An open letter about Bitcoin to Ann Barnhardt

I decided to write a letter, then made it an open letter, to Ann Barnhardt.

A lot of you may not have heard of her. She was my Morpheus, and it was well before Bitcoin existed. This is why it's extra painful I ignored Bitcoin for years because if I just looked at it, I probably would have immediately embraced it... and lost it all on Mt Gox!

I thought of her today and hoped she wasn't making the same mistake, as she's a Bitcoiner at Hardt. Badum-diss. Shut up.

Here's the link, and the letter. The post in the website has links with some of the text and pictures, and a link to Ann's video - you won't get all that with the plain text copy I posted here on Reddit.

https://armantheparman.com/barnhardt

An Open Letter to Ann Barnhardt

Hi Ann,

I want to thank you, and I hope this email finds you well.

A long time I ago, I watched your excellent multi-part presentation on YouTube describing the problems with the fiat money system.

I actually first heard the word ‘fiat’ for the first time in my life from that lecture. It was my first touchpoint to the awakening that humanity has been scammed, and a bunch of privileged people create money out of nothing and plunder the assets of the planet with it, and what’s more, they infiltrate/own the governments, media, education system to make us believe it’s good for society that they should control the issuance of money. We have been fooled, captured, hook line and sinker. An Austrian Econ enthusiast was born.

I know some people believe gold is the solution, but really, gold failed – it is BECAUSE of gold’s portability-weakness that we are in this fiat mess. Gold got centralised, particularly after being easily confiscated from US citizens in 1933 (exec order 6102), as I’m sure you know all about. Partially backed, devalued, and then completely unhinged from gold in 1971 (thanks Nixon), we are now on a US dollar paper standard, and it’s being used to enslave humanity.

“I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend, temporarily, the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States.” – Nixon, 1971 Gold can never rise as world money once again, as it can not resist the paper trading that suppresses its price – because no meaningful volume of trade can happen peer-2-peer in the international economy; and so it will always be held by institutions, and they will always contribute to the paper suppression of gold.

To resist, people need to not just withdraw gold, but not depositing it back to banks when spending. Another way to say this is that no significant volume of gold will be withdrawn from institutions to resist the paper suppression, and if that ever begins to happen, the gold would need to be deposited back into the institutions in order to use it as a medium of exchange (that portability weakness I mentioned earlier ensures this trap plays out). But sure, if we descend into chaos, we can barter with gold, silver, bullets and food; but a thriving civilisation can not be built from that, and if we approach a prospering civilisation, fiat will return to capture us again. Gold only resists fiat if we have fractured local economies, and that’s what we had for 5000 years. Fiat money can even be printed in an ongoing way to suppress gold with little risk (until hyperinflation of course, and then a new fiat currency is thrust upon the people).

But now we have Bitcoin. Hear me out, please. I wonder if you have looked into it yet because it should certainly be right up your alley, but there’s a high risk you’ll dismiss it at first like most people, as I did too. I have you to thank for me beginning this path of enlightenment, and I want to help you by gently encouraging you to look at Bitcoin with an open mind if you haven’t, and also to help you dismiss any concerns. After 10,000+ hours of study/writing/teaching, I can logically demonstrate that any concern I have ever come across, is refutable. You may converse with me for any clarification; I’ll give you my time. Also, I have a website with 5 years of my writing – https://armantheparman.com

There are a lot of initial pushback points like

“it’s too volatile“ “it has no intrinsic value“ “governments will ban it“ “it’s bad for the environment“ “quantum computers will kill it“, and much more

None of these are worthy arguments, and I have written essays to refute all of them.

You see, Bitcoin has the necessary technical properties of money, but not the social properties (yet) – the network effect of money. The network of people adopting it for future use as money has been steadily growing for the last 15 years, and it’s done a damn good job of growing so rapidly. It is 1 trillion in market cap, and one should ask themselves why this “Tulip Bubble” has inflated and collapsed, and reinflated 4 TIMES. The reason is that it’s not a bubble – it’s the way price action looks when a new sound money’s value is discovered. There is no other way. You see, Bitcoin is being adopted by a network of people that is only ever increasing – once you see a solution to worldwide tyranny, one never decides to abandon their only chance at resisting: Ether Bitcoin wins, or worldwide coordinated tyranny wins, and we all must choose a side. We are separating money and stat, join us.

Those who are adopting it have learned (and can never unlearn) that Bitcoin is the ONLY contender as worldwide money (the world economy is actually in a state of partial-barter using USD primarily, gold, and recently some other fiat monies).

Bitcoin is the only contender because it is the ONLY unstoppable digital worldwide money that has all the minimum properties of money (that you know about from Aristotle, plus more) and of those, it is by far in the lead, and insurmountable. With your finance background, you might know that money trends toward there being one, because the natural force that causes the emergence of money in society from a state of barter, is the same force that causes multiple competing monies (partial barter) to one money.

Even the “intrinsic” value property is actually satisfied, as I can argue that some people can find its cryptographic security and scarcity as a form of art, or beauty or a satisfying collectible – to deny this argument and say “not everyone thinks that way”, is to then be forced to conclude that “art has no intrinsic value because not everyone likes a given work of art” (to remain internally logically consistent).

Regardless, I can demonstrate that money does not actually need an intrinsic value impurity to be money (yes, impurity, money has monetary value with or without non-monetary value, the impurity) – it only needs it when society is emerging from a state of barter; this property then satisfies Mises’ regression theorem. Bitcoin isn’t evolving from a barter-society. We already have money in our respective countries so the regression theorem applied to Bitcoin results in the regression going back to the exchange for it in dollars, or the electricity paid to mine it.

The reason Bitcoin is a contender (and the only one) for the status of world money is that it is not unilaterally controllable by anyone (or changeable, which contributes to soundness), it’s digital yet strictly scarce in supply (21 million), open source (the code is not secret), it’s possible to settle with finality internationally peer-2-peer in 10 minutes (compare that to gold on a cargo ship, or USD in an armoured truck), it is open source, decentralised so it’s unstoppable and not changeable, and works without any central authority. Yes, it can be copied, but the PEOPLE adopting that version of money can not be copied, and money (a complex idea) is both the token AND the people. Compare this to a language and see that the “value” of a language is determined by how good it is (properties of words, symbols, sounds, grammar, ease to learn etc), AND how many people USE it. The difference between language and money in this regard is that one can learn multiple languages, but one can not store value in two different things (two different tokens). One must choose, and hard money (hard to produce) always beats easy money (easy to produce) given a long enough timeframe.

I’m going to stop here. If you got this far, thank you for reading. I hope to hear from you.

Best wishes,

Parman