By now, you must have heard the news about Bitcoin’s dramatic crash.

At its all time high, a single Bitcoin sold for $20,000. Right now it is hovering below $7,000.

I’ve been reading and learning about Bitcoin as much as I can digest for the past year or so and I’ve been fairly open about the criticisms people have about this newly minted digital currency, it’s of course still in a nascent fin-tech industry. But some of it has really been awful advice.

Hearing some of these bad advice or rather uninformed opinions has left me shaking my head in disbelief. Sadly, many show a great interest at spreading news or opinions from the grapevine, which is really damaging not only to themselves, but also to their circle of friends and family.

It dispels the likelihood of them ever encountering or learning about the truth for themselves about this new technological revolution.

I truly believe Bitcoin can be the single most important invention since the strange idea called the internet was born in 1969. Its not going to a smooth ride, but believe me when I say for the internet of money to even continue to thrive and flourish, this is part and parcel of its incubation process.

Think long term and leave your investment alone: “If you aren’t willing to own a Bitcoin for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.”

Before the 20th century, inventions were relatively easy to visualize and grasp. You can hold it in your hand and conceptualize it at every angle imaginable.

Then came the internet. It started as a digital gateway to connect two participants from a distance. Then all of a sudden, it was everywhere. But you can only see the pixels manifesting itself on our screens.

Sure you could hold on to our laptops and iPhone, but you can only see glimpses of it. Its essence has always been all-pervasive in our daily lives, displaying on our screens upon a complex yet rudimentary command of the swipe of our fingers. Surely something so transformative yet invisible would require some level of technical sophistication to understand before anyone could use right? Don’t you need to learn how to code? No you don’t. The internet today is so easy to use. But it took nearly 40 years to arrive at this stage. And its that extreme simplicity that allows it to be used ubiquitously today.

There’s an incredible feature in Bitcoin that a majority of people seem to have missed. Some people see it as a way to gain financial freedom quickly. That reason is not the sole reason why I stayed and continue to arm people with this knowledge.

Control the money and you control the world.

Bitcoin was born not out of greed, but out of necessity. As necessity is the mother of all inventions. Bitcoin’s incredible feature is hidden right there in plain sight.

In order to understand, you would first need to take a look back at how MONEY evolved in the first place.

In the ancient world, wealth is power. It still holds true till today. Anyone who holds the key to resources like gold and the ability to print money would rule the world. Then the kings would decree that their citizens MUST pay their taxes in their newly minted gold coins or else they would be subjected to brutal punishments or penalties. This one threat alone has been the ruling model or coercion strategy for monarchs and nation-states for thousands of years.

Any peasant who ever tried to create their own currency was either bankrupted or prosecuted with accordance to the law. The power to print money is the absolute and divine right of the state and not just anyone. That’s what happened to e-gold in 2008. E-gold at one point was transacting over $2 billion dollars and had over a million accounts at its height. At that time it was the world’s only successful micropayment system but in the end, had to face the systematic attack of the government.

Why couldn’t they operate? One word. “Unlicensed”. Unlicensed is the word governments and authority use to maintain its power. This power was then passed down from monarchs to nation-states, distributing power from one strongman to another.

Anyone who tried to be their own king by minting their own currency got squashed.

Every king or leader in the world understands that he who controls the money, controls the world. Take the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang (260-210 BC), who abolished every other forms of local coins and introduced one coin to rule them all. Only he had the power to create money.

Doing so would ensure the longevity of his empire by forcing his citizens to pay taxes in his coins and gradually transferring the wealth from people to kingdom by printing more money. As a citizen, you could only trade so much of your time to earn the coin and how much time does a person have? A Limited amount. 

At the end of the day, saving money would be meaningless. We’d have to work our entire lives just to see the day till we die. Retirement wouldn’t be an option.

Why do you think people keep falling for the same ol’ ponzi scheme, one after another. There’s a huge demand to get out of this whole freaking rat race. If you ask me, the entire way nations and governments are run is just a giant fucking elaborate pyramid scheme.

A pyramid in which money is slowly trickled down to everyone else. The only question is, does it trickle down evenly? No it doesn’t. Its the reason why over 2 billion people in the world still have no access to basic banking.

Fiat currency today is much closer to a pyramid scheme than Bitcoin will ever be. A pyramid scheme always relies on what the original creators intended. And most of the time, its not in our best interest. Even if you are somehow at the top of the pyramid, in charge of distributing the money, you’d do the same by keeping as much money as you possibly can for yourself. Nobody is stupid enough to NOT do so. The dictators and corrupted leaders of today would prove my point.They’d want to maximize their own power so that they can keep it for as long as possible.

With Bitcoin, today you can choose not to give them their absolute power simply by changing the way you think about money.

In decentralized networks like Bitcoin, there’s no single authority who can decide who and how the currency should be created and distributed to.

Bitcoin is designed to be user unfriendly, not user friendly.

People can’t seem to resist the urge to print money, so we outsourced the job to an unemotional machine we can’t influence.

Bitcoin protects us from ourselves.

— Kevin Pham (@_Kevin_Pham) July 5, 2018

There isn’t a single failure point like the head of the snake to decapitate. Sure you could suppress the ring leaders, defame its founders and use the mass media to ruin its reputation, but you could never kill it.

The Bamboo Network Effect

Unlike a tree that has a single tree trunk, a bamboo as depicted in the picture bellow has plenty of stalks independent of each other, and yet connected through its roots beneath the soil. Each of them represents a node. Cut off one stalk, cut off two, five, ten, etc. maybe? It continues to thrive.

There is no central figure head to chop off or infiltrate and you only need two participants (nodes) to keep the network alive.

Bitcoin is the first kind of money that is born that way. It isn’t like any other cryptocurrency using the underlying blockchain technology.

Other Cryptocurrencies are essentially playing catch-up. Bitcoin had years of uninterrupted time to grow its roots globally.

Decentralization

The most amazing hallmark of Bitcoin is its decentralized nature. No government or financial institution is ever in charge of minting coins let alone entrusted to regulate them. That job belongs to its global community of developers and miners.

Every altcoin has a founder and its creators. They have the biggest power and influence over their coin. While this isn’t entirely a bad thing in business (because you can respond to the market demands to better serve your customers), for a global monetary network it can be a very bad thing.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin remained anonymous precisely because he understood that people would come for his head and make an example out of him. He is the central figure-head and the only one standing in the way.

Below are 11 Awful Pieces of Advice That Everyone Must Ignore:

• Its all about the technology behind Bitcoin which is Blockchain

• Lets wait for the Next Bitcoin

Protip: Nothing is “The Next Bitcoin”. They can certainly try their best, but the majority of them are just a bunch of greedy salesmen trying to print their own version of money by copying Bitcoin’s open sourced code.

How do you make a billion in $BCH? Start with a trillion.

— Peter Brandt (@PeterLBrandt) July 1, 2018

• Bitcoin is a Get rich quick scheme

It’s counter-intuitive but most HODLers don’t buy Bitcoin to become wealthy. Instead they Buy Bitcoin to avoid becoming poor.

For example, during dire financial crisis like currency hyperinflation in Venezuela and Argentina, people chose to convert their worthless fiat currency into Bitcoin in order to preserve their monetary value and to be able to pay for everyday groceries later on.

The price of Bitcoin will always be the function of its supply and demand. Nearly 21 million coins will be minted, but an estimated of 20% of it will be lost forever.

So with a fixed supply of roughly 16.8 million Bitcoin the demand for it can only ever increase, price will be forced to go up in the long run.

And demand is already increasing. There’s a ton of institutional investors lining up.

Here they come. The traditional exchanges are coming to Crypto. You can’t be the CEO of an exchange and read that Bitfinex and Binance are making hundreds of millions and do nothing. https://t.co/XDCMOte11H

— Michael Novogratz (@novogratz) July 6, 2018

• Bitcoin is a bubble

The bubble concept was brought up as a low key way for comparison to something they don’t fully understand.

“The tulip bubble” is a popular low-thought way for lazy critics to try to insult an asset they don’t understand whose price has gone up. They used the first negative cliche that came to their minds; they didn’t try to or couldn’t find a better comparison. ~Nick Szabo , one of the original creators for the idea of Bit Gold.

• Bitcoin is dead

Bitcoin is in fact pronounced dead over 300 times since 2009. Keep em’ coming.

#Bitcoin most likely to gain mass adoption, according to new survey conducted by law firm Foley & Lardner LLP. pic.twitter.com/xI6W0NYDHk

— Blockchainlife (@Blockchainlife) July 9, 2018

• Bitcoin is Evil

Only used by drug dealers and criminals to conduct shady deals.

#HSBC Bank laundered almost a billion dollars for two Mexican drug cartels, they openly customise their branch booths to accept drug sized cases and no one goes to prison. No one pays a penalty.

But, be careful of #bitcoin. It’s money for criminals!

— James Allard ⚡️ (@TheCoinWeaver) July 6, 2018

• Bitcoin is Illegal

Cryptocurrencies especially Bitcoin, is like insurance against the failing governments. Everybody should have “insurance”.

Not only is Bitcoin Not Illegal, progressive countries and city nations like Japan, Switzerland, Malta, Singapore have all embraced Bitcoin with open arms citing the unstoppable nature of the Bitcoin Network effect.

At the end of the day, rejecting Bitcoin totally will cost a lot more than just adopting it. The tipping point can happen at any moment now. Using scare tactics has been their way for thousands of years to get people to comply and be a good citizen.

South Korea is officially recognizing #Cryptocurrency Exchanges as regulated banks The Cryptocurrency industry in South Korea is expected to see significant changes in the next few months. 🚀 pic.twitter.com/mKVEsn1FqH

— Blockchainlife (@Blockchainlife) July 7, 2018

• Bitcoin is not suitable for everyday transactions

Its so hard to use bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee or buy groceries. Zoom out and first look at the bigger picture. Bitcoin is democratizing money.

Furthermore, it is evolving and progressing towards that end in mind based on our constant interactions with it.

30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web to be a mechanism for physicists to be able to exchange knowledge, data and images between research institutions.

Did he ever imagine it would be used to post photos of us taking selfies to impress everyone in the world? No.

Unintended consequences are part of technology, and technology is a tool.

Each and everyone of us uses this tool , and each time we interact with it, it changes its nature to better suit our needs.

It gets molded by our collective use over a long period of time.

The Bitcoin Network reflects on the collective action & wisdom of all participants Globally, and it is gradually improving day by day with an army of developers behind it.

• Bitcoin has been hacked before

No. exchanges like Mt. Gox has been hacked, but not Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is the most secure financial network on the planet. But its centralized peripheral companies are among the most insecure. pic.twitter.com/0rxLtXscNJ

— Nick Szabo⚡️ (@NickSzabo4) June 18, 2017

• I cannot afford to buy Bitcoin, its worth $$$$

Whatever your means, there’s no quantity of bitcoin that is too small to be worth purchasing. Instead of buying four coffees a month, buy $20 of bitcoin on @CashApp.

You could also learn how to earn some Bitcoin through apps like Earn.com or get paid in Bitcoin for services or goods you sell.

• Experts say Bitcoin is a Fad

Bitcoin doesn’t care if you have a PhD in economics, a tenured faculty position, have billions under management or started 5 companies. Companies don’t control bitcoin, neither do academics, VCs or governments. USERS control bitcoin. That’s what decentralization looks like.

What other bad advice have you heard about Bitcoin? What bad advice have you followed?