I'm going to rank these 10 to 1 for a little suspense. #1 being my most bullish reason to HODL Bitcoin. I feel knowing all this stuff is extremely valuable, so I'm just going to drop it here. Please do you own research. Purchase & store your Bitcoin using your own due diligence. Get your coins off the exchange, get a hardware wallet (Coldcard/Trezor), get a node (CasaHodl/mynodeBTC) and protect that key with your life. If you want the power to have self-sovereignty, you have to understand it comes with responsibilities. Bitcoin gives you complete financial freedom, but remember you are held accountable for your money.
Here are my top 10:
10. Bitcoin is like the $55k 1st edition Charizard Pokemon card but 100x better - Plain & simple people want Bitcoin for sentimental reasons. It's the first successful native internet currency. This is a very noteworthy characteristic that can only possessed by Bitcoin. The 1st edition Charizard is extremely rare & sought after some 20 years later. Pokemon is a very popular franchise that is now ingrained into multiple generations. Bitcoin is an entire social movement & has the potential to withstand 1000 generations, maybe even more. Although unlike Charizard, Bitcoin is extremely liquid and easy to exchange (Soon more liquid than the $ itself) and will always have a defined market value, not what someone is willing to pay for it on the day. I'm just scratching the surface as to why Bitcoin is better than a rare Pokemon card.
9. The rise of the Lightning Network - Built on top of Bitcoin's unbeatable robustness, the Lightning Network will enable a future currency at global scale. The vision is to enable instant private micro-payments, with extremely high throughput, eventually overtaking all it's competitors (Visa, PayPal, list goes on). Imagine your wage streamed to your wallet by the second. The disruptive innovation being built is growing at an exponential rate . It is quiet young; at 2 and half years old it has already gained significant headwind and momentum. The use cases already are absolutely insane! Check out some of the Lightning apps (Lapps) I've been playing with here. Although the Bitcoin Lightning Network has many hurdles to endure, it's not hard to see that it has an extremely bright future. Yes if you're reading this, you're early. Lightning actually works now and I encourage you to try it. I've personally made over 1000 transactions, saving many sats in on-chain fees. I've already used numerous Lapps for real world use cases.
8. Bitcoin's game theory incentive - a global hash war is in the making - In the not too distant future I can see countries competing with each other to gain percentage share of the Bitcoin hash-rate. More hash-rate you have; the more of the remaining Bitcoins you can mine and the more governance you have in the network. It's already clear countries can see this evolving and are getting in now. The early bird gets the worm. The way I see it, countries would be foolish not to join, they will only disadvantage themselves and their people. Over regulation/taxing or outright banning will only slow adoption. The earlier a country adopts Bitcoin, the more wealth they will have in the future. If you look back in history when gold was primarily used as money, the economy flourished. Bitcoin is better than gold. The earlier you were to the gold rush, the richer and more powerful you were. Bitcoin is a digital gold rush. Although Bitcoin is peace money in my opinion, gold came with a lot of blood.
7. As demand & adoption grows, so will Bitcoin's decentralization - Bitcoin is already the most decentralized crypto-currency. A lot of coins/tokens will try to convince you otherwise, I highly urge you to ignore it & DYOR. Starting from the founder, Satoshi is an alias to an unknown person. The fact Satoshi disappeared is extremely valuable, as there is no central point that can be attacked. For instance, Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum could be held at gun point tomorrow to attack the network. There's many reasons Satoshi left, all are positive. His original mined Bitcoin has not moved. There's a lot of speculation regarding Satoshi; alive or deceased, his original intention was to gift the world with better money. Bitcoin is built on solid core values, it is principled and extremely ethical.
In terms of infrastructure; Bitcoin miners and nodes are growing at an exponential pace & are becoming more and more geographically dispersed (Currently mining is a little dominated in China, however I'm personally expecting a lot more competition from other countries in the near future). Hash-rate, node count etc continues to trend upwards (In fact, all metrics are). Developers contribute all over the world, most of them would probably not be easy to locate either. Despite the FUD, Bitcoin's second layer Lightning, is growing in the same way too. It is designed to become more decentralized over time.
Bitcoin is incredibly robust & in 2017 this was put to the test, in the midst of a blocksize scaling debate, a group of miners & companies collaborated in the attempted to 2x the block size and hard-fork the chain. There were many extremely good reasons why a 2x block increase and hard-fork was a bad idea. The amazing thing was they weren't able to. To make a long story short, it was actually the individual node operators like myself who reached majority consensus and won the debate, leading to Segwit (Segregated Witness) being activated through a soft-fork. Through Segwit, Bitcoin was able to scale more effectively with backwards compatibility (soft-fork) & enable the Lightning Network to come to fruition - Bitcoin history was made. The debate had literally been going on for years. So if companies on the inside can't make changes easy, what chance does a government have. This is why decentralization is very important. Bitcoin is in a league of it's own and should not be associated next to the rest of 'crypto'. In my opinion it has no competition. It's just going to keep winning. It's momentum is unstoppable.
6. The Bitcoin Network effect - How people have heard of the word Bitcoin? How many heard of Ethereum? Bitcoin is a powerful brand. It is the famous one that always gets the media attention. It's listed on every exchange, every wallet, every service in the industry. The other day when a bunch of high profile Twitter accounts got hacked with a 'Bitcoin scam', that was huge media attention. People are curious by nature, they'll do the research & they'll find out where the true scams are. Why did the hacker ask for Bitcoin? clearly it has value. Twitter as a whole has just become a giant platform to market Bitcoin. Any negative tweets/articles are quickly shut down, any positive is extremely well advertised and promoted. Twitter is well connected with some of the most powerful and influential people in the world owning accounts and tweeting regularly. The CEO of Twitter is Bitcoin only - look in his bio.
Basically everything is good for Bitcoin. It is the king, the majority in the space realize this. I believe an alt-coin market only fuels Bitcoin. Alt-coin profits always flow back to BTC, even ETH. It's an endless cycle that continually benefits Bitcoin. Win win, Bitcoin wins.
5. Bitcoin is 10 times better than gold, despite what Peter Schiff will tell you - As our economy continues to move onto the internet, so will the currency. Each day our lives are based around the internet in some way shape or form. This will only increase with time and advancements in technology. Bitcoin is compatible with AI, robots & drones. In a digital age, it seems ridiculously impractical to buy gold as a hedge to hyperinflation, now that Bitcoin is here. Basically the only benefit gold has, it's shiny and fun to look at i.e jewellery & gold bars. Yes it has a history of value spanning thousands of years, but does that really count when there's something that clearly competes with it's value on so many levels.
Bitcoin has an immense amount of intrinsic value. You get all the benefits of gold, plus a tonne more. Bitcoin is gold 2.0. Say you need to flee your country because your government is corrupt. You sell your house and put all your savings into gold. This is extremely risky - it is impossible to properly conceal & secure. Like gold, Bitcoin has a entire network of people who place value on it. Value is in the eye of the beholder. Bitcoin is noticeably better than gold because; It is easily transferable, infinitely divisible, more fungible (Who accepts gold as payment & Bitcoin is much easier to verify as genuine), it cannot be seized & can be easily secured. I can walk through airport security with 12 words memorized in my head & then open up a wallet, transfer the funds to an exchange or pay someone directly, then continue living. No one can stop you. My number one reason why Bitcoin is better, is my number one reason to remain forever bullish - stay tuned.
4. Capital controls & banking restrictions - To give you an example of capital controls, the news out of China recently; people are watching the price of gold skyrocket & are wanting to FOMO (Fear of missing out) buy - gold is a leading indicator of monetary collapse. The Chinese government is now restricting their people from buying precious metals. This is because they're worried about the Yuan. If everyone exited their currency to buy metals, it would collapse. This restriction will only force more people to buy Bitcoin. They simple cannot stop this. They would have to cut the internet in China, not going to happen. There is a lot of people in China and very few Bitcoin available.
Banks around the world are starting to put withdrawal limits on accounts. This is because banks simply don't have the money to pay everyone in a crisis (or ever). Banks lend money they don't actually have, they're actually all broke. We operate on a debt based system with no accountability. Bitcoin fix this.
3. Bitcoin will replace the benefits of cash in a cashless society - Even prior to COVID, it was always in the best interest of governments to completely get rid of cash. When the money system is credited in bank accounts online, it can be audited much easier for the tax man. However governments are now pushing to make currencies completely digital. You think the government has control now; if your digital money is tied to your digital identity, they literally have complete control over you. Personally I don't think this will happen in the rise of Bitcoin. We now have an option & far more people are beginning to wake up. Privacy is a basic human right and I firmly believe Bitcoin will be the tool to preserve it. The amount of stores I go to now & I see 'cash only' or 'discount with cash' tells me they're evading taxes. Let's be honest if a lot of these businesses don't, they're in serious trouble.
Bitcoin is actually very easy to audit by design, if all your Bitcoin addresses are connected to KYC and you continually re-use addresses. There are a number of ways to make you much more private on Bitcoin now & they're not hard to use - BTCPay Server (Mercants) utilized through Lightning on TOR, mixing through CoinJoin i.e Samurai's Whirlpool or Wasabi (just to name a few). Personally I think people will eventually learn about these privacy features and tell their friends. Similar to when everyone was downloading pirated movies, people became smarter & at least installed a VPN.
Cash is still the number one preferred payment method of criminals. However as a general rule, what you do with your money, should be your business, no government should be able to intervene. Yes you sacrifice the government surveillance of people and allow 'criminals' to do whatever. We can't allow a double standard and put power in the hands of a minority. Power always corrupts, humans will biologically favor greed if they're given enough power & opportunity.
Privacy should be very important to you. If you use Bitcoin normally it's very easy for people to find out more information utilizing a block explorer. For instance, your IP & how much money you have can be seen (if you're silly enough to put it all in one address). Bottom line, you should start utilizing some of Bitcoin's privacy tech. Note: your privacy can easily be undone if you utilize this tech incorrectly. Please do further research on this before putting into practice.
2. Inflation AKA Money Printing AKA Brrr - Central banks are printing like never before - The major flaw with Fiat currencies (USD, Euro, Pound, Yen etc) is they don't have a capped supply. The US dollar has not been backed by a know unit of measure i.e gold, since President Nixon in 1971. Since then, other Fiat currencies have used the US dollar as backing, hence why it's known as the 'Global Reserve Currency'. Since there is no fixed value to measure each unit of currency, governments & central banks can fund whatever they want through artificial inflation (essentially turning the money printers on - digitally) - wars, terrorism, pandemics...list goes on. Due to this fact, the buying power is constantly trending to zero. Fiat is unfortunately on the inevitable path of collapse. They can slow down inflation by raising interest rates, slowing the death of the dollar, however this will just introduce more problems - Imagine how many people will be forced to sell their house when interest rates only double.
To put Fiat currencies into perspective, the English pound originally equaled 12 ounces of sterling silver. In the last 300 years it has lost 99.5% of it's value through inflation - pure theft. If your central bank prints 10% extra currency into your supply each year (seems to be an average amount), after 7.2 years the supply doubles. This will reduce your purchasing power by 50%. The only people getting the 10% pay rise per year to match inflation are the politicians - very convenient. In these times, this printing has been greatly accelerated to fund the effects of COVID-19. However COVID was only the catalyst. It has merely brought the system's flaws to the surface. Money printing at tax payers expense is not a sustainable monetary policy nor is it ethical. Personally I find it hilarious that these printed stimulus packages are taxed - They're taxing your tax! Hence the movement on Twitter; #WhyPayTaxes if you can just print money!
Due to excessive money printing by central banks world-wide, Bitcoin is starting to make a lot more sense to people, it is becoming increasingly more apparent to the average person they need to preserve their wealth, and avoid having it siphoned out of their back pocket. I think the masses will really start waking up soon as the cost of living begins to dramatically rise (I don't really like the term 'cost of living' because it essentially means loss of purchasing power caused by inflation i.e money printing).
Bitcoin is inflated on a deflationary schedule, that is both transparent and predictable. Roughly Every 4 years this schedule halves. It gets harder to mine as time goes on & as more miners join the network, supply and demand for the hardest money on earth consistently rises. In roughly 2140, no new Bitcoin can be minted - only the transaction fees will get paid to miners (which by then will be extremely lucrative anyway). Roughly every 10 mins, 6.25 bitcoins are released into the supply as a miner reward for processing & securing a transaction block.
Fiat can be printed whenever, we cannot control this or predict it. This is particularly bad for our savings & our future in general. To put into perspective, one person evading tax to keep their business alive should be considered extremely legal compared to central banks printing money, if you want to strip it all back and use your own logic. Bitcoin is savings technology, 1 BTC = 1 BTC & this will never change. Inflation is damaging and complete bogus, despite what most universities will teach you. Keynesian economics is Fiat, Austrian economics is Bitcoin. Hardly any teach Austrian. My opinion is, they have to keep everyone brainwashed, starting from the beginning. Again, It disadvantages peoples lives and subtly steals savings over time! It's a criminal scandal.
1. Bitcoin's true scarcity will make it the most sought after asset class on the planet - This is the simplest, yet the most powerful in my opinion. It has a lot more depth than first meets the eye. Honestly I think even a lot of the Bitcoiners are underestimating this one, including myself. On paper, Bitcoin has a fixed finite supply of 21 million bitcoins (210 trillion sats), there is no fixed number of gold ounces, it's impossible to verify (more gold could be mined on a asteroid or scientifically created). There are a few major considerations to the 21 million coins advertised that you must understand. First of all, it's estimated around 5 million coins have been lost (remember the guy looking through the dump for his computer with $5m in Bitcoin). Once the keys are lost/forgotten, the Bitcoin is effectively burnt from the supply, making the remaining coins more scarce. As time goes on, you can safely bet this will occur more due to unsafe practices - again get yourself a hardware wallet, put your key somewhere safe with redundancy, on a material that is protected from all the elements.
In the last couple of years, roughly 11 million coins haven't even moved. It's impossible to tell the exact figures, but lately there has been less than 3 million coins available to purchase on exchanges. There are roughly 40 million millionaires, if they all wanted 1 BTC tomorrow, they simply wouldn't be able to acquire it. Bitcoin is extremely liquid and can easily be purchased these days by a large percentage of the world, the fiat on-ramps are growing at an exponential rate. There is no limit to orders, you can buy $1 worth if your wanted to. Approval can be sought very fast. There's nearly 8 billion people in the world, imagine the FOMO when this really gets going, how many sellers are there really going to be when the shit hits the fan & it's the best option we have. It will be the main store of value & medium of exchange, keeping food on the table and roofs over heads. Imagine when the entire world is fighting for the last few million coins. You can only imagine the effect on the price.
In summary, the current financial system is clearly a ticking time bomb coming to an end. Fiat currencies & central banking is incredibly broken & unjust. Personally I can't see a reason to ever sell Bitcoin, I know there are many people like myself & this is growing by the day. Bitcoin has a way of making you HODL through the highs & lows. I recommend you that you keep reading and listening in order to get your peace of mind. You'll only keep realizing it's a ground breaking technological & financial movement, here to save us. If you buy it because everyone else is, and you don't understand why or how to manage your funds securely, you're going to get REKT. If you don't understand market cycles and you let your emotions get to you, expect to lose money. Bitcoin has a way of rewarding the long term HODLers. 99% of traders lose because it's a very unpredictable market short-term. There's not a single reason in my mind why the long-term bullish trend will cease. If you can think of a good one with substance, I'd really like to know.
There are extremely strong hands HODLing Bitcoin. I personally believe traditional currencies are far riskier to hold right now. The stock market is held up by the hopes and dreams of a fed gone mad. You should be concerned about your super & your finances as a whole right now. The world is on extremely rocky ground. Your government may tell you everything is fine, but underneath the street it's an absolute shit-show. There is immense value here with insane opportunity to stack sats before the rest of the world realizes it. The way I see it, Bitcoin is clearly the future. You either take a position now and get as much share of the 21 million coins as you can or pay more & get less of a share later. Crazy part is, buying now is still extremely early. Buying 0.1 BTC or even 0.01 BTC (currently just over $100) could completely change your life one day. Bitcoin provides you with a certainty that cannot be given by anyone or anything else. It's almost euphoric how much power is given back to the people and what this means for the future. I urge you to research now. Do not sleep on this. Personally, I get more bullish by the day. Embrace the volatility, it's going to be a wild ride.
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