“And all for something you can’t see or touch.”

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This has pros and cons.

One of the greatest pros is that if you can’t see or touch it, then neither can a robber. Or a tyrannical government, for that matter.

It exists on a ledger, in cyberspace. To use an analogy, what you possess is the key to access your property on the ledger (if we are talking about pure or spot Bitcoin).

The easier way to have Bitcoin is either to buy shares in one or more of the 11 or so Bitcoin ETFs (buy them just like a stock, right through your phone or PC browser) or by owning shares in a Bitcoin mining company (there are probably 10 or 12 publicly traded companies) or buying shares in a proxy company, which by default generally means MSTR (MicroStrategy) because they have by far the most Bitcoin of any publicly traded company, and they are the pioneer in that regard.

You can’t see or touch shares of stock, either. You may still be able to get stock certificates printed out, but even so, it’s a ‘certificate’, the actual ‘shares’ of the company exist on a… on a ledger 😁

“Is God happy or sad about this?”

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That is a great question. I don’t know why He would be either happy or sad about it, because it is just a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or ill.

It seems reasonable to think He would not be very happy with the wholly corrupt fiat currency combined with fractional reserve banking system (all backed by nothing but the full faith and credit of a corrupt government) that we use today.

A system that robs everyone blind via debasement, so that whatever savings you have are like a melting ice cube, losing purchasing power at a rate of about 14% per year.

Or about the same amount of M2 money growth, if I understand correctly. Or about the same amount as the average returns of the S&P 500.

The current system bleeds everyone to death slowly, and the only way to maintain whatever purchasing power we have is to invest in something that returns at least 14% per year.

And that’s generally difficult to do without taking significant risk. But that is the position the government (ours and everyone else’s) has put us all in, as they all hyper-inflate their currencies due to profligate spending.

Bitcoin solves that problem.

It can never be inflated, because no government (or person) has control over it. It is programmed to only produce 450 Bitcoin per day (currently, in 2028 it drops to 225 per day), and when the cap of 21 million Bitcoins is reached, mining production ends forever.

And since it is estimated that nearly 5 million (of the 19 million mined so far) have been lost, Bitcoin is actually deflationary. And every time someone loses their keys (or dies without his keys being made known in his will, or other means to pass them on), that Bitcoin is ‘lost’, and everyone else’s Bitcoin becomes more valuable, because there is then less of it in existence.

This is what Michael Saylor is doing with his personal Bitcoin, according to an interview I watched a month or two ago. The last time he reported how much he had personally was in 2020, when he had 17,732 Bitcoin, which today would be worth $1,578,148,000. He has bought a lot more since 2020, but whenever he is asked, he only reveals the amount he previously stated in 2020.

He is not married and has no children.

The way I understood it, when he dies, his Bitcoin keys go with him. It’s his gift to everyone who believed in him and in Bitcoin, who made what is happening today possible. When Michael Saylor leaves this world, the value of everyone’s Bitcoin goes up, because all of his Bitcoin will be permanently ‘lost’.

It will still be visible on the blockchain ledger, and I’m sure Saylor will publicly identify which wallet is his at the time, so that everyone will know “That’s Michael’s Bitcoin”, in the same way the Bitcoin wallet of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakomoto (alias) is visible on the blockchain ledger, with over a million Bitcoin that have not moved since 2009, and counted as part of the nearly 5 million Bitcoin which have been ‘lost’.

So back to your question.

Would God be happy about a store of value that can’t (or at least not easily) be stolen by robbers, whose purchasing power does not relentlessly erode over time through debasement and inflation (and conversely, increases in value), and is not under the control of any human being or government, so there is no human in charge who can be deceived, manipulated, blackmailed or otherwise tempted by corruption?

An honest, transparent, and fair system of money that is ‘trust-less’, because there is no gatekeeper, no intermediary, no flawed human being in charge of it?

I can’t say whether He would be happy, but is there any reason why He would be sad about such a thing?

It’s theoretically possible.

The problem is that by historical calculations, once a nation’s debt goes beyond a certain ratio to GDP, it’s a death spiral that is supposed to be inescapable.

The only one I know of who escaped it before was America, after WWII, when apparently we grew our way out of debt.

Along with giving ourselves world reserve currency status, that little trick didn’t hurt our chances…

As I see it currently, there are two possible solutions.

Artificial Intelligence could increase productivity to such an extent that, combined with slashing government expenditures, we might possibly grow our way out of the death/debt spiral.

The other possibility is Bitcoin, which is why (in part) DJT suddenly began supporting Bitcoin and talking about creating a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve for America, once he talked to someone who actually understood it and explained it to him.

America still has world reserve currency status. That means the U.S. can print worthless fiat currency, and buy a hard asset like gold, and maybe we do. No one (in the public) knows how much gold America has, because our government is disgustingly corrupt.

But DJT knows. Remember when he sent Steve Mnuchin to Fort Knox, to examine the gold holdings of the U.S. Treasury? He never said what he saw, whether it was empty or full, and if it was full, whether it was full of real gold or just bricks that were painted gold.

But he knows, and so does DJT.

America can also print fiat currency and buy the hardest asset there is, which is Bitcoin.

If you buy Bitcoin for $100K each, and it sparks an international sovereign nation arms race, the price of Bitcoin could easily go to $10 million or more per Bitcoin.

Another way to think of it is if you are long Bitcoin, you are short the U.S. dollar, because the dollar is constantly being debased (losing value) over time, while Bitcoin is not. So as the dollar goes down in purchasing power, Bitcoin goes up in dollar terms. Bitcoin is the ultimate hedge against a debasing (or hyper-inflationary) currency.

Gold does the same thing, only less so, because gold is less efficient. It is difficult to secure, expensive to store, it can be counterfeited, etc., but more than anything, gold is not finite in supply.

For an asset whose value depends on scarcity, the fact that people can always dig up more puts a cap on how high the value can go. And besides that, the price of gold is ridiculously manipulated by the central banks to prevent everyone from running for the exists from their bogus monopoly money fiat currency system.

Nobody controls Bitcoin. If the price was to go up 50% (or down 50%) in one day, there are no ‘controls’ to halt trading like a stock exchange, it is a true free market, open 24/7/365.

The amount of Bitcoin in existence is truly knowable at any given time, the supply is known and limited, and the total amount there will ever be is known and capped. That makes it the hardest asset in the world. It’s hard for many people to really grasp this, even though they completely understand the concept of supply and demand.

With an asset where the supply is finite, and demand goes up, supply cannot be increased to meet demand. Therefore the only thing that can happen is for the price to go up high enough that someone else is willing to let it go.

There is something like $900 trillion dollars of capital in the world. Barely 1.75 trillion is currently in Bitcoin. I think gold is around $15 trillion. I read that Bitcoin flipped the total market cap of silver in the last day or two. If (when) Bitcoin overtakes the market cap of gold, that’s 8.5x the current Bitcoin price, or about $750,000 per Bitcoin.

And there’s no reason why it would stop there. Consider real estate, currently the largest depository of wealth in the world (if I remember correctly).

Real estate has all kinds of problems. There is maintenance and upkeep. There is insurance cost. There are property taxes. There is the hassle of dealing with tenants and lawsuits. There is political risk (e.g., rent controls), geographic risk (e.g., civil unrest), demographic risk (e.g., population flight, people working from home), financial risk (e.g., interest rate risk), etc.

Bitcoin has none of those risks or headaches, and far higher returns.

If there is $900 trillion in the world, and gold is $15 trillion of it, gold is 1.67% of all the wealth in the world. If Bitcoin matches gold, it too would only be 1.67% of all the wealth in the world.

But Bitcoin incentivizes people to invest in it, in countless ways that Michael Saylor is doing (creating) right now. There are wealth funds that can only invest in convertible debt instruments. They seek out high volatility assets for arbitrage opportunities, but such assets are few and far between. Bitcoin, as offered by Saylor in convertible debt instruments through MicroStrategy, is tapping into a whole new market of tens of billions (maybe hundreds of billions) of dollars, that no one else is doing.

The ETFs have made it easy for anyone to invest in Bitcoin, without knowing or caring about the complexities of personal custody.

Suppose just 5% of global wealth goes into Bitcoin over the coming 4 years of DJT’s next term. That’s another $45 trillion dollars flowing into an asset with a current market cap of $1.74 trillion.

What does that do to the price of Bitcoin? It’s not a 1-to-1 ratio, it’s a multiple. But suppose it was just 1 to 1. That would make Bitcoin go nearly 26x from here, or $2,288,000 per Bitcoin.

In some ways, the higher the price goes, the more attractive it becomes to big players like nation states and central banks and sovereign wealth funds, etc.

They’re not very interested in something with a market cap of just $1 or $2 trillion, because they can’t move into or out of it without sending the market into crazy swings (up or down).

The market has to be large enough (with enough liquidity) that big players can move hundreds of billions of dollars around without crashing the market.

Bitcoin is where this is all going. The big players don’t have a choice, it’s game theory on a global scale. When DJT announces that America is creating a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, it won’t matter if other countries ‘believe’ in Bitcoin or not.

If America goes in, everyone else either follows or gets left behind.

The price of Bitcoin went up $9,000 in one day a couple days ago. That’s nothing compared to what is coming, if sovereign nations start buying.

This may be the first time in history that the little guy can get in before the sharks, instead of after the sharks already have their position, and have priced everyone else out of the market.

Bitcoin is easily divisible, so there is no danger of it all disappearing into digital ‘vaults’.

There are 100 million Satoshis (Sats) in one bitcoin (BTC).

The point is that today, a whole Bitcoin is $88K, so each ‘Sat’ (each 1/100 millionth of a Bitcoin) is about $0.00088 USD, if I worked that out correctly.

If (when) a ‘Sat’ reaches parity with a penny, a whole Bitcoin will cost $1,000,000 (one million).

One million is not that far away, a little more than 10x from current price. Bitcoin has 10x’d lots of times, and that was when only retail investors were buying. I think the 24 month low for Bitcoin was $15K, so it has already gone nearly 6x since then.

So what happens if DJT established a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, and commits to buy 1,000,000 Bitcoin?

With only around 14 million Bitcoin in existence, that would be 7% of all Bitcoin in the world. At a current price of $88K that would cost $88,000,000,000

We probably send more than that to Ukraine every month.

But the price won’t stay at $88K while America (and everyone else forced into game theory) races to acquire this finite asset. The price will go up exponentially.

America has a huge advantage, in that we can print fiat and buy Bitcoin. Other countries can print their own fiat too, but it hurts their economies faster than it hurts ours.

Suppose American acquires a million Bitcoin. Suppose by the time it gets there, the price is $15 million per Bitcoin.

That’s $15,000,000,000,000 ($15 trillion).

And the price is still growing at (at least) 15% compounded annually (here is a chart showing historical CAGR of Bitcoin vs. other assets). While the interest on the national debt is somewhere around 4% (for example).

That certainly changes the equation on our national economic viability and stability.

Now suppose America acquires two million Bitcoin.