July 18, 2024
Bitcoin Is Not Your Typical Investment
Heads They Win, Tails You Lose
How well do you think you would do if you had to play basketball against an NBA team? What about if you had to represent yourself in court against a ‘dream-team’ of the world’s best lawyers? What if you had to play poker against players who knew what cards were next to be turned over? Or what if you had to play in some game where the rules kept changing and your opponents were the ones getting to make the changes?
Yet, somehow, you’ve been convinced that you should be investing in stocks and bonds — a game full of world-class professionals playing against you, with deep pockets and limitless resources, often with inside information about what’s about to be announced, and closely connected to the regulators who change the rules if those professionals somehow lose.
It sounds like a sucker’s game. And it is. But the alternative of not playing, and just putting your money in a savings account, is an equally bad choice. In a savings account, you are guaranteed that your money will lose purchasing power. You’ll earn next to nothing in interest, have to pay taxes on anything that you do earn, and inflation will outpace your money’s growth by at least an order of magnitude. Currently, yearly inflation is now at 7.9% and savings accounts offer 0.1% interest — so inflation is eighty times as high as what you’ll earn by trying to save money. And then there’s banking fees to pay on top of it all.
It Should Not Be Like This, And It Doesn’t Have to Be
This is clearly an unfair system. There are volumes written about how we ended up here. This article is not going to go into that history. Instead, it’s going to explain how Bitcoin gives you a fair option to exit this false alternative of being a severely disadvantaged player in the investment game, or a guaranteed loser in the savings game.
Pause for a minute to think about this: If you didn’t have to get involved in investing would you? If the money you earned from your job and saved for the future wasn’t being destroyed by inflation, and if home, gas, food, healthcare, and education costs weren’t soaring, would you risk your savings on things you aren’t an expert at? If you didn’t have to, would you buy growth stocks, commodity futures, index funds, convertible bonds, or any of these other things that a person can’t understand without getting a detailed education and years of experience in?
In the fifties and sixties, and even throughout much of the seventies, most people did not invest. A middle-class job got you a house, two cars, paid for school, healthcare, clothing, and even vacations. But this era ended. It didn’t have to, but it did.
The reason the era of being able to save your money ended is because money got taken over by those regulators who are all cozy with the financial institutions and, in working to ‘maximize the shareholder value’ for the financial institutions, they destroyed the integrity of money. Check out the charts at wtfhappenedin1971.com to see what began in the seventies and has only accelerated since then — from wages to the cost of living, from household debt to national debt, and even down to the very fundamentals of investments.
So How Do You Get Out? Buy Bitcoin.
How do you get out?
Well, you don’t do it at a financial institution. They’re out to make money for their shareholders by making sure their own share of the money pie grows faster than people who aren’t their shareholders — people like you.
You also don’t hold out hope for the regulators to take care of you either. They’re doing pretty fine getting rich personally while allegedly working for the public good. The current Secretary of the Treasury is Janet Yellen — who received over $7 million dollars in ‘speaking fees' from banks after 'regulating' them in her role as Chair of the Federal Reserve. In other words, before assuming her current role as Treasury Secretary, Yellen was sometimes paid over $250,000 per speech by the same banks she was previously in charge of regulating and now is again. But this isn’t just a case of one bad egg, it’s systemic in nature. For instance, Yellen’s predecessor, Steven Mnuchin, spent his whole career as a banker and apparently has a net worth of over $450 million now. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve was involved in a trading scandal as recently as September, 2021 where insiders made very profitable trades in advance of public announcements by that organization. But don’t hold your breath waiting for any of those who made these illegal trades to have to give the money back, pay fines, or go to jail. Those involved in this scandal “retired” with a golden parachute and all their gains intact.
What you can do, however, is exit this system that is rigged against you. It’s a system where regulators and bankers spend their time working for themselves, changing the rules on you, and destroying the middle class while they lie straight to your face. They lie about helping you, about the temporary or transitory nature of inflation, and about who they’re really working for.
You can make your exit from this corrupt system through Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not controlled by the Federal Reserve, or the office of the President, or Congress, or any other politician. It’s not controlled by a cabal of bankers and regulators either. It’s not controlled by anyone at all.
Decades ago, money could be earned and saved and relied upon to store your purchasing power for the future. But the system got taken over and this ability to save was siphoned off into making bankers rich at the expense of the middle class. Bitcoin, despite being an extraordinarily new invention, brings back that now-lost integrity to money. It brings it to the currency of the Bitcoin system, which is called bitcoin. It does not and can not bring it back to the currency of the unholy banker-regulator matrimony which has seized control of the dollar.
A lot of people are very excited about this. They should be. And so should you. Finally, there’s a way for you to keep what’s yours from the greedy and insatiable parasites who have been stealing from you your whole life.
A Profound Shift in Thinking and Perspective
We’ve been taught, for most of our lives, that you lose out by saving and have to speculate on investments in order to build wealth. That was true only because the ability to save was destroyed by the people we entrusted to oversee it. When those who are meant to protect something benefit from destroying it, we have made the mistake of “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse” as the saying goes. And, to carry on with this metaphor, Bitcoin is a henhouse that the foxes cannot get into. It is guarded not by animals, or humans, but rather is protected by the laws of math and physics themselves. These are protections that cannot be changed by bankers-turned-regulators who will soon become bankers-once-more.
Bitcoin has all the features of good money — especially that of not losing its purchasing power to inflation — because of its fixed supply.
As you learn more about Bitcoin, keep in mind that it is not some other investment to be weighed alongside a bond or a stock. It is an invention that restores to civilization something that did once exist, but that you may not have even believed could exist. Its promise is that you can earn money and save it without having to gamble it in a game you must play against full-time, well-funded professionals. That’s tremendously liberating.
The more you study it, the more you’ll come to realize that Bitcoin is not a risk-bearing financial investment. Instead, if it is even to be considered an investment at all, it is an investment in your freedom — your freedom to avoid unnecessary financial risk and to invest your time on whatever else you’d rather be doing than worrying about your investments.
This blog offers thoughts and opinions on Bitcoin from the Swan Bitcoin team and friends.
Tomer Strolight is Editor-in-Chief at Swan Bitcoin. He completed bachelors and masters degrees at Toronto’s Schulich School of Business. Tomer spent 25 years operating businesses in digital media and private equity before turning his attention full time to Bitcoin. Tomer wrote the book “Why Bitcoin?” a collection of 27 short articles each explaining a different facet of this revolutionary new monetary system. Tomer also wrote and narrated the short film “Bitcoin Is Generational Wealth”. He has appeared on many Bitcoin podcasts including What Bitcoin Did, The Stephan Livera Podcast, Bitcoin Rapid Fire, Twice Bitten, the Bitcoin Matrix and many more.
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