Bitcoin has already won the Reflect award

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Bitcoin won.

There has never been a more secure, rare, valuable, transportable, decentralized and networked asset in all of human history.

It’s more mobile than gold. He appreciates faster than property. Its supply is fixed unlike stocks and bonds. Its payment network is faster and cheaper than Visa.

Its user base is growing faster than that of the Internet in the 1990s. Its market capitalization exceeds one trillion dollars. It has huge upside potential. It’s already too big to fail.

And yet, skeptics keep repeating the same old FUD. Here’s where I’m going to break it down.

Bitcoin is a rail network in cyberspace

What could be more “green”: going to work or taking the train?

Obviously the train, right?

But what if you factor in the total energy consumption of building a fully functional and connected rail network? It took decades and billions of dollars (money is energy) to create a rail network that anyone can use at a fraction of the cost.

That’s what Bitcoin is: a rail network in cyberspace.

The energy expended to create this massive, secure, decentralized and redundant network is enormous. But only when considered in isolation. When it’s finished – and almost is – it will allow anyone to send money to anyone else anywhere, anytime for almost no charge.

Pure, frictionless monetary energy flowing between parties through Bitcoin rails. Ultra-fast, ultra-secure, ultra-reliable.

Imagine trying to send a gold bar to your friend in Bhutan at 12:45 p.m. on a Sunday.

Bitcoin does it in a second.

Bitcoin unlocks trapped energy

Everything is matter or energy. And humans need energy to survive. We have always converted energy from one form to another.

Take electricity for example. Electricity cannot be carried more than 500 miles – that’s a hard limit. So when human populations flourished in cities throughout history – New York, Bombay, London, Paris, Singapore – electricity had to be transported to them. And because of the strict limit, we built power plants.

We have put so much energy into bringing energy to people.

But there is energy trapped on Earth in totally uninhabitable places – streams, seas, deserts, forests, geysers, ice caps.

What if you could convert the kinetic energy of an isolated waterfall in the middle of an uninhabited part of the Amazon rainforest into electricity? And use it to power a Bitcoin mining platform?

You have now converted natural, renewable energy into an asset. Now multiply that by a billion. There are a billion sources of energy trapped on our planet that we have ignored simply because we do not live nearby.

A fully decentralized, non-intrusive and revolving network of Bitcoin platforms that take flight to create a secure and decentralized network of assets. Powered by Mother Nature.

We don’t need this electricity to power our homes because no one lives there. What if we used it to mine bitcoin instead?

More energy doesn’t mean more Bitcoin

Hey, if Bitcoin is really that precious, why aren’t we using every computer chip on the planet to do one thing, mine bitcoin?

Won’t that mean we can mine more, get paid, and get rich? Isn’t that what we did with the gold rush?

Well, no you can’t. Because of the beauty of the “difficulty setting”.

You see, unlike fiat money which can be invoked out of thin air (remember money is energy. And energy cannot be created or destroyed. Fiat money breaks the First Law of thermodynamics and is therefore false), the number of bitcoins that can be mined is fixed.

When you “mine” you are rewarded for your bitcoin work. You can only mine a fixed number of bitcoins in a particular cycle. And that reward is halved every four years.

As more miners pile up with their supercomputing hardware in this digital gold rush, the Bitcoin algorithm automatically adjusts the difficulty to make it harder to mine the fixed number of bitcoins.

When China banned bitcoin mining a few months ago, the Bitcoin hash rate dropped by 50%. Adjusting the difficulty automatically made it easier for the remaining miners to mine bitcoin.

You see, this is a great function of incentive, demand, supply, and computing power. And it happens autonomously. And it worked like a charm.

Do you think Google would be in trouble if 50% of its computing power stopped overnight?

Bitcoin is the most secure computer network on the planet

Bitcoin has never been hacked for 12 years.

Its greatest weapons: decentralization and redundancy.

Every Bitcoin node has a copy of the blockchain that every other node owns. So if you want to edit or hack the blockchain, you will need to get 51% of the entire global bitcoin mining network to agree with you.

You can’t because they won’t.

You see, mining doesn’t just generate more bitcoin. It also secures the network through decentralization and redundancy. Thus, miners are incentivized to mine bitcoin, and as a by-product, every Bitcoiner wins.

If you want to ban Facebook, you call Zuckerberg. Who are you calling to deactivate Bitcoin?

That’s right. Anybody. Or everyone.

There is so much more FUD that I will demystify in the next few days. It was just a taste.

Bitcoin is a never-ending rabbit hole. It is based on economics, ecology, network theory, computer science, mathematics, cybersecurity and game theory. The more you dig, the more you will find.

It’s a trillion dollar treasure that 99% of the world doesn’t own. But you can. Why wait?

This is a guest article by Akarsh Nalawade. The opinions expressed are entirely theirs and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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