Bitcoin Will Make Your Life Better, Just Like the Internet Did
It’s the only thing that matters to the general public.
Everyone agrees that Bitcoin is the greatest technological revolution since the emergence of the Internet. When you are a developer, you are immediately fascinated by the underlying technologies that make the Bitcoin network work.
For a technical person, reading Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper on Bitcoin is pure poetry.
In just nine pages, Satoshi Nakamoto manages to explain perfectly how Bitcoin works. If you wanted to do the same for the current monetary and financial system, it would take hundreds of pages. The disruptive side of Bitcoin is so important that many Bitcoiners, and that goes for me as well, focus a bit too much on the technical aspects when they talk about Bitcoin.
The result is that the general public generally feels that Bitcoin is too complex.
Many people end up giving up on Bitcoin before they can really understand why it was created, and especially why it is essential for the world of the future. That’s a shame, because Bitcoin can really change your life.
Rather than focusing excessively on the technical benefits of Bitcoin, I therefore think we should seek to present the purpose of Bitcoin to the general public without dwelling on the details first.
Let me give you an example to help you understand what I mean.
General public doesn’t care how Bitcoin works
When a person asks you why Bitcoin is such an extraordinary invention, you tend to start with the technological prowess that Bitcoin does. A Bitcoiner will tend to answer that Bitcoin is the first digital currency to solve the problem of double spending in a totally decentralized manner.
A Bitcoiner will then explain that Bitcoin achieves this technological feat by implementing a confirmation mechanism based on the Proof-of-work, and relying on a universal ledger system.
If the Bitcoiner is not interrupted by its interlocutor, it will then start talking about the blocks containing transactions that are securely linked to each other thanks to the power of cryptography.
A person who has no prior knowledge will be completely lost with such an answer. If the problem of double-spending is something you know, a majority of people have never heard of it.
The only thing that matters to the general public in this case is to know that Bitcoin allows transactions to be made securely.
Internet is a huge success, and the general public doesn’t know how it works
The parallel with Internet is interesting in this respect. Internet has spread to the whole world since the early 2000s.
Everybody uses the Internet to do research or send emails now. However, no one really wants to know how the Internet works.
If you ask your parents what happens when they send an email to a friend on the other side of the world, they won’t be able to tell you what happens on a technical level.
The only thing they are interested in is knowing that their friend will receive the email instantly wherever he or she is on Earth.
In the general public, most people are unaware that the TCP/IP layer represents the set of protocols used to transfer data over the Internet. When you tell them about the HTTP protocol, they will best relate it to the beginning of the Internet addresses they type into their browser.
Yet everyone has embraced the Internet.
So the big question is this:
Why has the Internet been adopted by the majority of people on Earth when its technical specificities are far from being accessible to all?
The Internet has been adopted so widely because it simply makes people’s lives better. The Internet is a major disruption that nothing has been able to stop. Not even the owners of newspapers that said the Internet would never work.
Bitcoin is also reminiscent of the losing battle between the disrupted and the disruptors.
Each time, the disruptors win, because they make people’s lives better. The disrupted have no choice but to adapt, or else they will disappear. Paper newspapers have had to evolve by switching to a digital first strategy.
Radio stations had to evolve in the same way when television appeared. The adage “Evolve or be extinct” is a reality.
Internet is a success because it makes people’s lives better
People around the world have massively embraced the Internet because its benefits were incredible. Do you want to learn how to program? Just go to the Internet and you’ll find hundreds of online courses. You’ll be spoilt for choice between written and video courses.
Your son is going to school halfway around the world. Before, you would have had a hard time with this separation. Indeed, getting news back then was a difficult thing to do. Now you’ll be able to call him for free every day by choosing from the countless instant messaging applications available.
The Internet also makes information available to everyone. You can follow in real time the riots that are currently taking place in the United States. When a tsunami hits Asia, you are informed in real time as well.
In the field of health, the Internet is changing things too. More and more operations will be able to be performed remotely via robots controlled by a major surgeon on the other side of the world.
I will stop there, but you have taken up the essential idea:
A disruptive technology is all the more likely to be adopted by as many people as it makes people’s lives better.
Bitcoin’s narrative must revolve around the better life it offers to its users
With Bitcoin, I’m convinced that the narrative we need to adopt is this one. Bitcoin will make your life better. This is how Bitcoin should be presented to the general public for mass adoption.
The revolutionary technical aspects of Bitcoin must stay with the people who can understand it. There is no point in losing the general public by explaining in detail how the Proof-of-Work algorithm works.
The general public wants to understand why Bitcoin will make their lives better.
To begin with, it seems obvious to explain that Bitcoin allows people to transfer money around the world securely in just a few minutes.
Your son went to school in Hong Kong, and you live in New York. He calls you on Saturday morning. He tells you that he has a problem and needs $1,000 immediately.
Since it’s the weekend, you won’t be able to make a bank transfer. Moreover, even during the week, the SWIFT global interbank payment network has a delay of 2 to 5 days at best for this type of transfer around the world.
You therefore have no solution with the current banking system.
Bitcoin works all the time. Transactions on the Bitcoin network can be carried out 7 days a week and 24 hours a day.
With Bitcoin, you are able to send the equivalent of $1,000 to your son on the other side of the world. This applies regardless of the time of day, or day of the week. After ten minutes, the destination address on your son’s wallet will be credited with that amount in Bitcoin.
I should add here that transfer fees will also be minimal. With SWIFT, the fees would have been much higher.
Bitcoin protects your purchasing power
You may not be aware of this, but your money in U.S. dollar keeps losing value over time. You can see this by looking at the evolution of $1,000 in purchasing power since 1971:
Your $1,000 from 1971 is only $151 in purchasing power by 2020. This represents a drop of almost 85% in your purchasing power.
The decisions currently being taken by the Fed and other central banks in the fight against the effects of the economic crisis will aggravate this problem.
The trillions of dollars printed by the Fe over the last few weeks are leading to a great monetary inflation, of which the poorest people will be the biggest victims.
To hedge against this great monetary inflation, you have various options: real estate, the stock market, gold …
All these options are more or less accessible depending on your level of wealth. For the poorest people, these options are difficult to access. In fact, many must continue to hold on to the U.S. dollar, which inevitably loses value over time.
Bitcoin solves this problem by making available to everyone a great store of value that requires only a smartphone and an Internet connection to be purchased.
Even better, you can buy Bitcoin in very small amounts. With gold, for example, this is impossible.
Bitcoin gives you the freedom
Bitcoin also makes your life better by giving you full control over what you own. Bitcoin has no leader, and no one can stop you from making the transactions of your choice. Your bank can and does.
Your bank can also confiscate your assets by arbitrary decision. Since banks are private institutions, they can apply the rules of their choice.
Once you have secured your Bitcoins on a hardware wallet, you are the real owner. No one can take them from you, or prevent you from using them as you wish.
Best of all, with its pseudonymous network, Bitcoin helps you protect your privacy.
With the surveillance society that most states want to build for the future, Bitcoin will be an essential weapon for hundreds of millions of people in the future. You will be able to keep all your financial transactions private.
Bitcoin is a true democracy that empowers its users. The Bitcoin protocol will not change without a consensus of its community. Thus, Bitcoin’s monetary policy will remain the same no matter what happens in the future. No leader will be able to come and change the limit of 21 million Bitcoins.
What you own in Bitcoin is protected. When you buy a Bitcoin today, you are guaranteed to own 1 Bitcoin out of 21 million in 10, 20, or 50 years.
With the U.S. dollar, and fiat currencies, you have the opposite guarantee. The 3 trillion that the Fed has just printed since the beginning of March 2020 is proof of this.
Bitcoin will make life better for millions of people in the future
Bitcoin makes your life better by allowing you to hedge against monetary inflation. I have just given you a few examples of some of the key areas where Bitcoin makes your life better.
I obviously couldn’t be exhaustive as the impacts of Bitcoin will be significant in the future.
So I couldn’t tell you about the fact that Bitcoin enables banking services to be offered to unbanked people in Africa. I was also unable to point out that Bitcoin is already the only solution available to millions of people who have to fight against hyperinflation and the oppression of authoritarian regimes.
However, I am sure that you have understood my message through the strong examples I have given you.
Bitcoin is the missing brick of the Internet when it comes to money. Bitcoin is the money protocol for the Internet that will enable the financial inclusion of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
As the Internet has done since the early 2000s, Bitcoin will make life better for hundreds of millions of people. This gives you a better idea of the extraordinary adoption potential for Bitcoin in the future.
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