Most Investors Still Don’t Understand Bitcoin – Here’s What They’re Missing
Inside Today’s Issue
Essay: You Probably Don’t Own Bitcoin And That’s A Huge Mistake
Strong GDP Growth
Job Growth = Rate Hike
Diesel Rises Again
Chart Of The Day… Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT)
Today’s Mailbag
Editor’s note: The Porter & Co. editorial and Customer Care teams will be off on Monday because of Labor Day. We will all be back on Tuesday.
Nobody invented money.
It was not designed, chartered, decreed, or granted. It was discovered, slowly, in trade. A man takes salt in exchange for his labor because he knows he can exchange it for other goods. Cattle, hides, shells, iron bars, bricks of tea, cakes of salt, strings of beads: each of these served as money at different times in history.
Carl Menger, one of the founders of the Austrian School of economics, first theorized how money evolved through trade. Men were led, he wrote,
each by his own economic interests, without convention, without legal compulsion, nay, even without any regard to the common interest, to exchange goods destined for exchange (their ‘wares’) for other goods equally destined for exchange, but more saleable.
The most important takeaway is that money predates all government. Governments don’t create money – in fact, as you’ll see, governments constantly corrupt money.
The second most important takeaway is that the market – through the choices of millions of individuals each pursuing their own economic interests – will always trend toward the best and most reliable form of money. That’s why, over time, more people favored metals, particularly gold and silver. And it’s why more and more people are choosing Bitcoin (BTC), today.
And what did governments add to money? Fraud, of course.
The denarius, the benchmark coin of the Roman Empire, was 90% silver (3.9 grams) under Julius Caesar. By AD 200, the coin was less than 60% pure, and by AD 300, it contained 5% silver. The Empire disintegrated alongside its money – something Americans would be wise to remember.
The same thing has happened to every empire.
