We’ve all heard of bitcoin and it’s underlying technology, the blockchain, at this point, and if you haven’t, you should probably look into it at your earliest convenience. It is an emerging technology that’s looking like it will be around for a while, and possibly revolutionize the fiat monetary system that we know and hate so much.
Like most cutting edge, forward thinking technologies, it has drawn more than it’s fair share of criticism from the banking elite (most notably and recently from Jamie Dimon), the media, and our government, along with most foreign governments as well.
We’ve heard all the usual “scare the public into submission” arguments against having a decentralized, peer to peer, censorship resistant, secure, pseudonymous system to facilitate the exchange of value anywhere on the planet almost as instantaneous as sending someone an e-mail. Said criticisms go a little like this:
“But drug dealers and thugs will use it to launder money!”
“It will be used to anonymously fund terrorist organizations such as ISIS!”
“It’s being used to buy drugs and paraphernalia on the dark web!”
While there are, no doubt, some portion of the population using bitcoin in nefarious ways, making sweeping blanket statements like this is absurd. Similar claims can be made against the USD, Euro, GBP, CAD, etc. the list goes on. These are, quite simply, futile attempts to hold back a tsunami of change coming, and a complete monetary revolution as we know it.
Let’s step back for a minute and dedicate a few words to summarize how our current monetary system works in our so-called two party democracy.
From a very high level, the machine looks like this:
Through a complicated method of controlled media censorship, social media brainwashing, and corporate funded corruption, we get a republican candidate and a democratic candidate, both self serving and in the pockets of wall street and corporate America.
Then, thanks to “Citizens United”, we have enormous campaign contributions flowing into each party directly from our corporate overlords ensuring our politicians are well paid and thinking first about the needs of large conglomerates and wall street banks, leaving the average citizen’s needs largely unmet.
So, it doesn’t really matter who we, as Americans, elect as our president because, either way, we’re fucked.
Then, as we saw most recently in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, our trusted lenders are encouraged, via laws enacted by our government, to take fractional reserve banking to a whole new level, fuck our economy up beyond all repair, and of course pay themselves handsomely in the process.
But never fear, the privately operated, mysteriously created, never subject to audit, federal reserve to the rescue! Since tax revenues are not nearly enough to even cover the interest on our national debt, our government needs to get creative. If this next part doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, I doubt it was meant to.
To raise the enormous bailout funds required to save our failing banks and companies (and to fund our never ending wars), the government will simply create trillions of dollars worth of new Treasury Bonds and flood the market with them, the sole purpose being to have them bought outright by the Federal Reserve at an interest rate we could only dream of receiving from our banks. Where did the Fed get this money they just loaned our government you may ask? From nothing. They can literally create new money out of thin air whenever they please, and because they’re never audited, who really knows how much money is floating around?
If bitcoin is a fraud (Jamie Dimon’s words), then I don’t even know what to call that last paragraph. Legally mandated fraud on a massive scale?
So the story continues, and just like magic, all of a sudden our duly appointed public representatives have trillions of brand new dollars at their disposal to spend however they wish (quantitative easing – what the fuck does that even mean?), all the while adding enormously to our national debt and weakening the spending power of our hard earned savings, through what can very well be considered a hidden form of taxation – inflation.
Can we guess who receives money when our government implements quantitative easing? Yes, the very people who caused this whole mess in the first place; the wall street crooks who made irresponsible bets in the stock market, the corporate CEO’s who ran their company’s into the ground, and all the “too big to fail” bank heads who took unsound banking practices to a new level. They didn’t just receive money to stay in business either, they received money to fund their private jets, their vacations, and their bonuses. The government basically rewarded them for the decline of our economy.
Also bear in mind that, while all this shit was going down, the average American citizen’s 401k just lost more than 50% of it’s worth, leaving those close to retirement further from being able to retire, and closer to actually swallowing a shotgun.
Ever wonder why we keep hearing about unprovoked and inexplicable mass shootings on the news? Or why we have an opioid epidemic which has been upgraded to a national crisis? Or why the suicide rates are so staggeringly high? There is only so much stress a population can withstand, and when an entire class of people are eroded away into poverty, this can be the result.
All ranting aside, what does bitcoin have to do with any of this? Well, let’s try to imagine a world where banks are no longer necessary, fiat money is dead, and wealth confiscation by government is nearly impossible. It’s a decentralized world of money, where people no longer need permission to send money, it doesn’t take a week for the transaction to settle, and it doesn’t cost 15% in banking fees to make it. It’s a world where capital controls do not exist, unsound banking does not exist, and market manipulation is much less effective. It’s a world where government over-reach is no longer possible, taxation is greatly reduced, and pointless wars can no longer be waged. It’s a world where our wealth can truly be private, a world where we can literally have a Swiss bank in our pocket, one that we have complete control over.
So in reality, when speaking about bitcoin, the true concerns of our mighty elite sound a little more like:
“How will we bleed our citizens financially dry with meaningless bank fees if nobody is using banks anymore?”
“But if it’s decentralized, how will we create more bitcoins at will to pay ourselves, and fund the never ending bailouts the corrupted banks, Wall Street financiers, and corporate CEO’s will inevitably require?”
“How will we enact capital controls to forcefully prevent people from funding organizations like Wikileaks and enabling their continual airing of our dirty laundry on the internet?”
“How will we continue to tax the middle class out of existence if we don’t even know how much money the average citizen has?”
So if Bitcoin is so threatening to the bankers who basically own the government and run the country, why don’t they just shut it down?
If you’re old enough to remember Napster, then you probably also remember how the authorities seized it and took it down for illegal media piracy. Napster’s fatal flaw was it’s centralized nature. Technology’s answer was to put a Napster in every internet connected house in the world. It is called bit torrent, and it is owned by everyone and no one at the same time. It thrives because it is decentralized. The only way to stop it would be to take down the entire internet.
Bitcoin can be thought of in the same way. There is no single organization or company in charge of bitcoin that the authorities can shut down. Bitcoin is not only censorship resistant, it is government resistant, and it is here to stay.
The nations who are smart enough to embrace bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, will be the powerhouses of this new monetary revolution.
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