Bitcoin will make civilization sane again

This is the first book I've read about cryptocurrency, and I took away from it something invaluable, hope. Jason A. Williams, the author, gives us a lot of reason to be optimistic about a Bitcoin-powered future.

The author is a...

Bitcoin maximalist

And you will be too after reading this book.

As we’ll discover, bitcoin is the best form of money ever invented. Not only that, it’s the best-performing financial asset on the planet, swallowing everything in its path. It will devour government currencies that are printing themselves into oblivion and it will establish itself as the next global reserve currency. It might take years, decades, but it’s happening. And there’s one simple reason why: Bitcoin is hard money you can’t fuck with.

Bitcoin is the best performing asset in the last five years, the last ten years. Up 4,000% since 2015. Up 16,666,566% in the last decade.

Fascinatingly, that author operates a factory where he turns old tires into Bitcoin. Which the green crowd should really appreciate, but probably doesn't.

Why bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency

No-one controls it. No governments, no companies, no central banks, no money printing. It’s a revolution as big as the internet. And it’s never been hacked.

Not only was bitcoin the best-performing asset on the planet in 2020, it quietly established itself as the next global reserve currency as central banks around the world desperately printed their money into oblivion.

Hard Money You Can’t F*ck With explains bitcoin in simple, readable terms and maps out how this ‘magic internet money’ will grow into the best form of money we’ve ever had.

We'll revisit this topic a little later...

Bitcoin is antifragile

Bitcoin isn’t just a currency or financial system, it’s the strongest computer network in history. And it only has one job: protecting hard money. It’s a $280 billion bug bounty — the biggest reward for hackers in history if they could figure it out — and no-one’s broken it.

Why do so many people believe so much in Bitcoin? Bitcoin has NEVER been hacked. Exchanges, wallets, and even hardware wallets have been hacked but not Bitcoin. Hackers hack everything hackable if the reward is enough. And the reward for hacking Bitcoin would be billions. The fact that it hasn't happened speaks volumes about the antifragility of the blockchain. It's working the way Satoshi envisioned it in his whitepaper (which you can listen to here), it's more profitable to validate the blockchain than try to attack it.

Bitcoin should be a store-of-value first

This is one of the key things I want you to take away from this book. Bitcoin’s main use-case is not payments… yet. The best use-case for bitcoin right now is holding. It’s an emerging ‘store of value.’

New innovations like the “Lightning Network” are now being built on top of Bitcoin. The lightning network allows you to send small amounts of BTC instantly with almost zero fees. The transaction itself is batched with others and later settled on the Bitcoin blockchain. In other words, Bitcoin is the slow, steady, secure, reliable, settlement layer. A strong, impenetrable fortress. The foundation. And faster payment networks can be built on top of it.

This is not designed for buying coffee. It’s for settling gigantic payments on the most secure network ever invented. It’s designed to be a global reserve currency layer.

The world doesn’t need another super-fast payment system. We have Visa, Venmo, Cash-app, Mpesa. The revolution is bigger than that. We need a whole new system of money — one that’s fair and transparent and open to everyone, censorship-resistant, scarce and deflationary.

As Saifedean Ammous later wrote in 2017: “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.”

Speaking of the Concorde, are you curious why you can't fly on it anymore, no matter how much Bitcoin you have? Check out this philosophical deep-dive on the book At Our Wits’ End...

The number of bitcoin addresses holding at least 0.1 BTC is over 3 million — a record high. And the number of “whales’ with over 1,000 BTC has swelled to highs of over 2,000. There are more people opting to store their wealth in bitcoin than ever before, validating its thesis as a store of value.

The arguments made in the book are compelling, until I'm convinced otherwise I'm a "small-blocker," we need an antifragile, bulletproof store-of-value that can't be fucked with a lot more than we need another digital payment tool. For fast, low-fee cryptocurrency transactions we have Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin's integrity should not be compromised so people can buy coffee with it.

Bitcoin is scarce

One point the book really drives home is the scarcity of Bitcoin. It's scarcer than you think. In fact, it's mathematically engineered to become scarcer with time, over the course of 4-year "halvening" cycles. If you're going to get into Bitcoin you need to have at least a 4-year vision, it may crash and lose value temporarily, but through the halvening cycles, it grows in value. It must.

It is absolutely, completely finite. Only one other thing like it exists: time.

I often tell friends and family, as long as governments are irresponsible Bitcoin will rise in value. And, at this point in history, the one thing we can count on is governments being irresponsible.

Inflation is coming...

To America at least. It's hard to understate how badly the US government has fucked us all by printing so much bloody money...

About the 2008 financial crisis...

Bernanke printed $7.7 trillion in emergency loans for the banks in just a couple of years, in complete secrecy. That’s ten times more than the original bailout. If people knew this was going on, there would have been riots

Now the national debt has soared to unprecedented heights

We’re running at 128% debt-to-GDP as I write this. Historically, anything over 77% slows down growth according to the World Bank. And anything over 130% is game over. In the last 200 years, 51 out of 52 countries defaulted when they went over 130%. Either a ‘hard default’ or a massive currency devaluation. We are right on the cliff edge.

I'd disagree with the author by contending that a hard default would be great. Why the hell should future generations of Americans be made to pay off the insane amounts of debt that our idiot politicians got us into? Debt is NOT sacrosanct, as Larry Kudlow, the Director of the National Economic Council, said - it's a risk that internationalist bankers choose to take on. I don't see how a sovereign hard default could be worse than the financial straights we are in now.

It's important to point out that the elites love inflation because they hold hard assets, namely real estate which just appreciates in value while the outstanding debt remains the same. Let's say you bought a house in Berlin at the end of WW1, you had a mortgage on the property that you had to pay interest on monthly, so ten years later you could travel to America, sell your wedding ring to a pawnshop, take the dollars back to Germany and pay off your loan. You'd be pretty pro-inflation too.

The same economic incentive drives the behavior of politicians and financial "masters of the universe." Th