An ELI5 on #Bitcoin.

Think of Bitcoin as a startup founded in 2008, created by a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, initially bootstrapped with his personal capital. No VC funding; just electricity.

His product? An unobtainium.

1/7 🧵

Bitcoin, an unobtainium, is an intangible, rare material, that allows you to store value across decades and generations. It's resistant to confiscation; censorship; theft by inflation; and attacks by corporations, governments, or even aliens - as in Avatar (2009 film).

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In order to possess this rather unobtainable material, you must have a 78-digit random number, also commonly represented as a set of 24 words. Never reveal this to anyone. Ever. Write it down on a piece of paper or etch it on steel; then take it to the grave.

3/7
Bitcoin can be teleported across space (with on-chain transfers) and time (using timelocks); without the possibility of intercepting it in transit. It's either with you or with the counterparty — there's no intermediate state.

It's not magic; simply laws of thermodynamics.

4/7
Satoshi stepped down as the CEO of Bitcoin in 2011. Who runs it today? No one, and everyone, at the same time. It has no board of directors. It's just a set of mathematical equations, unfailingly enforced by very strong network effects. There's no known way of stopping math.

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Today, it's a melting pot of bleeding-edge engineering and research, with hundreds of developers working on it for free. Each day, Bitcoin gets harder, smarter, and more secure; constantly evolving, and self-healing. True anti-fragility at work.

https://t.co/cI6MkklbZS

6/7
When you buy Bitcoin, you're using a product, but also buying equity in its success/failure. The price depends on how the market values its properties, and how difficult it is to produce more of it. It may be a passing fad or a very important feat of the human civilisation.

7/7
This is years of learnings marshalled in a few tweets. I learnt everything from:

@PrestonPysh @real_vijay @Breedlove22 @jimmysong @saifedean @michael_saylor @stephanlivera @100trillionUSD @pierre_rochard @RaoulGM @matt_odell

Go follow them!

For memes, follow @udiWertheimer.
Tagged the wrong Raoul. 🤦

The real one: @RaoulGMI

More from Crypto

Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis argues that it is not always obvious who (China or the U.S.) adjusts best to "turbulent changes."
Bitcoin answers that question.
Thread:


World economies currently suffer four major redistribution challenges:
The most important is increasing government stealth use of the monetary system to confiscate assets from productive actors.
/2

That process is exacerbated by "Cantillon Effect" transfers to interest groups close to government ("the entitled class," public sector workers, the medical industrial complex, academia, etc....), which is destroying much of that wealth /3

The shadow nature (see Keynes) of government inflation makes the process unidentifiable, un-addressable and undemocratic.
The biggest victims (America's poorly educated young) are unequipped to counter generational confiscation tactics of today's wily senior beneficiaries. /4

Government control of the numéraire in key economic statistics (GDP, inflation, etc...) makes it impossible for economic actors to measure progress and liabilities. /5

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.