Thread by @stephenjhall

A thread of bitcoin paradoxes 🧵

bitcoin is an innovation of multi-thousand year importance yet looks indistinguishable to the untrained eye from cryptocurrencies, which are mostly meaningless toys

not owning any bitcoin is one of the riskiest financial decisions an individual can make in 2024, yet bitcoin ETFs are perhaps the riskiest ETFs you can possibly own

bitcoin is uniquely positioned to become global money because it is apolitical in the sense that it is unmarred by the perspective or worldview of any one people or nation state, yet its origin and adoption represents the most significant and potent political movement of our time

bitcoin is a global decentralized network, yet its properties and the incentives of its monetary policy are likely to cause participants to regain an appreciation for hyper-local communities and economies

bitcoin seems to be an ephemeral and intangible form of money, yet the way it is secured is very tangible and physical—far more so than digital dollars, and bitcoin can even be transacted in the physical space with bearer instruments

bitcoin appears to be all-too-obviously some kind of ponzi scheme, yet it empirically has a growing parallel economy of adoptees who have no interest in ever exiting the “scheme”—because bitcoin is itself their exit

bitcoin is itself a “planned economy” in the sense that person(s) decided its monetary policy before it even began—yet the free and willful opt-in to that planned economy by billions of people could end all future attempts at planned economies

bitcoin uniquely can be unilaterally and sovereignly controlled by individuals in size, yet the only way the network can scale to 8 billion people is by communities building trust to share that responsibility

bitcoin’s immutable transactions makes it an extremely useful tool for theft/scamming people (see all of X), but in the end state bitcoin will be integrated in all applications as to incentivize computer systems to be hardened as perpetual, living bug bounties

bitcoin mining could in the end consume more energy than any other system globally, but its energy consumption is maximally efficient for the service the network provides to the world