People-focused media company enhances workforce communities with membership initiative; extends suite of new, exclusive offerings to learning and talent professionals
Press Release –
Jan 31, 2023
CHICAGO, January 31, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– BetterWork Media Group (BMG), a media company dedicated to connecting, supporting and empowering workforce communities of C-suite and senior-level practitioners, executives, scholars, consultants and solutions providers in corporate learning and talent management, announced recently the launch of its first membership program, now available via its two leading brands, Chief Learning Officer and Talent Management.
Members gain access to a slew of exclusive offerings, including the member-exclusive biannual print magazine (returning June of 2023), special pricing, discounts, and early access to event details and registrations, award applications and proprietary content.
“The launch of this membership program signals the beginning of many new and exciting initiatives BMG has planned for this year and those to come,” said Lauren Lynch-Wilbur, co-founder and co-chief executive officer for BetterWork Media Group. “My colleagues and I are so thrilled to be able to provide learning and talent executives with even more tools for enhancing their professional development experience, while simultaneously delivering on one of our biggest goals to date.”
BetterWork Media Group manages Chief Learning Officer and Talent Management, serving workforce communities of C-suite and senior-level practitioners, executives, scholars, consultants and solution providers in corporate learning and talent management. BetterWork Media Group provides a unique platform to connect, support and empower workplace communities via award-winning content, research, events, webinars and digital media. BMG’s founders have more than 70 years of collective experience in the media industry.
Chief Learning Officer is dedicated to serving as a platform and vehicle for C-suite and senior-level learning and development professionals to connect and advance in the profession and their personal careers. We are by CLOs, for CLOs.
Talent Management is dedicated to providing in-depth information and programming for senior-level talent and HR professionals who champion organizational culture and drive the design, development and execution of talent management programs.
This article was originally published in Bitcoin Magazine’s “Orange Party” print edition with the headline “The Stage Is Now Set.” Click here to subscribe now.
After many years of development and the successful routing of socialists, evil CIA proponents of “Democracy”, cowards and soft-skinned, fat, virtue-signaling infiltrators, Bitcoin is stronger than ever, growing in many surprising and encouraging ways and confounding people who can’t think.
The stage is now set for Bitcoin to totally replace fiat online and offline as the main way people spend. The infallible Bitcoin network and consumer-grade Bitcoin tools are spreading like wildfire in every direction as people wake up to what this new network can do for them and how fiat is inflating under their feet, just as people woke up to what the web could do, and that they didn’t need the post office any more.
The greatest explosion of Bitcoin users will be on mobile phone platforms where Wallet of Satoshi, Samourai Wallet, Breez, Muun, Phoenix, Pine, and BlueWallet are the vanguard of a new class of applications in the emerging “Consumer Bitcoin” sector.
Very few people understand the enormous impact Consumer Bitcoin is going to have on the way things are ordered in the world, and certainly, the list of selfish and ignorant bad actors listed above are either incapable of imagining it, and if not, are actively against it under orders to prop up the unethical, unsustainable, and evil fiat status quo.
Thankfully not all people are driven by fear of the new, or take their marching orders from violent psychopaths. This is manifestly clear in the case of El Salvador, the surprise market leader that is forging ahead fastest and most effectively to switch from the money of mass murder to the money of peace, “Bitcoin”. Not only are they embedding Bitcoin deeply into the economy there, they are actively educating other countries to help them remove the yoke of fiat and the murderous democracy boosters.
One of the countries attending the historic summit in San Salvador was the mighty Nigeria, which, should it heed the advice and learning accumulated there, could take its rightful place as the economic center of the continent of Africa. Rather than settling on the racist-inspired “Afro” currency, it could settle on bitcoin as the unifying, provably fair, and economically sound “lingua franca of money” for all citizens in African nations — bringing extraordinary economic benefits to all the people who live on that continent, as well as the long-overdue permanent removal of toxic Western influences.
Democracy created fiat. It is that fiat philosophy (created by a pedophile, John Maynard Keynes) that was a key factor in the ruin of the economies of the African continent. By adopting bitcoin, fiat will cease to have power over 1,404,827,471 people, setting them on a path to prosperity and proper order. Bitcoin has the power to defang the unnatural blood-sucking viper that injects poison into the economies of Africa and drains blood from the people.
Voting doesn’t make fiat ethical. Voting doesn’t trump math. Anyone who is for voting as the way to select how a monetary system should work is anti-Bitcoin, and certainly, no Nigerian should listen to a Washington wonk who desires all nations to be Cargo Cult copies of the West and its unethical, evil, unbalanced, and unworkable systems of control.
“Democratic” doesn’t equal fair, proper, or right. It doesn’t ensure just outcomes, or restrain the State from committing mass murder. Democratically overproduced fiat is the fuel that powered the mass murder “Military Industrial Complex” that ravaged the 20th century. Now, with bitcoin in place as the world’s money, outrages like this cannot happen again because there simply and literally is no money for it.
Everyone who understands Bitcoin and what it was designed to do does not argue about this. There is no argument to be made against it. The time of arguing is over. The lying, mass-murdering, racist democracy boosters (some of whom pretend to be “for Bitcoin”) will not be able to change the inevitable outcome. The producer of the form and arbiter of the function of money has been the root problem for generations. There will be no more debate. The die is already cast. Anyone arguing about Keynesianism vs Bitcoin, democracy vs free markets or any other distraction is delusional; reality is going to be asserted and imposed on the market and there is nothing you can do about it.
How and why is this so, and what is it about Bitcoin in particular that makes any of this predictable? Doesn’t the price of bitcoin and how it fluctuates refute these extravagant claims? Are they extravagant claims?
Bitcoin is a very new technology, even though the software and math concepts that it brings to life are decades old. The double-spending problem has been solved; this means that it is possible to use a digital “certificate” to stand in the place of money and be sure that as long as you hold it no one else can spend that “certificate” other than you. This is an unprecedented paradigm shift, the implications of which are not yet fully understood, and for which the tools do not yet exist to fully take advantage of this new idea.
This new technology requires some new thinking when it comes to developing businesses that are built upon it. In the same way that the pioneer providers of email did not correctly understand the service they were selling for many years, new and correct thinking about Bitcoin is needed, and will emerge, so that it reaches its full potential and becomes ubiquitous.
The original Hotmail Interface.
Hotmail used familiar technologies (the web browser and email) to create a better way of accessing and delivering email; the idea of using an email client like Outlook Express has been completely superseded by web interfaces and email “in the cloud” that provides many advantages over a dedicated client with your mail in your own local storage.
Bitcoin, which will transform the way you transfer money, needs to be understood on its own terms, and not just as an online form of money. Thinking about bitcoin as money is as absurd as thinking about email as another form of sending letters by post; one not only replaces the other but it profoundly changes the way people send and consume messages. It is not a simple substitution or one-dimensional improvement of an existing idea or service.
As I have explained previously, Bitcoin is not money. Bitcoin is a protocol. If you treat it in this way, with the correct assumptions, you can start the process of putting Bitcoin in a proper context, allowing you to make rational suggestions about the sort of services that might be profitable based on it.
Every part of Bitcoin is text. It is always text, and never at any point ceases to be text. This is a fact, and as text, it is protected under the free speech provisions of the constitutions of civilized nations with guaranteed, irrevocable rights.
If Bitcoin is a protocol and not money (it is), then setting up currency exchanges that mimic real-world money, stock and commodity exchanges to trade in it is not the sole means of discovering its price. You would not set up an email exchange to discover the value of email services, and the same thing applies to Bitcoin.
Staying with this train of thought, when you type in an email on your Gmail account, you are inputting your “letter”. You press send, it goes through your ISP, over the internet, into the ISP of your recipient and then it is outputted on your recipient’s machine. The same is true of Bitcoin; you input money on one end through a service and then send the bitcoin to your recipient, without an intermediary to handle the transfer. Once Bitcoin does its job of moving your value across the globe to its recipient it needs to be “read out”, i.e., turned back into money, in the same way that your letter is displayed to its recipient in an email.
In the email scenario, once the transfer happens and the email you have received conveys its information to you, it has no use other than to be a record of the information that was sent (accounting), and you archive that information. Bitcoin does this accounting on the blockchain for you, and a good service built on it will store extended transaction details for you locally, but what you need to have as the recipient of bitcoin is services or goods not bitcoin itself.
Bitcoin’s true nature is as an instant way to pay (despite not being money) anywhere in the world. It is not an investment, and holding on to it in the hopes that it will become valuable is like holding on to an email or a PDF in the hopes it will become valuable in the future without simultaneously investing in the companies that provide access to it for consumers doesn’t make any sense. Of course, you can hold on to bitcoin and watch its value go up, and its value will go up, but you need to have guts to weather the violent waves of selling and buying as the transition to an all-bitcoin economy gets under way.
Despite the fact that you can’t double spend them and each one is unique, bitcoin have no inherent value, unlike a book or any physical object. They cannot appreciate in value. Mistaken thinking about Bitcoin has spread because it behaves like money, due to the fact it cannot be double spent. Misrepresentation of Bitcoin’s true nature has masked its dual nature of being digital and not double-spendable.
Razzles. They start as a candy, and then end as a gum. Before you chew them, which are they? A candy, or a gum?
Bitcoin is digital, with all the qualities of information that make information non-scarce. It sits in a new place that oscillates between the goods of the physical world and the infinitely abundant digital world of information, belonging exclusively to the digital world but having the characteristics of both. This is why it has been widely misunderstood and why a new approach is needed to design businesses around it.
All of this goes some way to explain why the price of buying bitcoin at the exchanges doesn’t matter for the consumer. If the cost of buying bitcoin goes to 1¢, this doesn’t change the amount of money that comes out at the other end of a transfer. As long as you redeem your bitcoin immediately after the transfer into either goods or currency, the same value comes out at the other end no matter what you paid for the bitcoin when you started the process.
Think about it this way. Let us suppose that you want to send a long text file to another person. You can either send it as it is, or you can compress it with zip. The size of a document file when it is zipped can be up to 87% smaller than the original. When we transpose this idea to Bitcoin, the compression ratio is the price of bitcoin at an exchange. If bitcoin trades for $100, and you want to buy something from someone in India for $100 you need to buy 1 bitcoin to get that $100 to India. If the price of bitcoin is 1¢ then you need 10,000 bitcoin to send $100 dollars to India. These would be expressed as compression ratios of 1:1 and 10,000:1 respectively.
The same $100 value is sent to India, whether you use 10,000 or 1 bitcoin. The price of bitcoin is irrelevant to the value that is being transmitted, in the same way that zip files do not “care” what is inside them; Bitcoin and zip are dumb protocols that do a job. As long as the value of bitcoin does not go to zero, it will have the same utility as if the value were very “high”.
The current business models of exchanges are not addressing Bitcoin’s nature correctly. They are using a twentieth-century model of stock, commodity, and currency exchanges and superimposing this onto Bitcoin. Interfacing with these exchanges is non-trivial, and for the ordinary user a daunting prospect. In some cases, you have to wait up to seven days to receive a transfer of your fiat currency after it has been cashed out of your account from bitcoin. While this is not a fault of the exchanges, it represents a very real impediment to Bitcoin acting in its nature and providing its complete value.
Imagine this; you receive an email from across the world, and you are notified of the fact by being displayed the subject line in your browser. You then apply to your ISP to have this email delivered to you and you have to wait seven days for it to arrive in your physical mailbox.
The very idea is completely absurd, and yet, this is exactly what is happening with bitcoin, for no technical reason whatsoever.
It is clear that there needs to be a rethink of the services that are growing around Bitcoin, along with a rethink of what the true nature of Bitcoin is. Rethinking services is a normal part of entrepreneurship and we should expect business models to fail and early entrants to fall by the wayside as the ceaseless iterations and pivoting progress, just as it was in the early days of the web.
Bearing all of this in mind, focusing on the price of bitcoin at exchanges using a business model that is inappropriate for this new software simply is not rational; it’s like putting a methane-breathing canary as a detector in a mine full of oxygen-breathing humans. The bird dies even though nothing is wrong with the air; the miners rush to evacuate, leaving the exposed gold seams behind, thinking that they are all about to be wiped out when all is actually fine.
Day traders speculating on bitcoin from home cause the price to oscillate. It’s an artificial signal that has nothing to do with demand for bitcoin and its circulation as an economic tool to facilitate commerce.
Bitcoin, and the ideas behind it are here to stay. As the number of people downloading the client and using it increases, like Hotmail, it will eventually reach critical mass and then spread exponentially through the internet. When that happens, the correct business models will spontaneously emerge, as they will become obvious — in the same way that Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, cellular phones, and instant messaging seem like second nature.
In the future. I imagine that very few people will speculate on the value of bitcoin, because even though that might be possible, and even profitable, there will be more money to be made in providing easy-to-use Bitcoin services that take full advantage of what Bitcoin is.
One thing is for sure; speed will be of the essence in any future Bitcoin business model. The start-ups that provide instant satisfaction on both ends of the transaction are the ones that are going to succeed. Even though the volatility of the price of bitcoin is bound to stabilize, since it has no use in and of itself, getting back to money or goods instantly will be a sought-after characteristic of any business built on Bitcoin.
The needs of Bitcoin businesses provide many challenges in terms of performance, security, and new thinking. Out of these challenges will come new practices and software that we can only just imagine as they come over the horizon.
Finally, when there is no more fiat, and the chaotic transition zone between fiat and Bitcoin has been abolished, then everything will be priced in bitcoin, and there will be no volatility, because no one uses anything other than bitcoin to buy or sell. If you know any chemistry, this will be like a reaction’s reagents reaching equilibrium; you can shake it and stir it all you like; the reaction is over and you’re left with the inert product.
Right now, compared to the amount of fiat in the world, bitcoin can expand and contract very rapidly over a large range, because it is small in volume. It can expand to what for many is an unimaginably high price, and then shrink down again. As it gets bigger and accumulates more mass (its price expressed in fiat), these fluctuations will become smaller and smaller. Through all of this, bitcoin remains exactly the same; it is its users that are publishing numbers as a signal to react upon that are changing.
In its essence, this is a struggle between Bitcoiners and liars. The liars who promote democracy and who believe that morality and even rights can come out of a vote.
The ideas of socialism and democracy are diametrically opposed to the core philosophy of a voluntary peer-to-peer system like Bitcoin. Peer-to-peer systems disintermediate the transfer of information and eliminate the need for an arbitrary governing authority or service provider. Bitcoin, like math, has no philosophy and is neutral.
Socialism’s basic premise is that “property is theft”, and that all property, goods, and services should be collectively owned for the benefit of all people in a coercive State with no opt-out. Under a socialist system of forced organization, individuals do not have free use of their inherent rights, which are violently suppressed.
This is an inherently immoral proposition, where one group of people inevitably coalesce into an illegitimate ruling class to control and administer other people “for their own good” — the good of the collective. Even if this aggregation of power were not the case, no man or group of men has the right to force another man to relinquish his property.
Libertarians understand that there is no such thing as “the rights of the collective” and that only a living individual human has rights. Chief among these rights, the “root right”, is the right of property. Anyone who contends that Bitcoin is a socialist idea is fundamentally mistaken about how Bitcoin works and its true nature, or is trying to redefine socialism so that it can fit in with and be the standard-bearer of the inevitable rise of Bitcoin. You can detect this when you read the phrase, “my idea of socialism is”, which means that the speaker wants to abandon the bad smell of socialism and rebrand the word to mean something that it is not, so that he can remain “a committed socialist” and be a part the real world at the same time.
Bitcoin is the antithesis of socialism. Bitcoin transfers, and the ownership of bitcoin and the rules governing exchanges are not administered by a central State authority — unlike a system designed by a socialist, where who can own what, how much of it, and what can be done with it is absolutely regulated by a group of violent bureaucrats.
Bitcoin is a strict peer-to-peer protocol, and not a centralized system under the control of arbitrary rules or fallacious economic ideas like Keynesianism. In its essence, Bitcoin acts like a law of nature (powered by cryptography) and it does not and cannot care about your philosophy or ideology. By dint of this alone, Bitcoin cannot be called socialist or have a political philosophy attributed to it any more than an inanimate object or a fundamental force of nature can. It is designed to do one thing, it does that one thing, and that one thing is not inherently political; only Bitcoin’s users have political ideas that they try, and fail, to superimpose upon it. Bitcoin is neutral, like a hammer or a neutron or a handgun.
Bitcoin is a stateless tool that is purely voluntary. You may or may not use bitcoin at your own discretion. No one forces you to be a part of the Bitcoin ecosystem or to abide by its rules. How much bitcoin you accumulate in exchange for goods and services is entirely up to you and your trading partners, and what you spend your bitcoin on is entirely up to you.
The users of Bitcoin do not “have a say” in what you can or cannot do with them. There is no State, statist, or socialist that can tell you that you may not collect as many bitcoin as you can, or that your bitcoin belong to the collective, or that you must hand over a percentage of them to the State “for the good of the people”.
Users of Bitcoin, by default, are freely associating people, choosing freely to accept the rules of the Bitcoin system. This is the complete opposite of socialism, which is the negation of individual liberty, the abolition of free choice, and the elimination of property rights.
Anyone who claims to be a socialist while advocating for the widespread adoption of bitcoin is de facto acting against their socialist principles and desire to create a world where collective property ownership and centralized direction of capital is enforced by violence.
In a world where money transfers are made entirely through bitcoin, a socialist state will at the very least have a huge amount of trouble compelling people to hand over their money to the State by force. As usual, the socialist collectivists will resort to threats, violence, imprisonment, confiscation of real property, and any other immoral and disgusting means they can come up with to steal money from people. This prompts the question, “how can an avowed socialist advocate the adoption of bitcoin when it has the potential to destroy his violent Statist utopia from the inside out?”.
It’s an interesting question. I suspect that many socialists who advocate the adoption of bitcoin are having a profound internal struggle with the emergence of not only Bitcoin but of the internet itself and its astonishing, undeniable example of stateless cooperation between men that has changed the world and had the effect of benefiting everyone.
The internet has brought the entire body of human knowledge to everyone who uses it, at a cost that is near zero. It has also rendered practically redundant the state monopoly over telephone systems and postal systems. Anyone who still believes that “we” need the State in the face of these revelations is completely insane, or is on the road to abandoning socialism, or is sticking his fingers in his ears, unable to face the facts of this matter.
Mankind is better off in every way without the State. The paradigm shifts brought about by the internet in publishing, music distribution, postal mail, telephony, and the new, unprecedented services created by the connectivity of the internet are proof of this. Each of these industries has been regulated by the State in the offline world, and now that they are running in the online world without State regulation they are more efficient and beneficial by orders of magnitude. The only people who are against this are the vested interests, the buggy whip makers and the socialists, and every time they try and exert their influence they inconvenience and damage people and cause them to expend time and money where they would otherwise not have to.
The next great shift on the internet is going to be the complete disruption of the sclerotic bank-mediated money transfer systems in favor of internet-facilitated money transfers that remove banks entirely from the process flow. This event will cause a great acceleration in the transaction rate of commerce worldwide, will defund the socialist states and be of great benefit to everyone, everywhere.
All the attempts the banks are making now to embrace the internet and peer-to-peer payments systems will eventually fail, as long as people are free to develop software, release it, and freely interface with money at will. This is why PayPal had banned transfers that touch bitcoin in any way; they knew that Bitcoin is completely superior to PayPal, and that it constituted an existential threat to their business. PayPal allowing its system to be used to make payments in exchange for bitcoin is allowing blood vessels to feed a cancerous tumor. Bitcoin is cancer to PayPal and they must kill it at any cost.
The PayPal response to the inevitable peer-to-peer payment ecosystem in the form of their “Blue Dorito” suffers from the fatal elixir of powdered friction, arbitrary rules, suppression, and regulation by the State, all made soluble with a profound lack of imagination — none of which Bitcoin suffers from… but that is beyond the scope of this post. PayPal (and Coinbase) will eventually become the MySpace of moving money because they’re both wedded to a pre-internet mode of thinking when it comes to payments, and they are in an abusive shotgun wedding with the State.
Bitcoin is going to be the vehicle for services that make this disruption come to pass. Once critical mass is reached, Bitcoin will be completely unstoppable. We need only look at the French restrictions on 128bit SSL and the way they dropped them when it became the standard protection for e-commerce transactions. The first sign of this shift will be the adoption of Bitcoin as an accessory service on one of the major money transfer service providers, offering bitcoin transfers to the computer illiterate.
Bitcoin is not socialist. It is not collectivist. It is voluntarist. It is a system of voluntary, entirely non-violent, free association.
There are many misconceptions about what Bitcoin is. That’s not at all surprising. Some of these misunderstandings are quite natural; Bitcoin is something radically new and different, and so coming to terms with what it is can be a daunting task for the computer illiterate that does not know what money is. That combination — computer illiteracy and economic ignorance — are the toxic cocktail that makes it impossible to understand Bitcoin.
Some of the misconceptions however, have nothing to do with misunderstanding monetary theory. They are simply wrong, as it is wrong to say, “liquid water is dry”.
Bitcoin is not democratic. There is no universe where Bitcoin is democratic.
There. I said it in a way that is unambiguous. Bitcoin is not democratic. It has never been democratic. It will neverbe democratic.
It is important to understand this, so that you can know exactly what you are dealing with when you use and think about Bitcoin.
“ASCII Bernanke.” Bitcoin’s creator knows what money is and what needs to be done about the inherent problems associated with fiat currency — destroy the Federal Reserve irrevocably and return the control of money production to individuals voluntarily acting in concert. This is the only way the problem of inflation is going to be solved. That is what Bitcoin does. The portrait on the right is embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain as a tribute to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who destroyed the dollar in a Keynesian frenzy of money printing, defrauding millions of people.
Bitcoin, by design, is not democratic. No matter how many times you try and assert that it is, it is not, and it never will be. And it is also not socialist, as I just clearly explained.
Removing all of the fascinating, revolutionary technical details, the core of Bitcoin is that it is voluntary and the transactions and ledger entries made with it are mediated by a computer program. You choose, as a free human being, to download the required software, use Bitcoin and be bound by the network’s fixed rules.
There is no voting involved, no coercion, no obligation, social or otherwise to use it. You are not even required to donate your CPU and bandwidth to the Bitcoin network in exchange for using it. When you use Bitcoin, you volunteer to use it on its terms. It is as simple as that.
Lest you have any un-clarity about this, making a choice in and of itself is not “democratic”. More on that below, but to understand why Bitcoin is not democratic, we need to understand what democracy is.
What is “democracy”? Democracy is a coercive political system where people in a geographic area are “enfranchised”. This means that they all have a “vote”, allocated one vote per man, that they can cast in “elections”, where the accumulator of the most votes wins, and then that person takes “office”. No matter what the winner thinks or his plans are, he gets extraordinary, unconstrained, extra-judicial, extra-ethical powers over the “electorate” and near total immunity from the law.
That is all that democracy is.
I shall leave out that once in power, these people steal, murder, lie, corrupt, and poison to their black heart’s content, with almost absolute certainty that they will get away with whatever evil they do, no matter what the scale. In fact, the bigger the scale of their crimes, the less likely they are to face any justice of any kind, and the more likely they are to be rewarded. And of course, the sole monopoly on the dispensing of justice belongs to the same “democracy” which in effect, polices itself. In civil litigation the guiding principle is that no one may be a judge in his own cause, but in democracy, this is the default. It is an open scandal.
Now back to Bitcoin. At no point in the Bitcoin process do you have a vote over any aspect of how Bitcoin works, who owns what bitcoin, how they are distributed, transferred, their value, or anything whatsoever to do with its operation. If you don’t like it, you’re free to decline to use it.
The fact that you can choose one good over another does not mean you are participating in democracy or acting “democratic”. You cannot say that, “Ice cream is democratic”, because you can choose whatever flavor you like in Baskin Robbins or Carvel. Or choose Baskin Robbins over Carvel. You cannot say that choosing a Volkswagen over a Ford Fiesta is, “a democratic choice”. Democracy means only the hermetically sealed one-man-one-vote inherently corrupt and unethical political system. That is it. That is all.
Because millions of people have been brainwashed in government schools to believe that the system of government that educated them is the best, they have been encouraged to misuse the word “democracy” as a synonym for everything good or anything that is beneficial. I have even heard people saying, “that’s very democratic of you” when someone does another person a good turn. This is how distorted the meaning of the word “democracy” has become.
Bitcoin is a beneficial technology, so quite naturally, these uneducated and dangerous people will use the word “democracy” in association with it, despite it having no relation of any kind, way, shape, or form to democracy. Thinking about it, it is rather good that these people think Bitcoin is democratic. If they understood its true nature, they would hysterically rail against its mass adoption, as they have been trained like dogs to do against any threat to the violent system that has them in a hypnotic spell.
And these people are very well trained. And totally hypnotized. It should come as no surprise then, that Bitcoin, the software that is going to be of benefit to billions of people on Earth, is being called “democratic”. Sorry to shatter your mesmeric delusions, democracy lovers; Bitcoin is not democratic, and using it has nothing to do with majority rule, force, voting, or anything that touches democracy in any way. Bitcoin is without your greasy taint or fetid stink.
The nonsense that a choice in the market is “democratic” stems from the fallacious idea that consumers spending money is somehow a “vote”. It is not. It is an economic choice, that does not impose any rule over others, has nothing to do with achieving a majority, etc. Note also how some deranged thinkers misuse the word “voice”. This is the only way that the delusional democracy booster can make an argument — by distorting English until words lose all their meaning. People spending money do not “have a voice” (or as they say in the U.K., “have their say”); they have a choice. Even if they are using fraudulent central-bank-printed paper money, their voice, opinion, or sentiment is irrelevant at the moment of choice and exchange.
Even if you were to repurpose “the Blockchain” to act as a voter registration and voting system (ironically, it would then truly become a chain; a Chain of Fools that holds people as slaves to morally repugnant, violent, and unethical mob rule). This would not make Bitcoin the money-transport system democratic, it would simply be another “creative” use of the blockchain software — this time for an antisocial and completely evil purpose: enforcing the hold, coercion, and violence of democracy.
In this nightmare scenario, the miners would become de facto gaolers. Stealing bitcoin would mean that the political system could be bought — literally — for bitcoin. The idea is as nauseating as it is wrong.
All of this absurd posturing and conflating of Bitcoin with democracy (or socialism), however, is now nothing more than faintly amusing noise. The people who are doing it are as irrelevant as dead men.
The people who love democracy are going to find out first-hand what democracy really means and what it did to them, by virtue of its abrupt absence and the contrast of life before and after democracy. Bitcoin is going to defund the State by absorbing and extinguishing all the fiat currency in the world, so that eventually the the deluded slaves of democracy can vote all day and all night without the votes cast having any effect whatsoever. The libertarian society, protected and powered by Bitcoin, will not allow the violent, deluded, and sick devotees of democracy to wage war, steal money, or interfere with voluntary contracts and exchange.
Bitcoin is not democratic; it is voluntarist. No matter what you say or believe, the nature of Bitcoin does not change. You can call it a fruit cake, a leprechaun, cotton candy, a joke, Koosalagoopagoop, or anything else that you fancy. As it is with the ocean, if you dive into it, you will get wet. What you want does not come into it. If it is your desire to stay dry, don’t jump in, but you cannot expect to stay dry and go swimming at the same time. Calling Bitcoin democratic when it is not is utterly absurd, and insulting. The world has had quite enough of it and its virus-like variants.
Finally, Bitcoin doesn’t care what you think. It can’t care about anything. What you think doesn’t matter; that is the ultimate power of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is like a force of nature. You must conform to ethical standards of behavior in the Bitcoin-mediated world, or starve, since the option of violence is taken off of the table. The implications of all of this will only become clear once it is too late for the democracy lovers to stop it, who will be left scratching their heads wondering what happened, why democracy died, and crucially, why everything has not fallen apart…
…but is nowinfinitely better.
No government on Earth can change Bitcoin. They can either fail or adapt to Bitcoin. By allowing themselves to be transformed by Bitcoin, in a counter-intuitive and astonishing result, they will become more powerful than they ever have been. The benefits Bitcoin will bring to every economy will give unprecedented new tools to governments, not to oppress and destroy, but to do right by the explicit permission of the populace.
As people adopt Bitcoin, they will be “voting with their money” and moving to a space where the thin-skinned, lying boosters of democracy have no power over anything.
Bitcoin will eventually absorb all fiat currency in the world as consumer Bitcoin clients like Pine are installed globally. The jurisdictions that allow companies that facilitate this transformation to work unencumbered are going to be the new financial centers of the 21st century. And if they don’t, the absorption is going to happen in any case.
Whether or not your aim is to dominate in Bitcoin services as a nation, there is no other rational way to approach this other than abandoning KYC/AML, and Conway’s “Game of Life” provides a neat illustration of why this is so.
The world in the Game of Life is a two-dimensional grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbors, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:
Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
Let us now superimpose this simple idea on Bitcoin adoption. Imagine a world where there is total KYC/AML, and it has been running for years, with steady growth in Bitcoin adoption. The illustration below is a picture of this world; it is a grid with one billion cells in it. Each cell is a human being who uses money or bitcoin. If the cell is black, they use bitcoin as money. If the cell is white, they use fiat currency as money.
For a cell to turn from white to black (a person starting to use bitcoin), fiat must be converted into bitcoin at a KYC/AML entry point. This happens in a thin line at the edge of the fuzzy gray mass, via compliant companies that provide this conversion service.
Everyone outside in the white zone is either unbanked or using only fiat currency and banks. Everyone inside the mass in the black zone uses bitcoin. Those in the black zone do not ever engage with KYC/AML, because they already have bitcoin, and regularly send it anywhere, to any person, globally without further permission of any kind.
The central mass increases in size as it absorbs fiat currency. It will keep growing until either it absorbs all fiat currency, or a lower-than-total absorption equilibrium point is reached. A lower-than-total absorption equilibrium could be caused by the Bitcoin network reaching a technical upper limit (like the transaction rate limit, which is now impossible on a practical level thanks to Elizabeth Stark’s Lightning Labs “Layer-2” network) or a psychological or political distortion (banning, taxation, FUD, usability, or some other artificial pressure).
We can see from this illustration and thought experiment that eventually, there will be a huge number of users who will never again need to be KYC-/AML-verified, because their money exists and circulates freely only as bitcoin. This means that inside the Bitcoin ecosystem, KYC/AML is worthless after the first conversion. It also becomes immediately clear that any bitcoin leaving the mass on a peer-to-peer basis when new bitcoin users are brought in, creates more mass without KYC/AML, and this amount will be very large once the central mass is large.
This simple illustration shows what will happen as bitcoin absorbs fiat currency. KYC/AML will have a short life, after which it will be worthless as a tool to track people, since a large number of users are in bitcoin and never touch fiat.
The benefits of the virtuous circle of Bitcoin firms all incorporating and working in the same small area of the same city cannot be overstated. As a long-term strategy, abandoning KYC/AML is the only logical path.
Inside the absorption zone is where all the businesses touching Bitcoin will operate. That is where Bitcoin “pure play” businesses will flourish, and that means software companies, providing the very important wallet and merchant services, new classes of services built on multisig and the other tools in Bitcoin; powered escrow services, time-triggered conditional payments, and many other things.
All people, institutions, and governments in the future will be equal peers on the Bitcoin network where no person or entity has any more control over Bitcoin than any other, and everyone has access on the same, provably fair, equal basis.
Bitcoin is the pure, level playing field where no one can cheat and everyone is guaranteeing the network for the benefit of everyone else. This is not “democratic” as some very stupid people might want to convince you; this is voluntarism in motion.
All corruption comes from the law produced by crony capitalism and democracy and unethical companies using it to distort economics. Under a Bitcoin regime, it will not be possible to print money for any reason whatsoever. That former privilege of the State is permanently revoked in Bitcoin. Now money is allocated by merit alone; you cannot accumulate money if you don’t serve other people. That is true on an individual level, the business level, and the governmental level also. Everyone will have the absolute power to refuse to pay for anything they would rather not pay for. This will become a universal law under Bitcoin.
In Bitcoin, everyone will have a free choice to be a slave or not, but not with other people’s money. You can voluntarily choose to subordinate yourself to liars, democracy boosters, and warmongers, but you can’t forcibly enlist other people and their money. Since most people are not interested in “Spreading Democracy”, demonizing and murdering brown-skinned strangers and other vile, disgusting things, you can be sure that the ills of the 20th century spread by democracy and its evil boosters will come to a sharp, abrupt, permanent, and most welcome end.
Naturally the question that follows is, “Which of the current nation-states has the best chance of dominating in this Bitcoin-mediated world?”. Oddly enough, the country whose government behaved the worst in the 20th century has the best chance of turning itself around and becoming a beacon of light again. The United States of America.
The Founding Fathers of the greatest country in the history of the world, the United States of America, gifted that nation a system borne of genius, ethics, and subtlety. That astonishing system, when combined with and constrained by Bitcoin, will create a nation that will last longer than the Roman Empire and be more prosperous. All that is required is that it follows the law as laid down by the Founders.
Hearings on Bitcoin and its derivatives are being held in the USA on a regular basis, and invariably the expert witnesses fail to properly describe the actual processes going on. If they used the correct language and excluded all analogies, the only possible conclusion would be that America cannot regulate Bitcoin under its current legal system. The Constitution guarantees the inalienable rights of American citizens, and therefore Bitcoin is a protected act or practice by virtue of it being a form of published text. The only way Bitcoin can be made regulable is if the Constitution is changed; and that does not mean adding a new Amendment — it means removing the First Amendment entirely.
Inevitably the anti-Bitcoin “protagonists” will face a robust and ultimately successful legal challenge that will remove the possibility of any sort of “BitLicense” or interference from the CTFC, FinCEN, or any other agency. It will also remove any possibility of interference at the State level. The consequence of adhering to the basic law of the United States will cause America to become the center of all Bitcoin business for the entire world, and will cause trillions of dollars worth of e-commerce to flow through the USA.
Let me explain why this is the case.
Some say that Bitcoin is money. Others say that it is not money. It doesn’t matter. What does matter are three things: that Bitcoin is, that the Bitcoin network does what it is meant to do completely reliably, and what the true nature of the Bitcoin network and the messages in it are.
Bitcoin is a database, maintained by a network of peers that monitors and regulates which entries are allocated to what Bitcoin addresses. This is done entirely by transmitting messages that are text, between the computers in the network (known as “nodes”), where cryptographic procedures are executed on these messages in text to verify their authenticity and the identity of the sender and recipient of the message and their position in the public ledger. The messages sent between nodes in the Bitcoin network are human readable, and printable. There is no point in any Bitcoin transaction at which Bitcoin ceases to be text. It is alltext, all the time.
Bitcoin can be printed out onto sheets of paper. This output can take different forms, like machine-readable QR codes, or it can be printed out in the letters A to Z, a to z, and 0 to 9. This means they can be read by a human being, just like “Huckleberry Finn”.
At the time of the creation of the United States of America, the Founding Fathers of that new country in their deep wisdom and distaste for tyranny, haunted by the memory of the absence of a free press in the countries from which they escaped, wrote into the basic law of that then-young federation of free states, an explicit and unambiguous freedom, the “Freedom of the Press”. This amendment was first because of its central importance to a free society. The First Amendment guarantees that all Americans have the power to exercise their right to publish and distribute anything they like, without restriction or prior restraint.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This single line, forever precludes any law that restricts Bitcoin in any way.
In 1995, the U.S. Government had on the statute books laws that restricted the export of encryption software products from America without a license. These goods are classified as “munitions”. The first versions of the breakthrough Public Key Encryption software “Pretty Good Privacy”, or “PGP”, written by Philip Zimmerman had already escaped the USA via bulletin board systems from the moment it was first distributed, but all copies of PGP outside of the United States were “illegal”. In order to fix the problem of all copies of PGP outside of America being encumbered by this perception, an ingenious plan was put into motion, using the First Amendment as the means of legally making it happen.
It’s as simple as that. Once the source code for PGP was printed in book form, it instantly and more importantly, unambiguously, fell under the protection of the First Amendment. As a binary, the U.S. government ridiculously tried to assert that immaterial software is a device, and not text (software or “binaries” is text that can be run on devices). Clearly the idea that software is a device is patently absurd, but rather than waste money arguing this point in court, printing out PGP removed all doubt that a First Amendment act was taking place.
The printed source code was shipped to another country, perfectly legally and beyond challenge, and then transferred to a machine by OCR (Optical Character Recognition, a software tool that can turn a printed page into a text file, removing the need for a person to manually type out a printed page), resulting in a PGP executable that was legally exported from the United States.
The direct analogy to Bitcoin should be vividly clear to you now. PGP and Bitcoin are both:
Pieces of software that can be rendered as printed text on paper.
Software that generates unique blocks of human readable text.
Designed to generate text that is 100% covered by the First Amendment.
The purpose of PGP is to absolutely verify the identity of the sender of a message and ensure that the message was not read or changed in transit. The purpose of Bitcoin is to absolutely verify the ability of the owner of a cryptographic key (which is a block of text) that can unlock a ledger entry in the global Bitcoin network. Both of these pieces of software are messaging systems and services that absolutely fall under the First Amendment in every aspect, from the source code used to generate the software clients that do the message signing to the text the compiled clients generate, send, receive, and process.
Bitcoin is text. Bitcoin is speech. It cannot be regulated in a free country like the USA with guaranteed inalienable rights and a First Amendment that explicitly excludes the act of publishing from government oversight.
Bitcoin and PGP generate messages that are initiated by their users. Each of the messages that are generated by these two pieces of software are unique. The only bodies of law that could possibly be invoked regarding their output and source code are copyright and patent law respectively. The Bitcoin source is not copyrighted and the core idea of it is not patented, and in any case, none of this has anything to do with the nature of Bitcoin messages, or your right to publish. Typewriters can include patented methods in their construction, and those patents have no bearing on your First Amendment right to publish what you create with a patented tool.
Copyright gives the generator of these texts privileges under the law imposing fines on someone copying your message without your permission, but copyright law has nothing to do with exporting, regulating, or imposing a tax on the messages themselves, and of course, forbidding the copying of your Bitcoin payment message rather negates the purpose of using Bitcoin.
Taking all of this into account, if any legislator, regulator, three- or six-letter U.S. agency or other bureaucrat dares to try and regulate Bitcoin, they will be on a hiding to nothing. A legal challenge will be mounted, and will have to be mounted, because if the State can legislate against a single piece of software that generates messages, a legal precedent will be created allowing the U.S. government to regulate all software no matter what it does.
Bitcoin’s operation is fundamentally no different to what all email, text messaging, and internet-connected software do: relay messages. The only difference is in the software that tracks how the messages of the sender and recipient relate to each other. Email is no different to Bitcoin, save for the fact that a record of the sender and recipient and content of your email is not stored in a public ledger one against the other. We know it’s stored in a private database, but that’s another story. Wink wink.
Here is another example of case law proving that this reasoning is correct.
In Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice, it was established that code is speech and is protected by the First Amendment. This absolutely and unambiguously applies to Bitcoin, with eerie parallels to KYC/AML in Bitcoin. The unconstitutional ITAR requirements are exactly the same as asking Bitcoin traders to register as “Money Transmitters” and seek licenses before they can be paid to transmit text to the Bitcoin network for publication on the public ledger. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in Bernstein’s favor, and ruled that software was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government’s regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional. It is clear to see that Bitcoin falls squarely into the category of protected speech, there is no way around any of this, and the U.S. courts must come to the same conclusion for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is protected speech, and the case law says so explicitly.
The position that Bitcoin is money is fundamentally wrong, and systems like it have existed for many years without gaining the attention of any three-letter agencies. Take for example FarmVille, the massively popular farm simulation game on Facebook.
From Wikipedia’s entry on FarmVille.
This hugely popular game is no different to Bitcoin in nature. FarmBucks exist in a closed system, just as bitcoin does. The only difference is the size of the space where the messages are being sent, and in the case of FarmBucks, the number of users and transactions (messages sent) was large. FarmVille had 83,760,000 monthly active users and not a single one was subjected to KYC/AML to exchange fiat for FarmBucks or FarmCash. Why not? What happened to that money? Why weren’t FinCEN or SEC all over that game as they are on ICOs? No one can explain this adequately. This example is very useful as a tool to pull back the curtain on the people who assert that bitcoin is a money and is fundamentally different to a money kept in a game. All the rationales they use (mostly in the form of run-on sentences) to explain that the differences are inaccurate, and never address the fundamental processes; if they did, they would have no choice but to conclude that Bitcoin is no more subject to regulation than FarmBucks or PGP are.
Clearly, allowing legislation to touch Bitcoin means that any software of any kind will suddenly be liable to arbitrary and unconstitutional restriction. It will set a precedent that will be devastating to all software development in the USA, and software is the means by which everything is run, communicated, exchanged, and ordered in modern society. In fact, it is impossible to run a modern society without software.
Twitter for example, could find itself being regulated; it transmits messages that are no different in nature to the messages that Bitcoin transmits; the only difference being the publicly maintained ledger and application of the messages. In fact, Twitter could turn itself into a Bitcoin company quite easily by adding a few fields to its message JSON schema to include a Bitcoin address for each of its users, adding a page to its client, and running its own Bitcoin server pool. Would that extra text suddenly transform Twitter into a bank? Would that suddenly change the nature of each Tweet that is sent on their network, and cause them to be “Money Transmitters”? How is having a Bitcoin address integrated into your Twitter account different to making a promise by hand on Twitter to your followers or in a direct message?
Essentially, Bitcoin allows you to make written contracts with people without knowing them or signing paper; the network and software takes care of identifying and fulfilling the promise, all with cryptographically signed pieces of text. What the people calling for “BitLicenses” and the absurd, insulting, and totally anti-American “Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act”, are asserting is that because Bitcoin right now has a particular use, it should be exempted from the basic law of the United States of America. That is completely insane, and will have unintended consequences that would be absolutely disastrous for the American economy since almost everything today is mediated by or touches software.
On the other hand, if Bitcoin is left to flourish and the market allowed to define its services, means of setting the value and resolving disputes, Bitcoin as an ecosystem will be extremely robust and widespread, just like the internet is today, after having grown for decades without any regulation or oversight from the State.
We have seen a similar phenomenon with the legal position of encryption in France. SSL was regulated in France until Dominique Strauss-Khan, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, removed the restrictions. They knew that “French e-commerce” would take place inside “le pays Roosbeef” if it were not possible to secure French websites with SSL on demand without friction. American Bitcoin businesses (since the end points will be in their jurisdiction) will be taxed on their profits, and this will be a percentage of the trillions of global transactions made on the network for every conceivable and inconceivable purpose.
The same is true for any other country. The United States looks set to cripple itself by enacting “BitLicenses” and declaring by fiat that bitcoin is a currency, or a commodity, or legal tender. As I describe above, Bitcoin is none of those things by nature, and the myriad number of applications it can be put to is only just being discovered. Our project Azteco is but one of them, with the potential to reach the billions of unbanked people in the world, and provide them with an easy way to access internet e-commerce, worldwide, with a system that makes payment fraud impossible. The potential benefit to the unbanked and the websites that sell goods online and the jurisdictions where those websites operate is without precedent. Only a fool would do something that could harm the advent of this transformation, or shun this new technology and the business building on it.
No legislature will be able to keep up with the advances in software that are taking place; there are too many developers and efficient tools in the wild all over the world, all with equal access to the market. The best the State can possibly hope for is to tax new businesses that use the new tools as they emerge, and encourage entrepreneurs to incorporate in their jurisdictions. If America wants to drive away Bitcoin developers, exchanges, and new businesses, by all means, do so and take the consequences. There are many other places in the world where fast internet pipes have been laid and where the government is not so backward. Skype was founded in Estonia, not Silicon Valley, and this is for a reason. All the big bitcoin exchanges are outside the USA. There is a reason for that. No one wanting to start a Bitcoin business is planning to move to New York from anywhere, because they know that their business models will immediately come under attack.
For those of you who are frightened of a free market in Bitcoin, rest assured, all the laws that currently exist to do with fraud, theft, misrepresentation, and everything else, continue to apply to all people and corporations who use bitcoin. Bitcoin does not make laws or your personal or corporate obligations moot. When you deal with a company, you retain access to the law and recourse to it. When someone makes a promise to sell you goods with bitcoin, that promise is not nullified because you are paying with bitcoin. Good Bitcoin businesses will build dispute resolution systems the way that eBay and Amazon have, so that you never have to go to court to obtain justice if there is a problem. Online, reputation is everything, and bad reputations can destroy your credibility and customer base overnight. This is a far more powerful incentive to behave correctly and fulfill promises, which most people do by default in any case, rather than some arbitrary and absurd “BitLicense”.
All the “BitLicenses” and “Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Acts” in the world could not stop Mt. Gox from having a software problem, and no law can bring back the money lost either directly or through the disruption caused by the software error. Once again, it is entrepreneurs powered by the internet that make life easier and better, not laws and regulations. Regulation does not make software correct; developers do.
I have one recommendation for anyone advocating that there should be a “BitLicense” or that the reprehensible “Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act” should become law. Don’t waste everyone’s time, money, and resources proposing this anti-American idea. The EFF has better things to do with their time than teach the PGP “Munitions Case” lesson all over again. If it goes to court, your side will lose, and as a consequence, America will lose its head start as all Bitcoin entrepreneurs flee the USA for environments that will allow them to innovate, grow, and prosper.
And what can the business people who want a “BitLicense” forced on the software industry say? That they don’t trust themselves? That’s patently absurd. That they do not trust their competitors? If it’s the case that their competitors are not good actors, then the good actors have a market advantage. Remember, a license cannot protect the public from fraud or provide any guarantee of any kind; it can only distort the market.
What these “BitLicense” and Lummis-Gillibrand advocates actually want is a guaranteed market advantage. They are anti-American crony capitalists. They want to prevent the emergence of a “Golden BB” entrepreneur that might destroy their business, they want to slow down and stifle innovation, so that they can become the entrenched and unassailable gatekeepers. They want to bar new entrants to the market. It simply will not work. And it’s un-American.
The American legislature must let the American dream flourish and extend its power to Bitcoin, or it will be compelled to obey the law, and this has started to happen. Two judges in the USA have now found that bitcoin is not money, and have thrown out “Money Laundering” charges against two men:
U.S. Magistrate Judge Hugh B. Scott ruled in a money laundering case in Buffalo, N.Y., that bitcoin is more like a commodity and is not a form of currency, according to a local news report.
He recommended the money laundering charge be dropped against the defendant since bitcoin isn’t money.
In another money laundering case last year, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Teresa Mary Pooler stated it is very clear, even to someone with limited knowledge in the area, that bitcoin has a long way to go before it is the equivalent of money.
Bitcoin is not money. KYC/AML should not apply to it at all. The Hugh B. Scott ruling is highly significant, because it directly contradicts the idea of BitLicence and Lummis-Gillibrand. And lest there be any doubt, all of this, including legal remedies for breach of promise, applies to “ICOs” and “NFT”s (so called, “Digital Collectibles”), which are also nothing more than text stored in a database. The fact that they are called, “Initial Coin Offerings” or “Digital Collectibles” is irrelevant to the underlying processes, and it is not illegal to parrot the language and terms of finance, which are not trademarked or copyrighted. The Hollywood Stock Exchange wasn’t deceptive because it called itself a “Stock Exchange”. Opponents of Bitcoin and ICOs have no good arguments, and the threadbare pretexts for regulation they’re able to synthesize are as flimsy as fiat.
The longer-term effects of bitcoin becoming the only money will be a total collapse in the public’s belief in the Political Class, who, having had the power to steal and redistribute money revoked from them, will have literally nothing to offer anyone anymore. If a ceremonial class of apratchicks (entirely at their own personal cost of course) should remain, it will attract only the most hard-core and mentally ill participants and spectators.
And these evil people will not have stormtroopers on tap to raid citizen’s houses and steal from them with “Civil Asset Forfeiture” and other measures. All security will be provided by the free market, where the only rule enforced is Natural Law.
This is, of course, anathema to democracy addicts, who will be forced to go cold turkey.
Incompetence will also be permanently deprecated and suppressed by the market, because all money is accounted for in a fine-grained way, and people will only pay for services and goods that actually serve them correctly.
All of this may sound like the most “out there” fantasy, but so did Bitcoin before Bitcoin. And now Bitcoin is, and the effects it will have are what we, the people who predicted it will be, not what some idiotic democracy booster believes or wants it to be. The evil people never saw the need for Bitcoin in the first place; why should anyone believe that they have the crystal ball? We do, they don’t.
And as for the imbeciles that believe that only the State can keep people safe, the facts are against this also. The story of the incandescent light bulb is a perfect example of a scenario that will be absolutely forbidden in the Bitcoin-mediated world.
A PDF pamphlet of this article is available for download.
“The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.” –Satoshi Nakamoto
No Free Lunch
Those who decry Bitcoin’s use of energy fail to acknowledge a simple reality: that all things in life require energy, and there is no such thing as free lunch.
Much mainstream debate has been waged on “concerns” around Bitcoin’s use of energy, yet a significant proportion of that conversation has been muddied by deep-seated myopia on the part of legacy financial interests–a type of willful blindness toward recognizing the necessity of decentralized energy money in comparison to compromised fiat financial system of today.
The fact is, any economic engine is only as good as the energy which sustains it. For a network to maintain its structure and persist despite the entropy of the universe, energy must flow, and monetary networks are no exception. Ever since government-issued fiat currency severed the link between energy and monetary creation, the currencies of the world have been steadily marching to their graves.
The Importance of Decentralization
The fiat system is a prime example of centralized stakeholder capitalism run amok, whereby those with the greatest network equity have captured the governance of the monetary protocol, unilaterally manipulating the rules of the game to suit their self-interests. Easy money zombie companies abound, feeding on the capital redistributed to them from society via inflationary monetary policy.
The modern financial system has been co-opted by the most well-capitalized network participants at the cost of all others, namely those lacking asset ownership and access to cheap debt. The centralized control of fiat presents both a single point of failure as well as a single point of control for those with the stake, granting them nearly unimpeachable access and the ability to benefit from printing money.
For any monetary protocol to avoid this fate, it must be sufficiently decentralized and resilient to coercion.
Gold: Nature’s Proof of Work
Throughout much of human history, gold served as such a sufficiently decentralized monetary protocol, where the underlying rules of the gold standard were impossible to manipulate due to the fact that no individual could create physical gold without expending the necessary energy required to generate new supply. Thus, gold had verifiable scarcity and did not carry any counterparty risk due to the very laws of physics that govern the natural world.
These two aspects were highly desirable for money, and were only possible in that nature does not permit gold to simply be printed out of thin air, nor can it be in two places at once, preventing the occurrence of forgery and double-spending within the network. In this way, nature served as an incorruptible arbiter of the gold standard, ensuring “unforgeable costliness” in the production of new money. Network participants necessarily had to shoulder unavoidable costs to obtain gold, thus ensuring an apolitical money backed by nature.
Gold’s Shortcomings
Although gold’s connection to thermodynamic reality granted it scarcity, from a technological perspective it failed to keep pace with the needs of a rapidly scaling, international global economy. Prohibitive weight, inadequate divisibility, cost-ineffective verifiability, and the risk inherent to transporting physical gold around the world to settle payments all contributed to its shortcoming. To solve these scaling problems (namely related to transaction costs) governments created gold-convertible paper notes to facilitate capital flows, thus making (claims on) gold more salable across space.
However, because economic actors placed their gold with centralized custodial banks to increase its salability, the economy necessarily evolved to operate on a system of credit issued against that gold, whereby depositors accepted counterparty risk for the benefit of using paper currency. This effectively increased gold’s frequency of final settlement at the cost of incorporating trusted third-party intermediaries into the architecture of the monetary system.
This system of paper credit was ultimately backed by the balance sheets of central banks that issued these gold-convertible certificates. This meant that the ability of depositors to convert their certificates into the underlying commodity (gold) was reliant upon the favor of central banks, reflecting the permissioned and inherently political nature of the fiat system.
Promises from central banks, it turns out, are worth their weight in gold.
Because of gold’s physical manifestation, it required centralizing solutions that were vulnerable to regulatory capture. In a way, the fact gold exists in physical reality at all led to it being gamed by those with superior physically coercive capacities. During World War One, the conflicting nations were able to suspend gold’s convertibility, funding warfare through the ability to print fiat currency. As well, governments were able to outright ban private ownership of gold while unilaterally imposing capital controls in order to fund warfare, among other government programs.
At the conclusion of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system, the United States had issued dollar liabilities far in excess of its gold reserves on deposit. In 1971, when too many creditors came calling (namely France and the United Kingdom), US President Nixon officially closed the gold window by disallowing gold’s convertibility, bringing the world onto a fiat standard.
Why Fiat Fails
The necessary, and seemingly foregone outcome of government-monopolized money has delivered some particularly nasty unintended consequences. Those able to issue new currency gained the ability to paper over their bad debts, enriching themselves by socializing their losses at the expense of the broader economy.
Traditionally, this regulatory capture benefited governments and entities benefiting from government-granted monopolies, allowing them to accumulate greater and greater stake in the US dollar network. As well, the United States, as the issuer of the world reserve currency, maintains the ability to impose seigniorage whereas the rest of the world operating on the US dollar standard does not have this so-called exorbitant privilege.
Government-monopolized money has consistently generated unsustainable government debt as those with access to the printing press maintain the ability to inflate their obligations away. To debase is in fact an obligation of a state in competition for power with other states, and would otherwise render losers those unable to debase their currency during times of emergency or war.
As the process of ever-increasing government debt and compounding interest accumulation reduces growth, even more debasement is required to further kick the can down the road. All the while, unsound debts are increasingly papered over and forgiven. As a higher and higher proportion of unproductive capital circulates within the financial system, productivity falls and requires even more credit expansion for the system to function in a pernicious inflationary spiral.
Fiat currency, which emerged as an expedient yet centralized way to solve gold’s technological shortcomings, metastasized into an unsustainable systematic destruction of capital, its lifetime limited by the degree to which the state can coerce its citizens to participate in an inherently one-sided economic game.
Energy is the Key to Decentralization
Bitcoin’s proof-of-work is the only way to achieve immutable decentralized consensus for digital money, a domain characterized by adversarial game theoretic conditions; the famous Byzantine General’s Problem that Satoshi set out to solve.
Proof-of-work incontrovertibly requires energy to be expended to mine new coins, and energy carries a necessary, real-world physical cost. This imposition of “unforgeable costliness” (cred. Nick Szabo) bonds digital money creation to energy expenditure, introducing the first law of thermodynamics into the architecture of a digital monetary system.
Energy expenditure serves as the necessary check and balance in the process of decentralized monetary consensus and cannot be replaced. Energy’s inability to be forged by any known means minimizes the trust that individuals must place in one another, allowing immutable code to serve as law in the adversarial game that is money.
Porting unforgeable energy into the digital realm enabled the creation of the first absolutely scarce monetary good, granting humanity the capacity to provably value its collective future free from the monetary debasement implicit of captured, self-destructing, debt-based fiat currencies. Bitcoin’s use of energy now supports anyone, anywhere, to store value free from the yolk of central banking time theft, powering a monetary system no longer predicated upon harvesting future productive capital to sustain itself.
The beauty of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work is that the “opinions” of those who would wish to harm it bear no impact on the network’s truthful and uncensorable depiction of the ledger. The Bitcoin network’s energy-enabled decentralization guarantees it will continue to thrive, and we will all be better for it.
Misinformation #1
The World Economic Forum
“Bitcoin alone could help push global warming above two degrees Celsius”
Response:
This claim is perhaps the most egregious and often-cited misleading piece of FUD bandied about by the media. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is infamous for its disdain for bitcoin, and perhaps this makes sense given its close ties to central bankers and the cantillionaires who benefit from the control of the monetary system. Politics aside, the WEF and its acolytes would be well-served to take a closer look at the “science” they purport as truth when, as even a cursory glance at their cited material, Nature Climate Change, suggests their claim has no basis in reality.
The WEF continues to cite a barely two-page comment published in the aforementioned journal by Mora et al. (2018). This comment has since been debunked three separate times in the very journal in which it was published, a much better reflection of “the science” at hand. These readily-visible responses appear directly above the material cited by WEF, yet coincidentally find no mention by those with “concerns” about Bitcoin’s energy use. A curious case of selective blindness, perhaps?
The Mora comment, as well as being completely unrepresentative of reality, was written by a group of undergraduate students as an exercise to understand the academic publishing process. This level of academic inquiry should have no place in the public discourse and suggests that those with an ax to grind against Bitcoin don’t necessarily care to “follow the science”. If they did, they might have actually read responses like “Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions” (Masanet et al., 2019) which roundly debunks the model used by Mora and makes clear the many orders of magnitude by which Mora’s erroneous assumptions miss the mark.
2°C. To claim outright that Bitcoin alone, which is responsible for only 0.085% (8.65 ten-thousandths) of global carbon emissions, could be solely responsible for 2°C of warming is patently ridiculous, mathematically illiterate and borderline misanthropic. More ridiculous yet is the idea that the WEF is approaching Bitcoin with even a modicum of objectivity when they clearly have no interest in contrary evidence presented in direct opposition to their narrative within the very journal they purport as “the science”. As the WEF continues to make this false assertion, know that it is not done out of concern for “the climate” nor is it tied to an objective assessment of reality. Rather, it is done out of concern that those who previously controlled the global monetary order recognize this and are using all means available to maintain control, with public disinformation being a key attack vector.
Misinformation #2
Greenpeace
“Change the code, not the climate: A software code change would reduce Bitcoin’s energy use by 99.9%. Switching to a low-energy protocol has proven effective and uses a fraction of the energy. Ethereum is changing its code. Many others use less energy. Why isn’t Bitcoin?”
Response:
In a recent Greenpeace campaign sponsored by billionaire Chris Larsen (co-founder of Ripple Labs, the company behind the centralized cryptocurrency XRP), the environmental non-profit has gone on the offensive against Bitcoin, alleging its energy use could be virtually eliminated with one simple change. Never mind their laughable citation of Mora et al (2018) or the fact that Ripple is trying to position its provenant (centralized) cryptocurrency as a low-energy “sustainable” alternative to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work. Instead, let’s focus on Greenpeace’s malinformed perspective; that Bitcoin can simply switch to a different consensus mechanism and voila–problem solved.
Greenpeace and Larsen claim that “Many newer cryptocurrencies are low consumers of energy or carbon-neutral because they use a better model; proof-of-stake”, fallaciously equating proof-of stake and proof-of-work in terms of their security attributes. This dishonestly implies that Bitcoin’s imposed energy demands are unnecessary and inherently wasteful when “better” systems exist.
Fundamentally, proof-of-stake consensus is a self-centralizing security model and thus cannot serve as an alternative to proof-of-work in a domain as adversarial as money. Stake-based systems forego the need for energy expenditure to establish the state of the network and instead delegate validation as a responsibility of the network’s largest stakeholders. Over time, this means that as those with more stake increase their network equity through block validation, they recursively solidify their control over the network.
Simply, the network participants with the most stake dictate the state of the network and this inherently introduces counterparty risk into the system. This is essentially the same security model the fiat system operates upon, where the largest participants can undermine the monetary system due to their wealth, and typical network participants must accept the counterparty risk inherent in holding any money that does not effectively minimize trust. This is nowhere even close to the realization of apolitical money that Bitcoin set out to achieve, and in no sense provides a substitute for proof-of-work despite the opinions of Chris Larsen and Greenpeace on the matter.
Bitcoin, by requiring proven energy expenditure, imposes unforgeable costliness onto the network participants, such that miners are incentivized to accurately record the state of the ledger while being incentivized to respect the rules of the protocol. Trust minimization between network participants is an irreplaceable quality of decentralized money, and energy is an incontrovertibly necessary ingredient to achieve that aim.
Misinformation #3
The New Yorker
“Why Bitcoin is Bad for the Environment: A single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month, and is responsible for roughly a million times more carbon emissions than a single Visa transaction.”
Response:
Comparing the Visa network; a permissioned higher-layer protocol facilitating credit transactions atop the fiat system, to Bitcoin; a permissionless base-layer money achieving irreversible final settlement, is like saying that an IOU and cash-in-the-hand offer the same settlement assurance. Bitcoin’s trust-minimization is not remotely equivalent to Visa, highlighting a critical lack of understanding of what Bitcoin was designed to accomplish.
Inequivalence aside, the quantity of transactions in a Bitcoin block has no bearing on the energy intensity of that block. Mining not only secures newly submitted blocks but secures all previously mined blocks that came before. Bitcoin’s use of energy, rather than processing individual transactions, goes toward making the Bitcoin ledger increasingly immutable with each additional hash. Nearly the same amount of energy would be required for a given block even if zero transactions were contained within it.
This misattribution of energy expenditure also fails to account for higher-layer protocols like the Lightning Network, which can bundle many transactions into a single on-chain entry, massively reducing the (meaningless) expected “energy-per-transaction” cited by the New Yorker. Currently, the vast majority of miner revenue is not even derived from transactions, as transaction fees account for only 2% of the reward granted to miners.
In the interest of valid comparisons, it is important to highlight the relationship between the fiat monetary system and its energy use. Shortly after the fall of the gold standard, 1974 saw the birth of the petrodollar system via an alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia. The US military-industrial complex would provide military security for Saudi Arabia and in exchange, the oil-producing nation agreed to transact oil solely in dollars. These petrodollars held in reserve would then be ‘recycled’ into US Treasuries, thereby establishing consistent demand for US government debt.
While Bitcoin does not litigate the ethics of hydrocarbon production, it is not controversial to point out that the dollar, in that it is sustained by the continuation of the US military-industrial complex (the single largest consumer of oil in the world), carries an incomparably greater carbon footprint than the Bitcoin network will ever begin to approach. All this, while generating abhorrent negative externalities, among which are the countless lives lost to conflict and the inherently political nature of money controlled by a singular geopolitical hegemon.
Misinformation #4
NRDC
“In comparison with more traditional online banking, a single bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 330,000 credit card transactions. Given the world’s exceedingly tight timeline to reach net-zero emissions and avoid a climate catastrophe, the [Bitcoin] boom poses a big problem.”
Response:
Again, more unfounded, uncontextualized fear-mongering coupled with an invalid comparison of Bitcoin, a network for trustless final settlement and peer-to-peer value exchange, with credit transactions facilitated by intermediaries atop the fiat system. According to the Bitcoin Mining Council, an industry organization accounting for more than half of the global hash rate, the Bitcoin network accounts for only 0.15% of global energy use and .086% of global CO2 emissions, an indisputably insignificant energy demand profile. The fact is, other monetary goods are incredibly carbon intensive in comparison. Real estate, which carries a monetary premium far above its use value, accounts for 40% of global emissions and drives significant social externalities including exacerbating the global cost of living crisis and problems.
While it is true that Bitcoin does use energy, and that this energy load carries resultant emissions, a closer look at the kind and quality of energy being used is warranted. Globally, the Bitcoin network uses 59.5% renewable energy, a higher proportion than any other industrial process, let alone a higher proportion than any country in the world. Given these facts, short-sighted, alarmist concern-trolling by the NRDC serves no practical purpose in the discourse around climate change given Bitcoin has a decidedly undersized climate impact relative to its already inconsequential energy demands. The “boom” in Bitcoin mining poses less of a so-called climate “problem” than virtually any industry. Contrary to the NRDC’s framework, Bitcoin is helping to drive the acceleration of renewable energy solutions.
Misinformation #5
The Guardian
“Texas has a problem too. After China’s crackdown on bitcoin mining, many miners moved to Texas, where the electrical grid is deregulated. Environmental groups say the extra pressure on Texas’s grid could cause more blackouts of the sort that happened in February, when households were plunged into dark and freezing circumstances.”
Response:
As noted by The Guardian, Texas has had difficulties with its energy grid stemming from the inability to deliver enough energy when demand is high and incorrectly suggests that Bitcoin miners could cause future blackouts, while the polar opposite is closer to the truth.
Many of the problems facing the Texas grid are due to the high proportion of renewable energy it has integrated, often resulting in a large mismatch between when renewable energy is generated (when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining) and when demand for that energy materializes. This problem of intermittency has led to highly volatile energy prices–a problem for energy producers and consumers alike. Surprisingly, proof-of-work presents an opportunity to mitigate both of these undesirable outcomes and can help stabilize energy markets in times of critical need.
Bitcoin miners are highly mobile and continually seek out the cheapest energy inputs irrespective of geography. This type of uniquely geographically flexible and monetizable energy demand offers a critical avenue for renewable energy financing, unlocking previously unavailable financing options. With proof-of-work’s energy profile, negatively priced renewable energy that would have otherwise gone to waste can find a revenue-positive use while securing the Bitcoin network.
Additionally, Bitcoin miners can be of service to grid operators when prices rise too high, providing demand response functionality (reducing or eliminating energy load) and freeing up additional energy in times of critical need.
Demand response can coincidentally help reduce the need for natural gas and coal-fired peaker plants (a carbon-intensive and costly component of the grid) normally engaged during periods of peak demand. This type of market-enabled flexible baseload demand can help drive energy security and infrastructure resilience while reducing carbon emissions in the process. This capability has even been noted by the CEO of the largest grid operator in Texas (ERCOT) who called bitcoin mining a “great opportunity” for the grid.
Categorically, there is no alternative industrial process in the world than bitcoin’s use of proof-of-work capable of fulfilling such an important niche. It can even be argued that Bitcoin does not use enough energy to help stabilize the grid as quickly as would be ideal. All this considered, proof-of-work turns out to be a powerful solution for the grid rather than the “problem” for Texans The Guardian might have you believe.
Misinformation #6
Columbia Climate School
Bitcoin’s Impacts on the Environment: “To be competitive, miners want the most efficient hardware, capable of processing the most computations per unit of energy. This specialized hardware becomes obsolete every 1.5 years and can’t be reprogrammed to do anything else. It’s estimated that the Bitcoin network generates 11.5 kilotons of e-waste each year, adding to our already huge e-waste problem.”
Response:
The claim that the hardware for mining bitcoin “becomes obsolete” every 1.5 years, based on the study by Dutch Central Bank employee Alex DeVries “Bitcoin’s Growing E-Waste Problem”, is easily dismissed if one looks at real-world bitcoin mining data. Most bitcoin miners are in consensus that three to five years is a reasonable expectation for the extent of a mining rig’s profitable lifetime, yet some miners may continue functioning longer depending on the operator’s energy costs and tolerance for relative return on investment.
For example, Antminer S9 mining rigs, released in 2017, still make up a notable portion of Bitcoin’s hash rate five years later. As well, Antminer S15s, released in 2018, still account for a significant proportion of contribution to proof-of-work. Even a cursory look at the relative quantities of ASICs being used debunks the assumptions used by DeVries (and subsequently Columbia Climate School) are not representative of reality and should not be taken as such.
As said before, the Bitcoin network does not use energy on a per-transaction basis, yet DeVries and those who cite him continue to rely upon this misleading metric in order to create statistics that appear critical of Bitcoin. Even so, the aforementioned quote claims that each Bitcoin transaction somehow creates an iPhone’s worth of e-waste, totaling the equivalent of the “small IT” sector of the Netherlands, a country of 17 million people.
While this is an insignificant amount of e-waste, a mere drop in the bucket of the 53 million tons produced globally, it turns out to be massively overestimated on the assumption that 100% of the weight of each rig is indeed e-waste, rather than recyclable material or otherwise. In reality, the vast majority of the material within mining rigs comes from fans and heat sinks, with just milligrams of legitimate e-waste coming from the (nanometer-thick) semiconducting ASIC chips themselves.
In short, the study cited by Columbia is incredibly exaggerated, decontextualized and even undermines the school’s own premise of Bitcoin having a “huge e-waste problem” if taken at face value. That this unobjective attack was levied based upon work done by an acolyte of the Dutch Central Bank should not be particularly surprising.
As the limited lifespan of fiat currencies comes to a close, Bitcoin has emerged to take its place in re-connecting money to energy and restoring a sound foundation to global economic exchange. Inventor, scientist and environmentalist R. Buckminster Fuller may have put it best when he described the importance of global money once again coupled to thermodynamic reality in his book Critical Path (1981):
“In this cosmically uniform, common energy-value system for all humanity, costing will be expressed in kilowatt hours, watt-hours, and watt-seconds of work. Kilowatt-hours will become the prime criteria of costing the production of the complex of metabolic involvements per each function or item. These uniform energy valuations will replace all the world’s wildly intervarying, opinion-gambled-upon, top-power=system-manipulatable monetary systems. The time-energy world accounting system will do away with all the inequities now occurring in regard to the arbitrarily maneuverable banker-invented, international balance-of-trade accounting”.
Prescient indeed. Unstoppable energy money is finally here, and every watt used to secure the network from centralized control of the monetary system should be celebrated. The energy FUD is barking up the wrong tree and ironically happens to have found the sustainable monetary system they were looking for all along.
