Why Bitcoin In 3 Minutes
In the past there have been a number of things that have been used as money:
Rocks, animal skins, glass beads, copper, silver, and gold were each seriously coveted by people, at certain times and places.
Just one example, is that Indian princes built warehouses to store their cowrie shells.
Each of these moneys had certain characteristics that made it good money.
But over time, it became clear that one of those things was the best money.
That thing was gold, and its value increased tremendously over time against everything else.
Even the second best money, silver, lost over 90% of its value to gold in the last thousand years or so.
So, why couldn’t all those moneys live happily together?
Why did one have to decimate the value of all others?
The answer is network effects.
Network effects pushed the world towards one language: and english won.
Network effects pushed the world even harder towards one money: and gold won.
But there was a problem with gold.
Storing gold safely was hard, so people trusted it with someone else, who issued a paper promise or IOU.
Soon people simply started trading the paper promises, which had many names including dollars, as if they were gold.
Eventually, almost all the gold became centralized in places like Fort Knox.
But the authorities who had the power to print the promises, printed so many promises, that they broke the promises.
In the last 150 years, the broken paper promises lost 99% of their value against gold.
The broken paper promises are a terrible money. Garbage. Shit.
But because of network effects, we have no choice but to keep using them….
Enter, Satoshi Nakamoto, our hero!
Satoshi created code for a new money he called bitcoin, and released it to the world, for free.
It’s similar to digital gold, but even more scarce.
And Satoshi made sure that unlike gold, bitcoin would be easy to store, so there would be no reason use bitcoin-promises instead of bitcoin.
In the last 13 years bitcoin has improved to become easy to send, verify, transport, and hide.
It’s become the ideal money.
Bitcoin’s only real problem has been its small network.
Although we can all see that it’s not a real problem, because the network keeps getting bigger.
It is clear that the network effect of dollars is inadequate to protect it from the vastly superior money that is bitcoin.
It is clear that dollars and euros will go down in history along side silver, cowrie shells, and rocks, as near-worthless memorabilia.
Bitcoin’s small network is not only not a problem, it is an incredible opportunity.
For over the next 5 to 20 years the whole world will switch to a bitcoin standard.
This is inevitable. And those who recognize that inevitability have an incredible investment opportunity.
