2/6 The subtitle is "The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money" and speaks to money's purpose, how it's been corrupted over time and how Bitcoin redeems the corrupt nature of the current central-bank backed fiat monetary system
3/6 The main audience for this book is Christians, many of whom hold wildly biased notions of Bitcoin and makes the moral argument for Bitcoin. Not only is it a better, harder money, but it's a more moral money that's better aligned with building up civilization.
4/6 To understand that, however, we had to explain what money is from a spiritual perspective and the history of money. We examined what led to the current system we have now, why it's corrupted society so much and how it changes individual behavior.
5/6 Then we examined the moral and spiritual consequences in politics, in individual behavior and in churches, making the case that many of the spiritual sickness in those areas have their origin in the corrupt monetary system we're in.
6/6 Finally, we explain how Bitcoin changes the incentives around all those things and why Bitcoin is a more moral money.
Short rant about Quantum Computing breaking bitcoin:
1/ If you study even a little of it, you realize very quickly that the engineering challenges are enormous. Most attempts use temperatures a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, not exactly easy to produce.
2/ What's more, the way quantum works is that you have lots of coherence problems and half-life problems. You need redundancy which adds enormous complexity to the system.
3/ Add to that the best quantum algorithms really only give you a square-root factor speed-up. So if it took 2^256 operations for a brute force attack, congrats, now you need to do 2^128 operations... on a quantum computer.
1/ Back of the envelope math for doing a 58 block reorg (current confirmations for the tx that took money from binance):
Minimal cost: 58 * 12.5 btc = 725 BTC (assumes every miner would get roughly the same tx fees in the new chain and that 100% of miners go with this scheme)
2/ If 75% of the network going with this scheme, you would need on average 116 blocks to overtake the current chain, or about 1450 BTC worth of mining rewards.
At 60%, this becomes 290 blocks or 3625 BTC. At 55%, 580 blocks/7250 BTC.
3/ 7250 BTC > 7000 BTC, so at minimum, you need more than 55% of all hashing power to agree to reorg the chain. In 58 more blocks, this rises to 60%, in 116 blocks, 65%. In 174 blocks, 70%, 232 blocks/75%. The cost goes up pretty quickly assuming everyone agrees.
Executive summary:
- They're disrupting crypto exchanges
- They can make a lot of money $5/user/month at scale
- This is the next level of financial inclusion that we need
2/ A lot of people are asking about my involvement, especially since they're really skeptical of the business model. How is it possible they can charge $5/user/month and make money where other exchanges charge 0.15% per trade? The conclusion they've jumped to is that I'm scamming
3/ Allow me to lay out my investment thesis:
First, most people are skeptical because they've been abused by the financial services industry. They expect financial services of any kind to cost a lot of money in some way, shape or form. This is due to a lot of rent-seeking.
As long as there are people that get influence through being rich, having degrees, owning domains, being born into an influential family, kissing up to the right people and getting influence on anything other than their own ability, we are not there.
2/ Notice that all of those activities are essentially rent-seeking behaviors. Demanding some form of influence merely for being, not for doing. Why is this? How did rent-seeking become so prevalent? Why are there so many people intent on extracting money without adding anything?
3/ Here's why. Fiat money. Easy money. When money can be printed, when money can be extracted from the rest of the population and given to the rent seekers, people naturally rent-seek. It's easier than actually adding value.
2/ Acting non-scammy, that is, being ethical, is not a one-time decision. You don't act ethically once and then get a free pass for the rest of your life. That's not how it works.
3/ Being ethical is something you have to do over and over again. It's actually pretty easy to be ethical when things are easy and there really isn't much of a price to pay to act ethical.