Thread by @anilsaidso

My understanding and appreciation of Bitcoin has been shaped by a handful of essays that brilliantly capture its unique properties and potential.

These authors do not dictate WHAT to think, but rather HOW to think BETTER.

Here's the list.. 🔖

1/ “History shows us that the corruption of monetary systems leads to moral decay, social collapse, and slavery.”
@Breedlove22

bit.ly/2PrOFZz

2/ "The 21st century emergence of Bitcoin, encryption, the internet, and millennials are more than just trends; they herald a wave of change that exhibits similar dynamics as the 16-17th century revolution that took place in Europe."
@TuurDemeester

bit.ly/2XpFo8M

3/ "There are many men out there who will parrot the "debt is money WE owe OURSELVES" without acknowledging that "WE" isn't a static entity, but a collection of individuals at different points in their lives."
@MartyBent

bit.ly/3gvhuAi

4/ “If Bitcoin exists for 20 years, there will be near-universal confidence that it will be available forever, much as people believe the Internet is a permanent feature of the modern world.”
@real_vijay

bit.ly/3gtjhWB

5/ "This realignment would not be traditional right vs left, but rather land vs cloud, state vs network, centralized vs decentralized, new money vs old, internationalist/capitalist vs nationalist/socialist, MMT vs BTC,...Hamilton vs Satoshi."
@balajis

bit.ly/3k8GTlG

6/ “I became convinced that, whether bitcoin survives or not, the existing financial system is working on borrowed time.”
@parkeralewis

bit.ly/3fnpIJD

7/ "Bitcoin is a beautifully-constructed protocol. Genius is apparent in its design to most people who study it in depth, in terms of the way it blends math, computer science, cyber security, monetary economics, and game theory."
@LynAldenContact

bit.ly/31ivDKW

8/ “Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to re-imagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era..”
@pmarca

bit.ly/3i6iGun

9/ "Using Bitcoin for consumer purchases is akin to driving a Concorde jet down the street to pick up groceries: a ridiculously expensive waste of an astonishing tool."
@saifedean

bit.ly/2DwCEiX

10/ "The Internet is a dumb network, which is its defining and most valuable feature. The Internet’s protocol (..) doesn’t offer “services.” It doesn’t make decisions about content. It doesn’t distinguish between photos, text, video and audio."
@aantonop

bit.ly/31hFosN

11/ “Most people are only familiar with (b)itcoin the electronic currency, but more important is (B)itcoin, with a capital B, the underlying protocol, which encapsulates and distributes the functions of contract law.”
@naval

bit.ly/30trPXW

12/ "Bitcoin can approximate unofficial exchange rates which, in turn, can be used to detect both the existence and the magnitude of the distortion caused by capital controls & exchange rate manipulations."
@ProfPieters

bit.ly/2IOtJg1

13/ "You can create something which looks cosmetically similar to Bitcoin, but you cannot replicate the settlement assurances which derive from the costliness of the ledger.”
@nic_carter

bit.ly/3fjkyzM

14/ "When we can secure the most important functionality of a financial network by computer science... we go from a system that is manual, local, and of inconsistent security to one that is automated, global, and much more secure."
@NickSzabo4

bit.ly/3ouFaII

15/ "The BCB enforces the strictest deposit regulations in the world by requiring full reserves for all accounts.

..money is not destroyed when bank debts are repaid, so increased money hoarding does not cause liquidity traps.."
@pierre_rochard

bit.ly/3mVIso4

16/ "When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.”
@halfin

bit.ly/37J1303

17/ “No matter who you are, or how big your company is, 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙬𝙤𝙣’𝙩 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙥𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙞𝙛 𝙞𝙩’𝙨 𝙞𝙣𝙫𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙙."
@StopAndDecrypt

bit.ly/2J73O3d

18/ “Just like a company trying to protect itself from being destroyed by a new competitor, the actions and reactions of central banks and policy makers to protect the system that they know, are quite predictable.”
@JeffBooth

bit.ly/3qkYPw4

19/ “Technology, industry, and society have advanced immeasurably since, and yet we still live by Venetian financial customs and have no idea why.

Modern banking is the legacy of a problem that technology has since solved.”
@allenf32

bit.ly/2NgVf89

20/ “The rich and powerful will always design systems that benefit them before everyone else. The genius of Bitcoin is to take advantage of that very base reality and force them to get involved and help run the system, instead of attacking it.”
@gladstein

bit.ly/3qOlMbe

21/ “In the realm of infor­ma­tion, there is no coin-stamping without time-stamping.

The relent­less beating of this clock is what gives rise to all the magical proper­ties of Bitcoin.”
@dergigi

bit.ly/3yNlA0i

22/ “You can stay on the Fiat Standard, in which some people get to produce unlimited new units of money for free, just not you. Or opt in to the Bitcoin Standard, in which no one gets to do that, including you.”
-Ross Stevens

bit.ly/3vDxrfs