Bitcoin: Hard Money You Can't F*ck With: Why bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency
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Cash rules everything around me, CREAM, get the money.
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It’s worth 50 cents today. 50, 50 cents, y’all. Why does this happen? Why has the dollar lost half its value in 30 years?
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The money in your bank account is slowly wasting away because of money printing.
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In 2020, the money printers went into overdrive to tackle the Covid-19 crisis. Trillions of fresh dollars pumped into the system to stop it collapsing. More money in a few months than almost 200 years of American history. Totally unprecedented.
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The S&P 500 down 33%. In the coming months, 55 million people across America lost their jobs.
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On Wall Street, traders were reeling from the fastest crash in history. $16 trillion wiped out in a matter of weeks.
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The price of oil briefly turned negative and newspaper headlines screamed about a second ‘Great Depression.’ This was it. This was the financial crash to end all crashes.
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The US has Thrown More Than $6 Trillion at the Coronavirus Crisis.
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In a small room in Washington DC, twelve central bankers at the Federal Reserve — mostly old, white men — made a decision. How could they stop the economy from crashing into a depression? Print more money.
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By August, stocks were back to record highs. Wall Street was saved… again.
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This is what happens when you create money out of thin air and hand it out to those at the top. The rich get richer. The poor get screwed.
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They are devaluing your savings every year. Like going out and setting fire to your cash.
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How come my parents bought a house for $50k but now a bungalow costs a million bucks? Why is the stock market going up but millions of people can’t afford food?
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Shells, gold coins, the Dutch florin, the British pound. And ‘infinite’ currencies, like the dollar, have always ended in disaster.
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A new form of money, completely independent of banks and governments. A native digital currency for a digital world. A whole new financial system.
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“If someone buys 500 crypto miners, they need a lot of electricity to power it, right?” “A lot,” I said. “So why aren’t I seeing a spike in energy use around here? I should be seeing enough power to light up Times Square.”
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I run a renewable energy plant, fueled by recovered energy from the tires we process. We feed the energy straight into the mining rigs. I’m self-sufficient. Off the grid.
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I’ve heard of the dark-net task force. It’s the FBI branch that took down the Silk Road — the ‘Amazon of drugs’ powered by bitcoin in 2013.
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I led them through a door to the side of the warehouse and up a staircase. In front of us is the world’s first waste—to-energy cryptocurrency mine. I have fans moving the total volume of the air out of the mine six times a minute. This keeps the miners in an operating environment that maintains their efficiency. The computers are processing so much information they can overheat without being kept cool or having enough fresh air. The rigs are stacked up to the ceiling on metal shelves and there’s a low hum from the computers. The air is moving like a wind tunnel, hot columns and fresh air ...more
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Bitcoin is completely independent. It exists outside of banks. It doesn’t belong to any government. It doesn’t care about borders. It’s open to everyone, no matter who you are or where you live. It can’t be controlled by any one person, group or company. The network has never been hacked and it can’t be shut down. Bitcoiners call this ‘censorship-resistant’
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There’s bitcoin the currency (with a lower-case ‘b’) And Bitcoin the network or ‘protocol’ (with an upper-case ‘B’) that makes it all work. Think of the Bitcoin network like the internet.
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It was a genius move, creating a completely unstoppable movement, independent of a central body or figure. Bitcoin belongs to everyone.
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It’s like V for Vendetta. In the movie, an anonymous person called ‘V’ masterminds a revolution, then disappears. At the end of the movie, thousands of people show up to overthrow the system, all wearing the ‘V’ masks. No-one knows who started it, and now it’s too big to stop. It’s the same with bitcoin.
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My first thought was this is like video game money.
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we were moving into a digital economy and we need a native internet currency that goes beyond borders.
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I can send an email to anyone in the world in seconds. I can call you from the other side of the planet and talk to you in real-time. But it takes me five days to wire you money? It’s insane.
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Warren Buffett famously called bitcoin “rat poison squared.”
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Joseph Stiglitz claimed it was only used for nefarious activity and said “no government can allow that.”
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Patients were treated pretty cruelly, I thought, with total disregard for the cost of the care they were trying to get access to. So I came up with an idea to take all the non-life-threatening emergencies — broken bones, allergic reactions, colds, coughs — and put them in a retail setting: abandoned restaurants, old Blockbuster Video buildings etc. I called it FastMed, an urgent care facility outside the hospital.
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We went on to open up 123 locations across the country. I felt this fierce resistance to change when I started FastMed. And I could feel it with bitcoin. I still feel it. Whenever you get that backlash from inside an industry, you know you’re onto something.
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Michael Saylor calls it a “swarm of cyber hornets… exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.” And it’s never been breached.
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This is what makes Bitcoin revolutionary. Instead of one computer at a bank keeping track of all the money (centralized), there are thousands of computers all over the world (decentralized).
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Bitcoin isn’t just a currency or financial system, it’s the strongest computer network in history. And it only has one job: protecting hard money. It’s a $280 billion bug bounty — the biggest reward for hackers in history if they could figure it out — and no-one’s broken it.
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Seriously. This is the strongest army of computers on the planet acting like a fortress to protect your money. And people still think this thing doesn’t have value?