This morning, the much-anticipated "Bitcoin ETF" was finally approved in the United States. When the words "BITCOIN ETF APPROVED" were displayed on the big screen, everyone was like this:
Maybe many people who are not in the cryptocurrency circle have no feelings about this, or even think that Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, a scam, and a criminal thing. But as its most important asset and something I have watched grow over the past 10 years, I still feel a lot of emotion about it.
Bitcoin originated in 2009, when a man named Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper describing a "peer-to-peer value transfer system" that relied on cryptography and mathematics to start this massive decentralized social experiment. It was born in 2009, and it has its own special historical background. As we all know, 2008 was a global economic crisis, and people experienced bankruptcies, excessive issuance of fiat currencies, and other events. This gave Bitcoin the best timing and location at the moment it was born.
With anything, first its own flaws grow bigger and bigger, until they are too big to be ignored, and then others will have the opportunity to take advantage of it. If the public does not expect to reform the existing centralized financial system, then Bitcoin will not be able to grow from the beginning, because no one will read Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper.
According to Bitcoin, the transfer of value between people does not require a center. This statement is very subversive. Normally, you must have a trusted settlement center, that is, you have to trust the person who keeps accounts. For example, if you transfer money to your friend, the balance in your bank card decreases, and the balance in your friend's bank card increases, then you must trust that the bank center will not randomly erase your zeros - this is the necessity of the center, and it is also the settlement system we have been familiar with since childhood.
But sometimes think about it, do we really trust banks? We just have no choice. They are more credible than Zhang San and Li Si, right? But we have also seen incidents in village banks, where many depositors' money disappeared, such as being misappropriated by the bank president, forged by tellers or loan officers, etc. The bank refused to admit the debt and cheated you out of 100 million yuan. It said that it would just fire this employee and let him go to jail. What can you do? This is the cost of trust.
What's more, the biggest problem with fiat currency is that it can be legally "stolen". Do you know how much money the country has printed? You don't know, but you say you have data? But what you see is what the Statistics Bureau lets you see. If you don't have power, you won't know the truth, understand? The country can print countless money and give it to the industries it wants to subsidize and the people it wants to subsidize. However, after these industries, companies, and people receive the corresponding money, how they use it is not up to the country to decide. According to my observation, most of this money has become the upstream of the inflation chain, that is, it has enriched a small number of people, and the people at the bottom of the chain can only watch their money being diluted.
Do you know how exaggerated it is? People who do research projects in various universities in our country don’t even understand the concept, but they start to make up stories to cheat money. This is the case in a famous university I know. The tutors and students don’t know anything at all, but they dare to make up stories and cheat. How do I know they don’t know? Because that happens to be the field I know best. Ironically, their research projects are also involved in the formulation of national policies... Let me give you another example. One of the bosses in our private board of directors is the chairman of a state-owned enterprise. The leader asked her to think of a research project with a subsidy of hundreds of millions of yuan in 2 hours. It doesn’t matter whether it passes or not, just report it first, what if she gets the money?
This is called "stealing money" and "spending money recklessly". Whose money is being spent? Of course, it is the people's money.
Do you know why the negative cycle of plummeting housing prices cannot be stopped? Its underlying logic is that housing prices are "provided" by the income of ordinary people in the next few decades, and this money is transferred to local governments through land costs and taxes. If the local government, as the center, can use this money well, allowing everyone to create greater value and have higher salaries, the entire system will move towards a positive cycle; if it does not use this money well, the system will move towards a negative cycle because it has been stealing money from this node - has it now proved its redundancy in the system? It is because it is there, so the value created by the system is not as much as the part stolen and wasted by it.
After being pua for so many years, everyone suddenly remembered that when I originally traded precious metals, it seemed that there was no need for a central authority to record and settle accounts. It was just a matter of handing over money and handing over goods. Why must someone record accounts when transferring value? No one has stipulated the legal status of precious metals. Based on its own characteristics, everyone voluntarily chooses it as a trading medium. Isn't it good? So can we simulate something on the Internet that has the characteristics of gold but exceeds the characteristics of gold, and we don't need to trust the person who records the accounts and worry about him doing evil?
This thinking has actually been going on all the time, and there have always been some half-baked products. Finally, during that period of "public discontent", Bitcoin appeared. It is a value transmission system with a limited total amount, a shared ledger by everyone in the world, and it is completely open and transparent. The ledger is maintained by thousands of people, and no one can tamper with the data.
Therefore, the emergence of Bitcoin can be said to be inevitable. If it is not Bitcoin, there will be other currencies. If it is not 2009, it will be 2019. In essence, the drawbacks of the legal currency system and the greed of certain powers have reached a certain level, causing enough bad consequences, and people will automatically think about and study it.
This is not to say that Bitcoin can replace the legal tender system, but it puts some pressure on the legal tender system and gives people some inspiration, that is, whether it is currency or assets, it has always been based on people's consensus rather than power. If you do not do well and are too greedy, people will have their own currency consensus and have their own assets that are more suitable as value storage targets.
Some people say that Bitcoin cannot be used to buy things? It still needs to be converted into legal currency to buy things, right? You are wrong. There are too many merchants that accept Bitcoin payments. It is because you always live in China. In fact, there were many merchants in China that supported Bitcoin payments. The mall I opened about 7 years ago supported Bitcoin payments, but it was later stopped. You have to understand that Bitcoin can be used to buy things. It is just that some places do not allow it. But the world is big, you know, the wheel of history is rolling forward, and no government can really affect the long-term development of Bitcoin. It has experienced more than 10 years and countless life and death, but it has become more and more resilient.
Currently, the governments with the largest Bitcoin reserves in the world are the U.S. and Chinese governments, but the next big players will not only be governments. The first approval of the Bitcoin ETF in the United States is a landmark event, which means that Bitcoin has completely entered the mainstream of society from a niche investment product. What is visible next is that Wall Street fund managers will flock to help their high-net-worth clients allocate some Bitcoin, and there will even be many foundations that use "allocating some Bitcoin" as their selling point. After the U.S. Bitcoin ETF boom, it may be the Ethereum ETF, and the Bitcoin ETF in other developed countries. This is an unstoppable trend.
We all know that buying gold in troubled times is a good idea. But I once said in a live broadcast that gold has a certain hedging effect, but its overall share as a safe-haven asset is actually decreasing. Its biggest rival is Bitcoin. Because it has all the benefits of gold and does it better, but gold does not have many of the benefits that gold has. If gold represents the best asset in the past thousands of years, then Bitcoin represents the future.
