So, why is Bitcoin Important?
Bitcoin is a Radical Techno-Economic Experiment
Most bitcoiners would disagree that I start off the bitcoin story here, I’m kind of skipping to the best part. But this is something that needs to be said, and in my opinion, said right at the beginning.
I bet you didn’t know this, but Bitcoin is by far the most important project in the world for securing our freedoms in an increasingly terrifying digital world.
For you see, digital money is a whole new evolution for how money can be exploited for political ends. The potential for corruption has far reaching consequences.
I’m passionate about bitcoin because it’s literally our only hope.
Either bitcoin succeeds or the human race irrevocably falls into a technocratic dystopia.
Digital money is a uniquely novel tool where those who wield it can completely manipulate every aspect of a person’s life. Never before in history could you turn off someone’s money at will.
The ability to control people’s money, and therefore controlling all of their actions in society, is an ultimate power unique to digital money.
The power to freeze someone’s life savings, to stop a donation to a protest movement, or prevent someone from buying food, is the power to control all of society, forever.
We’re entering a new technological age, one where a few economic elites can have extraordinary power never before dreamed of by dictators of the past.
The great digital transformation brings with it great risks.
A system of this kind would be the most powerful system of centralized control the world has ever known.
That power should never be trusted with the human race.
Money is a system of control, those who control money have great power over the people who use it. As a result kings and governments have historically kept a tight control over money, just as they used to keep tight control over religion, and for the same reasons
Andreas Antonopoulos
Without monetary freedom and securing of property rights, there can be no freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, of self-defense, of privacy. Democracy itself is in risk of collapse.
This was actually my personal lightbulb moment which led me to devote my life to bitcoin.
You may think these things would be highly unconstitutional, and that they could never happen to us.
Except for the fact that history is full of these scenarios, and billions of people not in western democracies are at risk.
How many people actually stop to consider this attack vector? That we’re coming up against a great digital filter where an eternity of tyranny is at stake.
The ever growing bureaucratic state, combined with unlimited debt financing, trillions of data points from surveillance monitoring technologies and AI to process it all?
It’s a science fiction nightmare coming to life before our eyes.
Bitcoin Fixes This
It’s a defensive technology to fight back against the greatest tyrannical power the world has ever known.
I bet no one has ever told you this, but this is what bitcoin is really all about.
Bitcoin is the encoding of human rights into software. Rights which are enforced and protected for the first time ever, not by humans, but by machine.
Bitcoin is a techno-economic experiment to provide an escape hatch from the monopoly of corruptible centralized money.
The separation of money and state.
By creating apolitical, transparent, and open-source digital monetary infrastructure, bitcoin protects human freedom in our new digital age. It’s an all powerful freedom technology that seeds the destruction of digital authoritarianism.
Sound Money is a Human Right
Everyone deserves the right to be able to save their money, in a way that’s protected from seizure and debasement.
It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political Constitutions and Bills of Rights.
Ludwig von Mises
With it’s 21 million coin supply cap, hard coded issuance schedule, and immutable protocol design, Bitcoin was created to be the soundest money in history.
Bitcoin is the result of a fundamental breakthrough in fintech, information theory, economics and cryptographic systems, discovering immutable scarcity. The result of which, enables the freedom of humanity from the oppressive monetary exploitation of the state.
Bitcoin is money for our 21st century digital economy, it’s fully programmable and integrated with the internet. It can be transported around the world at the speed of light completely permissionlessly and is available to all of humanity.
It’s monetary policy can’t be captured by elites in any way shape or form. It’s a completely neutral third-party technology that was built by an anonymous programmer who left the project as a gift to humanity.
Bitcoin offers immutable private property rights, a savings account, and peer to peer money to every person on earth. Money which no one can censor, confiscate, debase, or otherwise steal, ending monetary oppression worldwide.
Bitcoin is unstoppable decentralized freedom technology for humans all over the world to escape authoritarian capital controls and financial repression.
Money is the Bedrock of Society
Everyone intuitively understands this, money runs the world. It’s all about the money. Always has been. If money were to stop functioning, the fabric of society would break down.
Money coordinates practically all economic activity, and economic activity coordinates practically all aspects of life. Food, water, shelter, energy, and all of our supply chains, literally everything that requires human coordination.
Many civilizations throughout history have crumbled under monetary collapse, like hyperinflation, where the value of the currency is quickly destroyed.
Bitcoin is important because it is insurance for the global economy.
It’s money that can’t be debased, and won’t hyperinflate. It isn’t the subject to political whim and it can’t ever be destroyed.
In finance terms, you could say bitcoin is a credit default swap on fiat currencies.
The truth is, we are in the largest economic experiment in human history. Never ending deficits, artificially low interest rates, and debt to GDP levels soaring.
Ever since I was 13 year’s old, I’ve been obsessed with economics and our federal debt. The aftermath of the global financial crisis and the unsustainable debt expansion has always fascinated me.
This is the most important problem facing humanity, and no one seems to understand or give a shit.
Bitcoin offers a way out of this nonsense. An escape hatch to a better future.
Bitcoin is like Noah’s ark, it’s a parallel economic system that could absorb all of the wealth on the planet and still function as money in case of a global systematic monetary collapse.
Literally saving the fucking world.
Which in my opinion, makes it one of the most important projects in history.
Bitcoin Solves Several Immense Problems for Civilization:
Bitcoin protects property rights for 8 billion people and banks the underprivileged classes of the planet.
It solves financial crises, inflation, and debt slavery, and it defends civil rights in a future surveillance state.
It solves the shortcomings of gold, returning financial sovereignty to the individual, and it puts the spending power of state actors and large corporations in check.
It de-financializes our Ponzi scheme fiat-capitalist economy and gives everyone in the world access to the best savings technology ever invented.
Bitcoin (decentralized money) will be as important and transformative as: the printing press (decentralized production of information) the separation of church and state (decentralized religion) three branch republics and federalism (decentralized government) and the internet itself (decentralized information).
Bitcoin is the Manhattan Project for Human Freedom
Just like the Manhattan project to build the atom bomb, some of the brightest minds all around the world have come together to work on this extremely powerful technology. However, instead of an ultimate project for destruction, bitcoin is an ultimate project for freedom.
Thousands of core developers, tens of thousands of node operators, merchants, corporations, investors, software engineers, human rights activists, keyboard warriors, and money nerds have all come together to work on The Bitcoin Project.
Bitcoin isn’t just money. It’s is an enormous, globally coordinated, research and development initiative. An open source software project aimed at building an unstoppable internet native monetary system. A collection of technologies and digital infrastructure that form the basis of a global monetary foundation.
A tech stack which implements fair, neutral, digital money, available for all of humanity. Fighting back against authoritarianism and the encroachment of a digital Orwellian surveillance state.
There’s a lot more to bitcoin then you might realize.
The things that are being built are truly mind blowing, and combine to form an unstoppable network of financial services. Multi-layer scaling, privacy solutions, multi party custody, atomic swaps, batch transactions, time locks, micropayments, money streaming, insurance and options smart contracts, decentralized exchanges, decentralized market places, sovereign identity, liquidity services…
Not to bore you any more but here is a non exhaustive list of world changing bitcoin infrastructure projects that you can look up at your leisure:
Lightning, Liquid, ARK, Federated Chaumian mints, eCash, Ordinals, L402, Web 5, Stablesats, Taproot assets, Whirlpool, CTV/APO/Covenants, BitVM, Stratum V2, MPC, DLCs, Eltoo, Ark, Coinpools, Statechains/Mercury layer, Spacechains, Splicing, Channel Factories, Hierarchical channels, Spiderchains, The Enigma Network, Chainway/ZK Rollups, RGB, Radient, Prime, Miniscript, Tapscript, Spirit of Satoshi, BOLT12, LSP, Carbonado, Prisms, BTC Pay server, Munstr, Rootstock, Sovereign defi, CivKit and Nostr marketplaces etc.