This post is a text version of a video I recorded in 2025. This is a work-in-progress for the next version of the video— there are differences in this text below.
What is Bitcoin and why should I care? This is me in 2014 trying to retrieve some Bitcoin that I that I buried three to four weeks prior. At the time of burial, the Bitcoin was worth $4. The price of the Bitcoin rose to about $400, prompting the search. Had I left the Bitcoin in a geocache until today, the Bitcoin would be worth $4,000.
Why is Bitcoin worth so much? We’ll come back to that. But first, real talk. This is the laundromat I go to once a week. I overhear stories from people working hard, two, three jobs, yet unable to afford basic necessities like health care for their aging parents or getting their car fixed.
Since 2012, over 1 million Americans have died from drug overdose. Many people my age are convinced they will never own a home. We are seeing divorces and the breakdown of the family unit. What’s wrong with society? It all comes back to money.
Addiction rates are higher in lower socioeconomic populations. Real estate has become one of the few safe havens for people with money to preserve their wealth over time. The number one reason for divorce is finances. The same amount of dollars buys you fewer groceries than it did the year before. This is a design feature of the US dollar.
Since 1971, dollars have been backed by nothing. The dollars we have are is devalued because they’re able to make more of it no matter what. Like endlessly forever and ever and ever. This brings us to the question, what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a computer security protocol for recording ownership and trust on a peer-to-peer basis.
I pick a secret number between zero and infinity. If you can guess my number, you get complete control of all my data and all my money. Who would like to guess my number? Wrong. You’ll never guess it because there are so many numbers.
There are more numbers than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on all the planets in the universe. Blockchain, as it’s called, is a ledger where every transaction depends on the chain of transactions that came before it. It is implausible to create your own chain where you can make your own rules. If you were to try to make your own chain where you say Chris owns 1 million bitcoins, the network can tell and simply rejects your chain. Bitcoin doesn’t care who I am.
I can transact using Bitcoin as easily as I can transact using cash. Nobody can freeze my Bitcoin. Nobody can censor me. No nation state can block me. Bitcoin is a language that communicates value.
I can use Bitcoin to save my purchasing power. I can use Bitcoin to buy goods and services. I can measure my wealth in Satoshi’s, a small unit of Bitcoin. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin produced. Nobody can print more.
Bitcoin is more scarce than diamonds, more scarce than gold. This trait is essential for sound money that keeps its value over time. I consume energy going to work producing goods and services. In exchange for the time and energy spent, I earn money. Bitcoin is the same way, requiring energy to be spent in order to claim the reward.
That’s what money is. This doesn’t fit on one slide. Bitcoin hands-on. There’s the book references. Um, if you want to try Bitcoin for yourself, I recommend Bitcoin safe for desktop use or on mobile Phoenix wallet.
If you want to get super secure and generate your private keys on a device that’s very difficult to be hacked, uh, cold card is nice. If you want insurance and help with a custody program, um, Ankorwatch is good. And, uh, prieve.com is a site I use to quickly convert the price. But nowadays we don’t use BTC as the denomination. We use Satoshi’s.
So what’s the point? Why am I making this presentation? I have an idea to start a Bitcoin meetup group in Spokane Valley, Washington. The nearest Bitcoin group is in North Idaho, which is a 2-hour bicycle ride, and I don’t want to do that and be all sweaty when I arrive to the Bitcoin meetup. So, I was thinking, oh, I could start a meetup here in Spokane Valley at the library or somewhere.
What would we do for the first meetup? I guess I would show a presentation and maybe introduce Bitcoin to people who are interested, maybe have heard about Bitcoin, but haven’t tried it or have heard about it and are wondering why it’s still around. Isn’t this like a a POGs type situation, a fad that comes and goes? No, I don’t think so. So, I think Bitcoin is a technological breakthrough, kind of like a a new technology unlocked on the RTS tech tree and it’s here to stay and we’re seeing tons of copycats and and it’s kind of like we’re in a bubble, but the bubble’s going to burst and we’re going to be left with the winners and I think the winner is going to be Bitcoin.
Look at this Soft War, a novel theory on power projection and the national strategic significance of Bitcoin by Jason Lowry. This book is hard to find. 2023. This is a this is a thesis. The thesis being Bitcoin is warfare.
Bitcoin is natural law extended to cyberspace, which is not something we’ve had before. You can wage war online for super cheap. And how do you def how do you defend against how do you defend against a botnet when compute power is super cheap? And one of the ways is you make the compute very expensive. You make the attack very expensive and Bitcoin kind of enables that.
I haven’t read the book all the way through, but I I’ve watched the podcast with Jason Lowry. My thoughts are kind of all over the place right now. So, this is very much a work in progress presentation. I’d love to hear your feedback, especially negative feedback, things that aren’t great and things that could be improved. Yeah, this is just something I’m working on.
And uh thanks for watching. Have a great day.
tl;dr: Bitcoin is money that cannot be printed