governments are about to come for cryptocurrency in a big way
governments are about to come for cryptocurrency in a big way
control of money and banking is the cornerstone of control of a society
a friendly reminder that he who controls the ability to store, access, and transfer money can exert near total control over a society.
it’s a thing you need to know. because believe you me, the governments know it too and they rely heavily upon this monopoly for both surveillance and for suppression.
you’re seeing it right now in canada as funds for protesters get frozen, blocked, and outright stolen.
the families of those who donated to the truckers (and had their data hacked) are finding their accounts frozen by the government. it’s being used as explicit punishment under emergency powers to silence and attack peaceful political opponents.
the pretexts are beyond flimsy.
this is the equivalent of a guy named “jimmie the brick” admiring your plate glass window and opining on what a shame it would be if something happened to it.
we did not take your right to speech, we just took your money because you spoke. (and yes, political donations are and must be protected speech)
the US convoy saw this coming.
it’s not an accident that as we see this in the US:
the response is this:
this convoy is being largely funded by crypto. and yeah, sure, you cannot seize a cold wallet that is self stored and air-gapped and sure, there is generally no fiduciary to force,
BUT, and this is a major but, it’s also pretty hard to turn that BTC or ETH into USD that you can use to buy, say, diesel fuel without tripping over the US government.
and i’m very curious to see if this is something they manage to get around.
this is the vital next evolution if crypto is to become real. you have to be readily able to turn it into stuff. it’s not really a secure or even useful form of value if you cannot turn it into purchasing power and allowing the state to control that substrate into which you must transition in order to do so means you do not really have a parallel structure.
you are still beholden, limited, regulated, and spied upon.
the US exchanges all have serious KYC (know your customer) requirements. they will ask about the sourcing of funds as well as all about you. KYC laws are not “safety” they are about surveillance and control. they predicate your ability to bank and engage in commerce upon state permission and validation. and they can yank you out of it just like a “no fly” list. they use this to keep you where they can see, stop, and seize everything.
this is where political lists come from.
and the US is WAY ahead of canada.
and lots of others are playing rapid catch up.
and mop up.
the “globalist” leaders are not taking kindly to the idea of challenge to their control of money systems.
make no mistake: the fight to control money will be the axis mundi of the social credit systems the collectivist planners seek to impose.
any tool the state can use against your enemies it can turn upon you as well.
and in time, they will.
maybe even by accident.
and this is exactly why taking them away and rendering money, commerce, savings, and investment opaque to government will be one of the most important projects of the coming decade.
it will fundamentally reshape the nature of the relationship between people and government and result in perhaps the most potent reapportionment of power since the magna carta or the bill of rights.
it will make we the people the customer of the state not its subject because the state will not be able to grab wealth at will anymore. you cannot tax what you cannot see.
i have my doubts about the existing coins. they are not truly anonymous, their chains look open to attack, and they do not look able to scale, even with layer 2 technology, to be able to handle the kind of transactional volume needed to act as actual currency.
until 30% of americans can buy their morning coffee with it every day and not strain the system, this is not really going anywhere as a mode of transaction. today, it would explode if 1% did.
i suspect the internet will need to be rethought as well, probably all the way down to layer 1.
there is no one who can be trusted to control the internet, so it must be controlled by no one.
we need an open source, massively distributed peer to peer internet with swarm sourced DNS and end to end strong encryption built into the protocols from the ground up.
it must be a system of stakeholders, not customers and they must all possess the agency to control their data, their information, and to associate and live in peace. arguments about “we must have the right to surveil you to keep you safe or because of what you MIGHT do” must fall away and the very ideas of supervision, surveillance, and censorship must be rendered anachronistic.
this is the only way to preserve the integrity of the public square and establish enduring free access to information.
as a side benefit, in such a system, the sheer volume of encrypted traffic will provide a steganographic substrate of such magnitude that all commerce, savings, investment, and value transfer will not even be identifiable must less interruptible.
freedom, as ever it must, will lie in self reliance. it cannot be rooted in convoluted permission. that is just a negotiation over the terms of your indenture.
governments have been truly awful stewards of money. since the federal reserve was created in 1913 value of a dollar has dropped by 94%.
they are bad at banking regulation and have caused an increase in crises and have rendered those crises more and more systemic. they “recover” by debasing savings.
it is now also a massive system of surveillance and suppression. post patriot act, they can seize your funds without recourse at any time if they so much as imply the word “terrorist” and that definition is growing unnervingly broad all over north america.
they declare emergency, brand opposition as terrorists, and start seizing assets.
this is a playbook straight from the 1930’s.
this is not fixable. we cannot get a “nice leviathan that respects you.’
moving outside it and making it subject to our tolerance rather than we to its is the only way.
the technology is, for the first time, really available to do this.
this project will be the most important work of the next decade. it will decide whether we inhabit a free society as a citizenry possessed of agency and liberty, or succumb to top down control from the collectivist authoritarians and have to eat our bugs or be barred from public transportation.
the idea of a middle way looks lees and less plausible given the current reach and audacity of the state. shoveling it back for a time might provide respite, but not safety.
that requires finding our own way. a way without them.
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