Czech Central Bank Buys Bitcoin

The Czech Central bank bought $ 1 million in BTC and some stable coins (tokenized USD basically) for its testing lab. The governor, Aleš Michl earlier said that Czechia should establish a BTC reserve. But I guess then Christine Lagarde called and they all got spooked, and so they are now cautious like this. Better than nothing though, it might be expanded in the future.

How to be a Good Bitcoiner 😆👌

Being a BTC head is not just about stacking sats, there is a whole philosophy that comes with it…

The fundamental belief surrounding BTC is better money. Money that has limited supply, money that you have self custody of, money that you can pass to others without needing the banks to mediate your transaction. And you should make the best of what BTC has to offer.

Self Custody

Are you holding your BTC on an exchange? Buy a hardware wallet. A hardware wallet allows you to be a direct custodian of BTC. On an exchange the BTC is not really yours. If the exchange goes bust so goes your stack. You want to be in control of your money; and use your own devices to transfer your BTC. This way the currency is in control of an individual and not an institution. BTC is about defeating the institutional control of money.

HODLing or Spending

Many people treat BTC as an investment. They see how BTC is growing in price against fiat currencies and treat it like a storage of wealth akin to gold or stocks. But BTC is primarily a currency, currency is a medium of exchange and money is here to be spent.

Now, stacking sats is nothing bad. You should have what is called a core stack, that is BTC that you will never sell and watch it grow in price. But at times you will see a vendor online that accepts BTC as payment. He is a fellow Bitcoiner and you should always respect his choice of payment, and pay him from your stack if you feel that your core stack isn’t threatened. I am mostly HODLing but I do buy stuff with BTC.

Just yesterday I bought a mini computer with Bitcoin. I saw the price in fiat and was dissuaded from buying it but then I saw the option of buying it with BTC and I reached into my stack and made the purchase. Something I had to unlearn was checking the fiat price of BTC. It is not about how much BYC costs in fiat but rather how many sats you have on your account. I am always overjoyed when BTC falls. I am always buying the dip with any money that I have available.

Run Your own Bitcoin Node

I am not a very technical type. But I bought the mini computer with intent to run a Bitcoin node. As far as I understand it, by running a Bitcoin node, you are keeping a piece of BTC infrastructure in your home. If you aren’t doing that you are basically using infrastructure of somebody else. BTC is all about being the master of your own money.

For better explanation of why you should run your own node, see the video below:

Russia to Build Crypto mining and AI Infrastructure in BRICS Nations

Not so long ago, Russia was dismissive of cryptocurrencies but has since been orange pilled and came full circle…

From Forbes:

Russia’s largest data center operator BitRiver has partnered with the Russian Direct Investment Fund to build mining and AI computing facilities across BRICS nations.

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“We will focus on creating a mining-based infrastructure – building data centers and connecting them to necessary power sources to enable AI project deployment and development across the country,” said BitRiver CEO Igor Runets according to the announcement.

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The companies cite a global shortage of energy-intensive data center capacity as a key driver for expansion. The initiative aligns with Russia’s push to strengthen its position as the world’s second-largest crypto mining market after the United States.

Central Banks go After Bitcoin

Source

Last week, Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf of the European Central Bank (ECB) published a paper entitled “The distributional consequences of Bitcoin” in which they made a host of dubious claims about Bitcoin.

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Here are the claims:

The main premise of the paper is that if bitcoin’s price continues to rise, early bitcoin investors — the “early birds” (the authors’ term) — will gain wealth at the expense of the “latecomers.” While this is true if the early birds hold all of their coins to no end, the dynamic is no different with any other publicly-traded asset. The bigger point that the researchers miss, though, is that some of us are both “early birds” and “latecomers.” I first bought bitcoin in January 2018, and I also bought some last week. Did I impoverish myself in this scenario? No, I didn’t. Nor has anyone who has dollar-cost averaged into bitcoin over any period of time.
One of the other primary arguments in the paper is that Bitcoin has failed as a payment technology. In making this claim, the authors fail to even mention the Lightning Network, a layer built on top of Bitcoin that enables fast, cheap bitcoin payments. In recent years, the Lightning Network has grown exponentially.
Throughout the piece, the authors bring up how bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are the preferred currencies of criminals and bad actors worldwide.
The authors also make the claim Bitcoin is a threat to democracy because crypto PACs now donate to politicians. The presupposes that every other lobbying group out there isn’t a threat to democracy, which is laughable…
Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s former opposition, popularized using cryptocurrencies for donations when the Putin regime limited its access to traditional financial rails.
The authors also suggest that central banks can just tighten monetary policy to counteract the “bubble” forming in bitcoin’s price.

Imagine that, an asset appreciates. I hope you are stacking those sats my friends. BTC is actually used as payment in places where banking system is not very developed. In the EU, the adoption of BTC as a payment system is of course much slower. BTC is not a good option for criminals as the ledger is open and transactions can be traced to specific names.

The US Federal Reserve is not far behind in the stuck up dinosaur, legacy finance race…