This repo contains a collection of notes for newcomers to bitcoin. If you're curious to learn more or even if you think it's a scam then hopefully you find value here.
Disclaimer: these notes should not be construed as financial advice.
- What is money? Why do we use money? What are necessary properties of money?
- What is inflation? Is CPI inflation? Are the people who create inflation in charge of reporting how much inflation there is?
- Why aren't gold and silver used as money anymore?
- WTF happened in 1971? (hint: the global reserve currency officially went off the gold standard)
- What does it mean for a currency to be backed by something? The dollar used to be backed by gold (ie. redeemable for gold). The dollar is now backed by the "full faith and credit of the US" but what does that really mean?
- Should any group of people be trusted to control the world's money supply? "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" and all that...
- Why do governments have a monopoly on money? That wasn't the case until fairly recently in history. Even the Romans crafted coins from gold and silver that they couldn't conjure from thin air. Picture your least favorite political group or dictator governing the issuance of money. Does that change your perspective?
- "Economists say a gold/bitcoin standard won't improve price stability, etc.!" What percentage of economists work directly for the government or are funded indirectly through grants? Does that create any strong incentives?
Throughout history people used the following as money:
- seashells
- stones
- the Mongols even tried paper money (see the paragraph above "List of coins used" where it talks about their hyperinflation)
- silver
- gold
Shells aren't durable or fungible (they look different from each other so how much is one worth vs the other?). Precious metals work pretty well for a local economy but how do you transact with someone far away for e-commerce? Digital money is great for online transactions but then you have to trust that the people managing the money don't cheat and double spend the money.
Until Bitcoin.
Here's the full 9 pages of the whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
It's a technical document, but I highly recommend trying to read it. Most LLMs these days are plenty capable at explaining the core concepts in there.