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But I repost here:
The *Real* Advantages of Bitcoin
Compared to fiat currencies, Bitcoins have absolutely astounding advantages. Most people only list the “PC” advantages, but for this blog, I’m going to list what I believe are the REAL advantages, despite what the public may think about them. Here they are, in order from most to least important (in my opinion):
#1 – Immune to Litigation
This is the #1 advantage of Bitcoin in my book. Anyone who has been sued, or has been threatened legally, knows that your money and property are NOT SAFE in a world owned by lawyers. You could work your entire life and have all your savings wiped out by a single bad actor in our true criminal “justice” system.
With Bitcoin, you can store of wealth in a veil of secrecy through the full power of modern cryptography, making a large portion of your property immune to confiscation by the lawyers. Bitcoin will make litigation vastly weaker as a tool of oppression and inequality. No longer can a bad wife or husband take your retirement savings in a divorce settlement… and so on and so forth.
#2 – Borderless
When I say “borderless” when speaking of Bitcoin, I mean so in the most powerful way: Bitcoins can be secretly transported anywhere in the world instantly for free. Contrast this with gold or fiat money, which is almost impossible to get out of the country incognito.
Ever tried walking through customs with massive piles of cash or gold bars? Somehow I doubt it’s going to work. With Bitcoin, however, you can walk through the metal detector and get a full pat down etc., and walk right to your gate without hassle, despite having millions of dollars of Bitcoins on your truecrypt-protected flash drive – it’s that easy.
While in the past difficult and expensive international diversification was absolutely essential for anyone serious about keeping their wealth and themselves safe from a potentially oppressive government at home, Bitcoin is the ultimate offshore bank, literally bringing ultra-cheap international diversification to the masses right in their own living rooms!
#3 – No Inflation
Inflation is the great wealth tax, the invisible arm of government that can reach into your pocket and steal any day or night, without your direct knowledge, simply by devaluing the currency. You may feel you’re protected by investing in “hard assets” such as gold, but in reality, those assets are going to be taxed relative to the base monetary unit, which is usually being debased. In other words, although the gold price may keep up with inflation, you are forced to pay a phantom capital gains on it — so it doesn’t really keep up, and that’s not even taking into account storage fees.
Bitcoin, both due to its anonymous nature and hard cap in coin issuance, is much more practical for protecting large amounts of wealth from the ravages of inflation than any other medium. One could argue gold can do this if you store it yourself and sell it secretly for cash when you wish to spend it, it’s very hard to do this for many obvious reasons (acid tests, divisibility difficulty, transportation, etc.), and neigh impossible for very large sums.
Finally, Bitcoin may even prove to have some resistance from the adoption of fractional reserve banking, since one of the main purposes of banking (making it easy to store and transport wealth) has been taken over by the Bitcoin protocol, so it probably means less capital available for FRB and thus less overall credit expansion in the Bitcoin market (this would also mean a more stable Bitcoin-based economy… but we’re getting off track here..
)#4 – No taxes or regulatory overhead
Think of all the sky-high costs associated with doing business in a fiat money system: income taxes, payroll taxes, regulatory costs, compliance personnel, legal fees, accountant fees, estate taxes, gift taxes, sales taxes.. the list literally goes on and on and on. Have you ever thought of what happens to a dollar as it circulates through the economy? Every time a transaction happens, the government gets a big piece of that dollar — so it doesn’t take very many transactions for that dollar to make it way completely back to the government.
Taxes and regulatory bodies are like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking wealth from productive people and giving it out to parasites. Productive people are impoverished while big bankers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and lazy government employees live high off the hog. It means less money to build out productive capital infrastructure, less people doing real productive work, less money available for legitimate charity, and lower standards of living for everyone. Since Bitcoin is anonymous, taxes suddenly become voluntary — and thus, a better world.
#5 – Freedom to spend your own damn money!
What do Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and pretty much all the big banks have in common? They all block you from giving donations to WikiLeaks! Now, whether you approve of WikiLeaks or not is a personal decision ( you can probably guess that I love them
), but that’s the point — it’s YOUR choice. By restricting what you can spend your money on, the current financial system is overriding your decisions and controlling you. Use Bitcoin, and spend your money freely.#6 – Dead Simple
This may seem to be an odd point to a non-techie, since Bitcoin is so technologically advanced and “complicated”! Well, this may be true in some ways, but honestly, how many accounts do you have with the government’s fiat system just to take advantage of tax breaks? An IRA, a Roth IRA, a 401K, a 509 plan, an HSA account… and you can only contribute so much to blah blah…, and with this plan you cannot invest in blah blah blah. Honestly, Bitcoin is dead simple. Buy Bitcoins, they’re yours, spend them when and if you wish.
No Rules.
