Wences is widely considered the OG of bitcoin adoption and evangelism in Silicon Valley circles. He bought and began making bitcoin’s case in 2011. Here’s his Wikipedia.
He wrote a 15 page PDF that he shared privately with friends and potential investors. Milk Road kindly published it here.
There were a few passages that I felt compelled to share. Highly recommend reading the whole thing to understand why bitcoin matters, and a practical recommendation for how to invest.
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HIGHLIGHTS
To illustrate the power of these qualities, consider that today the only standard of value and settlement that the United States of America can be certain that The People’s Republic of China (PRC) will not discriminate access to, censor transactions from or dilute the value of is the Bitcoin Blockchain.
The only innovation of the Blockchain is its sovereignty, the only sovereign Blockchain so far is the Bitcoin Blockchain and the fuel that keeps it sovereign is the Bitcoin currency.
If Bitcoin succeeds it may be a global non-political standard of value and settlement. The world already has a global non-political standard of length in the meter, and a global non-political standard of weight in the kilo. Could you imagine a world in which we changed the length of the meter or the weight of the kilo regularly according to political considerations? Yet that is what we are doing with our standard of value.
However, the history of protocols is very different. Once a protocol gets established it almost never changes. For example, we are using IP (Internet Protocol, or just “the Internet” colloquially) for almost all transport of data (until the late 90s cisco routers used to route dozens of protocols, today they only route IP). We are using only one web protocol and only one email protocol. The email protocol, for example, is quite simple and limited.