Bitcoin, 购买力保护者

By Bitcoin 杂志 - 1 年前 - 阅读时间：13 分钟
12 年 2022 月 2 日，星期二 00:XNUMX AM

Bitcoin, 购买力保护者

When fiat money’s music finally stops, the inflationary pressure must go somewhere — and to bitcoin, the hardest asset, it will go.

This is an opinion editorial by Dan, cohost of the Blue Collar Bitcoin 播客。

给读者的初步说明: 这篇文章最初是作为一篇文章写的，后来被 分 into three parts. Each section covers distinctive concepts, but the overarching thesis relies on the three sections in totality. Part 1 worked to highlight why the current fiat system produces economic imbalance. Part 2 and Part 3 work to demonstrate how Bitcoin may serve as a solution.

系列内容

第 1 部分：菲亚特水暖

介绍

破管子

储备货币并发症

坎蒂隆难题

第 2 部分：购买力保护者

第 3 部分：货币去复杂化

财务简化器

债务抑制器

“加密”警告

结论

从长远来看，当今金融体系中存在的前所未有的债务水平意味着一件事： 货币贬值. 这些天来，“通货膨胀”这个词经常被轻率地抛来抛去。 很少有人理解它的实际意义、真正的原因或真正的含义。 对于许多人来说，通货膨胀只不过是他们抱怨葡萄酒和鸡尾酒的加油站或杂货店的价格。 “这是拜登、奥巴马或普京的错！” 当我们放眼长远思考时，通货膨胀是一个巨大的——我认为是无法解决的——法定数学问题，随着几十年的发展，它变得越来越难以调和。 在今天的经济中，生产力落后于债务的程度，以至于任何和所有的归还方法都需要斗争。 跟踪债务进展的一个关键指标是债务除以 国内生产总值（GDP） （债务/GDP）。 消化下面的图表，该图表具体反映了与 GDP 相关的总债务和公共联邦债务。

如果我们关注联邦债务（蓝线），我们会看到在短短 50 年内，我们的债务/GDP 已从低于 40% 变为 135% 在 COVID-19 大流行期间——上个世纪的最高水平。 还值得注意的是，当前的困境甚至比这张图表更加戏剧化，这些数字表明，因为这并不反映巨大 无资金准备的应享负债 （即社会保障、医疗保险和医疗补助）是永久预期的。

What does this excessive debt mean? To make sense of it, let’s distill these realities down to the individual. Suppose someone racks up exorbitant liabilities: two mortgages well outside their price range, three cars they can’t afford and a boat they never use. Even if their income is sizable, eventually their debt load reaches a level they cannot sustain. Maybe they procrastinate by tallying up credit cards or taking out a loan with a local credit union to merely service the minimum payments on their existing debt. But if these habits persist, the camel’s back inevitably breaks — they foreclose on the homes; SeaRay sends someone to take back the boat out of their driveway; their Tesla gets repossessed; they go bankrupt. No matter how much she or he felt like they “needed” or “deserved” all those items, the math finally bit them in the ass. If you were to create a chart to encapsulate this person’s quandary, you would see two lines diverging in opposite directions. The gap between the line representing their debt and the line representing their income (or productivity) would widen until they reached insolvency. The chart would look something like this:

是的，这张图表是真实的。 这是美国的升华 国家总债务 （红色）超过国内生产总值或生产力（蓝色）。 我第一次看到这个图表 发布在Twitter上 由著名的稳健货币倡导者和技术投资者劳伦斯·莱帕德 (Lawrence Lepard) 撰写。 他在其上方添加了以下文字。

“Blue line generates income to pay interest on red line. See the problem? It's just math.”

The math is catching up to sovereign nation states too, but the way the chickens come home to roost looks quite different for central governments than for the individual in the paragraph above, particularly in countries with reserve currency status. You see, when a government has its paws on both the supply of money and the price of money (i.e. interest rates) as they do in today’s fiat monetary system, they can attempt to default in a much softer fashion. This sort of soft default necessarily leads to growth in money supply, because when central banks have access to newly created reserves (a money printer, if you will) it’s incredibly unlikely debt service payments will be missed or neglected. Rather, debt will be monetized, meaning the government will borrow newly fabricated money1 from the central bank rather than raising authentic capital through increasing taxes or selling bonds to real buyers in the economy (actual domestic or international investors). In this way, money is artificially manufactured to service liabilities. Lyn Alden 提出债务水平和债务货币化 在上下文中：

“When a country starts getting to about 100% debt-to-GDP, the situation becomes nearly unrecoverable ... a 赫希曼资本研究 指出，自 51 年以来，在 130 起政府债务超过 GDP 的 1800% 的案例中，有 50 个政府违约。 迄今为止，唯一的例外是日本，它是 世界上最大的债权国. 通过“默认”，Hirschman Capital included nominal default and major inflations where the bondholders failed to be paid back by a wide margin on an inflation-adjusted basis … There’s no example I can find of a large country with more than 100% government debt-to-GDP where the central bank doesn’t own a significant chunk of that debt.”2

法定中央银行和国库的过度货币权力首先是过度杠杆（债务）积累的重要原因。 对货币的集中控制使政策制定者能够以一种看似永久的方式延缓经济痛苦，反复缓解短期问题。 但即使意图是纯粹的，这场比赛也不会永远持续下去。 历史证明，善意是不够的； 如果激励措施不恰当，就会出现不稳定因素。

可悲的是，随着债务水平变得更加不可持续，有害的货币贬值和通货膨胀的威胁急剧增加。 在 2020 年代，我们开始感受到这种短视的法币实验的破坏性影响。 那些行使货币权力的人确实有能力减轻紧迫的经济痛苦，但从长远来看，我的论点是，这将扩大整体经济破坏，特别是对社会中弱势群体而言。 随着越来越多的货币单位进入系统以缓解不适，现有单位相对于没有这种货币注入的情况失去了购买力。 压力最终在系统中累积到一定程度，以至于它必须从某个地方逃逸——那个逃生阀是贬值的货币。 长期从事债券交易的格雷格·福斯 像这样:

“In a debt/GDP spiral, the fiat currency is the error term. That is pure mathematics. It is a spiral to which there is no mathematical escape.”3

由于几个关键原因，这种通胀形势对中下阶层成员来说尤其麻烦。 首先，正如我们上面所讨论的，这个人群往往持有较少的资产，无论是总资产还是占其净资产的百分比。 随着货币的融化，股票和房地产等资产往往会随着货币供应量上升（至少在一定程度上）。 相反，工资和工资的增长可能会落后于通货膨胀，那些拥有较少自由现金的人很快就会开始踩水。 （这在 部分1.) 其次，中产阶级和下层阶级的成员大体上明显缺乏金融知识和灵活度。 在通货膨胀的环境中，知识和获取就是力量，并且它通常需要操纵来维持购买力。 上层阶级的成员更有可能拥有税收和投资知识，以及选择金融工具，在船沉没时跳上救生筏。 第三，许多平均工资收入者更依赖固定福利计划、社会保障或传统退休策略。 这些工具完全属于通货膨胀行刑队的范围。 在贬值期间，以膨胀的法定货币明确计价的资产是最脆弱的。 许多普通人的财务未来严重依赖于以下之一：

The lesson here is that the everyday worker and investor is in desperate need of a useful and accessible tool that excludes the error term in the fiat debt equation. I am here to argue that nothing serves this purpose more marvelously than bitcoin. Although much remains unknown about this protocol’s pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, his motivation for unleashing this tool was no mystery. In the 成因块， 第一 Bitcoin block ever mined on January 3, 2009, Satoshi highlighted his disdain for centralized monetary manipulation and control by embedding a recent London Times cover story:

“《泰晤士报》 03年2009月XNUMX日即将进行第二次银行救助。”

The motivations behind Bitcoin’s creation were certainly multifaceted, but it seems evident that one of, if not the, primary problem Satoshi set out to solve was that of unchangeable monetary policy. As I write this today, some thirteen years since the release of this first block, this goal has been unceasingly achieved. Bitcoin stands alone as the first-ever manifestation of enduring digital scarcity and monetary immutability — a protocol enforcing a dependable supply schedule by way of a decentralized mint, powered by harnessing real world energy via Bitcoin mining and verified by a globally-distributed, radically-decentralized network of nodes. Roughly 19 million BTC exist today and no more than 21 million will ever exist. Bitcoin is conclusive monetary reliability — the antithesis of, and alternative to debasing fiat currency. 从来没有像它那样存在过，我相信它的出现对大部分人类来说是及时的。

Bitcoin is a profound gift to the world’s financially marginalized. With a small amount of knowledge and a smartphone, members of the middle and lower class, as well as those in the developing world and the billions who remain unbanked, now have a reliable placeholder for their hard earned capital. Greg Foss often describes bitcoin as “portfolio insurance,” or as I’ll call it here, hard work insurance. Buying bitcoin is a working man’s exit from a fiat monetary network that guarantees depletion of his capital into one that mathematically and cryptographically assures his supply stake. It’s the 最难 人类从未见过的钱，与人类历史上一些最软的钱竞争。 我鼓励读者留意赛义德·阿莫斯（Saifedean Ammous）在他的开创性著作中所说的话“ Bitcoin 普通”

"History shows it is not possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours."

On a zoomed out timeframe, Bitcoin is built to preserve buying power. However, those who choose to participate earlier in its adoption curve serve to the benefit the most. Few understand the implications of what transpires when exponentially growing network effects meet a monetary protocol with absolute supply inelasticity (hint: it might continue to look something like the chart below).

Bitcoin has the makings of an innovation whose time has come. The apparent impenetrability of its monetary architecture contrasted with today’s economic plumbing in tremendous disrepair indicates that incentives are aligned for the fuse to meet the dynamite. Bitcoin is arguably the soundest monetary technology ever discovered and its advent aligns with the end of a 长期债务周期 when hard assets will plausibly be in highest demand. It’s poised to catch much of the air escaping the balloons of a number of overly monetized4 asset classes, including low- to negative-yielding debt, real estate, gold, art and collectibles, offshore banking and equity.

It’s here where I can sympathize with the eye rolls or chuckles from the portion of the readership who point out that, in our current environment (July 2022), the price of Bitcoin has plummeted amidst high CPI 印刷品（高通胀）。 但我建议我们小心并缩小。 今天的 投降 was pure euphoria a little over two years ago. Bitcoin 具有 被宣布“死亡” 这些年来一遍又一遍，只为这只负鼠重新出现，变得更大更健康。 在相当短的时间内，类似的 BTC 价格点既代表了极端的贪婪，也代表了其在价值获取升级的道路上的极端恐惧。

History shows us that technologies with strong network effects and profound utility — a category I believe Bitcoin fits in — have a way of gaining enormous adoption right underneath humanity’s nose without most fully recognizing it.

以下摘自 Vijay Boyapati 众所周知的 “Bullish Case for Bitcoin= essay5 explains this well, particularly in relation to monetary technologies:

“当一种货币商品的购买力随着采用率的提高而增加时，市场对什么是“便宜”和“昂贵”的预期也会相应地发生变化。 同样，当货币商品的价格崩盘时，预期可能会转变为普遍认为先前的价格“不合理”或过度膨胀的信念。 . . . 事实是，“便宜”和“昂贵”的概念对于货币商品来说基本上没有意义。 货币商品的价格并不反映它的现金流量或它的用途，而是衡量它在货币的各种作用中得到广泛采用的程度。”

If Bitcoin does one day accrue enormous value the way I’ve suggested it might, its upward trajectory will be anything but smooth. First consider that the economy as a whole is likely to be increasingly unstable moving forward — systemically fragile markets underpinned by credit have a propensity to be volatile to the downside in the long run against hard assets. Promises built on promises can quickly fall like dominoes, and in the last few decades we’ve experienced increasingly regular and significant deflationary episodes (often followed by stunning recoveries assisted by fiscal and monetary intervention). Amidst an overall backdrop of inflation, there will be fits of dollar strengthening — we are experiencing one currently. Now add in the fact that, at this stage, bitcoin is nascent; it’s poorly understood; its supply is completely unresponsive (inelastic); and, in the minds of most big financial players, it’s optional and speculative.

在我写这篇文章的时候 Bitcoin is nearly 70% down from an all-time high of $69,000, and in all likelihood, it will be extremely volatile for some time. However, the key distinction is that BTC has been, and in my view will continue to be, volatile to the upside in relation to soft assets (those with a subjective and expanding supply schedules; i.e. fiat). When talking about forms of money, the words “sound” and “stable” are far from synonymous. I can’t think of a better example of this dynamic at work than gold versus the German papiermark during the 魏玛共和国的恶性通货膨胀. 沉浸在下面的图表中，看看在此期间黄金的波动性有多大。

迪伦·勒克莱尔 说过 以下与上表有关：

“你会经常看到德国魏玛以纸币计价的黄金图表呈抛物线走势。 该图表没有显示的是在恶性通货膨胀期间发生的急剧下跌和波动。 使用杠杆进行投机活动多次被淘汰。”

Despite the papiermark inflating completely away in relation to gold over the long run, there were periods where the mark significantly outpaced gold. My base case is that bitcoin will continue to do something akin to this in relation to the world’s contemporary basket of fiat currencies.

Ultimately, the proposition of bitcoin bulls is that the addressable market of this asset is mind numbing. Staking a claim on even a small portion of this network may allow members of the middle and lower classes to power on the sump pump and keep the basement dry. My plan is to accumulate BTC, batten down the hatches and hold on tight with low time preference. I’ll close this part with the words of Dr. Jeff Ross, former interventional radiologist turned hedge fund manager:

“Checking and savings accounts are where your money goes to die; bonds are return-free risk. We have a chance now to exchange our dollar for the greatest sound money, the greatest savings technology, that has ever existed.”6

In 部分3, we’ll explore two more key ways in which bitcoin works to rectify existing economic imbalances.

脚注

1. Although this is often labeled as “money printing,” the actual mechanics behind money creation are complex. If you would like a brief explanation of how this occurs, Ryan Deedy, CFA (an editor of this piece) explained the mechanics succinctly in a correspondence we had: “The Fed is not allowed to buy USTs directly from the government, which is why they have to go through commercial banks/investment banks to carry out the transaction. [...] To execute this, the Fed creates reserves (a liability for the Fed, and an asset for commercial banks). The commercial bank then uses those new reserves to buy the USTs from the government. Once purchased, the Treasury's General Account (TGA) at the Fed increases by the associated amount, and the USTs are transferred to the Fed, which will appear on its balance sheet as an asset.”

2.来自 “国债重要吗” 通过林奥尔登

3. 从“Why Every Fixed Income Investor Needs to Consider Bitcoin as Portfolio Insurance”格雷格·福斯

4. When I say “overly monetized,” I’m referring to capital flowing into investments that might otherwise be saved in a store of value or other form of money if a more adequate and accessible solution existed for retaining buying power.

5.现在一个 书 同名。

6. 说在一个 宏观经济小组 at Bitcoin 2022 研讨会

这是丹的客座帖子。 所表达的意见完全是他们自己的，不一定反映 BTC Inc 或 Bitcoin 杂志.

原始来源： Bitcoin 杂志