I’ve been on a slightly more than year long deep dive into the rabbithole that is Bitcoin and in this post I’ll try to explain why Bitcoin is important. I’ve wanted to get my thoughts on Bitcoin down in this blog, but it is such a huge topic that I struggle to come up with a good format. Instead of writing up a huge “What is Bitcoin” post and failing to explain it properly, I want to start off with why should anyone care about it at all.
Imagine you had a magic button that printed a fresh dollar bill (or $5 Canadian bill for you canucks) in your wallet each time you pressed it. Would you press it? I think the more appropriate question is: Would you be able to stop yourself from pressing it? I think you would have a hard time finding anybody who would take their finger off this magic button. It’s human nature to be greedy and build your wealth. Having more money just solves so many problems.
Now what if I told you that this button actually exists? But you can’t have it, only the government can. The government, being the creators of their money and having full control over it can print as much of their money as they want. They can and do press this button until their little beurocratic fingers are raw to the bone. They will press that button until all value in their money is lost and kids living under such governments are better off playing with cash because toys cannot be so easily printed.
Every money that can be so easily printed will eventually collapse to inflation. Since the average life of a government currency is only 25 years, we can see that the government also suffers from greed and simply prints their way out of their problems. Even the reigning king of monies today, the US dollar has suffered an astounding loss of 95% of it’s value in the last century. If a money can be printed, it will be printed.
Since nobody has control over Bitcoin, it cannot be corrupted in this way. Bitcoin is hard money. It cannot be printed arbitrarily. If more and more people adopt Bitcoin as their money, the power to print money and steal people’s wealth via inflation will be wrested away from the hands of the government. That, amongst many many other reasons is why Bitcoin is important.