For a hundred years, governments have fully controlled money. In the course of this time, they have destroyed its integrity. Now half of every transaction is fully subject to the whims of central bankers and monetary planners. This absurdities have presented themselves most fully in recent years. Now you can’t earn from saving. Holding money is pointless. Banking is broken. The paper stuff is profitless for average people. It is hard to move thanks to exchange controls. It is taxed at every turn. And government spending of this fake stuff has gone totally nuts to the point that no politician in the world even cares. They talk fiscal responsibility but it is all just a game. They know that they can just print more. The money has been wrecked. Power has grown at the expense of the people.

How long will humanity live in these chains made of paper money? Only as long as there is no tool to let them out. What if Bitcoin is that tool? It came online in 2009 — an absolutely brilliant protocol that mimics the gold standard without the storage costs — and languished at 14 cents for two years. Then came the Euro crisis. Then came Greece. Then came Cyprus. BTC was trading at $15 on January first. Now it is $144. This is an explosion.

More substantially and importantly, demand is far outstripping the capacity of the existing BTC infrastructure to handle it. We are seeing Russian, American, and European money vanishing into digits. This new system has some astonishing features. The most important one: it gains in value. This is completely unlike paper money, which loses value.

What’s not often understood is the unexploited potential of Bitcoin. It is capable of providing the full range of financial services. It can do micro-insurance in a flash. It can process payment faster than one click. The transaction costs are nearly zero. There is nothing in it like normal banking and therefore none of the confusions and corruptions associated with banking. Property titles are strict and constantly checked. It is completely open source so there is no reason for an Audit Bitcoin political movement.

Conceptually, it is possible for the whole world supply of money to vanish into Bitcoin. That might leave the price of BTC at some $3 million each. But Bitcoin can handle it because it can adapt based on math alone. People are catching on. They almost can’t believe it.

As I watch transactions, I’m seeing them grow in frequency and size. The first time I saw 300BTC move, I was amazed. Then I saw 500BTC. Then 1000BTC. Then 2500BTC.

What if we are living in the midst of the reinvention of the world financial and monetary system? It could be happening right now. Also, what happens to states under these conditions? States depend on the paper money system. Without it, they live on taxes and that’s all. What this means in practice is essentially the end of the world for the nation state — not just one but all. A central command post of accumulated power could unravel and disappear in a matter of years or even months.

That’s the significance of what we are living through right now. It could be a complete rebirth of freedom — all without a single political change. The state is not reformed but simply dies. It is mind boggling to consider the potential here.

Is this scenario nuts? Consider Leonard Read . He said that the main attribute of freedom is its capacity to surprise us. We all need to be better about saying “I don’t know” simply because the great contribution of human action is invention and creation, the capacity to make the world anew.

We could be living in the midst of this right now and not even know it.