1/ Central Bank Digital Currencies are a threat to human freedom and should be vigorously opposed (it is no surprise that it is China that is pioneering their use).
2/ While the current fiat system is antiquated and unjust, it provides at least one basic protection for human freedom: the ability to default to cash. Cash is anonymous and provides a level of financial privacy that allows us to live outside of a surveillance state.
3/ Imagine a society with no cash and only digital money where every single financial transaction can be tracked by a central government. That is what China is aiming for and it will allow them to further oppress minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs.
4/ Another baneful economic policy that is enabled by CBDCs is the ability to pursue a policy of deeply negative interest rates. Central Banks attempting these historically unprecedented policies are currently limited by a population's freedom to withdraw to cash.
5/ When all money is digital and controlled by a central bank, instead of being limited to say -0.5% or -1% interest rates, they could attempt a policy of, say, -15% interest rates, literally robbing the population of their savings in an attempt to force spending.
6/ Central Banks like to contend that CBDCs are an alternative to #Bitcoin, but they lack the twin value propositions that make Bitcoin special:
- Freedom from debasement
- Freedom from confiscation
We don't want CBDCs, we want Bitcoin.
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1/ Over the years, the New York Times (aka Mouth of Sauron) has produced some fairly poor takes on #Bitcoin. But the one published today by @BCAppelbaum (who's on their editorial board 🤦♂️) may be the most embarrassing yet.
2/ It is so rife with misunderstandings and errors (both technical and economic) that one is left with the impression that the NYT isn't capable of the most basic reporting of facts on #Bitcoin. Quelle surprise.
3/ Consider this doozy where the author thinks #Bitcoin's security is breakable because Alan Turing "figured out the password" of the Enigma in WW2.
This cringeworthy argument is like saying that if someone can jump over a ball, they can jump over the moon.
1/ Many members of the US Congress do not seem to recognize the direction of the political winds. There are over 20 million Americans with a financial stake in the success of the nascent industry being built around #Bitcoin. 10 years ago there were almost zero such people.
2/ The infrastructure bill was crafted in the hope of shearing this new economy to finance a ballooning budget proposed by the Biden administration. Instead the language of the bill would skin the industry.
You may shear a sheep many times, but skin him only once.
3/ 4 years from now there will likely be 50 to 100 million Americans with a stake in #Bitcoin. This is a bipartisan demographic that will not forget the damage being done to this nascent industry by the Biden administration, nor the Senators doing their bidding in the Senate.
1/ While the resumption of #Bitcoin's bull market is a cause for optimism, anyone who cares about Bitcoin should be aware that its adversaries are attempting a major attack on the Bitcoin ecosystem as you read this.
Thread 👇
2/ President Biden's infrastructure bill has had new provisions added that specifically target industry participants with onerous new legislation.
3/ The earliest drafts of this legislation were far worse and I've learned that recent updates have watered the proposed changes, but make no mistake, this is still an attack on the ecosystem. It is only the vigorous pushback by industry participants that can stop this.
Watching @Elon chat with @jack, @moneyball and @CathieDWood and the question about whether #bitcoin should scale at the base layer came up (Elon often brings this up). I cover this in great detail in my book The Bullish case for Bitcoin (I can send you a copy, Elon). Thread.👇
This is NOT about physics. It's about *credibility*. If it were possible to modify the base layer easily it would completely destroy the credibility of the inflation schedule.
Decentralization and the difficulty of changing Bitcoin is our prophylactic against inflation.
The block size war was the climax of this debate (one side wanting base-layer scaling for transactional throughput, the other wanting to maintain protocol immutability and decentralization).
The network split and the market voted overwhelmingly in favor of decentralization.
1/ While there are no a priori rules for the path a monetary good will take as it is monetized, a curious pattern has emerged during the relatively brief history of Bitcoin's monetization.
Thread 👇
2/ Bitcoin's price appears to follow a fractal pattern of increasing magnitude, where each iteration of the fractal matches the classic shape of a Gartner hype cycle
3/ In his article Speculative Bitcoin Adoption/Price Theory, Michael Casey posits that the expanding Gartner hype cycles represent phases of a standard S-curve of adoption that was followed by many transformative technologies as they become commonly used in society