Tag Archives: bitcoin

Bitcoin

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I’ve been thinking about bitcoin off and on since approximately 2017. More intensely since about Dec 2020. Here is a short distillation of my thoughts. 

My main interest in bitcoin is not bitcoin itself but its characteristics of being “hard” currency. Currency that can not be debased or inflated for use by a central authority. Beyond that, bitcoin itself has very few special properties. Any economic research that is interested in sound monetary policy applies to bitcoin, of which there has been much. 

But Bitcoin does have a few key properties that give it great benefits as a sound monetary unit. 

Bitcoin is much better than gold, the historical hard currency, as a hard currency. 

It has 3 key features. 

One. It can be purchased or transacted from your home, or anywhere else with internet access, to anywhere else with internet access. I can send bitcoin to anyone in China, Haiti or Argentina, or next door. 

Two. It can be split into much smaller pieces than gold. The smallest unit of a bitcoin is a Satoshi. With $1 you can buy ~ 2100 satoshis today (when 1 full bitcoin is worth $~$46,000)  whereas transacting in gold in small useful units is basically impossible. You cannot really buy $1 worth of gold or even $100. 1 oz of gold is nearly $1k. 1 gram of gold is still ~ $60. That is not a useful transaction unit at all. 

The third is that bitcoin has a hard fixed amount that will ever be created. Gold is not truly scarce in the universe. While mining gold is difficult and allows a relatively fixed amount. There is still growth in the total gold supply each year and potential to find new deposits at any time or get a massive amount from asteroids in space. In contrast, Bitcoin is capped at 21 million bitcoins that will ever exist, providing ultimate scarcity. 

For a primer on bitcoin, I recommend the Fidelity Paper “Bitcoin First”. 

“Sound money not only imposes fiscal discipline upon government, impeding reckless federal spending and imprudent warfare, but it also provides a stable unit of account, store of value, and medium of exchange for entrepreneurs, businesses, and individuals.” 

If you have any interest in talking about bitcoin let me know!

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel – And The World Today

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I recently finished listening to  “The Ministry for the Future: A Novel” by Kim Stanley Robinson. 

The book focuses on the impacts of climate change in the future. Near the start of the book there is a heatwave that strikes India harder than the rest of the world. 20 million people die.
This makes me think of the link of this event compared to the current wave of covid sweeping through India and what actions they may take as a result?

In the book there are various attacks by environmental terrorist style groups to try to force companies and individuals to reduce their carbon footprint. 

While I don’t condone that type of violence, much of history is driven by violence, and usually the history books are written by the winners, who write their violence off as justified.

This leads me to consider the link between “The Ministry for the Future: A Novel” and another book I am reading now, “Rethinking Humanity: Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, the Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom (RethinkX Sector Disruption) Paperback –  by Tony Seba, James Arbib”. They are not proposing violence for any change, but they point to how technological change could lead to societal change, and has in the past. And how “Organizational systems” need to adapt to times, or collapse. Historically, they have collapsed, but they are proposing that we have the change to no collapse, this time. I recommend this book to everyone. 

Another development in “The Ministry for the Future: A Novel”  is the carbon coin. This makes me think of a paper written by ARK investment group and Square (the company). It is a very short read (5 pages).

“Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future In this memo, we aim to explain how the Bitcoin network functions as a unique energy buyer that could enable society to deploy substantially more solar and wind generation capacity. This deployment, along with energy storage, aims to facilitate the transition to a cleaner and more resilient electricity grid. We believe that the energy asset owners of today can become the essential bitcoin miners of tomorrow. “ – Link 

The implication is that bitcoin can create an incentive to develop clean energy as long as you can incorporate bitcoin mining as a secondary income source for the green energy when it is not being used by the grid. This would allow a buildup of excess energy supply in the grid that would be used by customers as needed but alternatively used to mine bitcoin, and thus create profit, when there is excess.


I am not aware of this happening yet. Although there are plenty of grid scale battery storage solutions that are replacing “peaker” power plants and providing tremendous payback to their developers. So that is a 3rd option for excess renewable grid buildout. 


There are even more reasons besides temporary surges in use for peaker plants. A coal power plant apparently suffered an explosion in Australia and  a battery plant was able to provide instant backup. 

Various battery plants have also paid back their build cost relatively quickly. 

Back to Bitcoin. The largest risk for Bitcoin is it’s challenge to the sovereignty of Ffat currency of any nation. If it does challenge a nation’s ability to collect taxes in their own fiat currency, it will be outlawed. On the other side though, gold is a current store of value that does not fundamentally topple the current fiat money system, but lives alongside it. If bitcoin were to continue in that manner, it would be fine.

I often call the USD (and all other government issued currency) as “backed by bombs”. This is in reference to any government’s “monopoly on violence”.

Meaning that the threat of violence by the government if you don’t pay your taxes, in their designated currency. 

Various governments have already outlawed Bitcoin, such as the Chinese government, despite a large percentage of Bitcoin mining happening in China.


Other overreaching governments such as Turkey have also outlawed Bitcoin.

What does that mean for Bitcoin in the USA? It is unclear yet. Personally, I hope it is regulated and taxed as a normal currency eventually, (and not as as art or gold, which have very high tax rates as collectibles).