitcoin die?” and try to come up with a better answer than those bankers and journalists who have failed to provide a satisfactory response to this question over the past fifteen years.
It’s impossible to answer this question in a short Twitter post, so without going into the technical, social, financial, or game theoretical reasons why Bitcoin will not die, I’d like to leave you with just one breadcrumb at the start of this trail – ultimately, this isn’t about Bitcoin at all.
It is about a realisation that the financial system, and the way money is created, are gratuitously unfair, and that this unfairness is buried deep in the way that our systems operate, so deeply that it is barely visible and rarely thought about.
It is understanding that if you are not born into a vanishingly small percentile of the population, then the dice are loaded against you from the first day of your life, and that all your efforts to change your destiny by exchanging your time and your work for government-issued money will be undone, by the ability of governments and central banks to create that money from nothing, and to ensure that it flows to those closest to the point of creation – and not to you.
It is the realisation that your time, and your work, will be debased and diluted by the actions of governments and banks throughout your life, and like Alice Through the Looking Glass you will have to sprint alongside the Red Queen of the financial system for all of your days; sprinting just to stay in the same place, and ever at risk of falling behind.
Bitcoin is not a gamble. Its mere price will rise and fall. But its actual value is, strangely, not in itself but in what it represents, and in what it preserves – the value of human time, immune to manipulation and debasement. It represents something of yourself that cannot be taken away or diminished by a third party without your express consent.
Others have written far more eloquently about these ideas and I encourage you to seek them out. Then, when the price has fallen again, you may be able to decide if you want to let go of the Red Queen’s hand and choose another path through the Looking Glass world.
At that point, "It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on."
🚨A health warning🚨! We’re going to see a lot of these headlines as the price spikes. Unfortunately, the price is almost always what attracts attention.
By all means, get curious. But I’d exhort you not to dive in because of price euphoria, without having read around the subject first, and understood a little more deeply what might be going on here.
I’m writing with the perspective of more than a decade in the space, and the more I have learned about Bitcoin, the more ignorant I feel and the more I realise how much I still have to learn. To steal a line from Newton, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
If you are beginning to discover Bitcoin for the first time, I can offer you only three pieces of advice with any certainty (and these are my firm opinions, not financial advice of any kind):
1. At some point, the Bitcoin price will drop.
2. When it does, there will be a flood of articles from journalists, from governments and from central banks, all declaring that Bitcoin is dead.
3. Bitcoin will not die.
It is the last of the above points that is the most important, and where I would suggest you begin your journey. It’s absolutely crucial to ask “Why won’t Bitcoin die?” and try to come up with a better answer than those bankers and journalists who have failed to provide a satisfactory response to this question over the past fifteen years.
It’s impossible to answer this question in a short Twitter post, so without going into the technical, social, financial, or game theoretical reasons why Bitcoin will not die, I’d like to leave you with just one breadcrumb at the start of this trail – ultimately, this isn’t about Bitcoin at all.
It is about a realisation that the financial system, and the way money is created, are gratuitously unfair, and that this unfairness is buried deep in the way that our systems operate, so deeply that it is barely visible and rarely thought about.
It is understanding that if you are not born into a vanishingly small percentile of the population, then the dice are loaded against you from the first day of your life, and that all your efforts to change your destiny by exchanging your time and your work for government-issued money will be undone, by the ability of governments and central banks to create that money from nothing, and to ensure that it flows to those closest to the point of creation – and not to you.
It is the realisation that your time, and your work, will be debased and diluted by the actions of governments and banks throughout your life, and like Alice Through the Looking Glass you will have to sprint alongside the Red Queen of the financial system for all of your days; sprinting just to stay in the same place, and ever at risk of falling behind.
Bitcoin is not a gamble. Its mere price will rise and fall. But its actual value is, strangely, not in itself but in what it represents, and in what it preserves – the value of human time, immune to manipulation and debasement. It represents something of yourself that cannot be taken away or diminished by a third party without your express consent.
Others have written far more eloquently about these ideas and I encourage you to seek them out. Then, when the price has fallen again, you may be able to decide if you want to let go of the Red Queen’s hand and choose another path through the Looking Glass world.
At that point, "It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on."