Storing Your Wealth Is A Human Right

It’s your birthright to be able to store your wealth, and with bitcoin, you can use it for the first time.

When someone pays you, it’s because you’ve done something valuable for them. Money is the measure of this value. If you make hamburgers and someone is willing to give you $5 for one, then that’s how much the hamburger is worth to that person. If you get rich selling those $5 hamburgers, that means society highly values ​​your ability to provide hamburgers and is willing to reward you with more money so you can do whatever you want with it, hopefully producing more hamburgers. In short, unless you steal or lie to others, the money you earn is a measure of how much value you have provided to the world. Shouldn’t you be allowed to retain that value over time? Shouldn’t that be as powerful as tomorrow, in a week, in ten years, or to your grandchildren?

To be clear, there are lots of ways to provide value to the world that don’t come with money — helping a friend move, looking after kids, being a mom in general, watching the neighbor’s dog, doing charity work, introducing someone to Pink Floyd, and so on. I’m not trying to stop these things. Everything is good and important. That’s not relevant to talking about money.

Related reading: Without Bitcoin you can work longer and with less money

If you work hard, provide value to society, and they give you money, the value of your money is constantly being robbed by corrupt governments and central banks. This is why you can’t just put your money under the mattress for 50 years and retain its value. If you could, I wouldn’t be writing this article and there would be no point in bitcoin existing. We don’t realize it because the theft is slow and the process is too complicated for most people to understand, but that doesn’t make it any less immoral and wrong. Saving your wealth is a human right such as speaking, owning property, having children, and so on. However, people in power would not just leave money for free. You can’t just expect them to stop committing corruption. In the past, the only way to gain freedom was to fight for it, but bitcoin gives us a bloodless alternative: just exchange your broken money for good money. For the first time, there was an unstoppable competitor to counterfeit government-issued money.

Related reading: The US Dollar Is a Ponzi You Should Never Invest In

Arguments Against Storing Wealth

Believe it or not, the argument I just put forward goes against most mainstream thinking which believes that the government should control the money supply and without wise management from the central bankers who print the money, we, the filthy, unscrupulous savages know nothing, would damage the economy in the same way. hoarding all our money and not spending it. Apparently we would rather starve to death in holes in the ground than spend money. Without someone to slowly drain that money and force us to spend it, we would enter a deflationary death spiral. In my opinion, this is patently unreasonable and clearly convenient for those in power, and the mental gymnastics required to believe that this is incredibly complicated.

What if you don’t agree? Where do you vote for central bank governor? Where is the voice of society reflected in central bank policy? No where! You don’t elect central bankers, silly! This is neither a democracy nor a republic. You are too stupid to be trusted with the magical workings of money. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Bitcoin changed this. Now, if you don’t agree with the premise that we shouldn’t keep our wealth, you can buy bitcoins and keep them.

How Bitcoin Lets You Store Your Wealth?

The price of bitcoin is volatile, but that is a temporary result of how small and young it is. Most of bitcoin’s price comes from people treating it like a speculative technology stock. When the market is scared, as it is now, the prices of bitcoin and other speculative assets fall, such as technology stocks. These investors don’t really understand the long-term value of bitcoin or they wouldn’t sell it. Everyone gets the price they deserve. So, if you understand the technology, have reasonable value for money, and have a low time preference, you’ll get a good deal, whatever the price. If your time preference is high and you need money now, don’t put much of your wealth in bitcoin. It will be there later when you want to save whatever excess you have. It may rise or fall in the short term, but in the long term it will rise.

Most importantly, there will only be 21 million bitcoins. No CEO or company in charge of bitcoin can change this. Governments can’t just print more bitcoins when they want to pay for something like stimulus checks or invade other countries. The fixed supply of bitcoin is completely different from what we currently have in dollars and is more similar to how gold works. The problem with gold is that its supply increases ~2% per year from gold mining. Even if some of that 2% is used for industrial purposes, nothing can prevent humanity from discovering large deposits of gold, finding ways to make it, mining it from space, and so on. In fact, a gold deposit was recently discovered in Uganda that is estimated to hold ~320 thousand tons of gold. Since the entire world currently only has ~170K tonnes, this represents a large potential increase in total quantities. This will make the value of gold lower than its original value unless it is mined very slowly.

Related reading: Bitcoin Is Digital Scarcity

Not only is Bitcoin inflatable, it is also digital. You can store them in your head as a dozen “seed words.” Or you can have it on your phone. You can even have a regular wallet secured with a password that you can hand over if it is confiscated by the authorities and a second hidden wallet only revealed with a different password or derivation path. It’s just data and all the clever tricks and toys to hide data can be used. You can store your bitcoins in wallets that require one or more trusted third parties to sign any large transactions.

Economic slavery is not binary, but rather a spectrum. If you can keep 0% of your wealth, then you are 100% a slave. If you can keep 50% of your wealth, you are “only” 50% a slave. Consider that the middle class in the United States pays income taxes of 30-35%. Plus all the other taxes like sales tax, state tax, property tax, inheritance tax, licenses and fees, etc. Remember that each person loses 10-20% of their wealth every year due to inflation. There are people who are 60-70% economic slaves who work in January, February, March, April, May, June, and some of July only for the government. And this only happens if everything goes as expected, but what happens over and over again throughout history is that governments create too much money, which leads to hyperinflation, and everyone becomes very poor, lives are ruined, babies starve, and society takes decades to get there. . recover.

Do you feel you are getting good grades from your government? When I talk to people in small countries, even countries with +50% tax rates, people often say that. This may be because their governments are smaller, more homogeneous, and more tied to the people. But in the United States, the federal government is huge and ever-expanding, meddling all over the world, giving money to corrupt governments, and the politicians are completely out of touch. Do they treat you like a valued customer or as a slave? Should Apple use force to force people to buy its products or should people pay for it voluntarily? Should charities threaten to freeze someone’s bank account if they don’t donate or should people give freely because they believe in the work the charity does?

Historian and economist Thomas Sowell once asked his history professor where slavery came from. The teacher quickly answered: “That’s the wrong question. Slavery has existed forever. The real question is where freedom comes from.” In the past, freedom came from brave men and women who sacrificed their time, reputation, energy, energy, and in some cases their lives so that they could wrest a little independence and freedom from the hands of the sociopathic, narcissistic, and domineering people of the world. strength. The bitcoin revolution doesn’t have to be that brutal. As long as you have a means of communication, like the internet, and as long as there is someone willing to exchange bitcoin for pseudo-money, there will be a path to self-sovereignty and there will be a way to signal to central banks that you will not play their rigged games.

Is Bitcoin Really the Answer?

You don’t think about something until it stops working and becomes a problem. This is normal and even necessary because reality is very complex and you need a filtering mechanism to filter out the 99% of things that don’t matter and focus on what is important. Most people don’t fully understand cars, computers, the internet, their own bodies, and so on. You know how to use these things but they don’t fully emerge until they break and you have to figure out what went wrong. As a species, our money is corrupt. Most currencies in history have failed, just as most species have become extinct. The impact of the weakening dollar is now starting to be felt.

If you don’t have any problems or don’t appreciate sound value for money, then Happy, you are the recipient of huge financial benefits that most people in the world do not enjoy. As I have written before, the world is now sick and dying due to the corruption of money, and the impact is usually only limited to developed countries, but as the economic crisis develops, many lower and middle classes in developing countries are starting to suffer. was rudely awakened. They looked for scapegoats and many started blaming the damaged money. You can tell by all the inflation memes on Twitter and Reddit. Children growing up in this environment will instinctively understand that central banks are not their friends and are not the wise stewards you were indoctrinated to believe in university economics classes.

If you evaluate money as a technology, bitcoin is clearly superior. It is programmable internet money and is completely immune to corruption. It’s a fair playing ground for everyone. Even if you believe central banks should increase the money supply, you can’t deny the temptation to over-inflate is irresistible and historically almost all money has failed because of this. You also have to admit that monopolies are generally a bad thing. Why not hold a currency competition? If government-issued paper money is superior, then in the long run it will win and you can ignore me. But do you think people would choose to blow their money if there was another alternative? May the best money win.