Money, Currency and Bitcoin: Ideological Foundation

I was discussing civilly about bitcoin, what adoption entails, and I wrote what turned out to be a great manifesto as to why Bitcoin is Money first and foremost, what money is vs a currency, and why it matters. its long, but worth it as it will stop you from viewing Bitcoin as some chode financial instrument to make boring fiat in:

remember, the point of Bitcoin is to protect your wealth, over being able to transact easily. we already have plenty of currencies. But to understand this, there are many points that need to be made and clarified:

people go on about how Satoshi said e-cash,so we must make Bitcoin as convenient as Fiat at least because Satoshi said we must be e-cash. (funny, appeal to authority is the foundation of the fiat system)

but turns out, we discovered that Money is more important than Currency

Money must be scarce, and hold its value. What you think of as value, is simply market value, or the price. That is only one aspect of value.

Because the Fiat regime has abstracted/financialized everything, we can only understand value through the price of an asset, rather than how well it meets the needs society has for it, or doesn't. Is this thing actually of use to anybody in any meaningful way?

This creates a circular loop where no matter what asset you are talking about, its all priced in fiat, thus its market value is subject to large volatility, as there is no real peg but pure speculation. There is nothing of actual substance that either party would stand to lose, that a loan at a low cheap interest rate cant fix.

Value is subjective (otherwise Communism, with its obsession with value in labor would be right), but only to an extent. The cryptography intellectual Nick Szabo wrote a monumental piece on the topic called Shelling Out: The Origins of Money

TLDR, money arises in humans from their biological drive to hoard and collect rare items, thus accumulating value, to then be stored and/or exchanged with other humans. Money is the technology that allowed humans to begin to cooperate and build society. humans understand value innately, before central authority even existed

it proves why proof of work isnt a total waste, and how proof of work is how humans have verified not just money, but value itself, from time immemorial.

This point is made indirectly, but when you see how much time our ancestors "wasted" in making trinkets, necklaces from bone vs basic fucking survival, you begin to understand how deep in our biology money, and the concept of value are.

To tie it all in: how much demand would there be in a free market for all these complex derivative options, vs an asset that actually produces? How much value does one instinctively see in a paper contract for a fiat currency swap, a swap between two currencies intrinsically worthless? Yet 97% of market activity is pure speculation in all markets, not just crypto space.

Ironically, because Bitcoin is an asset you can actually own, you can argue that Bitcoin trading in general is far less speculation than the entire futures market: try telling that to a traditional economist :D

This is because we live in a fiat market, where value is, to a large extent, dictated by decree and law. This essentially gaslights you into thinking that value is pretty much only reflected in the price of an asset.

Because things are priced in fiat, you are now manipulated into thinking the currency has value, you now conflated currency and money. It permeates your language, your thoughts, and traps you from being an economically free individual.

Fiat Currencies work pretty well AS A CURRENCY, BUT NOT AS A MONEY AND THIS IS DONE BY DESIGN, thus we don't really need currency as badly as we need currency that holds its value first and foremost: ie money.

That's why you cannot really get Bitcoin from a cozy first world perspective, where the dif between money and currency is made irrelevant, by how golden our cages are in the first world.