Copy of the talk I presented at Bitcoin 2013 - Role of Bitcoin as Money

[evoorhees]

With a few typos edited, here is the talk I presented on Saturday at the Bitcoin 2013 conference.

For this talk, Forget the tech. Forget the mining. Forget the cryptography and the peer to peer networks and the open source code. All of these things are secondary to an understanding of money itself.  The core of the Bitcoin experiment is not about tech at all, it’s about money.

http://evoorhees.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-2013-role-of-bitcoin-as-money.html

What an amazing conference it was! So fun to meet so many people I only knew from teh interwebz

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[atomium]

With a few typos edited, here is the talk I presented on Saturday at the Bitcoin 2013 conference.

For this talk, Forget the tech. Forget the mining. Forget the cryptography and the peer to peer networks and the open source code. All of these things are secondary to an understanding of money itself.  The core of the Bitcoin experiment is not about tech at all, it’s about money.

http://evoorhees.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-2013-role-of-bitcoin-as-money.html

What an amazing conference it was! So fun to meet so many people I only knew from teh interwebz

this is great, thanks for the very insightful and educating talk, if there is a video as well that would be awesome!

[evoorhees]

Haven't seen one but will post if I find it!

[Raize]

I appreciate what you do, Erik. Every time I go to write something to friends and family, I find that you've written essentially the same thing more succinctly than I ever could have. It's much appreciated. I can basically paraphrase you in everything I send to them. Just don't ever start copyrighting your work.

[finway]

Great presentation. Thank you Erik.

[Technomage]

The live talk is even better than the text. Erik is a good speaker. I've also found that having the text there while performing helps a lot. Doing freestyle is not my thing.

All of the talks will be published later, which is good. I missed many interesting ones.

[klaus]

Erik thanks alot. You are the best, always an inspiration !
When Gavin is the native cute son, you are the rockstar.

[marcus_of_augustus]

 good material ...

[ktttn]

I appreciate what you do, Erik. Every time I go to write something to friends and family, I find that you've written essentially the same thing more succinctly than I ever could have. It's much appreciated. I can basically paraphrase you in everything I send to them. Just don't ever start copyrighting your work.

+1
Blank stare-proof. THE basics.
Edit: Currently inboxing this to 100+ facebook friends a day for 20+ days.

[101111]

That was beautiful, thanks Erik.

[maz]

Great talk, nice one Erik.

[savantguy]

Thanks Eric, glad you are spreading the wisdom this country needs to advance into a better time.

[newtothescene]

Awesome talk/article!  Thanks for sharing.

[Fizzgig]

Such a well written piece, clear and quick at getting to the heart of the misunderstanding!

[Sukrim]

My reasoning with Bitcoin as money is that it is ideal money BECAUSE it's value (in the sense of "backing" maybe or in the sense of "if nobody else sees this as money, I can still use it in my daily life") is exactly 0, but it's usefulness as money is very high, higher than most other money systems I've seen.

There is nothing attached to Bitcoin that can "cloud the view" so to say, as it is unbacked: no government, no economy, no religion, no country, no physical representation, no counter party.
Once you accept Bitcoins, you accept a 100% "bubble" that is 100% backed by it's inherent usefulness, open markets and faith in the underlying mathematical principles.

I personally see this as a strength, not a weakness, Bitcoin is in my view the ultimate "fiat money" (with fiat being translated similar to "fiat lux" - "there shall be light") - created out of nothing and valued at whatever price just because it is useful, not because you have to or because you might want to do something else with it too. All you will ever get with bitcoins is a ledger entry in a distributed database on the internet. Everything beyond that exists only because these ledger entries are as useful or more useful for being used as money than some metals, sea shells, paper notes or ledger entries at banks (or amazon).

As you already said - the only real way for any other system to beat Bitcoin is to become more useful than Bitcoin itself, as it's value comes from within. Another way would be to keep the usefulness of Bitcoin and add additional "real" value to it, something that I personally would be interested to see, but that's very hard for me to wrap my mind around and I don't even see glimming faintly on the horizon. I have heard some good ideas on the forums from time to time, but they either drift into details, completely different directions (Ripple for example tries to be the best way to exchange something of value - IOUs, not to become ideal money) and I again believe as soon as you strip the value component from these ideas, they become even better money systems again with more open markets, less centralization and more trust in the underlying principles than in the backing.

[xcsler]

Required reading.
Thanks.

[RodeoX]

It was an interesting talk Erik. I wish I had seen more of your presentation but there were so many good topics at the conference that I found myself poping in and out of several at a time.
Cheers m8.

[QuestionAuthority]

Nicely done. Very well aimed toward the average person.

[ThatDGuy]

This is amazing.  Absolute must-read.

Thank you!

[Kazimir]

I like how you're not going into any technical details, which would only scare off newcomers, but rather emphasize the unique economic and social characteristics of Bitcoin (and the significant difference to fiat money). The innovative essentials are much more important than techno babble.

There is actually a brief introduction to Bitcoin on bitcoininfo.tk which also avoids the intricacies, I also like that for the same reason. Imho a better approach to Bitcoin that ranting about mining, block chains, private keys, and whatnot. But compared to that page, Erik's talk is much more complete and in depth. I also like how you cover the meaning and history of 'Money' in general.

Great stuff, Erik!