Bitcoin – An exciting money [Part 2]

You probably missed out on the first part of this series, catch up here. And if you are fantasizing about the feeling of using Bitcoin as a legal tender in your country, just know you’re not alone in that feeling. Well; the wait might be brief. Bitcoin is tearing up the place and a lot of governments are probably considering taking the same route as El Salvador. Nayib and his team are setting the pace and you love to see it!

Getting other nations to adopt Bitcoin like the Central American nation won’t be an easy one. But if we got to where we are currently, then going further is easier. The exciting money will win, or something close to that…at least.

Fast, cheap, convenient…the previous part reflected on these, if you’ve recently performed a Bitcoin transaction then you must have felt at least one of these. If you used the lightning network, then you certainly felt the three!

Actually, Bitcoin is exciting for more reasons than these…

Bitcoin unifies the world, the users; to be precise. Imagine a world where a currency like Bitcoin reigns supreme. ‘One currency to rule them all’. Bitcoin flaunts generality as another huge flex. The variation in the value and logic between different currencies used worldwide is a huge source of arguments and confusion. Exchange rates vary, and what a currency is worth relative to another currency changes almost every hour. The logic behind these variations is the principal source of misunderstanding.

A nation’s currency is said to reflect its economic and political success, but sometimes the latter prevails and economically stronger nations’ currency could easily trail behind a nation with obviously weaker economy. Political tussles presiding over the financial system are a common cause of international rifts. That’s where Bitcoin comes in…

Countries adopting Bitcoin can forget about having to decide the exchange rates and if these rates are actually deserved, this could save a lot of resources and misunderstandings.

In reality, fiat travels a longer distance than you’d ever think. Beyond the boundaries of ‘buy and sell’; money is used for a whole lot of other kinds of settlements, legal and otherwise. For a piece of paper with an intrinsic value that can be held by anyone at any time and running on a covert technology that practically prevents you from ‘taking a look’; fiat is far from transparent.

I’d frequently wonder how the treasury handles the taxes and how the budget is disbursed, a thought certainly shared with many more people. On a national level and lower, tracing the movement of money and how much is held by individuals and organizations at a given time could help a lot. Forensics apart, a better economic decision could be made if everyone knew exactly how much the other is worth. You’d argue against this utility but it comes in handy when it does. But then, this is impossible with fiat.

A Bitcoin transaction doesn’t only show the amount transacted, it also carries the accounts involved and every detail of the transaction. This transaction is not only visible to anyone with the hash but the details of the preceding transaction could be easily traced, as well as the details of the accounts involved. Cryptocurrency transactions are transparent in this way.

A currency that gives handy tools for proper verifications and authentication is an exciting one; more exciting than fiat. A feature many would detest, for obvious reasons. But yeah, Bitcoin gives you that…if you need it. It’s amazing.

Remember the scenes from the 2014 movie; ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’? I’ve lost memories of most of them. However, I still remember the scene where a dollar bill was put up as a wager for a shooting challenge.

‘Take your hat off boy, that’s a dollar bill!’ The excitement, the respect, it was a whole dollar bill! Fast forward to our contemporary society, dollar notes and every other fiat note come nowhere close to commanding such a level of value and respect anymore.

With years of continuous use by an ever-growing population of people and years of continuous printing by an ever-running printing machine; the value of fiat currencies has suffered so much from inflation and poor economic practices. Staying true to its initial value is a losing war that it is tired of fighting and has given way to a steep-speed fall in value. The United States dollar remains the most widely used medium of comparison to the other fiat currencies, but despite this wide use and good economic backup, its value has been on a free fall over the past couple of decades.

A rather logical stuff, because a higher percentage of dollars in circulation today were printed over the past five years. Other currencies have seen similar irregular inflation as the global economy continues to show instability. You’d agree that the current global economic system is imperfect, personally, I’d say it is almost ‘completely faulty’. Despite surviving for so long, the fiat system and centralized currency issuing scheme haven’t really been so efficient. The parabolic fall in value over the years is a result of these shortcomings.

‘There will ever be twenty-one million Bitcoins’. Bitcoin’s fixed supply is regarded as a fix for inflation. For me, that works. Yes, it does. The global economy is riddled by unregulated inflation. Millions are printed from the tin air, just like the tether machines, lol. Seriously, the tether system depicts the global economic system to a large extent.

Bitcoin cannot grow in total supply, circulating supply may vary as a couple of millions of Bitcoins remain unmined and thousands of Bitcoins are being lost to mismanagement and accidents. Instead of growing in supply; Bitcoin can only grow in value we have seen this play out very well.

Hundreds of words already! But there are even more features and privileges Bitcoin easily hands its users and everyone adopting it as a legal tender. But let’s get to that in the next part. Stay tuned!