On Value
pecunia non olet
To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today. - Theodore Roosevelt
What is Money?
The number in your bank account, or the green pieces of paper in your wallet right? Why is that money? This seems like a silly question, but when was the last time one really stopped and pondered the things society declares as money?
The phrase “everybody knows that” perfectly explains what makes a certain thing money. Money is a social construct, man simply made it up. To get more technical -
money is the most liquid (trade-able) asset in an economy. A naturally emergent phenomenon. Nature is beautiful, markets are intelligent, and man is social.
Properties of Money
Divisibility
• Able to subdivide and recombine the monetary medium at various scales
Durability
• Persistence over time
• Won’t rot, corrode, melt, etc
Recognizability
• Able to verify the authenticity (not counterfeit)
• Quickly and easily as say its value
Portability
• Able to move across space
• Able to easily secure
Scarcity
• Resistant to counterfeiting or supply inflation
• High “Stock-to-Flow” ratio
History of Money
The invention of “money” has occurred thousands of times across thousands of civilizations, all independent of each other.
Examples of historical items used as money: cattle, seashells, rai stones, angry beads, cigarettes, salt, aluminum, gold, silver, real estate, and fiat.
Why was money invented in all these different civilizations?
Money solves a universal problem
It gives us an instrument to compare things
Allows you to easily compare one thing that you have, to another thing that you want
Instead of having to look at the entirety of the world (i.e. how many hats does a microphone cost?), we can compress all that data down into a single number. Aka: price
Precious metals were naturally selected by the world as money because they best satisfied the first 4 properties of money. Divisibility, Durability, Recognizability, and Portability. Of all the metals, GOLD best satisfied the 5th property, scarcity.
Gold as Money
“That restaurant is a gold mine”. Everyone knows today that gold is valuable. Very few people can name the properties of money and tell you how gold is the best exemplification of those properties. A tool that is so old, that we forgot why it is useful
Scarcity is the most important property of value. Of all the monetary metals, gold is the most scarce. It exhibits the lowest & most reliable supply inflation rate (~1.8% per year). Aka highest stock-to-flow ratio ( ! = ~55). This is why the entire world coalesced around gold and collectively decided that it was the best tool or technology to be used as money. Gold, historically, has been the “truth” of money.
Market participants voluntarily adopted it via entrepreneurial experimentation and countless trial/error, but... gold isn’t perfect.
Pitfalls of Gold
Gold has been used as money for 5,000 years. However, it does lack in 3 properties.
Divisibility: High value-to-weight. Why silver has had some marginal utility across history (more day-to-day transactions)
Portability: Very heavy. Large costs associated with moving gold across space. Both from a transportation and a security perspective
Recognizability: Need to assay and test the authenticity at the time of each trade. This is time intensive, uneconomic, higher transaction costs
Recognizability thread
Eventually people figured out that one could centralize the custody of gold.
Store a bunch of it in a warehouse
Warehouse provides a stamp on a certificate that makes it redeemable for gold
Nownoneedtoassaytheauthenticityateachtransaction
You could just TRUST the reputation and certification function of the private business that runs the warehouse. This is how gold-backed currencies were introduced
The gold certification-function businesses, over time, led to the centralization of gold custody into fewer and fewer hands:
Private warehouse businesses - Banks - Central Banks. Central banking is the “business” that governments have successfully targeted, monopolized, and controlled throughout history
Government Money
Historically, governments have mastered the art of centralizing the world’s money (gold) and thereby controlling the currency. Although most governments have typically started out by backing their currencies with gold (i.e. “hard” money or “sound” money). They inevitably move away from that standard as soon as a money has lost its tie to gold, it becomes a purely government money.
This is called Fiat money. Fun fact - every single fiat money in history has failed. The only exceptions are the recently created ones that exist today. Fiat money is issued by the state. It is backed EXCLUSIVELY by the “full faith and credit” of the issuing government. This is money that we all TRUST to be valuable because the government says so. This allows the government, in all its supreme and omniscient knowledge, to create and issue money whenever it wants. This has led to an economy where every single market participant is 100% reliant on centralized entities to manage the money
Trust
Today we all rely on centrally controlled institutions for:
Enforcement of the rules
Record-keeping
Adjudication of the system
Example:
Central banks – govern monetary policy
Commercial banks – custody and manage assets
Payment Processors – mediate consumer transactions
Traditional financial systems founded on a trust-based model fail to provide predictable economic assurances:
Value should be exchanged globally and freely. Yet, centralized parties determine the eligibility of participants and control the flow of capital.Wealth should be protected and owned wholly.
However, centrally controlled wealth is guaranteed only if institutions are willing to protect it. Since it is subject to weak and unpredictable property rights, citizens must rely on the protection inherent in the assets themselves.
To a significant degree, the financial system’s weakness today is a function of a trust-based model controlled by centralized institutions. Human bias and error exposes participants to mismanagement, creating an unpredictable environment for economic activity. - Yassine Elmandjra, Analyst at ARK Invest
Rules should be enforced reliably and predictably. Centrally controlled institutions can enforce and change rules arbitrarily.
Integrity of the system should be verifiable. Centrally controlled institutions lack transparency and audit-ability.
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust-based model. - Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator
Inflation
Inflation is the increase in the money supply, most recently seen occurring due to Printing money. Money printer go…
Why should one care?
Scenario:
One lives on a remote island with 100 other people. There are 10,000 rare stones circulating around the island and one currently owns 500 stones. People use the rare stones for buying and selling the things they need. The rare stones are this society’s money. One day a ship shows up from a foreign land. The ship comes from a place that can easily manufacture these rare stones. The ship is carrying 100,000 stones. People on the ship start interacting in the island economy with their “counterfeit” stones. What just happened to the value of ones 500 stones. Inflation, they were diluted by the exogenous supply.
There is a massive incentive for any single person to increase the supply of a widely accepted money, show up with a ship full of stones, discover a new gold mine, or print money.
Any person that is able to monopolize the production of a money has a mechanism to confiscate value from all of those who use the money as a store of value or medium of exchange. It’s a mechanism for creating wealth inequality selectively - see Cantillon Effect. The anti-Robin Hood – stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.
Inflation has been low over the last few decades at a Fed mandated rate of 2%, but recently the Consumer Price Index is up to around 5%. 5% still seems like a manageable number, because one owns real estate, stocks, and crypto - right? Not so fast...
Chapwood Index
The data solidly supports what many Americans have suspected for years. The CPI no longer measures the true increase required to maintain a constant standard of living. This is the main reason that more people are falling behind financially, and why more Americans rely on government entitlement programs. - Chapwood Index Founder Ed Butowsky
How much have the following items gone up in price in the last 50 years?
• Quality bottle of wine and steak dinner
• 4-year University education
• Condo in Manhattan
• Stock prices of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix , Google
• Healthcare
• Fine art
• Retirement annuity: Safe government bond that earns $50k per year in income cost $1M in 2010. Today it costs $10M
Think these things have outpaced the “CPI”? Take a guess as to whether or not these items are included in the index - NOPE.
Why do governments do this?
Short-term interests that need to be served at the expense of long-term interests. They are trying to quietly paper over bad decision making. Which encourages more bad decision making. Fiat currency gives government the ability to confiscate from the rest of us to paper over their past mistakes. This is what has created the massive inequality that exists today. This also explains the massive bureaucratic bloat that we see around the world.
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. - Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin
The most difficult-to-produce money wins. So, if the fiat US dollar is on that historic path towards self-destruction, the question becomes, what comes next? Bitcoin.
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is simply computer code
Free and openly available – aka “open source” – computer code
Any individual can choose to download and run this software
All you need is a computer with an internet connection.
There are “coins” associated with this software. We call those coins bitcoins.
Transactions of these coins between individuals are recorded on a public ledger, which is a fancy term for a shareable spreadsheet
The network of computers running this software is what we call Bitcoin
How Does Bitcoin Work?
One can be a user today by simply installing a Bitcoin wallet on ones computer or phone. A wallet will generate a Bitcoin address. One can disclose ones address to someone who wants to send bitcoin, or vice versa. Similar to email.
Why is Bitcoin Good Money?
Five Key Properties of Money - Divisibility, Portability, Durability, Recognizability, and Scarcity.
Divisibility
• Bitcoin is pure digital information. 1’s and 0’s.
• Each bitcoin can be divisible into 100,000,000 units, which are called Sats.
• The code could easily be updated to increase the divisibility further, similar to a stock split.
• So Bitcoin has PERFECTED the trait of divisibility.
Durability
• Bitcoin is INFORMATION that is stored in a distributed fashion.
• Everyone that is running the software has a complete copy of every single transaction across its entire existence.
• So, one could eliminate 99.999% of all Bitcoin nodes on Earth, and it would still exist.
• The entire network can be replicated from one single node.
• A good analogy is the Bible
The Bible is technically just information – words on a page, but it’s been so distributed over space and time that no one person can change it.
It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
The Bible has outlasted empires.
So Bitcoin has PERFECTED the trait of durability
Portability
• Bitcoin, which is again just information, can be moved at the speed of light. It doesn’t get much faster than that.
• Looking at portability from the security lens. One can custody Bitcoin in these ultra high security custody schemes: Multi-signature schemes – collaborative custody, geographic diversity, encoding options, etc.
• So Bitcoin has PERFECTED the trait of portability.
Recognizability
• Bitcoin cannot be counterfeited.
• The Bitcoin network is an army of computers. Every computer is checking every other computer’s work to make sure that they all always honor the common rule set:
No inflation.
Impossible to counterfeit.
21M supply cap: The most resistant money to counterfeiting.
So Bitcoin has PERFECTED the trait of recognizability.
Scarcity
By being digital, Bitcoin enables the property of absolute scarcity
Anything physical in the world is just a product of our time necessary to produce it.
If we could flip a switch and make everyone in the world go mine gold today, the supply of gold would surge, and the price would plummet.
The incentive structure in the Bitcoin network, along with the collective computing power of the entire global network, is such that only 21 million bitcoins will every exist.
As we learned with gold, the market tends to zero in on the money with the highest degree of scarcity.
Bitcoin is the first money in history with a 0% terminal inflation rate.
So Bitcoin has PERFECTED the trait of scarcity.
Decentralization is King
Nobody is in charge of Bitcoin.
There is no centralized institution that can manipulate Bitcoin.
Analogy: The Internet
Nobody can singularly manipulate the protocols that constitute the internet, just like nobody can singularly manipulate the protocol that is Bitcoin.
Most crypto asset are essentially companies. Centralized entities control the protocol. Subject to changes at the discretion of the centralized entity. Thus, relying on TRUST of a third party is the norm.
Bitcoin and other decentralized protocols are designed to allow for trust minimization due to the nature of trusting in code rather than trusting in one individual, group of people or entity.
When it comes to money, it’s all about TRUST MINIMIZATION, which allows one to remove politics from money (to a certain degree). This is what gold was: a neutral monetary protocol that no one could singularly manipulate. Bitcoin is something that’s beyond our control. It is man-made, but it no longer manipulable by man, which is what gives it its value. It is resistant to any political decision.
Incentives
Prevailing theory of inflationary economics: Print money slowly over time to increase nominal value of goods and assets. When there’s an economic shock or contraction, create even more currency and issue it out selectively to try and stimulate the economy. Simply, Quantitative Easing.
Bitcoin takes the opposite approach: The Bitcoin protocol established an initial inflation rate (in 2009 when Bitcoin was created) of 50 BTC every 10 minutes. It also established a pace at which that inflation rate trends towards 0 over time. For every new block that is added to the block chain, issue x new bitcoins. Every 4 years, cut that in half. This exponential decay function in the bitcoin supply asymptotically approaches 21 million bitcoins by the year 2140. Bitcoin has a perfectly predictable inflation rate, which declines over time. Simply, Quantitative Tightening.
As supply approaches 21 million, inflation approaches 0%. Newly issued bitcoins are payment to miners. Every 10 minutes, a new block is added to the block chain, and new bitcoin is created and issued. A complex math problem needs to be solved before this can happen. First miner to solve this problem is rewarded with the new bitcoin. The block is then added to chain.
Miners require electricity. This energy that miners are contributing to the network is translated into security on the network. The more expensive bitcoin becomes, the harder it is to manipulate. The price is positively correlated to security.
Every 4 years, the new bitcoin issued per block contracts by 50%. Supply & Demand.
It’s almost like you can see the code being exercised on the price chart...
Restricting new supply flow of money increases price and draws in more buyers, which makes network more secure. This then increases profitability of mining, which draws in more miners and makes network even more secure. These mechanisms increase demand as a store of value. Bitcoin is a programmatic virtuous feedback loop.
Hacking Bitcoin
Many have either experienced the following themselves or know someone who has. “My credit card gets hacked all the time. I get multiple notifications every year informing me that there was a data breach here, malicious activity there... What makes Bitcoin any different than anything else on the internet?”
Bitcoin is a protocol, not an application. Traditional hacks are targeting applications that are riding on top of the internet protocol. Protocols (once they’ve been favored) are the foundational elements on which everything else is built. It’s the language that everyone chooses to use. HTTP, TCPIP, HTML, etc
Bitcoin is a protocol because all nodes and miners (of which there are tens of thousands) are choosing to participate with the same version of the code. They’ve all chosen which language they’re going to speak.
Technically Bitcoin can be manipulated, but everyone that’s enforcing the protocol (people running nodes) would have to agree that the manipulation is in their self-interest. If you wanted to change it for the worse, you’re never going to get the buy-in from all the node operators.
People are involved in Bitcoin BECAUSE of the rules that are already enforced. No inflation, No counterfeiting, and 21M supply cap. There is an asymmetry in the governance - one has to campaign the group and prove to them that the change will be better for them.
The Bitcoin software is simple. There aren't a lot of features. The development community is extremely conservative. They are not trying to be faster, cooler, better, etc. They are just trying to optimize for preserving the 21M supply cap. That is priority 1 through 10. By being relatively feature-less, there is not much attack surface by which hackers can try to exploit the code.
Trusted third parties are security holes. When we entrust a single party with a single security scheme, there is a single wall to penetrate. That wall is built by centralized code which is not visible to the general public. If you’re able to penetrate the wall, you’ve got access to whatever the wall is safeguarding.
Typically, it’s a few million dollars or customers personal information for a single organization.
Bitcoin’s security model is antithetical to the “trusted” third party’s security model. It’s decentralized. Bitcoin has become the most powerful computing network in human history, by far. The code is visible to everyone worldwide. It has created a perpetual honeypot inviting hackers to try and come and crack it. Prize is $1 Trillion. No one has been able to do it. It has a perfect uptime.
Other Coins
“There are thousands of cryptocurrencies out there. What makes Bitcoin so special? What’s stopping someone from coming along and creating a better Bitcoin?”
Anyone can “fork” Bitcoin, which just means copying the code, making a few tweaks, and publishing it online. The problem is, how do you get the social layer to adopt the new coin? You can fork the protocol, but how do you fork the community that comes with it?
Analogy: Chess
You can fork the game of chess and change the rules, but nobody’s going to play with you.
These are the rules, this is how chess is played.
Any changes to those rules wouldn’t really benefit anyone.
The game has already been established and is very hard to break.
Settlement Assurance via Mining Network
Energy expenditure by miners represents security budget of Bitcoin. Every block of transactions is allocated an amount of that security budget. If there has been, say, 5 or 6 blocks of transactions since your bitcoin transaction, it is so deeply buried under all this expenditure of energy that it is impossible to reverse. Any lower currency would take hundreds or thousands of “blocks” to get the same level of security. Bitcoin gives you assurance of settlement finality in the lowest amount of time.
If someone is going to send $100M, they want ABSOLUTE assurance. That it will be received and that there’s no chance of it being undone. No one is doing that on the Litecoin network, or the Zcash network, they are doing it on Bitcoin.
One can’t fork the mining network as the network effects are too strong. Each incremental user on a network increases the value of the network exponentially. Take telephones, for example: Two telephones: only one possible connection. Bump it to 5 telephones, suddenly you have 10 possible connections. If increased to just 12 telephones, there are now 66 possible connections.
Facebook
Everyone wants to be on that specific network because everyone is already there It is self-reinforcing, the bigger it gets the more desirable it is. Facebook has one-sided network effects. Only one type of participant: the user.
E-bay or Craigslist
These platforms have similar network effect properties, but their network effects are two-sided: buyers and sellers. Craigslist, arguably, has a stronger monopoly position than Facebook because they have buyers AND sellers locked up. That’s why you see limited innovation on their website. They don’t need to do much.
The more one increases the sidedness of a network effect, the more difficult it is to disrupt the network because now one has to introduce a superior value proposition for two different types of participants simultaneously. If one is unable to do that, one is unable to crack their network effect.
Bitcoin’s network effect is FOUR-SIDED. Holders, Buyers/Sellers/Traders, Miners, and Developers.Bitcoin is insulated from disruption in a way that we’ve never even seen before.
2017 Hard Fork
We already have real-life proof of the theoretical concept that you can’t fork Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash fork was attempted in 2017.
Backstory: the fees on the Bitcoin network peaked in the 2017 bull run and a group of holders decided they wanted to fork Bitcoin. They wanted to introduce larger block sizes, more transactions per block, and lower fees.
Problem:this increases the size of the blockchain such that the average person can no longer run a full node. This would require more powerful and costly computing/hardware requirements to continue to operate a full node. This is not good for a decentralized protocol. This reduces the decentralized nature of the forked network, which increases the attack surface and makes it more vulnerable to corruption and coercion. This is exactly what has happened in the past with As with gold and fiat currencies.
Civil War: Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash
When a coin is forked, it’s just copied, the original coin is not affected. Bitcoin holders get the new coin also, 1-to-1, so there is little risk to them. So, even if someone introduces a “superior” market feature, one could just hold Bitcoin and all of its forks and one is guaranteed to always be holding the winner. As a holder, no action is need, just hold. By the way, Bitcoin Cash has collapsed 98%+ compared to Bitcoin.
The Iron Fist of Government
“How will the government allow this to happen?” First of all, there is the Supreme Court case precedent for open-source software. A PGP case study in late 90’s. PGP is“Pretty Good Privacy”–program used to encrypt data. The government was attempting to classify PGP that was being exported overseas as a weapon. They wanted to control importing/exporting. The case took a turning point when the defendant printed out PGP’s source code and presented it as physical evidence. “This paper in my hand is PGP. It is speech written on this paper.”
The Supreme Court declared PGP was protected under the 1st amendment (freedom of speech). So, one would have to overturn the 1st amendment to outlaw Bitcoin. A detail that would be very difficult to ignore, given that one would have this irreconcilable difference in the body of the rule of law.
The ban itself is virtually unenforceable as Bitcoin is just a lightweight software client running all over the world. There is no way to determine who’s running it and who’s not. There is no central authority, no office, no CEO. Again, no single attack vector.
How would one shut down the internet, everywhere, worldwide, forever? The entirety of Bitcoin is represented on the software running on each individual node on Earth.
Shut down the exchanges. China already tried this and what resulted was a restriction of selling of Bitcoin, which led to price increases. As prices rise the network becomes more secure, which draws in more participants. Also, exchanges are tax-paying businesses. So, there are incentives for other countries to serve as a Bitcoin exchange “safe haven”
Shut down the miners. Again, this was already tried in China. Miners just move. Rigs are small modular designed boxes, they easily ship them elsewhere, plug back in and they are back in business.
They’re going to ban it, they’ll never let it survive. Actually, the opposite is happening right now. Caitlin Long is standing up a crypto bank in Wyoming. Regulators are actually going out of their way to capture this opportunity, Especially in places like Wyoming & Miami. Also, multiple members in Congress right now are holders of bitcoins. So, there are plenty of incentives to play nice with Bitcoin. There are no effective attack vectors. What’s the next best option?.....
Volatility
“This is so volatile! It’s too risky to buy right now.” First of all, volatility is a natural function of price discovery in the marketplace. Volatility is inversely correlated to any asset’s level of maturity. Going from 0 to multi-trillion dollar market cap is a nonlinear path.
Take Amazon for example in 2000-2001, Amazon experienced a drawdown of 94%! It’s grown double digits every single year since or 40,000% gain since then. Amazon accomplished this by dominating digital distribution networks.Bitcoin is dominating digital monetary networks. At only a little over a decade old, $1T market cap, but competing for a market cap that is 300 times that.
Bitcoin is either 0, or it’s a global reserve asset. Its binary – either this thing works, or there’s some black swan that takes it out. Yes, right now Bitcoin is the ultimate “risk-on” asset. But it’s competing to become the ultimate “risk-off” asset
Volatility itself has been exacerbated by fiat currency supply inflation. Take March 2020 - the market drawdown was faster and sharper than anything on record, Markets more interconnected than ever, information moves faster than ever, but the monetary medium itself has been so debased that each unit has such diluted value that it actually contributes to the volatility of asset prices.
The answer to volatility is position sizing. There’s no such as something that’s too volatile. Something can only be too volatile for the size of the position. If it’s too volatile, reduce the position size, basic investing 101.
Example: Portfolio of 1% Bitcoin, 99% cash has had the same performance as S&P 500 over last 10 years.
Intrinsic Value
All value is subjective. All market participants are attempting to satisfy their own wants and the wants of their customers. Wants are inherently subjective. Anything that can help contribute to the satisfaction of a want (which is what value is based on) is necessarily subjective. So, one cannot say that any particular good or service has an intrinsic value.
What this argument is attempting to say, is that Bitcoin has no industrial use value. i.e. Gold is used in electronics, jewelry, dentistry, etc. “Because Bitcoin doesn’t have any industrial use value, it cannot be money.” This just points to another aspect of Bitcoin’s superiority as money.
Example: market cap of gold is ~$10 trillion. ~$0.5 trillion of that is industrial demand. THE REST OF THAT is the monetary premium on gold (demand to hold gold as store of value). Bitcoin, with no industrial use whatsoever, is 100% monetary premium. It is pure money. The only purely monetary technology we’ve ever had.
Ponzi Scheme
Definition: an investment scam that’s guaranteeing a rate of return to investors with low or no risk. It preys on investor ignorance, risk and reward are two sides of the same coin. Actually, Bitcoin is more like an inverse Ponzi scheme Bitcoin offers no rate of return, it just represents credible monetary properties and clearly it is very volatile. Instead of preying on investor ignorance, it actually encourages investor education. Most intelligent investors that have looked at Bitcoin have come to see clearly that it is not a Ponzi scheme of any sort.
Moore’s Law, Energy, and Thermodynamics
It is fun comparing Bitcoin mining to gold mining. In some sense, Bitcoin isn’t brand new as Gold has been “energy money” for thousands of years. One ion the reasons that gold has value is because of the energy that it takes to extract. It gives us assurance of its supply limitation (scarcity). This is called “proof of work.”
Bitcoin is returning us to a proof of work monetary model. Let’s say one is a miner that started 4 years ago. One purchased brand new hardware. The fastest processors are able to compete at the lowest expense per consumed energy. Fast forward to today - a new miner today has rigs that are operating 4 times faster that cost the same as what one paid 4 years earlier.
The Bitcoin Protocol goes through another “halving” (50% drop in new supply flow). Mining income is cut in half. Who can withstand that shock better? Bitcoin induces miners to refresh hardware every 4 years to remain competitive. Legacy hardware isn’t thrown away – it’s just rolled off to cheaper energy sources. Also, energy producers will soon realize that they can monetize currently wasted energy like natural gas flaring and peak winds in middle of night. This all leads to more and more demand for Bitcoin.
Miners sell their earned Bitcoin to pay their electrical expenses. Once Bitcoin becomes diffuse enough in society, electrical producers will start to hold some Bitcoin as well. That Bitcoin will likely NEVER be sold into fiat (like it is now). This takes even further supply from the market and causes even more upward pressure on price.
Bitcoin is monetary energy. Money is a tool onto which we try to map our economic time and energy. Time and energy (from first principle thermodynamics) cannot be created or destroyed. AKA time and energy also have a 0% inflation rate, absolute scarcity. Bitcoin is the first money that perfectly, thermodynamically , maps onto the substance it is intended to tokenize originally
Conclusion
In sum, Bitcoin is a non-counterparty insurance policy on the legacy technology of central banking. It’s an insurance policy that becomes more valuable the more dollars they print. It’s a true barometer for the debasement of the legacy fiat system. Always assume the market is smarter than you (because it is). The market is the sum-total of everyone’s intelligence worldwide.
It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it. - FA Hayek
One could never hope to have that much intellect (consistently, over time). So, ask oneself, what’s happening in the world right now... What is the market telling us that has caused this insurance policy on the legacy technology of central banking to become the best performing asset in human history? Bitcoin is still in its infancy, it will continue to grow and thrive.