In this episode Saifedean talks to regular seminar attendees about El Salvador’s recent adoption of bitcoin as legal tender. They discuss how this is a test of the importance of legal tender laws for monetary choice, and the drawbacks of legal tender laws. Will this hasten bitcoin's adoption in daily transactions? Or will it encourage hodling? What impact would wider use of bitcoin have on El Salvador’s exports? Why are governments without their own currencies more likely to adopt bitcoin? Can bitcoin inspire a populist anti-inflationist political movement in Latin America? They also touched on recent media reports about recovery of bitcoin from colonial pipeline hackers.
Related links:
Jack Mallers talk at Bitcoin 2021 conference during which president Nayib Bukele announces bitcoin will become legal tender in El Salvador: https://youtu.be/_59hrgTiRJU
Jordan Schachtel article on colonial pipeline hack: https://dossier.substack.com/p/the-colonial-pipeline-hack-the-russians
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/
