What problems does Bitcoin fix?   Before investing, I recommend you ask yourself what problems does what I am putting my money into fix?

1.  Cooking the Books.  As I mentioned in an earlier post I was an investor in 2008.  In 2008, many investors had become innocent. I’m afraid it’s happening again.  The innocence allowed the investor, in a naive fashion, to blissfully believe whatever was said by executives of publicly traded companies.  Trust returned.  Unfortunately faces were ripped off by Lehman Brothers.  Through fraud, Lehman Brothers financially engineered 50 billion dollars from their books to conceal the amount of leverage they had been using.  Lehman Brothers failed.  Investors lost big.  Financial crisis ensued. Many employees at Lehman lost everything.  People committed suicide at large financial institutions.  More than 10000 suicides have been attributed to the financial crisis.  Bitcoin fixes this problem.  The immutable ledger created by Bitcoin’s transactions can not be hidden or financially engineered.  No fraud with Bitcoin. 

2.  Hand in the Cookie Jar.  Middlemen, banks, and the federal government have had their hands in the cookie jar for far too long and simply have been fleecing us sheep.  Middlemen, who add really nothing but an extra layer, have been fleecing the employees and customers.  Instead of buying from the maker of a product, or paying the ride share driver directly, there is a middle man like Amazon or Uber, fleecing the retailer and the customer.  Banks fleece us with fees.  Governments fleece us with taxes, bailouts for the rich, and devaluation of our currency.   Bitcoin can remove these middlemen from financial transactions.  It can return us to a no marked up environment where we work directly with the provider of the food and service.   It can remove banks from our wallets and decouple government and money.  Bitcoin fixes this.  

3.  Too many currencies.  Ever travelled internationally and had to go through the nut roll of exchanging your currency?  No more with Bitcoin.  It’s global.

4.  Settlement of transactions.  How frustrating is it to figure out how much money your have in your bank account or on your credit card at any given time. The reason is banks and credit card companies don’t settle transactions immediately.   Those checks you forgot you wrote can be sitting in someone’s desk waiting to be cashed at an inopportune time.  It is frustrating.  It is nefarious.  It allows the banks and credit card companies to keep your collective monies longer to make money off of it.  All why they charge you fees to do it!!  No longer with Bitcoin.  It settles same day usually in less than an hour.  

5.  Ever been left out of the banking system?   Maybe not unless you are from Africa or Venezuela or remote parts of the world.  Or if the US dollar fails.  Venezuela has fleeced the hell out of their citizens.  Don’t think that can’t happen here.  The Social Security Trust Fund will likely be dry in 2031 if not earlier.  Also many States are bankrupt.  Not with Bitcoin.  With Bitcoin you have a valid usable currency that the government can’t touch or devalue.  You have a currency that you can use if the government doesn’t offer one (Africa) or if the currency fails.  Currency fail you ask?  Can’t happen right?   Wrong.  Every reserve currency in the world eventually failed.  Other people’s money is easy to spend.  Right US Government 30 trillion in debt and counting.   Not with Bitcoin. 

6.  Ever tried to travel with large amounts of gold or cash?   Large amounts of gold is heavy and cumbersome.  Traveling with large amounts of cash or gold will leave you more paranoid than a long tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs.  Not with Bitcoin.  Bitcoin fits in your cell phone or on a flash drive, Trezor, making it incredibly transportable.  Also it is secured by public/private key and cryptography. 

7.   Ever gone through the pain of escrowing money, bonded contract, arbitration, multi party signature?   Bitcoin is easily programmable to all four transactions. Makes life a lot easier.  There are so many other programmable options.  That will be material for another article. 

8.  Ever tried to pay a robot cash? Ain’t going to happen.  How about it when a vending machine spits back your dollar or shoots your coin through like goose poop without capturing it.  Guess what?   You know.  Not with Bitcoin.  Online payments.  Vending machines.  Internet of things.  As Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square says, Bitcoin is the native currency if the internet.  It solves the problem of paying the machines to work for us.  The future is near.  Bitcoin is the solution.  Trust, efficiency, speed, autonomy, robotics, global, cyber bank, no middlemen; welcome to the internet of money.