Discovering Bitcoin, 2021

Hello everyone, happy new year! 2022 will be an amazing year for everyone in sha Allah, the year we rebuild and try to move on from the haunting clutches of Covid-19 from the past 2 years.

It's been a while since I blogged and I figured what better way to start my long lost hobby than a new year, a new fresh start. 

As everyone following me on twitter would know, 2021 has been a transformative year for me. 2020 was the year I finally graduated medicine, after 7 years of relentlessly chasing a goal. Throughout those 7 years, every night I imagined myself holding that scroll and wearing that pointed hat to say 'I finally have those 2 sacred letters in front of my name. Dr. Irfan.' Alas, the tiring pursuit of chasing those initials got to me deeply and at the end of the journey, all I could think of was having a simple life without the burden of the unselfish life of a doctor.

2021 for me was about going on a journey, to rediscover my love for life. I did everything available just to make money and pay the bills, including driving passengers around as a Grab driver and learning online advertising to sell Wagyu beef. I finally found something that I could do consistently and from home, without a boss by being a freelance translator. Alhamdulillah, the skills I've amassed in writing and reading both in Malay and English allowed me to work in something not related to my formal studies. 

When I finally found my stable source of income, the next thing I thought about was investment. To be perfectly honest, I've never been good with money. My relationship with money is: I have money and what use is money if not to be used? So I would spend every last one of my allowance, never once had I saved let alone invest! In my defense, I learnt when I was younger that money is a lie! It's just paper backed by nothing but our trust to the government that it holds value! That's why I never bothered to save. Thanks to Mike Maloney's series on secrets of money on Youtube, it came into my world that banks and government could just print money anytime they want and the expansion of money stole from savers, thus I never saved. Simple right.

Back then Bitcoin was already a thing but I never looked into it closely. I knew that it was digital money that was 'decentralized', whatever that meant. I never grasped the true value of Bitcoin when I first heard of it in 2014. 

Fast forward to 2021, news of Bitcoin was no longer possible to avoid. Friends in the stock and forex market would talk about Bitcoin hitting RM200,000 per coin. That was insane to hear, as the price was no where close to that when I first heard of it. On social medias I would see shouts of HODL and laser eyes appearing on my feed, screaming insane claims of the Fiat system that will soon come to its downfall. As if by chance, I also just received a RM1000 insurance claim from an accident where I broke my arm in 2019, so it was a good time to invest. I decided Bitcoin deserves a fair chance to look into.

Researching Bitcoin in 2021 feels easier than it was back then. I noticed that Bitcoin had a large imprint on the online community so I followed a bunch of people with #Bitcoin in their profile and looked at what they had to say. The r/Bitcoin subreddit was also helpful in understanding the mentality and strategy of Bitcoiners. But I was still not all in. Many Bitcoiners seem to have an amazing level of conviction that their asset will succeed, and that intrigued me. It's as if they knew something I don't. 

So I dove head first into the rabbit hole.

It turns out understanding Bitcoin is not as simple as knowing that it is digital money, but I had to learn what is money. It brought me into a brief history lesson of money and I learnt that money was the first communication tool. In fact, the earliest form of writing that was found was related to money! It was an account of who owes what to whom. I found out that seashells, glass beads and even salt was once used as a currency. Until precious metals such as gold and silver became world wide money and humanity lived on the 'Gold standard', where paper money can be exchanged with gold. That was of course until 1971, when president Nixon decided to sever the ties of gold and paper money, thus Fiat money was born!

Why is the dollar losing purchasing power over time?

By discovering this key piece of information which is history, something that had actually happened, I understood that the concept of money once changed, and that means it can change again. Besides history, the premise of Bitcoin is that the money supply cannot be added thus that brings in a new kind of economy where you are forced to build capital instead of taking debts. This economy turns out had its own school of thought in the world of economics, which is Austrian economics, which was taught by the likes of the great Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Carl Menger. The Austrian economists believed in money that should be separate from the control of the state, as opposed to the thoughts of Keynesian economics, taught by John Maynard Keynes. 

On top of history and economy, Bitcoin turned out to be a social experiment, a study in human behavior. Though it clearly poses a threat to government and banks, it turns out that Bitcoin's incentive as the price keeps going up (via it's programmed nature) turns out to be too strong that even enemies would like to buy Bitcoin and help adoption. This is why Bitcoin is such a great tool for freedom. The study of the game theory is crucial in Bitcoin, to understand that anyone who comes in contact with Bitcoin could either join the game and be at the right side of history, or ignore and reject Bitcoin, and lose all the possible gains.

I have rambled on for far too long now, but one thing I would like to add, something that has strengthened my conviction in Bitcoin is how it helped a lot of people world wide. Whether it's the Palestinians holding Bitcoin to build wealth as they're forced to use the Israel currency. Venezuelans, Turks, Argentinians, and Uruguayans holding Bitcoin to preserve their wealth as hyperinflation strikes them. Or El Salvador whom adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and saves them $40M in remittance money from the US. Bitcoin clearly has a function in this world, and if you think Bitcoin does not solve problems... It's because you have a narrow view of the world and your comforts deny you the ability to see these issues :)

In summary of 2021, I am grateful to have spent the time on learning the fundamentals of Bitcoin and not just go balls deep into the world of cryptocurrency which has their own pitfalls as well.

With that I end this blog post, may 2022 be the year everyone discover Bitcoin!