Thx 🙏🏻
quotingParman on the "shocking" revelation that Bitcoin is not money. Hear me out...
note1pxq…l8sr
Bitcoin is a money CONTENDER. What it currently is is a barter token competing to be money. It's the best one, the leading one, and it's inevitable that it will win and be the ONLY money (there may be some minimal bartering going on at the irrelevant fringes).
For Bitcoin to be money, there needs to be no (or minimal) barter in the social economy in question (the world). The world is currently bartering fiat monies (with fiat MONEY within each country, roughly speaking), and the closest thing to world money is USD. You can't have multiple monies in a system, that's barter.
The purpose of Bitcoin is not to end 3rd-parties and custodians (retail/commercial banks) - it's to end CENTRAL banks (the control and manipulation of money).
Eliminating 3rd-party and trust, as Satoshi discussed, is related to someone being trusted in controlling who owns what money in the SYSTEM, about what is true, to avoid double-spending (The Byzantine General's problem).
Proof of work and the time-chain combined with algorithmic rules about which state is valid is how he solved this - it has nothing to do with accounts and custodians HOLDING money on behalf of others (as BCashers will have you believe for their own purposes).
We actually NEED banking as a service in society, otherwise we aren't freeing our time to specialise. With money, we don't have to be our own baker, or dentist, or farmer... or banker.
Specialising is risky in the absence of a money economy because we don't know if we can buy all the things we want/need with our output; we have to barter. Money solves that so we can specialise risk-free and increase our output. When everyone does that, humanity flourishes. So it's counter productive for a money society to advocate that people should be their own banks. Instead, Bitcoin allows us to be our own bank, or someone else's, should we choose to, with no barrier to entry. THAT is what fixes banking - it fixes that they have a monopoly. We don't need to eliminate banking, that's outrageous.
Banking is hard. Not only does it help people to have specialised services to secure what they own (which they can do in a trust-distributed way, OR on their own if they think it's necessary), but banking also efficiently brings lenders and borrowers together (fractional reserve is another topic, and which Bitcoin makes honest, doesn't totally eliminate, and doesn't need to 100% - a rant for another day).
Central banking is arguably the greatest scam and scourge on Humanity there ever has been, and needs to be destroyed. A totally different thing to retail banking which needs to be FIXED not eliminated. Bitcoin does this.
If you want to know more about the Byzantine General's problem solution...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-problem-with-money-explained