Bitcoin Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Bitcoin. Here they are! All 89 of them:

Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
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.
Behcet Kaya (Uncanny Alliance (Jack Ludefance PI Series))
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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.
David Gerard (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts)
The divine line "Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency is for criminals" is a cunning defensive strategy created by so called traditional financial services sector.
Mohith Agadi
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.
Olawale Daniel
Ethereum, or some other Cryptocurrency is going to be the global standard of payment. It’ll be of greater value than national fiat.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Proponents of Austrian economics include the fringe economics blog Zero Hedge, which has confidently predicted two hundred of the last two recessions
David Gerard (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts)
Code talks. Talk walks.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Cryptocurrency and Blockchain technology offer a lot of potential with investing.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
Bitcoin effectively combines gold’s salability across time with fiat’s salability across space in one apolitical, immutable, open-source package.
Saifedean Ammous (The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization)
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.
Jeffrey Tucker
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.
Camila Russo (The Infinite Machine)
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).
David Gerard (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts)
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation of inflating the money supply.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
An intelligent investor sees an opportunity in dip than risk.
Mohith Agadi
The Bahamas is becoming a leading nation when it comes to Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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%.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
You might think of Bitcoin and blockchain as two halves of a whole, but in reality, they are very distinct commodities.
Olawale Daniel
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.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies)
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.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
If you can memorize your seed phrase and private key, your brain becomes a Bitcoin wallet.
Olawale Daniel
Bitcoin is the most stellar and most useful system of mutual trust ever devised.
Santosh Kalwar
To make our world a better place, we need to build products that the corrupt cannot abuse - Bitcoin is the best example of that.
Olawale Daniel
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
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.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
Privacy is the foundation of free societies.
Don Tapscott (Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World)
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,
David Gerard (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts)
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.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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.
Phil Champagne (The Book Of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto)
I like the concept of 'not spending more money to spend money'. Let's scale it.
Mohith Agadi
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.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gospel of Technology)
The purpose of a centralized financial system or any other system, is not to exploit people, but to ensure stability in the society.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gospel of Technology)
Sound money is also an essential element of a free society as it provides for an effective bulwark against despotic government.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
A good that assumes the role of a widely accepted medium of exchange is called money.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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.
Andy Greenberg (Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency)
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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?
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
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.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies)
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gospel of Technology)
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?
Ali Hazelwood (Check & Mate)
Bitcoin consists of: A decentralized peer-to-peer network (the bitcoin protocol) A public transaction ledger (the blockchain) A set of rules for independent transaction validation and currency issuance (consensus rules) A mechanism for reaching global decentralized consensus on the valid blockchain (Proof-of-Work algorithm)
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain)
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.
Kenneth S. Rogoff (The Curse of Cash)
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!
Dominic Frisby (Bitcoin: the Future of Money?)
For as long as the government could print more money and have that money accepted by its citizens and foreigners, it could keep financing the war.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
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.
Nik Bhatia (Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies)
It’s either going to change everything, or nothing,
Nathaniel Popper (Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money)
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.
Dominic Frisby (Bitcoin: the Future of Money?)
The darknet marketplace will continue to grow and with it will grow the demand for anonymous cryptocurrencies.
Will Martin (Black Market Cryptocurrencies: The Rise of Bitcoin Alternatives That Offer True Anonymity)
Creating a complete picture of a company financial health, by looking at periodic financial statements, is like turning a hamburger into a cow
Don Tapscott (Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World)
The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave.” - Proverbs 22:7
Bitcoin and Bible Group (Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money)
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.
Olawale Daniel
In crypto, everyday is not a green day, but true holders will later get paid.
Olawale Daniel
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.
Olawale Daniel
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.
Phil Champagne (The Book Of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto)
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.
Phil Champagne (The Book Of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto)
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.
Paul Vigna (The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order)
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.
Penny Reid (Love Hacked (Knitting in the City, #3))
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.
Will Martin (Black Market Cryptocurrencies: The Rise of Bitcoin Alternatives That Offer True Anonymity)
Sadly for Bitcoin, most Austrian economists aren’t fans – even as Bitcoiners remain huge fans of Austrian economics.27 You will find Austrian jargon in common use in the cryptocurrency world. Proponents of Austrian economics include the fringe economics blog Zero Hedge, which has confidently predicted two hundred of the last two recessions. Zero Hedge covers Bitcoin extensively, and Bitcoiners are fans in turn.
David Gerard (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts)
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
Ethereum is the second-biggest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin. It’s also very different from Bitcoin in its structure and purpose. Ethereum wasn’t developed as a currency alone. Its innovation lies in opening the blockchain up to development for different applications outside currencies and finance. Developers can build software on top of Ethereum’s blockchain, and use the network’s distributed ledger to build trust for all kinds of applications. Since the Ethereum blockchain is decentralized, once a developer has built an application, it can’t be censored or taken down by any authority. That application lives as long as the Ethereum blockchain continues.
Alan T. Norman (Blockchain Technology Explained: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide About Blockchain Wallet, Mining, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Zcash, Monero, Ripple, Dash, IOTA and Smart Contracts)
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.
Phil Champagne (The Book Of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto)
To pin the future of blockchain on any one currency, let alone the initial one, means limiting blockchain potential; a potential that once scaled promises to have an unequaled impact on our day-to-day lives. And that really is the stuff of stars.
Olawale Daniel
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.
Dominic Frisby (Bitcoin: the Future of Money?)
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.
Dominic Frisby (Bitcoin: the Future of Money?)
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.
Saifedean Ammous (The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking)
Incorporating cryptocurrency in the traditional centralized financial system not only speeds up transactions exponentially, but also it makes the system more user-friendly, whereas in a decentralized system cryptocurrency will only breed insecurity and chaos, due to the utter absence of liability.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gospel of Technology)
What do these decades-old international organizations see in an arcane digital technology built by the crypto-libertarians and Cypherpunks who gave us Bitcoin? It’s the prospect that this decentralized computing system could resolve the issue of social capital deficits that we discussed in the context of the Azraq refugee camp. By creating a common record of a community’s transactions and activities that no single person or intermediating institution has the power to change, the UN’s blockchain provides a foundation for people to trust that they can securely interact and exchange value with each other.
Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
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.)
David Gerard (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts)
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?
Phil Champagne (The Book Of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto)
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.
Dominic Frisby (Bitcoin: the Future of Money?)
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.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
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.
Dominic Frisby (Bitcoin: the Future of Money?)
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?
Dominic Frisby (Bitcoin: the Future of Money?)
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
Nathaniel Popper (Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money)
If you read anything about bitcoin, you’ll see the very same things that they said about the internet in the early '90s. It is a haven for pedophiles, terrorists, drug dealers, and criminals. How many of you in this room have bitcoin? How many of you in this room are terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers or criminals? Audience laughs You see the thing about bitcoin is while they push this story, every now and then someone who has never heard of bitcoin notices an important thing: it’s still not dead, which is always surprising because every two or three months there is an article that says it’s dead. That’s great marketing. Because every time someone hears it’s dead and three months later they hear it’s still not dead, they think, "Huh, this thing really tends to survive." I call bitcoin "the internet of money,” but perhaps we should call it “the zombie of currencies.” It is the currency that is the undead. The
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
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.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
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.
Nik Bhatia (Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies)
The case for bitcoin as a cash item on a balance sheet is very compelling for anyone with a time horizon extending beyond four years. Whether or not fiat authorities like it, bitcoin is now in free-market competition with many other assets for the world’s cash balances. It is a competition bitcoin will win or lose in the market, not by the edicts of economists, politicians, or bureaucrats. If it continues to capture a growing share of the world’s cash balances, it continues to succeed. As it stands, bitcoin’s role as cash has a very large total addressable market. The world has around $90 trillion of broad fiat money supply, $90 trillion of sovereign bonds, $40 trillion of corporate bonds, and $10 trillion of gold. Bitcoin could replace all of these assets on balance sheets, which would be a total addressable market cap of $230 trillion. At the time of writing, bitcoin’s market capitalization is around $700 billion, or around 0.3% of its total addressable market. Bitcoin could also take a share of the market capitalization of other semihard assets which people have resorted to using as a form of saving for the future. These include stocks, which are valued at around $90 trillion; global real estate, valued at $280 trillion; and the art market, valued at several trillion dollars. Investors will continue to demand stocks, houses, and works of art, but the current valuations of these assets are likely highly inflated by the need of their holders to use them as stores of value on top of their value as capital or consumer goods. In other words, the flight from inflationary fiat has distorted the U.S. dollar valuations of these assets beyond any sane level. As more and more investors in search of a store of value discover bitcoin’s superior intertemporal salability, it will continue to acquire an increasing share of global cash balances.
Saifedean Ammous (The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization)