Archive for April, 2014

Speech to the Bitcoin Conference, “Bitcoin and the Entrepreneur”

Tuesday, April 29th, 2014

I have selected as the title of my remarks today “Bitcoin and the Entrepreneur.” Some may suggest, knowing of my distaste for Crony Capitalists, that this would be more naturally worded “Bitcoin Versus the Entrepreneur.” But those are not my sentiments as I write this.

My purpose in this piece is not to deliver the usual assault on the so-called monolithic Big Brother state and its Crony Capitalist clients. On the contrary, in recent months I have rarely heard anything positive about any current administration anywhere in the press except from a few Mocking Bird Talking Heads. Nor is it my purpose here to discuss or defend the spread of different Alt Coins. I think it is highly beneficial to have some 20,000,000 Alt Coins and derivatives, side chains and other projects regularly transacting on the internet, if I may say so, the incisive, the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by developers is most refreshing and experiment is vital to the progress of Bitcoin.

Nor, finally, is this essay intended to leave un-examined the proper degree of privacy which the State should allow to any person on the internet.

My topic here is a sober one of concern to all users of Bitcoin as well as users of the internet in general.

I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future–for reducing this threat or living with it–there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security–a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.

This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the Bitcoin user and to the public at large–two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this threat to freedom. I refer, first, to the need for a far less invasive State; and, second, to the need for far greater privacy in all spheres.

I

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. To be specific, to secret operations like PRISM, so bravely exposed by Edward Snowden. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted intrusion into the private lives of individuals the pertinent and intimate facts about them, far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify those intrusions. Even today, there is little value in supporting the benefits of an open society by accepting the State’s arbitrary mass surveillance. Furthermore, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of mass data collection and concealment of such collection. The president of the United States should not permit these intrusions to the extent that it is in his power to stop the abuses. And no official of his Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should use the pretext of keeping America safe as an excuse to spy on Americans, to torture, to rain death on people with drones, to cover up America’s mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

I ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the world to re-examine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of their country’s peril. In times of seismic technological change, the government and the press have customarily worked oppositionally in an effort based largely on self-interest, to prevent the State from transforming totally into the enemy. In times of unprecedented change the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must not yield to the State’s need for national security. This is why Bitcoin should not ever fall subject to legislation, in direct violation of the protections it naturally has as a form of speech.

Today no war has been declared on Bitcoin–and however disruptive Bitcoin may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion as was the case with the ill fated “War on Drugs”. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy in the form of the New World Order are advancing around the globe. The survival of our Liberty is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired, save legislative and regulatory ones.

If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it decides to come to the defence of Bitcoin, then I can only say that no government ever posed a greater threat to our Liberty as does the present crop of nation states. If you are awaiting a finding of absolute proof of this then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent. A cursory look at the arbitrary arrests and raids on Bitcoin businesses, users and traders provides a stark picture, vivid and terrifying even for the most inured journalist.

What is required is a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions–by the Bitcoin entrepreneur, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on undemocratic regulation instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on judge made law by day and armed raids by night. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine of tyranny that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, and until the revelations of Snowden, not published. Its mistakes are brushed aside as “learning experiences”, not headlined and always without consequences to the unlearned perpetrators. Its dissenters are exiled and mercilessly threatened, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumour is printed, no secret is revealed. The State conducts itself as if the Cold War had not ended, in the new clothes of the “War on Terror”, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match, or indeed tolerate.

Nevertheless, every democracy now recognizes the necessary de-funding of the police state apparatus commonly misconstrued as national security–and the question remains whether that de-funding and ultimate restraint needs to be done quickly or if we are to promote this liberty restoration project as a long term one in the form of death by a thousand cuts.

For the facts of the matter are that all nation’s foes have openly boasted of acquiring through central banking, control of the money supply that they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery or violence; that details of the Federal Reserve’s money printing to defraud the world’s financial operations have been available to every newspaper reader, friend and foe alike; that the size, the strength, the spread and the nature of our money and principle weapon of inflation, and our plans and strategy for the money’s use, have all been pinpointed in the Libertarian press and other news media to a degree sufficient to satisfy any curious reader; and that, in at least in one case, Ron Paul, the publication of details concerning the secret mechanism whereby money is created and its alteration from a sound gold standard is now a matter of acknowledged fact, even by the Bank of England.

The newspapers which refuse to print the truth about this are disloyal, unpatriotic, irresponsible and bear ill will to their readers. Had we been engaged in open warfare, they undoubtedly would not have published such items. But in the absence of open warfare, they recognized only the needs of page views and advertisers and not the standards of journalism. And my question here is whether additional reliance on the so called “Mainstream Media” should not now be abandoned.

The question is for you alone to answer. No public official should answer it for you. No governmental plan should impose its restraints against your will. But I would be failing in my duty to you, in considering all of the responsibilities that we now bear and all of the means at hand to meet those responsibilities in the form of new software like Bitcoin, if I did not commend this problem to your attention, and urge its thoughtful consideration and ultimate resolution.

On many earlier occasions on this Blog, I have said–and your gut has no doubt constantly said–that these are times that appeal to every citizen’s sense of impending change to liberty and freedom. It calls out to every citizen to weigh his rights and comforts against the vile tyranny leering at him through CCTV in direct opposition to those rights and the common good. I cannot now believe that those citizens who work in the software business consider themselves exempt from that appeal.

There should be no calls for or desire to establish a new Office of Bitcoin, or to enact Bitcoin regulation, or BitLicenses, guidelines or legislation to govern the flow of Digital Currency. I am not suggesting any new forms of thinking or any new types of security classifications. I have no easy answer to the dilemma of how society will reorganize itself without a State, and would not seek to impose it if I had one. But I am asking the members of the software profession and the Bitcoin industry in whatever country they are to re-examine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the present danger, and to heed the duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all.

Every entrepreneur now asks himself, with respect to every Bitcoin story: “Is regulation really needed?” All I suggest is that you add the question: “Is regulation in the interest of the consumer?” And I hope that every group in the world and the institutions that make it up–unions and businessmen and public officials at every level– will ask the same question of their endeavours, and subject their actions to the same exacting tests and ethics, coming naturally to the conclusion that the controls of the State are not needed.

And should the entrepreneurs of America consider and recommend the voluntary assumption of specific regulations or guidance, I can assure you that we will cooperate whole-heartedly with those recommendations if they are in fact purely voluntary and in our interest.

Perhaps there will be no recommendations. Perhaps there is no answer to the dilemma faced by free and open software in a free and open society in a global and all pervasive internet. In times of technological disruption, any discussion of this subject, and any action that results, are both painful and without precedent. But this is a time of disruption and peril which knows no precedent in history. This is what we are facing with Bitcoin.

II

It is the unprecedented nature of the Bitcoin Blockchain and sovereignty and their challenges that also gives rise to your second obligation–an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to correctly inform, protect and alert the users of Bitcoin–to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well–the perils, the prospects, the purposes of Bitcoin and the choices that we face.

No entrepreneur should live in fear of a crack down by the violent State or scrutiny of his programs. For from that scrutiny comes from mis-understanding; and from that mis-understanding comes support or opposition. And neither of these are necessary. I am not asking newspapers to support Bitcoin, but I am asking for your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of citizens whenever they are fully informed.

I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers–I welcome it. All Bitcoin entrepreneurs intend to be candid about their errors; for as a wise man once said: “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.

Without Liberty, no business man and no country can succeed–and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why the American press was protected by the First Amendment– the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution (except Copyright, which was the Founding Father’s greatest and most damaging error)- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants”–but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion. Bitcoin, being first amendment protected speech, can also annoy, mold, lead, indicate by its flows, crises, and ultimately, give the public what it wants. This is is at the very core of the Bitcoin revolution. It belongs to everyone and no one, and all men have an absolute right to it, as they do to speech itself.

Bitcoin has greater coverage and absolute penetration of international borders–for money recipients and transmitters are no longer far away and foreign but always close at hand and local on the internet. It means greater and improved flows of money as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to refrain from violence against you with the fullest possible humility since it can no longer steal your money to hurt you, even under the absurd pretext of national security–and we intend to make this happen.

III

It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass and made real and onerous by the Federal Reserve have made us all part of a connected world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world’s efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure. Bitcoin changes this dynamic utterly. No longer will gunpowder or the printing press work together to enslave mankind, for the printing press, used to defraud and finance the waging of war on men is now rendered useless as a new and wondrous incorruptible money comes into being.

And so it is to the internet and the personal computer–to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, the sender of his love letters and the mover and protector of his wealth–that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with or without your help, man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.

Bitcoin and Reality versus American Journalists

Thursday, April 3rd, 2014

“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.” – Ayn Rand

This famous Ayn Rand quote is true, but the real question is raises is “what is reality?”

For some American journalists, reality is their belief that America is the center of the universe, and that their opinions, rulings and laws apply everywhere by default. By any objective measure, this is false.

Bitcoin is a technology that proves once again, that America is not the center of the universe, or even of economic activity on the earth. It doesn’t have the biggest population or the greatest economic freedom. It is just another country, one jurisdiction amongst many, and one that the vast majority of the people of the earth ignore completely.

With Bitcoin it will be shown again, as it was with CDMA and GSM, that what American journalists and entrepreneurs want will not become the world default simply because they want it. Their peculiar ideas and sense of right and wrong applies only to them. The majority population of the world is an economic force that they cannot possibly compete with, and in the internet age, this means that they must always lose and submit to the effects of numerically superior populations.

For those of you who do not remember, there were two competing mobile phone network standards in the past; GSM and CDMA. These standards were not compatible, and the only country that settled on CDMA was the USA; everywhere else in the world settled on GSM.

Now, GSM is the global default, and no mobile phone is CDMA only. The world won, America lost. All the development, investment and engineering effort that went into creating the CDMA cellular network was lost, wasted in fact. The same will be true of Bitcoin, and any internet technology, which is more properly called, “software”. We could also use the example of software patents, which are only issued and valid in the USA, to show how parochialism is moot in today’s internet age but we can save that for another time.

There are no “rogue players” or “bad actors” in software. Software is neutral. It does not and cannot care what you do with it. It is not concerned with puritanism, or hysterical fear-mongering about the scant few people who choose to smoke marijuana. Software is information that can perform acts on information; this is the breakthrough that preceded Bitcoin that almost no one has picked up on. For the first time ever, an idea or a design can be made to do something without the direct guidance human agent. Previously, ideas that are designs needed to be written down on paper and then executed by hand to create a mechanical device. Even delivering the idea had to be done by a human. Now, information can be mediated by a machine, that can communicate to another machine. That machine can be a printer, or any other mechanical device, or another machine of the same design. These machines are called, “computers”.

Now with Bitcoin, computers and software are being used to do accounting in a way that allows the data stored in them to mimic the properties of fiat paper money. The problem that Bitcoin solves is called “The Double Spending Problem”. Previously all data, which is infinitely copyable, made it impossible to verify wether or not a piece of data had been copied. Now with the blockchain, data that is tracked inside it can be allocated to a single person, in a way that is verifiable by anyone anywhere. This is superior to holding a paper dollar, because Bitcoin ledger entries cannot be forged, unlike paper dollars, or entries in a bank ledger. This means that Bitcoin can be used as money, amongst many other things that require a single owner to be identified as the owner of something.

The nature of Bitcoin should be clear to anyone reading this piece, and you should already own some. What you may not understand is the truly profound revolution that Bitcoin is, and the ramifications of what the solution to the Double Spending Problem are.

Bitcoin will make socialism impossible. It will make all forms of coercive collectivism impossible. American journalists say things like, “Sometimes our greatest strengths are also our greatest weaknesses.” This is communist drivel. There is no collective weakness in man, or collective strength. That an American journalist is writing like this is troubling enough, but what is even more shocking is how little insight people have to what Bitcoin is about to unleash.

Bitcoin will make it impossible to run a coercive State apparatus. Thanks to the money printing antics of the central banks world-wide, and in particular, the Federal Reserve, which prints the money that underpins the entire global fiat system, the paper money systems of the world’s central banks are going to disappear. This is not hyperbole; every single fiat currency that has ever existed has gone to hyperinflation and ceased to exist. Here is a list…

Angola 1991-1995, Argentina 1975-1991, Austria 1921-1922, Belarus 1994-2002, Bolivia 1984-1986, Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1993, Brazil 1986-1994, Bulgaria 1996, Chile 1971-1973, China 1948-1949, Free City of Danzig 1922-1923, Georgia 1993-1995, Germany 1922-1923, Greece 1942-1944, Hungary 1945-1946, Israel 1970-1971, Japan 1948-1951, Krajina 1992-1993, Madagascar 2004-2005, Mozambique 1977-1992, Nicaragua 1987-1990, Peru 1988-1990, Philippines 1942-1944, Poland 1989-1991, Romania 1998-2005, Russia 1921-1922 and 1992-1999, Turkey 1990-1995, Ukraine 1993-1995, United States 1861-1865, Yugoslavia 1989-1994, Zaire 1989-1996, Zimbabwe 2004-2009

The currency of the United States has failed twice. The third time is just around the corner. This is guaranteed and inevitable:

At heart, this economic crisis is in fact a currency crisis. Throughout history no paper currency (or “fiat currency”, since it is accepted as money by virtue of Government fiat or decree) has survived, and this time will be no different. The average lifespan of fiat currencies has been 16 years*. The present system is unique in that it has survived for 38 years and for the first time ALL countries throughout the world are on a fiat money standard. This means that the resulting crash will be on the scale of something the world has never seen.

[…]

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/coming-financial-tsunami

Bitcoin is something new; a distributed public crypto ledger that has an application making it useful as a pseudo currency, which emerges from the process of a machine running software. The value people put on it is subjective, since it has no form or mass, and since it is scarce, real world goods can be divided against it in a catalactic calculation. This is something really new, that is difficult to understand at first and which is extremely powerful and useful.

The decentralized structure of Bitcoin makes the violent actions of the Statists impossible. It flattens the field so that everyone is protected from the biggest violent predator, the State. There will be no more creation of money out of thin air by the State. No more debasement of people’s savings. No more fiat currency created by central Banks. This, along with the removal of banks as transaction facilitators is the true transformation that keeps Statists up at night in a cold sweat. This is what American journalists desperately want to prevent, once they get a glimpse of what Bitcoin is and what it will do. Bitcoin will decentralize everything, and remove government force from the equation by starving it of stolen loot. You only need look at BitTorrent to get a glimpse of what trying to stop it will look like.

BitTorrent is a protocol released by a single man, Bram Cohen, to solve the problem of centralized servers acting as mediators in file sharing. It is a software breakthrough as important as Bitcoin, and looking at BitTorrent is a good way to illustrate how the Bitcoin disruption is going to emerge, evolve and propagate.

BitTorrent takes up one third of all internet traffic. It has completely replaced all previous centralized file sharing services and software. This is analogous to Bitcoin replacing the money transfer services. Bitcoin will replace the banks completely as storage of money can be done on your phone or laptop or keyfob. Bitcoin will replace both money transfer services and banks which will no longer serve any useful purpose, unless they pivot to Bitcoin exchanging sites.

BitTorrent makes it possible to get a file from anyone anywhere in the world, instantly. Bitcoin makes it possible to send money from person to person anywhere in the world without knowing them, instantly.

BitTorrent is not controlled by anyone. It was written once and spread by the work of developers world-wide. Bitcoin was written once, and is spreading exactly the same way.

BitTorrent does not belong to anyone. It is free software. Bitcoin is the same; it belongs to no one, anyone can download and develop whatever they like with it.

All of these facts combine to make viral effects inevitable. Bitcoin is going to spread everywhere. People like to download movies, but they do not need to. That pressure alone caused BitTorrent use to explode. People actually need to send and receive money on a daily basis multiple times. They have a real, crucial to life need for Bitcoin; this will cause it to be quickly propelled at a greater velocity and momentum than BitTorrent, and it will stay at that high level of momentum. It will become a beneficial juggernaut.

BitTorrent services cannot be stopped by the State. There are technical and practical reasons for this, but first among the reasons is that there are too many people using it to stop them all individually. You cannot turn off the internet to stop them, without killing world commerce. You cannot block the sites that list torrents (the files used to seed information to BitTorrent nodes) Because there are many tools that prevent net censorship that are child’s play to use, like “Stealthy” the Google Chrome plugin which takes only a single click to unblock any censored website. The only thing that can work as a propaganda exercise is to arrest the owners of the biggest torrent indexing sites. Technically, these indexing sites are not participants in file sharing at all; they are only listing files that need to be downloaded from somewhere else and used by a BitTorrent client somewhere else. If the law worked properly, these torrent indexing sites would be free and clear of any wrongdoing, because they do not host any copyrighted material themselves, they only index files that may or may not point to other files that exist on users computers that are seeding. And these token arrests have not and will not stop anyone sharing files. Ever.

Of course, the technical, ethical and legal facts are of no consequence to the American journalist and the American legal system. They throw out the rule of law to protect the incumbent industries that are threatened by file sharing. It has not worked of course, and filesharing is bigger than ever, more efficient and greatly strengthened by two decades of research and software development that has made BitTorrent filesharing something that can never be removed from the internet.

Now superimpose all of this onto Bitcoin.

Bitcoin services will not be stoppable by the State. There are technical reasons for this, but first of all, there will be too many people using it to stop them all individually. You cannot turn off the internet to stop them, without killing world commerce… that will be based on Bitcoin. You cannot block the people that sell Bitcoin, because they will do it person to person hundreds of millions of times per day, world-wide. All the tools used to stop internet censorship will be used to stop Bitcoin exchanging sites from being taken down, and when I talk about exchanges, I do not mean the exchanges that mimic the stock exchange model. New exchanges are going to emerge that are nothing like stock exchanges and these will be so simple to use that anyone can understand them. The software that powers them will be open and this will make them very resilient. Arresting a vanishingly small number of unlucky Bitcoin users or site operators will have zero impact on the world-wide exchange of Bitcoin.

This is the reality faced by the American journalist that wants the world to stay exactly as it is forever. Their blinkered world view is already finished, and they don’t even know it.

Their antiquated, violent, prohibitionist ideas of “bad actors” is going the way of the dodo. There are no “bad actors”; in reality there is only the market, which works to suppress people who are truly bad; i.e., people who break their promises and do not deliver on what they promise to deliver.

No “regulator” or recent immigrant prosecutor in palookavile USA is going to stop Bitcoin, or the people who use it. They might bag a trophy prosecution, get their portrait painted and hang the stuffed heads of their innocent victims on their wall, but the vast majority of people will be unaffected, not only because they do not have the staff or the means to stop everyone, but they have very limited jurisdiction. Look at internet poker and casinos to get a feel for what that looks like in real life.

The American obsession and subservience to their unconstitutional agencies is utterly baffling. These three to six letter agencies all try and carve out turf whenever something new arrives, and Bitcoin is no different. The American FinCEN and the IRS both have declared that Bitcoin is two different things, as if they were not both parts of the same government. It is the modern equivalent of a keystone kops movie; watching them bump against each other scrambling around trying to get to grips with the slow motion software tsunami that is about to sweep them away.

That anyone is calling for “a clear voice” from these people is beyond belief. Why should any of these people have jurisdiction or a voice over free speech? Yes, Bitcoin is a form of speech, it is not money, no matter what a State mouthpiece journalist tells you.

These agencies have no business, right or legal obligation to regulate, control, inspect or stop Bitcoin in any way. Just because there are a few people asking for “guidance” from them does not mean that the conclusions they come to are correct, ethical or enforceable. The people who make a career out of testifying before committees like beggar servants are irrelevant to the truth of software. No matter what they say or claim is their “stake” in Bitcoin, no one outside of their incestuous Washington bubble cares. Bitcoin, like BitTorrent, will flow into every device and nothing they do or say can stop this from happening. The market will determine what services thrive and succeed, not blabbering wannabe leeches.

There is no such thing as “the BitTorrent community”. Soon the idea of a “Bitcoin community” will seem utterly absurd. There is no software community, rice community, air community or math community. All of these things work and taste good despite there being no “community” to “represent” them. These quaint ideas come mostly from people who do not have Bitcoin or who do not write software. They are desperate, once they realize what is happening, to get on board and have a part to play in this incredible once in a lifetime event. This is perfectly understandable, and in fact, desirable. What is undesirable however, are the types that do not have direct involvement in software choosing to assert themselves by bringing the law onto the heads of the people who are actually creating the infrastructure and who own the thing that they are fans of.

It is not enough for these people, like the journalists, to witness and report what is going on, or to start collecting and using Bitcoin; they must impose their petty, small minded, limited imaginations on others to achieve satisfaction. Its nauseating, and unethical, and in the end, will be a complete wasted effort because no one cares what these people think. The people that write software and own Bitcoin are going to do what is good for them, spend their Bitcoin in ways that benefit them, build services that they need and write the software that does what they need to get done. No one cares about these low brow busybodies, and the BitTorrent example is a perfect fit once again. Journalists are non-actors in the new world order of software. They do not write anything that can be executed; all they can do is complain. And they are very good at it.

Bitcoin has the potential of raising the standard of living of living of the 2.2 billion unbanked. The State, busybodies and socialists are not required to make this happen; only entrepreneurs, software and hardware developers are needed. There is no such thing as “over regulation” in Bitcoin, the regulation comes from the software itself and its baked in rules. If you agree to abide by the software’s rules, you can use Bitcoin. If you do not, you cannot. You can use other software, or use other methods to account for your money, but that is entirely your decision. No law is required to mediate an exchange of Bitcoin, and there are enough laws that cover fraud and contract to protect anyone who interacts with a business that makes a promise. And of course, contracts are what are going to be “Blockchainized” next, with Etherium.

If only journalism could be made to be as true and reliable as Blockchain mediated transactions!

It is profoundly shameful that journalists and Statists want to cripple something that could change the world and improve the lives of billions in the same way that the telephone and the internet have changed the world for the better. Their personal ideas of right and wrong that are entirely wrong and learned by rote should not be the standard by which free men should be forced to live. Even if their ideas about ‘drugs’ are correct, this is a vanishingly small amount of trade in comparison to the 2.2 billion unbanked that can benefit from Bitcoin, along with the billions of banked who will have their money freed by it.

The question is this; is man going to live by the peasant thinking of the lowest common denominator, or is he going to reach for the stars?

Thankfully, the latter is going to be the case. No thinly veiled threat that “we” must come begging to “Washington” is going to stop the spread of Bitcoin everywhere.

Nothing is going to stop liberty from being the default. BitTorrent file sharing is the model that proves this. It is deeply entrenched in the fabric of the internet and the minds of the users. Soon, Bitcoin will be exactly the same. It will be ubiquitous, the best services will thrive, and the bad services will be quickly abandoned. All the boasting about thousands of outlets and millions of users by some startups are completely meaningless. In the internet age, these big numbers can drop to zero very quickly. Look at MTGOX, MySpace, AOL, and all the other large sites that no longer exist, or that are now mere shadows of their former selves.

No site is immune from falling out of favor with King Consumer, but one fact remains true in every instance; the internet persists, ready to facilitate the next big player. Bitcoin is the internet of money. No matter what player disappears, the Bitcoin network will still be there, ready to transact, store and record.

This is the only thing that is important.

The world has changed, Statists.

Get used to it, because no one wants you. Everyone wants Liberty.

And we are going to have it.

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Translations:
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http://www.8btc.com/bitcoin-and-reality-versus-american-journalists