Bitcoin

Bitcoin is still working today, exactly the same as it worked last year and the year before that and the year before that. By all the noise and all of the stuff and all of the crashes and this and that and the other thing, it just continues to work. It just is. It’s becoming like air or water. It just is, like it or hate it. It just is.

Bitcoin exists not only on the technological layer but even more importantly, on the social layer. It is open-source software. If there is truly a technological breakthrough, it can simply be added to bitcoin.

I received $1,000 this week from a friend. PayPal shows $955 as withdrawable amount. $45 fee for a $1,000 payment, while Bitcoin processes $194 million with $0.1

Full nodes on the Bitcoin blockchain store every transaction made going back to the zero block; full nodes on the Ethereum blockchain additionally store the static code (if any) associated with a given account and that code’s current state in storage.

The beauty is that Bitcoin isn't a reliable store of value yet, but it will be if it gets adopted. Adoption = more liquidity & lower volatility. So late adoption and SoVness are one and the same. By definition no one can be left out.

The power of miners is very limited. Try to stop your central bank from diluting your currency by doubling the money supply in the next 30 years. Impossible. Now try doing it in bitcoin. Easy: just run a full node. We'll run them together. It'll work. That's how we got here.

Transaction demand is to some extent a function of the number of people simply holding the currency. Even if my main use case is holding, I’m still going to have to enter and leave the network.
This wouldn’t matter much if Bitcoin had loads of on-chain capacity, but the current capacity limits (likely to hold for a while) will turn even modest global adoption — just by people who do the minimum transacting possible — into a capacity problem.

We don’t theorize about what exists today. We can observe. We can extrapolate though. Bitcoin has thus far replaced zero currencies per decade. I agree it’s fair to expect that trend to continue

Bitcoin continues to be misunderstood by many people in the cryptocurrency space who want it to be more than it has to be for it to succeed...Yes, Bitcoin has all sorts of drawbacks as a blockchain, but it is the one cryptocurrency with a widely understood use case: censorship resistant store of wealth. Fiat currencies, precious metals and real estate (including land) all have more government control and/or are more difficult to move around and transact in than Bitcoin. With everything crazy that’s going on in the world politically, the demand for censorship resistant wealth storage is high and growing.

Bitcoin’s strongest moat is that it’s the only leaderless cryptonetwork... Satoshi could leave right at the beginning because Bitcoin was already “good enough”. It was based on 30 years worth of work in cryptography and computational game theory. But all other cryptos aren’t “good enough” to overcome Bitcoin’s network effect and switching cost.

There is nothing about Bitcoin that makes it a good store of value. That line of narrative is incredibly dangerous. It has been used to sell Bitcoin to the masses who don’t understand where that value is going to come from.

Ten years in and Bitcoin could hardly be more successful — indeed since its genesis it has clearly been the most successful form of money ever invented. It has thrown entire bodies of economic theory out of the window, the old practitioners gripping tenuously from the balcony. Bitcoin grew 10,000-fold without the anointment of any king, nor the blessing of any banker.

What is needed is actually secure independence of money from politics, which the Bitcoin protocol does much better than any other prior monetary system.

BTC is the Birkin Bag of crypto-assets. Expensive and rare with high transaction costs but huge brand value.

Bitcoin has an interesting property in that it was ethically issued and has ongoing ethics in its distribution: everyone knows the rules and takes risks based on how the code works. Incentives are aligned. Most other projects don’t even attempt to duplicate this level of fairness.