Episode notes
"Bitcoin is poorly suited to the purpose of becoming any nation's main medium of exchange."
That was the topic of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on August 12, 2019. It featured George Selgin, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, and economist Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (2018). Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
Welcome to the audio podcasting home of Saifedean Ammous and The Bitcoin Standard.When a pseudonymous programmer introduced “a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party” to a small Online mailing list in 2008, very few paid attention. Ten years later, and against all odds, this upstart autonomous decentralized software offers an unstoppable and globally-accessible hard money alternative to modern central banks. The Bitcoin Standard analyzes the historical context to the rise of bitcoin, the economic properties that have allowed it to grow quickly, and its likely economic, political, and social implications. Ammous' firm grasp of the technological possibilities as well as the historical realities of monetary evolution provides for a fascinating exploration of the ramifications of voluntary free market money. As it challenges the most sacred of government monopolies, bitcoin shifts the pendulum of sovereignty away from governments in favor of individuals, offering us the tantalizing possibility of a world where money is fully extricated from politics and unrestrained by borders.
THE BITCOIN STANDARD TOOLKIT
The Bitcoin Standard Toolkit is a selection of the Bitcoin services I recommend to readers and learners on saifedean.com, as they upgrade from The Fiat Standard to The Bitcoin Standard.
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Check their website here: https://nydig.com/
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To secure your bitcoins, it is important to keep your seedphrase backed up safely, and for that, I highly recommend using the CypherWheel seed storage device, a gorgeous and brilliant sturdy piece of low time preference engineering from a fourth-generation machine shop in Maine.
Check their website here: https://cyphersafe.io/
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Whenever someone asks me how to invest in Bitcoin, my advice is to accumulate bitcoins periodically for the long run, or dollar-cost averaging. When you buy every day, week, or month, you play bitcoin’s volatility to your advantage. In the long run, this strategy will outperform every other bitcoin investment strategy, except for dumb luck, and lying about timing the market. For dollar-cost averaging, I strongly recommend OKCoin, the exchange with the lowest fees for recurring purchases worldwide. OKCoin is also the bitcoin exchange accessible in the most countries around the world.
Check their website here: https://okcoin.com/
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I believe it is really important to run a node, but I don’t recommend running it on your work or personal computer, as it can compromise the performance of your computer and, more importantly, the security and privacy of your bitcoin node. A far better solution is to buy a dedicated hardware node, and for that, I highly recommend Nodl.
Check their website here: https://www.nodl.it/
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My hardware wallet of choice is the Coldcard. I strongly recommend only conducing bitcoin trades on computers that are dedicated to bitcoin and cannot connect to the internet. I like the Coldcard because it is a contained machine optimized for bitcoin and bitcoin only.
Coldcard is basically a small computer that can only do bitcoin, which makes securing it more straight-forward. Use the code BITCOINSTANDARD on coldcardwallet.com to get a 5% discount.
Check their website here: https://coldcardwallet.com/
