Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

Quote from: https://www.zeit.de/2021/25/bitcoin-kryptowaehrung-politische-bewegung-dezentralisierung-umweltverschmutzung-spekulation/komplettansicht

Bitcoin

The clever gold

Bitcoin is more than just an object of speculation and an environmental problem: it is a new political movement of radical decentralization.

By Ijoma Mangold
June 16, 2021 DIE ZEIT No. 25/2021, June 17, 2021

For his followers, Bitcoin is an answer to many problems in the world. © Javier Jaén for DIE ZEIT; Andreas Arnold / dpa

Bitcoin's greatest strength is its ability to be intellectually fascinating. You could say: it is the opposite of stupid money. It owes itself to a new technology, but it would be nothing without the ideal energy with which it has fixed the world's brightest minds since its invention twelve years ago. It is a politico-technological idea that has what it takes to sweep the banking system away, give people who have never had an account access to a worldwide payment system, challenge the power of central banks to protect against inflation, in short, the To make the world a better place. "Fix the money, fix the world" is what Bitcoin circles confidently say, because the digital currency is more than just a highly volatile speculative object for its followers (it goes without saying that for many it is too). You don't have to believe these commitments to improve the world, but anyone who wants to understand why the idea of Bitcoin is spreading like fire cannot ignore the utopian embers of the new currency.

Usually it is left-wing movements that are committed to world improvement utopias - Bitcoin is not a completely left-wing project. But it is also not a real project, but is neutral to its political interpretation or use. This may be because a new monetary system, comparable to other infrastructures such as the Internet, is too basic to merge into a simple right-left dichotomy.

Perhaps one could put it this way: There is a more left-anarchist and a more right-libertarian camp in the Bitcoin community. The latter hates inflation and refers in his arguments to the economists of the Austrian School, to Hayek and Mises; The former, on the other hand, hates surveillance and invokes the anarchist cypherpunks who, in their famous 1992 manifesto, saw cryptography as the salvation from total surveillance on the Internet. It was in this environment that the idea of digital money first appeared. The two movements do not live side by side, but have learned from each other and found that the synthesis works well. The anarchists began to deal with monetary theory, the libertarians discovered the utopian fighting spirit. As with dynamite, the combination of two different substances creates considerable explosive power.

To understand the extent of this explosive power, one has to look at the blockchain technology on which Bitcoin is based. The Internet has completely turned the world upside down because it was suddenly possible to send information worldwide and in real time. What you could not send digitally up to now, however, was value, vulgo: money. Because the internet is a copier. When I send a vacation photo to a friend, I will send a copy of the picture. The photo stays on my computer. This is not a problem with photos (information), but with money it is. If I sent it to someone and it was really just a copy, it would cause their value to decline immediately. That is why almost all electronic payment methods that the world knew before Bitcoin, from Visa to PayPal, are always mediated by an intermediary, by a third party who keeps records and ensures that the sum disappears from one balance sheet and the other Balance is credited.

But that also means: We are never masters of our money, but rather entrust ourselves to third parties. That displeased the cypherpunks. Most of them were programmers and mathematicians. This is how the Tor network came about, with which it has since been possible to surf the net undetected. For the entire informational self-determination, that was clear to the Cypherpunks, it also required a monetary system on the Internet that was decentralized and safe from intervention by states and corporations. That was the birth of a dream.

With a decentralized database, how do I prevent someone from spending their money twice if there is no longer a central instance to validate the validity of the transactions? The solution to this problem is the blockchain. It is an ingenious solution and so complex that it unfortunately eludes a brief description. She invented a character by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, who put the white paper for Bitcoin online in 2008, mined bitcoins herself in the first few years and exchanged views on forums with like-minded people before she retired in 2011 and stopped being heard. The only thing we know because Bitcoin is open source and everyone can see all transactions at any time: Nakamoto has mined around a million Bitcoins. He or she has not touched it since. If he / she were to sell these bitcoins, he / she would be one of the richest people on earth today. But neither the lust for fame nor the greed for money seem to move the founder figure. In Bitcoin mythology one speaks of the "immaculate conception".

In the early days, Bitcoin was supposed to be a payment system. Recently, however, the talk of digital gold has caught on: Bitcoin is primarily seen as a store of value because it is deflationary. There won't be more than 21 million bitcoins, that's anchored in his code. Bitcoin is scarce like gold. It's the digital invention of scarcity. Gold has its value because it is scarce and difficult to mine. This also applies to Bitcoin. In order to "mine" bitcoins, high computing power is required, the energy consumption - this is what the fundamental criticism of digital money has recently focused on - is enormous. One could say: Bitcoin literally recreates the archaic, dirty mining conditions of a gold mine in the digital sphere.

A currency for strong nerves

At the core of the Bitcoin creed is decentralization. Bitcoin is peer-to-peer, a network that has no control authority. The majority of network participants determine what Bitcoin is. That is why it is difficult to attack, for example by governments. There isn't one head that you can cut off to take out the monster - you would have to turn off the internet yourself.

It has been said on the Internet that it follows the principle of "Kill the middleman!". That is only true to a limited extent: It has abolished the old middlemen in order to put the new platforms in their place - Uber, Amazon, Airbnb. Only the Bitcoin really kills the middleman because it is completely decentralized. Bitcoin is a threat to the platform economy.

For Andreas Antonopoulos, one of the most charismatic Bitcoin heralds, Bitcoin is the money of the underprivileged: Around two billion people do not have a bank account and are therefore fundamentally excluded from the global economy. On the other hand, according to Antonopoulos, an old Nokia cell phone is enough to carry out a Bitcoin transaction. And: The World Bank estimates the so-called remittances, the money that migrants transfer to their countries of origin, at $ 700 billion. Much of these transfers go through Western Union, which charges up to 20 percent fees - from the poorest in society.

A currency only for strong nerves

But despite its radically democratic claim, the Bitcoin community sometimes falls into the trap of the personality cult. This is probably related to the extreme volatility: Like all money, Bitcoin is purely fictional, it has the value that people attribute to it. But because, unlike gold, it does not look back on a history of several thousand years that creates trust, nobody knows whether fiction might not burst like a bubble. The nerves are on edge. In this situation, every encouragement is blissfully embraced. When Tesla was one of the first listed companies to include Bitcoin in its own balance sheet six months ago, it was an accolade for Bitcoin and its followers. When Elon Musk announced that you could pay for your Tesla with Bitcoins in the future, you were in seventh heaven. Musk was worshiped like a saint. Except that a little later the flighty Twitter troll Musk "suddenly" wanted to have discovered the ecological balance of digital money and distanced himself from Bitcoin again - a withdrawal of love that led to a veritable drop in the price. Since then, Musk has been warmly hated in the community. (When he was a little friendlier this week, the Bitcoin price promptly picked up again.)

The fact that Bitcoin has become more and more popular over the years has to do with the crisis in the global economy. If you look at the Bitcoin chart, you will quickly see that it runs parallel to the major financial crises of the last 15 years. Bitcoin was invented shortly after the financial crisis, as a response to a corrupt financial system in which the banks made risky bets without being held responsible for the disastrous consequences: Too big to fail - the states crammed the banks out and rolled them over Follow-up costs in the form of monetary devaluation and increasing debt on the community.

In the Bitcoin community, it is therefore not uncommon to come across a politicization biography that is surprising at first glance: from Occupy Wall Street to Bitcoin. Many young people, whose hearts beat for Occupy Wall Street, discovered Bitcoin because they suddenly realized that it was nonsense to believe that more government regulation could disempower Wall Street when in fact the state, the central banks and Wall Street was under a blanket. Decentralized money seemed to them to be the much more precise answer, which demanded personal responsibility from everyone and which could not be manipulated.

Classic left intuition assumes that the concept of personal responsibility is primarily inconsiderate individualism and an escape from the solidarity community. Solidarity is essentially understood as a form of state empowerment. The Bitcoin worldview turns this around: if the state's power to act serves to save banks and devalue cash balances, then state monetary policy is not an instrument of justice.

The powerlessness of the states

That was the moment when a previously left-wing youth suddenly discovered the Austrian school of monetary theory for themselves and recognized a medium of emancipation and freedom in a decentralized monetary system. Friedrich von Hayek had once indulged in the idea of the privatization of money. He knew that was unrealistic, but in the interests of freedom he thought it was at least a nice thought. 30 years after his death, the dream of money that cannot be manipulated by governments is practicable.

You don't have to approve of this combination of ideas, but anyone who wants to understand the Bitcoin movement cannot avoid this tipping point when the social energies from Occupy Wall Street flowed into the crypto-ecosphere. It's a key narrative.

Thinking about money has become a new trend anyway, presumably out of fatigue with too much woke identity politics. At first the new magic word was: MMT - Modern Money Theory. The MMT is a classic left-wing theory that trusts the state with incredible control competence in the name of social justice and sees money printing as the means of choice for a policy of redistribution. Bitcoin is the libertarian counter-position to MMT: From their point of view, the huge sums that the central banks pump into the markets always get stuck in the financial system, only ensure that house prices and share prices rise (asset price inflation), i.e. the already rich get even richer, while the little man has to reckon with negative interest rates and inflation on his savings account.

Bitcoiners use the word inflation with disgust. Because so many authoritarian regimes (apart from China) are inflationary regimes, deflationary bitcoin is such a big promise in countries like Nigeria or Turkey. And so, probably for the first time in history, deflation became the slogan of a rebellious political movement aiming to overthrow the system.

The history of Bitcoin is also a reaction to the monetary policy events of the past decade: When bank accounts were frozen in the Cyprus crisis in 2013, Bitcoin reached a value of 100 dollars for the first time. When Greece had to introduce capital controls in 2015, the Bitcoin cost $ 300. And its most recent rally, with an all-time high of just under $ 63,000 in April of this year, is likely to have been fueled by the central banks' renewed expansion of the money supply in response to the pandemic.

The downside of Bitcoin is the powerlessness of states

Decentralization and personal responsibility are spelled out in concrete terms with Bitcoin: If you forget the 24-word access code to your cold wallet, a digital offline wallet, you have lost your coins forever: No higher authority can help you. If one wants to understand why Bitcoin has mobilized a new political revival movement, this ethos of self-responsibility is crucial. While the progressive new ideas have tended to be left-wing and centralization-friendly (states should restrict capital and control the flow of money and ensure inflation when there are liquidity bottlenecks), the children of Bitcoin are skeptical of centralization. Freedom also means monetary self-determination.

The downside of this self-determination: Bitcoin deprives the central banks of their power to act. He could turn their monetary policy into a blunt sword. Will the states put up with this disempowerment or will they ban Bitcoin? Everything is open. The likelihood of getting rich with Bitcoin is the same as the likelihood of losing all of your money. But the spirit of this idea is out of the bottle for now. The first states such as El Salvador are already making it official currency, while countries such as Nigeria and Turkey have more or less banned it. Many Bitcoiners are already preparing to retreat to the catacombs. For a romantic world saver, illegality is good form. Presumably, however, it will come as it has always happened on earth: Bitcoin will not redeem the world from all evils, instead, appropriately regulated, it will find its existence as a new form of investment somewhere in parity with gold. And maybe it will help central banks find their way back to a non-expansionary monetary policy. Most things in life are dialectical.

Tags
Bitcoin, Elon Musk, Blockchain, PayPal, Wall Street, Computer

*Translated with Google Translate

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