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@ SatStackr
2025-05-23 13:58:46Growing up, we were told that in order to build wealth, we need to save little by little. By living below your means, you are providing more for your future.
It is a simple formula that will help you build up the capital necessary to buy a car, a house or start a business… You prioritize long-term benefits and delayed gratification over immediate rewards.
This is called having a low-time preference. In contrast, high-time preference individuals prioritize today over tomorrow, seeking immediate gratification.
Austrian economists explain that civilization growth is driven by low-time preference societies. Groups of individuals who prioritize long-term planning are able to innovate and develop new tools for a better future. Over time, this behavior leads to technological inventions like the light bulb and artistic masterpieces like the Notre Dame cathedral.
***What happens when you realize that the money you save is losing value over time? ***
There is less incentive to save for the future, because in the future your savings will be worth less. You might as well spend it now and enjoy life today.
When the money you save loses its value, you are facing one of two choices:
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Spend it today and reap the rewards of your hard work;
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Invest it (stocks, real estate, etc.) with the hope to reap higher rewards later, bearing the risk of losing it all if the investment does not pay off.
There is a distinct difference between saving and investing as the latter approach is riskier than the former. By investing, you are betting on the upside while bearing the downside risk. Saving, in contrast, comes without downside risk. That difference becomes blurry when the money you save is losing value. In fact, saving becomes inherently a losing approach. Logically, you will be forced to place a speculative bet with the hope to outperform the guaranteed loss of value. You are required to find a way to hedge your bet…
Humans over time have always sought out a medium to save their economic energy for a better future. That used to be beads and seashells, and evolved to precious metals like gold and silver.
Money is a tool that we use to save our economic energy over time, and exchange value with each other.
I spend time fishing, you spend time farming, the neighbor spends time building homes, and society rewards us with money for the time and energy we spent being productive
Today, the tool that we use to save our economic energy is clearly losing value over time. The nominal value remains the same, but the purchasing power is decreasing. In other words, the value of our time today will be worth less in the future.
That explains why everyone around us is looking for the next best investment opportunity. We are all needing to become investment experts, speculators, on top of our respective professions. Speculation became necessary, and some of us are forced into a high-time preference lifestyle.
Earn now and spend it all now before you lose it.
This should not be the case…
Time is Money
Our time is the only scarce resource we all have. We use it to be productive and generate economic value, then store that value in the form of money in order to reap the rewards in the future.
Money is the abstract representation of our time. Hence, time is money.
In January 2009, at the height of the global financial crisis, a software protocol called Bitcoin was released pseudonymously by Satoshi Nakamoto. This individual (or group) released a whitepaper a few months prior named “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” outlining how the system enables secure, peer-to-peer transactions without relying on a central authority. (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)
Although there are more technical concepts involved, the bitcoin protocol can be thought of as a language for communicating value. The same way we respect the rules of the English language to communicate ideas with one another, bitcoin users adhere to the network’s consensus rules to communicate value with each other in a peer-to-peer fashion.
There are no physical or digital coins in the bitcoin network. Rather, it is a collection of transactions transferring value from sender to recipient. Transactions are validated and propagated by nodes across the network, before being recorded into the blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain is a global public ledger of all transactions that cannot be altered.
More importantly, Bitcoin is money that does not lose value overtime.
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Its supply is capped at 21 million coins.
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Its scarcity increases over time due to the predictable issuance rate, which halves roughly every 4 years.
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Its decentralized nature puts the power in the hands of its users.
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There is no governing body that can devalue or alter it.
It is a tool that we can use to save our economic energy over time, and be able to use it later.
It is the scarcest verifiable commodity: we cannot make more of it no matter how high its demand grows. That cannot be said for any other commodity in the world today.
A savings tool in disguise
See, most people tend to view bitcoin as another speculative investment. They presume they have missed out on another investment opportunity, and it’s now too late to get in.
Meanwhile, it is quite the opposite. Bitcoin’s value will keep growing over time due to its deflationary nature.
With bitcoin, we can save for a better future, for a rainy day, and spend more time with our loved ones or focusing on our craft to build better tools or artistic masterpieces. It takes away the burden of having to speculate on which stock will perform best, or which real estate market will grow the fastest, all while working one or multiple jobs
Bitcoin is not another investment opportunity you missed out on. It is the best savings tool humans have invented (or discovered), while everything else is the speculative bet. Bitcoin is the hedge against the guaranteed devaluation of money, without any counterparty risk.
What we were taught as children is true. With the right tool, the idea that saving will help you build wealth overtime stands true. Bitcoin might seem like an investment today given the volatility during its adoption phase. In reality, it is the perfect way to store your time and economic energy and grow your wealth. Whether you make $1/hour or $1M/hour, you can start saving in the best money humans have invented.
My goal is to help people around me understand this technology and break the stigma around it.
Bitcoin is not the next best investment.
It is the best tool we have found to store our economic energy across time and exchange value with each other.
Bitcoin is Money.
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