[continued from Chapter 4]

In December of 2018, I was dropping off my oldest at his school one morning, when a friend of mine spotted me on the corner, waiting for the crossing guard to let us cross. I must have looked like someone staring into the abyss because my friend approached me and said, "What's up Cain? You look like a zombie. Everything okay?"

I played it off and said I was just tired, but of course I knew the real reason. At that moment, one Bitcoin Cash was worth less than $100 a coin, and I admit I was a bit shell-shocked.

Thankfully, the price recovered back into the triple digits fairly quickly, but for most of 2019, it's been a year of just trying to hang on.

I guess the question I need to ask myself is why I continue to hang on rather than just move on?

If 2017 was the year I learned the meaning of fomo, and 2018 was the year I learned about the technology, 2019 was the year I bought into the ideology.

I'm not saying I've suddenly become an anarchist, anarchocapitalist, voluntaryist, libertarian, etc., but for the first time in my life, I am thinking about certain ideas that never before occurred to me.

For example, I've started thinking about things like privacy. In the past, I didn't understand why it was so important. Then last year I watched the Edward Snowden documentary "Citizenfour", and I was especially impressed by this quote by Snowden himself:

"I remember what the internet was like before it was being watched, and there's never been anything in the history of man that's like it. I mean you could have children from one part of the world having an equal discussion where they were sort of granted the same respect for their ideas in conversation with experts in the field from another part of the world, on any topic, anywhere, anytime, all the time. And it was free and unrestrained. We've seen the chilling of that, and the cooling of that, and the changing of that model towards something where people self-police their own views, and they literally make jokes about ending up on "the list" if they donate to a political cause, or if they say something in a discussion, and it's become an expectation that we're being watched. Many people I've talked to have mentioned that they're careful what they type into search engines because they know that it's being recorded, and that limits the boundaries of their intellectual exploration. And I'm more willing to risk imprisonment or any other negative outcome personally, than I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me...”

These words crystallized for me why we need privacy. This is why I think projects like CashShuffle and CashFusion are so important to BCH. I believe that these tools have the potential to offer us some of the best privacy tech out there, a tool that not everyone is forced to use, but everyone will have the option to use.

In the film Snowden also says, “We all have a stake in this, this is our country and the balance of power between the citizenry and the government is becoming that of the ruling and the ruled, as opposed to ... the elected and the electorate."

He refers to "our country", but I like to think this sentiment can be applied to the entire world, to all of humanity.

I know this sounds grandiose. I know some people might read this and cringe, but I think it's necessary to think big, especially if you're going to create dramatic change. For the first time in my life, I can see another way that our society could work. Bitcoin has the potential to greatly improve our lives, but I believe that only the version that we call Bitcoin Cash can make it happen.

With all that said, however, I know that ideology alone isn't going to get us anywhere. People aren't suddenly going to wake up and want less government and fight for their liberties and their privacy. If Bitcoin Cash is going to fulfill its promise as an electronic peer to peer cash system, what we need are businesses that leverage BCH to generate profits.

I know we still have a long way to go. I'm not delusional enough to think that BCH is a sure thing, or that its success is guaranteed. But let me paraphrase something said in the BCH Gang telegram channel the other day regarding businesses built on top of BCH:

"Nothing that has an obvious return on investment will make you 10x returns."

I believe this statement also applies to Bitcoin Cash itself. Now what we need are people that can figure out what isn't obvious to everyone else. And when they do, these are the people who just might end up changing the world.

Thank you to everyone who has been reading this series. Thank you for the views and the tips, and I look forward to adding chapters in the future as this journey continues.