✨ Today, I started my ８ＴＨ ＹＥＡＲ working full-time in #Bitcoin.

I've been a journalist, I've worked at a global exchange and I've spent thousands of hours down the rabbit hole.

If you're just starting out, here are the lessons I'd pass along 🧵

Tulips, the #Bitcoin of the 17th century

How a pandemic, FOMO, and speculation made a flower worth the same as a mansion

/THREAD/

1/ During the beginning of the 1630s in the Netherlands, tulips were difficult to cultivate and preserve.

This made them a luxury good reserved for the rich and affluent of the upper class living in mansions with big gardens.

2/ The tulip market was not organized nor regulated, as other trades, which made it easy for professional growers to enter it.
Due to the international trade expansion, the growers starting cultivating rare varieties, to achieve higher prices.

3/ The biggest change occurred when florists used tulip bulbs as speculative assets.

The market expansion led to forward bulb-purchase contracts, thus enabling trading during the entire year, and not just during the summer months when tulips bloom.

4/ Easy loans and credit for forward contract purchases led many to enter the market since not much capital was required.

People from the lower economic class (maids, servants, craftsmen) could not resist the temptation for some quick profits and entered the speculative market.

Hello and good Friday, January 28, 2021, I’m Drew and this is Rocketboom [chair breaks]

I see many people are missing why ‘digital currency’, e.g. #Bitcoin is an important disruption in the world. It's not actually about stock trading. It’s waaaaaaaaaay bigger than that.

I USED TO DO A THING. I wrote scripts to break down these kinds of topics. I felt compelled to come back out and explain because its such a big idea...and too many people are not seeing it.

TLDR; Digital currencies allow people living in impoverished nations to transcend the failures of their individual governments, such that their work and purchase power becomes more equal in potential to those in the wealthiest countries.

Examples are always nice. Lets. [cut to voice over]

#BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $7.81 trillion AUM, recently granted two of its funds the ability to invest in #Bitcoin futures.

Here's why I think BlackRock investing in Bitcoin futures is bearish, and could result in a major downturn in the coming months.

1) According to the new BlackRock SEC filings, it mentions the use of Bitcoin derivatives and other assets as part of its investment scheme. The futures will be cash-settled, and likely on the CME BTC exchange.

2) If BlackRock was bullish on Bitcoin, they would've directly bought it, but instead they are choosing to buy Future contracts. Why?

With Futures, they can either short or long. Considering BlackRock's historically bearish stance on BTC, It's quite clear they will be shorting.

3) Here's a short clip of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink bashing #Bitcoin, saying theres zero institutional demand, and calling it an ‘index of money laundering':

4) By investing in the Bitcoin futures market, it essentially allows them to gamble on its future price.

With their large cash size, BlackRock will be the largest player in this market. They can and will tank Bitcoin's price to avoid paying out. Banks have done it before...

Unmasking the Deceased Programmer Who Donated 28 Bitcoin to Capitol Hill Rioters. https://t.co/EOrIu7x4J6

French far-right hacker Laurent Bachelier aka "pankkake"

1/ The Price of Bitcoin

- Why price is entirely what matters
- How the price helps build Bitcoin

A thread👇

2/ Marketing viral loop

“A viral loop is a mechanism that drives continuous referrals for continuous growth.

It’s how you drive your existing customers to refer others to your brand, and in turn, get those new customers to tell even more people about you." - @ReferralRock

3/ Most of us heard about Bitcoin in 2013, 2017, when friends and family were talking about the rapid price increase. It’s through this viral loop that Bitcoin grows in adoption.

4/ The price is that signal to folks that Bitcoin is interesting, solves a problem, and that others are recognizing it as a new money. If Bitcoin’s price had stayed at $100 none of us would be here. While there is volatility, we keep seeing higher lows = long term trend upwards.

5/ Satoshi built a viral loop into Bitcoin.

“As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.” - Satoshi

|1| I have seen a lot of tweets emphasizing the partnership between @iotatoken and @renaultgroup. It's a great compliment for IOTAs tech, but everyone who ...

#IOTA #greentech #ElonMusk #Bitcoin

|2| is following IOTA more closely should not be surprised at all.

All the recent partnerships are probably hard to grasp for the outsiders/disappointed, but ...

|3| it is not like the management behavior is something one can not change easily. The IOTA Foundation grew through the defeats it experienced.

IOTA is ...

#Bicoin

|4| no more a realm of promises.

While the media and public judged over IOTA, they put in years of research into #coordicide

While the media and public categorized IOTA as failure (many of them to this very day), they kept fighting for ...

#research #DLT

|5| their vision and continued with their Imagination of "DLT 3.0":

--> removing the need of miners,
--> scalable,
--> feeless,
--> data/value layer,
--> governance model mitigating growing centralization,
--> ...,

#ResearchPaper #DLT #trilemma

1/ Satoshi’s Vision™ is a silly endeavor, as it doesn’t matter what it was, we are where we are now. However, those pushing the “Bitcoin was first made for payments” narrative insist on cherry-picking sentences from the white paper and forum posts to champion their perspective.

2/ The following tweetstorm is a categorical repudiation of this tired narrative. Bitcoin was purpose-built to first be a Store of Value (SoV), a thread:

3/ How do we determine Satoshi’s intention? We need to look at his ideology, description of functionality/architecture, timing, and audience. Let's start with how Satoshi describes the problem Bitcoin solves. In his first public comms after the whitepaper, in the first paragraph:

4/ “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” - Satoshi

5/ He later expands on that Libertarian thought in his other writings:

“[with Bitcoin] we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.” — Satoshi Nakamoto

https://t.co/kWHHSWdlw2 #GoldStandard #Bitcoin #BTC
#Covidstroika

1/ If you're new, here are some must-read resources on bitcoin, ethereum, defi, web 3.0, and the future of crypto.

Tools to join the revolution. 👇

2/ @case4bitcoin is the ultimate bitcoin beginners resource, with macro stats and charts, a deep library of curated content, and regular updates that put bitcoin's evolution in

3/ We've built the new @MessariCrypto to give users a "second screen" for navigating the markets.

+ ROI & fundamentals metrics by sector
+ Comprehensive asset profiles
+ Charting tools, screeners, watch lists

Free! (Though we have premium tools,

4/ Our crypto theses were downloaded 3x more than 2019's. At 134 pages, it seems daunting.

But it's a tight summary of all of our research team's epic work throughout the year.

Almost like 120 tear sheets or 12 sector research reports stapled

5/ Once you've been redpilled on BTC, and have an understanding of the overall crypto markets, the next rabbit hole to jump down is usually ETH.

@RyanWatkins_ and @WilsonWithiam wrote the must read primer on Ethereum, and its major new upgrade

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Satoshi Nakamoto
[email protected]
https://t.co/G8BUvnF9nT

Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial

institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps

transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came

from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The network itself requires minimal structure.

Messages are broadcast on a best effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. 1. Introduction
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial