Money Supply

Bitcoin and the Death of the Middleman

Making a phone call used to be more like pressing 0 on a hotel phone, limited by the telephone companies ability to train people to literally connect people, then software made away the limitation and the middleman.

Most auctions prior to eBay required a trained auctioneer before software came along and revolutionized bidding. Advertising also used to require deals to be made person-to-person now the biggest tech companies sit back and watch advertisers compete against themselves in real time.

In any major city you can be sure that some, often most of the biggest, most prestigious buildings have logos of banks on them. Some people think that those banks take money from people then lend it out at a higher rate of interest, but in reality deposits and loans are in two seperate databases.

Banks create 97% of the money supply with central banks creating the other 3%. The middleman job of a bank is not to take from Peter and loan to Paul, it is literally to create money.

Recently we have seen what happens when there is a limitless desire for cash, when people sell everything to pay for safety or margin calls regardless of value. Currently this ends up being US dollars, that way when things return to normal you can buy most things as they are priced in USD but at the same time banks trying to be responsible stop lending and this stop expanding the money supply. This is a bad but since 2008 we learned how to solve this on an industrial scale, that is what central banks are for.

A central bank steps in when an asset is worthless and buys it at face value. For example if a bank was making billions on loans that will never be paid back and people stop paying the interest a central bank will step in and buy those loans no matter how big at face value, making the commercial bank go from bankrupt to attractive, avoiding the crisis that was about to unfold had the market had their way with the bank due to bank runs, investor sentiment, etc. Nobody knows or even cares what the central bank does with the assets because they, just like a bank, created the money to buy the assets from thin air expanding the money supply.

Ok so what does this have to do with bitcoin? Well if there is no connection between deposits and loans then you may as well use your own database to handle your deposits and the bank for your loans. This way you cut out the middleman when you have a lot of value to store but don’t need or want all the bells and whistles that come with it.

Banks are not using their vault to keep your money safe, they are creating money and using the story as a facade to build trust with them, but your trust is based on a lie. Like all good lies this one will eventually collapse. Bitcoin on the other hand is built so you can see everything and do your own checks, like the worlds biggest excel spreadsheet, not a magic show like a bank.

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