I wish more people knew about Bitcoin’s connection to the bank bailouts. Bitcoin unfortunately does not have the best brand ambassadors. This week is a great opportunity to tell your friends about it, because it matters.

The 2008 bank bailouts were a major motivator behind the creation of Bitcoin. The first block ever mined even contains a reference to it: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. During the bank bailouts, the government just printed a bunch of money and gave it to the banks, around 700 billion USD. They did this because it was politically expedient, well really because they had to or the whole damned system would collapse. And the 99% ended up paying for the mistakes of the 1%. All of us were made to pay for the mistakes of a very small, incredibly powerful and wealthy segment of society who made reckless investment decisions. People lost their homes, their jobs, their livelyhoods, their savings, and yet not a single one of those bankers went to jail. Instead, they took the bailout money and gave themselves extravagant bonuses. Yet the problem is not new, throughout history, every nation that has ever failed, has had their currency end in hyperinflation. The temptation to print money is too strong. Perhaps it is something that should not be entrusted to politicians or even humans at all.

Satoshi, in his wisdom, created a system by which no new money could ever be printed. No corruptible, tempted authority could use it to turn on the money printer and rob entire generations of their wealth or force them to pay for wars they did not support. He made a currency which cannot be corrupted and cannot be hacked, with 99.9% uptime, with instant transfers across borders. It is neutral technology open to anybody with a phone or a computer and access to the internet. Which is much less than you need to open a bank account. Bitcoin doesn’t care about your credit history, or whether or not you can provide a reliable mailing address. Bitcoin doesn’t close on weekends and will never charge you exorbitant fees to use your own money. You never have to wait days for a payment to clear. Bitcoin puts you in charge of your money and nobody else. And it makes sure nobody can print away its value.

But then a bunch of people came along selling get-rich-quick schemes based on crypto technology, and everybody goes “crypto bad”. Satoshi gave a gift to the world. He didn’t stick around to get rich off it, he didn’t use it for celebrity, he just made Bitcoin and disappeared. Thank you Satoshi for your gift to the world.

  • kodafrmdaOC@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Satoshi gave a gift to the world. He didn’t stick around to get rich off of it

    Isn’t Satoshi the largest holder of bitcoin? If bitcoin was used as a global currency, would he not start off as the richest and most powerful individual?

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Satoshi hasn’t moved any coins in many many years. Many speculate Satoshi is dead. Moving any of those coins would probably crash Bitcoin’s value relative to USD, but Bitcoin would survive and keep true to its promise via protocol: anybody who owned Bitcoin would still own that bitcoin and could faithfully transfer it around the network with no issues. And not even Satoshi could print more into existence.

      Even if Satoshi could somehow sell all their coins at current market rates, there are still plenty of people whose wealth measures in the trillions who would be way richer and who really did nothing for their wealth aside from be born into it.

      For context: Jeff Bezos owns 10% of Amazon. Zuck owns 14% of Facebook (down from 28% at IPO). Elon has 17% of Tesla. Satoshi’s share is relatively small compared to other founders, and all of those companies are worth more than Bitcoin’s total market cap. Those are just some people who got rich off a single company, there are people whose wealth is measured in countries not companies. People with lineage who measure their accounts in trillions, not billions. Satoshi would barely even rank on the list of richest people.

      • kodafrmdaOC@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I wish I believed you. I believe the technology or some form of it has the potential for good, but I can’t realistically see it used that way in my lifetime. The only ones who have been flocking to it so far are grifters.