What is Bitcoin?
When asked this question, you often hear the same answers nowadays.
Bitcoin is digital gold.
This is the easiest answer and a way to mitigate the impact of Bitcoin and its potential revolution. It's a way for financial giants and people like Michael J. Saylor to trap Bitcoin within the current monetary and financial system. All this, when Bitcoin is so much more than that.
No one will explain why Bitcoin is hard money and how its intrinsic characteristics completely change the game for you.
Hard money is a currency that cannot be easily created, whose available quantity evolves very slowly over time. Hard money protects savings, promotes foresight, limits debt, and constrains political power.
Historically, hard money has taken many different forms depending on geographical and cultural contexts:
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Carved limestone stones (Rai stones, Yap Islands)
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Beads (such as wampum beads in North America or Africa)
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Shells (such as cowrie shells, used in Africa, India, and China)
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Precious metals such as gold and silver, widely adopted by civilizations such as Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China.
What do these forms of currency have in common?
In each case, it is the market itself. Individuals have collectively experimented to select the most effective forms of currency according to universal criteria:
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Scarcity
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Divisibility
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Durability
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Portability
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Social acceptance
This spontaneous monetary evolution is comparable to a natural selection of exchange instruments. It gradually converged towards precious metals, particularly the gold standard, which supported one of the greatest cycles of economic expansion in history: the 19th century and its “Gilded Age.” This was a period of strong growth, monetary stability, and rapid industrialization in the Western world, before the monetary breakdown of the 20th century.
In 1971, under the ideological influence of technocratic Keynesianism, which had become the dominant doctrine, the United States unilaterally abandoned the convertibility of the dollar into gold and created money without limits or real counterparties, known as “fiat money.”
The result was catastrophic, and we are still paying the price today, with consequences that continue to worsen:
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Continuous devaluation of fiat currency
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Structural inflation
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Systemic debt
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Gradual destruction of the middle class
Faced with this rupture, the entire world found itself in monetary limbo, adrift, dependent on the discretionary decisions of central banks that have no other solution than to issue ever more money to mask the effects of past excesses.
Currency is no longer a measuring instrument. It has become a political tool. And like any corrupted unit of measurement, it ends up distorting absolutely everything: prices, investments, behavior, and benchmarks.
It is in this context that the need for a new monetary standard has emerged. A monetary standard that would not be arbitrarily decreed by people who are not representative of the people, but a standard that would arise spontaneously from the market, as a new stage in the natural history of money.
Satoshi Nakamoto launched the Bitcoin network on January 3, 2009.
Bitcoin entered the scene with characteristics superior to fiat currency. Bitcoin is hard money that is accessible to everyone, secure, resilient, auditable, unforgeable, and whose issuance policy is predictable, immutable, known, and verifiable by anyone without the need for any permission.
On these specific points, you must understand that Bitcoin is not seeking to compete with the dollar, the euro, or the yuan. Bitcoin seeks nothing more and nothing less than to restore scarcity in a world that abandoned it long ago.
Major economic thinkers (Hayek, von Mises, Menger, etc.) have always defended the idea that no free society can survive for long with a currency subject to political power. Bitcoin gives us a chance to regain power by being independent of political power and financial institutions.
The power of Bitcoin, therefore, comes from the fact that this hard money has emerged from the market, from trust, and real scarcity. Bitcoin is not the product of arbitrary decisions made by people who are not representative of the people, gathered in a central office, nor of any presidential decree.
The reason I have such confidence in the future of the Bitcoin revolution, despite all the challenges we will face, is above all because Bitcoin was not imposed, but emerged from the market. As a result, the power of the Bitcoin revolution is limitless. Finally, the gradual collapse of its alternatives only amplifies the phenomenon.
