Bitcoin Debate

I just had an ad hoc Bitcoin debate. I'm finding, the more I put myself out there on the topic of Bitcoin, the more I learn about myself and my command of the knowledge I've been accumulating to date. I'm still learning - every single day, reading and listening and watching all of the content that keeps on growing. I stuck my typing fingers out and said something asking everyone on a particular call I was on if they'd been tracking Bitcoin. I heard rumblings, ah, yea, I'm still working on setting up my Coinbase account or, yea, I've gotta dollar average on in. Another person, let's call him Joe, went all in on the other side of the argument, Bitcoin is dead, it's not money, and the only currency that'll ever live is the U.S. Dollar. He said I should be worried about 51% attacks. I was told that I needed to study my history better and go look up the term, "Tulip Bubble", and then get back to him. 

Then I got the following screenshots shared with me:

Seemingly harsh, I thought. Study my history better? Tulip Bubble.... Why do people keep bringing up tulips when they are trying to argue against cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin? Tulips. ...  That always surprises me.

Actually, as my business partner says, "the “tulip bubble” as people refer to it is more of a confirmation of human behavior that, again, is a stupendous affirmation of why bitcoin is needed, is the answer."

I debated back and forth in my mind on whether to engage - or to just let this Tulip Joe go.....  and despite my tendencies, decided to go for it. Here's what I wrote in reply (for context, this is a group chat, so there are other folks viewing this discussion going back and forth). This is literally a "copy/paste" of my response:

• If you've truly read the whitepaper for Bitcoin, you know that Bitcoin was created to specifically address the problems of modern money - the U.S. Financial system and the U.S. Dollar (fiat money).
  

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Macro-economic points: 

• Federal Reserve has cut interest rates to 0%. This is an issue.
• The world is addicted to Quantitative Easing like it's heroin. Trillions of USD printed out of thin air, even in this year alone. "QE4": This is another big issue.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan guy) wrote (in beginning of The Bitcoin Standard): "... we only discovered too late: one can macroBS longer than microBS, which is why we need to be careful of whom we endow with centralized macro decisions." ----> basically, those that have claimed to understand macro-economics and have been running the Fed, had no idea what they were doing.
• 1971 US officially went off the gold standard - became fiat money. There's history for you.
• oh yeah, and shortly after that, 1974 -- Nobel Prize winner, Hayek wrote about ("Pretense of Knowledge") how that was going to be a grave mistake, the U.S. dollar becoming a fiat currency, as the world's reserve currency.  And here we are.
• After WWII, 1944, Bretton-Woods Agreement, the U.S. Dollar became the world's reserve currency. Another bit of history. We had the most guns. But today, 2020 - we're at another "Bretton-Woods" cross roads. Did you see the IMF (international monetary fund) meetings that happened this week - the world is moving to digital currencies. China's already got a massive head start. The middle east is working on digitizing quickly. Once all of these digital currencies exist, what's the common digital currency across the globe? Bitcoin.

Supply side - Bitcoin has a limited supply 

• Again, only 21 million total Bitcoin ever available. Only 18.4 million currently in circulation. Math.
• Actually more than 60% of Bitcoin in circulation has not moved - people are using it as a store of value.

Demand side for Bitcoin (which has limited hard capped supply)

• Bitcoin is up more than 70% year to date, and is the best performing asset class in the decade (2010-2020).
• Corporations are now using Bitcoin as the reserve asset part of their treasury: Galaxy Digital, MicroStrategy, Square, etc. This is just the start. There is very few other assets out there that's not simply way over priced and/or not a great store of wealth when you look at the price in terms of gold prices. Demand will continue to go up.
• Actually, despite how "volatile" Bitcoin has been, it's been consistently trending upwards - it beats a lot of other national currencies out there, including the U.S. Dollar. Another example: Turkey. I wouldn't be surprised if nations opt into Bitcoin as a way to leap frog innovation/time to pull themselves out of the dark holes they are in today. Another example: Venezuela, Argentina, Columbia, etc. Again, more support for the Demand side.

As for 51% attack concerns, yes - and now we are much further along with the Bitcoin network. It would literally cost billions of dollars ($15 billion I read somewhere?) to make this happen, if one could find and secure all the hardware, and that alone is really difficult to do for even setting up a small mining operation. The chances are becoming more and more slim as the Bitcoin network has matured - case in point, we now have more and more public companies putting their cash reserves into Bitcoin. It's 2020 now, a lot has happened since 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. There is no other currency that is as sound, as secure, as borderless, deflationary, hardcapped, transparent, immutable, decentralized, nonsovereign (as Travis Kling says often), than Bitcoin. My bet is on the digital future, on technology, and on math.

More on the 51% attack concerns: Think about it in terms of the built-in game theory. In short, it's not in the best interests of the miners to try and spend a shit ton of money  to double-spend Bitcoin. They would have to spend a shit ton on equipment, electricity, space to even get a short at rewriting the blockchain. It's like trying to rob the bank for $10 million, after spending $10 million. Makes no sense. The numbers favor all of the people who have an incentive to keep the integrity of the Bitcoin global network is MUCH greater than the number of folks that want to attack it. We saw it - with Bitcoin Cash as the hard fork. That was a critical moment in history and the perfect moment for Bitcoin to have died. It didn't. Bitcoin has only gotten stronger since then. 

RE: Bitcoin and tulips. Yea, this is the knock that we hear often from the "peanut gallery, it's a lazy argument intellectually and very misleading" (as I think Pomp would say about the Tulip argument). I heard a lot about tulips in 2017 and especially in 2018. Those were truly hard times for me personally.

[AND THANK GOODNESS FOR HUMANITY that] Bitcoin didn't die in 2018, sorry. Nor in 2019, sorry, or in 2020. Sorry. You're talking about the ATH (all time high, that was just all kinds of crazy speculation thanks to the ICO's) in 2017, it went from $1k to $20k, and then back down to $3k. It's not a good factual representation for anyone that looks at the market holistically. [I've learned recently that] The Bitcoin average across many weeks, 200 weeks is the better metric - [and as we've seen] Bitcoin is a solid investment. Also look at the number of consecutive days that Bitcoin has been (really boring) and just hanging out over $10k in 2020. ----> really that'll show you that Bitcoin has stabilized a lot since the crazy hey day of 2017. [Technology is evolving FAST. 10 years ago, I had turn-by-turn map directions printed out on paper. Today I have Waze on my phone.] As investors, we should care more about the long term. Things go up and down, and in this case, Bitcoin has been trending up, even with its ups and downs. The technology is much more mature. The network is much bigger.

​And the timing is also, very right.

One more (the U.S. Dollar versus Bitcoin debate): 

I don't know how I did, if all of my facts are straight - they should be close (enough). 

Anyways, I'm a believer in Bitcoin, in bitcoin, and in blockchain. This is the future.

​--Arry