The Tether of State Violence and the Value of Freedom: Why I’m a Crypto Zealot

A response to Paul Krugman’s mistakes on crypto and state power, and how crypto is giving us a new lease on freedom.

So that’s why I’m a crypto skeptic. Could I be wrong? Of course. But if you want to argue that I’m wrong, please answer the question, what problem does cryptocurrency solve? Don’t just try to shout down the skeptics with a mixture of technobabble and libertarian derp. -Paul Krugman, NYT

Paul is wrong.

Crypto assets are valuable because they provide individuals a mode of economic power that is outside and beyond the power of the state and ‘the men with guns’ that creates the value of fiat money through violence. We call this apparatus law, and it is very, very expensive to maintain, with all the corruption it serves. The problem that cryptocurrencies solve is that of breaking the state-banking alliance and the monopoly that they hold on the issuance and control of money.

Through the power of crypto, we are removing these corrupt, violent third parties from the economics of money, and replacing them with code that we run and verify ourselves. This is allowing for us to constitute a new monetary system together that is beyond the control of any kind of violence or state authority.

What Paul fails to understand is the intrinsic value found in a form of wealth that cannot be seized or destroyed by the state, or other violent forces. He does not understand that the tether of state violence is a bond that we seek to destroy through the formation of a new form of freedom we are creating through crypto, and the economic independence it offers us.

The Tether of State Violence

“Yet the value of a dollar doesn’t come entirely from self-fulfilling expectations: ultimately, it’s backstopped by the fact that the U.S. government will accept dollars as payment of tax liabilities — liabilities it’s able to enforce because it’s a government. If you like, fiat currencies have underlying value because men with guns say they do. And this means that their value isn’t a bubble that can collapse if people lose faith.”

I’m sure that Paul is well aware that people are starving in Venezuela from the popular Maduro diet instituted through the Bolivar’s insane inflation rate. And this is hardly the first example of this either. Again and again we have seen what the bubble of fiat money looks like when it collapses. The emaciated mobs of starving people is the very real cost of continuing to bear the monopoly of fiat money when ran by corruption and violence. This is what the tether of fiat money backed by violence looks like when it is collapsing, and the state refuses to capitulate the faith of their monopoly on money as such. Fiat money is a bubble that can collapse; just after horrific and unimaginable amounts of unnecessary suffering, violence, and death has occurred.

Thank God for resources like bitcoinvenezuela.com, and the ability for people to mine their own crypto anonymously so they don’t have to use the garbage Bolivar, Rial, or any other fiat money whose history of failure and violence we know all too well. The crypto revolution is marching forward day-by-day in places like Venezuela where people are choosing to refuse state fiat money and the violence which constitutes it as the law.

By people making the choice to constitute their economic power towards crypto over state political and economic power, we are creating the framework for a new economic, and ultimately political future. Because of the very real freedom that crypto provides to people through personalized empowerment over their wealth, crypto is solving the problem of state tyranny, and the monopoly of banking.

Crypto is proving itself to be economically superior to fiat money backed by violence for the very real reason that crypto is a system governed by truth rather than physical force. No amount of violence can violate the blockchain, there is no war that can stop crypto’s rightful conquest of money.

Because if Bitcoin really is just using cutting-edge technology to set the monetary system back 300 years, then men with guns should be able to break crypto with their violence, right?

But the truth is, they can’t.

No amount of violence, guns, bombs, or killing will stop the next block from being mined, and no amount of force can move Satoshi’s coins from the addresses in which they rest. The power of violence is banished from this place through the power of crypto.

Bitcoin is a system that uses cryptography — a technology of war — to outsmart state legal power and constitute a totally new system of wealth with the internet at its core. This is the territory of freedom that Satoshi spoke of, and it is ours if we know what real value of this wealth is.

The Value of Freedom

The truth is if you don’t control your wealth directly you are not really free.

There are countless examples through history of the state robbing and murdering people under the name of ‘safety and security’ when it‘s nothing more than just raw greed, avarice, and hate. In a world where a Nobel laureate economist tell us in the most powerful journalistic outlets that the political power of money grows from the barrel of a gun, we should understand the value of crypto and the freedom it provides.

Today there are millions of refugees, slaves, oppressed, and silenced Others who have no voices for themselves, no means to access money in anyway — they are forbidden from the economy and having a means of wealth to themselves. Through the power of crypto and cyberspace, there is a possibility to change this, and ensure that each and every person in this world can have power over their own economic means.

While bitcoin may be the monetary equivalent of digital gold, it is a prototype for a kind of technological innovation that is shattering the state-banking alliance and their monopolies which are supported by violence under law. At the same time crypto is also introducing novel new technologies of wealth into cyberspace, by which we can reappropriate control of our economic commonwealth once again.

In challenging state fiat money and banking services through direct economic competition, crypto presents itself as a more efficient form of money for the very reason that men with guns cannot simply show up and rob all people of their crypto as the U.S Goverment did with gold in 1933. People are becoming crypto converts because of these very real features that crypto offers and the spectacular growth of the crypto ecosystem over the last five years is the clear indication of that.

Crypto zealots like myself are choosing to economically protect ourselves because we understand the value of the personal freedom of controlling one’s wealth versus the cost of giving that up to others. After having witnessed a long train of abuses that invariably point to the tyranny and destitution by which states and banks seek to rule us, we are creating the alternatives which will give ourselves the economic power and political liberty we are entitled to. Through crypto we choose to create not just new forms of money, but a new form of life. A life that is beyond the -isms of the past, and holds the keys to a liberated future.

We are from the future that has been foretold, and we are here to take the freedom that has been reserved for only us. We choose to create a novus ordo seclorum based upon the majesty of cryptography and its capacity to bear truth as the singular authority of legitimacy to its power. We understand that any agreement made with the State is one under the threat of violence, and is profaned by that very nature. We owe no allegiance to them, or any other power who seeks to control us through violence and a kind of political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. Together we crypto zealots are creating a new commonwealth whose power is based upon not the violence of men with guns, but the refusal such violence as our singular task.

Let the ruling classes tremble at the Crypto revolution, and the promise of freedom that it holds!