bitcoin

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Entourage star who at the top of the Hollywood game pivoted to an integral spiritual path and farmstead

Trump is doing his part to make money great again (by embracing Bitcoin). Preamble:

At this point I've spent a few thousand hours studying Bitcoin. It's a fascinating rabbit hole and a subject I've become passionate about. Here are some of the conclusions I've reached:  

1. Bitcoin is by far the best form of money that humanity has come up with so far. It’s accessible to anyone with an internet connection (truly global and egalitarian), its supply is finite (something we’ve never had before) and it separates money from state, which is really good for a number of reasons. To name just a couple: it curtails governments' ability to wage endless wars (that are, at least in part, funded with the creation of new money/debt) and it prevents them from constantly inflating the money supply and devaluing the value of each unit of the currency (the scourge that we all know as ""inflation"").  
2. Since it's still in the early days of its valuation, Bitcoin's "price" (exchange rate might be more accurate) in the short-term is very unpredicatable and volatile. But in the medium to long-term, it's becoming more and more valuable by orders or magnitude (hundreds of dollars, to thousands, to tens of thousands and soon hundreds of thousands per bitcoin). This makes it an excellent savings vehicle for the long-term. It's also a form of money that is unconfiscatable which can be extremely useful to people living under totalitarian governments, fleeing war zones, etc.
3. Everything else in ""crypto"" besides Bitcoin is at best, a startup with a yet-to-be-proven use case and in most cases more like a scam. This can be quite infuriating to those of us who understand Bitcoin because every single crypto scam only serves to further confuse the mainstream and to make people assume that Bitcoin must also be a scam.

Deep Take:

Trump has just announced that the US government will create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, meaning they will be holding (and likely buying) bitcoin as a strategic asset, similar to how they hold gold, oil, etc. As much as I might dislike Trump and many of his policies, I think this is something that can have incredibly good long-term consequences for the world.  

I do think it’s a shame that since it's Trump doing this, progressives and people on the Left are probably even less likely to adopt Bitcoin. I imagine for most people who don't like Trump it will just seem like another of his crazy/dangerous schemes. I think that's a shame because when used as long-term savings technology, adopting Bitcoin can be enormously empowering financially and in terms of enhancing personal responsibility. I've lived this in my own experience and it's something that I wish for others. 

Nonetheless, I’ve always considered myself more of a progressive and I still took the time to look into Bitcoin, so it's definitely possible. I hope others on the Left can manage to be independently-minded enough to not miss the boat. I also think that only someone as “out there” as Trump could have allowed something as revolutionary and "against the grain" as a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to happen in the US government. Evolution, as they say, works in mysterious ways.

Trump is being advised by Wall Street veterans like Howard Lutnick (Commerce Secretary) and Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary) who understand Bitcoin and its potential future value. And yeah, they're probably mostly in it to make money. Lutnick, by his own admission, owns hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Bitcoin. But that's not the point. The point is that Bitcoin is like a Trojan Horse. I'm pretty sure people in the US government and Wall Street (and subsequent governments around the world who adopt a similar strategy) will do their very best to co-opt Bitcoin. They'll try to take it over and neutralize it as a threat to their monetary monopolies. But Bitcoin has proven its anti-fragility time and again. Not only does it ""refuse to die"" but every time it's been attacked, it comes back stronger and even more resilient. I fully expect that to continue.

And so by taking the first steps towards the US government adopting Bitcoin (and thereby legitimizing it in the eyes of the world), Trump and co. are accelerating the transition from government-backed inflationary currencies to a form of money that can’t be inflated or manipulated by anyone and can be used by everyone. It's going to be a long and messy transition, but I think it's a very, very good thing for humanity's future. As the saying goes: ""even a broken clock is right twice a day." : )

#DeepTakes

Learn about Bitcoin. Your future self will very likely be grateful you did. I think understanding Bitcoin is in everyone’s best interest.

Although everyone’s heard about Bitcoin at this point, I think it’s still mostly misunderstood (and misrepresented).

I also think it’s here to stay, and will become increasingly significant and enmeshed in all our lives in the coming years and decades.

Also, learning about Bitcoin necessarily involves learning about money, and I think the subject of money is also widely misunderstood (to everyone’s detriment).

My experience engaging with the subject of Bitcoin has been extremely enriching. Yes, my net worth has grown because of it, but that doesn’t even seem like the most valuable thing I’ve received. Here are a few things I’ve gotten out of it:

-Holding bitcoin through the euphoria of its highs (in dollar terms) and the despair of its lows, has helped me develop levels of equanimity and resolve that I frankly didn’t know I had in me.

-Learning about things like Austrian economics, sound money, fiscal responsibility and libertarian principles has, I think, made me a more genuinely integral/integrative thinker. It has tempered my natural left-leaning idealism with what feels like a more grounded, common sense simplicity.

-Understanding the story of Bitcoin (and of its pseudonymous creator) has shaken me out of a cynical malaise that I didn’t know I was in, where I was assuming that it was almost impossible to have any significant positive impact on the world.

-Thinking of my savings in bitcoin terms instead of dollars/pesos has made me view my life on a much larger time scale, thinking in years and decades instead of days or months (while still living in the immediacy of the moment).

So, I want to invite you all to learn about Bitcoin. I’ll share a few great places to start below, and I’m down to converse about it anytime (it’s one of my favorite subjects).

I don’t think links work in these posts yet (just sent that feedback) so I’ll just name the resources, you can easily find them by googling:

*The Legendary Treasure of Satoshi Nakamoto by Tomer Strolight. This is a fantastic blog post on Bitcoin’s origin story. It’s philosophical, it’s spiritual, it’s awesome. And it’s now also been adapted into a great short film on YouTube, so just search for it there, it’s on Swan Bitcoin’s channel.

*How Money and Banking Work (and Why They’re Broken Today). Another fantastic short film on YouTube, by financial analyst and author Lyn Alden (who, by the way, I’m pretty sure is operating from integral awareness, though she’s probably never heard of Ken Wilber or integral theory). The short film is a summary of her excellent book Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better.

A couple of awesome introductory books are:

*The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous (if you lean more conservative or libertarian)

*A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin by Jason Maier (if you’re more left-leaning).

*And finally, if you’re ready for the deep dive, there’s a free online college-level course at Saylor Academy that’s called PRDV151: Bitcoin for Everybody. That was the course that REALLY helped me grok this vast subject.

When you do decide to dive in, let me know how it goes!