Why Bitcoin Gives Me Hope by Matthew Jones
Money is also language – a method of communicating value. This topic needs its own article to explain so I won't go into detail here but – if money is a means of communicating value – why do prices keep going up? Why have houses risen so much in price over the decades? Why have staple food prices almost doubled since 2020? What is being communicated by the colossal rising price of Bitcoin since 2009?
Nowadays it seems like we can work so hard and still not be able to afford our expenses. This has been especially noticeable since the 2020 Pandemic. Prices have risen much faster than wages have risen – which means we have to work harder to stay in the same place.
But why are prices rising? There are many theories, some of which are cut into headlines for mainstream media, and sometimes vaguely explained to me in through university Economics class.
The rise in prices over time is commonly referred to as inflation. My Economics professors are lovely people, but we have had some back-and-forths when I disagree about the fundamental nature of inflation.I think that inflation only rises because the banks print money. In my opinion, our lives become harder as prices become higher due to the fact that the banks print money.
In the common Economics which we are taught in school, there are a bunch of charts and graphs aiming to explain why inflation is good, especially at 2%.
But why ‘should' prices/inflation rise at 2% per year – according to the Economists? It is because money used to be directly exchangeable for real gold, and the amount of gold mined every year was expected to increase by 2%. If the exact amount of gold increased by 2% per year, AND money was in fact directly exchangeable for gold, this would be a good system. If this were true, the amount of dollars would be at a 1:1 ratio as it is to gold, and their exchange would be fair.
In fact, it used to be almost just like this, and this system did work from between 1944 and 1971.
In 1944 it was nearing the end of WWII, and the alliance powers made an agreement that gold and US dollars must be mutually exchangeable to keep the peace (it can be argued that much of WWII was fuelled by Hitler's ability to print infinite money without it being backed by gold, but that's a rabbit hold for another day).
In 1971, the US government (President Richard Nixon) decreed that gold and dollars were no longer exchangeable. Since 1971, the price of gold has gone up from $35 per ounce to almost $2,000 per ounce. Well, this is the most common perspective.
From the other perspective, we could say that the value of each dollar has gone down, while the price of gold stayed the same. In 1970, 35 dollars used to buy one ounce of gold, but the dollar has become so weak over the years that you now need almost 2000 of them to buy the same ounce of gold.
You could also use the example of a house. Our grandparents could spend 100,000 dollars to get one large property in Vancouver, Canada. Today, you need 1,500,000 dollars to buy the same house. Did the house change? No. Well, it may be older and weaker, so shouldn't it be cheaper? Did the land that the house sits on change? No, it's still the same land. So how does our generation find hope for the future and the hopes to buy a home? Our wages have gone up by around 2x in the same time house prices have gone up 15x or more.
This is where Bitcoin comes in.
Bitcoin doesn't lose its value over time. Dollars do.
Bitcoin can't be censored or frozen by the government. Dollars can.
Gold was what our grandparents may have used to store wealth in times of trouble, but we don't live in our grandparents age.
We use smartphones, and Bitcoin is 100% digital. Bitcoin is digital gold.
Gold is good, but it can't be put on to 8 billion smartphones around the world and sent at the speed of the internet.
Why carry gold to the grocery store when I can just carry my smartphone?
Gold is good, but it's heavy, and it's hard to divide. Bitcoin has no weight, can be carried anywhere, and can be divided into one hundred million (100,000,000) pieces without effort.
Dollars will continue to lose their value if the banks keep printing money. They want to stay in power. Their friends want to stay in power. The more dollars we print, the less each dollar is worth. Bitcoin cannot be printed. There is no CEO. There is no headquarters.
Bitcoin is hope because it is a silent and nonviolent exit from the monetary system which is being corrupted by the money-printers.
I can store my wealth in dollars, but if I send my dollars to a movement that the government doesn't like, they can freeze my bank account.
I can store my wealth in Bitcoin, on my Computer, on an app with 20 passwords and a PIN that all must be answered correctly and consecutively, and it can't be frozen.
I don't worry about the future and prices rising because I have Bitcoin. Prices are rising if you hold dollars, but they are falling if you hold Bitcoin. However – you do have to have a long-term view. This is not an overnight get-rich-quick idea. In fact, it's not a get-rich idea at all. It's about storing your wealth and savings in a place where it doesn't lose value. If grandpa had 100,000 dollars in the bank and a 100,000 dollar house in 1944 and he never did anything with either, today he would have 100,000 dollars in the bank and a1,500,000 dollar house.
I am still a human being and have human emotions. I am a cancer patient at the age of 27. I lost my mother who was an amazing, dear, wise, teacher and friend. My Life is not perfect. But Bitcoin allows me to see that the future is not scary. It is inviting us with open arms if we can shift out perspective to see it.
Seriously – don't get me wrong – I still put money into mutual funds. I still pay into Life Insurance. I am incredibly grateful to my agents for encouraging me to buy Life Insurance when I was 24 – without it, I would be in a much darker place after my cancer diagnosis. I am so grateful that my mother had Life Insurance because it really helped my Family after her sudden passing. The companies that own and manage these assets are very intelligent – they will be using Bitcoin soon. In fact, Blackrock and Fidelity are both already on board.
So, our grandparents bought a house in 1944. Grandpa's house is worth money, but it's not just money – it's also property. And so Bitcoin is not just money, it's also property – digital property. But Bitcoin might even be better than a house because it can't be stolen without your consent (which includes if you leave it on an exchange, or let someone else hold on to the keys).
Bitcoin is also human rights, because it allows anyone with an internet connection to have the keys to their own bank. With Bitcoin, you become your own bank. This also means that you have the responsibility to take care of it. If you lose your keys (passwords), you lose your coins. Sometimes, some of us will choose to keep our money in banks because we want to avoid the responsibility of carrying all of our wealth ourselves. This is understandable. Not everybody wants that responsibility.
I am not an Economist. I am not a computer programmer. I am not an investor. I am a common person on this dynamic planet. I see Bitcoin as hope for the future.
It's hard to explain this with language alone. I've listened to thousands of hours of content on how it works and I still can't explain the whole thing. But I can say that having Bitcoin is increases peace of mind. Owning it and understanding how it works is like having electricity in your home. You don't need electricity in your home to survive, but it really helps. And once you have electricity in your home, you don't really want to go back to using a wood stove.
What's very interesting is that those living in first-world countries with the biggest economies (Canada, USA, Japan, France, Germany, China, India, UK, etc.) don't see the value of Bitcoin as much as the poorest countries do, with corrupt governments. Earlier I wrote about 2% inflation. Imagine living in Argentina, Venezuela, or Turkey, and your 10,000 dollars of savings can now only buy 1,000 worth of goods. If that happened, you would start looking at Bitcoin.
I talk to people from wealthier countries, and I'm here in Canada, so it's not obvious to the amazing people who live here that Bitcoin is the future of payments and savings. Most of us will see Bitcoin as another cryptocurrency, stock, or trend that will go away with time. But Bitcoin is like the internet. It's a weird thing that exists only for memes until it becomes a fundamental layer of society that we globally communicate through.
This is only the tip of the iceberg of Bitcoin. There's so much more to learn and I'm still a beginner, but it seems to me that nobody I personally know is interested in it the same way I am.
Bitcoin gives me hope for the future. I'm not worried about prices going up, because I don't price things in dollars, I price them in Bitcoin.
Think about this – in the year 2010, 10,000 Bitcoin was spent to buy two pizzas (priced around $41 total at the time).
Today, even after the Bitcoin ‘crash' down to $35,424.61 CAD, the 10,000 bitcoin is worth 354,246,051.03!
That's 350 million dollars.
Anyway, I'm learning how to write on substack, I want to share my thoughts with the world, and this articles is getting too long. I'm sure some of my information is not 100% accurate. There are also many, many other aspects I haven't addressed but I will in future articles. I'm going on tangents. Please give me any feedback <3. Thanks for the read. Love you!
P.S. Even though my diagnosis is considered ‘incurable' my tumour is virtually invisible at this point and I have no symptoms. That will be a topic for another article <3 :) !
