TFTC: Decentralize Peer Review
Dis-intermediate the captured and parasitic journals
Had a great rip with Marty Bent at TFTC.
Marty has been running one of the more informative Bitcoin podcasts while also being actively involved in a Bitcoin mining company that is salvaging stranded energy and turning this into Bitcoin.
This grid ties Bitcoin as a load balancing tool which stabilizes the grid, decentralizes the grid, and opens an auction for the pursuit of the cheapest energy on the planet regardless of how close it is to a population center.
Watch Jordan Peterson catch on this concept.
Usually currencies are dependent on linking themselves to Energy or Matter (OPEC/oil and Gold standards) but these alignments to energy are political, maluble and nothing more than fiat promises. Gold Standards get broken and the OPEC deal will eventually collapse. When energy grids become dependent on currencies for load balancing and remote energy salvage, the currency it relies on becomes unstoppable.
First country to kill bitcoin.. have some grid instability and watch the capital flight out of your country to countries like El Salvador, Argentina and Madeira that are welcoming this wealth to their countries. China tried this and failed. 40% of the total Bitcoin mining capacity was tied to hydro and coal plants in China to help load balance the supply/demand asynchronicities. Upon the ban, this mining capacity packed up and moved out of China and left them to implode their own economy. Now they are silently allowing Bitcoin mining back into the country after they stepped on that rake.
Bitcoin itself, is portable. Bitcoin mining is portable. Bitcoin can be stored in your mind with simple memorization of your key phrase. Unlike all other forms of wealth, it cannot be seized and can be accessed anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.
This is important to understand given the Currency wars underway.
I have been asked by a few followers for some links to get educated on Bitcoin.
Here are a few of my favorites.
I attended this meeting at MIT and you can hear me in the audience for the Q&A. It was not easy to get to with the 2 feet of Snow that visited Boston that night.
Jack Mallers is actually the son of some people we know in our industry. It has been wild to watch his success. He helped Bukele transition El Salvador to a Bitcoin Standard. History in the making and reminder that your age is very little to do with your capacity to dent the universe.
5 hours into this presentation Michael Saylor provides a MacroEconomics discussion on Bitcoin. These macroeconomic forces are why Bitcoin wont be willfully adopted. It will forced out of economic necessity.
To understand why Bitcoin adoption will be gravitational and irreversible you need to understand the Speculative Attack by Pierre Rochard.
TL/DR
One of the governments weaknesses is how it prints money. This can be weaponized against itself once there is a truly scarce un-seizable asset class.
When banks loan you money, they print that money into existence, diluting all other dollar holders. Most people don’t know this and think the loan is coming from other bank customers who have savings deposited at the bank.
Not so.
Fractional Reserve banking means they get to fabricate dollars if you qualify for a loan. So if one takes this fake money and buys real scarce assets that accrue value faster than the interest rate on the loan (loans at 5% interest, BTC climbing 50% a year), you can repeat these loans ad infinitum until the currency collapses. The more they loan money to a scarce asset holder, the more they inflate the currency. You get to pay the loan back in diluted currency while you stack the scarce asset.
This will be hard to do with the dollar as its the strongest currency but every shitcoin currency will fall first. Pierre walks through how this will play out.
To some extent this speculative attack is playing out with Microstrategy. This is Michael Saylor’s company which has now collected 200,000 BTCs or about 1% of all 21M Bitcoins (19M that are actually issued as of today). They have done this by taking on low interest rate loans to buy Bitcoin for the company MSTR. As the company collects BTC on their balance sheet their stock price soars as wall street is desperate for Bitcoin exposure and prior to Bitcoin ETFs they had no way to get into the game. MSTR would then issue more stock and buy more BTC. Stock soars, Bitcoin price rises as there is more than usual demand compared to its decreasing supply. They issue more convertible notes and buy BTC. Stock Soars, BTC soars. Rinse wash and repeat.
The key to this is that Bitcoin mining rewards decay in half every 4 years. Today there are 900 Bitcoins minted every day to reward miners for securing the network with Exahashes of compute. On April 20th of 2024, the mining rewards will get cut in half to 450 BTC per day. This will occur while ETFs and MicroStrategy are racing to grab as much Bitcoin as they can for their customers/shareholders.
In other markets, when the price of a good skyrockets it affords allocation of resources to produce more of it. When gold goes up in price, less profitable mines come back online to offset the Supply/Demand mismatch. This cannot happen with Bitcoin. As a result the price escalates further incentivizing a flight from Fiat.
Many view the Bitcoin price as a Tulip bubble. Tulips bubbles didnt last 15 years and become larger than the entire Silver market or Delta Airlines. Bitcoins Market cap just flipped Meta and by April 20th will leave Google in the dust.
This is not a Tulip bubble and you are not late. Its very likely Bitcoin will lap the Gold Market (12T) which would bring BTC to a $700K price. It will then eat the Bond market offering another order of magnitude in price. $1-10M Bitcoins are not off the table when you speak to many analysts that cover this space.
The question you have to ask is how much of your estate can you afford to leave in Weimar republic Fiat? The question isn’t if BTC is perfect. The question is how much better is it than what you currently store your value in?
And for those who think this is just about money…
Its not. Its about the end of war.
More people to follow on this topic
Ones and Zeros floating around in the aether. Not my idea of money.
Bitcoin is not private though. Monero is. Bitcoin is the on and off-ramp to crypto and privacy coins.