Bitcoin Quotes

Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

This is a historical lesson of immense significance, and should be kept in mind by anyone who thinks his refusal of Bitcoin means he doesn't have to deal with it. History shows it is not​ possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours.

Everything to do with cryptocurrencies and blockchains is the domain of fast-talking conmen. If anyone tries to sell you on either, kick them in the nuts and run.

The divine line "Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency is for criminals" is a cunning defensive strategy created by so called traditional financial services sector.

In trading Bitcoin and other commodities, everyone wants 1000% in a week, but can't handle 20% drop in a week. That's the beginning of witchcraft.

The eleven iPhones are set up identical to the Androids. But it’s a whole different scenario as far as the Bitcoin wallets. They all have currency in them, and none has been sent out. I labeled each one with the amount in each of the wallets. It comes to a total of more than four billion.” “Four billion? Are you sure it’s not million?” “I’m sure, Boss. Four billion in available cryptocurrency.

Proponents of Austrian economics include the fringe economics blog Zero Hedge, which has confidently predicted two hundred of the last two recessions

Ethereum, or some other Cryptocurrency is going to be the global standard of payment. It’ll be of greater value than national fiat.

Code talks. Talk walks.

Cryptocurrency and Blockchain technology offer a lot of potential with investing.

Bitcoin effectively combines gold’s salability across time with fiat’s salability across space in one apolitical, immutable, open-source package.

There are a billion people, right now, with access to the internet and feature phones who could use bitcoin as an international wire-transfer service.

In the same way that central banking nearly wrecked the world and created one calamity after another, bitcoin can save the world one transaction at a time. It is time for a new beginning.

The inventors of JavaScript never intended for someone to build Gmail, or Facebook or Bitcoin wallets on top of it. We don’t know what people will build on top of Ethereum, but the idea is that they will be decentralized and unstoppable applications.

Computer programmers are highly susceptible to the just world fallacy (that their economic good fortune is the product of virtue rather than circumstance) and the fallacy of transferable expertise (that being competent in one field means they’re competent in others).

money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard‐earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.

its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.

It's not about Bitcoin or Ethereum or NFT's... These things have merely shown us what's possible. But the real value is in Cryptography, Blockchain Technology, Cryptocurrency and Smart Contracts - these are the things with the real business implications.

The Bahamas is becoming a leading nation when it comes to Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency.

An intelligent investor sees an opportunity in dip than risk.

History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation of inflating the money supply.

The total U.S. M2 measure of the money supply in 1971 was around $600 billion, while today it is in excess of $12 trillion, growing at an average annual rate of 6.7%.

Bitcoin experts argue that deflation is not bad per se. Rather, deflation is associated with a collapse in demand because that is the only example of deflation we have to study.

The same people who thought Bitcoin at $100 was expensive, now think it is fairly valued at $30,000.

If you can memorize your seed phrase and private key, your brain becomes a Bitcoin wallet.

To make our world a better place, we need to build products that the corrupt cannot abuse - Bitcoin is the best example of that.

As the adage of the entire internet once went, “I just replaced your entire industry with 100 lines of Python code,” that’s exactly what we’re doing with bitcoin.

This isn’t about nation-states anymore. This isn’t about who adopts bitcoin first or who adopts cryptocurrencies first, because the internet is adopting cryptocurrencies, and the internet is the world’s largest economy. It is the first transnational economy, and it needs a transnational currency.

Darknet markets remain the most popular Bitcoin use case after speculation and ransomware. In 2014, darknet markets were estimated to have processed more bitcoins than all legitimate payment processors put together.

Capitalism is what happens when people drop their time preference, defer immediate gratification, and invest in the future. Debt‐fueled mass consumption is as much a normal part of capitalism as asphyxiation is a normal part of respiration.

The first way to address the “war on poverty” is to get rid of currency inflation and return to a form of money whose value holds over the long term.

If you have wealth without liquidity, you're still in bondage. If you have capital without currency, you're still in bondage. Liquidity equals freedom.

Sound money is also an essential element of a free society as it provides for an effective bulwark against despotic government.

A good that assumes the role of a widely accepted medium of exchange is called money.

I like the concept of 'not spending more money to spend money'. Let's scale it.

A record shop must not be harder to use than BitTorrent. The legal options, iTunes, Netflix and Spotify, made it big by being more convenient than piracy,

Privacy is the foundation of free societies.

Modern technologies are 99 percent bravery , and 1 percent investment

The purpose of a centralized financial system or any other system, is not to exploit people, but to ensure stability in the society.

Centralized blockchain can be a great boon to the society, especially in the developing parts of the world, whereas decentralized blockchain will only cause chaos and destruction.

At the end of the day, bitcoin is programmable money. When you have programmable money, the possibilities are truly endless. We can take many of the basic concepts of the current system that depend on legal contracts, and we can convert these into algorithmic contracts, into mathematical transactions that can be enforced on the bitcoin network. As I’ve said, there is no third party, there is no counterparty. If I choose to send value from one part of the network to another, it is peer-to-peer with no one in between. If I invent a new form of money, I can deploy it to the entire world and invite others to come and join me. Bitcoin is not just money for the internet. Yes, it’s perfect money for the internet. It’s instant, it’s safe, it’s free. Yes, it is money for the internet, but it’s so much more. Bitcoin is the internet of money. Currency is only the first application. If you grasp that, you can look beyond the price, you can look beyond the volatility, you can look beyond the fad. At its core, bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that will change the world forever. Join

The HSI agent wasn’t caught in the Welcome to Video dragnet because IRS agents had violated his privacy. He was caught, the judges concluded, because he had mistakenly believed his Bitcoin transactions to have ever been private in the first place.

Civilization is not about more capital accumulation per se; rather, it is about what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, the flourishing and freedom to seek higher meaning in life when their base needs are met and most pressing dangers averted.

The introduction of Bitcoin, as a currency native to the Internet superseding national borders and outside the realm of governmental control, offers an intriguing possibility for the emergence of a new international monetary system, to be analyzed in Chapter 9.

Bitcoin is often mistakenly characterized as “anonymous” currency. In fact, it is relatively easy to connect identities to bitcoin addresses and, using big-data analytics, connect addresses to each other to form a comprehensive picture of someone’s bitcoin spending habits.

There are almost 200 currencies of the world, but there’s only one international currency. There are almost 200 currencies controlled by central banks and governments, but there is only one mathematical currency today, and that is bitcoin. We are going to build more of them. Cryptographic currencies are going to be a mainstay of our financial future. They are going to be a part of the future of this planet because they have been invented. It’s as simple as that. You cannot un-invent this technology. You cannot turn this omelette back into eggs.

Sound money allows people to think about the long term and to save and invest more for the future. Saving and investing for the long run are the key to capital accumulation and the advance of human civilization.

While microeconomics has focused on transactions between individuals, and macroeconomics on the role of government in the economy, the reality is that the most important economic decisions to any individual's well-being are the ones they conduct in their trade-offs with their future self.

Blockchain itself is not dangerous, but if we start using decentralized blockchain as a complete substitute for our traditional transaction methods, then I am afraid, it would destroy the very human foundation of our financial system.

I arch an eyebrow. “Weren’t we talking about your Baudelaire affair?” “I don’t really remember what happened. We— Wait.” “What?” I lean closer, wide eyed. “Kasparov was there.” “The former world champion?” “Yes. He wanted to play with me.” “And?” “What do you mean, and? I went to play.” “Let me get this straight. You chose playing chess with an old man over getting laid?” He looks at me like he’s a cloistered nun and I’m explaining Bitcoin to him. “Did you get that it was Kasparov?

Meanwhile, peer-to-peer blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin might completely revamp the monetary system, making radical tax reforms inevitable. For example, it might become impossible or irrelevant to calculate and tax incomes in dollars, because most transactions will not involve a clear-cut exchange of national currency, or any currency at all. Governments might therefore need to invent entirely new taxes—perhaps a tax on information (which will be both the most important asset in the economy and the only thing exchanged in numerous transactions). Will the political system manage to deal with the crisis before it runs out of money?

it can use laws, regulations, and outright coercion to come out on top: a determined government is always going to win the battle for currency supremacy, at least in the long run. Other transaction media may thrive, but the government currency will be at the center.

In May 2010, a Florida programmer by the name of Laszlo Hanyecz wanted to test the technology. He offered to buy a pizza for 10,000 coins. The pizza arrived. For several days after that, Hanyecz bought 10,000-bitcoin pizzas. I bet he regrets it now. Ten thousand bitcoins would at one stage be worth over 12 million dollars. Twelve million bucks for a pizza!

It’s either going to change everything, or nothing,

It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.

The darknet marketplace will continue to grow and with it will grow the demand for anonymous cryptocurrencies.

Throughout the ages, currencies have ceased to exist because of one rudimentary fact: governments are unable to resist the temptation to create free money for themselves.

Learning how cryptocurrency works is like learning a new language. It is incredibly difficult at the beginning, but once it clicks it will stick with you forever.

In crypto, everyday is not a green day, but true holders will later get paid.

As H. L. Mencken put it: “Every election is an advanced auction on stolen goods.

because money is the market good with the least diminishing marginal utility.

But money's marginal utility declines far slower than any other good, because it declines along with the utility of wanting any good, not one particular good.

The average savings rate of the seven largest advanced economies12 was 12.66% in 1970, but has dropped to 3.39% in 2015, a fall of almost three-quarters.

Who is going to invest in a company that shows you what’s going on quarterly, compared to one that shows you what’s going on all the time?

Creating a complete picture of a company financial health, by looking at periodic financial statements, is like turning a hamburger into a cow

Most people think the big money in crypto is in day trading, but the holy grail in cryptocurrency industry right now is spotting the gems before the public knows about it. Understanding pre-sale, public sale and pre-exchange purchase arrangements is so vital for massive profits.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted notto debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.

I don’t believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network. The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint.

gold is valuable as a currency or investment because we believe it is valuable (which is the same reason for valuing money itself). Gold’s value as currency is an abstract social construct.

He lied,” she said. “There is no way for us to seize bitcoins. Well, there is no current way for the federal government to seize bitcoins at will; in order to do that we’d need one of the creators of the currency.” She paused and watched me very closely for a reaction. This was all still gibberish to me. This was something out of a science fiction novel, or a Stephen King movie with Tom Cruise where Tom Cruise has to run someplace from some people—because that’s what Tom Cruise does, he runs while looking concerned and futuristic. Therefore, I decided to look surprised and thoughtful. “Yes.” She nodded; she believed I was following her train of thought. I wasn’t following her train because mine had derailed on thoughts of a running Tom Cruise…weird little man.

But a government which raises taxes to fund a monarch's lavish lifestyle will engender mass resentment among his population, endangering the legitimacy of his rule and making it ever more precarious.

Bitcoin isn’t a digital currency. It’s a cryptocurrency. It’s a network-centric money. I really like the idea of a network-centric money. A network that allows you to replace trust in institutions, trust in hierarchies, with trust on the network. ​The network acting as a massively diffuse arbiter of truth, resolving any disagreements about transactions and security in a way where no one has control. ​ ​

By investing in anonymous cryptocurrencies, you are buying 'insurance' against a recession, as the value of the cryptocurrency could increase significantly if the economy falters and the black market grows.

a money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard-earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.

There are three ways in which a government can fund deficit spending: currency inflation (printing new currency), borrowing from the public, and taxation. Governments tend to favor currency by fiat (i.e., creating new currency), which allows it to blame the inevitable price increases on speculators rather than on its true culprit, currency inflation.

Why would you want YouTube, Facebook or Netflix running in a decentralized way with no central body in charge? It eliminates the problem of excessive personal information on Facebook, or your YouTube viewing habits being monitored and marketed to.

A coder and independent security researcher named Sergio Lerner conducted a detailed analysis of the block chain at the time Satoshi was still mining. He concluded that Satoshi had mined at least one million bitcoins – more precisely 1,148,800. Lerner felt that if any of these coins had been spent, it would not be difficult to work out Satoshi’s identity – the recipient of the coins would know, unless the sender had sent the coins anonymously. But it appears that none of them were ever spent.

According to Cantillon, the beneficiaries from the expansion of the money supply are the first recipients of the new money, who are able to spend it before it has caused prices to rise. Whoever receives it from them is then able to spend it facing a small increase in the price level. As the money is spent more, the price level rises, until the later recipients suffer a reduction in their real purchasing power. This is the best explanation for why inflation hurts the poorest and helps the richest in the modern economy.

Cryptoassets, like gold, are often constructed to be scarce in their supply. Many will be even more scarce than gold and other precious metals. The supply schedule of cryptoassets typically is metered mathematically and set in code at the genesis of the underlying protocol or distributed application.

Smart contracts on Ethereum are worse than even non-financial commercial code; as of May 2016, Ethereum contracts averaged 100 obvious bugs (so obvious a machine could spot them) per 1000 lines of code.348 (For comparison, Microsoft code averages 15 obvious bugs per 1000 lines, NASA spacecraft code around 0 per 500,000 lines.)

The well-known phenomenon of the modern breakdown of the family cannot be understood without recognizing the role of unsound money allowing the state to appropriate many of the essential roles that the family has played for millennia, and reducing the incentive of all members of a family to invest in long-term familial relations.

One typical argument raised against Bitcoin concerns the limit on the maximum number of bitcoins that will ever be created, which Satoshi Nakamoto set at 21 million. Once reached, what could prevent someone from increasing this limit? Nothing really, but he would need the cooperation of the majority of miners for this change to be accepted. Even were the majority of miners to agree to lift this restriction, if all did not agree, then a split in the block chain would result. Those in favor of lifting the restriction would use one version of the block chain while those not in favor would use a different version. In effect, we would have two virtual currencies rather than one, the “original Bitcoin” and a “Quantitative Easing Bitcoin”. Over the long term, one would hold its value longer and better and would therefore become the preferred version while the other would drop in value. What would be your guess as to which one would hold its value longer and retain the interest of users of Bitcoin?

The implications are enormous – not just to corporations, but to governments as well. If everything can be dis-intermediated and decentralized, what about the services governments provide – healthcare, welfare and education? The bureaucratic middleman megalith that makes them so inefficient and expensive could be circumvented altogether.

Bitcoin represents a fundamental transformation of money. An invention that changes the oldest technology we have in civilization. That changes it radically and disruptively by changing the fundamental architecture into one where every participant is equal. Where transaction has no state or context other than obeying the consensus rules of the network that no one controls. Where your money is yours. You control it absolutely through the application of digital signatures, and no one can censor it, no one can seize it, no one can freeze it. No one can tell you what to do or what not to do with your money. It is a system of money that is simultaneously, absolutely transnational and borderless. We’ve never had a system of money like that.

Hyperinflation is a form of economic disaster unique to government money. There was never an example of hyperinflation with economies that operated a gold or silver standard, and even when artifact money like seashells and beads lost its monetary role over time, it usually lost it slowly, with replacements taking over more and more of the purchasing power of the outgoing money.

As with Rome, the fall of Constantinople happened only after its rulers had started devaluing the currency, a process that historians believe began in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–1055).8 Along with monetary decline came the fiscal, military, cultural, and spiritual decline of the Empire, as it trudged on with increasing crises until it was overtaken by the Ottomans in 1453.

This idea about crossing borders many times a day on the internet…Well, imagine there’s a blogger in Australia and they’ve written a nice article and actually they want to be paid a little bit of money when people read their thing. He’s not set up on Visa, you don’t want to type out all this stuff on a credit card. Surely, if you were to pay him 50p’s worth of bitcoin for this incredible article that he’s written, or a piece of data that he’s calculated that for some reason has value to you, it enables little transactions like that to happen on a vast scale. You can do it quickly and simply and get rid of all this noise in the middle. Ironically, I think cryptos are more likely to push the world towards paid content than the other way around – because they enable it in a way that wasn’t possible before.

By the time you look a few hundred feet down, you are looking at a snapshot of the past that has remained undisturbed for millions of years. In the blockchain, the most recent few blocks might be revised if there is a chain recalculation due to a fork. The top six blocks are like a few inches of topsoil. But once you go more deeply into the blockchain, beyond six blocks, blocks are less and less likely to change.

It will even bring into question our system of representative democracy. The tech is there for people’s identity to be proven and for them to vote instantly on just about any issue that comes up – gay marriage, abortion law, planning permission, military intervention. Liquid democracy – where people actually vote on decisions as they get made – is surely a far truer democracy. Why then do you need a congressman or parliamentary representative?

Wences had first learned about Bitcoin in late 2011 from a friend back in Argentina who thought it might give Wences a quicker and cheaper way to send money back home. Wences’s background in financial technology gave him a natural appreciation for the concept. After quietly watching and playing with it for some time, Wences gave $100,000 of his own money to two high-level hackers he knew in eastern Europe and asked them to do their best to hack the Bitcoin protocol. He was especially curious about whether they could counterfeit Bitcoins or spend the coins held in other people’s wallets—the most damaging possible flaw. At the end of the summer, the hackers asked Wences for more time and money. Wences ended up giving them $150,000 more, sent in Bitcoins. In October they concluded that the basic Bitcoin protocol was unbreakable, even if some of the big companies holding Bitcoins were not. By

Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge. It doesn’t care if the bitcoin address is the address of a multimillionaire, the address of a central bank, the address of a smart contract, the address of a device, or the address of a human. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t care if the transaction is carrying lots of money or not much money at all. It doesn’t care if the address is in Kuala Lumpur or downtown New York. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care.​ It moves money from one address to another based on a simple locking script. And that means that if you want to build a new application on top of bitcoin, you can upgrade the devices and you can build an application. You don’t need to ask for anyone’s permission to innovate. ​ ​Write the app, launch it on your endpoint, and bitcoin will route it, because bitcoin is a dumb network. That is the power of innovation on the internet. It’s innovation without permission. It’s innovation without central approval. It’s innovation without a broad network upgrade. And that means bitcoin is not a specific financial network. It’s not a financial network for large transactions or small transactions, fast transactions or slow transactions. It’s whatever you want to use it for, based upon what you choose to do at the endpoint.

Observing prices of agricultural commodities in the Roman empire in terms of grams of gold shows they bear remarkable similarity to prices today. Examining Diocletian's edict5 of prices from 301 AD and converting gold prices to their modern-day U.S. dollar equivalent, we find that a pound of beef cost around $4.50, while a pint of beer cost around $2, a pint of wine around $13 for high quality wine and $9 for lower quality, and a pint of olive oil cost around $20.

The United States summoned representatives of its allies to Bretton Woods in New Hampshire to discuss formulating a new global trading system. History has not been very kind to the architects of this system. Britain's representative was none other than John Maynard Keynes, whose economic teachings were to be wrecked on the shores of reality in the decades following the war, while America's representative, Harry Dexter White, would later be uncovered as a Communist who was in contact with the Soviet regime for many years.

The oldest recorded example of fiat money was jiaozi, a paper currency issued by the Song dynasty in China in the tenth century. Initially, jiaozi was a receipt for gold or silver, but then government controlled its issuance and suspended redeemability, increasing the amount of currency printed until it collapsed. The Yuan dynasty also issued fiat currency in 1260, named chao, and exceeded the supply far beyond the metal backing, with predictably disastrous consequences. As the value of the money collapsed, the people fell into abject poverty, with many peasants resorting to selling their children into debt slavery.

The death knell for silver's monetary role was the end of the Franco-Prussian war, when Germany extracted an indemnity of £200 million in gold from France and used it to switch to a gold standard. With Germany now joining Britain, France, Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, and others on a gold standard, the monetary pendulum had swung decisively in favor of gold, leading to individuals and nations worldwide who used silver to witness a progressive loss of their purchasing power and a stronger incentive to shift to gold. India finally switched from silver to gold in 1898, while China and Hong Kong were the last economies in the world to abandon the silver standard in 1935.

Nero, who ruled from 54–68 AD, had found the formula to solve this, which was highly similar to Keynes's solution to Britain's and the U.S.'s problems after World War I: devaluing the currency would at once reduce the real wages of workers, reduce the burden of the government in subsidizing staples, and provide increased money for financing other government expenditure. The aureus coin was reduced from 8 to 7.2 grams, while the denarius's silver content was reduced from 3.9 to 3.41g. This provided some temporary relief, but had set in motion the highly destructive self-reinforcing cycle of popular anger, price controls, coin debasement, and price rises, following one another with the predictable regularity of the four seasons.

What is the attraction of central bankers to issuing their own digital currencies? The answer lies in wider access to second-layer money. Recall that the Federal Reserve issues two types of money, wholesale reserves for private sector banks and retail cash for people. In order to provide monetary stimulus, the Fed issues reserves and hopes that private sector banks will use those reserves to circulate third-layer deposits into the economy by lending money. With a CBDC, the Fed could issue second-layer money directly to people in the form of digital helicopter money; the phrase “helicopter money” comes from Milton Friedman, who in 1969 provided the imagery of dropping cash out of a helicopter in order to stimulate economic demand.

In retrospect, the major difference between World War I and the previous limited wars was neither geopolitical nor strategic, but rather, it was monetary. When governments were on a gold standard, they had direct control of large vaults of gold while their people were dealing with paper receipts of this gold. The ease with which a government could issue more paper currency was too tempting in the heat of the conflict, and far easier than demanding taxation from the citizens. Within a few weeks of the war starting, all major belligerents had suspended gold convertibility, effectively going off the gold standard and putting their population on a fiat standard, wherein the money they used was government-issued paper that was not redeemable for gold.

The denarius was the silver coin that traded at the time of the Roman Republic, containing 3.9 grams of silver, while gold became the most valuable money in the civilized areas of the world at the time and gold coins were becoming more widespread. Julius Caesar, the last dictator of the Roman Republic, created the aureus coin, which contained around 8 grams of gold and was widely accepted across Europe and the Mediterranean, increasing the scope of trade and specialization in the Old World. Economic stability reigned for seventy-five years, even through the political upheaval of his assassination, which saw the Republic transformed into an Empire under his chosen successor, Augustus. This continued until the reign of the infamous emperor Nero, who was the first to engage in the Roman habit of “coin clipping,” wherein the Emperor would collect the coins of the population and mint them into newer coins with less gold or silver content.

It was in the city-states that humans could live with the freedom to work, produce, trade, and flourish, and that was to a large extent the result of these city-states adopting a sound monetary standard. It all began in Florence in 1252, when the city minted the florin, the first major European sound coinage since Julius Caesar's aureus. Florence's rise made it the commercial center of Europe, with its florin becoming the prime European medium of exchange, allowing its banks to flourish across the entire continent. Venice was the first to follow Florence's example with its minting of the ducat, of the same specifications as the florin, in 1270, and by the end of the fourteenth century more than 150 European cities and states had minted coins of the same specifications as the florin, allowing their citizens the dignity and freedom to accumulate wealth and trade with a sound money that was highly salable across time and space, and divided into small coins, allowing for easy divisibility.