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On the What Bitcoin Did podcast I was listening to Quoth the Raven talk about how it took him a long time to come around on bitcoin. He talked about how there should be an easy answer you can have for a child when asking something like “what exactly am I buying?” But I think it’s hard to answer because of how intangible bitcoin is. Even Peter was fumbling around with trying to come up with a simple answer to that question. From an outsider perspective it makes sense how with $50000 to spend, there should be a simple answer to this question because there’s a whole lot of other things you can buy with $50000. And of course anyone can buy any amount of bitcoin, but unit bias is still very real.
At first my thought for a simple answer is it’s just a currency conversion. It’s like asking “what am I buying when I spend my money on US dollars?” which is clearly a weird question to ask. From there you can unpack the question further, with the acknowledgement that truly answering the question of “what are you buying” is not supposed to have an easy answer. And then you can go into the differences between fiat currencies and bitcoin, what properties of bitcoin make it so valuable, etc.
However this answer only applies if you view bitcoin as a currency. Not a lot of people do, even people who buy bitcoin. Even Michael Saylor does not advocate bitcoin as a currency, instead he frames it as digital property. I think of it as digital property too, but I wonder what’s the ELI5 answer to “what are you buying”, if there is one?
438 sats \ 2 replies \ @go 17 Feb
100 million individual freedom tech particles which can be sent to anyone for anything
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @joda 18 Feb
Hawt
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @go 18 Feb
❤️‍🔥
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533 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 17 Feb
I think they got to the correct answer in that interview. You are buying, unless the network fails, gets co-opted or replaced , certainty of your purchasing power at least in Bitcoin terms.
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Even that is a bit wordy for someone new. I like "inflation-proof currency/asset"
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I have known those whose mothers have died and left them as an inheritance that exact amount of money. Though your question is more abstract, the answer with value ought to be the same--an entire life savings is what you are buying and a potential inheritance.
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Bitcoin is money. You’re converting into better money. You’re effectively “buying” increased purchasing power for your future self. Saylor’s a bit of a statist tbh.
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At one point I tried to visualize it on paper but a few lines of hex characters isn't satisfying. Essentially it's the ability to spend that much bitcoin in the future.
We call it an unspent transaction output (utxo) and it's value is being able to turn it into a spent output, pay miner fees, and create new utxos owned by yourself or someone you're paying.
Stepping further back you can think of a utxo as a slice of the future economy, a vote of confidence, a share of a decentralized organization, or one of many other things that we'll discover over decades.
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Currency conversion is the right idea I think. Bitcoin is a money. It doesn't matter what someone who doesn't understand it thinks it is.
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We can actually do quite a lot with Bitcoin...there are many ways to spend it without trading it for fiat
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Like Peter said in the show there isn't an single answer because bitcoin offers many use cases for different people. In the case of Quoth the Raven he is asking from an investor perspective, he knows stocks and gold, and for him it's a bet on people getting tired of inflation and rebel against the fiat system and opt-out, and doing so it increases the value of the network and btc. For me, the simplest explanation i can come up is its savings technology, it's the ability to save long term, it's something everyone needs and there is no other better option that Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is different things for different people, from speculative asset to censorship resistant money and everything in between.
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Most of the western countries consider Bitcoin an asset, similar to shares for example, and therefore you have to pay capital gains tax when selling it for a higher amount than what you acquired them for.
Some countries see Bitcoin as a legal tender, like El Salvador, so what you are saying as an example applies here, you are literally exchanging different types of money, so there's no capital gains tax in El Salvador.
Like anything important, it's difficult to explain it in simple terms.
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To me I am buying a superior form of money that gives me access to future optionality. That optionality will differ for people, some want a home, some want a fresh start, some want to buy future hours of not having to work, some want to be able to move, some want to start a family
Fiat gives you a smaller and progressively shrinking optionality window, Bitcoin for me has done the opposite, it gives me time to really consider my options
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Just tried listening to that podcast while walking the dog. Definitely need to listen again to process all that he talked about.
This might be one to have a notepad with.
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I don’t get it. $50k will buy me the chance to send one of my kids off to college. If BTC pumps such that I don’t need so many sats, well n fine. But even if it stays the way it is now, I’m determined to slog until I save enough sats/fiat
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They mentioned gold with this question, with answer like: "You buy piece of rare metal that's durable, rare and shiny"
While technically correct, this answer doesn't touch the 'store of value' or 'distributed value ledger represented by pieces of it" aspects of gold. And as such this answer is not an informative answer. Answering this question with gold have similar issues as bitcoin. It's just a coincidence that gold have physical representation that can serve as a basis for this technically-correct-but-not-so-useful pseudo-answer.
If you really are satisfied with "piece of metal" answer for gold, I guess you could create similar answer for bitcoin: "You buy a rare, durable metal with atomic number 0, which means it doesn't have any mass and exists only as pure information".
Is having a diversified cryptocurrency portfolio more likely to increase your chances of becoming a crypto millionaire compared to having a non-diversified portfolio? Do individuals who achieve millionaire status through cryptocurrency investments generally have diversified portfolios?
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How are you diversified if all the assets you're buying are correlated and just leveraged bets on Bitcoins movement?
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So what is your advice
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If you want to diversify you want things that perform inverse of one another in different conditions. This would be into assets that have less correlation to lets say Bitcoin, you would look at cash, precious metals, real estate, fixed income, and try to play the flows, I am no trader myself, i stick to what I know and what works for me
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Thanks bro your advice
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