Apolitical
Bitcoin is apolitical money. This is one trait that separates it from every other asset.
You might argue we will not find a solution to all political problems in cryptography, however, as Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out, “we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.” And we have and will likely continue to enjoy the opportunity to have freedom and property that Satoshi provided.
Many believe this freedom emerges out of a competition between various cryptocurrencies. This is a mistake. For what it does, Bitcoin has no competition. It is peerless.
In the expansive history of monetary mandate, censorship, and oppression, everyone alive had ideas. Bitcoin delivered a simple, actionable solution. Unforgeable, unstoppable, unconfiscatable transactions ordered and stored on a distributed network.
As long as honest nodes control the most hashing power on the network, they can generate the longest chain and outpace any attackers, and we can store and transmit property, value, and therefore uncensorable free speech across space and time.
The only requirement is that the good guys collectively have more hashing power than any single attacker. For over a decade that has been the case.
Bitcoin gives you the freedom to acquire and control property. This is a singular form of ownership. Bitcoin is freedom. It is unique in this regard. You can actually take ownership of freedom through Bitcoin. This is what it means to be running Bitcoin.
The problem with fiat is that its rules are forever incompletely explained. There is a degree of randomness brought to bear on all forms of alternative cryptocurrencies and fiat, because they’ve introduced a great amount of human governance and dictate into the system.
Humans are not maximally effective at policing themselves, because they are subject to the fallacy of infinite regress. Who watches the watchers? and so on.
This admits of a question: How is governance defined? In Bitcoin one has the option to run older versions of Bitcoin, and the freedom do whatever one chooses with one’s Bitcoin, without being cast out from the network. Our updates are agreed upon by a majority and adopted individually at will. Bitcoin is backwards compatible. And the burden of choice with whom or for what to transact rests solely on the owner of the transactions unspent.
There is no limitation imposed by the rules of the fiat game. They are not playing with a definite supply of numerals but instead with a system for constructing numerals indefinitely .
The fiat game was constructed on the premise that the highest number, positive or negative, takes the trick. The problem is the rules of that game have been abused to the point where it has become generally unclear to the population at large how the game works. In fiat, what is, and what is not money?
In fiat you are playing three-card monte with the fed, who provide the illusion of security, entertainment, and instant gratification (if you play nice), in exchange for the perpetual debasement of your wealth.
Instead of making this false promise, Bitcoin simply provides you with certainty as to how much property you have in this moment and in the next. Bitcoin is property ownership in a rented world.
So we are just quietly accumulating Bitcoin. Bitcoiners understand that only a terminally closed supply will maintain value long term, and increase value when priced against all other non-scarce assets.
In fiat you are constantly paying a permissionless convenience tax by way of monetary debasement on top of the outright taxes paid to fund wars and institutions that enforce the fiat network. Bitcoiners understand that any amount of money will forsake value ad infinitum when its supply is unlimited.
As a society we have grown accustomed to not a definite supply of monetary numerals but instead a system for constructing money indefinitely.
Every other monetary system is allowing people to decide at each moment at what rate to continue printing money, and when to tighten up, but it will never stop, there’s no incentive to. History has shown that governments can’t resist the temptation to debase society’s currency in order to enrich themselves.
Time
Bitcoin is a closed monetary enumeration that accounts for the asynchronous communication that is inherent in every decentralized system.
Synchronous events don’t exist. Everything happens in plenty of its own time. From the perspective of a centralized system however, with a single line of sight, this would not appear to be the case. There is a sobering parallax effect when viewing the monetary landscape through Bitcoin’s decentralized system.
But information, and even Bitcoin cannot represent the state of the world directly. And Bitcoin doesn’t pretend to do this. The state of things is not, nor has it ever been as any government tells you it is.
The Bitcoin blockchain is but one description of time within greater and smaller systems, orthogonal systems. All other cryptocurrencies have left out the essential decentralized feature of such a description of time and try to mask this with accessory features.
There is a wealth of monetary experiences revealed to us by the scrutiny Bitcoin incites, which were hidden or abstracted from view before. One of these is the understanding of our time as an asset we must constantly trade. Time is not money. But time, like Bitcoin, is scarce.
