Breaking FUD: Embracing Bitcoin

The biggest thing holding many back from getting into Bitcoin is FUD. This is the unholy trinity of F.U.D. FUD is short for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. I’m now inspired to come up with a new acronym that is the opposite of FUD! What is the opposite of FUD? Calm, Certainty, and Faith. CCF. That’s a terrible acronym. Let me work on that and put a cool acronym in a future post!

But let’s break some FUD! Here is an excerpt from the “Breaking FUD” e-magazine by Vlad Costea released May 2023. I’ll post more of this e-magazine over the coming days.

“Bitcoin has once again entered FUD season. It’s the time when it gets thrown in the same basket as crypto scams in order to have its technological legitimacy questioned.

“It’s been this number of years, what did Bitcoin accomplish? Here’s why it’s a wasteful ocean-boiling failed utopia for libertarians and all the people we tell you not to like”,  you hear them say.

These are the moments when critics and skeptics get to shine – because when the price is down from the previous highs, the number of disillusioned retail investors grows. Naturally, the majority of the attention shifts towards these poorly informed but strongly-convicted voices that tell you that it’s over and it was a bad idea all along.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin offers financial inclusion to millions of people worldwide.

The unbanked, the politically oppressed, the socially and financially constrained, and the ideologically driven constantly benefit from the kind of freedom of transactions which no government or private institution will ever grant them. If the previous enumeration sounds too general and formulaic, here are some specific examples:

– the Canadian truckers, who protested for their freedom to work under irrationally authoritarian conditions in early 2022, eventually had their bank accounts frozen through political abuse. In order to be able to make transactions and receive support, they had to use bitcoin;

– the citizens of countries which experienced triple digit inflation during 2021 and 2022 protected their savings using BTC. Many such cases can be found in Sudan, Argentina, Lebanon and Venezuela;

– in countries such as Suriname and Turkey, bitcoin’s crash from its all-time high is still not as drastic as the devaluation of their national fiat currencies;

– in El Salvador, the country which embraced the magic internet money as part of their official currencies, bitcoin transactions are part of daily life;

– and if you still think that Bitcoin still hasn’t proved its utility, consider this: in 2022, Chinese spies reportedly sent BTC bribes to a US double agent via Wasabi wallet. Meaning that government officials also find Bitcoin useful, in spite of the official narrative they propagate through the media.

If 2021 was filled with Tesla Cybertruck and citadel memes, then the fall of 2022 and probably most of 2023 are all about FUD against Bitcoin. It’s easier for speculators who don’t understand the purpose and ideals of Bitcoin to criticize it through half-truths and distorted facts.

And it’s also extremely convenient for government officials, central bankers and private bankers to promote this FUD through their authority and the media channels they control.

Such dishonest and deceitful actions effectively increase the demand for failing fiat currencies and may also temporarily boost faith in their silly money system.

But FUD, outside of its governmental weaponization, is nothing but a series of natural reactions which help us process events and phenomena that shake our worldview and system of beliefs.

When we’re faced with something new and revolutionary for which we don’t possess enough information to understand, the first instinct is to be afraid of the changes it might bring to our surroundings. Fear is part of our human nature.

As soon as we learn a little bit more about it, we no longer hold strong opinions about the outcomes – which leads to uncertainty. And when we deal with a meteoric collision between our deeply-rooted system of beliefs and a black swan event, we tend to cast doubt on the contender.

FUD is part of who we are. It’s a mechanism which makes us defend a status quo and helps us approach change in a critical manner. If we embraced every new idea without applying a basic level of scrutiny, our civilization would get destroyed.

On the other hand, the permanent emergence of new information helps us transcend the FUD phase in order to embrace something that’s truly revolutionary and worthwhile.”

I trust you enjoyed that!

I’m Charles Polanski and I seek to turn the Bitcoin-curious into Bitcoin investors and enthusiasts.

Thanks to Vlad for making this excerpt available to freely spread.
Find him on Twitter: @TheVladCostea
“Your Bitcoin influencer’s influencer.”
Host of the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast
Writer of the open source @btctkvr mag.
Check out his work: http://linktr.ee/btctkvr