Why It Takes Both Time and Energy to Make Bitcoins
To earn money you have to put in time and work. So for the sake of fairness, it should also be the case that the creation of money itself takes time and work.
But this is not the case with national currencies. Any arbitrary amount of dollars, euros, pesos, pounds, etc.. can be conjured out of thin air instantly and with no work. The creation of this kind of money is therefore not tied to time and work. And so, this method of the creation of money discourages people from working. It instead encourages people to seek handouts of this easy money. This isn’t just welfare for the poor — it is mostly huge handouts for the very rich.
Bitcoin fixes this.
Creating bitcoins requires time. Bitcoin, the system, guarantees that bitcoins, its unit of currency, can only be created over a preset schedule of time. A small amount of bitcoin is created every ten minutes on average, with that amount getting cut in half every four years, leading to a maximum supply of 21 million bitcoins ever.
And creating bitcoins also requires work. Nobody can conjure bitcoins without proving that they worked to create them. The creation of bitcoins is a giant competition between workers all over the world to win each reward that is won every ten minutes on average. The more competitors and the more work they do, the harder it gets to win.
So if you put in your time and your energy to earn money, wouldn’t you want to choose a money that also requires the people who create it to have to put in their time and energy too? That money is Bitcoin and it is the only money in the world now that gives fair treatment to people who put in their time and energy to earn money.
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Want more? This entire series (plus a 26th bonus article) is available as a pdf or kindle ebook at https://swanbitcoin.com/whybitcoin.
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This is article 6 of “Why Bitcoin” — a series of articles I am writing that are all short, accessible to newcomers and still interesting to long time Bitcoiners.
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