Countless times, over and over again, for thousands and thousands of years on this planet, the same story has played out…
Strong men create good times
Scene 1. Establish a sound monetary system
Scene 2. Develop a wealthy society atop the monetary system
Good times create weak men
Scene 3. Begin to redistribute the wealth through taxation
Scene 4. Begin to redistribute the wealth through inflation
Weak men create hard times
Scene 5. Create wars and crises and panics to inflate the money further
Scene 6. Hyperinflate the money until it is useless
Hard times create strong men
Scene 7. Survive the ensuing societal collapse
Scene 8. Make plans for a new sound monetary system
Whether we look at the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or the European succession of empires, including the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, or the British, the story is always the same, build your society atop a strong sound currency, inflate the currency, grow beyond your means, collapse your society, rinse and repeat.
Perhaps this is the inevitable fate of humanity. An unending cycle of booms and busts as we grow. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps instead, we are on the brink of something akin to harnessing fire or learning how to sail the seas.
There was a time, hundreds of thousands of years ago, when humanity did not have airplanes, skyscrapers, or instant global communications. A time when we didn’t have the technology of fire, when we spent most of our waking hours seeking food. It wasn’t until we harnessed fire, when we were able to predigest foods over the fire, that we were afforded the time to do other things. Other things like thinking, and imagining something more than the next meal. Time for us to sit at the fires edge, look up into the night sky, at the glistening stars, and wonder. Time for us to expand our conscience.
Long ago, before we developed the technology of fire, we didn’t have the time to think about anything more than getting our next meal. And today, we are on the brink of freeing up another area of our mind that is constantly calculating, not the next meal, but the next investment. Our money is broken.
In the same way that our food preparation was broken without fire, and we didn’t even realize it, our money has been broken without a fixed supply, and most of us don’t yet even realize it.
The reason that all societies, from those most ancient societies, to the most modern, have always, in every instance, risen to power and then collapsed, is not some innate fault of humanity. This is not some original sin that forces us into failure.
In the same way that a poorly built boat won’t make the trip across the ocean, a poorly built money won’t allow society to cross the grand expanse of time. Not because the humans sailing the boat, or because the humans governing the money, are evil, or greedy, or ignorant, but simply because the boat was not built properly, because the money was not built properly.
It took many thousands of years before humans could devise a ship to reliably sail across the oceans. And similarly, through missteps, and setbacks, it has taken humans thousands of years to devise a reliable money to sail through the expanses of time. In the same way that countless lives were lost to poorly designed ships, countless lives have been lost to poorly designed money.
As history has shown us, those lives lost did not foretell that humans were stuck to some inevitable fate of not being able to cross the seas. On the contrary, humanity rose to the occasion, and through technological innovation, we now easily traverse the seas as a trivial inconsequential matter. And we are now on the precipice of a similar outcome with our money. The correct design has been discovered, a fixed supply, and it has been sailing through time uninhibited for over a decade now, with reasonable expectations set for another 10,000 more decades.
Welcome to the revolution.
From the moment the Romans started accelerating their money printing, they sealed the fate of their Empires collapse. The above chart provides the details of the percentage of silver (money at that time) that was included in the currency. Notice how the percentages of silver in the coin declined over time, in direct correlation with the collapse of the empire.
In other words, the Roman government was printing money faster and faster every year, trying to cover their exploding budgets (sound familiar?!). Ultimately the inevitable collapse ensued, as no one was interested in holding that degraded and debased money, or doing business with that worthless money.
It’s rather obvious that if a boat is faulty, with a leak, it begins to sink. In the case of money, it was historically impossible to see if there was a leak, it was hard to identify if there was too much water leaking into the “monetary” boat. It was not until the creation of an open sourced public ledger, with Bitcoin, that we could “keep an eye on the boat” to ensure there were no leaks. Everyone in the world can easily keep an eye on our monetary boat to see that there are no leaks, that there is no inflation of the money supply which could sink our monetary boat.
But it is not just seeing whether the monetary boat is sinking or not that creates a better money. Certainly the Romans could not keep an eye on their money supply. But in the case of modern society, anyone with an internet connection can readily see how leaky the US dollar boat is.
Instead, what is innovative about bitcoin, is that not only can anyone with a simple cheap computer and internet connection verify the supply, but that same computer can enforce the supply. This is the proverbial spark that has ignited this revolution.
By open sourcing the power of monetary monopoly, there is effectively no one able to change this global consensus. And this is that sly round about solution F.A. Hayek so presciently suggested in 1984:
I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.
You see, every time there has been a new monetary system developed, it has always happened under the governance of the state. There was always some government in power with a military to enforce the monetary system. And that model works well for the initial start up of the monetary system. The problem though with a monopolized monetary system, is that the centralization of the power ultimately results in ignorant greedy humans finding reasons to print more money for themselves, and for their governments. It’s the rational and reasonable thing to do. Humans are always willing to take more for themselves if presented the opportunity.
The problem is that you can’t allow a small group of humans to control the money printer. They will inevitably print too much of it. So rather than changing human nature, we can simply change the monetary system.
When boats were sinking because of flawed design, we didn't go on a program of teaching humans how to swim across the ocean. We didn't employ a social engineering program to give humans gills and flippers. Instead we improved the boat, we made it so the boats don't leak. Same thing with the money. We don't need to remove greed or ignorance from humanity. We just need to make a leak proof monetary system, and that is exactly what Bitcoin is. There is a mathematically sound and easy to understand simple formula in the Bitcoin protocol that limits the total supply to 21 million. No more, and no less. A leak proof money.
And what makes this public ledger so powerful is that rather than having some central bank run the software at their facility, with Bitcoin, every user can run the Bitcoin software at their home, and enforce the 21 million supply. If you wanted to increase the supply, you would need to get the rest of the world to agree with you to make themselves all poor. That would be as easy as deciding you wanted to speak Latin from now on, and demanding everyone in the world start speaking Latin so you can speak Latin with everyone. Good luck with that, lol.
Obviously there are a lot of people that have been lead to believe bitcoin is a scam, a ponzi, that it is useless, or that it will boil the oceans and kill us all, or that only criminals and racists use it, and you don’t want to be a criminal or a racist, now do you?
Of course there is a certain industry, the banking industry, that would lose some of their primary business functions, including the holding, sending and receiving of money, if bitcoin were to, check that, when bitcoin takes over. And so, of course they are going to push a campaign with news organizations and politicians spreading fears uncertainties and doubts about this revolutionary new monetary technology.
When Kodak camera developed the digital camera, and saw their film business threatened, they didn't embrace the new superior technology, they fought it and lost. When Blockbuster video had the opportunity to buy Netflix, they didn’t. They fought it and lost. When the car was invented in the early 1900’s, the horse and buggy industry didn't buy car businesses, they fought and lost.
Humans are naturally inclined to certain ways of conducting business. The bankers are inclined to bank, not to buy bitcoin for themselves. So they will fight bitcoin, and they will lose. They will lose for the same reasons that digital cameras beat film, that digital video beat VHS tapes, that combustion engines beat horses. These new technologies that prevail are orders of magnitude better. There is just simply too much improvement for everyone that dramatically outweighs the losses that the vested industries face.
The same is the case with Bitcoin. Sure the banks and their owners are going to lose a majority of their business. But the improvements to the rest of the populations, to the world writ large, to be able to forgo the tyranny of empire and their inevitable collapse, the ability to maintain a sound monetary system for centuries, for millennia on end, and the ability to quench that uncertainty of the future with a stable cash savings account, is astronomically better for all of society in the long run.
Open sourcing the monetary monopoly is a wholly foreign idea to most of the world. The leaky boat that is the US dollar is completely unseen by many. Our most well known and beloved celebrities have no clue of our sinking US dollar boat. They sense something is wrong, they are grasping for answers, but they miss the target.
For example, recently Jon Stewart began promoting a campaign to get people interested in performing government service. His marketing material was recently tweeted by a former military service member, Jason Kander, who has hundreds of thousands of followers on twitter. Here are two well known guys and here is what they have to say about today’s society:
There should be a draft where every young person has to do one year of something — military, public works — something so that we all feel invested in the same game, because that’s the part that we’ve lost.
You see, there is no discussion of the money printer. The source of the angst, of the lack of feelings of being invested in society, in their minds, has nothing whatsoever to do with money printing.
It will take some time for the grass roots open sourced monetary monopoly revolution to spread across the entire planet. But in the infamous words of Christine Lagarde:
It will come, it will come, in due course. In due course, it will come.
Those closest to the money printers, those paid by it, those that fight to protect it, are blind to, or blinded by, the theft that takes place, and to the inevitable collapse the money printer is pulling towards us all. These “nocoiners” haven’t yet seen that the solution to the problem, the feeling of not being invested, can not possibly be solved by anything other than equitable access to the money printer, the actual source of the unvested feeling.
It’s understandable that today’s leaders and celebrities are not able to see the problem, they’ve been raised on an education of fiat, of by decree, of trust don’t verify. The banks have told us for multiple generations now that inflation is necessary for a stable economy, when it is in fact inflation that is necessary, only if you are interested in the creation and ultimate catastrophic collapse, of empire, as history has demonstrated to all humble observers, in one hundred percent of the cases examined.
A sober, coherent analysis of the current monetary system, of a leaky inflationary monetary system, and its high time preference incentives will lead one to conclude the only possible conclusion, that the lack of access to the money printer, is the cause of the feelings of not being invested, among those trying to survive in this society. And that the only possible way to resolve these feelings is through just that, total and complete unfettered vested access to the money printer, an open sourcing of the monetary monopoly.
It is no wonder that those who have already transitioned to the new monetary revolution of Bitcoin do feel invested.
They each have a vote as to the amount of leaks they want in their monetary boats. Precisely zero. It becomes abundantly clear that the problem with money, the reason money was broken was its unfixed supply. With Bitcoin the supply is fixed, locked in at 21 million, and with a fixed supply, Bitcoin has “fixed money.” Once you see that the problem was the leaks, it is hard to unsee. Like being in a sinking boat, and seeing that the boat is sinking because of the leaks, it becomes pretty apparent, pretty quickly, and pretty hard to unsee the solution, once you see it.
Ultimately there is nothing wrong with money printing per se. The problem always arose from the centralized nature of that printing. When those that print are a privileged class separate from the rest of society, they can benefit from the money printing first before the rest, it’s the Cantillon effect. And this benefit has inevitably led to the hyper inflation and destruction of the currency along with a destruction of the society, every single time, for thousands of years.
The only solution to the problem of centralized monetary monopoly is a decentralized monetary monopoly. By open sourcing the monopoly, Bitcoin has frozen the money supply for all of time to 21 million bitcoin.
The new age of sound money is here. Benjamin Franklin explained it well:
When the people find that they can vote themselves a sound money, that will herald the end of the fiat money dark ages.
The empire fiat dark ages are winding down. THE PEOPLE have open sourced the monetary monopoly and the revolution is here.
Join us.
Loved this article clear and concise.
Great article!!