BITCOIN

“Bitcoin Is Venice”

What if the year was 1400, and you stood at the brink of the Renaissance but didn’t know it? What if someone handed you a magical book that would explain what the coming Renaissance was, reveal the injustices and inefficiencies of the medieval system, and foretell why and how things would change in the coming decades?

Humanity has potentially begun a historical transformation on par with the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and one with potentially even greater impact.

That may sound outlandish, but I make a compelling argument that it is, in fact, true. In the same way that medieval Venice set the stage for the peoples of Europe to break free of the empire and transition from serfdom to liberty, and from financial slavery to financial sovereignty, today the Bitcoin network is the path to escaping the broken and unsustainable post-1971 political economy.

In newspapers and on television we are told not to worry about inflation, that employment is more important than saving, and that we can own nothing and be happy. We should be satisfied, in other words, to work for those who own the assets, just as we watch their wealth continue to grow and concentrate, while we see the currency that we earn depreciate and see our way out of debt vanish.

Over the past decade, governments, economists, and journalists have relentlessly hammered into the minds of their populations and audiences that Bitcoin is dangerous and risky. That it’s for criminals. That it’s a Ponzi scheme. That it’s destroying the planet.

Time, however, has shown that it has been dangerous and risky to not hold bitcoin, which has been, since inception, the best-performing financial asset in the world.

But against the facts, Bitcoin users are still routinely told by authorities that their choice — opting peacefully into a new, fair, and neutral monetary system — is wrong, immoral, or even treasonous.

The reality is that the world financial system is a cruel labyrinth, and we’re all trapped inside, stuck in a situation where tomorrow is traded for today, where capital is strip-mined without consideration for the future, where our money is devalued by central planners, where our liberties are increasingly eroded, and where our behavior is spied on and used to engineer us to become more compliant and dependent.

Bitcoin fixes this and helps us escape but not by violence. It is “not a sword for Theseus to fight the Minotaur, but a thread to follow to exit the Labyrinth.”

And exit we shall. We, after all, owe the Minotaur nothing. Let the beast starve. We’ll find our own way out.

The way is through a new kind of Venice in cyberspace available to anyone in the world regardless of one’s wealth, class, race, religion, gender, nationality, or occupation. Where any of the billions with internet access can connect to this revolution, be a part of it, and even own a piece of it. That’s what makes this revolution so much different from the ones that came before. Whereas those achieved change through new hierarchical structures, Bitcoin will change the world through decentralization.

As more and more people begin to realize that Bitcoin is monetizing right in front of our eyes, creating an alternative to the degenerate, fiat capitalist system that we have been forced to partake in, we should feel no debt to the old regime of short-term thinking, top-down planning, consumption-driven spending, growth obsession, central banking, bailouts, rent-seeking, regulatory capture, toxic bigness, risk transfer, globalism, and financialization.

Instead, we should turn our eyes to a future of long-term thinking, peer-to-peer collaboration, open-source architecture, nurturing, replenishing, risk sharing, localism, and growing productive capital, where the farmer plants his seeds instead of eating them and enjoys many harvests to come.

?

?