When I discovered bitcoin some years ago, I thought I was woefully late to the party. In retrospect it’s obvious how hilariously wrong I was. Like Jon Snow, I knew nothing. Most of the price action, technological development, geopolitical consequences —all this was still ahead of me. And as years go by, I believe this to be even more true today. If you’re reading this, you are not too late. This is still the beginning.
One thing becomes clear after years of researching Bitcoin and its effect on the world: Bitcoin cannot succeed just partially. It won’t play second fiddle. Like Satoshi foresaw, it’s all or nothing. Global monetary evolution or irrelevance.
Why is this the case? Bitcoin is money, emerging in a bottom-up fashion, competing with top-down fiat money. Society needs money to smoothly exchange goods & services and to preserve the value generated for future use. In economic terms, money serves the role of being a medium of exchange and a store of value. Now fiat money works quite fine as a medium of exchange (especially in the Western world), but it’s been getting increasingly worse as a store of value over the decades.
To compensate for this failure of fiat money, people look to other instruments to use as a store of value, such as securities or real estate. Bitcoin thus competes with such instruments as well. Compared to other stores of value, bitcoin doesn’t fall under a particular jurisdiction (such as stocks, bonds, derivatives or real
