If Bitcoin would be any animal, it would be the honey badger. The honey badger is notorious for its strength, resilience and toughness. A honey badger having a bad day has been known to aggressively intimidate lions and hyenas. Bee stings, snake bites and porcupine quills rarely penetrate a honey badger’s skin.
Roger Ver, an early promoter in the Bitcoin world, paid $1,500 a month to have a billboard brandishing a honey badger Bitcoin ad along Santa Clara’s Lawrence Expressway with the words “The Honey Badger of Money.”
But what the hell do honey badger tendencies have to do with bitcoin, digital money stored on the internet?
In the early years of Bitcoin, 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 deemed it rat poison. Yet, Bitcoin remains intact and unscathed from the constant bombardment of hack attempts to suppress its market capital, like a honey badger accosted by bees, snakes or lions.
In the realm of cryptocurrency, bitcoin is very similar to the 35-pound mammal that is impervious to pretty much anything thrown at it, including fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). Earning it the name “the honey badger of money.” Bitcoin OGs are all too familiar with the honey badger memes 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 bewildered. So, here are six reasons explaining why the honey badger is truly Bitcoin’s spirit animal.
1. Fearless Currency
Bitcoin provides a new technical solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem, among many other things. Bitcoin is a disruptive technology. The network and the supporters of Bitcoin are fearless in making bitcoin the number-one currency in the world.
Much like the honey badger, Bitcoin is brave in going up against central banking and traditional wealth assets used as stores of value, such as gold and equity stocks. Bitcoin will not back down to anything that threatens its distribution, even governments. This will cause a stalemate for currency regulation or outright dematerialization of banks that do not peg their treasury to bitcoin in the future.
2. Distributed Globally
Just like the internet was released to give the world a web of information, Bitcoin is another layer of the internet that allows millions and soon billions to be their own banks and ultimately control their wealth. Bitcoin has a global reach that is distributed all over, not just a centralized location. Decentralized nodes secure transactions, leaving little use for banks because Bitcoin users can self-post their funds.
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 across the globe, those time constraints are considered super fast.
The naysayers or altcoin believers will say that Bitcoin is slow, and a new sleek cryptocurrency will eventually outpace it on transaction times. In my opinion, the idea that Bitcoin is slow has no merit when you zoom out and look at how long it takes for transfers under 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 corporate credit card provider, “International wire transfers may take 1–5 days. ACH transfers and other types of money transfers take 2–3 days.”
In an emergency, 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 most proven second layer for speedier transactions, is fast — very fast.
Lightning currently has a maximum throughput of 25 million transactions per second (compared with on-chain throughput of seven transactions per second). In conjunction with Taproot, this speed is expected to increase expeditiously as the network grows.
4. No Regard For Borders
Bitcoin allows one to live or earn wherever it suits them. Hence, restriction of money by borders is the last throes of a decaying nation state. People can bypass national borders thanks to the internet. Bitcoin has no regard for boundaries and moves about freely from peer to peer. These borders even detail the reaches outside of Earth. Yeah, Bitcoin and space travel will be a reality in the future if it is successful.
Bitcoin’s center of hash can be utilized beyond Earth and encompass the universe because nodes can be run anywhere, including in off-planet colonies. Cofounder of Unchained Capital, Dhruv Bansal, wrote a brilliant piece on quantitative hash rate mining on other planets in the “Bitcoin Astronomy” series.
The ideas go as far-reaching as a Bitcoin hash war between Mars and Earth, hybrid blockchains called timechains, and Earth’s future convergence into a hyperbitcoinized world. I guess the honey badger will be space-bound shortly. For the sci-fi buffs, that’s some cool stuff to think about.
5. Secure Encryption: Nothing Can Stop Bitcoin
Gold is money you can’t print, and Bitcoin is money you can’t corrupt. All of the transactions are public on the blockchain, but the encryption process is highly secure.
Bitcoin Core is an application built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain rails. The underpinning of Bitcoin core encrypts its wallet using the method called the 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 core encryption fundamentals are secure and immutable.
6. Bitcoin Doesn’t Give A Bit!
Governments want to tax bitcoin. Do you think Bitcoin cares?
Any sane person that understands what this digital asset is would agree it does not. Bitcoin doesn’t give a bit because it does what it wants. In the animal kingdom, the honey badger pretty much does whatever it wants also. The similarities between the two are uncanny. Bitcoin does not have 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 in front of, no one nor nothing to point the finger at if it does or doesn’t work. If it fails, that would mean, in theory, we all have failed, because it is based on consensus. Bitcoin is on its own time preference, pacing along, dematerializing relic stores of value into the standard of Bitcoin. It is completely removed from the physical and social flaws that societies dish out. It doesn’t care. It just is.
This is a guest post by Dawdu Amantanah. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.