https://www.early-retirement.org/fo...ypto-purchase-today-111411-2.html#post2683128
I'm wondering if it's possible to answer a question in words, rather that a series of tube posts.
Your question basically is "what is revolutionary about Bitcoin (but I don't want to watch videos on the topic)", correct?
If so, I would say at the outset, that it will require time for anyone to understand key core aspects of Bitcoin. These include topics beyond just the underlying blockchain technology, including delving into areas such as economics (both micro and macro), psychology, philosophy, history, politics, law (just to mention a few!).
However, as to your specific question, where I started on my journey was reading Satoshi's whitepaper on peer to peer electronic cash. You can view this here:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
What Satoshi and his early collaborators proposed was a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. They started with the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of ownership, but the problem they solved was that this system was incomplete without a way to prevent so-called "double-spending" (think "money printing" in the old world of paper money). To solve this, they proposed a peer-to-peer network (using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions) which then quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power.
For me, it was really enlightening as I had already been considering similar problems. The solution that Satoshi proposed was brilliant and revolutionary. I fully understand that reading the whitepaper is not for everyone - you really need to be mathematically and engineering inclined to appreciate his paper. I fully get that. But it was out there, it was public, and Bitcoin was open for anyone in the world to participate in from day #1 in terms of mining (including of course Satoshi himself who had to mine his own coins).
So what happened after that was that we literally got to witness the immaculate conception of Bitcoin, as the first coin ever was hashed. (Imagine if you could literally see gold as a new metallic chemical element being "created", or if you were a Christian literally seeing the birth of Christ). This is what our generation literally witnessed and is part of in relation to Bitcoin.
The creation of Bitcoin was the first time, both in human history and indeed in the history of our plant, that a natively digital decentralized global currency was conceived - first used by a small group of dreamers, cypher-punks, programmers, geeks, gamers, philosophers, libertarians etc, and from then on just growing and growing and growing, defeating every hurdle raised along the way. It is not often that a movement of the people succeeds over the might of globally entrenched powers, but I believe this is happening. We all have the literally "once in lifetime" (indeed "once in a generation") opportunity to become a part of this. Especially those of us with both access to information, the internet, and with existing wealth stored in fiat currencies.
The revolutionary part (both technologically, politically, philosophically, and economically) is that no longer can any ruler dictate what we as individual citizens may collectively use among ourselves as both a store of value and medium of exchange. This is indeed also why America is becoming a global leader in this area, due to our strong belief in individual freedoms both for the US and globally (not to mention the rights enshrined in our Constitution) and why you see resistance in some communist countries such as China who take more of a collectivist/authoritarian approach to human freedoms.
No longer do we have Governments or other power structures printing "money" which they mandate we use (and of course which they control). And no longer do we need to rely on intermediaries such as banks to control (and effectively steal) our money for their "services". We now have a digitally native, globally universally consistent and accepted currency. And that is a truly revolutionary moment for us as a global civilization.
As to the even more basic question people ask "just tell me what the price will be in 10 years!", I'm not going to answer that. What I will say is that at current prices, Bitcoin has around 10% the market cap of gold. So a parity of wealth stored in Bitcoin would bring BTC to around the 600K per coin level. We have a new halvening likely to occur some time in 2025, which will significantly increase mining difficulting (leading to a decreased supply of newly mined coins resulting in price appreciation assuming demand stays constant). And we have the potential for absolutely MASSIVE adoption from the masses in developing countries on the one hand, and from the world's largest financial institutions on the other. So its certainly quite feasible that we could see BTC at over 1m per coin in the next 5-8 years. By that point, the "common man" will likely be speaking about Bitcoin in terms of Sats for daily transactions (100,000,000 Sats : 1 BTC) with only the institutions and "Bitcoin OGs" still referring to value in Bitcoin. There will also be a huge societal distinction between "whole-coiners" (people who have more than a coin of wealth to their family name), "Sat-workers" who are people scrapping away stacking smaller amounts of Sats but far from having a whole coin, to "no-coiners" (newly born people who have no Sats to their name, or those who failed to adopt when Bitcoin was emerging, whether out of ignorance, lack of opportunity etc).
[MOD EDIT]
Hope that helps. Again, hard to summarize it all in a single post.
I strongly urge anyone who has an interest to do some research. There's some great content out there, and much if it is (for better or worse) on media such as YouTube. If you prefer more of a reading format,
www.bitcointalk.org is a great resource.
There are also may great books on Bitcoin. One I suggest starting with is "The Bitcoin Standard" by economist and academic Dr. Saifedean Ammous.
Good luck!
