Hey reader!
This blog post is a transcript from my video that you can find at the link above.
#1 – Bitcoin Incentivizes low-time preference behaviour
As a Bitcoiner, when you come to believe that Bitcoin is pretty much inevitable, and the value you’ve put into it can never be debased, you stop worrying about money.
If you’re getting into Bitcoin now, you’re not late, you’re early.
When I realized this, I stopped worrying about money, something shifted in my brain.
I started to dream.
I asked myself, “If this is true and plays out the way I think it will, what do I want to do with my life?”
In my mind, the rat race was over. In a moment, it was gone.
I realized that finances won’t constrain how big a family I can have, and I started to think more about adoption.
I realized I can do things I’m passionate about, and not just work for a paycheque.
I can think about what life will look like in decades, not just in weeks or months.
To have a low-time preference is to be more concerned about the future than the present.
It’s characterized by saving for the long run, taking care of your health, and engaging in activities that better both yourself and society.
Contrast this to high-time preference, which means to live for the moment.
It’s characterized by living paycheck to paycheck, eating fast food, and doing things like lobbying the government for more short-term stimulus.
As a Christian, I already have been training myself for years to think a thousand years or a million years into the future – well beyond my temporary life on earth.
Bitcoin captures an element of that.
Having a low-time preference is both more sustainable for your life, and leads to greater human flourishing.
So I love that discovering Bitcoin helped me to lower my time preference.
#2 – Bitcoin is for both my friends and my enemies
Jesus himself said to love your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you.
We should wish our enemies well.
Because Bitcoin is a global and permissionless money, it means it is for you and for your enemies.
Bitcoin is both hated and loved by people on the right and the left.
Donald Trump said last year and I quote: “I am not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated crypto-assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”
Clearly, the Don does not like Bitcoin.
But it’s not just the Republicans.
President Joe Biden recently signed into law a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that will direct cryptocurrency exchanges to notify the IRS of all transactions.
Many in the Bitcoin and Crypto space see this as a naive or intentional attack on the asset class.
So clearly either Biden doesn’t understand Bitcoin or is deliberately trying to discourage it in the US.
The point here is that Bitcoin is equally hated by both sides of the political spectrum.
It is also equally loved by both sides.
Bitcoin is being used by communists in Cuba to get around US sanctions.
And Bitcoin is being used by gun-loving farmers in Texas.
The point is, Bitcoin is like electricity, the internet, or the discovery of fire.
Bitcoin is for everyone. Anyone can use it for good or for ill.
#3 – Bitcoin fosters an environment of a relentless search for truth
I’ll say at the get-go that I do not believe this to be true of other crypto-currencies.
It’s through learning about Bitcoin that I was ushered into this world of evaluating things from first principles.
A first principle is a basic proposition. It’s asking the question, “why” enough times until you can’t backtrack any further.
For example, if you ask about where our food comes from, you could talk about grocery stores, supply chains, animals, plants and eventually you’ll get to the sun, which causes everything to grow and supplies all the energy we need to live.
In the Bitcoin community, I have seen this idea of arguing from first principles used frequently and applied to the question of money.
Only in Bitcoin, do I hear people asking the question, “what is money?”
Everywhere else in the cryptoverse, the question is “how can I make more money.”
It’s Bitcoiners who are asking the question behind the question.
When you start with the question, “What is money” and evaluate everything from Gold to Fiat to Bitcoin based on various benefits and barriers, you can start to learn why Bitcoin is a superior form of money.
In a postmodern world, Bitcoiners believe they have discovered a form of objective truth – an immutable and completely honest form of money.
When they contrast that to all the craziness they see in the world, they can’t help but search for truth in other areas too.
#4 – Bitcoin is relentlessly egalitarian
The way to get ahead in our world today is to own hard assets.
As new money gets created through inflation, hard assets appreciate in value.
But how available are these assets for the majority of people to own?
How many people can go out today and buy gold, stocks, or real estate in a stable country?
As Michael Saylor says, only 1/4 people on the planet can purchase the S&P 500 index.
In my country, buying real estate in good locations is now impossible for most of my peers, as you need a large downpayment and a high-paying job for the bank to give you a mortgage.
You could try to buy precious metals like gold or silver, but you may need to visit a brick and mortar location or have an address to which someone can send it by mail.
What if you are homeless?
What if you don’t have a bank account?
Most people on earth are stuck paying rent and saving in cash that is melting away by the minute.
Bitcoin is relentlessly egalitarian in that it provides most of the world’s population the opportunity to own it.
Anyone with a smartphone (and there are over 6 billion smartphone users in the world) can go online and buy Bitcoin right now.
They can buy less than a dollar at a time if they’d like.
What if they don’t have access to an exchange? Well, hopefully, they will soon.
More and more exchanges are being developed every day. Even big banks are starting to offer Bitcoin.
People like Jack Dorsey are working on creating a decentralized exchange to accelerate Bitcoin adoption around the world.
Bitcoin is relentlessly egalitarian.
Just like how Jesus is good for everyone and is accessible to everyone, Bitcoin strives to be that too.
#5 – Bitcoin is Freedom money
In many ways, our world is getting better and better.
In his book, Factfulness, Hans Rosling brings to mind some amazing ways in which our world is improving:
For example, in the past 20 years, the number of people globally living in extreme poverty has almost halved.
He lists many other improvements too.
But in one area, in particular, our world is getting worse and worse.
Today more than 50% of people in our world live under the control of an authoritarian government… and that number continues to increase.
In these countries, everything from human rights to property rights to freedom of religion are under constant threat.
If you belong to a certain culture, race, religion, or identity, not only your way of life, but often your life itself is at risk.
Most of all, in these countries, any attempt to speak out against the government is detected early and punished harshly (often through AI).
As Bitcoin continues its historical run from being worth pennies in 2009 to more than 40 thousand US dollars today, it turns heads.
People, corporations, even governments now adopt it for its price appreciation
But within Bitcoin is freedom in an entirely different sense.
Bitcoin is uncensorable, unconfiscable, and permissionless.
So what happens is that as people move their wealth into it, they learn they can do whatever they want with it without having the government’s permission.
If a social credit system has cut them off from buying goods and services, they adopt Bitcoin as their money and buy and sell with any vendor who deals in Bitcoin.
If they live in a country where Bibles are illegal they can transact in Bitcoin and the government cannot stop the purchase.
This is what leads Jeff Booth to say, “Bitcoin defunds communism.”
And as our fiat monetary systems go deeper and deeper into debt, and Bitcoin continues to have a fixed supply of 21 million, more and more corporations, governments and individuals will adopt Bitcoin to preserve their capital.
And here’s the thing: as those people and those entities adopt bitcoin, they inherit the freedom properties of bitcoin and therefore, even without realizing it, provide those properties to their citizens.
Human Rights advocate, Alex Gladstein says, people get into Bitcoin for the Number Go Up technology, but the Trojan horse within Bitcoin is Freedom Go Up technology.
HODLing Jesus 