I think about myself a progressive particular person as a result of I look all over the world and I see that it’s not simply, truthful, equitable, or peaceable. I’ve at all times regarded for tactics to make the world higher, and I’ve at all times executed that from inside the methods I acknowledged as damaged. For many of my grownup life, I’ve anticipated the federal government (one instance of a damaged system) to make guidelines and legal guidelines that nudge the system nearer to justice, equity, fairness, and peace. Isn’t that the most effective we will hope for?
One cause why I encourage you to find out about Bitcoin is so you possibly can query the present system by one other lens. Studying extra about how and why Bitcoin works is just one half of the journey. Bitcoin additionally offers a chance to look at the unexamined, research the water round us, and ask powerful questions concerning the methods we now have at all times lived with. It presents the chance to ask questions we by no means actually ask. What’s cash? Who controls it and the way? Who ought to management it? Studying about Bitcoin empowers you to think about what issues could be like if we change a construction we intuitively know is unjust however have by no means had the vocabulary to query earlier than.
The concept the financial system would possibly at some point be all the way in which mounted has by no means appeared like an actual risk. The concept all the system may very well be changed—the water round us that we don’t discover—has by no means been a risk both. But whereas lots of my liberal mates are very adept at declaring systemic inequities, proposals for systemic change to interchange the methods that trigger these unfairnesses are few and much between. Actually monetary and financial methods are methods that one doesn’t often study, however a greater understanding of Bitcoin curiously affords you a greater understanding of the methods it seeks to interchange, and why incremental change gained’t essentially handle its unfairnesses. It additionally means that you can think about, maybe for the primary time, a world with out these inequities.
The world is managed by political, social, financial, and army methods that each create and rely upon the hegemony of america greenback. Unfairness, inequity, and violence are woven into the material of those methods. They’re inexorable elements of these methods, not simply unlucky externalities that exist on high of in any other case wholesome buildings. To take only one instance, wealth inequality is not only an unlucky factor that occurs as a result of some grasping individuals break the foundations and get away with it. It’s a obligatory and built-in characteristic of a system that will depend on a hegemonic United States greenback being a world reserve asset (see Chapter 7). However now, for the primary time in human historical past, we now have a possible financial invention that would overhaul the system, not simply tweak it from inside to be a little bit extra truthful.
In my expertise, the extra an individual is aware of concerning the legacy monetary system, the extra they dislike it. Henry Ford is credited, almost certainly incorrectly, with having stated, “It’s effectively sufficient that folks of the nation don’t perceive our banking and financial system, for in the event that they did, I consider there could be a revolution earlier than tomorrow morning.”5 Bitcoin may very well be the nudge that will help you find out about our banking and financial system and begin a peaceable revolution.
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5: “The Reality Is Out: Cash Is Simply Created, and the Banks Are Rolling in It,” Underground Community, accessed November 29, 2022, https://underground.internet/cash/the-truth-is-out-and-the-banks-are-rolling-in-it/.
