The digital revolution will destroy the power of the modern state over its citizens, reduce the significance of the nation state as an organising unit, and give individuals unprecedented power and sovereignty over their own lives.

Individual Sovereignty

The non-monetary demand for bitcoin can be explained as: The demand for the coins is a prerequisite to using the network. Unlike industrial demand for gold, completely independent from its monetary demand, demand for bitcoin to operate the network is inextricably linked to demand for it as a store of value.

Bitcoin solves the issue of a monetary solution that is saleable across, space, scale and time. Gold for example, is inconvenient to move across space. Additionally, it is not decentralised as banks had to store it in order to keep the gold standard. Bitcoin solves all of these issues, something never seen before. Bitcoin offers digital sound money and digital cash.

Bitcoins Solution

however, bitcoin has its flaws. Its nature means high transaction costs, and therefore will probably be used for everyday transactions and replacing fiat entirely. It can however act as a new global reserve currency and allowing cross border payments without intermediaries and replacing the forex market.

It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. It performs a useful service that people will pay for. It lives because anyone, anywhere, can run a copy of its code. If any one copy is corrupted it is discarded, quickly and without any fuss. It is transparent: anyone can see its code and exactly what it does. It can’t be changed, argued with, tampered with. It can’t be corrupted or stopped or interrupted.Even if a nuclear war that destroys half our planet occurs, it would continue to live, uncorrupted.

Bitcoin Description By Ralph Merkle

The idea that government needs to constantly interfere and regulate the market has been engrained us with no basis or truth other than governments telling us that it is so. It is not. Devaluing a currency may make a country richer nominally, or increase the nominal value of its exports, but it does nothing to make the country more prosperous.

Governments Monetary Role

Blockchain technology can best be understood as the conversion of electric power to verifiable undisputed records of ownership and transactions.

Blockchain

In a Keynesian economic order, foreigners are actively subsidized to come buy the country at a discount. Each country is impoverishing its citizens to boost its exporters and raise its GDP, and complaining when other countries do the same.

Keynesianism

There are many, but almost all pose economically infeasible or unprofitable for the attacker. The only 3 that pose a real threat are:<ul><li>a hardware attack, especially through miner equipment producers (one of bitcoins only less centralised points and therefore weaknesses)</li><li>the creation of another solution to what bitcoin solves, which is highly unlikely but possible </li><li> a serious technical threat would be the breaking of the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, but again it is not clear how or when this might happen, and difficult to succeed.</li></ul>

Threats to Bitcoin

In an academic system corrupted by government money, the curriculum is not determined through its accordance with reality, but instead with the political agenda of the governments funding it. Governments love Keynesian economics for the same reason they did in 1930s: it offers them the justification for acquiring ever more power and money.You won’t get a job or funding in this system by producing important works productive and useful to the real world, but by furthering the agenda of the funders. Since the funding is from one source only, the idea of a free marketplace of ideas is impossible.

Corruption Of Government Money

None of this would be necessary if there was a sound global monetary system serving as a global unit of measure of value, allowing producers and consumers worldwide to have an accurate overview of their costs and revenues, separating economic profitability from government policy. Hard money takes the question of supply out of governments’ hands, and would force everyone to be productive to society instead of seeking to get rich through monetary manipulation.

Hard Money

A comprehensive and authoritative exploration of Bitcoin and its place in monetary history When a pseudonymous programmer introduced “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party” to a small online mailing list in 2008, very few people paid attention. Ten years later, and against all odds, this upstart autonomous decentralized software offers an unstoppable and globally accessible hard money alternative to modern central banks. The Bitcoin Standard analyzes the historical context to the rise of Bitcoin, the economic properties that have allowed it to grow quickly, and its likely economic, political, and social implications. While Bitcoin is an invention of the digital age, the problem it purports to solve is as old as human society itself: transferring value across time and space. Author Saifedean Ammous takes the reader on an engaging journey through the history of technologies performing the functions of money, from primitive systems of trading limestones and seashells, to metals, coins, the gold standard, and modern government debt. Exploring what gave these technologies their monetary role, and how most lost it, provides the reader with a good idea of what makes for sound money, and sets the stage for an economic discussion of its consequences for individual and societal future-orientation, capital accumulation, trade, peace, culture, and art. Compellingly, Ammous shows that it is no coincidence that the loftiest achievements of humanity have come in societies enjoying the benefits of sound monetary regimes, nor is it coincidental that monetary collapse has usually accompanied civilizational collapse. With this background in place, the book moves on to explain the operation of Bitcoin in a functional and intuitive way. Bitcoin is a decentralized, distributed piece of software that converts electricity and processing power into indisputably accurate records, thus allowing its users to utilize the Internet to perform the traditional functions of money without having to rely on, or trust, any authorities or infrastructure in the physical world. Bitcoin is thus best understood as the first successfully implemented form of digital cash and digital hard money. With an automated and perfectly predictable monetary policy, and the ability to perform final settlement of large sums across the world in a matter of minutes, Bitcoin’s real competitive edge might just be as a store of value and network for the final settlement of large payments―a digital form of gold with a built-in settlement infrastructure. Ammous’ firm grasp of the technological possibilities as well as the historical realities of monetary evolution provides for a fascinating exploration of the ramifications of voluntary free market money. As it challenges the most sacred of government monopolies, Bitcoin shifts the pendulum of sovereignty away from governments in favor of individuals, offering us the tantalizing possibility of a world where money is fully extricated from politics and unrestrained by borders. The final chapter of the book explores some of the most common questions surrounding Bitcoin: Is Bitcoin mining a waste of energy? Is Bitcoin for criminals? Who controls Bitcoin, and can they change it if they please? How can Bitcoin be killed? And what to make of all the thousands of Bitcoin knockoffs, and the many supposed applications of Bitcoin’s ‘block chain technology’? The Bitcoin Standard is the essential resource for a clear understanding of the rise of the Internet’s decentralized, apolitical, free-market alternative to national central banks.

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