Bitcoin Explained: Everything You Wanted to Know w/Saifedean Ammous
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- čas přidán 15. 06. 2024
- Asking for Bitcoin explained is like asking how a rocket works; it's a little complex. A digital currency is valued at a certain amount of dollars (or euros, yen, etc.) and is used to pay for goods or exchange for other currencies. That makes sense. But things can get complicated as we go deeper into Bitcoin and the blockchain. There's no need to get overwhelmed; we brought Saifedean Ammous, economist and author of “The Bitcoin Standard,” onto the show to explain.
Saifedean, like many investors, was skeptical of Bitcoin at first. He thought it was merely a fad that would pass away in a few years. But, after researching the history of money, the rise and fall of fiat currencies, and the standard that Bitcoin was built on, Saifedean changed his tone. Now, he's a huge proponent of this new "digital gold" and has spent years of his life warning others of fiat currency's faults and the opportunity behind Bitcoin itself.
In today's episode, Saifedean explains what Bitcoin is, how it works, why the blockchain is needed, and why saving money isn't enough in today's fiat inflationary environment. You'll also hear why "hard money" like Bitcoin beats "easy money" like the American dollar and why the latest cryptocurrency crash isn't as bad as mainstream economists think. So if you've thought of snagging a bit of Bitcoin, this is the best place to start.
00:00 Intro
02:46 Why "Hard" Money Matters
11:40 Easy Money, Hard Times
18:51 Fiat Currency Explained
27:09 Bitcoin Explained
44:40 The Bitcoin-Only Blockchain
52:00 The Bitcoin Crash Explained
56:25 Keep Your Keys!
59:24 Connect with Saifedean!
59:47 The New "Digital Gold"
Show Notes at:
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Bitcoin-The New Face Of Banking:
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Episode 371
#biggerpockets #biggerpocketsmoney #money371
Listening to Saifedean has helped me learn and understand so much more than I could have ever done on my own.
This show aired about a week before bitcoin went from sub 17,000 to over 70,000
It's not $15K now, dudes. What's the best performing investment of 2023? What's the best performing investment of the last 5 years? What's the best performing investment of the last 10 years? See any pattern yet? Start to understand what he was saying yet? Talk to Michael Saylor next if you still don't understand.
This aged like wine!
cant believe people with this acces to this kind of info and still DONT HAVE BTC. having btc doesnt mean all in, not having at least a 5% allocation for small retailers and at least 1% for wealthy people will be the dumbest trade of history in a couple of decades.
@@user-vw7kv1yj2j A reasonable position to take- but that means that BTC is a speculative investment, not money or a currency... that is denominated in dollars/yen/rupees/yuan et cetera...
it takes years to learn but basically: buy strong when is cheap, dollar cost average when is in the middle. stop when is expensive. sell a bit when is on top and wait to be oversold and at bottom prices. repeat ad nauseam. a todler could do it.
Wow, can’t actually believe you guys were able to talk to him.
I’m actually surprised on how Mindy didn’t ask any questions for always expressing how she doesn’t understand this space, perfect opportunity to pick his brain.
I encourage people to really question “what is money?”.
Bitcoin ≠ Cryptocurrency
This was great!!! Buy, hold, repeat 😊
Yeah Scott and Mindy this will be awesome. You got the brilliant mind to explain Bitcoin. Heck yeah. Love his books. This is the man to explain it. Holy cow I can’t believe it. Love it. Haven’t listened yet. Just saw the name and had to write a comment to express my excitement. Happy birthday to me. 🎉🎉🎉
This podcast was done last year. Jan 2023. Infact as you spoke the market was picking up.
Now those who bought a chunk did they make a bad decision like you said?
We should stop measuring Bitcoin in Fiat terms with a daily time frame and look at the log time of this.
There is no such things as a DUMP.
Thanks for the podcast
Great show, but Mindy, I have to say to your comment at the end, that YOU personally may not invest in Euros, because you are earning and living off Dollars.
However...as with Dollars, the purchasing power of Euros is constantly getting less. Things cost more Euros every year, because its worth less than the previous year. This is the same with Dollars and pretty much all fiat currencies.
In countries where the fiat currency is declining in value even faster, they actually DO buy Euros or Dollars as an investment.
You being in the US cant see it because you use Dollars....but think....everything you buy regularly is getting more expensive each year is it not? Why? Because the money is getting worth less.
On the flipside, long term, everything priced in bitcoin is getting cheaper each year. Think about that...
Personally I invest in bitcoin every month, like a long term savings plan.
My total bitcoin balance is growing monthly, while at the same time the value of bitcoin is growing long term. I am totally outperforming every other option I have to invest money into.
FYI re 37:00 Satoshi allocated 1 million BTC to himself and these have not moved since. Also a good statement on btc and a good argument that BTC really is a commodity.
Like these two hosts, anyone who says “invest in bitcoin” needs at least 100 learning hour to start to make sense of bitcoin
Bitcoin is just a fake word they shouldn't be calling it Bitcoin because there's no physical coin why don't they call it b paper-based on Federal reserve notes? It's very simple your teck device tells the other tech device to change the numbers. Nothing is transferred from One tech device to the other just as the banking system the check that you were right out just tells the banker to change the numbers in the account there's no exchange of money or physical money it's all an illusion people are delusional they keep holding on and wanting to grasp some form of medium of exchange that makes absolutely no sense.
Have a word with Michael Saylor, if you think you should invest in anything other than Bitcoin. He'll put you straight.
Is the channel deleting comments? Or youtube? Or is something happening on my side so that i cannot see comments?
people cant loose their bitcoin. people can destroy it by accident. which is quite different. as these looses makes it even more scarce.
As we approach infinity through time, Bitcoin approaches a valuation infinitely better than all other investments. The only scenario in which this does not play out is one in which the subset of humanity collaborating through the Bitcoin Medium is outcompeted by another Subset using a different medium. This separate subset must maintain a real production growth, in excess of the Bitcoin economy's productivity, equal to or greater than the inflation rate of the medium they choose to monetize.
It's funny, I have been developing software in the crypto space for years, I have made my own wallet from the ground and developed my own backup methods (I don't use paper to keep my backups, to me that's weird when we already have encryption technology)... yet I don't invest in cryptocurrencies, I used them for what they are good: send money internationally really easy, interact with decentralized protocols and more.
I think people also need to read/listen from devs/users that don't invest in cryptocurrencies but use them a lot, I feel lot of people are trapped in the hard money/real money/conspiracy narratives instead of actually using them and realizing how good they are for multiple use cases
Are people who buy and hold bitcoin not actually using it? Are people who buy and hold gold not actually using gold? Are people who buy and hold houses, stocks, .... Using bitcoin as a savings technology is a perfectly usecase, is it not? Especially given the capped supply
@@carlwatts1230 In my opinion the capped supply narrative is just a gimmick which tries to become true with the more people who says that and believes it, plus the capped supply can be changed in the future if the majority of the nodes agrees to so if at some point of history society decides that the the number of Bitcoins needs to be modified it could just be changed.
Now going one by one:
"Are people who buy and hold bitcoin not actually using it?" - No, they are not and that held coin is doing nothing for the economy nor for the owner beside the hope of a store of value which in my opinion (and lots of people think the same) is a failed narrative because Bitcoin has acted as a leveraged stock market instead and once inflation goes up its price goes down because interest rates gets increased and people don't need to seek risking investments.
"Are people who buy and hold gold not actually using gold" - No, they are not (just like with Bitcoin) with the only difference that more people believe Gold has value so the chances of the store of value working are bigger.
"Are people who buy and hold houses" - people are living in houses, so on one side the buyer is not using it but the house itself if being used in the economy. Not comparable to stuff like Bitcoins or Gold.
"stocks" - Stocks are a financial instrument which is the representation of ownership on a company, this transaction has two sides: On one side you get ownership and on the other the company gets financing. Again not comparable to stuff like buying and hold Gold or Bitcoin.
Don't get me wrong I actually like Bitcoin and the Blockchain ecosystem it created, I have been using crypto assets for years and more than 80% of my money is on the blockchain. It's just that the "buy and hold" narrative is silly in my opinion because its based on the hope that in the future someone will pay more than what you paid for while in the meantime it does nothing because people don't use it... but I guess I think that way because I also understand the buy gold and hold narrative either
@@HaimRich94 Question for you: IF the suppply somehow actually were capped and was going to stay so. Imagine there is no doubt about that. In that hypothetical scenario do you think bitcoin is useful as a savings device? So people can work now and save that energy to spend or invest later, knowing it cannot be debased and knowing it is a bearer asset with no counter party risk. The case Saif makes for bitcoin is just a sound money case.
Do you believe saving money provides utility? Would it be useful for there to exist a money or an asset that cannot be debased which primary usecase is for saving? Meaning low to no risk of losing its value and low to no risk of it being debased.
What do you think about the usecase of "store of value"? Otherwise known as "saving".
Interesting you say that people who are saving their purchasing power in gold are not using gold. What are they doing then? What are they doing with the gold? What is the gold doing for them?
I have simple answers for that. One is that they are saving purchasing in order to prepare for an uncertain future. It think savings technology is a useful technology. People are using houses and stocks these days to achieve that usecase thereby distorting the demand signals for houses as houses an stocks as stocks. There is additional demand for these assets because the money is being continually debased so people cannot save like they could in the 10th century. The money is broken.
I agree with most of what you say about stocks and houses but I was trying to suggest a point there: namely that many people are using these things as a store of value. Most people have a vague understanding that plain money cannot be used for saving so people must become investors in order protect their hard earned purchasing from the vampiric parasitic cantillionaire entities that thrive in the fiat system we live in.
whoops i typo there. meant to type 19th century, but really time where there was a sound money standard where the "put money under the mattress£ strategy succeeded in preserving purchasing power
I love Safe, and love all things Austrian School, but I'm still in the Peter Schiff and Lynette Zang camp... when the SHTF, as I believe that it will, local farmers will always accept gold and silver in exchange for food. After looking into BTC for over ten years, I simply don't have confidence in it... but that's just my personal POV. Call me an "OK, Boomer" all you like (age 64).
Im 62, and I LOVE ❤️bitcoin. (I used to hate the idea because i didnt understand it) Anyone who spends 100 hours studying BTC will end up loving it because they finally understand how it helps solve many of the worlds problems. Before you judge it, study it. ❤️
correction. If the US collapses those who had all their money in that basket has bigger problems.
Thanks for this episode. Just converted the Roth into BTC!
Just kidding. I am dollar cost averaging in just like I do for VTSAX
Where's the word dollar originated in our law?
Her argument doesnt make sense … when we invest in something we should understand risks … even real estate has down times (example: 2008) but long term you win same as bitcoin, but bitcoin is a better class asset more safe and more transportable…
This dude loves to talk but explains very little. He is a true Bitcoin maximalist that can’t look past his own investment. To completely disregard the Smart Contract innovation that Ethereum brought to the table is just crazy
But Ethereum has a central point of attack and had a pre-mine. That’s exactly what Saifedean argues against in the podcast lol.
Saif is the kind of guy who thinks that what actually is useful will come to bitcoin. Liquid already offers more sophisticated smart contracts with bitcoin and bitcoin itself has smart contracts. They are just more limited and therefore more predictable and safe to use. Smart contracts will likely become expressive on baselayer bitcoin if something like simplicity gets forked in and otherwise the smart contract functionality will appear on higher layers
I am more of a multicoiner myself but i do think that alot of the useful stuff may eventually come over to bitcoin. And it is very hard to predict which of these altcoins has long term viability. Probably a good rule of thumb for most people to stay away from the whole altcoin space unless they absolutely can't do what they want to do any other way. And there are usecases like that.
Also saof cares most about MONEY. Bot smart contracts. He just wants money that cannot be debased. Incorruptible neutral money. That is what saif wants. And bitcoin is by far the best for that and arguably the only one. No other crypto is credibly hars money.
Said cares about the economic innovation. About the new kind of internet money. He explains a tremendous amount but it is about economic history. He explains how economic processes are influenced the kind of money that serves as the medium of exchange. He isnt a computer guy. He is an economics guy. Economic history and economic theory is his bread and butter and he does provide a very useful framework to understand the last 5000 years of economic history and in particular the last 200 years
@@carlwatts1230 I think my main complaint was some of his analogies when trying to explain some of the concepts were just really hard to follow and didn’t do a great job at explaining Bitcoin and the benefits of blockchain
Bitcoin does not flow like currency like a river with the word current came from. All you have is one tech device telling another tech device to change the numbers but no transferring of money currency or anyting.
The fact that somebody calls today coin as in Bitcoin? This makes me believe somebody's trying to deceive somebody. Why don't you call it bitpaper since the Federal reserve notes are paper.
If Bitcoin is derived from software than anybody can create their own software and they can create their own Bitcoin so why would I need your bitcoin.
That comment is so embarrassingly ignorant. Maybe do some basic research before commenting again about something that you clearly don't have the most basic understanding of.
The best one wins. The market will determine the winner. People tried before bitcoin, and people still keep trying to launch new “bitcoin”. But the free market will determine the winner and best. That is why Bitcoin is winning after years of people trying. The apples, the googles, etc. and now BTC winning the race. That is the beauty of free markets.
@@alexdmarcon You haven't done any research, or you wouldn't be asking such an ignorant question. How do you propose getting your 'new bitcoin' started , exactly?
Read the whitepaper. It's like 9 pages.
Gold is valuable because it is hard to destroy.
Bitcoin has a similar principle and it's deflationary by nature.
That's the tip of it. Please continue to do your own research.
Read the bitcoin whitepaper