It doesn’t “fix poverty,” but it solves an enormous systemic theft and breakdown of value communication in society that causes tons of poverty that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred.
Discussion
only guy swann could respond with such a condensed treasure-trove of hard earned wisdom like this.
Oh okay thanks for the reply.
Let’s say Bitcoin is finally ready and fully implemented in every fabric of the financial system.
I am an average Joe who works paycheck to paycheck. How can Bitcoin help me to elevate ‘my poverty?’
Isn’t is just a different payment/monetary system?
What we really want from money is reciprocal equity, not absolute equality...
You have to understand why "living paycheck to paycheck" has become so common, and why financial life never seems to move ahead, but instead seems in a perpetual chase to keep up with zero.
We call this "the fiat hamster wheel." It's hard to see when you inside the fiat system, but the value of your money is constantly falling, you are having to get constant hourly wages simply to keep the same purchasing power, & you (and everyone else) is incentivized into a never ending cycle of taking on debt.
Imagine if your paycheck bought you 5% more at the end of the year, *without* any raise, debt was super expensive so you and 90% of everyone else didn't go into debt unless it was important, & everything usually purchased *with* debt was essentially 20% of the price you are used to, because there isn't a constantly propped up debt mountain fueling it's price infinitely higher.
In short, with sound money:
• Debt would be scarce
• Savings would be abundant
• Things would be affordable
• and your money would get more valuable over time
In the transition from fiat to btc, bitcoin is savings technology and if you can spend it, a medium of exchange.
Bitcoin can only protect the value you have accrued in fiat at the time the exchange takes place.
When you have a salary with yearly negotiations, btc does not help you retain the value you will earn throughout the year if you sign a contract earning fiat. Your income is still subject to being devalued…only when you are paid and can convert to btc can that value accrued be locked in.
If you really wanna accelerate, demand a fixed salary in denominated in btc. Instead of earning $100,000 per year, ask for 5 bitcoin per year ($20k/btc). This is protect your salary from dollar devaluations throughout the year. At some point, your real earnings will explode higher…it’s just math.
Let’s say ok I converted everything to btc and when it fluctuates so much what happened? I lose even more just like btc now have been cut in half in value.
If it keeps going up, great! Everyone wants that and you never have $1 today then tomorrow it will be only 50c
unless it was 2008
It’s important to separate value and price. Bitcoin’s *price in dollars* has gone down; it’s *value* has not gone down, if anything, it’s gone up.
It’s also important to realize that the majority of the world does not have the privilege of living in America where we can print the world’s reserve currency.
Look at Lebanon or Turkey or Nigeria or Venezuela or any number of countries where citizens have seen the value of their money—their purchasing power—cut in half overnight by an arbitrary decision by a small group of unelected bureaucrats and bankers.
sure but at the end of the day people need to eat and sleep and they need *price* to buy food and roof on top of their heads.
Btc has value, but will it buy and fulfill people’s needs and necessities? and you gotta remember not everyone has a disposable income to begin with to invest in btc or other assets
You have lost half of your value in the dollar, it's just extremely hard to see because it's your measuring stick for everything else.
(ie. you think BTC lost half its value because you weighed it in dollars.)
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Example: I bought my house 5 years ago for $160k, recently it was appraised at $320k and this was without taking into account *any* of the renovations or digging out and drying in the basement, etc. It was purely on the old square footage, and current market.
Understand, my house is *not* worth twice as much. I can't take that $320k and go buy twice the size of house. I get exactly *this* house for that money now.
–– My dollars lost half their value. What you probably think you are seeing is that housing goes up in price, but what you are actually seeing is a relatively stable asset (a house) that is hard to make more of, going up in *price* as the purchasing power of the dollar plummets.
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Now, you are 100% right that Bitcoin is very volatile, it's a tiny life raft being monetized in a sea of huge ships crashing into things and rushing by. But 5 years ago it was around $5k, and 6 years ago it was $1k.
Bitcoin *should* be incredibly volatile right now, because its a small market being tossed around in huge debt cycles and massive leveraging implosions in the fiat money market. But its trend is up, and no one is making anymore Bitcoin. There are 21 million and that's it. TRILLIONS and trillions of dollars get printed without ceasing.
– The dollar losing half its value should be weighed as a horrific failure.
– BTC value loss should be weighed as an unfortunate expectation over the short term.
The dollar has THE LARGEST MARKET IN THE WORLD - by an order of magnitude! Meaning that any supply change is absorbed by such an astonishingly enormous market, that we should never feel it unless its absolutely incomprehensibly large. DESPITE this, it has plummeted. If you don't get paid more than twice what you got paid 5 years ago, you made no progress (ie. the hamster wheel). For the largest market in the world, that should be considered the most spectacular failure imaginable. In 5 years you will hold some amount of dollars, but you have zero f*ckg clue how many other dollars will exist by then, and your savings has essentially ZERO chance at buying you the SAME amount of stuff.
(not to mention the multiple lesser fiat monies that are currently hyperinflating and countries that are crumbling at this very moment, but let's compare to the "best" horse)
With BTC, you should *expect* volatility. It will be tossed around by the massive ships turning over, exploding, and crashing into enormous icebergs. But it actually floats. And in 5 years you will have the same amount of BTC in relation to all the BTC that exist. It won't change by even a thousandth of a penny's worth. The likelihood that it keeps and even grows its value, is extremely high.
TL;DR
• In 5 years you are practically guaranteed to have a huge loss of value in your dollar income, & in any dollars you save.
• In 5 years you are very likely to have a lot more purchasing power if you get paid in, or save in BTC.
• The dollar might be the biggest and fanciest sinking ship, BTC might be small and harder to navigate. But the dollar is still a sinking ship, and BTC still floats.
If you want to plan for the future, you should actually read this and think about it seriously. I bought Bitcoin today.
In short, with sound money:
• Debt would be scarce
• Savings would be abundant
• Things would be affordable
• and your money would get more valuable over time
Ok, that sounds pretty good to me...
Let's do that then.
#Bitcoin 😎
Everything is dandy until you check the real world and almost everything you consume comes from countries that have never heard of btc at all, or even the people themselves do not understand what it is.
Your money would get more valuable? BTC has been down half of its value since 2-3 years ago. If you have disposable income in a meantime, great for you but how about other who don’t? wait their savings in btc bounce back?
Some times,I feel that all powerful nations together like US , China, India, Russia will be able to contain it. Now they have learned , not to kill it but to keep its price low by secretly shorting it all the time. #[6]