Money is the first form of language ever invented.
That’s right…
Tally sticks from the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe have been found that date back over 30,000 years.
Bones found in Africa that date back over 80,000 years are even argued to be the first tally sticks by some.
These pieces of wood or bone recorded money as a unit of account. They were ledgers that recorded debits and credits owed to and from the owner of the tally stick.
Comparatively, the oldest evidence of written language in the world only dates back to either 3500 BC Sumarian or 5300 BC Tamil.
While it’s widely debated, neither written language is close to how old written money ledgers are.
So, what did people actually use as money over the years? The form of money itself has certainly evolved a lot…
From shells to ivory, metal coins of all varieties, the shape of money has evolved a lot throughout the years.
For thousands of years, gold has been the superior and preferred form of money by many different civilizations.
It’s relatively scarce, extremely durable, impossible to manufacture at will. Gold actually has a lot of good properties of money. But it has its limitations too, which we’ll explain later.
The United States even pegged the dollar to gold for decades, until President Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971.
That’s when dollars stopped being backed by gold reserves held in the central banks’ vaults. With the absence of the gold standard, the government can print as many dollars as it wants… as often as its wants.
The more money it prints, the less value each dollar possesses. This is called the fiat standard, and it’s not the first time history has seen something like this…
The largest empire the world has ever known, the ancient Roman empire, collapsed primarily because it ran out of silver and hyperinflated its currency – the denarius.
As it was expanding territories across Europe, the Roman empire had tens of thousands of soldiers and mercenaries. It paid for its armies with silver coins.
Originally, those coins were made 100% out of silver. But as the empire expanded and its silver supplies depleted, the government needed to stretch its reserves…
So, it started minting new coins made out of 50% silver and 50% wood. But that didn’t even last for long as the empire continued growing. The ratio continued on a downward trend for years…
The Roman empire ran so short on silver that the final coins it produced before collapsing contained 99.5% wood and only 0.5% silver.
As you could expect, the soldiers eventually decided fighting for small circular pieces of wood wasn’t worth risking their lives for anymore (especially as hyperinflation ensued and their money didn’t buy nearly as much as it did when they first started fighting)… So they stopped conquering, the empire collapsed, and the currency became worthless.
To some extent, there are many similarities between ancient Rome and the modern day United States you can see playing out today in terms of money and power…
The US is the world’s largest superpower today. In large part, that is due to establishing the dollar as the global reserve currency under the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement.
Under this agreement, 44 nations established a new international monetary system where they agreed the US dollar would be pegged to gold at $32 per ounce and all their fiat currencies would be pegged to the dollar.
It didn’t take long for problems to arise as these countries began valuing paper money less and printing more of their own at will.
As the value of their currencies started to diminish through inflation, they started taking advantage of the $32/ounce gold exchange rate they could get from the United States and buying as much as they could.
As the US’s gold supply dwindled, Nixon got nervous, effectively canceled the Bretton Woods agreement, and took the US off the gold standard… Nobody else was playing by the rules, so why should the US? They were getting screwed by the exchange rate as gold was being valued more than fiat.
No longer would dollars be redeemable for an equal share of gold. Instead, they became backed by the “full faith and credit” of the US government – and remain that way to this day.
After Nixon did this, the price of gold started to soar as more units of fiat were printed, devaluing each unit. And the Bretton Woods system was officially replaced de facto by the current regime based on freely floating fiat currencies.
Unemployment started to rise in the 70’s as people lost faith in the value of the new paper money they were working for, which was backed by thin air.
Sound familiar to ancient Rome?
Economists and politicians thought that raising inflation and printing money would reduce unemployment, a tradeoff known as the Phillips Curve.
That worked to some extent, but then inflation became a problem of its own. Even Nixon’s price freezes weren’t enough to stop the rampant inflation that ran into the 1980’s.
Fast forward to today and the 8% inflation we’re experiencing is the highest it’s been since the 80’s… And that’s if you believe the “official” government inflation numbers.
Hint: they’re awfully manipulated to make things seem better than they actually are. I don’t know about you, but the price of the things I buy are going up a lot more than 8% per year… Like housing, vehicles, college tuition, medical expenses, etc.
The dollar is losing value at its quickest rate since the 1980’s due to excessive money printing with no backing to anything of value fixed in supply. In fact, the supply of dollars has doubled in the last decade. Put another way, the average price of everything has also roughly doubled in the last 10 years.
Inflation is why all fiat currencies have failed in the past and all will fail in the future…
Eventually too many units will be printed, the price of everything will rise exponentially (hyperinflation will ensue), and the people working for less valuable money will revolt because they can’t afford the basic necessities.
That’s why good money has to be backed by more than the [false] promises made by elites at the top of hierarchical bureaucracies.
Good money needs to be scarce, secure, divisible, fungible, portable, easily-verifiable, and decentralized – meaning nobody controls it or can manipulate its supply at will.
Bitcoin is all of these things.
Bitcoin was invented by a pseudonymous person or team of people who go by Satoshi Nakamoto. The fact that nobody knows who this person or group of people are is extremely important because nobody controls Bitcoin or can shut it down. That’s what makes Bitcoin unique to every other currency the world has ever known, and likely ever will know.
After solving a handful of computer engineering problems that had yet to be solved to create sound digital money, including the Byzantine Generals problem, the double spending problem, and more, Satoshi launched Bitcoin into the world naturally releasing his software to the public to be double checked, verified, and improved upon.
The open-source nature of his technology is what has allowed over 18,500 crypto assets to be created, with more new ones popping up every day. If you wanted to create your own alternative digital coin, or “altcoin,” it would only take a matter of minutes.
In my humble opinion, 100% of all altcoins (and fiat currencies) will fail to become the next global reserve currency because they all lack Bitcoin’s most important asset… It’s decentralization – the fact that nobody can control it or shut it down.
Every altcoin (and fiat currency) is centralized, controlled by the known person or group of people who created it and have their hand on the money printer. And they could all be shut down or sanctioned by whatever government who wants.
In many instances, the altcoin founders “premined” their own coins, which means they gave themselves a portion of the digital tokens for free.
Some altcoins might solve other problems in the blockchain space, but 99%+ will be worthless in the long run because they’re created to make the founders rich and powerful – not the users.
Whereas, Satoshi created Bitcoin to give people all over the world complete ownership of their money without the need for a centralized third party to verify transactions and steal wealth through confiscation or inflation.
Owning Bitcoin gives you the ability to be your own bank. If you store your private keys correctly, you can do whatever you legally want with your Bitcoin.
If you lose those keys, however, they will be locked in your public address indefinitely – thus decreasing the total amount of Bitcoin in circulation even further from its fixed supply.
This is essentially a donation to all the holders of Bitcoin who still have their private keys because the lost Bitcoin can’t be traded for anything. With great power comes great responsibility…
Only 21 million Bitcoin will ever exist. Roughly 19 million have already been mined since its launch on January 3rd, 2009 – known as the genesis block.
And the remaining 2 million Bitcoin won’t be mined until around the year 2140. It’s the exact opposite of fiat currencies, where less units get printed over time – not more.
It’s deflationary money, where the price of goods and services become less expensive over time, instead of more expensive.
Anyone with an Internet connection can access Bitcoin. Bitcoin is decentralized like the Internet – meaning it can’t be shut down by governments unless the entire Internet was shut down across the entire world – a highly improbable scenario.
The biggest country in the world is the Internet when you think about it… With approximately 5 billion users (over 63% of the world’s 7.9 billion population).
And in fact, you don’t even need an Internet connection to send Bitcoin. People are SMS texting Bitcoin to each other in remote parts of the world without Internet. And there are more phones on the planet with SMS texting ability than toothbrushes…
Bitcoin is already a store of value and a medium of exchange. Next, it’s working on becoming a unit of account where the price of all goods and services will be priced in “satoshis.”
Satoshis are the smallest unit of Bitcoin. Each Bitcoin is divisible by one hundred million units. And it’s even possible to divide it further than that. Without increasing total supply, you can always create smaller units to pay for less expensive things. It’s beautiful.
While gold is relatively scarce compared to fiat, how secure it is depends on how much money you pay. It’s not easily divisible and thus fungible. It’s also not very portable, especially in larger quantities.
Verifiability of gold is expensive and time consuming considering you have to go to a specialist who can melt your gold down to verify it.
All that to say, even though gold has been used as money for thousands of years, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best money today… Especially when we have superior technology to do so.
That’s all money is at the end of the day – technology. The best technology that allows us to store wealth and fairly exchange value over time and space.
In the words of the great Andreas Antonopolous (who you’ll learn more about later)… “Because the 21st century needs a 21st century system of internet money that is open, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant, immutable, and permissionless… and that’s Bitcoin.”
All that being said, we’ve still only scratched the surface. And I’m sure you have a ton of questions. Tomorrow, I’ll be answering the most common and important questions about Bitcoin.
So, stay tuned to Part 3 of this report, which you’ll receive in your inbox tomorrow at 6 o’clock in the morning. If you’d like to submit a questions of your own, send it to [email protected] or click this link.
RIP Dollar (1792-202X)
Is the U.S. dollar headed to the slaughterhouse?
Given the sudden emergence of a Fed-backed digital dollar (a.k.a. FedCoin)…
I’d say kiss the greenback goodbye.
See, FedCoin isn’t just theoretical anymore…
So what will FedCoin look like?… feel like?… how will it affect your wealth?… your day-to-day finances?… your investment portfolio?
I wouldn’t wait to find out…
Because once FedCoin arrives…
Every dollar you own could be under Fed control.
FedCoin’s underlying platform is able to process up to 1.7 million transactions per second – with 99% of all transactions completing in under a second.
So if you’re a profit-motivated person…
I urge you to get positioned ahead of FedCoin’s arrival… because early investors have a shot to top some of the market’s biggest winners lately (i.e. gains of 182%… 373%… even 747%).
For those looking to amass wealth in 2023, ask yourself…
“Can I afford to miss such a major wealth event?”
Decide quickly, because time is running low.
Click here for the urgent details.
P.S. – America’s “digital reset” isn’t happening in a vacuum…
Every country of economic importance – i.e. places like the United Kingdom… Mexico.. Canada… Japan… and France – are developing their own FedCoin, which could impact over $1.25 quadrillion in global assets.
Is your portfolio positioned, accordingly?
Because whenever currencies undergo a “reset”…
Investment profits tend to be stratospheric.
If you’re ready for a sneak peek at FedCoin… to see how it could function… to prepare for its deep impact on society… simply click the image (below).
