If you like remote work, you’ll love Bitcoin.
That may sound like a stretch at first. Even for me–I’m a big proponent of both–the symbiosis between remote and Bitcoin is just starting to became clear.
But before we jump into remote work and Bitcoin, we need to understand language and money. They are more similar than you think.
Want to learn more about Bitcoin? These are the five books I’d recommend.
Book |
Author
|
Get the Book
|
The Bitcoin Standard |
Saifedean Ammous |
|
Layered Money
|
Nik Bhatia |
|
The Price of Tomorrow |
Jeff Booth |
|
The Bullish Case for Bitcoin
|
Vijay Boyapati |
|
Why Buy Bitcoin
|
Andy Edstrom |
Layers of communication: language + money
When I ask you, “How do we communicate?” Your answer would likely be “through language.”
But that’s just one layer of communication. Another, arguably more important way we communicate, is through money, the transaction layer of communication.
Think of it this way…
- Language: I could tell you I love your product which could communicate some of my thoughts. But if I don’t buy it, what am I really saying?
- Money: Or, I could buy your product without saying anything. What is packaged in the price I’m willing to pay? I’m saying I like your product, how much it is worth to me, and what I’m willing to forego to acquire your product.
In other words, language helps us communicate what we value to each other, but has a limit. Money allows us to show exactly how much we value everything.
Whereas the key to remote work is a place for digital language to occur, the key to Bitcoin is a place for digital money to be stored and transacted.
Remote work = digital language.
The breakthrough that allows for us to work from anywhere (rather a physical office together) is the internet. The internet allows us to communicate digitally in light speed with anyone, anywhere through language. Wherever language can occur, so can value creation (or work that pays you).
Remote work is a decentralized, distributed way to provide value through a digital language layer.
Learn (a lot, a lot more) from some great authors:
Remote Work Books For Your Home Office Shelf
Bitcoin = digital money.
The breakthrough that allows for Bitcoin is also… the internet. The internet allows us to store and transact value digitally in light speed with anyone, anywhere through a form of money, Bitcoin. Money is the storing and exchanging of value.
Bitcoin is a decentralized, distributed way to store and transact value through a digital money layer.
Learn (a lot, a lot more) from some great authors, podcast hosts, and analysts:
The Best Bitcoin Books: A Sortable List
The 21 Best Bitcoin Podcasts + Guests
The Best People To Follow For Bitcoin Analysis
The 5 aligning principles of remote work + Bitcoin
There are five (that I’ve identified so far) principles of remote work that perfectly align with Bitcoin principles. You’ll see how closely remote work and Bitcoin align, and could therefore, work together.
1. Digitally native
Remote work is inherently digital since we communicate over the internet.
- To work remotely, we don’t go to the post office with a letter and ask them to scan the paper into an email. We don’t record a video on a camera then send the file over the internet, we just use Zoom. The communication happens and lives only the internet. The breakthrough is the speed of natively digital communication that can happen anywhere.
Bitcoin‘s value is stored and transacted digitally.
- With our current form of paper money, we use a credit card or a wire transfer to move funds. But that is a digital representation of a physical system, not a digitally native transaction. A digital layer on a physical system makes for a slower system. Think about how long a wire transfer takes from your bank to a friend’s.
- Bitcoin is digital money, so it doesn’t have to slow down to settle on a physical layer.
2. Portable
Remote work is portable, meaning that you can bring your job anywhere and still earn money there.
- In fact, all you’d need is your brain to bring your work somewhere. You wouldn’t even need “your computer” per se. With most systems running through the cloud, you could log into any computer to access your team and work.
- You can carry your value-generating job anywhere with just your brain.
Bitcoin is portable, meaning that you can bring your money (or stored value) anywhere you want.
- All you need is your brain to remember a seed phrase to your Bitcoin wallet to access your money anywhere. If you store in gold, it’s too heavy to transport. If you store in paper money, you’d have to get permission to move it out of the country.
- You can carry your store-of-value money anywhere with just your memory.
3. Decentralized
Remote work doesn’t require a physical office where everyone works together.
- In a physical office space…
- A fire drill or WiFi outage would stop all work.
- Increases in commercial real estate in your city would cause costs to soar.
- An increase in traffic would make all employees unhappier.
- In a fully remote company…
- Each employee runs their own WiFi, so the entire system would never go offline all at once.
- If commercial real estate prices or traffic increase in one city, most of your employees won’t be affected.
Remote companies are less vulnerable to risk than in-office companies.
Bitcoin doesn’t require a governing body, or a central bank, to manage the money supply.
- With paper money issued by the government (Fiat), there is a central authority managing the form of money. This opens the risk of…
- Inflation: Additional money is printed that devalues the current money you hold without your consent.
- Gatekeeping: The central authorities can remove your access to the financial system based on your country, type of business, or political leanings.
- Corruption: Those who are closest to the people who can create more money may benefit the most.
Bitcoin has no governing body or centralization which makes it impossible to manipulate and makes you less vulnerable as the holder.
4. Distributed opportunity
Remote work distributes economic opportunity more fairly than in-office work.
- If you wanted to work in American banking or finance, you most likely need to be in New York.
- With remote work, you can get a job anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
- Where you are born no longer dictates your economic outcomes, the value you provide does.
Bitcoin distributes savings anywhere in the world more fairly than Fiat currencies.
- If you want access to the US dollar system, it’s best to be born in the United States.
- If you are born into a hyper-inflating country, you will be forced to sell your time for a currency that is quickly losing value.
- If you want access to Bitcoin, you can be anywhere with an internet connection and benefit from non-manipulated currency.
5. Time preserving
Remote work removes the waste of a commute, a structural loss of time every day.
- The average round-trip commute time in the US is about one hour (55 minutes). That means you take on one hour of waste to work eight hours, or 11% waste.
- Remote work preserves your time by removing the waste of a commute.
Bitcoin: There will never be more than 21 million bitcoins in existence, an ultimate inflation rate of 0%.
- Between 2020 – 2021, 40% of all US dollars in existence were printed in a 12-month period. If you increased your net worth by 40% in that time, it means you really increased your share of the pie by 0%. If you increased by 0%, you really declined your share by 40%.
- By storing your wealth in dollars, you suffer from the waste of inflation (a hidden tax on your current money).
- With Bitcoin, you’ll never suffer the decay of inflation because a fixed supply of currency is enforced.
If you like remote work, you’ll love Bitcoin.
The internet allowed for us to work from anywhere, a breakthrough in how humans operate. But the internet and remote work have only solved the communication layer of work.
See Also: The Best Places To Find Bitcoin Jobs
For all the revolutionary benefits of remote work so far, it is still missing the transaction layer.
- We communicate over the internet instantly, but send money that takes three days to arrive.
- We bring our work anywhere, but can’t bring our money.
- We removed the waste of our commute, but haven’t removed the waste of inflation.
- We removed the need to be born into a country for opportunity, but we are still born into our country’s currency.
Bitcoin is the missing piece.
With remote work + Bitcoin, we can create, store, and transact value from anywhere at any time. The combination of the two is what will put our digital revolution on par with the impact of the agricultural or industrial revolutions.
We’re living through a massive change in where we live and how we work. Luckily, remote and Bitcoin go hand in hand to take us there.
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