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Introduction to Bitcoin

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
252 Seiten
Englisch
Konsensus Networkerschienen am14.03.2024
'Hilbay's book is a blueprint for a different kind of future, where the world operates on one digital currency standard, beyond the control of any one country or alliance of countries, where the most valuable and technologically advanced money is something that will be accessible to anyone: a refugee or a billionaire, equally. Where foreign lenders and dictators cannot simply 'devalue' a local currency to crack the whip on local workers, or where an empire cannot force their currency to be the only one that energy producers accept. If everyone is on the same footing, Hilbay explains, then the world gets a whole lot more equal.' - Alex Gladstein, Human Rights Foundation This book is about money, not making money. It is about how money arises and how it is engineered. For the most part, it is a historical survey of the characteristics of money and why these have practical consequences for all of us. The fundamental thesis of this book is that Bitcoin exhibits many of the traditional characteristics of sound money as well as the attributes of what sound money ought to be, considering the current state of our civilization and the problems humanity confronts. Simply put, it is the best form of money humans have ever had. This changes everything.

Florin T. Hilbay holds a degree in economics from the University of Santo Tomas, and in law from the University of the Philippines. He taught constitutional law and philosophy of law in the University of the Philippines and is the author of Unplugging the Constitution (2009). At 40, he was appointed Solicitor General of the Philippines. As Solgen, he represented the country in the arbitration over the West Philippine Sea in Philippines vs. China. He now serves as Dean of the College of Law of Silliman University, where he teaches a course on Money and State.mehr

Produkt

Klappentext'Hilbay's book is a blueprint for a different kind of future, where the world operates on one digital currency standard, beyond the control of any one country or alliance of countries, where the most valuable and technologically advanced money is something that will be accessible to anyone: a refugee or a billionaire, equally. Where foreign lenders and dictators cannot simply 'devalue' a local currency to crack the whip on local workers, or where an empire cannot force their currency to be the only one that energy producers accept. If everyone is on the same footing, Hilbay explains, then the world gets a whole lot more equal.' - Alex Gladstein, Human Rights Foundation This book is about money, not making money. It is about how money arises and how it is engineered. For the most part, it is a historical survey of the characteristics of money and why these have practical consequences for all of us. The fundamental thesis of this book is that Bitcoin exhibits many of the traditional characteristics of sound money as well as the attributes of what sound money ought to be, considering the current state of our civilization and the problems humanity confronts. Simply put, it is the best form of money humans have ever had. This changes everything.

Florin T. Hilbay holds a degree in economics from the University of Santo Tomas, and in law from the University of the Philippines. He taught constitutional law and philosophy of law in the University of the Philippines and is the author of Unplugging the Constitution (2009). At 40, he was appointed Solicitor General of the Philippines. As Solgen, he represented the country in the arbitration over the West Philippine Sea in Philippines vs. China. He now serves as Dean of the College of Law of Silliman University, where he teaches a course on Money and State.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9789916723845
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum14.03.2024
Seiten252 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse919 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14166707
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

INTRODUCTION


Bitcoin Is Evil. -Paul Krugman (Nobel Prize in Economics)

Remember, all I´m offering is the truth. -Morpheus

You must unlearn what you have learned. -Yoda


The monetary network that is Bitcoin has been online since 2009 and yet so few have a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of what it is and what it does. A human rights advocate complains, [n]early everyone has heard about Bitcoin, but only a tiny few are aware of the deep impact the digital currency is having around the world. This is both frustrating and unfortunate, though understandable. Several reasons account for it.

First, despite its phenomenal growth, its civilizational importance, and the problems it solves, its network is still very young. Gold has been around for thousands of years and the current fiat monetary system with the United States dollar as global reserve asset is already almost a hundred years old. Bitcoin, in contrast, is only more than a decade old. It´s just about ready to disrupt the incumbents.

Second, anyone who claims to fully understand Bitcoin will soon be humbled. Bitcoin is a beast that´s difficult to tame- it is a monster of an intellectual and emotional challenge, a child of many disciplines. Not only does it require hundreds of hours of dedicated focus to learn what´s new; it also demands that we unlearn not a few important things about the world, some of which we hold dearly and consider crucial to our worldview. University education is not immune to this agnostic wrecking ball. A wholesale destroyer of models, it eats away at some fundamental assumptions.

It is inherently inter-disciplinary-learning the hows and whys of Bitcoin is a rabbit hole of an adventure full of long tunnels that just don´t seem to end. To the open minded, it offers a rewarding dance with ideas; to the strong-willed, it´s multiple gunshots to the head and heart.

Third, Bitcoin has been lumped together with so-called altcoins as part of an industry of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin´s virtues are often falsely co-opted by the latter, while the latter´s erring ways are sometimes sadly attributed to the former. This should be expected for a technology that creates massive value, but it is dangerous not least because individuals new to the space become vulnerable to rug pulls and scams. Only time and sustained education can remedy this.

Fourth, in a sense, Bitcoin is a victim of its own phenomenal growth. That it has grown from a speculative bet on a niche project of a few computer geeks to a globally traded asset worth several hundred billion (even reaching a trillion in 2021) dollars in fourteen years also means that many of the new entrants to the space become mere traders and speculators, attracted almost solely by the price action. Many come and go as the bull and bear cycles wax and wane. This, again, is understandable. Nonetheless, its astounding success can easily distract people from taking the deep dive and understanding why Bitcoin has grown in value in the first place, and why many disregard bitcoiners´ constant reminder that the more interesting thing about Bitcoin is not its price. Bitcoin, the network, is so much more than its tradable token, bitcoin.

Fifth, many believe that Bitcoin cannot be understood if one is not a programmer or a mathematician. This isn´t true. While Bitcoin is written in computer language, it´s still fundamentally meant to solve practical and familiar human concerns related to money and power. On the one hand, it is a revolutionary technology about how human beings can store and transfer value among themselves, and across time and space. On the other hand, it most certainly invites us to a transformative meditation about the nature of power and how humans and institutions should interact with it. In short, Bitcoin is about what everybody knows is important-money-even if they have little idea about its history and the technology behind it. Or, as John Oliver put it more eloquently, Bitcoin is everything you don´t understand about money combined with everything you don´t understand about computers.

Nonetheless, the problems Bitcoin identifies and the solution it offers can be understood well enough with concepts and analogies that explain the code behind the technology. While there´s a steep learning curve and some of the terms are new and a few of the concepts are counter-intuitive, those who invest the necessary time to understand Bitcoin can make a reasonable judgment that it is the real deal-it is working and its promise is being fulfilled-and that its potential impact on all of us is immensely positive and awe-inspiring. It deserves to be understood. We deserve to understand it, for our own sake.

There will come a time when Bitcoin need no longer be explained as the technology matures and becomes more familiar, as more applications and use-cases are built on top of it, and as the next generation of users is simply born into its ecosystem, in much the same way nobody today needs to read a book to use the internet, email, or smartphones. Soon enough, it will become simultaneously user-friendly, widely adopted, and indispensable for all, as it is now for many in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and many others ravaged by inflation or monetary repression. For now, let us be thankful we still get to talk about the plumbing and the wiring of the system as it is being built. We are this early.

The aim of this book is to introduce some of the facets of Bitcoin for anyone curious enough about this remarkable invention/discovery. While the book is an introduction, it seeks to offer sufficiently comprehensive snapshots of the big picture at various levels of granularity. The goal is to help the reader understand what an open, permissionless, peer-to-peer, immutable, censorship-resistant, decentralized, global, digital money and payments system it is and why it matters to every human being today and in the future. It also seeks to be a guide for those intellectually and emotionally ready for the journey. I hope that along the way readers will understand why bitcoiners are so excited and hopeful about this technology, why they believe we´re at the cusp of a transformative revolution, and why many of them are willing to spend time to introduce others to it even at the risk of being pedantic.

Today, there is a growing revival of the debate over sound money, the role of banks, currencies, their relationship with the state, and how they affect people´s lives. To be sure, there was a time when this debate was the stuff of mainstream politics. Somewhere along the way, this conversation was forgotten, partly because of the remarkable growth years and the blinding asset inflation of the 20th and 21st centuries, and partly because those in charge have little incentive to let citizens know how hotdogs are made. But the ground is already shaking beneath our feet, people are feeling the pain of constantly declining real wages and/or soaring inflation, and widening inequality has become ever more apparent.

This conversation needs to happen again not because it is a cute intellectual adventure but because the pains of the stomach are inevitably felt by both the heart and mind. It is crucial for people to know that there is a fundamental cause to that pain and that nagging sense of unfairness, and they need to understand that cause. It is also important to let people know that there is already a solution: that bitcoin fixes this, as your bitcoiner friend will often insist.

When the operating system of your computer starts freezing or crashing more and more often, maybe it is time to start thinking of an update. Or maybe, an upgrade to a new system. If we think of the monetary system as a transmission mechanism (which, rather than transmitting electricity or messages, instead sends information in the form of value), or an engineered solution to the problem of transferring value across space and time and realizes that it now has a lot of problems (an inflation bug, centralization tendency, etc.), it gets easier to understand why an upgrade may be necessary. After all, money is the oldest social network on Earth.

No single book can explain Bitcoin. Almost like a hydra, the more puzzles you slay, the more puzzles appear. Those who start seeking answers to the question what is bitcoin? will almost certainly soon hear an echo of the question what is the matrix? It is, however, possible to provide the proper context about the many interesting problems it solves, an introduction to its colorful history, a reflection on the features of this metasubject, and point to a few solutions already built and some of the directions in which Bitcoin is heading. The reader can then choose his own adventure, one which bitcoiners have found meaningful in many ways. This is because Bitcoin is a framework for understanding the world, with explanatory power that just keeps on giving. It is a source of deep insights about energy, people, power, history, politics, justice, and so much more. Its potential to empower citizens all over the world against institutional and institutionalized abuse is a well of remarkable depth. Those who think Bitcoin is just about money are in for a surprise.

The organization of this book is fairly straightforward, beginning with recognizable issues with the current monetary order. Bitcoin is not a solution looking for a problem, but a solution to specific problems. It is therefore best to let the reader immediately know that we´re...
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Autor

Florin T. Hilbay holds a degree in economics from the University of Santo Tomas, and in law from the University of the Philippines. He taught constitutional law and philosophy of law in the University of the Philippines and is the author of Unplugging the Constitution (2009). At 40, he was appointed Solicitor General of the Philippines. As Solgen, he represented the country in the arbitration over the West Philippine Sea in Philippines vs. China. He now serves as Dean of the College of Law of Silliman University, where he teaches a course on Money and State.
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Hilbay, Florin