Why do I prefer transacting with Bitcoin, and why it is something people should be paying attention to

Money is karma

I can wave at a taxi and go anywhere I go because the taxi driver trust the money I will pay them with. Money, to its core, is trust that it will be tradable for anything at any time.

This property is what makes human able to come together and build a better future. The rules we all play by are quite simple. One should give to society more than it takes. Money is the karma system that ensures this is true: One cannot buy services with money one hasn’t earned by providing services. This creates a race to become able to provide other with better services with less effort, driving innovation and progress.

Money is the trust that society will give you back as much as you give to the society.

Money is trust

We need a government to enforce the law. If the taxi driver could simply take my money and kick me out of the car without consequences, trust would not exist and the monetary system would fail. Trust in a common government creates trust between individuals.

Trust is the magic component that makes it all work, but also the Achilles’s heel of this system.

A government can possibly increase its currency supply through inflation to finance its own projects, stealing from the poor and helping the rich. A government can possibly turns that karma game around and make the most profitable strategy not providing the best service to others, but be able to borrow money. A government can possibly impose political and moral decision through deciding who is allowed to borrow money, and even who is allowed to open a bank account (in 2021, 4.5% of US household didn’t even have a bank account, and didn’t even have the ability to play that game). This can possibly turn the entire financial world into a “who can dance better in front of the banker” game. This can possibly remove the incentive of providing better services and replace it with simply the incentive of making money, which may have become two distinct things. Arguing that any of the above point is true is way out of my reach, and is not the point. What I will argue is that, any of these points are possible

If only we could trust a monetary system without needing to trust a government, we would have the same benefits without any of the risks. We would even have more benefits. The current system requires the two transacting parties to trust a same government. If money weren’t tied to any government, then any two parties would trust each other even if they don’t trust any common government.

For the first time in the history of humanity, we may be able to create trust on a global scale.

Language is democracy

If a network of individual speak the same language, they can communicate. One member of the network is free to modify the language by introducing a new word, or changing the meaning of existing word/grammar, by using it in one own’s speech. However, if nobody else want this change, nobody else will adopt the change and it will never make it to the language. Language evolve when overwhelming majority think a change is convenient.

be accepted and spread over the network only if an of the network think that this change makes sense.

Bitcoin is Language is Money

Money historically has always been physical, such as gold coins, paper bills etc…

With the rise of the internet, money is becoming more and more virtual. A bank can issue a loan just by changing number in their database, paper cash only represent a tiny fraction of existing money (about 0.8% in 2019) One can now express the desire to transact money by talking to one’s bank, and the bank are capable of agreeing that money is transferred without physically moving money.

This is why money is virtual. The banking network are running a simulation of the monetary system so they don’t have to move cash around. Transactions are requests to one’s bank to move money.

Bitcoin is not virtual money. Bitcoin is digital money. Bitcoin is not a language to express the desire for a money transaction to happen. Bitcoin is a language to express money transaction.

TODO – brief technical explanation to make it more concrete

Bitcoin is the first technology that expresses money as information. The information contains all the cryptographic proof that each transaction really happened to allow anyone to verify themselves and trust it.

Bitcoin inherits the property of a language. Nobody can change it directly, but anybody can suggest changes and improve it if the overwhelming majority of the network follows. There are technically no boundaries to what Bitcoin may evolve into. Bitcoin is simply the monetary system that the overwhelming majority wants.

Bitcoin cannot be corrupted, because most people don’t want it to happen.

Bitcoin offer the same trust between individuals that government-issues money, without suffering the same risk of corruption.

China can trust a money to transact with the US, the US can trust a money to transact with China, and so can any country in the world. This never happened before.

[2]: see the blocksize war