What do we do now ?
Let’s recap what we have discussed: Psychopaths and Sociopaths, a small but significant portion of the population ~4%, are attracted to institutions and often start new ones or initiate practices that make all of our lives miserable, often with the help of people with good intentions - Lenin called them the useful idiots.
Once the thieving and abuse are in motion, justified by lies and propelled by people’s ignorance, the system gets a life of its own. There are enough people in the world who will take advantage of these systems once they are in place and who will advocate against their elimination. The Military industrial Complex has been around since Eisenhower and employs many people who will fight to keep it alive, for example.
In Simon Sinek’s framework for The Infinite Game, players who engage to ‘win’ in a finite game cannot win in the infinite game, because the rules are different.
And so it is for the goal of reaching liberty, prosperity and peace.
Aristotle knew this when he said “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men” and certainly the people who segregated the powers of our government were aware of this, and Jefferson in particular. If the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, it really means, there is no end: fighting for freedom is a constant struggle, an infinite game. They segregated the powers in the hope that this struggle could be less painful, would give the people more latitude and ample warnings to prevent the resurgence of totalitarianism.
After centuries of slow decay we have a bureaucratic state that attacks anything that might threaten its expansion, leveraging all three of Graeber’s pillars of domination : violence, secrecy and charisma, and culminating with a United States Government that has been continuously at war for over 25 years, something else had to be tried.
Blockchain was the hope. Finally something that was unstoppable would answer to the creeping bureaucratic cancer by exposing its lies and subverting its services.
After all, if government’s ideas were so good, why would they need to be mandatory ?
Blockchain offered ways that money could not be inflated out of sight, leaked information could not be erased, fraud could be eliminated from voting. The dream was a full inversion of control.
But soon after it started, you had to disclose your identity to use it. The casino attracted the same people with short term and shallow morals that would go along with the oversight, just because they might get rich before the exit door closes.
Some, who never really knew about the original intent don’t even mind and still cheer for the US Government’s new permissions for Bitcoin ETFs and classifications of Tokens as assets. I probably got this wrong, you’ll have to excuse my ignorance of the latest pronouncement from whatever 3 letter agency flexing its legalese.
The point is, none of it worked. Money is still the US Dollar, inflated 3-fold since the invention of Bitcoin, voting systems are still corrupted and the media still lies about every war the Empire wants to start.
So what do we do now ?
Should we just fight the system with humor the way Srdja Popovic and others argue, as ridicule can sometimes bring a totalitarian system to collapse ?
A lot of Bitcoin maximalists will tell me to just wait. The system will collapse and Bitcoin will be come the money that nobody can inflate. I have objections to this that I don’t think can be reconciled, if any of them paid attention. The most important one has to do with the fact in a gold economy the cost of extracting an ounce of gold from the ground is almost the price of an ounce of gold. Not equal. Not more, just a little less. And if you think about this fact as an Austrian economist would, you would realize that it’s an exception to the normal direction of price setting, from final goods to the components of that good. Gold does not derive its value from the desirability of the shovel that digs it. Another issue is that deploying twice as much capital to mining gold will have the expectation to produce twice as much gold, same as in any other industry, with the constraint that the capital - such as the shovel - priced in gold will need to be bought and amortized, which will affect its price.
Follow these thoughts and you’ll see why Bitcoin in its current form can’t become money.
My point here is that waiting for bitcoin to fix all this may not be enough.
The rest of the blockchain ecosystems are all scrambling to evade surveillance while the VCs that funded them with US Dollars are anxiously waiting for them to launch a real commercial application that will return the fund.
Many closed-network applications that barely justify a blockchain could pull it off. For example putting QR codes on a blockchain for tracking shipping container content and custody can work as a decent application with successful revenue streams. A lot of blockchains like Hedera are going for these commercial applications as a way to generate revenue. Blockchain isn’t needed for this, but it does help a few things. And when you realize you’re relying on Hedera’s council partners to run the chain that tracks your QR codes, you might wonder if the whole thing might have been easier with a bunch of Kafka nodes on AWS.
Perhaps prediction markets will still rise to make the most money, but the scheme is truly a redistribution, since none of it adds to the production structure of the economy, only to the consumption end of it, for now. Should someone start to actually use this commercially for actuarial purposes, we could talk about how the rest of the economy could leverage it, but at the present time, even life/health insurers are not allowed by law to use true actuarial data which includes categories the government thinks will harm minorities - without proving it would, of course.
The stablecoin promise is also very much a regulatory capture story at this point. I mentioned before that there is a good chance this could be good for the US Dollar system in the short run and disastrous in the longer term.
So, naturally at this point, you’re wondering if our only options left are to buy spray paint and start spraying the Flock cameras that watch over everything, wear anti- face recognition gear or AI thwarting mechanisms and build home made anti drone guns. Is confrontation and Sabotage the only option left ?
Well, no.
But first, we’ll need to talk about the elephant in the room.
