This is a part of the Bitcoin Infinity Academy course on Knut Svanholm’s book Bitcoin: Independence Reimagined. For more information, check out our Geyser page!

Power to the People

Under a fiat currency monetary system, multinational corporations and big governments are hopelessly intertwined and inevitably help fuel each other’s agendas. Policies such as safety regulations and standardizations may have been implemented by politicians with the best of intentions, but what inexorably happens when lobbyists advance their agenda is that laws and regulations set the bar for entry into the market at heights unreachable for smaller companies. Entire markets get monopolized by multinational behemoths because of centralized governance models. One example of this bureaucratic cancer is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the new set of rules governing how companies must store their employees’ and clients’ personal data in the EU. To comply, smaller companies will have to allocate a larger part of their total revenue than bigger companies, giving them a competitive disadvantage in the process. Giant media outlets will also likely benefit from Article 11 and Article 13, a copyright directive that will open the door to censorship of YouTubers and other content creators. The outdated copyright laws of the twentieth century are being shoehorned into the realm of the Internet, where they were never supposed to be in the first place. Traditional copyright laws are obsolete and dysfunctional and will not protect the starving artist at all. The only thing they do is empower the big media houses and Hollywood studios.

You can vote for this or that party, but the truth is, as long as the control of the money supply remains centralized, there is nothing you can do to really influence the decisions of those with true power. All you can do is limit the ways in which they can control you. Bitcoin is a one-man revolution for every man, woman, and child on Earth. An individualist revolution is the most grassroots thing there is, but it does require people to actively participate rather than just complain about the state of things. This is a good thing. A lot of privacy tools are already available for those who want access to an escape tunnel now rather than later. Privacy-focused hardware such as Purism computers, privacy-focused web browsers, VPN tunnels, and the TOR project might all be somewhat flawed, but at least they’re a step in the right direction. The revolution will not be centralized.

Bitcoin by itself is only pseudonymous at best, but combined with some of the aforementioned tools, a bunch of hardware wallets, and a full node, anyone can take a giant leap towards self-sovereignty for a relatively small amount of money. Remember that even if the Internet provides everyone on Earth with a plethora of opportunities as it is, if we want it to reach its full potential, we need to keep it decentralized. This can only be done by actively choosing not to use the default settings on most gadgets and by being vigilant when prompted about what we want to allow our phones, tablets, and computers to do.

The idea of absolute digital scarcity achieved through decentralization is not easily dismissed, not even for politicians and the Silicon Valley elite. Some of the more honest among them embrace the idea, like Senator Patrick McHenry of the 10th district of North Carolina or Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter. We’d better help these sorts of voices get heard if we want the mainstream to catch on. You don’t have to be a virtue-signaling delusional psychopath to get somewhere in this world. There are more or less decentralized alternatives to Twitter, but as long as Jack’s in charge, it certainly seems like one of the better social media platforms we have today.1 True, all the big platforms have some form of censorship algorithm running, but remember that these networks are privately owned and entirely made up of people who voluntarily chose to join them. It’s not really censorship if you have the choice to opt out. Censorship is only censorship when carried out by a government authority or another mafia-like entity because it is only then that you’re coerced into silence. A voluntary system doesn’t count, even though a more pro-free-speech attitude from the Facebooks and Googles of the world would probably be a good thing. Keep in mind how the Cantillon Effect helped these conglomerates amass power and that the ultimate tool for putting an end to their reign is in your hands already. Bitcoin. Fixes. This.

Every time you vote in a democratic election, you legitimize democracy. Most people in most democracies do this, even though all democracies are all flawed in more or less obvious ways. Every time you stack sats or acquire Bitcoin in whatever way you can, especially if you get paid in Bitcoin for a good or service, you promote yourself. By using Bitcoin, you vote for yourself and your personal independence. No matter what you think of the country you live in or democracy in general, I bet you wouldn’t mind if the powers that be were a little less capable of patronizing you. We humans tend to think of ourselves as slightly more capable of deciding things for ourselves than our peers. With Bitcoin, we have a way of proving this to be true. Whether we’re actually capable of handling our own private keys doesn’t really matter to the system. Bitcoin will punish the reckless and compensate the attentive accordingly. It acts as the ultimate expression of equality of opportunity, and eventually, the Bitcoin economy will weed out those who weren’t really mature enough to use it in the first place. This may sound harsh, but the truly, deeply evil thing that fiat currency does to people is arguably a lot worse.

Social benefits and safety nets have deprived people of the ability to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions and learn from their mistakes, creating a generation of snowflakes and unicorns who unscrupulously claim victimhood whenever anything bad happens to them. Everything is always someone else’s fault, it seems. The saddest part about this development is that it takes the focus of the general public away from the real problems of the world and shifts it towards more and more arbitrary matters. If you feel that you’ve been bereft of your childhood, maybe you should try growing up.

Opting out of the current paradigm isn’t easy, but it’s easier than most people believe it to be. You don’t have to choose one system or the other. Having just some Bitcoin is an insurance policy like no other because it hedges against the entire system collapsing. As the global number of Bitcoin users grows, individual nations will have a harder and harder time controlling it or even taxing its users. Just as the children of today dismiss any of the obsolete arguments about anything from their parents’ generation with the phrase “OK, boomer,” so will the children of tomorrow dismiss concepts like “banking hours” or even “inflation.” They will have known about Bitcoin all their lives, and they will have taken notice of its behavior over the years compared to that of the fiat currencies. With the discovery of Bitcoin, the adoption clock started ticking, and the inevitable fall of the fiat currency era began.

1. After this book was written, Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO of Twitter and started devoting much of his time and energy to Bitcoin-related projects, such as Nostr.

About the Bitcoin Infinity Academy

The Bitcoin Infinity Academy is an educational project built around Knut Svanholm’s books about Bitcoin and Austrian Economics. Each week, a whole chapter from one of the books is released for free on Nostr, accompanied by a video in which Knut and Luke de Wolf discuss that chapter’s ideas. You can join the discussions by signing up for one of the courses on our Geyser page. Signed books, monthly calls, and lots of other benefits are also available.