Big Win For Bitcoin In China Today - Legal, Top Court Rules
The People's Court of China ruling further validates crypto use in the Chinese mainland, some industry watchers have indicated.
The US populace is hopelessly myopic at the moment: only focused on our own tribe, neglectful of the fact that some of these issues — inflation, the “wild” fires, predatory elites, lackluster media and free speech liberties, possible UFO sighting frenzy… these are all global issues, they aren’t unique to America.
Thank goodness for Substack seers like yours truly to remind you how unsettled things are at the moment.
And in judging the health of crypto, the American speculative dabbler at the moment is over reliant on important — but not omnipotent — stateside guidance from specialized regulators like the SEC… while totally ignoring substantial advancements occurring in Europe, Africa, South America, and now in Asia.
Accessibility is improving, as is regulatory clarity, in some of these countries.
China has a much larger population (1.5 billion versus our 340 million or so) and arguably more disposable income at the moment — despite their imploding domestic real estate market.
At the most macro eagle eye view, there are more than 7.5 billion humans on the planet, and all of them need to use money. Like shelter and food, it’s a base layer need. Money is a form of communication. To have no money is to be locked away in solitary, away from the crowd.
Big Money is the largest industry on planet Earth, bigger by an order of magnitude than Big Pharma, defense/aerospace contracting, and commercial real estate.
They made up the money supply, there’s no proof of work component (that’s the core innovation of Bitcoin; computer screen ready money that can be trusted, since it is generated through mining or computer “work” rather than through decree or force).
Fiat is made up, they gift those US dollar zeros on the computer screen to pre-approved too big to fail banks which are basically publicly held boiler rooms, and from there the banks loan out the funds they’ve received from Mother of Dragons Yellen and the value sorcerer Powell.
But they loan it out at significant interest, introducing inefficiency and pain. And they screen for “qualified” candidates only, limiting social mobility
Imagine a car with no brakes. That’s digital money without a proof of work component; it’s the worst of all worlds, and dangerous at the macro or civilizational level — because just like a car sold without brakes, a collision is eventually inevitable.
I was surprised to have a couple “boomer” or older supporters email me recently, expressing a genuine interest in understanding cryptocurrency for the first time. One of you expressed that you want to believe in Bitcoin and all this stuff, you just don’t really know where to begin, and you don’t know the core tenets of our movement.
Look, the day I no longer believe Bitcoin is the best for me and my future expected needs/desires, is the day I part ways with it. I feel that way about everything in my life with few exceptions, if any.
The Bitcoin origin story is unlike anything else in computer science history.
Successfully fusing pre-existing technologies that were floating around on the Internet without much commercial adoption at the time, software developer Satoshi Nakamoto — believed to be a pseudonym, rather than any individual’s real name — released his “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” live network in January 2009, and anyone was welcome to participate.
Until disappearing sometime in 2010, he answered individual users’ and developers’ questions on the Bitcointalk forums, explained further on the ethos, as well as answering technical questions about how the mining network might evolve over time, etc. — in some areas, Satoshi was wildly prescient both in how Bitcoin would eventually become popular and command value, and in how the mining network would become more sophisticated.
In his own words, for a summary of what was invented: “Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non- reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.”
And thus the gauntlet was thrown down. He could have released his innovation through a company and traditional fundraising, and probably would have made an easy and early fortune. Instead, he went the unusual route of releasing it under the leading open source MIT/X11 standard, so that others could build upon it, and even more bizarre: he kept his identity completely unknown, aside from this presumed pseudonym.
The project was announced not in a glitzy Silicon Valley “release event,” but instead, through a simple white paper published online (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) that explained in only 8 pages what Bitcoin is, how it works under the hood, and thoughts on future applicability.
It came out recently that nearly all new Macs have this Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi pre-installed on a hidden folder, which some have perceived as a subtle nod from Apple devs that they respect Satoshi’s innovation as the Steve Jobs-level computer science breakthrough it is.
And unlike fiat currencies, whose supply increase at a non-linear unknowable rate, the Bitcoin code locks the eventual supply in at 21 million bitcoin, and about 19.47 million have been “mined” or released by the network so far, since it went live in January 2009 as explained above.
With someone’s address (a short string of numbers and letters generated by your Bitcoin wallet) or a QR code (a scannable rectangular image that loads or links to your corresponding address), you can easily send a person Bitcoin.
Curiously, this address can be generated without the generating party or person needing to connect to the Internet even once in order to do so — an aspect of the staggering elliptic curve mathematics that make Bitcoin work, where a generated address/private key pairing is unlikely to ever be generated again by another wallet.
It’s a completely different approach to money, akin to how email is a different approach to delivering textual messages from the post office — yet it gets the job done all the same, and faster, too.
Yet it doesn’t solve all our problems. There are times when you still need to use the post office to ship something, and there are times when civilization will still go with fiat currency, or gold, silver, or other valuables as the value metric for certain projects. For sure, I mean I don’t doubt that.
And with that said, Bitcoin exists — Prometheus has tossed us the monetary fire, it cannot be undone. Big Money has been democratized, dematerialized, and put in everyone’s hands. You either see, or ya don’t. But appreciate you all regardless, and promise the next couple posts won’t be coin related… been thinking about the West’s UFO issue and had an interesting realization. I’ll share it soon when the idea is a little less half baked.
Thanks for nudging me to explain the Bitcoin ethos all over again, since we have some new subscribers who don’t really understand why I believe in it with all the negative press tied to it lately, FTX, etc.
I believe in it for the reasons above.
Apple was a movement, but it wasn’t a protest movement.
People spent good money on Apple computers early on and told their friends nonstop, because they perceived them as less buggy (maybe they were) and just less stiffly corporate than the PCs that were sold at the time.
In much the same way, some of the world’s richest people already sing Bitcoin’s praises — including BlackRock’s Larry Fink.
So I think there’s no need to consider ourselves a protest movement. No we are just the emergent victors, and we’ll be graceful and gracious as we take things over for sure, but our collective patience is not eternal.
Sooner or later, crypto gobbles up most of that fiat largesse, and what progress it will be for the planet… even if not everyone chooses to participate. The right to say no to crypto is as important as the growth in businesses accepting it. We aren’t CBDCs. We aren’t central banks. We aren’t “the mark” — and therefore, a good crypto will never force you to use it.
You stumble across Satoshi’s whitepaper one rainy evening on the Internet, sip on a good whiskey or tea, and the enormity of it all hits you.
what's your favorite pizza topping? I can get you a nice got slice.