Feature, not bug

I have a regular job which gives me a steady income and enables me to support my family. Like many people I live in a house which I had to loan money from a bank to buy. Like many people I pay taxes and I receive my paycheck in an inflationary, government issued currency. And like some people I understand how these mechanisms keeps me, the hamster, running in my wheel. But I also have a lot of spare time and I’m connected to the internet most of the time. On the internet I can do a lot of things that I can’t do anywhere else. I can reach out to like minded individuals all over the planet and I can educate myself and I do. I recently graduated from a Massive Open Online Course in digital currencies at the University of Nicosia and I can highly recommend it. Finding out about this new technology has changed my life in ways that a regular job never could. I’ve always been curious about new technologies and I’ve always been fascinated by breakthroughs that question the norm. Bittorrent technology for instance. How fast things change when you change the rules of the game. It makes you see how rigged it was before the change.

Up until now I’ve only used Bitcoin and my knowledge about it for personal gains. But I’ve realized that this is bigger than me and that I can best help myself by helping others. If you’re curious about cryptocurrencies and if you get to learn more about them, you’ll come to understand that spreading the word is the only way forward and that we can all do our part. This could very well be the biggest social change we will see in our lifetimes. Potentially bigger than any industrial revolution or structural change that came before it. I believe in it because I believe in people. Thinking people. I believe that thoughtful people should have a bigger influence on society as a whole than greedy people. So I write these articles, I talk to my friends and my family, I wear a Bitcoin t-shirt, I like YouTube videos, I tweet and I recommend articles. And you should too. Yes, you could just buy some Bitcoin, hold them and shut up about it, but if we really want this paradigm shift to happen we should all get to know more and we should all talk more about it.

Since the first waves of internet disruption I’ve become more and more convinced that making money by selling copies of things was a phenomenon of the 20th century only. This concept didn’t exist before then and It won’t exist in the future. We can either embrace the new culture in which we share and crowd fund things or we can choose to stay on our leashes, obedient and passive. I choose the former. Therefore I hope that you all get to know a little more every day and that you talk to each other. A couple of hundred years ago states started to become secular as they begun to separate themselves from their respective religions. Some say that blockchain technology is the beginning of the separation of state and money. I think that’s an understatement. It’s the beginning of the end of the state as we know it. The dawn of something much more compelling. The dawn of complete trust between all humans.