What a week it has been, bizzybitcoiners! From Trudeau freezing bank accounts of political dissidents with his newfound powers under the Emergency Act, Russia not actually invading Ukraine like everyone said they would, the CIA casually collecting data on US citizens with no one except the fringe talking about it, and a pretty amazing ad by Coinbase during the Super Bowl (even if their servers crashed from the traffic) I’d say it’s continuing to be a wild 2022.
Bitcoin sits at $40k threatening to go back into the $30k range due to various reasons from regulatory pressure to good ol resistance in “the charts”. Bitcoin has been in a more or less “choppy trading range” for over a year now:
Jurrien’s thread (which you should all read by clicking the tweet above) goes on to talk about the more important factors in bitcoin’s metrics besides price, that of network effects. Network effects is a term to describe how quickly something gains adoption in our civilization by spreading. I read a good tweet from @awayslice the jist of which was to ask yourself “when was the first time I used email?” For most people (born before the year 2000) it would be in the 1990s on AOL or maybe for work. Now ask yourself “when was the first email sent” Answer: 1971. Email was in its Twenties when you first used it. Now consider this, bitcoin is only 13. It is being adopted faster than email. Meaning…NEWS FLASH…we are still early.
Quick Lesson: There are billions of people on the planet. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin due to how the code is written. That is 21,000,000 btc. Now most people will stop here and say “Gotcha! There won’t be enough for the whole world!” That’s when I tell them that bitcoin goes 8 decimal places beyond zero. The smallest unit of a bitcoin is 0.00000001 btc. This is called a Satoshi or Sat (named after the creator of bitcoin) Some people call these bits as well. For instance right now, $1 will buy you 2460 Sats. Meaning you would own 0.00002460 btc if you bought $1 worth. So in reality there are actually 2,100,000,000,000,000 Sats. So plenty to go around. Especially after you have read the book in this week’s recommended reading….
book
Have you ever wondered what would have happened if we let Nature take its course in the 2008 bail-outs? Instead of saving rotten banks that took on too much risk, we let them fail and allowed true capitalism to correct the problem warts and all? Booth takes the reader through a series of technological advances that lend to his theory that we are headed towards a deflationary world, leaving behind the inflationary world we have inherited. A world more in line with Natural order. Like some other authors, he doesn't mention bitcoin until the very end of the book, but bitcoin ends up as a pillar of this deflationary world. A deflationary asset with a set and known release schedule as the cure to an inflationary clown world run amuck.
video
Staying on the 2008 bailout train, we come to the video of the week. A wonderful peek at what could be the future under a bitcoin standard. No wonder bitcoiners are mostly optimists...#fixthemoneyfixtheworld"
article
"Utopian Dystopias" by Aleksandar Svetski
A little throwback of an article by a thinker and writer who has recently started to receive more love in the bitcoin community, Aleksander Svetski. Certainly file this pieve under “tough love” because Svetski does not pull punches. The main question he poses to the reader is “Would you rather be safe or free?” I think most bitcoiners choose the latter.
podcast
"Why Bitcoin" with Andreas M. Antonopoulos on the "What Bitcoin Did" Podcast
Andreas Antonopoulos speaks with Peter McCormick on the What Bitcoin Did podcast about the basics of “Why do we even need bitcoin?” Here is a great introductory bonus video of Antonopoulos’s work from 2016!
bonus
If you are interested in buying a little bitcoin for the long run then join me on Swan Bitcoin and get $10 in free bitcoin once you start a recurring purchase plan (and a free book!). You can set up daily, weekly, or monthly buys with ease. This method of Dollar Cost Averaging is a great way to level out some of the volatility of bitcoin. Remember! You don’t have to buy a whole bitcoin! When you buy fractions of a bitcoin, it’s called Stacking Sats.