Read Lyn Alden to understand why gold failed and how bitcoin solves those problems.
Gold settlement was too slow, risky, and hard to verify. The telegraph made physical settlement obsolete and centralized gold reserves.
Gold is physical so it is vulnerable to capture by whoever has the biggest guns. The government simply captured the centralized gold reserves and forced everyone onto a fiat standard.
This is what will happen to all the ETFs, exchanges, and treasury companies. Saylor's bitcoin will be the national reserve. History rhymes.
Replies (3)
Yup, read Lyn Alden's book, too. My big takeaway was the impedance mismatch between clearing (telegraph) and settlement (gold) is the root of instability.
Fixed with ecash and bitcoin.
Lightning Network is the telegraph , Cashu is the IOU and Bitcoin is the gold.
But you also need a reputation layer. That's nostr and it's cryptographic keypairs. IMO. Which I'm thinking about more in context of the immutable nature of btc transactions.
Thanks, great points! I'm familiar with Lyn's work, which I find has a lot of explanatory power.
I think free banking on top of Bitcoin might emerge and we might find out that it works pretty well since falling back to self custody is so much easier with Bitcoin than wiith gold.
As for Saylor's stack becoming the government's, interesting take
