Pitching Bitcoin: Part 1 of 3
What is Bitcoin? And why should you care?
For both of these questions the interweb already provides hundreds, if not thousands of answers. At Tantra Labs we care deeply about Bitcoin and fostering growth in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and we love seeing all the amazing content emerging to help people become Bitcoiners.
There are many books, guides, videos, and podcasts out there that do a fantastic job of explaining the importance of Bitcoin. Jameson Lopp’s website is always an excellent place to start. Great books include Saifedean Ammous’ The Bitcoin Standard, basically anything from Andreas Antonopoulos (See The Internet of Money), Yan Pritzker’s Inventing Bitcoin, and even the Bitcoin Rabbi’s children’s book, Bitcoin Money. The Bitcoin podcast scene is large and growing too, and some of our favorites include Tales from the Crypt, the Stephan Livera Podcast, What Bitcoin Did, and Trace Mayer’s The Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast.
The problem with these resources, especially when recommending them to friends and family who might be new to Bitcoin, is that they are generally pretty specialized and not necessarily suited to pre-coiners or new-coiners. This problem pertains more to podcasts than books, as the books mentioned do a pretty great job of introducing their topics, but if you are a Bitcoiner trying to pitch Bitcoin to friends and family, it’s not always easy to know where to start.
So before you go and hand grandma a copy of Jimmy Song’s “Programming Bitcoin,” we thought we would help you out with a unique and hopefully humorous guide on how to pitch Bitcoin to various types of people:
Life is good for the fat cat. He or she has worked hard, and maybe still does, but now they tell others what to do and how to do it. Heck, they might even use their fat cat money to influence politicians. Why on earth would the fat cat care about Bitcoin when their interests are so aligned with the legacy system? Pitching Bitcoin to these folks may be tough, but there are a number of arguments that might catch their attention. The first of these is Bitcoin as a safe haven asset. Bitcoin is demonstrating more and more that it is uncorrelated to traditional assets. With the advent of negative interest rates and the general sentiment of the world economy deteriorating by the day, Bitcoin is starting to look pretty attractive. It doesn’t hurt that the fat cat likely has plenty of money to burn and as a result, a higher risk tolerance than most. Getting the fat cat to go full bitcoin anarchist is probably out of the question, but to echo Anthony Pompliano, the goal here should be to get them off zero. Appeal to their bottom line and you can’t go wrong. Orange coin good. Number go up.
This one should be pretty easy. Millennials already make up a large portion of the Bitcoiner community, and if you look at what drives them, this should come as no surprise. Millennials may have a high time preference, but they also reject societal norms and hate being told what to do. They’ve lost faith in their governments and institutions, and Bitcoin may just be the answer they didn’t know they were looking for. Starting off with the sound money argument isn’t always recommended, but for millennials who lived through the 2008 financial crisis and are still dealing with student loans and a less than favorable job market, this argument may just work. Millennials are also prime for the environmental argument. Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy, but for good reason. And as Bitcoiners, we know that Bitcoin actually encourages the growth and development of renewable energy sources, ostensibly by fixing the root problem of destructive consumption, i.e. easy money. Parker Lewis writes that Bitcoin does not waste energy, and for the ultimate energy-fud-dispelling article, see “PoW is Efficient” by Dan Held. Finally, you can always appeal to their greed. Bitcoin may be 10 years old, but things are just getting started. Even the most conservative models point to the potential for asymmetric returns the likes of which the world has never seen. Use that to your advantage. Millennials already think they’ll be working long past the current age of retirement. Bitcoin fixes this.
Oh the goldbugs.. Peter Schiff aside, the goldbugs should be our best friends. So why aren’t they? Goldbugs already understand the principles of scarcity and sound money. But goldbugs tend to be from an older generation that isn’t as comfortable with the idea of a natively digital asset. But this is where you come in. Satoshi may not have had time to explain Bitcoin to Dan Larimer, but you do. Not to Dan Larimer. He’s too much of a shitcoiner to listen, but your goldbug friends just might. Don’t be pushy. Engage with them in an intelligent debate. Ask them why they are so bullish on gold. Then you can start to bring up some of gold’s drawbacks such as its low salability across space, the high costs associated with securing and assaying it, as well as the difficulty in dividing it up into usable amounts. But the key here is not to talk about gold’s drawbacks directly, but rather to talk about how Bitcoin solves these drawbacks. And it wouldn’t hurt to remind them that the United States centralized gold when they made buying, selling, and owning gold a criminal offence in 1933. U.S. citizens couldn’t freely transact in the shiny, yellow metal again until 1975. Once again, Bitcoin fixes this.
Click HERE to read Part 2.
Thank you all for reading and I hope you found this amusing and hopefully a little helpful. Next week we will release Part 2 along with Part 3 the week after that. Special thanks also go out to those who shared their thoughts and suggestions on this piece: Nik Bhatia, Bitcoin Tina, Phil Geiger, Gigi, Marc Weinstein, Brett Morrison, and Russell LaCour,
— Brekkie von Bitcoin, Creative Director at Tantra Labs
Stay tuned as we present more thought pieces and ongoing research!
For more from Brekkie von Bitcoin, follow him on Twitter @BVTBC.
For more about Tantra Labs, check out our introductory post here.
To learn about BTC denominated portfolio management, read this article from Nik Bhatia.
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