If Bitcoin were an animal, it would be the honey badger. The honey badger is known for its strength, resilience, and tenacity. A honey badger having a bad day has been known to aggressively intimidate lions and hyenas. Bee stings, snakebites, and porcupine quills rarely penetrate the skin of a badger.
Roger Ver, one of the early promoters of the Bitcoin world, paid $ 1,500 per month to have a billboard waving a honey badger Bitcoin ad along Santa Clara’s Lawrence Freeway with the words “The Honey Badger of Money “.
But what do the honey badger trends have to do with bitcoin, the digital money stored on the internet?
In Bitcoin’s early years, some miners attempted to attack and take over the Bitcoin blockchain network with a 51% hash attack to no avail. Governments have banned it and Wall Street investors like Warren Buffet have seen it as rat poison. Yet Bitcoin remains intact and unscathed from the constant bombardment of hacking attempts to suppress its market capital, like a honey badger accosted by bees, snakes or lions.
In the cryptocurrency realm, bitcoin is very similar to the 35 pound mammal that is impervious to virtually anything thrown at it, including Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD). This has earned it the name of “the silver honey badger”. Bitcoin OGs know Honey Badger memes all too well and understand with conviction that the coin supply and its network are immutable and impenetrable.
For Bitcoiners new to the space, this concept may still leave you puzzled. So here are six reasons why the honey badger is truly Bitcoin’s spirit animal.
1. Currency without fear
Bitcoin provides a new technical solution to the problem of the Byzantine generals, among others. Bitcoin is disruptive technology. The Bitcoin network and supporters are not afraid to make bitcoin the number one currency in the world.
Much like the honey badger, Bitcoin is courageous in taking on central banks and traditional assets used as stores of value, such as gold stocks and stocks. Bitcoin will stop at nothing that threatens its distribution, even governments. This will lead to a deadlock for currency regulation or outright dematerialization of banks that will not peg their cash to bitcoin in the future.
2. Distributed worldwide
Just as the Internet was started to give the world a network of information, Bitcoin is another layer of the Internet that allows millions and soon billions to be their own banks and ultimately control their own. richness. Bitcoin has a global reach that is spread everywhere, not just a centralized location. Decentralized nodes secure transactions, leaving little use to banks as Bitcoin users can post their funds on their own.
3. Transactions are super fast
Bitcoin transactions typically have a range of 10 minutes to 60 minutes for settlement. When you talk about moving large amounts of money around the world, these time constraints are seen as very quick.
Opponents or supporters of altcoin will argue that Bitcoin is slow and that a sleek new cryptocurrency will eventually overtake it in terms of transaction time. In my opinion, the idea that Bitcoin is slow has no merit when you zoom out and watch how long it takes for transfers in the traditional banking system to occur. For Bitcoin, slow and steady wins the race. It’s all about efficiency, and with innovation, speed will come.
According to Divvy Pay, a well-known business credit card provider, “International transfers can take 1 to 5 days. ACH transfers and other types of money transfers take 2-3 days.
In an emergency, the minutes and hours can be crucial. Meanwhile, Bitcoin can send millions of dollars of value anywhere in the world in about five minutes to 10 minutes with low fees depending on network speed. The Lighting Network, which is Bitcoin’s second most proven layer for faster transactions, is fast – very fast.
Lightning currently has a maximum throughput of 25 million transactions per second (compared to the on-chain throughput of Seven transactions per second). In conjunction with Taproot, this speed should increase rapidly as the network grows.
4. No respect for borders
Bitcoin allows you to live or earn where it suits you. Therefore, border restriction of money is the last test of a decaying nation-state. People can bypass national borders thanks to the Internet. Bitcoin has no respect for borders and moves freely from peer to peer. These boundaries even detail the expanses outside the Earth. Yes, Bitcoin and space travel will be a reality in the future if they are successful.
Bitcoin’s hash center can be used beyond Earth and encompass the universe, as the nodes can be run anywhere, including off-planet colonies. Unchained Capital co-founder Dhruv Bansal wrote a brilliant article on the quantitative exploitation of hash rate on other planets in the “Bitcoin Astronomy” series.
Ideas go as far as a Bitcoin hash war between Mars and Earth, hybrid blockchains called time chains, and Earth’s future convergence in a hyperbitcoinized world. I guess the honey badger will be in space soon. For science fiction buffs, these are cool things to think about.
5. Secure encryption: nothing can stop Bitcoin
Gold is money you cannot print and Bitcoin is money you cannot corrupt. All transactions are public on the blockchain, but the encryption process is highly secure.
Bitcoin Core is an application built on the rails of the Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin kernel foundation encrypts its wallet using the method called Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). This is the same encryption algorithm used by the NSA for its classified information. AES is considered highly secure. Nothing can stop Bitcoin because its encryption fundamentals are secure and immutable.
6. Bitcoin doesn’t give a little!
Governments want to tax bitcoin. Do you think Bitcoin cares?
Anyone in their right mind who understands what this digital asset is will agree that it is not. Bitcoin doesn’t give a bit because it does what it wants. In the animal kingdom, the honey badger does just about anything it wants, too. The similarities between the two are disturbing. Bitcoin has no emotion because it is a technology designed to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions, but people who believe in its potential do.
There is no Bitcoin CEO or Bitcoin headquarters to protest to, no one or anything to point a finger at whether it works or not. If it fails, that would mean, in theory, that we have all failed, because it is based on consensus. Bitcoin has its own time preference, pacing, dematerializing the relic stores of value in the Bitcoin standard. It is completely removed from the physical and social defects that societies spread. It doesn’t care. It’s just.
This is a guest article by Dawdu Amantanah. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
