Name: Casually Explained: Bitcoin
Uploaded: 2025-06-05T02:52:44.000Z
Duration: 10 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

Adverbs of manner

Now, as someone who doesn't get very emotionally attached to a financial investment, shoutouts to my future children, I think the best way to introduce Bitcoin is with a quote from Sun Tzu's famous blog post, The Art of War, where he said, I fear not the man who's read a thousand crypto white papers, I fear the man who's read one crypto white paper a thousand times.

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Because if you go on crypto Twitter, God forbid, there's no more common way to dismiss Bitcoin skeptics than simply saying, do the work.

So a few years ago, that led me to set aside a day to really dive into and study the Bitcoin white paper.

One morning, I sat down, had way too much coffee, which for me is one, opened the PDF and started reading.

After just five minutes, I sat back and thought, wow, because there wasn't any more pages.

Not knocking the content, but if anyone tells you they did the work, just know what they meant was they read a pamphlet.

In brief, the reason the Bitcoin network was innovative was because in 2008, anonymous chess grandmaster Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a solution to a problem that had been plaguing digital currencies for decades, which is if I want to buy two large pizzas from Papa John's, but I have no cash to do it, how do I send the money digitally without a financial institution having to verify the transaction between us?

Two years later, this transaction was successfully performed.

Although at today's Bitcoin price, those two pizzas cost about $615 million, about the same as the entirety of Papa John's market cap at the time.

While at first glance, it seems like a fairly practical problem to solve, it doesn't really explain why the price has gone up over 500 million percent while I didn't have any.

Bitcoin maximalists say that Bitcoin has gone up so much because one day it'll become the new global reserve currency, replacing all fiat on earth and be worth tens of millions of coin.

But then there's a whole other group of Bitcoin skeptics that say it's a scam and all going to zero.

First of all, it's not possible for Bitcoin to go to zero because a guy on Reddit said he'd buy all 21 million for one cent each.

There's also no way it can go to tens of millions of coin because that would put its evaluation at about $400 trillion.

This doesn't make any sense because the Bitcoin network doesn't even sell AI graphics cards.

Now that we know the proper price of Bitcoin is somewhere between one cent and $10 million, how do we know which direction it's going to go?

If you look at what the experts say, legendary investor Charlie Munger called Bitcoin rat poison, which is clearly bearish.

But if you take Michael Saylor, chairman of the Bitcoin options trading vehicle MicroStrategy, he'll tell you Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy, which I think is bullish, but I might have to ask my shaman.

I would also like to add that I didn't edit anything here.

The problem I found is that if you ask anyone who's into crypto why Bitcoin has value, the most common response is it's digital gold.

The obvious follow up is why does gold have value, which then usually devolves into because it's scarce and because people have valued it since the dawn of humanity.

And while that's a great explanation for OnlyFans, this is the economic equivalent of saying it's a good store of value because it is.

On the other side, people from traditional finance often make the argument that a digital asset isn't real, so you can create an infinite amount of them and therefore they have no value.

This isn't a very good argument because if digital assets have no value, how can the founders of nearly every crypto project rug pull the whole thing to buy yachts?

Now, while you shouldn't evaluate the effectiveness of a technology based on the character of people who believe in it, I certainly do anyway.

And Bitcoin in particular has a strong bias towards anti-government sentiment and libertarianism.

If you're not sure what that means, imagine if the government were to say, because you didn't pay your fair share, 150 people died today from an underfunded government program.

This kind of thing would really rattle a libertarian because they know that their taxes would have helped the government to get at least a dozen more.

Even looking at the types of people within traditional finance versus crypto, while there are some who really get it, you get the feeling that most of the people in decentralized finance aren't familiar with how the existing financial system currently works, causing them to often reinvent the wheel and run into the same mistakes that have already happened before.

Take Sam Bankman Freed in the collapse of FTX.

Everyone in crypto was like, I mean, there was no oversight or transparency.

And that made traditional finance say, what?

And unfortunately, not because they were 12.

For this reason, a big threat to the crypto industry has been regulation because there isn't any.

You can go on Binance, buy 75 times levered Dogecoin futures without a single confirmation window.

And in 25 seconds, you'll either make three times your money or lose everything, which, let's be honest, is pretty fucking awesome.

While this has begun changing a lot in the last few years, after so many people were losing all their money repeatedly, there is a lot of environmental criticism brought towards crypto because the process of mining new Bitcoin is extremely energy intensive as the process is done by brute forcing math problems with a huge amount of compute.

Bitcoin mining was actually banned in China because the government decided the amount of energy being expended to solve arbitrary math problems was excessively wasteful and it would be much more productive to use those children for something else.

Generally speaking, the single biggest concern of most people is Bitcoin's price because even though it doesn't produce anything in the literal sense, from the time you could easily publicly buy it as a speculator, it is one of the best performing assets of all time.

Critics will argue that saying Bitcoin is the best performing asset of all time is like saying a winning $2 Powerball ticket is the best performing asset of all time.

But if you bought a winning lottery ticket, you would gladly look that person dead in the eye and say, correct.

There are two popular theories of pricing Bitcoin that are thrown around enough to be worth considering.

The first common theory is it'll take at least half the market cap from gold because they serve similar monetary purposes, which would put them both at around an $8.4 trillion market cap at today's prices or $420k a coin.

This makes a lot of sense because the biggest Bitcoin bull I personally know is the 76-year-old guy who owns the penthouse in my apartment complex who may or may not be the Baron from Dune.

He owns a commercial weed farm and while weed stocks aren't doing so well, the man needs a new backsplash for his kitchen.

The second common price theory is the use of a stock-to-flow model created by Twitter user Plan B.

And while I'm absolutely strawmanning this, a stock-to-flow model is like saying if you have 100 food and 100 hungry people, what happens to price when you have 50 food and 100 hungry people?

The pattern then checks out in real life down to 10 food.

So logically, you can just keep extrapolating and predict if you have one crumb and 100 hungry people, how much higher would the price be for half a crumb instead?

Using this model, it currently predicts the price of Bitcoin in 2030 will be $14 million a coin, which is so far beyond even the AI chip theory that the only explanation is that Cathie Wood is about to bless us with a new saga of her shonen manga.

What's interesting at this point is that with the creation of Bitcoin ETFs, regulatory oversight emerging but giving the green light, and so much money from traditional finance pouring into the crypto ecosystem, purists look at their ascending token portfolio with glee as it seems like it's blue skies ahead for prices to climb even further.

But some people have started to point out that as time has marched on, every day their favorite crypto assets trade more and more in lockstep with traditional financial assets, and ownership has become more and more concentrated on centralized exchanges and mainstream financial products.

Even five years ago, the whole space was about disrupting traditional finance, but now it's about cheering on any product that lets you get exposure to the network without being part of it in the hope it drives the price higher.

Just like an Oppenheimer, it's caused some people to dim the lights, adorn their trilby, and recite with scorn, he who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he thereby become a monster.

Causing everyone else to say, bro, I just want to be able to afford a house one day, can you please chill the fuck out?

In my view so far, despite a lot of people telling me they've done the work, much like the Bitcoin blockchain, I'm still looking for proof.

And personally, I haven't been able to find anyone who I think really has a convincing argument for the future of the technology or the price, and it's pretty much hopes, dreams, and speculation all around.

That is except for one person, a Bitcoin talk forum member from 2013 named GameCubey, who during a huge sell-off titled the thread, I am HODLing, where he went on to say, I type a D that title twice because I knew it was wrong the first time.

It's because I'm a bad trader, and I know I'm a bad trader.

You good traders can spot the highs and the lows, pit-pat, piffy, wing-wong-wang, just like that, and make a million bucks?

I should have sold moments before every sell and bought moments before every buy, but you know what?

You only sell in a bear market if you're a good day trader or an illusion noob.

In a zero-sum game such as this, traders can only take your money if you sell.

Actually, on the bottle, it spelled whiskey.

He then passed out, not realizing the profundity of his own words, because everyone had recognized the hodler in themselves too.

To me, GameCubey is a man who finally cracked the code on not just Bitcoin, but life in general.

You can't make a bad decision if you never decide, you can't have a regret if things could never be different, and of course what I've now adopted as my golden rule, your girlfriend can't leave you for another man if she's cheating on you with a woman.

Now, unlike your girlfriend leaving you, one thing you can't solve by just saying no is data brokers getting their hands on your information, who then turn around and sell that data to whoever wants to buy it, potentially getting it into the hands of robocallers, scammers, or God forbid, the government.

This is because you're giving them permission to nearly all the time whenever you sign up for things online, but if the inner libertarian in you is getting flustered already, the good news is you can use today's sponsor, Smith & Wesson.

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This is because these data brokers actually have to remove your information if you ask them to.

It's just ridiculously tedious to contact all of them and go through the process.

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It's so simple that once you sign up, you think, okay, so what do I do now?

But you forgot the whole point is finding the data you use to sign up.

Since the last time I talked about Incogni six months ago, it's done an additional 12 hours of work and completed a couple dozen more requests.

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