unDebunking all the Bitcoin misinformation, one by one

There’s incredible amount of misinformation out there surrounding Bitcoin. In the Bitcoin community, it’s called FUD, which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Traditional media, journalists, banks, all often spread false, inaccurate or misleading information, some in the hope of discouraging people from adopting Bitcoin because they simply don’t want it to succeed, while others clearly haven’t invested the time needed to truly understand Bitcoin and what it brings to the world. However, the truth always prevails and the fallacies of these people will be brought to light with time. To those who spend the time to truly learn and understand Bitcoin, it is clear Bitcoin is one of the world’s greatest invention and a once in species event. The whole world just hasn’t woken up to this fact yet, but it’s only a question of time.

Below, I address all the FUD and misinformation I’ve encountered since I went deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole a year ago during which I’ve spent 1000+ hours studying Bitcoin. I now wish to give back to the community in my own way.

Final note, I stand on the shoulders of giants and I am truly grateful to the entire Bitcoin community. My personal discovery and understanding of Bitcoin was made possible by all the people that contribute to the community with incredibly high quality content, from articles to podcasts to books. I sincerely thank Preston Pysh, Croesus_BTC , PlanB, Jeff Booth, Lyn Alden, Michael Saylor, Robert Breedlove, Adam Back, Parker Lewis ,Vijay Boyapati, Saifedean Ammous, Gigi, and Alex Gladstein, to name a few. I strongly encourage you to follow them and many more on Twitter.

Please feel free to leave to a comment if I can bring adjustments to any of the sections below.

Here we go.

1. “Bitcoin is too volatile” : Many people argue Bitcoin is too volatile to be used as a store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account, and to be included in an investor’s portfolio.

• First of all, Bitcoin has grown from 0 to a trillion dollars market cap in 12 years. No other asset or company has done so in history. Such returns do not come in a straight line. Volatility is the price you pay for outstanding returns. For example, Amazon throughout its history has had several major drawdowns and despite the associated volatility, it remains one of the best investments ever for people who never sold.

Bitcoin Price Chart since 2013.

• Bitcoin is volatile now because it is a monetary asset still in its early days. Although it’s been around for 12 years, it is still relatively young in comparison to other assets like gold. Therefore, humans are still in the early phase of price discovery of this new monetary asset. In the future, the volatility will decrease as the asset matures and the market capitalization increases.

Bitcoin’s price volatility is a function of its nascency. In the first few years of its existence, Bitcoin behaved like a penny-stock, and any large buyer — such as the Winklevoss twins — could cause a large spike in its price. As adoption and liquidity have increased over the years, Bitcoin’s volatility has decreased commensurately. When Bitcoin achieves the market capitalization of gold, it will display a similar level of volatility. As Bitcoin surpasses the market capitalization of gold, its volatility will decrease to a level that will make it suitable as a widely used medium of exchange. […] Each hype cycle has lower volatility than the previous ones because the liquidity of the market has increased. — Vijay Boyapati, The Bullish Case for Bitcoin

• Gold was also highly volatile during its period of price discovery, similar to Bitcoin today.

• Bitcoin is also volatile because it is a truly free and open market. There is less observed volatility in other assets class like bonds and stocks because they are completely manipulated by the actions of central banks around the world. As shown later in this article, this manipulation has long term devastating consequences to the world economies and people within them, from inflation, broken cost of capital, misinvestment, speculation, fraud, supply chain problems, etc.
• People can also manage the volatility of Bitcoin by simply adjusting their portfolio allocation. For example, even an allocation as small as 1% can increase a portfolio’s expected returns without dramatically increasing it volatility.
• People can also reduce the stress associated with the volatility and “buying at the right time” by establishing and following a simple Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) strategy, for example buying Bitcoin on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Many exchanges now offer this functionality.
• Finally, people often measure risk with volatility. With Bitcoin, there is no counter-party risk. One should therefore ask itself: do I prefer to own an asset that is volatile but represent the best asymmetric risk investment in the history of human kind without any counter party risk (Bitcoin) or a manipulated asset less volatile with limited upside and significant counter-party risk (e.g. bonds)?

2. “Bitcoin consumes too much energy” & “Bitcoin is bad for the environment” : Many critics point the finger at Bitcoin’s energy usage, but leave out of the equation the benefits it brings to society.

• First of all, humans consume energy. It’s how we live and evolve as a species. Cars consume energy, should we go back to riding horses? Computers use energy, should we go back to the time before computers existed? High energy usages are correlated with highly developed societies.
• Yes it is true, Bitcoin does consume energy, but that means it is working. Bitcoin’s energy usage comes from the Proof of Work that secures the entire network without any single authority or point of failure. Proof of Work is what is required to keep the whole network secure for all the participants, no matter the amount of Bitcoins they hold. I encourage you to go read more on the differences and advantages of Proof of Work versus other protocols such as Proof of Stake.
• Now, think of all the enormous costs associated with running the current fiat systems all around the world: all the energy and time associated with all the people, buildings, bureaucracies, armies and investments made to secure all fiat currencies of all countries. Bitcoin replaces all that in a much more efficient way by running open-source code 24/7/365 on decentralized computers all over the world without error and without any single point of failure. The Bitcoin Network saves the world a tremendous amount of energy and frees an incredible amount of time, that can both be reinvested into productive tasks for societies and humanity.
• Therefore, Bitcoin’s energy usage must be evaluated considering the benefits it brings to the world: a decentralized money network, accessible to all citizens of the world, that can’t be debased, manipulated, stopped or censored and that appreciates over time. Bitcoin is the best form of money the world has ever seen and fixes many of the world’s problems. Fix the money, fix the world.
• Considering Bitcoin is a massive net positive for our planet, it is clear Bitcoin does not waste energy. And the beauty of it is that even while providing all these benefits to humanity, Bitcoin’s energy usage still remains an infinitesimal percentage of the world’s total power usage.
• Moreover, since electricity is the main cost for mining Bitcoins, miners have a huge incentive to seek the cheapest cost of electricity there is: renewables such as wind, solar, hydro and geothermal. A recent publication by Square and ARKK has demonstrated that Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future.
• Bitcoin can also now be mined in very remote areas, allowing stranded energy to be accessed for the first time since it wasn’t economically feasible before Bitcoin. Alex Gladstein has written an excellent article illustrating this topic.

Bitcoin can make monetizable isolated energy sources all over the world — like waterfalls, running rivers, or creatable dams — now entirely untapped because they would be cost prohibitive to connect to electric grids close enough to residential or industrial areas. In doing so, Bitcoin can fundamentally change the economics of energy by introducing a highly profitable use of electricity that’s location independent. The world has never had a profitable use of energy that’s location independent. Now it does. — StoneRidge 2020 Shareholder Letter

3. “Bitcoin is not scalable” : Critics often compare Bitcoin to payment processors like Visa and MasterCard and claim Bitcoin is not scalable because it can’t process as many transactions per second.

• Bitcoin’s current main use case is as a store of value. By design, the Base Layer (also called Layer 1) of Bitcoin can accommodate a high number of transactions that are settled on the blockchain approximatively every 10 minutes. But the Base Layer wasn’t designed to accommodate an extremely high number of transactions that settled instantaneously when used as a medium of exchange for transacting in real time all around the world. That is not a bug, it’s a feature. The blocksize debate was resolved in favor of small blocks and keeping the rules of Bitcoin backwards-compatible, both by market actors and by the majority of the technical community. Today, engineers and users alike favor second-layer solutions such as the Lightning Network, which allow for an exponential expansion of Bitcoin’s capabilities. While an exponential scaling problem can’t be solved by linearly increasing a single parameter in the first place, the more important thing is that Bitcoin’s consensus rules were not broken. Breaking these rules is a slippery slope that can lead to breaking Bitcoin’s ultimate promise of 21 million coins.
• Bitcoin’s capacity to scale and handle extremely high number of transactions is happening on the second layer (Layer 2) and additional layers above.
• The Lightning Network is a Layer 2 “decentralized network using smart contract functionality in the blockchain to enable instant payments across a network of participants”. It leverages all the advantages of the Bitcoin Network while allowing for an incredibly high number transactions (much higher than Visa and MasterCard) instantaneously around the globe at almost zero fees. It is only getting started and the number of Lightning Nodes and the network’s total capacity is growing exponentially.

• Other applications such as LN Strike are leveraging in turn the Lightning Network to allow people to send money instantaneously worldwide and to purchase Bitcoin at almost no fee.
• All in all, Bitcoin’s protocol, with the combination of its Base Layer and additional layers built on top it, form the most scalable money network the world has ever seen.

4. “Bitcoin is too complex for people to understand and use” : Critics argue that understanding Bitcoin is not simple and can be time consuming, therefore people won’t use it.

• Ask yourself : How many people actually understand how the Internet works? Who really understands how TCP/IP transfers information from one place to the other? Or how their smartphone works, or their camera, or WIFI, or Bluetooth, or their microwave? People don’t need to understand exactly how things works for them to use them. They need only see the value it brings them. This exact same principle applies to Bitcoin. Once people see the value it brings them (such as : money that appreciates over time, that can’t be debased, can’t be seized, can be transported everywhere, etc), they start adopting it and using it more and more.
• The Bitcoin network and the applications built on top of it are also continuously getting better and easier to use. Similar to how hard and slow it was to connect to the Internet back in 1996 versus how easy and ubiquitous it is today, with time Bitcoin will only get easier to use and more accessible to the whole world. For example, easy to use hardware wallets such as Ledger and Trezor can now be used with excellent multisig applications that have great user experience (Casa, UnchainedCapital, etc), NYDIG is working on offering native bitcoin solutions for people directly with their bank, Square and PayPal are integrating Bitcoin in their applications and wallets and Umbrel allows anyone to easily run their own node from home without any technical expertise. This trend will only accelerate over time and using Bitcoin will become just as easy as using a cellphone today. Of course this won’t happen overnight, but just like with the Internet, we will get there.

5. “Few people use Bitcoin, it is pure speculation”: Critics say too few people use Bitcoin for it to succeed, but fail to recognize that’s precisely how any technology’s adoption curve works, especially in the digital age.

• The adoption of any technology always starts with a small number of people of using it. The Internet was first used by only a few people, then a few million, then the whole world. That’s how a new technology is always adopted. It starts small, but then grows exponentially.

• Humans think more in linear terms and have a hard time understanding exponential growth. A great example of this is in 1998, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman said “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” He was saying this based on the fact that in 1998 the Internet usage was limited to a few million people, it was slow and hard to connect and its use cases where limited. Today, the Internet reaches billions of people around the world with high speed connectivity at very low cost, at their home and on their smartphones, and there are millions of applications built on top of it.

• Yes, it is true, only a small percentage of the world’s population uses Bitcoin today, but that is normal for any exponential adoption curve. History will prove critics wrong once again: Bitcoin will keep on being adopted in an exponential way and in near future the whole world will have adopted Bitcoin.
• Preston Pysh and Croesus_BTC have an excellent podcast episode on that topic.

6. “Bitcoin will be banned by governments” : This has been thrown out many times, yet the reality is completely different.

• It the United States, many states such a Texas, Wyoming and Florida have adopted laws to protect Bitcoin as property, attract capital, create jobs, etc. Jerome Powell of the FED and Gary Gensler of the SEC recently confirmed the US has no intention to ban Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. And the SEC recently approved Bitcoin Futures ETFs. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis recently said “Thank God for Bitcoin” during a speech to the Senate on the debt ceiling.
• In Canada, there are Bitcoin ETFs already approved and publicly traded, such as Purpose Bitcoin ETF and 3IQ. There are also clear taxation guidance published on the Canada Revenue Agency’s website.
• In El Salvador, Bitcoin is now legal tender. Many other countries are also or are in the process of legalizing Bitcoin, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see other countries follow in adopting it as legal tender in the near future.
• All in all, Bitcoin is a global open network that can’t be stopped. Just like the Internet. The states and nations that realize this first will be the ones to reap the greatest benefits, whereas the ones who hesitate or resist it will be the laggers of tomorrow who regret their decision/indecision.

7. “Bitcoin is used by criminals” : Critics claim this because the first use cases of Bitcoins were by people transacting on the illegal website Silk Road.

• History has shown that the early adopters of new innovation are often illicit/shady activities.

If you think about new technology the first users are always the bad guys. Who was the first person with a pager? Drug dealer. Who was the first person with a cell phone? Drug dealer. Who’s first person to use the Internet? Porn industry. — Mark Yusko, CEO & Chief Investment Officer, Morgan Creek, April 30, 2019

• Moreover, the Internet is still used today for many illicit activities. However, no one would every dream of going back to a world without Internet since it brings such immense value to the world. The same is true for Bitcoin. Yes some people might use it for illegal activities, but it is such an infinitesimal percentage compared to all its users adopting it worldwide and compared to the incredible benefits it brings to the world.
• Another important point here is that the vast majority of the world’s crime is still done using cash. Why? Because it untraceable. On the other end, Bitcoin is completely traceable because the blockchain ledger is open and publicly accessible by anyone. Therefore, anyone can see and follow transactions on the ledger, making it a very poor choice of medium to conduct illicit activities.

8. “Bitcoin only advantages the rich” : Critics say Bitcoin only allows rich people to benefit from it, either because they have better access to on-ramps, or simply because the price is too high

• For the first time in the human history, Bitcoin’s open network actually places everyone, from the rich to the poor, on the exact same level playing field since the Bitcoin network is opened to anyone around the world, doesn’t discriminate, censor, refuse or block anyone. Anyone is free to participate or not. And the Bitcoin protocol and its rules are known in advance, the monetary policy hasn’t changed since the start and will never change, no matter how many governments or rich and connected people try to.

Nobody and nothing can violate these mechanisms — no lawmaker, no hacker, no protester, no banker, no government, no corporation, no army — Nothing. It is as raw and real as reality itself. — Tomer Strolight, Why Bitcoin’s Rules Are Enforced by Physics

• Bitcoin is being adopted by millions of people all around the world, not just in developed countries, but also in places like South-America, Africa and Asia. Alex Gladstein has written very powerful articles showing how Bitcoin adoption is changing lives for the better in various parts of the world where they start adopting it.
• Regarding the high price argument, it actually doesn’t matter if you have 10$, 100$ or 1 000 000$ to invest since Bitcoin can be divided in 100 million units (more on that later). Therefore, anyone can invest the amount they want and proportionally, the gain each one makes in the price appreciation is the same (a price increase of 20% is the same percentage increase if you own 100$ or 100 000$).

9. “Bitcoin is centralized because some people hold large amounts of it” : Some critics try to argue that large Bitcoin holders control the network.

• There reality is no one and everyone controls Bitcoin. Bitcoin is governed by rules, not rulers. The protocol code’s is open-source, freely accessible to all. No one can make changes to the code without consensus of the entire community.
• Ownership is also getting more and more distributed around the word. And as always, anyone is free to opt-in or opt-out at any time.

• Mining is also increasingly distributed geographically (see chart in section 21). Individuals can even mine Bitcoins at home by joining mining pools.
• All in all, Bitcoin is the first truly decentralized money network the world has ever seen and the rules are the same to anyone.

10. “Bitcoin advantages the people who got in early”

• Yes people that got in early and hold on to their Bitcoins have been greatly rewarded for their patience and conviction. But it’s easy today to say it was obvious back then or to think “I would have hold on to my Bitcoins as well if I knew it existed back when it started”. The reality is that most people sold it along the way, not fully understanding at first the magnitude and potential of this new technology.

• In 10 years, people will say the same thing of the persons who buy Bitcoin today. Anyone can be that person that buys today and patiently keeps it for 10 years+. It sounds simple, but not everyone has the patience to do just that. Wait. Be patient and humble. Those who do will be greatly rewarded.

Don’t wait to buy #bitcoin, buy #bitcoin and wait. — Michael Saylor, July 18, 2021

11. “I am too late to buy Bitcoin. The price has risen so much”:

• The funny thing is that everyone has this feeling they missed the boat when they first learn about Bitcoin or buy some for the first time because it always looks like the price appreciated so much in the past. Twitter, Reddit and online forums are full of examples of people who thought they were late when Bitcoin was at 10$, 100$, 1000$ on and on…

• As shown previously, Bitcoin’s adoption is only getting started. Various estimates say that less than 1% of the world’s population has a meaningful exposure to Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin’s Total Addressable Market is the entire world, it is clear we are still very early and that incredible growth is still ahead of us.

Either way you look at the numbers, it’s very early still for Bitcoin. By looking at Bitcoin’s valua­tion as a percentage of its full poten­tial, we see that Bitcoin’s current value is somewhere between 0.2% and 3% of its eventual end state, meaning 30x to 500x upside remains. By looking at Bitcoin’s adoption progress, we see that Bitcoin’s current adoption penetra­tion is somewhere between 0.01% and 8.5%, depending on what threshold of adoption you look at. — Croesus_BTC , Am I too late for Bitcoin?

12. “Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme” : Critics like to call Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme, but it doesn’t meet any of the criteria to be categorized as such.

• Lyn Alden has written an excellent article on this topic demonstrating that Bitcoin clearly doesn’t meet the definition of a Ponzi scheme. In short: Bitcoin doesn’t promise any investment returns, the code is open-source and freely accessible to anyone to evaluate (the opposite of secrecy), there were no Bitcoins pre-mined and there are no leader or single person in charge. I encourage you to read her full article on this matter.
• Yes it is true people buy Bitcoin because they believe the price will appreciate in time. But isn’t that the same thing why people buy houses, stocks, art, etc? It is a human right and natural instinct of self preservation seeking to store, preserve and protect its own wealth. More on that later.

13. “There are so many other cryptocurrencies, surely another better one will replace it”

• First of all, Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that has the all attributes and mission to become the world’s best store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account and global reserve currency. Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency purely decentralized without any single person or entity in charge and it started without any pre-mine. On the opposite side, all other cryptocurrencies (alt-coins) have some form of centralization and many had pre-mined coins given to their founders when they started, and their objectives and uses-cases are very different: DeFi, smart contracts, etc.
• Therefore, comparing Bitcoin to other cryptocurrencies is like the good old saying of comparing apples and oranges. Bitcoin is alone in its category.
• Bitcoin’s network effect is unstoppable and keeps reinforcing itself everyday as more and more people around the world join the network. Whereas networks are usually one sided (example: telephone, Facebook, etc) or two sided (example: eBay, Amazon, etc), Bitcoin has an incredibly unique and powerful 4-sided network effect with users, investors, developers and miners. The incentives for any participants of all sectors to join and help growth the network make Bitcoin the world’s most powerful network in the history of humanity and it will just keep on growing exponentially and reinforcing itself in the years to come. Lyn Alden’s article “Analyzing Bitcoin’s Network Effect” is a must-read on this subject.
• Satoshi’s discovery of digital scarcity with Bitcoin is a once in a species event. Other cryptocurrencies claim to bring marginal improvements (for example: a little faster, more private, etc), but often to the detriment of other important attributes like decentralization or security. All in all, no other cryptocurrency has a value proposition sufficiently better in order to overcome Bitcoin’s ever growing network effect.

14. “Bitcoin is code therefore it will be hacked someday”

• Bitcoin has been running continuously since 2009 without ever being hacked. It uses cryptographic technology and Proof of Work to secure the entire network. As more and more miners join the network, the total processing power of network (Total Hash Rate) keeps growing and the network is continuously getting more secure and more resistance to attacks.

Bitcoin is a relatively new technology, but in its twelve years of existence, Bitcoin has proven itself to be the most secure digital system in the world and the most reliable monetary system ever invented. Bitcoin’s blockchain has never been hacked, and zero counterfeit currency has ever been uttered on the network. — River Financials

• Bitcoin’s genius design also aligns the incentives of all the participants in the network (users, nodes, miners, etc) which makes sure all actors have nothing to gain by trying to cheat and everything to gain by respecting and enforcing the rules. This is the most eloquent application of game theory the world has ever seen, all backed by code.

15. “Bitcoin isn’t backed by anything, it isn’t backed by any government”

• People think their fiat money is backed by their government, but the reality is that it is actually backed by government debt. Today’s societies are over leveraged, built on credit and debt because of how the system works. And with fractional banking, if all the people of a population wanted access to their money at the same time, banks would collapse since the money is multiplied artificially.
• Bitcoin fixes this. Bitcoin is backed the credibility of its monetary properties which are enforced by open-source code, distributed worldwide, that can’t be altered without consensus of the network. This is much more reliable and trustworthy than fiat money issued by any government that can seize money if they want to, debase their currency by printing tons it at zero cost, etc. At any time, people that hold their private keys can have full access to their Bitcoins, no matter where they are in the world. The implications of this for humanity cannot be overstated.
• Special note worth mentioning: fiat money is a recent phenomenon in the history of the world and was not chosen freely by the market, it was imposed by governments on their populations.

Mises’s theory of money offers hope. The public is in charge, not central bankers. The public will decide what money it prefers and how it will be used. The free market is economically sovereign, not the State. Monetary reform, when it comes, will be imposed from the bottom up. — Mises on Money

16. “Bitcoin doesn’t generated any cash flow therefore it has no intrinsic value” :

• Just because an asset doesn’t generate cash flow, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. For example, people buy various assets that don’t generate cash flow in order to store their wealth, such as real estate, art, gold, diamonds, etc. For example, various estimates suggests that a very high percentage of the world’s total gold market value is not for industrial / manufacturing use, but used as a store of value.

Vijay Boyapati, The Bullish Case for Bitcoin

• Bitcoin is the best saving technology the world has ever seen at it is the only asset with increasing scarcity. This breakthrough is made possible today by leveraging the power of mathematics and technology that didn’t exist previously.
• Bitcoin’s “Number Go Up Technology” (NGU) refers to Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment function, its halving cycles roughly every 4 years and its strictly limited supply of 21 million Bitcoins. As more and more people join the network, the demand for Bitcoin keeps rising. At the same time, because of the halving every 4 years, the supply of new Bitcoin keeps decreasing. A combination of increasing demand with decreasing supply leads to exponential price appreciation, wish in turns keeps attracting more people.

• Former institutional investor PlanB has created the Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow valuation model to predict Bitcoin’s price based on its stock-to-flow ratio, after reading about it in The Bitcoin Standard. PlanB’s excellent articles in which he presents his methodology are published here. To this day, his models have predicted Bitcoin’s price with outstanding results.

PlanB

• Finally, new businesses and platforms such as BlockFi and HodlHodl are emerging that allow people to earn extra yield on their Bitcoins.

17. “Bitcoin is too expensive”

• Bitcoin can be broken down into 100 million units, called Satoshis (Sats) which is the exact same asset. Therefore, while it is true that owning one full Bitcoin is becoming more and more expensive as the price keeps appreciating, anyone can purchase fractions of a Bitcoin for any amount they choose, for amounts as small as 1$, 5$, 10$,…

“Stay humble. Stack Sats.” — Matt Odell.

• As shown previously, Bitcoin’s price will keep appreciating over time and today’s price will look like a bargain when looking back in a few years.

18. “Bitcoin isn’t scarce because it can be divided and anyone can copy the code”

• Just because it can be divided into 100 million Sats doesn’t mean it is less scarce. If a person cuts an apple in four, does that make 4 apples? No, it simply makes 4 fractions of an apple, and only the person that has 4 quarters of the apple can claim to have 1 full apple. Same is true for Bitcoin. Yes 1 Bitcoin is divisible into 100 million units, but 0.1 Bitcoin will always be 0.1 Bitcoin, 0.25 Bitcoin will always be 0.25 Bitcoin, just as 1 Bitcoin will always be 1 Bitcoin.
• Since the code is open source, some critics argue Bitcoin’s code can be duplicated and therefore it isn’t scarce. While it is true that the code can be replicated by anyone, that same person then needs to go convince people to use, nodes to run the code, miners to mine it, exchanges to accept it, investors to invest in it, services to custody it, wallets to support it, etc. Many people have indeed tried to clone/fork Bitcoin’s code in the past decade, but none have succeeded in gaining any traction and most have either faded away today or represent an infinitesimal percentage of Bitcoin’s total market value.
• Due to Bitcoin’s every growing network effect, it is now an impossible task for any other crypto to over take Bitcoin in its category.

19. “I live in a stable country and our currency works fine, why should I care about Bitcoin?”

• Congratulations you won at the geographic lottery by being born in a country with a stable financial system. However, this is not the case for the majority of the world we live in. Billions of people live in countries with high inflation where their money is losing or has lost all its value, are without bank accounts, are governed by corrupt governments, etc. For them, having access to Bitcoin can make the difference between life and death. I encourage you to read articles written by Alex Gladstein showing how Bitcoin is hope for billions of people around the world.
• Even for people in a “financially stable” country, Bitcoin is the best saving technology the world has ever seen. All developed countries are running large fiscal deficits, printing unimaginable amounts of money and are in an ever ending race to debase their currencies. As a result, fiat currencies around the world are losing their value every year.
• Inflation is a hidden tax affecting billions of people and penalizing them to save money while encouraging them to go into debt or consume. Inflation also directly benefits rich people that have assets to the detriment of the rest of society, resulting in an ever widening gap between the rich and the poor. I encourage you to go read about the Cantillon Effect.
• The United States dollars went off the gold standard in 1971 and since then there has been disastrous long term consequences for its citizens. The website wtfhappenedin1971.com has great examples of such impacts.
• This excellent presentation by Jörg Guido Hülsmann explaining The Cultural Consequences of Fiat Money is a must watch.

20. “Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC)” will replace Bitcoin

• More and more people are adopting Bitcoin around the world for its attributes that make it the best form of money to have ever existed, such as: it is completely decentralized, it appreciates in value with time, it can be transported and sent anywhere around the world without any central authority, it is censorship-resistant, it can’t be manipulated, can’t be debased and can’t be seized.
• CBDCs are the exact opposite of what Bitcoin represents. CBDC are centralized currencies controlled by central authorities. Therefore, these currencies can easily be manipulated, debased, inflated and controlled, with even more ease than today’s fiat currencies. With CBDCs, central banks could for example impose restrictions on how their digital currency can be spent, artificially create more units at no cost, charge negative interest rates if the money is not spent, etc.

“I think it’s logical for central banks to introduce central bank digital currency. […] . They’ll control the money supply. So it’s not scarce like Bitcoin. It will be easier for central banks to do quantitative easing, even more easy than it is today. […] It’s [CBDCs] something completely different than Bitcoin and it doesn’t pose a threat to Bitcoin at all. — PlanB

• As central banks try to introduce, impose and control CBDCs, it will shed even more light and awareness to the public that government issued currencies do not possess any of the qualities that make Bitcoin sound money and will also increase the public’s confidence that money can exist in a purely digital form. For these reasons, CBDCs will only increase Bitcoin’s value proposition and accelerate its exponential adoption.

“CBDCs’ accelerate Bitcoin’s adoption.” — Preston Pysh

21. “The mining network is controlled by China”

• With recent developments (China banning crypto for 100th time), this argument is fading away. In May 2021, China announced (again) they were banning crypto mining, and more recently announced (again) they were banning all crypto exchanges and related services. Despite all these Chinese bans announcements and the massive mining migration that followed, the network operated without any interruption and Chinese miners relocated to other jurisdictions such as the USA, proving once again just how resilient the network is.

Evolution of the Bitcoin (BTC) network’s hashrate, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) project.

• All in all, no country or single entity controls Bitcoin and no one can shut it down. It is purely decentralized, governed by rules, not rulers. Despite various attempts to stop it worldwide, Bitcoin can’t be stopped. Any attempt to stop it actually makes it more resistant and the network continues to grow as more and more people keep adopting it worldwide.

To conclude, Bitcoin is one of humanity’s most profound invention and eventually the whole world will grasp this realization. Until then, some people will undoubtedly keep spreading FUD and misinformation. I hope the present article will help you see through all the noise as you continue learning how much of a powerful technology Bitcoin is and what it truly represents for the world.

I wish you all the best in your journey to understanding Bitcoin.