Trust is a part of life. It is impossible or if not impossible it is at least crippling to not trust anything or anyone. But trust is also not a boolean. There are levels and layers of trust. I trust the chair I'm sitting in to hold my weight, but If I gained 100 lbs I would cease to trust it. Most of the time we are faced with trade-offs. We trust that our employer will pay use come payday. As they continue keep their word our trust is likely to grow. If you are in a relationship and your partner lies to you trust is broken. It can sometimes be repaired, but it takes time and work.

We all have placed some level of trust in fiat money. We have to. The system requires trust. If you use banks, you are trusting they will give you your money when you request it. If you are a merchant you are trusting that the credit card processor is doing their job. Its a very high trust system and systems like that require high levels of trust are risky.

With technology most people are also trusting third parties. If you use the Apple app store you are trusting that they are vetting the apps you install on your devices. Today we have tools that allow our trust to be minified. We have public private key encryption that allows for someone to cryptographically sign the digital artifacts. This allows us to mathematically prove that something was created by a person with the control over a key. This works with email, software, and bitcoin.

When you start with bitcoin, if you're doing it the right way the first thing you do is create a wallet. You will generate a 12 or 24 word seed phrase. This seed phrase is all that is required to control your bitcoin. When you are new to bitcoin it can be hard to wrap your head around what is going on. Many people think that their bitcoin is in their app. Or on their computer. Actually its on the blockchain distributed across thousands of nodes running on computers all over the world. What is so powerful is you have custody of your bitcoin if you have your seed phrase. Honestly, it still blows me away that this isn't a bigger deal to most people. The fact that you can memorize 12 words and store all of your wealth in you mind is amazing. It is also terrifying as long term bitcoiners know. Thankfully we have tools to help us.

As I started my bitcoin journey one of the early steps was setting up my own node. I can download install bitcoin-core and validate that the code was signed by the maintainers of the project. Anyone with a computer or access to a computer can do this. A node allows you to validate your own transactions. Not only this but you can validate the current supply of bitcoin. These two things do not exist in the fiat world. Both parties can validate the transaction. There is not requirement that we trust each other. Even more incredibly we don't need a middle man. Because there isn't a middle man there isn't someone that censor your transactions.

The next step I took was to set up a lightning node. This made me even more bullish. Not only can I validate my transactions in a trustless and permission-less way, I can run my own Lighting node and send bitcoin to anyone on the Lighting network in an instant. While Lightning is not perfect, most of the time it just works. I can instantly pay someone anywhere in the world for a very low cost. There's no payment processor. No Paypal. No Visa. Just the network and peers. Its revolutionary. No longer do I have to trust that Paypal won't close my account. I don't have to worry that I might have my transactions reversed. My funds stolen. Its a thing of beauty. On top of that, I have more privacy than I have on the credit card payment rails. Lightning isn't perfect but it is worlds ahead of the fiat world.

These are just a few things bitcoin can do but they are big ones. Things like this often become less appreciated the longer someone is in bitcoin but at the same time missed by new comers. When bitcion critics say, bitcoin isn't backed by anything I always think... are you serious? You must not understand the bitcoin network. I think its extremely valuable and reason to be bullish.