It’s time to talk about the bitcoin (BTC) price again. In the night from Thursday to Friday, the bitcoin price made a huge shift. For many newcomers, these kinds of moments often cause great panic and uncertainty. Is it done with bitcoin? Even Arjen Lubach has devoted part of his show to it this week. Lubach threw a fragment into the air with the title “And now crypto is over”, only to announce the end of bitcoin with some superficial arguments. I agree with him that “crypto” is nonsense, but bitcoin does have value in my opinion.
Well, the US Federal Reserve is busy raising interest rates considerably, all financial markets are in their hole, the bitcoin price has been hit hard and Arjen Lubach is attempting to declare bitcoin dead. The people who have been around for a while are now used to this chaos and know how to distinguish the signal from the noise. All the nonsense that mankind produces is generally noise and the cheerful ticking of the Bitcoin blockchain is the signal.
Bitcoin has never changed
The nice thing about bitcoin is that it has never fundamentally changed in its entire history. This means that with the software that Satoshi Nakamoto launched more than 13 years ago, you can still download and verify the entire transaction history. The world has changed a lot in 13 years, but bitcoin is still exactly the same. That is precisely the power of bitcoin. It is a form of money that always stays the same.
Nobody can change the maximum of 21 million units and the rules within the network are the same for everyone. That has been the case for 13 years and that is never going to change. In a world where one crazy event follows another, something about the steadfastness of bitcoin is extremely valuable in my view. Bitcoin is for me the means where I keep my savings in peace. The bitcoin price can fluctuate wildly in the short term, but I am sure that my percentage of the pie will never fall due to inflation. The short term price is a distraction and part of the noise. It’s about the signal, the tapping of the blockchain.
Get started with bitcoin
There have been during the past bull run a lot of new people have arrived who are probably a bit shocked by the price trend. That is unfortunately part of it. My advice is to get started with Bitcoin. Listen to podcasts, learn about monetary history, run your own node, play around with the Lightning Network and learn how Bitcoin works.
As soon as you see that Bitcoin is an impregnable fortress, those fluctuations in the price in the short term don’t do you much anymore. Then you can also let figures like Arjen Lubach talk quietly, because he obviously doesn’t have much knowledge about the subject. Try explaining to someone in Argentina or Turkey that it’s a bad idea to strip the government of the monopoly on the money press. For most figures it is easy to shout from their Western bubble in which we have the luxury of a relatively stable currency. Although the cracks in the purchasing power of our money are also becoming increasingly painful. In fact, it’s idiotic that we have to argue that it would be a good idea to have a form of money where no one has a monopoly on the money press. Anyway, we can see from the current price that a large part of the world does not yet understand bitcoin. I remain calm, only when the blockchain stops working will I start to worry.