Famous investor Warren Buffett recently said:

"If you offered me all the bitcoins in the world for $25, I wouldn't take it." 1

And he would have done well. Bitcoin would have no value in that case. For bitcoin to serve its purpose, it must be well distributed to as many people as possible. That's also why I want to try to convince you to play the bitcoin game with me.
But what good would bitcoin be to you anyway? You may not even have any of the problems that bitcoin is trying to solve.

It doesn't protect you from inflation.

There is a fixed amount of bitcoin - it will be almost 21 million someday and never more. But over the last year, bitcoin wouldn't have protected you much. Whatever you bought at almost any time in the last year, you're worse off now.
Bitcoin price in USD over the last year

You don't need unlimited transactions

With bitcoin, you don't need to ask permission to send funds. But most of the time, neither does your bank. When they want proof of income or freeze your funds for a while they do it to protect you.

You don't really need fast and cheap transfers around the world either

Bitcoin works from morning to night, during the holidays, and is very fast and cheap when using the Lightning Network. But you do most of your transactions in your country. Card company fees are hidden in the purchase price and you don't have much reason to deal with them.

There's no need to run away from the war

With bitcoin, you can flee to a foreign country. All you have to do is remember 12 words. But you have contacts in your country, you know how it works here. Running away would bring too many complications.

In sum, you don't need bitcoin itself to live. 🤷

However, bitcoin is a so-called coordination game
If others don't use bitcoin, it will be useless to you. But it's not such a big deal if you have some bitcoin. But if the rest of the world switches to bitcoin and you don't have any, you'll have a big problem. In the new world, your money will have no value. Those who have been accumulating bitcoin for years will have a huge advantage against you.
Bitcoin adoption matrix
The later you enter bitcoin, the more of your privileges you will lose.
But all this is only if others want to use bitcoin. Why would they?
There are plenty of reasons. Some of them I've already mentioned, even though they probably don't make sense to you. But for the masses of people in the rest of the world, they are of great importance.

Isn't bitcoin protecting you from inflation?

If you look at the numbers in the long run, you'll see that it protects you too.
Bitcoin price in USD since 2013
If you think only in the last year, you only need to live in a country with an even worse currency than we have. For example, this is a chart of the Turkish lira.
Bitcoin price in TRY over the last year
I couldn't find charts of countries with the worst inflation like Sudan or Venezuela.
Inflation is rampant all over the world. Only about 21% of the world's people live in countries with inflation between 1-3%, which is generally recommended by macroeconomists (even though there is nothing meaningful to support such a target). The other 6.6 billion people live with higher inflation. Over 100 million people live with annual inflation over 100%.2
There are many people in the world who are already protected from inflation by bitcoin. Billions more people will one day notice that there is a way to protect themselves. Then the move to bitcoin may be very quick.

People around the world are blocking transactions

In early 2022, truck drivers in Canada were forced to get vaccinated if they wanted to continue their jobs. This led to widespread protests. People pledged their support through the GoFundMe platform. The court subsequently decided to freeze the funds.3 The state tried to harm them in many other ways, but the funds only came to them through bitcoin. Read more here: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/search?query=trucker These people had a good incentive to use bitcoin and became an example and a threat to many others.
At least in China they are experimenting with so-called CBDC - central bank digital currencies. It's not that much of an impairment compared to normal government money. But it does free the hands for more restrictions and central planning. There are enough people in China alone who will soon need an escape to the free money that is bitcoin.
Globally, 31% of adults don't have access to a bank account.4 In developing countries, it's over 40%. Overall, this affects 1.7 billion people. Even in your country, you can meet people who don't have a bank account yet, but they work with bitcoin on a daily basis.5
All these people have a good motivation to learn how to use bitcoin.

Fast and cheap transactions

If you earn money abroad and send money home you may have to pay high fees. Low- and middle-income households moved about $550 billion in 2019. Companies like Western Union have a fee of between 5 - 9.3% on these transactions for $200. For smaller amounts, which are more common, the fee was commonly 40%.6 This motivated Jack Mallers to offer the Strike service in El Salvador with virtually zero fee. He uses the bitcoin network to do just that.7

People are being forced to flee the country.

Bitcoin then saves their life savings. For example, one Ukrainian man fled to Poland and transferred $2,000 worth of bitcoin.8 Over 6 million people have fled to the Czech Republic alone this year because of the war. Globally, in 2021, over 81 million people were forced to leave their country.9 All of these people have a good incentive to gradually learn how to use bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the money that most people in the world agree on. The great powers are competing with each other - the dollar, the yen, the ruble and many others. Ordinary people, meanwhile, are gradually switching to bitcoin. In the western world, people play casinos with altcoins. But in the long run, those who save in bitcoin win. You don't have to want to accept that. But the sooner you adopt bitcoin, the better off you will be over time. A world with bitcoin is both fairer and more efficient.

Summary

  • You don't need bitcoin much in the Western world
  • You're better off than people in other parts of the world
  • But they need bitcoin very much.
  • If you don't switch to bitcoin in time, you will lose your privilege
Or as the classic says:

"It might make sense to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Satoshi Nakamoto

This article is a free transcription of my lecture from UTXO.cz on June 5, 2022 in Czech language 🇨🇿

Resources

Footnotes

I am really starting to get tired of the bitcoin isn't an inflation hedge, lol it stops you from dilution IN THE BITCOIN network, it doesn't control whats going on in secondary markets, gosh everytime I have to explain that one it does my head in lol
As someone not in the western world (South Africa) bitcoin looks so good, I literally have no other way to save, every financial instrument is impaired when you do the real return calculations and the currency is not doing you any favours
Bitcoin is MEANT to redistribute wealth and its only going to do that by allowing those who didn't get much out of the fiat game to get in first
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Side note: The way you formatted this post, top stuff man, appreciate the time you took to use the mark ups
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The best way I've found to orange pill those in the West who have never witnessed currency collapse is:
Have them scroll through https://bitbo.io/ and check the BTC performance relative to African, Asian and Latin American countries' currenices. This clears up any confusion instantly. Having the USD or Swiss Franc as your unit of account blinds you to the harshness of financial repression around the world.
My home currency has collapsed 50% against the US dollar within my lifetime. It hasn't been quick, just a slow bleed out. All fiat economies are steadily melting icecubes.
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This comment was featured on This Day in Stacker News.
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Michael Saylor dives deep into the road to adoption and admits most people's understanding is flawed of how it will be used in the next 10 to 40 years, in particular in western countries.
This video of Saylor on BTC Magazine pairs nicely with the discussion in this post.
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Great read. Just a random thought in case someone feels like getting their hands dirty: it would be great to have some webpage/dashboard where one could easily look for BTC all time highs against many different fiat currencies. It's a great way to see how, even in a bear market, BTC is still working wonders for people outside the western fiat domain.
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Feast your eyes on https://bitbo.io/
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I would love a site like that.
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Reading the title I thought it was a click bait but actually it was a good read. As you pointed out the real issue is the so called "financial privilege" of many of those that critic bitcoin. They don't understand the true value propositions of bitcoin because they hold a position of privilege being born in a rather safe part of the world (for now)
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The adoption matrix is really interesting. I never thought about it that way.
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Western fiat is a threat to the stability of the western world, and the safety of all the world. It may have served a purpose during war, but its continued use only impoverishes all but the few. The underlying problem of fiat is the unlimited credit expansion of governments. So long as the currency is accepted, it destroys wages, pushes savings into risk assets, creates value bubbles with misallocation, and allows eternal wars with taxation by inflation.
Bitcoin is the new declaration of independence. It is separation of money and state.
This writing from @hj is a very good summary of counterarguments against bitcoin, and we need more of this to understand the mountain face that has yet to be scaled, and to be prepared for any hardships we may be bringing upon ourselves by doing so. There is a yet unaddressed problem with bitcoin I have identified. Assuming it does become the world currency, and it will, central bank fiat is in actuality not money. It is debt currency, and like stupidity, the depths of the ability of the world to create debt is nearly unlimited. For the world to move to hard and superior money is to swear off the ability to loan cheap money. If a currency is deflationary, and bitcoin will be indefinately due to its ability to store value, the interest rates will necessarily be high to incentivize lending. A loan will also suffer from a time-value problem for the payor as the principal will be harder and harder to pay as the loan ages. The equivalent interest rate for hard money could be 25 to 50 percent per year. A bank currency allows money on deposit to be lent many times over, and therefore the bank currency permits low interest rates (cheap currency). For the payor, a loan under an inflationary bank issued currency is very cheap. With modern interest rates of 3 percent and inflation well above 10 percent, you technically are being paid take out credit. So long as everyone services their debt, the long-term inflation of this bank currency is fixed at zero. The problem arises when governments take on debt on behalf of the people. This should never happen, at all, ever. But it does and always will because the temptation is too high and the character and intelligence of people with this power is too low. It's because of this moral hazard that a hard world currency is necessary. They have made cheap money unsustainable and undesirable.
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Well, if anything its pretty fun.
Mining
  • Solo block mining
  • Home mining Operation
Node
  • Copy of the rules
  • Lightning Liquidity management
  • Future apps/Developments
Community
  • Fountain
  • Stacker
  • Twitter
Spending
  • Fold -Bitrefill -NOAH
Storage
  • Cold Card/Satscard/Tapsigner
  • Sparrow/Wasabi
As a former bank employee tasked with introducing customers to new financial tools........These are some cool products and services
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Nice homage to pascal's wager. Need to make that into a pamphlet or stickers.
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Glad to see a meaningful submission here once in a while. Agreed. Am stacking for the kids and future generations as well as possibility to flee against tyrannical govs. One never knows when the utility of digital money that are secured with truly distributed network might come handy.
We are still early - keep calm and DCA in
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Want more of these types of posts. Good work friend, take my sats.
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That’s right. Bitcoin is poor’s people money. Western world still doesn’t get it enough.
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Good read! As an investment, Bitcoin the asset is a hedge against money supply inflation, but not against CPI inflation (which lags money supply inflation by 12-18 months it seems).
But it's value as a tool for censorship-resistant transactions has only really started taking off in parts of the world where that's needed and desirable - Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Ukraine, Vietnam, Philippines, etc. Our payments systems in the West and in China are pretty good, but will be outcompeted over time as long as there's interested developers and passionate users.
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Bitcoin. The perfect weapon for assymetrical warfare. Every time someone else adopts it, but you were already in, it gives you a bit more power
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каждый находит свое в биткоине! кто то защиту от инфляции, кто то независимую отправку средств. кто то для бизнеса
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This post was featured on This Day in Stacker News.
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Nice formatting! 😍
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Sats.get();
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Биткоин это все что я могу контролировать в этой жизни.
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Honestly if i was offered all the bitcoin in the world i wouldnt take it, because then i would own so much of it, that it would put everyone else off, and i might lose that $25
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Well done. And step by step but btc is getting stronger and stronger
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This was an amazing read.
Nicely explained and structured. Good reasoning and sources. Cheers!
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Yesss. Upvoting by replying.
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Need Bitcoin cos it’s the future of currency
I agree bitcoin is really helping protect people that live in countries of high inflation. Hence the somewhat reluctant or slow adoption rate for lack of a better term, compared to africa and South American countries for example.
For those who came late to Bitcoin, these tales are just right ... Talk less about the redistribution of wealth, the poor will continue to be poor, .. Bitcoin is Not About Wealth .. Deepest delusion!!!
This submission has received about 22€ so far. Pizza moment?
The bitcoin is the future!