Hello and good Friday, January 28, 2021, I’m Drew and this is Rocketboom [chair breaks]

I see many people are missing why ‘digital currency’, e.g. #Bitcoin is an important disruption in the world. It's not actually about stock trading. It’s waaaaaaaaaay bigger than that.
I USED TO DO A THING. I wrote scripts to break down these kinds of topics. I felt compelled to come back out and explain because its such a big idea...and too many people are not seeing it.
TLDR; Digital currencies allow people living in impoverished nations to transcend the failures of their individual governments, such that their work and purchase power becomes more equal in potential to those in the wealthiest countries.
Examples are always nice. Lets. [cut to voice over]
Imagine you live in Syria. You have a job as a web developer. Your clients are in Syria & you get paid in Syrian Pounds. Things are going great but suddenly, your country falls into civil war & the value of everything plummets as inflation skyrockets.
You are lucky to maintain your job and you are making the same amount of money, but each day your ability to purchase goes down. Eggs used to be 1000 Pounds, now they are 2000.
Even though your salary is constant, you have lost half your value and must work twice as much now to afford what you used to.
Each country with its currency is like a company with a stock. If the country is operating well, producing & distributing efficiently & effectively, the people may enjoy a wealthier lifestyle. Like Google! Where employees have options, and free gourmet buffets.
If a country is unable to manage its business, the people go down with the country. Like the New York Times! Where they fire you just for having a feeling. But while you can still write, it's a matter of luck what country you get born into.
The Syrian developer may have little to no control over the decisions their government makes, but! And this a big idea: the developer in Syria can decide to use a different currency.
Instead of keeping the money in Syrian Pounds in a mattress or a savings account with a fixed annual interest, if instead the money is put into an account with a stronger currency, even with the same fixed interest, there will be way more purchasing power.
In fact, by using a stronger, more stable currency, the developer's purchasing power will go up the more their country goes down!
Imagine now that the entire world uses a single currency! THIS IS THE BIG IDEA! It doesn’t matter if it's bitcoin, gold, or whatever. We would all share the same playing field, all around the world.
We would all become diversified based on the world itself, not just the success or failure of our own country. There will always be inequality, which may never go away, though, the beauty of digital currency is that it opens the flood gates to enjoy prosperity from anywhere.
There needn’t be a single currency, there could be many to choose from if you are feeling lucky (as a gentleman I prefer #Dogecoin).
WIll the world change in this way? It's already happening. Developers in Syria do work for clients in other countries and get paid in other currencies, and often prefer not to convert it to their own, unless they absolutely must.
The store owner down the street can setup to accept bitcoins in a few minutes, and their patrons can use their coins to pay for their goods, completely bypassing the local currency with a better storage value for all.
Most people don’t want volatility and stock trading, they want something strong and stable to hold and use day-to-day. Something they can depend on for their families, and keep readily available in their wallets to use at the local market.
You can see many of the digital coins are being set up for this purpose (stable coins) & they are working to make transaction fees less than credit cards & banks while offering perks. Like Apple Pay!
Consider the position Apple is in to offer their own digital currency. You might be holding Apple money already in your Apple wallet. That's what their credit card & Apple pay is, just about.
They are piggybacking on Barclays and accepting Visa and MasterCard, but they have their own system, and you know it's just a matter of time before those companies get cut out of the equation.
This is where digital currency is going. It’s not just a disruption to the stock markets and the SEC, it's the democratization of the entire world economy, redistributing wealth from the few to the many, regardless of our strange political land barriers.
[Back to camera, no one is there. We hear the sound of a Rocketboom Coin circling the penny stock drain. It falls in.]

More from Bitcoin

The defi matrix

As each asset class goes on-chain, it can be stored in a digital wallet. And it can be traded against other such assets. Not just cryptocurrencies, but national digital currencies, personal tokens, etc.

We’re about to enter an age of global monetary competition.

The defi matrix is the table of all pair wise trades. It’s the fiat/stablecoin pairs, the fiat/crypto pairs, the crypto/crypto pairs, and much more besides.

Uniswap-style automatic market making for everything. Every possession you have, constantly marked to market by ~2040.

More liquidity, less currency?

This is an interesting point. Cash doesn’t make you money. In fact, it can lose you money in an inflating environment.

Reliable, 24/7 mark-to-market on everything is hard — but if achieved, means less % of assets in cash.


AMMs boost BTC. Here's why.

- All assets trade against all assets in the defi matrix
- Automated market makers give liquidity for rare pairs
- Everything is marked-to-market 24/7
- Value of cash drops, as you can liquidate instantly
- The new no-op is to keep your assets in BTC

Basically, automated market makers like @Uniswap boost BTC in the long term, because they allow *everything* to be priced in BTC terms, and *anyone* to switch out of BTC into their asset of choice.

Though in practice this may mean WBTC/RenBTC [or ETH!] rather than BTC itself.
1/THREAD: WHEN WAS IT CLEAR?

Oct. 8, 2020: The purpose of this thread is to document and timestamp when it first became clear that #Bitcoin was likely to become a major reserve asset for public corporations, and eventually states, with Square's purchase of $50M in BTC.

The purpose is to give something to cite when ppl later claim "But there was NO WAY OF KNOWING..."

h/t @ErikSTownsend who used the same format to call out the impact of Covid on Feb 8 and made me personally aware of the looming shutdown of the country
https://t.co/opuiNgSeqC !


Bitcoiners smarter than me have been predicting the takeover of the dollar by Bitcoin for many years.

In 2014 with Bitcoin barely at $1B, @pierre_rochard wrote https://t.co/EGHa58KqHq, covering all the incorrect narratives of Bitcoin and stating it will overtake the dollar.

"[skeptics] misunderstand how strong currencies like bitcoin overtake weak currencies like the dollar: it is through speculative attacks and currency crises caused by investors, not through the careful evaluation of tech journalists and 'mainstream consumers'" - @pierre_rochard

I first became bullish on Bitcoin in the summer of 2016, around a $3B market cap, but it was still a toy project at that time in the eyes of most in the financial world, while many technologists thought of it as a v1 technology to be improved on.
$BTC: Two Bitcoin FUDs to address this Thanksgiving weekend:

1. China PlusToken FUD: Old news. Please see linked thread.

2. U.S. Treasury FUD: Read thread below...


1/ These news are much more relevant, as they imply severe trade-offs for people who want to keep their bitcoins undoxxed, with the cost and risks of doing so. I would not disqualify the tweet as mere FUD in the sense that what he posted is false. It should be taken seriously.

2/ For all we know, his decision of making it public before TG weekend may come out of the urgency of informing CT of a poignant anti-Bitcoin move by a Trump administration trying to cut lose ends before leaving office—not just "price manipulation" as I've seen suggested around.

3/ It implies the acceleration of a process already planned for for months in advance, not something he just came up with to "crash the market."

4/ In practicality, assuming this passes, it will have two major consencuences:

a. Armstrong's analysis is correct. And I would go further in saying, this regulation would leave the U.S. severely handicapped to continue to be the leader in the cryptocurrency industry worldwide.

You May Also Like

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)