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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
When Ray Dalio uttered the words “cash is trash!" on CNBC in early 2020, he seemingly broke the fourth wall.
For someone of his stature and influence within the political machine to acknowledge the chronic and unavoidable debasement of fiat currency was a clear turning point.
While he did temporarily reverse his position, his general view remains unchanged.
The perverse incentives of the fiat system—siphoning value from savers to fund deficits—can only lead to more of the same.
20 years ago, Michael Crichton coined a term that has now become essential for navigating the incentives of today’s news media landscape:
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
🧵
Named after Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Crichton explains the pitfalls of observing errors in the reporting of a topic, yet trusting the same source in areas where you are less knowledgable/able to verify accuracy.
Bitcoin is multidisciplinary and multifaceted.
It represents a major paradigm shift in innovation and the communication of value. Thus it can take years to gain a basic fundamental understanding.