April 23, 2020
When you think of a safe-haven asset, precious metals like gold or silver probably come to mind. They’re investments that individuals flock to as hedges against turmoil in traditional markets. The debate over whether Bitcoin follows in the footsteps of these assets rages on. In this article, we’ll look at some of the main arguments for and against Bitcoin being a store of value.
Bitcoin Highlights the Virtues of Quantitative Hardening
Since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, you have probably heard several times about quantitative easing. If you find the economy, and particularly the monetary and financial system, too complex, you may not have reacted immediately when you heard this term come back into the limelight.
However, the unlimited quantitative easing program conducted by the Fed since March 23, 2020 will have a strong impact on your daily life in the weeks and months to come. The inflation of the money supply in U.S. dollar that this will necessarily induce is likely to lead to a strong currency devaluation.
The origins of the word HODL — a cornerstone of a Bitcoin investor’s vocabulary — came from a resolution voiced on a forum in 2013. It was the verbalization of a man (possibly half-inebriated) of a newfound creed. He admitted that he had been tempted by those around him to trade his way to riches; enchanted, as it were, by the pundits who professed to have access to divine wisdom on timing the market with uncanny precision.
Something rose within him on that day that inspired him to engage in honest self-assessment. And he proclaimed his verdict on himself unabashedly: “I’m a bad trader.”
Bitcoin March 2020 Journal by Words
WORDS is a monthly journal of Bitcoin commentary. For the uninitiated, getting up to speed on Bitcoin can seem daunting. Content is scattered across the internet, in some cases behind paywalls, and content has been lost forever. That’s why we made this journal, to preserve and further the understanding of Bitcoin.
This link takes you to the March 2020 edition. This project is a great initiative that I will try to support once a month with a link to the previous month's edition.
You can read this like an exciting magazine with quality articles about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin and The Business Cycle
For centuries, production in capitalist countries seems to progress in some kind of “cycles”. Every few years, the economy experiences a period of sharp economic growth which is then upset by a collapse of businesses and a high unemployment rate — a recession.
This cyclical movement of the market, repeatedly going from an economic boom to bust, is known as the “business cycle”. Social scientists of multiple disciplines have suggested numerous explanations for this phenomenon, from “under-consumption” to some psychological propensity.
Bitcoin Is Your “Get Out of Fiat System” Card in the Monopoly Game Fed Plays With You
The situation we are experiencing is exceptional in every respect. More than two billion people around the world are still confined to their homes at the time of writing. Some of them have been confined to their homes for more than a month.
The coronavirus pandemic that the world is facing is the reason for these exceptional measures that have been taken by the world’s major economic powers. This obligation to stay at home is hurting the world’s major economies enormously.
The world is gearing up for a recession the scale of which has not been seen for decades. Nevertheless, this containment is a necessary evil. The health of millions of people must come before economic imperatives.
Bitcoin Proof of Work is Efficient
Most people think #Bitcoin’s PoW is “wasteful.” In this article, Dan Held explore how everything is energy, money is energy, energy usage is subjective, and PoW’s energy costs relative to existing governance systems. This article is a collection of direct thoughts from many individuals in the space — my value-add was in the aggregation, distillation, and combination of narratives.
Bitcoin Is Not Slow – It’s Highly Secure
Poorly informed or disingenuous critics often point out to Bitcoin’s “slow” transaction validation time. Yet a truly decentralized and global currency needs to have a rigorous verification process which allows all nodes to validate and broadcast transactions.
The 10-minute block time is not just some cautious threshold that a concerned creator has added to an obsolete technology, in an era when internet speeds were slower. It’s a reasonable amount of time which allows everybody to be in sync with the rest of the network – from the miners who harness solar energy in the middle of the desert to the metropolitan node operators, all participants should have the capacity to download and validate ~1 MB every ~10 minutes.
[BOOK] Why Buy Bitcoin: Investing Today in the Money of Tomorrow
Some people still view Bitcoin as a startup. But despite being declared dead many times by the mainstream media, Bitcoin grows stronger every year. What’s going on? It’s not too late to learn about Bitcoin and invest.
Bitcoin’s value has grown exponentially over multiple boom and bust cycles spanning a decade. Bitcoin is an Internet-native phenomenon like Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, and Tencent. It therefore benefits from the “network effect” which makes it dramatically more valuable as the network grows.
But its potential value is much larger than the giant Internet companies we know so well. If Bitcoin reaches that potential, its value could rise by 50 times its current price in the coming decade. This book from Andy Edstrom will help you understand the role of money in our society, the current state of debt in our economy, and how Bitcoin provides a better solution.