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bitcoin.md from HariSekhon/Knowledge-Base repo: https://github.com/HariSekhon/Knowledge-Base

Bitcoin

Why Bitcoin?

Central banks and Governments are stealing the value of your money every year.

They keep printing money and have devalued over 90% of the US dollar, UK pound sterling and every fiat currency. The Euro has lost 90% of its purchasing power in just 2 decades since introduction.

Every other asset in the world can be confiscated by governments, bitter exes, judges, civil lawsuits etc.

Think your assets, real estate or bank accounts can't be frozen or stolen?

Look at Abramovich when the Russia-Ukraine war broke out.

You are one ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, car crash, or other civil lawsuit away from having everything stolen from you by state force.

And that doesn't even include the growing talk of European "Re-migration" (a euphemistic word for mass deportations).

Not Too Late to Bitcoin

You're not too late, as Bitcoin is deflationary, which means it's scarcity can only go up, this beats even gold.

Why Bitcoin and not Gold

Bitcoin is often called "digital gold".

So why not just use regular old gold?

  • gold is hard to verify (can you tell the purity or fakeness of a gold coin personally?)
  • gold costs money to store
  • gold is heavy and hard to move
  • gold would be confiscated if you tried to take it through the airport
  • gold is easy to steal
  • gold is easy for authorities to confiscate (governments have done it before eg. US made it illegal in 1930s to hold gold)
  • new sources can increase the gold supply inflation - asteroid mining in the not-so-distant-future will flood the market at some point in future

Bitcoin is better than gold and safer than gold.

Why Bitcoin and not Real Estate

Real estate can be confiscated, and heavily taxed.

As legacy democratic countries decline from unsustainable mass welfare state parasite voting, they'll become ever more desperate for taxes - real estate is a sitting duck for tax raids.

You cannot just put your real estate in your suitcase and leave.

You will face capital gains taxes and take a long time trying to sell real estate to get out.

Real estate is simply not a safe 21st Century portable asset in a politically destabilizing world of mass welfare state and mass welfare immigration.

Bitcoin Technical Summary

  • Limited Supply - 21 Million Coins ever
    • Deflationary compared to government fiat money which is inflating towards zero value
  • Cryptography Secure - mathematically provable and verifiable by anyone at any time
  • Energy Currency - cannot be faked, there is a real-world cost in electricity
  • Coins Mined by solving complex cryptographic challenges
  • Predictable Coin Mining Rate
  • Energy Intensive:
    • the CPU difficulty protects it from attacks because even supercomputers cannot match the compute strength of the entire global Bitcoin network of high speed computers which use each specialized hardware for extreme performance called ASICs
  • World's Most Powerful Computer Network - 100x more powerful than all the supercomputers
  • Bitcoin Network hasn't gone down in over 10 years - 99.98%+ uptime since inception in 2009, more than any centralized server ever and better than Big Tech companies:

https://bitcoinuptime.org/

https://bitbo.io/uptime

Why Bitcoin Can't be Replaced by other Crypto "Alt Coins"

  • Network Effect:
    • like a social network, getting everybody to move off it to something else is extremely difficult and would be slow
    • people don't want to move because their peers aren't there - it's catch-22

Hardware Wallet

Buy a hardware wallet for security.

See the Crypto page for a list of hardware wallets.

Buy Bitcoin

See market price and a bunch of other useful metrics on BitBo's dashboard:

https://bitbo.io/

BitBo - Best Places to Buy Bitcoin - filter by country for which exchanges are available to you

  • Exchanges:
    • usually requires Know Your Customer (KYC) for regulatory compliance eg. XapoBank or the exchanges listed on the Crypto page
  • Peer-to-Peer (P2P):
    • marketplaces eg. HodlHodl, Vexl
    • buying from individuals who already have Bitcoin eg. friends you meet at conferences, meetups
    • Bitcoin ATMs (usually max $1000 limit)

You may want to avoid buying Bitcoin on regulated Exchanges which have KYC (Know Your Customer) as this allows your Bitcoin holdings and transfers to be tracked by governments and other actors.

Do not leave your Bitcoin on exchanges.

The Exchange can steal your Bitcoin or go bankrupt like FTX, or the Government can seize it just like any bank account.

"Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins"

Avoid KYC interrogation bullshit, it's your money, you earnt it, you shouldn't have to answer questions about it.

When stupid banks ask me where I got my money, I just tell them:

"I'm a drug dealer. What do you think, I earnt it the hard way otherwise there'd be more of it".

Stupid question deserves a stupid answer.

This is of course amusing to me because I am a brown skinhead looking trouble maker and would have been a better drug dealer than most people. Alas, I'm an engineer instead.

While I like to joke about this, in reality see Breaking Bad S02E06 - Peekaboo - the consequences of drugs on families and especially children is unforgivable, so no, I wouldn't actually want to be a drug dealer.

Live free, don't answer to banks or governments about your own money by avoiding KYC entities entirely.

OTC

Buying large amounts of Bitcoin is better done Over The Counter (OTC) if > $100k.

Bitcoin Block Explorer Sites

https://mempool.space/ - see your Bitcoin transaction in the ledger queue

https://blockstream.info/

https://bitbo.io/ - Bitcoin price and market movement dashboard

https://satscribe.chema.me/ - enter a TXID to get an AI powered explanation of it

https://bitnodes.io/ - see how many bitcoin core nodes are running worldwide and where

Buy Giftcards Using Bitcoin

https://www.bitrefill.com/ae/en/

Chainalysis

Analyzes the entire Bitcoin ledger to trace your Bitcoin holdings, transfers and cash outs etc.

https://www.chainalysis.com/

BTCMap

Find places to spend Bitcoin directly.

https://btcmap.org/

TaxBit

Reports on Bitcoin ledger tracking and detects taxable events. They track clusters of wallets with transactions between them to figure out what's likely owned by you.

Tracks BTC addresses that have gone through centralized exchanges and are KYC'd. Easy to find you.

https://www.taxbit.com/

That's when Govs can come with OSINT, or bad actors can use Poisoned Nodes etc.

Security

Make sure the BTC you receive isn't tainted - it hasn't gone through some darknet market place or a hack.

Privacy

Bitcoin's ledger is public and KYC (Know Your Customer) links your identity to your address.

This data can be leaked, doxing your Bitcoin net worth, or demanded by increasing tax aggressive governments harassing expats.

You can use anonymizing services like CoinJoin to try to re-anonymize your Bitcoin movements and addresses:

https://www.coinjoins.org/

Borrow Against Bitcoin

Borrow Against Your Bitcoin instead of selling it.

You have to send your BTC to them as collateral.

High interest rate though.

Run Your Own Node for Added Privacy

https://umbrel.com/

https://mynodebtc.com/

Layer 2 Chains

Bitcoin Treasury Companies

https://bitcointreasuries.net/

Bitcoin Retirement Calculator

https://calc.bitcoineracademy.com/

https://bitbo.io/tools/retirement-calculator/

https://bitcoincounterflow.com/bitcoin-retirement-calculator/

Bitcoin News

https://www.theblock.co/

Learning Resources

https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information.html

https://www.btcsessions.ca/

Bitcoin Atlantis Videos

https://bitcoinatlantis.com/recap

Tutorial Videos

Sparrow Wallet Tutorial

Muun Mobile Wallet

The $5 Wrench Attack

$5 Wrench Attack

Technical Stuff

Run Your Own Bitcoin Node

Official Bitcoin Core:

https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/

Annoyingly this gets flagged by AVG Antivirus as malware and deleted.

Alternative:

https://bitcoinknots.org/

Libraries

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