Fiat money is glasses and bitcoin is education

This is Robert Breedlove’s analogy which I think is perfect to describe people’s relationship and understanding of money.

Do we ponder what materials the lenses are made from, what about the arms. Plastic? metal. Where are they made, can we fix them? Do we even care? The one object that we see the world through, that our eyeballs are the closest to is something we regard in its entirety with about as much interest and regularity as we might a hat, sweater or brand of moisturising cream.

The same can be said of our government issued fiat currency. We interact with money every day, we hold it in our wallets, in our accounts and down the back of our sofas. We think about how much of it we have or don’t have, we obsess over balances, we yearn for more of it, we trade our time and energy for it, we let it rule us, yet we don’t have an interest in what it really is at its core. How it is created, how it is distributed and who controls it. This is a symptom of lack of financial education. Why do they not teach financial education in schools? that’s for another article but I’ll leave here this famous quote by Henry Ford to help you get a bit of an idea.

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

Henry Ford

Bitcoin encourages financial education, both in the monetary protocol itself and the diametrically opposed in just about every way fiat monopoly of which we realise we need bitcoin to free ourselves from. Bitcoin helps us make those comparisons of what is soft and hard money, what money is now and what it should be for a fairer society. If those that hold bitcoin are not educated or interested in becoming educated, they will fail to see the need for bitcoin, and their interest will wane in the bear market when the price is on a downward trajectory. If those that hold bitcoin do become educated they will buy the cheap bitcoin the uneducated are selling, and they and their future generations will be richly rewarded.