SPEECH TITLE: Bitcoin Takeover magazine breaking FUD (BTCTKVR)
SPEAKER: Vlad Costea
CONFERENCE: Pizza Day Prague 2023

Introduction

Hi guys, I’m Vlad and I’m doing the Bitcoin Takeover magazine, an Open Source magazine project, which I believe is going to break Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) and onboard the next 1 billion users with this edition.

If you look at the price right now, you’re going to assume that we are in a bear market, compared to the previous all-time high, whatever that means. And during a bear market, we have all of these silly narratives that end up catching momentum and they get mainstream attention. Most of the time they’re super silly, and as you’re about to see here… Over the years, from 2014 to 2017, during the bear market, it was about blockchain, not Bitcoin. It was about Bitcoin 2.0. That’s when you started having silly ideas like Ethereum being presented, and that’s when you had Tether on Bitcoin because they were saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, we have this BTC token, it’s super cool, but did you know that the Bitcoin Network can do tokens? How about we do that?’ That’s how they pushed a new bull market because institutions saw some potential.

Afterwards, during the 2018-2020 bear market, the narrative changed a little. It became more about Bitcoin, and somehow they started showing Bitcoin to institutions and they thought that was the salvation for the price, but they ended up dumping on us like Tesla. Don’t get me started on that. There was also the stock-to-flow model, which was silly because it assumed that since the supply is diminishing, the demand is going to remain constant, which means that the price is always going to go up. If you study a little bit of Austrian economics, you’re going to stumble upon a concept that’s called praxeology, and you’re going to realize that it’s praxeologically wrong to assume human action is going to stay constant. And demand for anything in this world cannot stay constant or grow over time. So stock to flow went bust, it was a bad idea.

Onboarding the next 1 billion users on Bitcoin

I have my own silly narrative which actually makes more sense, because I believe that we’re going to onboard the next 1 billion users among the people who already heard about Bitcoin but their minds are filled with nothing but FUD. They know very vaguely what Bitcoin is, they know it’s internet money, they know what it can do, but at the same time, they have these limitations about Bitcoin that were instilled in their brains by the mainstream media, by their governments, and all of these institutions that don’t really want Bitcoin to succeed.

10 threats to Bitcoin by Chat GPT

What is this magazine? Why am I showing it so hard? I try to be contemporary, so I started using AI and I asked Chat GPT, ‘What are the top 10 most serious threats to the Bitcoin project?’ I got a very relevant reply which covers regulation, competition from other cryptocurrencies, scalability, security vulnerabilities, price volatility, limited use cases, energy consumption, centralization of mining, lack of education and understanding, and lack of mainstream acceptance. And I took it as a challenge to tackle each one of these subjects in an article that takes less than 10 minutes to read.

Breaking bitcoin FUD

My assumption is that if you take this and you put it in the hands of someone who says, for example, that Bitcoin is wasteful, they’re going to read this article and understand that, ‘Okay, there is actually this report by the Cambridge University which keeps track of the Bitcoin Network and how much energy it supposedly consumes and if you rank it, it consumes less electricity than televisions that are left idle around the world, or for example, refrigerators are very close to the amounts of energy that’s being consumed by Bitcoin.’ And whenever you say that Bitcoin consumes too much energy, it’s kind of a nihilistic argument which says this should not exist, there is no room for this in the world, and that’s what bankers and governments usually say.

My thesis is that you need to get to the people who already heard about Bitcoin and help them explain that it’s not as bad as they think it is. But since I still believe that there’s some legitimate criticism about Bitcoin, I still have one last article on top of the 10 ones that break the FUD and it’s called ‘FUD for Thought’. And this one basically explains that ‘Okay, there’s an uncertainty with the security budget. We’re not sure that as the mining rewards diminish by 50% every 210,000 blocks, which is approximately four years, we’re not sure if the miners are gonna stay profitable. And what happens when they’re no longer profitable?’ The other legitimate criticism about Bitcoin concerns privacy and the fact that still you can discriminate between UTXO-A and UTXO-B which means that it’s not really fungible. And that’s the only quality of sound money that’s still missing from Bitcoin.

I did write all of this by myself and there’s also one extra article which I think puts everything together. And this by Grafton at Trezor and he explained how he took one of his friends through the journey and made him buy bitcoin for the first time to purchase the Nintendo Switch for his son and why it’s a lot easier. The point of this and the takeaway from his article is that we have built the tools that we wish we had when we first got into Bitcoin. And I think that’s ultimately the mission of every bitcoiner. Once they get very deep into this, they understand that they had roadblocks and they hope that the future generations are not going to have to deal with that. Once again, we hope that there’s some Evolution from the entire process and we’re not gonna deal with that. So we built stuff that we think is going to help other people in the future and this is my contribution.

The project is going to evolve in the next year because I’m going to present it at every conference.

Bitcoin Takeover roadmap

This is the road map and I typed it like a shitcoiner because they like road maps. I’m going to promote it at more conferences, open source every page under the Creative Commons Zero license, which means that everyone can copy, edit, modify, distribute, print, sell. I don’t care what you do with it, just attribute credit where it’s due and spread the word.

Someone is already translating this into Portuguese for the Brazilian audience and I also spoke with someone who’s going to translate it in Spanish and French. And I think it might be a big deal by the end of the year. I’m trying to speculate here, I’m trying to pump my own bags, but I think that if you take these people who have very poor ideas about Bitcoin but know something about it and you try to explain to them why it’s not the way that they think it is, they might just give it more of a chance than they have by this point.

I also want to start Geyser fundraising campaigns to pay the translators. I want to list the magazine for sale in lots of places. So it’s open source and it’s free, that’s the concept, but that’s for the digital version of it. When you print it, it has some real-world costs and it’s not cheap to print something like this. I think it’s like 15 EUR, which isn’t really cheap because I wanted it on nice paper which is glossy and feels nice when you touch it because you’re less likely to throw away something that feels nice as opposed to a leaflet or a newspaper.

What else am I gonna do? Of course, kickstart the next bull market, onboard the next one billion people to Bitcoin because we are doing this event at the same time as the Miami people and they’re super bullish and they’re promising that they’re going to save the world. So why don’t we do better than them?

Knowledge is forever but let’s break the Bitcoin FUD.

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Also read: The currency caste system (hunger games)

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