Until now whenever weve needed to transfer money weve had to rely on a third party, whether it be a bank, a clearing house or a payment network. Bitcoin offers, for the first time, a method for transferring value and making payments from anywhere to anywhere, in real-time, without any intermediary.
^ Bitcoin is powerful because it is borderless and permissionless.
This is not true, and people keep repeating it at a concerning rate. The reality isn't quite so snappily summed up, but it's wildly different from this presentation, and that makes it very dangerous misinformation.
There is counter party risk
There is permission
There is trust
And all three are vested in the mining network, and everyone happily sweeps this under the rug at every opportunity. Until someone comes up with a way to decentralise mining (or remove the miners ability to choose which transactions to include), I will not allow people to repeat this misinformation unchallenged.