I’ll bite. Here’s my two sats:
To be fair, most people don’t get the difference between sound money and fiat money, anyway. Bitcoin, to most everybody else, just looks like digital fanaticism at best or scammy and untrustworthy money at worst. I say this as somebody who didn’t know or understand. (Yes, despite my B.A. in Economics, which focused more on modern economic systems and laws of supply and demand than sound money vs. fiat money—more a function of what was practical to learn for a career than epistemically coherent.) My thinking on economics and finance and investment used to only live in my understanding of fiat money (and ignorant event to the term).
When I first learned about Bitcoin, it was only presented as a means of easy digital exchange—not as a store of value that couldn’t be inflated away by monetary expansion. It never occurred to me—and indeed confused me—why it would retain any intrinsic value. I scratched my head a bit around why any money inherently holds any value, and sort of filed that away to think about another time.
Had I then invested even $1,000 in Bitcoin, I’d have ~$7,300 today. It was just as clear a concept then as it is today. But I still didn’t get it. I might’ve if I’d learned about sound money and fiat currency more plainly.
It doesn’t help people in tradfi—everyday people, journalists, or analysts even—that there are actual scams, plenty of phishing and other dodgy digital kerfuffery. Bitcoin gets wrapped up with that in their heads, somewhat understandably, from that point of view. It certainly did for me. It seemed to be a fad.
Add in the ‘spectacle’ of equally understandable genuine fans of Bitcoin who *do* get what it means as sound money, and it starts to look exactly like what tradfi people who don’t get it as sound money thought it was to begin with—a fad.
We can argue that the actual tradfi experts should know the difference, but many may not. Many mainstream media outlets also likely don’t have much staff that really understands the difference or the global financial system, either. It IS complicated and pretty much all that most people have ever known is fiat money. The world seems to work okay on that money to them, and there are partial or plausible causes to many of the problems that fiat currency contributes to.
This is why I’m a newly huge fan of @Lyn Alden's approach to this topic in Broken Money (which I’m thoroughly enjoying reading) and in her 32-minute YouTube summary of the book. It’s a dispassionate and clear-eyed approach to highlighting the problems with the system.
Even if we had entirely good faith actors in that system, you would still get bad results because of the incentive gradients at play—as would be the case for so many other systems we can decry. There don’t even HAVE to be villains for this to fail—normal people making rational short-term decisions that they must make would still get us this outcome.
I am all for the energy—Bitcoin isn’t going anywhere, and on some level, it is genuinely laughable to think it will just die. But I think the cause of restoring sound money for what it can enable us as individuals and a species to do deserves more of us, and if there is to be a stable transition, demands more of us. That means a lot more patience with those who don’t yet understand why we’re out here cheering for it. After all, to them, it looks like we’re cheering for ‘just another asset’ that just dropped more than 40% of its value in less than a year.
Is that fair? Maybe not. Is it necessary? Most assuredly.
It may be easy for me to say—after all, I really just got here. I only really got here because my good friend @nprofile1q... patiently, but insistently kept talking to me about fiat and sound money—and how Bitcoin is a sound money.
Perhaps it’s best to face this music by talking through the basics, time and time again, with great patience and deference. After all, that’s the same patience behind, “Stay humble and stack sats.”
Stay curious, y’all.
To be fair, most people don’t get the difference between sound money and fiat money, anyway. Bitcoin, to most everybody else, just looks like digital fanaticism at best or scammy and untrustworthy money at worst. I say this as somebody who didn’t know or understand. (Yes, despite my B.A. in Economics, which focused more on modern economic systems and laws of supply and demand than sound money vs. fiat money—more a function of what was practical to learn for a career than epistemically coherent.) My thinking on economics and finance and investment used to only live in my understanding of fiat money (and ignorant event to the term).
When I first learned about Bitcoin, it was only presented as a means of easy digital exchange—not as a store of value that couldn’t be inflated away by monetary expansion. It never occurred to me—and indeed confused me—why it would retain any intrinsic value. I scratched my head a bit around why any money inherently holds any value, and sort of filed that away to think about another time.
Had I then invested even $1,000 in Bitcoin, I’d have ~$7,300 today. It was just as clear a concept then as it is today. But I still didn’t get it. I might’ve if I’d learned about sound money and fiat currency more plainly.
It doesn’t help people in tradfi—everyday people, journalists, or analysts even—that there are actual scams, plenty of phishing and other dodgy digital kerfuffery. Bitcoin gets wrapped up with that in their heads, somewhat understandably, from that point of view. It certainly did for me. It seemed to be a fad.
Add in the ‘spectacle’ of equally understandable genuine fans of Bitcoin who *do* get what it means as sound money, and it starts to look exactly like what tradfi people who don’t get it as sound money thought it was to begin with—a fad.
We can argue that the actual tradfi experts should know the difference, but many may not. Many mainstream media outlets also likely don’t have much staff that really understands the difference or the global financial system, either. It IS complicated and pretty much all that most people have ever known is fiat money. The world seems to work okay on that money to them, and there are partial or plausible causes to many of the problems that fiat currency contributes to.
This is why I’m a newly huge fan of @Lyn Alden's approach to this topic in Broken Money (which I’m thoroughly enjoying reading) and in her 32-minute YouTube summary of the book. It’s a dispassionate and clear-eyed approach to highlighting the problems with the system.
Even if we had entirely good faith actors in that system, you would still get bad results because of the incentive gradients at play—as would be the case for so many other systems we can decry. There don’t even HAVE to be villains for this to fail—normal people making rational short-term decisions that they must make would still get us this outcome.
I am all for the energy—Bitcoin isn’t going anywhere, and on some level, it is genuinely laughable to think it will just die. But I think the cause of restoring sound money for what it can enable us as individuals and a species to do deserves more of us, and if there is to be a stable transition, demands more of us. That means a lot more patience with those who don’t yet understand why we’re out here cheering for it. After all, to them, it looks like we’re cheering for ‘just another asset’ that just dropped more than 40% of its value in less than a year.
Is that fair? Maybe not. Is it necessary? Most assuredly.
It may be easy for me to say—after all, I really just got here. I only really got here because my good friend @nprofile1q... patiently, but insistently kept talking to me about fiat and sound money—and how Bitcoin is a sound money.
Perhaps it’s best to face this music by talking through the basics, time and time again, with great patience and deference. After all, that’s the same patience behind, “Stay humble and stack sats.”
Stay curious, y’all.
