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17 Jun, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Is bitcoin a waste? How efficient is bitcoin?

The latest podcast answers this with a full cost-benefit analysis of bitcoin, based on a chapter from my forthcoming The Fiat Standard.

Listen, subscribe, rate, and share on your favorite podcast apps:

saifedean.com/podcast/63-bit…
Run The Numbers:

Bitcoin costs: electricity & infrastructure

Bitcoin benefits: appreciating savings, money transfer, & obsoleting fiat & its costs:

-inflation, estimated at 2.5% of global GDP annually
-rising time preference
-economic distortions
-activist govts
-conflict
How to think of bitcoin efficiency: return/expenditure

return = total market value of bitcoin savings (~$800b)

expenditure = cumulative miner expenditure from day 1 (~$30b)

Bitcoin has created $800b of secure savings today from only $30b of investments over 12 years.
~25% of world's wealth is in govt money, & that's being devalued at a weighted average of 10% per year, conservatively

Every year, around 2.5% of global wealth is destroyed by government inflation, currently around $10trillion/year.

Compare to bitcoin consuming $30b in 12 years
Bitcoin annual efficiency is total secured bitcoins (~$800b or 18.8m btc) divided by annual security spending (currently ~$14b, or 0.35m btc)

This is roughly equal to the stock-to-flow ratio. Bitcoin gets more efficient at securing value as its s2f rises & inflation drops
You can find all of this discussion in more detail in my forthcoming book, @thefiatstandard, which you can preorder now and receive the completed first draft of the book!

saifedean.com/tfs-btc

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More from @saifedean

Saifedean.com Profile picture
10 Jun
All the shitcoiners complaining about bitcoiners being toxic to their shitcoin scams spent the year 2017 supporting Segwit2x, the most serious attack on bitcoin ever.

They have not once admitted this was a mistake, because they are happy to sacrifice bitcoin for their dumb scams
The next time an altcoin-promoting con artist tells you bitcoiners are toxic, ask them what they did in 2017 to fight the toxicity of the corporate takeover that wanted to force bitcoiners to adopt new consensus rules & destroy bitcoin's most important property: immutability.
Of all the supporters of the segwit2x attack on bitcoin, only the great Wences Casares has introspected, apologized & admitted his mistake. All the rest are unapologetic opportunist scoundrels who would gladly destroy bitcoin for whatever scam they're pumping this week.
Read 4 tweets
Saifedean.com Profile picture
24 May
Fiater thinks bitcoin is a bewildering bubble while living in a world where governments owe $100t+ of low & negative interest rate debt while locking their people at home & arresting them for working.
Everything in fiat world is a bubble propped up by fake money: bonds, stocks, governments, education, housing, credit markets, etc...

But if you listen to fiat media & education, there are only two bubbles in history: tulips and bitcoin.
Tulip mania basically didn't happen, but fiaters use it as the bubble bogeyman because real bubbles are all very similar to modern fiat.

Example: John Law's Louisiana Purchase assignats were a devastating bubble, and functionally no different from QE.
smithsonianmag.com/history/there-…
Read 5 tweets
Saifedean.com Profile picture
21 May
The latest podcast:

Elon Musk: The Fiat Rockefeller

Under gold, the richest man in the world, Rockefeller, transformed the lives of billions.

Fiat's richest man trades carbon & shitcoin scams & gets govt subsidies to build expensive toys for the rich

saifedean.com/podcast/57-elo…
To become the richest man in the world under hard money, Rockefeller, born in poverty, built the foundations of modern industrial society by providing billions with the infrastructure that allows them cheap & reliable energy for heating, cooking, production & transportation.
Under hard money, there's no alternative to providing people value to get them to give you money to get rich. The richest man in the world will be the man who provides the world with the most value & Rockefeller transformed the world.
Read 6 tweets
Saifedean.com Profile picture
15 May
Bitcoin consumes so much energy because it uses a fully mechanical & digital process to ascertain truth. It doesn't rely on the authority of anyone.

It isn't a more energy-intensive way of doing consumer payments; it's a less energy-intensive way of achieving consensus than war.
All attempts to compare bitcoin energy consumption with banks, consumer payment technologies, central banks, or gold completely miss the point of bitcoin's real opportunity cost. Bitcoin doesn't replace these & they can, in principle, coexist with bitcoin.
Bitcoin replaces the need for strangers to have to be subject to the same government & central bank in order to trade internationally, which necessitates one government imposing its will on the rest of the world, which can only be done with war. Image
Read 7 tweets
Saifedean.com Profile picture
15 May
Carbonhysterics coming after Bitcoin will be the end of carbonhysteria. Nobody does their homework as thoroughly as bitcoiners, while climate hysterics are either scammy careerist grifters or unthinking simpletons who believe marketing press releases.
Carbonhysteria is science by press release and intimidation. You can't keep a career in fiat unless you are hysterical about CO2. Bitcoiners can't be cancelled because they have hard money savings. You'll have to run the numbers & show the receipts to convince them. Good luck!
Here's a sample of what sane people who aren't making a living from spreading hysteria have to say on CO2 & climate:
@AlexEpstein: The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
@ShellenbergerMD: Apocalypse Never.
Steve Koonin: Unsettled.
@ClimateAudit: climateaudit.org
Read 4 tweets
Saifedean.com Profile picture
12 May
The fiaters' mental gymnastics to rationalize this away are going to be spectacular!
Classic fiatsplainin:

"Akshully, this anecdotal data of rising prices is not enough to prove inflation. You need to look at the entire basket of goods, like the CPI does, and the CPI finds very low inflation, so your anecdotal data is DEBUNKED"
Read 6 tweets

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