Bitcoin
Civilization-
strength money.
This is money’s final form. All of economic history has led us to Bitcoin. The perfect monetary policy. Impervious to debasement. Accessible to anyone. Controlled by no one. Infinite shelf-life. Lighter than air. Moves at the speed of light.View the Bitcoin White Paper (PDF)
Inflation-proof
Store your wealth securely. You earned it. Now keep it. Bitcoin has a strictly-limited supply. There will be 21 million bitcoin. That’s it.
Market-leading returns
Over 195% CAGR for the past decade. Translation: Bitcoin has nearly-tripled in price, on average, for each of the past 10 years.
Cash
/Bonds
/Gold
/Stocks
/Real Estate
A small group of people in the central bank sets the supply of cash to balance political needs. These needs often dictate a supply increase, diluting any cash balances kept as a store of value. The Bitcoin protocol set the supply of Bitcoin at a fixed value, to maximize its utility as a store of value.
Tax clarity
“For federal tax purposes, virtual currency is treated as property.”“Bitcoin is one example of a convertible virtual currency.” —IRS
Always on
Banking holidays. You know. Those days when your money doesn’t work. The Federal Reserve takes 11 days off per year. That’s 3% downtime. Add in weekends and it’s over 30%. Bitcoin works nights, weekends, and holidays, with less than 0.03% downtime over its 13 year life—a 1000x improvement.
Annual service availability
Trades 24/7
Buy or sell any time you want. More trading history than the S&P500. Bitcoin never sleeps, pal.
Low fees
Pay a flat rate regardless of value transacted. Can move $1 billion for less than $1. Bitcoin formalizes and automates the transaction process, letting anyone compete to be a financial intermediary. This drives efficiency in costs. Bitcoin passes the savings on to you.
Fast transfers
Move any amount of money in 10 minutes or less. Compare that to wire transfer timing, fees, and conditions. No phone calls to confirm. No FBO codes. All you need to send money is Bitcoin wallet software, a destination address, and some Bitcoin, of course.
Fully-auditable
Every single transaction is independently-validated by a global network of 13,389 nodes, preventing counterfeiting, forgery, and debasement. You can audit Bitcoin yourself. Yes, you. Run a node with as little as a Raspberry Pi and the open-source Bitcoin Core software. This network instantly rejects invalid transactions, ensuring no one else can change the rules.
Unparalleled security
Hard work makes hard money. Bitcoin miners perform over 168 exahashes per second—that’s 168,200,000,000,000,000,000—in their mathematical competition to mine transaction blocks. Whichever one cracks the code first, gets to add a block of transactions to the global Bitcoin ledger—that’s the blockchain. To the winner go the transaction fees.
Altering that ledger in a 51% attack would cost billions of dollars and vast quantities of scarce chips. Even then, the worst an attacker could do is undo recent transactions—like bouncing a check. Elliptic-curve cryptography prevents anyone from ever spending your Bitcoin without your signature.
Ultra-resilient
Bitcoin is designed for adversarial conditions. In 2021, over 50% of Bitcoin mining happened in China. When China banned it, miners dispersed worldwide. Bitcoin continued operating without disruption, and recovered its previous mining rate in under 6 months.
Ultra-portable
Carry an unlimited amount, anywhere in the world, with just 24 words, stamped in steel, and a passphrase. Store it in your pocket, on a hardware wallet the size of a calculator, to sign transactions securely even if your phone or computer gets hacked.
Widely-adopted
An estimated 46 million Americans own Bitcoin. So do public companies like TSLA, SQ, MSTR and more. And so does El Salvador, where Bitcoin is legal tender and over 60% of the population has it.
“I like bitcoin as a portfolio diversifier” —Paul Tudor Jones
“I’d rather have bitcoin than a bond” —Ray Dalio
This material has been prepared for informational purposes only. The Bitcoin Brochure is not investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Do not rely upon The Bitcoin Brochure for those types of advice. Do your own research to supplement the information provided here. Consult your own investment, tax, legal, and accounting advisors for individualized advice about your situation. This information is not warranted to be up-to-date or free from error. Don’t trust, verify. The Bitcoin Brochure is not a solicitation to buy or sell any asset. The authors of The Bitcoin Brochure may hold Bitcoin. Holding Bitcoin carries the risk of total loss of funds if you lose control of your keys.
- U.S. Federal Reserve, Fedwire Funds Services[⇡]
- U.S. Federal Reserve, Fedwire Funds Services[⇡]
- NYSE, Trading Days[⇡]
- NYSE, Holidays & Trading Hours[⇡]
- BP, Statistical Review of World Energy[⇡]
- U.S. DoE, OSTI, TV Energy Consumption Trends and Energy-Efficiency Improvement Options[⇡]
- Cambridge, CBECI[⇡]
- U.S. DoE Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Global Implications of Standby Power Use[⇡]
