After spending 10 years thinking about Money & Bitcoin, here's the simplest explanation I can come up with:
Money is a technology to move Value across Space, Time, and Scale.
Value is the utility humans derive from Goods & Services.
Value is highly subjective, and it changes across Time and Space.
Unbeknownst to them, Economists have defined these functions as:
- Store of Value (Time)
- Medium of Exchange (Space)
- Unit of Account (Scale)
Throughout History, no monetary system has managed to satisfy all 3 functions of Money at once. This is where the idea of Backing Money and the necessity of separating Money and Currency come from.
This trade-off can be described as a Money Trilemma: you can optimize for 2, but not all 3.
Gold is great at Time & Scale, but not Space.
Fiat is great at Space & Scale, but not Time.
Until the invention of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the first form of Money that successfully excels at all 3 functions simultaneously.
It achieves that by perfecting all the properties of hashtag#Money, with no extra room for improvement:
#Bitcoin is:
- Infinitely Divisible
- Instantly Portable
- Forever Durable
- Mathematically Finite (what is mistakenly called Scarcity)
- Perfectly Fungible
Bitcoin is the final Evolution of Money.
The World just hasn’t figured it out yet.
