The Permanence of Murder & Bitcoin
TO BE OR NOT TO BE, CENTRALIZED, THAT IS THE QUESTION!
You’ve likely heard these old tropes:
Money is the root of all evil
Good times create weak men
Weak men create hard times
Hard times create strong men
Strong men create good times
Well, they’re both egregiously wrong. They both leave out a rather important word. Any idea what it might be? You won’t be surprised.
CENTRALIZED money is the root of all evil
Good times create CENTRALIZED men
CENTRALIZED men create hard times
Hard times create DECENTRALIZED men
DECENTRALIZED men create good times
We can take this one step further. Since money is a technology, and since men wield technology, we can restate both of these expressions again from a perspective of centralized or decentralized technology by stating that:
CENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY is the root of all evil
Good times create CENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY
CENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY creates hard times
Hard times create DECENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY
DECENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY creates good times
So what does any of this have to do with Murder or with Bitcoin? Well, in a word, everything. A subtitle for this article could have been A Brief History of Humanity. And after careful inspection of this history, at the center of it is the permanence of our actions, which holds the greatest weight and drives us forward. A rather unsurprising and simple insight, as all true things tend to be.
ON MURDER
Our good friend the spook, Major Jason Lowery introduced the world to his power projection theory, that no matter what laws are written, ultimately disagreements are always settled in watts, in power, in killing the other guy. It doesn’t matter who is “right or wrong” in a dispute over property rights, because ultimately, whoever wins in the murder game is right by default, because the other guy is dead, permanently, and can’t rebut the victor.
As Jason points out, the thing about law, about written words, is that they can always be amended, repealed, burnt with fire, or shot through with a bullet. They have no permanence, or rather, their permanence is easily voided through murder, through power projection as he might phrase it.
ON BITCOIN
Some 21 years ago, in 2002, long before Bitcoin or Jason arrived on the scene, Nick Szabo published Shelling Out: The origins of Money. In this work Nick describes the forerunners of modern money as the thing with an unforgeable costliness, with a permanence, if you will:
To be useful as a general-purpose store of wealth and means of wealth transfer, a collectible had to be embedded in at least one institution with a closed-loop cycle, so that the cost of discovering and/or manufacturing the object was amortized over multiple transactions. Furthermore, a collectible was not just any kind of beautiful decorative object. It had to have certain functional properties, such as the security of being wearable on the person, compactness for hiding or burial, and unforgeable costliness…The results for our ancient forebears were the first secure forms of embodied value very different from concrete utility — and the forerunner of today’s money.
Lo and behold, what do we find in the Bitcoin protocol? An unforgeable costliness, with Adam Back’s proof of work.
In Satoshi’s words:
To implement a distributed timestamp server on a peer-to-peer basis, we will need to use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back’s Hashcash…
The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making… To modify a past block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the [unforgeable costliness, the] probability of a slower attacker catching up diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added [and thus attaining a permanence to the bitcoin timechain not unlike murders permanence within the power projection timechain].
ON PERMENANCE
Murder is effective, precisely because of its unforgeable costliness. If there is a property dispute, and murder is applied, there is simply no amount of expense that can be imposed to offset the murder, to bring the dead back to life. This is the root reason for the effectiveness of power projection, the permanence of it’s outcome, the unforgeable costliness of its outcome.
You see, human society continues its never ending cycles into bloody revolution every couple hundred years or so, over every piece of habitable land on the planet, since time began, precisely because, all technologies other than murder, become sufficiently centralized to create an imbalanced equilibrium between those with the power, and those without it. The only solution to this imbalance, historically, has been murder, because the written laws that pulled the society forward were the very things that generated the imbalance, because power has a natural corrupting force, because people naturally want more fore themselves and their family, and so obviously if written laws are not permanent, then those in power to oversee the laws, will obviously help themselves to revising the laws for their benefit. This is the case for the most noblest of humans.
It is not possible to fix the problems of amendable written laws by swapping out the humans with other humans with limited lives, so even if we could create a perfect human, that human would eventually die, and whoever took his spot would inevitably not be as perfect. You can’t fix an impermanence problem with more impermanance. Try as we might to avoid the bloody route of murder to establish and enforce property rights, there simply has been no unforgeable costliness superior to murder, the end result of power projection, and therefore, this is always the path we are on, 100% of the time, whether we care to see it or not.
For these same reasons, after every bloody revolution, human society goes straight back to its never ending inevitable murderous climb, back into high society with pomp and parade, full of ridiculous insane laws, because nobody really wants to pursue the murderous power projection route, precisely because of its permanence, because of the potential that those involved in the unforgeable costliness might end up on the losing end. So we play the game, on and on, until finally, the cost to continue is simply too high to carry on with the charade, with the insanity, with the lockdowns, with the mandated medical procedures, with the dismembering of children's sexual organs, and the complete debasement of peoples dignity, self worth and money, that the down trodden, those that wanted to be left alone, fully aware of the suicidal act they take upon themselves is less of a cost than living with the imbalances of power, with the broken laws, that will surely cause untold harm to their children and their children's children.
The most terrifying face of death comes form the hands of men who wanted to be left alone. They try so very hard to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back against the growing imbalances of power, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back their lives as they have lived them are over. The moment the men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back. It is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be which is why, when forced to take up violence, to take up the murderous power projection game, these men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those in centralized power positions who are merely play acting at politics and terror. True terror arrives at these centralized powers door and they will cry and they will scream and their will be no mercy, for it will fall upon the deaf ears of those men whom simply wanted to be left alone.
- Every revolution since the dawn of time
BITCOIN IS MURDER, IN TERMS OF PERMANANCE
The unforgeable costliness of murder has an equivalent for the first time in human history, in the form of the unforgeable costliness of a bitcoin. No matter how much energy is expended the fixed denominator of Bitcoin is unchangeable, and similarly, the movement of each persons individual bitcoin, the numerators of bitcoin that make up the total supply, the denominator, are also unchangeable. It is not possible to double spend a bitcoin altering the numerator of an individuals property, or increase the denominator and thereby altering the value of everyone’s property.
In other words, in terms of permeance, Bitcoin is equivalent to Murder, something that has never been achieved in the brief history of humanity.
But more than that is the positive externalities of Bitcoin relative to Murder.
In the case of Bitcoin an individual is incentivized to produce as much hash rate as possible to increase their control of more property which means generating as much energy as possible. And not just increase the amount of energy produced, but increase as much energy as possible, at the lowest cost possible. And increase as much computing power as possible, also at the lowest cost possible. What this means is that the incentive to control more property, to mine more bitcoin, incentives the production of lower cost energy and lower cost computing power. The lower cost energy and computing power will then filter through all of society by everyone on the planet to assist in ever more flourishing and prosperity. Bitcoin is ultimately incentivizing weapons of mass construction.
Conversely, in the case of an individual looking to increase their control of property, they must develop ever more destructive weapons to kill their adversaries who are looking to do to the same to them. With the game of murder, the game of power projection, individuals are ultimately incentivized to produce weapons of mass destruction.
Bitcoin is the antithesis of murder. With unforgeable permanence like murder, but rather than through the destruction of civilization but through the construction of civilization. So as our world gets further and further into clown world, for the first time in human history, my fellow Kings, Queens, and Knights, we need not raise our swords to resolve the wrongs committed by our blind leaders, we need not plunge ourselves into suicide so that our children can have a better future, we simply raise our hearts and our minds, knowing our property can no longer be debased, ensuring the deflation of the hyperinflated oppressive states, and a better world for our children and our children's children.
AND THE ANSWER IS, TO BE DECENTRALIZED!
With Bitcoin we can break the cycle of centralized power from centralized technology, because the design of bitcoin incentives decentralization. Each individual has more certainty about his future if he personally takes ownership of his bitcoin and of his bitcoin protocol.
Remember the path of human history thus far:
CENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY is the root of all evil
Good times create CENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY
CENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY creates hard times
Hard times create DECENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY
DECENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGY creates good times
So if we can stop at that last line, if we can can keep our technology decentralized we can maintain a state that creates good times, into perpetuity. This doesn't mean that we need to replace Bitcoin with all forms of government, to stop government from having any central control.
The process is very simple. Governments around the world and the centralized technological powers that they wield, are powered by money that they can print for free through the creation of debt. The debt they create are bonds and treasuries and gilts, etc. They simply increase their credit card limits through bank purchases of their debt. And where do these banks get their money to purchase these debts? Primarily from people like you and I through deposits we hold at our banks. In other words, if there were less bank deposits held at banks, there would be less money available to buy government debt, and therefore, less power that the governments could wield. So all that we need to do, to reduce the powers of centralized technology held by centralized governments, is to simply hold our money in bitcoin rather than in bank deposits. But keep in mind, if you are holding bitcoin on an exchange, it is not your bitcoin, it is the exchanges. You, and you alone, must take possession and control of the private key. In this way, we reduce global money held by banks, which in turn reduces a banks ability to buy government debt. The less debt a government can sell, the less money they have to spend on enforcement of their horrific laws and pet projects. Governments will be forced to get lean, and limit their services to only those essential items that taxpaying citizens are willing to accept.
As a bitcoin holder, we keep Bitcoin the protocol decentralized and eliminate the possibility of someone changing the code because each of us bitcoin holders is incentivized to run the version of the protocol we prefer, that we are in consensus with, and the version that we all prefer is the one that is not inflating the total supply of bitcoin, that is not reducing the value of the bitcoin that we hold. So every new bitcoin holder becomes an independent decentralized Bitcoin protocol node runner, incentivized to keep the supply of Bitcoin fixed at 21 million for all of his life, and then when his children inherit the bitcoin, those children will have the same incentive to run their own Bitcoin protocol, ensuring a perpetual decentralized protocol, which thus ensures a fixed supply of bitcoin, 21 million, forever.
Over the coming years and decades, more and more centralized power brokers will find their government debt purchases working less well for them, relative to bitcoin because of its fixed supply, and they, and their children, and their children's children will slowly, one by one, defect from their weapons of mass destruction, and opt into the weapons of mass construction, the Bitcoin network. Over time, our children's children will teach to their children and their children's children the necessity of maintaining the fixed supply of bitcoin, through the decentralized operation of it, to maintain limited powers on centralized governance, whatever shape those might take in the coming decades and centuries ahead.
In the end, all people, of all of Earth, for all of time, will come to accept either willingly or begrudgingly, The Permanence of Murder & Bitcoin.
Wow what an impactful read, 10/10. Like art