What is Bitcoin in plain terms?
Bitcoin is online money, like ApplePay or Venmo. The difference is that in those systems, many companies see your transaction, take a fee, and in some cases might block your transaction. With Bitcoin you can pay someone directly, person to person. This is called “decentralized” and basically means no more middlemen!
So that’s the basic premise, but there’s more. The way this system was constructed, it holds spending power over time really well — like some people use gold in the same way. This limited supply is called “scarcity”. While the US Dollar has been amazing for decades, the system has been eroding before our eyes. From the 2008 Financial Crisis to the 2020 COVID economic response to insiders (mainly big banks) taking advantage of the system, the Fed and Treasury have been expanding the money supply massively…. much, much faster than in the past 40 years that our current system (often called “fiat”) has been in effect.
What does this mean for you? Well, the way you saved money for the future of you and your family may not work anymore. Sure the stock market is at an all time high, but many worry that the whole system, may have big problems in the future. Maybe in 10 years, maybe in 5 years, who knows maybe THIS year even! So consider for the long term saving of your money things that have a good chance of keeping value through the turbulent economic times ahead (again, we are talking 5, 10, 20 years or more).
Bitcoin fits the bill as its a way of storing wealth, like gold, that has a limited supply, but unlike gold, it is online, made for our digital world (like cell phones were to land lines). So it’s a way of transacting (like ApplePay without Apple) and its a way of saving for the long term like a digital version of gold.
In short, Bitcoin, a global currency with a fixed monetary supply (like gold but better), serves as an excellent long-term savings tool due to its scarcity and resistance to inflation, unlike traditional currencies controlled by central banks, and has the potential to change how the world thinks about and uses money, promoting freedom and choice.