The Mamba, Madison and Satoshi: How Decentralization was, and still is, the answer Part 1

By Jeffrey Wernick, with Jesse Benton

The late great Kobe Bryant was revered for his fierce competitiveness and indominable spirit. Few players in any sport could match his sheer will to win. What is less appreciated about the Mamba was his intellectual curiosity and sharp analytical mind.

In an interview given to NBC’s Chris Collinsworth during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kobe, already a three-time NBA Champion and reigning MVP, called playing for the USA the most important honor of his career because America is the, “greatest country in the world.”

When a surprised Collinsworth asked whether talk of patriotism was “cool to say,” Kobe calmly replied, “It’s a cool thing for me to say. Look at the opportunities our country has given us. I think it is the best.” He spoke with no sense of bravado, nor did he sound braggadocious. Kobe was simply stating the facts as he saw them.

The Mamba was right. What he knew, and what so many have forgotten, was that the unique respect for individual rights enshrined at America’s Founding has created opportunities to advance and prosper at levels never before seen.

For 7,000 years of recorded human history, governments focused on control through a central power. The amazing system our Founders gave us in 1789, built on the work of luminary thinkers like Adam Smith, John Locke and David Hume, was a revolutionary leap forward toward decentralization and permissionless access, addressing the fatal flaws of centralized authority and trust. The depth of the Constitution’s impact was profound and, I argue, unequalled until Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin White Paper in 2008.

Satoshi and our Founders are kindred spirits. While I have never seen Satoshi write about the US Constitution, I have little doubt that if the spirits of Washington, Jefferson and Madison could be raised for an evening of discussion, they would love Bitcoin and block-chain technology, and not just because they didn’t like fiat money. The Founders shared the fundamental ideals of Bitcoin, tackling governance problems by constructing a system that sought to be decentralized, permissionless, censor-resistant and had immutable money. It is only through these principles that we will find solutions to our current circumstances.

Politicians today make frequent, and occasionally eloquent, calls for “unity.” In his inaugural address, President Biden pledged that his “whole soul” was devoted to

“bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy similarly opined, “It does not matter if you are liberal, moderate or conservative. All of us must resist the temptation of further polarization. Instead, we must unite once again as Americans.”

If we just rally around a central authority, the Politicians say, then we’ll be OK. But these nice-sounding words are, in the end, just propaganda. We were never intended to depend on a central authority in Washington, DC.

The Constitution is a contract between the People and the Government that lays out rules that the People consent to live and be governed by. The Constitution enshrines our inalienable human rights endowed by God or nature, and strictly constrains and limits the power of government. We all have the right to our lives, our liberty and the fruits of our labor.

The Founders, having defeated a tyrannical King a decade earlier, saw a strong central authority as the greatest threat to the civil contract. Therefore, the Constitution created not a democracy, but a decentralized Republic.

The Constitution made clear and simple promises: it gave us sound money, guaranteed our inalienable rights and enumerated the specific powers of the central government. Power was intended to be kept as local as possible, and states were expected to nullify unconstitutional laws. A clear set of checks and balances were constructed to stop the accumulation of power in any one branch. Power and authority were distributed.

James Madison famously told us, “As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.” This simple but powerful statement explains the core of the American contract. We own our rights. They belong to us and us alone, and we cannot be justly deprived of them by any person, group or government.

What made the founding of the United States unique was not that it created a sovereign nation, but rather a nation of sovereign individuals. For the first time in known history, the People were governed by their own consent, and gave that consent with the expectation that the contract would be strictly adhered.

As the great philosopher and abolitionist Lysander Spooner wrote, “A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime; whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions calling themselves a government.”

The Federal Government was intended to be far less powerful than the leviathan into which it has mutated. It was given no power to levy an income tax, keep a standing army or emit bills of credit (print money). Money was defined as units of gold and silver, and the Senate was elected by state legislatures. Alexander Hamilton even promised in Federalist No. 78 that the Supreme Court would be the weakest branch of government because it had, “no influence over either the sword or the purse,” and had, “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.”

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison championed the doctrine of nullification, a concept that has been unfairly vilified but is in fact deeply American and patriotic. They asserted that the federal government was an agent of the States with certain specified, delegated powers, and that States should simply refuse to comply with, or nullify, any federal use of power not expressly authorized.

Nullification was affirmed in 1798 and 1799 in the respective Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. In response to our first major challenge to Free Speech, the Alien and Sedition Act, Legislatures in both States took positions that the law was Unconstitutional and should not be enforced within their borders. The Founders saw nullification as the ultimate check against unjust authority and supported states, local governments and juries’ power to nullify. Some of the most prominent instances of jury nullification involved the refusal to convict Northern Abolitionists for violations of the odious Fugitive Slave Act.

The Constitution was at first a hard sell. Debate raged for nearly a year between the Federalists, who supported ratification, and the anti-Federalists who thought the document entrusted too much power to the new Federal government. The Bill of Rights, argued by some as unnecessary, was in fact a compromise to assuage the anti-Federalists, and it further enshrined our protected freedoms for those who thought the Constitution too vague.

This was the Contract that unified us as Americans, and it was only to be changed through a rigorous and precise amendment process. There may be small tweaking through legislation or legal arguments about interpretation, but changes of substance require an amendment.

As power comes more and more centralized, Americans have grown increasingly divided and political parties seem more like warring gangs than governing statesmen. Our Founders would be dismayed at the state of today’s civil society. They did not even want political parties in the first place, rightly predicting that they would factionalize and divide the country.

In his farewell address, George Washington warned of the “baneful effect” of political parties and wrote that, “they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”