Then this spring I got bored on a Sunday and actually tried to fact-check him. Not to agree with him to prove him wrong, if I\u2019m being honest. That backfired a\u00a0little.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what I found, minus the cult\u00a0stuff.<\/p>\n
It started as a \u201cwe\u2019re mad at the banks\u201d\u00a0project<\/strong><\/p>\n October 2008. Lehman Brothers just imploded, the government\u2019s bailing out the same banks that caused the mess, and regular people are watching their retirement accounts get gutted while nobody responsible loses their job. That\u2019s literally the month Bitcoin\u2019s whitepaper dropped.<\/p>\n The guy (or group, nobody actually knows\u200a\u2014\u200athe name \u201cSatoshi Nakamoto\u201d is almost certainly fake) wasn\u2019t trying to build a get-rich scheme. He was trying to build money that didn\u2019t need a bank\u2019s permission to move, and that no single entity could just\u2026 make more of whenever they felt like\u00a0it.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a hard cap. 21 million coins. Forever. My cousin brought this up probably four times before I actually understood why it mattered\u200a\u2014\u200ait\u2019s not a marketing number, it\u2019s baked into the code, and changing it would require basically the entire global network of Bitcoin users agreeing to rewrite the rules. Which isn\u2019t happening.<\/p>\n Image Generated by\u00a0Chatgpt<\/p>\n The \u201chalving\u201d thing that I genuinely didn\u2019t get for\u00a0months<\/strong><\/p>\n Okay, this part actually took me a\u00a0while.<\/p>\n Every four years-ish, the reward for mining a Bitcoin block gets cut in half. Automatically. Nobody votes on it, no CEO signs off; it\u2019s just scheduled into the software from the very first line of code back in 2009. The last one happened in April\u00a02024.<\/p>\n Look at price charts after previous halvings (2012, 2016, 2020), and there\u2019s a pattern: prices tend to climb in the following year or two. Is that guaranteed to happen again? No. Absolutely not. But it\u2019s not some conspiracy theory either; it\u2019s just supply shrinking against demand that hasn\u2019t shrunk, which is like, econ\u00a0101.<\/p>\n The part that actually got my attention<\/strong><\/p>\n January 2024. The SEC approves spot Bitcoin\u00a0ETFs.<\/p>\n I had to look up what that even meant. Basically\u200a\u2014\u200ayou can now buy Bitcoin through a normal brokerage account, the same app you\u2019d use to buy Apple stock. No crypto wallet, no \u201cwrite down these 12 random words or lose everything forever\u201d nonsense.<\/p>\n BlackRock runs one of these funds now. BlackRock. The company that manages money for pension funds, insurance companies, literal governments. Billions of dollars went into these funds within months of\u00a0launch.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the moment I stopped being able to write it off as internet monopoly money for people with too much free\u00a0time.<\/p>\n Why some governments straight up hate\u00a0it<\/strong><\/p>\n Nobody really says this part out loud but I\u2019ll say it: Bitcoin isn\u2019t just annoying to banks, it\u2019s annoying to anyone who wants control over\u00a0money.<\/p>\n Governments decide who can move money, how much exists, who gets frozen out of the system. Bitcoin doesn\u2019t ask. You\u2019ve got internet access, you can send it anywhere, to anyone, and no one can stop the transaction from happening.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why some countries have banned mining outright. It\u2019s also why central banks everywhere are scrambling to build their own government-controlled \u201cdigital currencies\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200awhich, ironically, is them trying to build a version of digital money they CAN control, because Bitcoin was specifically designed so they\u00a0can\u2019t.<\/p>\n Make of that what you\u00a0will.<\/p>\n Should you actually buy\u00a0some<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m not your financial advisor and honestly I\u2019d be suspicious of anyone online who confidently tells you yes or no on this. Too many people selling courses, too many people selling coins, too many people with an agenda dressed up as\u00a0advice.<\/p>\n What\u2019s true: Bitcoin has crashed more than 50% several separate times in its history. People have lost real, painful amounts of money panic-selling during those crashes. Other people held through the chaos and made genuinely life-changing money.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re curious, the only rule I\u2019d actually stand behind: don\u2019t put in money you can\u2019t afford to lose. That\u2019s not me being cautious for legal reasons, that\u2019s just\u2026 common sense with anything this volatile.<\/p>\n Where I ended\u00a0up<\/strong><\/p>\n I still think a chunk of crypto Twitter is insufferable. That hasn\u2019t changed. But I stopped thinking Bitcoin itself is dumb, because the \u201cwhy\u201d behind it actually makes sense once you dig past the memes\u200a\u2014\u200ait\u2019s a real attempt at rebuilding who controls money, and it\u2019s still an open question whether it works long-term.<\/p>\n My cousin\u2019s insufferable about being right, by the way. I\u2019m not telling him that\u00a0part.<\/p>\n Not financial advice, just a guy who got bored on a Sunday. Do your own homework before putting real money into anything.<\/em><\/p>\n I Spent a Weekend Trying to Prove Bitcoin Was Dumb. I failed.<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So my cousin won\u2019t shut up about Bitcoin. Every family dinner, same thing. And for years I just nodded and changed the subject because honestly, I thought it was for people who watch too many YouTube videos with thumbnails of rockets and green\u00a0candles. Then this spring I got bored on a Sunday and actually tried […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":230888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230887"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=230887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/230888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=230887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=230887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=230887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}