To Know Bitcoin Is To Love Bitcoin

It is my contention that an individual’s certainty of the inevitable success of the Bitcoin protocol is asymptotically correlated to that person’s understanding of it. Behind the Bitcoin protocol is an amalgam of technologies that work together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. To fully understand the profundity of this invention so early in its life, a person needs to have a hungry curiosity as well as the willingness to dedicate many, many hours of focused effort on key educational materials that span a variety of disciplines.

In the meantime, however, I will say: Understanding Bitcoin starts with understanding money. And that starts with realizing that you may not yet understand money from a first principles foundation.

Since the beginning of the technology which our civilization collectively refers to as “money,” the preferred value exchange medium of every age has always been naturally emergent and collectively agreed upon by a free market of trade due to specific attributes of that medium. Early examples include seashells, bones, beads, stones, and precious metals.

Until the development of the nation-state, money had never been a piece of paper whose use is mandated by force and whose sole value proposition comes from being backed by “the full faith and credit” of an organization which, as Murry Rothbard wrote in “Anatomy of the State,” achieves its ends by maintaining a “self-enforced monopoly on the use of force and violence, [and ultimate power of legislation] in a given territorial area.” Although as the territorial area of a government becomes more localized, voting necessarily becomes more transparent and easier to verify and settle.There are more practical and actionable checks and balances, as well as more manageable oversight. There is also a strong human element (social consensus layer), as members of any local government body are likely to know many of their constituents on a neighborly level.

Large, predatory government feigns to serve its citizens, but, as Rothbard notes, in reality it is “the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered, but by coercion.” The monopoly on legal coercion is maintained through violence, social conditioning and indoctrination, extortion, gatekeeping, exploitation and monetary debasement. At this point, many people will defend their governments, citing the services a government does provide: public safety, education, roads, social programs, safety nets, etc. I contend that such things are better managed and financed by public and private free industries operating within a free market of exchange under a sound money standard. In a scenario such as this, where prosperity itself is significantly more ample, the number of men and women who require social assistance will be greatly reduced. Those who do require it will be helped as they always have — through the beneficent generosity of those who have the means to provide assistance. It is important to note here that the moral standards of a sound money society are continually on the rise and after several succeeding generations of such, it will become increasingly clear that we live in a reality of abundance, both spiritually and materially.

As the standards and quality of life within a society flourish, so does that society’s industry, moral caliber and intellectual progression. This often leads to emergent solutions to fundamental problems. Take education for example: Save for a few specialized occupations in medical and research fields, modern society has collectively crafted a tool that has all but replaced centralized higher educational institutions. People have begun to realize they don’t need to spend $100,000 to waste four years on busy work just to receive a piece of paper saying they had the privilege. Vastly superior and arguably more relevant educations on any given subject can be attained in half the time by a sufficiently curious mind and an internet connection, which puts at our fingertips the entirety of the collective human knowledge base in video, graphical, audio and text formats, as well as provides the means to communicate in real-time 24/7 with billions of others for help. It’s important to note that neither the infrastructure nor maintenance of the internet requires the existence of a federal government.

For the most part, the useful services a state does provide neither accurately reflect the price of taxes paid nor does it justify the true cost of our enslavement as we allow a governmental monopoly on money to persist. The hijacking of free-market money and the gradual transition to monopoly-mandated fiat currencies spans over several centuries and was completed in the U.S. in 1971. The fiat monetary system is an inherently evil system designed to increase wealth inequality while also enriching those highest up in the system (search: “Cantillon effect”).

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