Bitcoin, Gold & Honey - Musings of a Bitcoin-Believing Beekeeper's Wife

My husband is a beekeeping Bitcoiner. He is a believer in and holder of Bitcoin, and he is a full-time beekeeper who spends all year working very hard (as do his bees!) in order to produce “liquid gold” - local honey from his 350 beehives in the scenic Connecticut River Valley.

In the animal kingdom, honey is truly like gold. Honey, like gold and Bitcoin, is scarce and difficult to obtain, and there is a high cost to doing so - gold mining can be dangerous, and honey-harvesting can result in many bee stings! Wild beehives, like gold mines and Bitcoin mining centers, are not easy to come by - all three are quite rare. For beekeepers, much time must be spent managing domestic beehives and harvesting and bottling honey, and many monetary resources must be used on beekeeping equipment. Bees also require resources (nectar from flowers) in order to make honey, and it takes bees months to execute all of the steps needed to produce honey. Similarly, for gold miners, much time and many resources must be spent in the process of mining for gold. Finally, for Bitcoin miners, it takes a tremendous amount of electricity for the data-mining computers to successfully solve very difficult math problems (by guessing numbers) and thereby mine Bitcoin. Each Bitcoin is “backed” by the massive amount of energy that it took to mine that Bitcoin.

The benefits of honey, once it is obtained, are rich. Honey is the only form of pure, eligible sugar produced by any animal species, and its nutritional and medicinal properties are well-known. Honey is not only delectable - it is a superfood consisting of live enzymes and antioxidants, like flavonoids and polyphenols, making honey anticancer, antiproliferative and anti-metastatic. Honey is used to treat many ailments - most famously, seasonal allergies (since honey contains trace bits of pollen, which the bees pick up as they visit different flowers, collecting nectar). Honey is used to treat skin burns, rashes, ulcers and other skin conditions. Honey helps soothe sore throats in the cases of colds, bronchial asthma, tuberculosis, throat infections and other respiratory diseases. Honey is naturally anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and antiviral. Honey triggers serotonin, which can have antidepressant and anti-anxiety effects. Traditionally, honey has also been used in the treatment of eye diseases, hiccups, fatigue, dizziness, hepatitis, constipation, worm infestation, piles, ulcers, and diabetes. Furthermore, honey has been used in the treatment of numerous cardiovascular, neurological, and gastrointestinal diseases. The list goes on and on.

Gold, once mined, is also a highly valuable asset to obtain. It is a precious metal that has held its value for millennia, as it has been used as currency for the last 5000 years (human civilization altogether only being about 10,000 years old). Gold possesses a high utility value in terms of its uses in jewelry, dentistry, electronics (like computers), medicine, glassmaking and other items and industries. Over the centuries, gold has held its value, proving itself a worthy store of value. For example, one ounce of gold two thousand years ago in Ancient Rome could buy you a toga. Today, an ounce of gold can buy you a suit. 70 years ago, in the 1950s, 186 gold coins could buy you a house. Today, 186 gold coins can still buy you a house. The entire medieval “discipline” of alchemy, the forerunner to modern chemistry, was based around attempting to convert base metals to gold. Just as how fiat currency (like we have in America today) can always be printed, alchemists always failed to make gold.

And Bitcoin, the first and original crypto, is digital gold. It is a digital store of value - a digital asset that is scarce and difficult to obtain more of. Bitcoin and gold are both decentralized currencies that are not controlled by any world government. Gold is the king of precious metals, and Bitcoin is unique among cryptocurrencies in that it is the original, first cryptocurrency, and it is truly decentralized. The other coins (like the memecoin Dogecoin) have CEOs and solve certain “issues” in the code, like scaling, by centralizing. While Bitcoin and gold are both examples of “hard”, sound money, Bitcoin is even “harder” than gold, as Bitcoin is even more scarce than gold. Whereas the world supply of gold increases by about 5% every year (and silver, even more), due to increased gold-mining, it is written into Bitcoin’s code that there can only be 21 million Bitcoins, with each Bitcoin divisible by 100 million satoshis (“sats”). This is enough to provide for all of the world’s economic needs. The total number of Bitcoin (21 million) was designed to match the approximate total amount of wealth in the world. Almost all of the possible Bitcoins have been mined, and some have been lost. Whereas 90% of the U.S. dollar’s value has been lost since America fully went off the gold standard in 1971 (and 93% of its value has been lost since we began going off the gold standard in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, in order to fund World War I), the value of Bitcoin will only keep increasing.

For all of gold’s merits - such as its physical beauty and the satisfaction of being able to hold it in one’s hand - another benefit of Bitcoin over gold is the utter transparency of Bitcoin’s public ledger. One prominent concern with gold is that certain countries (like China) are not being truthful about how much gold they really possess, and that when they do release this information, the price of gold will plummet. On the other hand, every Bitcoin transaction is recorded in the public record, whereas paper fiat money can easily be faked (counterfeit!). It is impossible to “fake” a Bitcoin - the network will reject it. When a Bitcoin is mined, the Bitcoin joins the blockchain, in which every Bitcoin fits together like pieces of a puzzle. This calls to mind the image of bees working together in a hive to create beautiful patterns of honeycomb (honey encased in beeswax). Bees are inherently “programmed” (pun intended!) with all sorts of different jobs that are needed in order to create honeycomb. Similarly, there are so many complex and crucial aspects of the Bitcoin code that work together in order to create a functioning Bitcoin network. There are many flowers that constitute the bee ecosystem, and there are so many engineering systems that constitute the Bitcoin ecosystem. The bee ecosystem must be protected and nurtured, and the Bitcoin ecosystem must be fortified and expanded (for example, in terms of layer 2 programming). In both areas, there is so much work to be done!

Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin operates on a “proof of work” basis, as opposed to “proof of stake.” Proof of work is more secure than proof of stake, but it is slower and consumes more energy. Whether one is producing honey or mining gold or Bitcoin, all of these worthy and valuable “products'' require real work, effort and sacrifice - unlike fiat currency that is just printed by world governments, endlessly debased, and eventually devalued into failed nonexistence, as has been the case with every fiat currency that every human civilization has ever adopted. When the ancient Romans began grinding the ends of their coins into new coins, inflation became one of the causes of Rome’s demise and the currency ultimately failed. Today, you only see the Roman “denarius” coin in museums, whereas gold preceded the denarius and has outlasted it. Government money-printing is responsible for so many of the societal ailments that American society faces today, such as inflation of food and housing, and seemingly-endless forever wars. We must continue to work toward a society that is based upon jobs, products and currencies that require real work and effort. We must work toward hyperbitcoinization.