The internet is the greatest expression of freedom since the printing press for liberating the shackled minds of human beings.
There is currently a sea change underway with regards to my generation’s approach to money. It’s name is cryptocurrency. Bitcoins currently trade at $654.18 USD as of the writing of this post. (It’s pretty volatile so it may be more or less by a little or a lot when you read this.) I personally own .0170655 bitcoin which at the moment is a little over $11.
Now I can’t tell you if bitcoin will succeed or fail and there are plenty of people who know far more about it than I do, who have already talked extensively about all the backstory and history and functionality of it. (I have included some links at the end if you want to beef up a bit.) But what I do know is that the single most exciting and important thing about bitcoin is that there is bitcoin. It’s real and it’s money. I get it that the value fluctuates and people seem to acquire and trade it like stocks, but it’s money. You can spend it. More and more vendors everyday are set up to accept bitcoins. Even more people on the internet have bitcoins themselves and want to spend them.
Functionality in a modern economy of a highly volatile currency aside, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are currently the only money you can legally spend in the developed world that isn’t issued by a centralized bank, in concert with that nation’s government. Pardon my French, but this is a big fucking deal.
Simply put, debt is slavery, and every “free” person in the world today is some degree of a slave. I posit to you this; your government issues one legal tender for all debts public and private. This tender comes from an independent bank that works very closely with your government, but is not regulated by it. The bank controls the interest rate that the money is loaned at. Your government collects taxes on your income, and you are required by law to pay those taxes in the government issued currency. And there’s the rub.
It really all boils down to income. You have no choice but to earn income or drop out of “functional modern society”. Look deeply into the history of the banking industry and you will find it is an industry that is built on a foundation of fraud and manipulation. Back in the days of Jesus, interest wasn’t called interest. It was called usury, and it was a sin against God. You are probably familiar with the story of the lone time Jesus was purported to use violence. The Jews at that time believed that they must only use the holy shekel coin to trade in, and so the money changers, (which is really just another way to say bankers) hoarded all the shekels and charged exorbitant rates to the Jews to buy them. Jewish people couldn’t afford the coins and suffered in increasing poverty, leading Jesus to flip over the money changer’s table and cast them out of the Temple for committing usury in God’s house. But the eternal strategy of the banker was there. They found a way to manipulate the currency to extract a profit for themselves.
When the government needs money, it sells bonds to the Federal Reserve bank, which in turn gives the government the same amount of money in return, with interest owed. $10 million in bonds buys $10 million in cash, plus the interest on that money every year. So if we owe them the money plus interest, but the only money we have is the money they issued, then how do we ever pay the interest down? Good question. That’s exactly the point, we don’t ever pay it down. Most of these transactions are actually done electronically today, but the principle remains the same. Private banks use currency manipulation to control populations. Make no mistake, the Federal Reserve is not a branch of the Federal Government in any way shape or form, other than the presidentially appointed chairman. They were created by an act of Congress, however the government has no say over their monetary policy decisions. From their own website:
“It is considered an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.”
The American Revolution was really a currency revolution. When the colonists began to get their economy up and running, they issued paper money called colonial scrip that was issued without interest by the government of the colonies directly, not from a private bank. They issued enough paper money so that everyday people had enough to conduct normal business and transactions. If people started to run out of money, the government issued more. This sounds like bad inflation and it could be if allowed to go too far, but with an interest free currency, there is no debt to be paid back, so the money’s purpose is merely to facilitate the flow of goods and services between those who are actually laboring for it. An amazing concept right? The Bank of England didn’t like this, they wanted the colonies to use their money, issued through the King of England, and with interest owed that had to be paid back to the bank in gold. The King outlaws colonial scrip, “no taxation without representation” and the Boston Tea Party happen, and you have the start of the Revolutionary War. Our founders tried to do away with central banking, and central banking has been able to defeat them every time.
If you were a big central bank and you wanted to make sure you got paid every year, how would you go about it? You would want some kind of secured payment, something you knew you could depend on year in and year out no matter what. You would want the government to tax its people’s income, because people have to work pretty much no matter what. Labor has to labor to stay alive, and the sweat of the working class can be manipulated to make the banks richer. We haven’t always had an income tax, only since 1913. Know what else was instituted in 1913? The Federal Reserve Bank.
In theory the income tax isn’t even legal. According to the constitution only congress has the power to issue money, and the only type of taxes allowed to be rendered are direct apportioned taxes, which income tax is not. If you look through American case law you will find a very few examples of people who have taken one of those two basic arguments and won a court case against the IRS, saying that they didn’t have to pay income tax. You will of course find far more cases of people in jail for not doing so.
So what’s this got to do with bitcoin? Well, bitcoin is our generation’s colonial scrip. It’s not perfect yet, as with most things my generation designs it tends to go through several iterations before it gets perfected. We are the open source generation, that’s how we roll. Torrents are pretty amazing, but I remember I-mesh and Kazaa too. That’s why the topic of cryptocurrency should be so interesting and important to everyone right now, because we need all these great minds to come together. Generation Omega invented a way to liberate the planet financially, if we can figure out how to make it work. We do have one really huge advantage that makes this a pentaflop more likely to occur than ever before, the internet. This of course only makes issues like government surveillance, internet privacy and security, and most importantly net neutrality so much more vital themselves. All of these things are so intertwined, and that’s why I am really positive about what the outcome could be. The internet is the greatest expression of freedom since the printing press for liberating the shackled minds of human beings. I encourage everyone to learn and read as much as possible about cryptocurrency because like I said earlier, this is a big fucking deal.
Links:
Coin Desk – Bitcoin News Prices, Charts, Guides, & Analysis
TradeBlock by The Genesis Block
CryptoCoinsNews – Bitcoin Resources and Tools
MIT Technology Review – Cryptocurrency
This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list of links, just some good starting points I have personally come across. If you have any to share yourself please do so in the comments.
On The Responsibility of Intellectuals 