Bitcoin is more than just the greatest store of value humanity has ever created
Yes it is the best store of value we have going forward, but look under the hood and you'll start to see the true majesty of what BTC/LN, as a peer-to-peer communication technology, can deliver.
In a recent interview, with the ‘world’s youngest #bitcoin educator’ and enigmatic Lily Knight, Michael Saylor hit on a point I have been exploring a lot in my recent rabbit hole excursions. He stated the following when asked by Lily what he thinks is the biggest misconception surrounding Bitcoin:
Well a lot of people think it’s just an investment idea or it’s a speculative asset. The biggest misconception is that it is just an investment. In fact, Bitcoin is the world’s first digital monetary network and it’s a technology. And when you start thinking of it as a better technology for money, then you realise it’s not just a trade it’s actually a way to think about the world.
You can catch the first part of the interview below and this quote comes about half way through:
Now in order for Bitcoin’s growth to continue and for it’s dominance to be completely affirmed, it’s unquestionable force as the greatest store of value has to be the guiding light through the current narrative, and it is doing a terrific job of proving itself in that regard, reaching a new ATH today of close to $65,000. With all of the institutional interest circling the space now the price seems destined to reach $100,000 in the next couple of months.
In this post though I want to take the focus away from the main weapon Bitcoin can yield in the fight for its’ global adoption, because there is so much more to unpack under the hood. This is where Saylor is trying to point us in his comment above. Bitcoin is about way more than just an investment. It is a new system of thinking. In the words of Marty Bent of TFTC, following his podcast with Sphinx Chat co-founder Paul Itoi, he says: ‘The network and value transfer protocol that is being built on top of Bitcoin in the form of the Lightning Network is going to flip multiple industries on their head.’
The stack that the team is building is INSANE. They are leveraging the Lightning Network to build an end to end encrypted chat app that sends messages over Lightning. Users connect their nodes to the app, or spin up a node in the cloud and connect that to Sphinx, and begin CHATTING OVER THE LIGHTNING NETWORK. A new communications protocol is being built on top of the value movement protocol that is Lightning right in front of our eyes. Sending a message with value attached. On top of this, they are enabling content creators to syndicate their content via the app and get streamed sats and tipped in sats as individuals consume their content (art). This makes much more sense than NFTs. Instead of one person clout chasing by buying a token that gets an artist paid. Artist can demand that every individual who consumes their art has to stream them some sats first. Very small payments from millions of people means artists get paid and everyone can contribute.
With my exploration into NFT’s, it opened up new possibilities to think about how artists can get a fair value reward for the content they create. In the current system, where creators have to rely on third-party hosting, getting their fair slice of the pie is nigh on impossible. NFT’s opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about how creators can interact with their audience, but this ramps up the potency in that connection even further.
What is the Lightning Network?
The Lightning Network allows for a new network to be layered on top of the main Bitcoin network that allows for more transactions per second, without clogging up the Bitcoin transaction rate. There was a split in the Bitcoin camp in 2017 which I learnt more about in Nic Carter’s chat with Lex Fridman. There were two trajectories people saw Bitcoin going in the future; a philosophical standoff. Some wanted to remove the block limit and allow for infinite transactions, which apparently was how it was originally released by Satoshi, and others wanted to keep the change he/she/they made soon after release, which brought a limit to the block sizes, forcing block sizes to remain small and limiting the number of transactions that can occur in every block. There was a soft fork in the Bitcoin blockchain as two protocols ran side by side, one being Bitcoin Cash with much larger block sizes and the other being the main Bitcoin network, which it seems has won out in the long run. There is way more to study in regards to this topic which I hope to do at a later date. But for now that is what I understand.
The Lightning Network is an answer to the issue raised by those wanting to increase the transaction limit, without interfering with the main Bitcoin protocol. It allows for small transactions to be ledgered on a layer above the main network through peer-to-peer nodes, which can then consolidated on the main chain at certain points to update the transfer of Bitcoin on the blockchain. Therefore, many more transactions are occurring in a small number of concrete transactions on the blockchain. Everyone is a winner.
When all this starts to get very exciting is when you start peeling back the possibilities for some of the interactions that can occur on some of the systems being built on this second layer of Bitcoin. One example is Sphinx Chat which is what is spoken about in a podcast that Robert Breedlove saw as ‘one of the most important podcasts of 2021’.
Why does this make me so excited?
I can hardly speak to much of the technicalities of what Sphinx Chat does or how it works on the Lightning Layer, but I can get excited about some of the real-word possibilities that it is already allowing people to explore and experiment with.
It is a parallel system, built on a digital monetary network. A place for the free exchange of ideas to be supported and fostered in a decentralised and trusted framework. Here is a quote from Sphinx Chat co-founder Paul Itoi:
If you look at podcasts and the idea of the free exchange of ideas and being able to kind of cut through the crap and get to the truth on these things through peer-to-peer conversations and free flow of ideas, then all of those things that the institutions have been just skating by, telling people just garbage, gets harder and harder to do, because you have this escape valve. You can go into a tribe and listen to what is fake about our money. And then the next thing you’re gonna go is, ‘Wow if I’ve been fooled by money this whole time, what have I been hearing about food.’ And then if you go down the line you realise, ‘Wow, I have gotten fat for no reason, we have had people steal our time in the form of inflation, and we have had people call it education which it isn’t.’ Indoctrination. It would be horrible to live your whole life and then at the end look back and go, ‘Well I was fooled the whole time.’
This is the peer-to-peer communication network that Bitcoin is primed to operate, allowing for a flow of value to be upon the hard foundational layer of Bitcoin as a financial network. This decentralised flow of value over a peer-to-peer network is where the future of community, collaboration, content, enterprise and cooperation will all lead, and is why Bitcoin is going to revolutionise way way more than just where we store our wealth.
We can begin to imagine new ways of thriving and cooperating in new systems, outside of the broken one we are forced to adopt today. Their conversation talked about how it could transform education and the dissemination of true knowledge, farming and agriculture, cooperative living, land sharing and home schooling. And this was all just the tip of the iceberg.
In places of poverty and financial difficulty, people can be onboarded into the Lightning Network simply with a phone. This phone, with the help of Elon Musk’s Starlink Network - which aims to bring everyone on the planet online in the very near future - can allow someone from anywhere to be their own bank, earn Sats with simple tasks, and liberate themselves from the systems they are forced to exist within.
This is a magnificent vision for the future. It could allow us to re-associate with our local land, and the people around us. As a community, with Sphinx chat and payments on Lightning, you could band together and pay for a rancher nearby to rear a cow for you and your people to live off. This really demonstrates the beauty and elegance in the technology, all made possible through decentralised value transfer on the blockchain.
The app Paul and the team are building will enable things like teaching pods that payout teachers directly. It will lead to a completely private onramp for individuals around the world. It will replace Slack. It will replace Soundcloud. It will replace Clubhouse. It will end factory farming.
It is magnificent to think of all of these encroaching possibilities being nourished into existence by such intelligent, thoughtful and creative minds, who are fighting tooth and nail to bring a change to the world that needs to come from somewhere. For ages, I have failed to even get a hint as to where the hope was going to be grown or found, but this is actually tickling that sense. I think we are onto something big here, and it’s so important to keep it moving in that direction, fostered by brilliant and collaborative minds. I think its something about the nature of the Bitcoin community and it being a shared, peer-to-peer, ownerless network that is adapted and fostered in an open-source fashion, that binds all of it’s facets with an ideal and a hope, from anyone stacking Sats to buying billions of Bitcoin. It’s one grand vision and everyone is invited.
It's so important to embrace this side of Bitcoin because it then shows you there is so much more to fight for than just a better place to store money. This is going to change how the world communicates with each other, how it shares content, how it builds projects and supports local initiatives; all built upon a decentralised network that can't be manipulated, twisted or coopted by a single entity.
I hope we get to the point where one day we can look back on this century as the moment it all turned around, and we learnt our lessons from decades of war, power grabbing, greed, manipulation, destruction, fear - and started changing the narrative. We are all Earthlings aboard this incredible Spaceship Earth, and it's time we started thinking from the as one tribe. This tribe can all be connected on the Bitcoin network, with nodes all over the world and value being shared and spread globally.
I think that the world is going to evolve to a point where we have 8 billion people with mobile wallets. They’re using them to pay their bills and to store their life savings. And Bitcoin is going to become the base layer of that 8 billion person mobile network, allowing all of us to transact with each other and trust each other at the speed of light
I'll end with a semi-religious note. The Kalachakra tantra prophesies that when the world declines into war and greed, a huge army will emerge from Shambhala to vanquish Dark Forces and usher in a worldwide Golden Age. This final battle is prophesied for the year 2425 or 2425. If there is one thing today that points to a Golden Age for humanity, it is Bitcoin and what it offers.
It can give us our time back; time to study, to learn, to build a compassionate practice, time to connect, to tell stories, to support each other, to experiment, to build long-term projects, to stop wasting so much in the short-term on frivolous and wasteful material and energy. A giant rain-check must take place. We all know this is not sustainable, and it's only with new realities and new systems of living we can begin to disengage from a broken narrative we’ve been indoctrinated into since we sat down at the first day of school, aged 4.
So yes, Bitcoin is an incredible investment opportunity. But just look at what else is possible and you’ll start deprogramming from everything else you’ve been sold in your personal quest for happiness and freedom.
Final note: First steps towards a node:
https://getumbrel.com/