Tag Archives: crypto

Bitcoin is the most valuable asset in human history

When I first started writing this blog, the price of a single bitcoin was around $230 or so. Today the price of a single bitcoin is beyond $17,000 along with a whole slew of new financial assets that have been created by no governments or bankers; but by cryptography, computers, and coders alone.

bitcoin-price

This new kind of money serves not the interests of the banking and corporate elites, or the corrupt government ministers who kowtow to them; but the people who control them alone.

We have seen Bitcoin become the most valuable financial asset in human history despite all of the harping of bankers, economist, and purported ‘experts’ of finance, economics, and money. They  have declared bitcoin are a scourge, that it is ‘rat poison’ and is something to be detested. They say that bitcoin is a grievous wound against all of society, and it must be destroyed.  Again and again we hear from them that bitcoin is a bubble, that it has no social value, and that it is going to ‘crash’–and yet we find that the honey badger of money continues its slog upward and to the right despite all of their raging cries.

This is by no mistake, as Bitcoin is fundamentally better at storing value than any fiat currencies in existence today. This is because of bitcoin’s fixed and known monetary supply and monetary inflation rates. More importantly however is the social consciousness and consensus that allows for bitcoin to exist and never be destroyed. People can now control their personal wealth with nothing more than the power of cryptography. Bitcoin is rewriting the entire way that money is understood and used, which will become a political conquest within the coming decades.

Saving in fiat money is for chumps

keynes“Why would anyone outside of a lunatic asylum want to hold money? What an insane use to put it! For it is a recognized characteristic of money as a store of wealth that it is barren; whereas practically every other form of storing wealth yields some interest or profit.”

–John Maynard Keynes

Today, each and every form of fiat money is nothing more than a legal tender that holds value simply because governments command it. However, if we look over the course of history; again, and again, we see states fail, governments collapse, and their money always inflates to nothing. This is not by mistake, but by design. Just look at what has happened in Venezuela over the last few years.

What those in contemporary finance and government fail to see is that bitcoin radically departs from state-sponsored financial systems and the tyranny that they enable. For the better part of modern human history we have simply had to deal with the fact that government officials could show up at our places of business or our homes, rob us at gun point and call it legal. That governments everywhere could simply fictionalize up mountains of money and give it to their corrupt banking and corporate friends, and tell us it was for our own good.

Again and again, we see the powers-that-be prod us down the road to serfdom, and tell us it is the yellow brick road to the Emerald City. We have seen what happens to those who follow that path, and the poverty it creates for all of us.

The revolution that we have all been waiting for is finally here, and it is the radical divorce of state and money from each other. Governments were never entitled to steal the wealth of the world for themselves and for their barbaric and unholy purposes. We finally have a way to resist their tyranny and fight back with economic means alone. Just as we once saw the radical divorce of church and state fundamentally change society for the better, we will once again witness such a radical epochal change–but this time it will be from the separation of money from the state.

Those of us who hodl bitcoin know and understand that bitcoin has nothing to do with money. The true purpose of Bitcoin is to create a new form of economic power that will be the harbinger of a new society from which freedom and liberty are more than meager slogans. Bitcoin will empower a society where all economic power is outside and beyond the control of the state; and the monstrous banking and financial sectors will be vanquished from this earth once and for all. It is from this base of power that we are creating that a whole new society within the framework of the web that will allow for us to free ourselves from debt bondage, and corporate slavery forever.

Bitcoin will become the most value asset in history not only because it is a better form of money, but because of the astounding economic, social, and political power it creates. Through tearing out the economic base of the corrupt systems of fiat money; we can create a new and more egalitarian society using the power of the Bitcoin and cryptography. The banners we will raise in this new society will have the following inscribed upon them for all to see and choose to follow if they wish:

To each according to their code, to each according to their keys! 

Trojan Horse Blockchain

trojan horseBitcoin is the trojan horse of the fiat monetary system and will ultimately end the state’s control of money. However this process will also compromise bitcoin’s core principals and cause for the corruption of bitcoin’s pseudonymous traits. Over the next decade as the cryptoeconomy expands its reach to become truly global, the financial system will quake as its foundation shifts from state fiat money, to decentralized digital currencies. While we should celebrate the rise of digital currencies, the full collapse of governments and global financial system is unlikely.

What we will see instead will be the horrifying metamorphosis of bitcoin into a panoptic nightmare. Bitcoin will be used by governments, bankers, and regulators to track our every purchase, and monitor all financial activity. Tainting tools will become so powerful that pretty much any bitcoin transaction will be possible to de-anonymize.

The crisis of fiat money will change not only finance and banking for the better, but the nature of governance as we know it. Bitcoin is going to be a trojan horse to the fiat banking system, and will destroy all government monopolies on this issuance of money. While bitcoin will be able to act as a check on the economic power of governments, in doing so it is also going to expose bitcoin to rigorous state regulations, and ultimately the full capturing of bitcoin as a whole system. Bitcoin may end the state’s control of money, but it may also open the path to the state’s ability to watch all financial transactions.

Inverting Bitcoin

Blythe Masters

Blythe Masters

This video at the Bank of England with Blythe Masters she speaks about what she believes to be in store for the future of bitcoin. She openly admit that the state supports her project, and that, “There will be no currency that gets around government controls.” Later the host of the program states, “There is no innovation that governments cannot seize for their own advantage…” This is followed by a discussion of the panopticon effect that bitcoin can have through tainting bitcoins and tracking their movements. All of this seems to be eluding to the capturing of bitcoin–banks and governments are working together to ‘inverting’ the blockchain to monitor all transactions.

Capturing Bitcoin

To capture bitcoin, all that governments need to do is auction off the bitcoin payment system to be regulated under the threat of force. This is already happening and companies like Coinalytics and Elliptic and providing the tools to taint and track bitcoins coming from anywhere. Effectively, this make every bitcoin highly traceable, which in turn can allow the banking system to merge with bitcoin to create a financial panopticon.

bitcoin-taintingThis new global monetary system where bitcoin will act as the rails of the financial system is magnitudes more efficient than all current fiat systems. This will create a lower general transaction cost when compared to any fiat money today, and will be the foothold that digital currencies will take to win out economically over fiat money in the long run. This is the inversion of bitcoin and will be how bitcoin will finally ‘die’ because of state compromise.

However, this is only the death of bitcoin’s body, not its soul.

Death by state and bank compromise will create the conditions for bitcoin’s core mission to be achieved through it becoming a trojan horse within their own system. This will cause for the destruction of fiat money, and will reassert the power of the purse back into the hands of the people.

There is no way that banks and financial service companies will be able to use ‘the blockchain’ (i.e. bitcoin) without also causing two other actions to happen simultaneously:

  1. The legitimization of bitcoin and other digital currencies as a global money.
  2. Exposing the legacy financial system to speculative attacks from the cryptocurrency economy, ultimately leading to a devaluation of fiat money against bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as fiat money is displaced.

Capturing the State

If bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency, as the central bank of Barbados believes it could be, then bitcoin is forging a path towards capturing the state through the very means by which it has captured all of us: through economic means.

resistBitcoin has some flaws in regards to its privacy that should scare off neer-do-wellers and privacy advocates alike. However, these same aspects are what makes bitcoin very, very appealing to the financial world, and is the reason they will start using bitcoin as their base currency under the mantra of ‘blockchain’. The transparent nature of the blockchain offers the possibility of a totally regulated and systematized world of digital currencies that is a statist wet-dream. However, through implementing such a system, states will also lose control of their choke hold on the economy, and will eventually find it slipping through their grip entirely. The fundamental truth is that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are better money than ANY form of money that we have ever seen! This is by virtue of that cryptocurrencies are not state-controlled, and cannot be state-controlled. It is plain and simple economics at the end of the day which is going to cause for bitcoin and other digital currencies to win out over fiat money.

Bitcoin has created a whole new generation of crypto-activist who see the power of digital currencies and cryptography in a way that will allow for a new fundamental form of power to exercise itself. The trojan horse is not bitcoin itself, but to see the possibility of real economic independence outside and beyond the control of the state which bitcoin enables. There is no longer any separation between politics and economics, and that is the very space in which we will make the new digital economy, and ensure our liberties through strong crypto.

Through refusing to use their corrupt money that they use for war, oppression, violence, and to keep the general population impoverished; we can force governments everywhere to respect our freedoms which our ancestors fought and died for. The state was never suppose to have economic sovereignty over us, and it is now time for us to reclaim that sacred right, and ensure it can never be taken away again. Strike against state capitalism, and reclaim your financial freedom which was never suppose to be taken in the first place!

The Destituent Power of Crypto

Arduino

“There is something that all people, whether they admit it or not, know in their heart of hearts: that things could have been different, that that would have been possible. They could live not only without hunger and also probably without fear, but also freely. And yet, at the same time—and all over the world—the social apparatus has become so hardened that what lies before them as a means of possible fulfillment presents itself as radically impossible” –Theodor Adorno

We will witness the radical impossibility that has been promised since antiquity: a world unified under the banner of true freedom. Through the power of digital technology and crypto, this world will become a reality. This is because the form of power that crypto is based upon is only a destituent kind of power–it only finds value in a world where money, language, and politics have been fully corrupted, and the only thing left to do is to refuse it. Through the deactivation of the power structure as we understand it through a totally new strategy of power inoperativity, we break the whole system.

The new digital economic exist outside and beyond the control of any and all forms of government. It does this through deactivating the control states have on the economy through creating a new monetary system. From the NSA, CIA, and DOD, there is no lettered agency that can claim any degree of sovereignty over our means of economic exchange, and private communications that we have made for ourselves within the framework of crypto. There is nothing they can do other then display their powerlessness against the majesty of cryptography, and their own selfish and fearful need to control everything. Crypto is the bases for the new society that we shall create in the shell of the old.

Destituent Power

Agamben“If revolutions and insurrections correspond to constituent power, that is, a violence that establishes and constitutes the new law, in order to think a destituent power we have to imagine completely other strategies, whose definition is the task of the coming politics. A power that was only just overthrown by violence will rise again in another form, in the incessant, inevitable dialectic between constituent power and constituted power, violence which makes the law and violence that preserves it.” -Giorgio Agamben

The goal is not to create a new form of money–that has already been achieved. The real objective is to render a new kind of law; a new kind of politics. A kind of politics that does not taint itself with the violence of man, or the machinery of the state. There no longer is a need for the law-making violence of the state machine, and we are creating a new world where such crude and barbaric forms of violence can no longer legitimize themselves. We shall vanquished such evil from this world through simply absconding into bits spread all through the globe.

A new epoch is beginning and the first goal is to render both old money and old politics not just worthless; but as a testament of its corruption.

Our power is a destituent one. A power which robs the current laws and politics of any meaning through displaying their total corruption. This empowering a new system which they cannot affect, they cannot touch, and they cannot corrupt. We can do this through shattering the current economic-political monopoly, and rending those powerful in old world indifferent to that of the digital realm.

We seek to reactivate Law as it was suppose to be, rather then attempting to constituting changes through the corrupt system of today. The laws of the old world are meaningless in this digital space; and now we need to make this is true in the world of flesh and steel as well. Once we see that abandonment of the current political architecture is the only way forward, that we will be able to start to creating our new form of politics.

The digital system radically divides itself from the state system of laws through a political praxis of non-violence. Through protecting information with encryption, and widely distributing media against corruption and injustice as a form of truth, we can create a new world.

The legal violence which enacts state laws and creates their power simply cannot exist here: there is no territory in which it can apply itself. This radical division is what fundamentally divides our codified digital laws from contemporary violence made laws. We don’t need the violence of statism to cooperate.

The Digital Commons as an Economic and Political Praxis

Through the power of the internet and the digital commons, we can recreate our systems of government to be the Utopian fantasies they were dreamed to be. We can reactivate the power of being ruled by constitutions–agreements to what we are entitled to as citizens. This can allow for us to be governed by the science and immutability of technology, rather then the finicky wills of men who corrupt with ease for selfish gains. No longer do we need to tolerate the violations of our sacred compacts, and the trouncing of the very rights which create our governments.

The deployment of all of these new cryptosystems with harden cryptography is not just a mathematical breakthrough, but the roots of an epochal change. The economic power of digital currencies deposes of state economic system in exchange for a digital one. This is just the very beginning of the deposition of power away from the hands of the state, and back into that of the people. Over the next decade these systems are going to fundamentally challenge the state, and their control on every level of life.

This power deposes because it is an explicit exit from the current, corrupt economic and political system that is pervasive and all-encompassing in our lives. In the digital, the whole multitude of society can exist; with no minders or masters. Here we have chosen to construct all of this for ourselves, without the help of our masters of state, or their capitalist allies who have corrupted our systems of government for private gains.

Towards the Future

We can create a radical new world where the freedom of all is not just a hope, but a reality. The power of technology has drawn us closer then we have ever been before, and now we can see the world as it truly is:

There are untold billions of us living in the most destitute of situations, fighting for the smallest of scraps from Empire. Once we see that there is the greatest of strengths in creating a new form of digital solidarity which can beat back the beast of global fascism, we then might stand a chance for a real future which we are no longer slaves; but truly free to determine the world which we will make.

The Brinkmanship of Crypto

“A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the true name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive rerouting of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.”
― Peter Ludlow, Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias

States believe themselves to be above and beyond the laws and constitutions that created them. They believe they are the law itself, no different from the kings and emperors that came before them. This has driven the world under the leadership of state governments into a dangerous power struggle with their own people. This game of brinkmanship has led to the extreme development and deployment of cryptography as a means to resist tyranny, and will cause for the downfall of states in the coming years as they lose control of the means of communications, exchange, and ultimately their population.

Due to the constant transgressions of all States into a territory to which they have no claim, we have been forced to use the power of encryption to shield ourselves from their glaring eyes. We use encryption to protect the very rights to which we are entitled, but which the state would still deny us. The same aggressive, violent and illegal behavior states display outwardly towards each other, they now present towards their own people. The have pushed us into a brinkmanship that can only end in our mutually assured destruction:

The people, as bound and sworn subjects, and States, as sovereign governments that reign through the power of the Social Contract and constitutions that bind us.

This is how the old social contract is destroyed, and new smarter one is deployed.

Encryption as Resistance to Tyranny

The power struggle for states to control all communications has each state engaged in a civil war against their own citizen for control of all information. States violate civil liberties of their citizens systematically, utilizing violent police actions to respond to our political actions. We are fed propaganda that such actions are for our own safety, and that the state must see all and approve of all to protect against ‘terrorist’ that are little more than a fabrication. We are brainwashed from a young age not to disobey authority or we will be met with the truncheon and broken teeth. Direct physical resistances is impossible and merely gains us broken bones, and lengthy prison sentences. To abscond into bits is our only hope now.

These repressive bodies of armed men under the authority of the state has driven the circumstances which impels the development of cryptosystems. This dangerous game that has all states engaged in brinkmanship against their citizens, violating their right to privacy and interloping into every facet of life for ‘security reasons’. Through these actions, states have caused for the extreme development and use of cryptosystems across the global. States have proven themselves to no longer be trusted, and we must use crypto to protect ourselves from them. People around the globe can now use crypto to negate the economic and political functions of the state, and evade their unjust draconian laws.

Digital currencies are the economic empowerment of cryptosystems that fights against both corrupt bankers, and the corrupt state fiat money system. Over the next several years there will be a florishment of activity from System D, and the global south as they discover what crypto can do for them. This will be at the expense of the contemporary economic and political system, as more and more people choose to exit state economies and political systems, and join the new digital ones.

Economic Resistance Through Digital Currencies

It is inevitable that this new form of technological capital will clash against the old forms industrial capital. Through the creative deconstruction of money as a social ideal, bitcoin recreates capital as access to, and direct ownership of the social network that is money. It renders a new kind of capital that is based upon mathematics, encryption, and technology; which is superior and more efficient that the violent monetary monopolies of state fiat capital.

Crypto provides absolute protection of both ones communications, and now wealth as well. It is from this base of power that we can start to understand the true power at the root of digital currencies.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are new forms of capital that any person can use from anywhere on the planet. We are creating a new world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.  We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. State legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Through the understanding and application of cryptocurrenices and cryptosystems to the modern economic and political machine, we are forging a new future; outside and beyond the controls of states from the past.

Digital Solidarity

There is solidarity to be found in our mutual quest to have transparent, privacy-protected form of wealth. This solidarity is transnational in its nature, and can be found among people in every corner of the globe. We now have a mode of true economic resistance that will allow for us to reject the corrupt beast of government and capitalism, while forging a more egalitarian system for all. There is now an economic system which makes economic exploitation much more difficult. This will create a rising tide for all, at the expense of the contemporary capitalist class. Crypto gives people a way to organize, communicate, and exchange for themselves, without the approval of the state and outside of the banking system. This new form of international money can operate outside the bounds and beyond the limitations of any, and all states. It is truly a manifestation of a digital sovereign; an economic and political power that is beholden only to itself.

People of the world will adopt cryptocurrencies in the coming decades, not from the majesty that is offered by the mathematical security of these systems, but the from the sheer economic efficiency they present against the old monetary system. Digital currencies are too efficient and inexpensive when compared to the expensive, corrupt, inept system of finance, exchange, economics, and banking the world has today–the transaction cost of cryptocurrency systems are just too low compared to fiat ones. Digital currencies can help our society solve the fundamental issue that has always existed between money, and exploitation: the control of money itself.

Hidden from the all-seeing oppressive panopticon of the technological totalitarian state; crypto is the organizational weapon against the bureaucratic state, their police armies of death, and their alliances with corrupt capitalist who poison and permanently destroy vast swaths of the natural world. We can now fight back without needing to subjugate ourselves to the violence that will meet us if we organization in the streets. We must strike at the root of the problem, which is economic in nature, and has manifest itself though the control money by a small corrupt group of politicians and bankers. We must end this exploitation, and the only way is to create and use another system of money which they can have no power over.

Crypto Endgame

There is a total war that is happening against all people right now–a grand civil war that has all states engaged against all people. This war is pervasive, all-seeing, and complete in the most insidious ways. The web of torment and despair we have endure can only be made present by the catastrophe as Angelus Novus sees it. This is about far more than just money and economics–this is about justice, redemption, and the creation of a free future for all.

As people start to see through the illusion of money and how governments use that to control their populations; their will be a slow abandonment of government fiat currencies for cryptocurrencies. Through withdrawing our support of fiat money, the old system will collapse upon itself, and there will be a grand jubilee. States will be forced to acknowledge our economic power, and ask for our help–to which we will say no, and we will watch them burn.

The war by the state against citizens is larger than about simply having privacy, or a right to personal wealth–this is about fascism. The insidious, hidden mode in which intolerance and oppression is allowed to exist through an authoritarian state masters commanded by capitalist. These people in government care more about controlling people through violence, than to resolve the problems that propel their populations to demand justice. We can now create that on our own; without their help and beyond their control.

We are creating a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

The Revolutionary Vanguard of The Digital Age

“How is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and—if you wish—merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people—primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct.” -Vladimir Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

Vladimir Lenin was the leader of one of the most profound and powerful revolutions that the world has ever seen. Today he has been turned into little more than a goblin of the past by the powers that be. Comprised, defiled, and disposed by the masses due to a century of relentless propaganda against his ideas, and communism itself, most have never read anything of Lenin’s, but will still tell you his ideas were a failure. If we can take the time separate the filth from the facts, we can see that Lenin presented the revolutionary praxis through which the State can be destroyed. Over the course of the 15-years after Lenin released, “What is to be Done?” he build the largest vanguard party in history and destroyed one of the most powerful nation-states that ever existed. The tactic that allowed for Lenin to accomplish this is called vanguardism.

The Digital Vanguard and Proletarian Internationalism

Che Guevara To have a deeper understand of what exactly the vanguard is, we can look to international revolutionary and hero Che Guevara, who implemented Lenin’s ideas to help liberate millions across the globe:

“The vanguard group is ideologically more advanced than the mass; the masses understand the new values, but not sufficiently. While among the vanguard there has been a qualitative change that enables them to make sacrifices in their capacity as an advance guard, the masses see only part of the picture and must be subject to incentives and pressures of a certain intensity… All of this means that for total success a series of mechanisms, of revolutionary institutions, is needed.”

-Che, Man and Socialism in Cuba

What strikes me about this comment is this is the same sort of ideological position that Anonymous and other hacktivist groups have taken without exposing their statist identities. Though the ‘institutionalization’ of the revolutionary values found within digital technology, activist have been able to strip their physical bodies from the struggle, and enshrined them within digital practice. This allows for the entirety of the revolutionary vanguard to exist solely upon digital means alone. What makes this so incredible is that it allows for the fusion of anarchist and communist principals through practice alone. This practice allows for organization around the principals of strong crypto; which blinds the state, and stripped them of their ability to bring violence to revolutionaries.

The second important principal that comes from this digitization of the vanguard is the completeness in which it embraces proletarian internationalism. Through stripping our physical selves from the revolutionary praxis of the internet, we are forced to operate on only a global scale. There is no way to see our nationalities; only our mutual humanity–we can only deduce from our online interactions that the other person is human, and that is it. With the physical protection that is afford to us through this medium, it allows for us to see the full vulnerability of other humans within this system. Though we may not know the physical bodies of those we interact with, we can still see the fundamental properties that make them as flesh and blood as you and I. To see humans first and foremost as humans, and not as nationalities, sexes, races, or labor, is what forces the perspective of proletarian internationalism on to the digital vanguardism. This principal is forced upon from without, unlike communist vanguardism which vulgarizes its own principals in the name of one official power.

To Build a New Way Forward

When we can understand the internet as a revolutionary apparatus to destroy the state and usher in a new epoch based upon digital practices alone, we can see that the first two of Lenin’s principals of the vanguard have already formulated themselves. Heros like Ed Snowden and Julian Assange among many others, have seen the truly revolutionary power of the internet, and have used that power to show the world what a single human can do against the catastrophe of governments. They have set an example that shows the truly revolutionary power of the internet. This is why they have been so ruthless pursued by states, because they show how vulnerable their corrupt system is to our digital power. This power has been know for the better part of a decade, but it has only been with the advent of strong crypto that a single person can stand against the supposed omnipotence of the state; and prove that omnipotence to be little more than smoke and mirrors.

The second of Lenin’s principals (to organize with the broadest swaths of society) has been seen in the Arab Spring, and the failed Occupy uprisings. It proved that the internet can be used to communicate, and organize around revolutionary change. Since 2011 we are seeing more and more direct action being taken by hacktivist groups and individual strikes against various aspects of the state capitalism machine. Each victory in the form of data theft, a site take down against a major corporation, and the advent bitcoin all are displaying the weakness of the political-economic system. However, we also know from the aftermath of these events that the final, and most essential component of Lenin’s theory has not been enacted: Political leadership, strategy, and tactics.

The Need For A Revolutionary Vanguard

To quote Che again, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible.”

We must know and understand that is through our conviction that people shall always matter more than money, that we can change the world. To know that it is we who will fight against the wicked and corrupt, that it is us that shall liberate the impoverished and smash the chains of the oppressed! We do not do this for our hatred of those who oppress us, but for the love of those that we demand to be given the freedom they are rightfully entitled to. It is only through the revolutionary zeal and infinite capacity of our love for humanity over all else, that we can create a new, and better world.

Today we have a choice: we can continue to work within the system, when all evidence points to the corruption, and impossibility of creating substantial change, or we can take it upon ourselves to start actively organizing against this system. The only way that we will be able to create revolutionary change is through embracing the third and final principal of Lenin’s revolutionary vanguard: through political leadership, strategy, and tactics to help steer the masses towards liberation. The only way that this can be done is through the open organization and promotion of revolutionary tactics against the machine. By using the power of bitcoin, and the censorship-resistant blockchain we can create an alternative economy and society that is fully outside of the hands of the state.

The Legal Politics of Money

Digital currencies are a new form of economic organization that exist entirely outside of the reach of the State. This has far-reaching ramification not just for money and capitalism, but for the ideological super-structure of the world today. Forcing concepts like exchange and economics into a theorem where tangibility is no longer needed causes for an unraveling of the state power structure itself. Institutionalized violence is no longer prerequisite for the monetary and legal system to function.

The ideological structure of capitalism has embedded itself into the state via the legal system. The State then acts as a thug on behalf of capitalist by enforcing laws through means of legalized repression and violence. It is from this proof-of-violence concept that states are able to force people to accept the legitimacy of contracts, the law, and the value of fiat money at the point of a knife. If governments could not the violence of their legal systems to enforce the acceptance of fiat money, or the repayment of debt; the entire international monetary system would collapse overnight.

Sovereignty of Value and Legal Ideology

All contemporary forms of fiat money rely on the physical and legal enforcement of laws, and the monopolization of the payment systems in order to create exchange value. All state money systems operate on maxims of restrictions based in law, enforced with mystical propaganda in one hand, and a clenched fist of enforcement in the other. The propaganda that is used to convince people of the need for the State to control money is far more important than the laws that create that money, or the guns and violence that are used to enforce their value. It is only through the repressive apparatuses of the State, and the cooperation of their capitalist allies that allows for this system of fiat money to continue to hold value.

Legal restrictions create the nominal values of the currency bills from all states. It is the same for the EU’s Euro, the Chinese Yuan, or Malaysian Ringgit–the currencies have nominal, redeemable value for goods and services in those Nation-States (or unions), and not outside them.

The value of these national currencies are created explicitly from the monopolization of the payment systems, and the monopolization of the issuance of legal tender. The monopoly of money itself via legal tender, and the monopolization of the payment system by the banks working with the state, is how national currencies forces themselves into a means of value, unlike commodity-monies like gold, sliver, or bitcoin.

The value of fiat money is unnatural and is only create through legal force. The power to create fiat money exist solely in the legal realm. However, what forces them to have value is the violence in which the laws based around those nominal values function. There is no such law to make commodities into money; they are simply valued.  Mises surmises this in the appendix of “The Theory of Money and Credit,”

Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises

“Another acatallactic doctrine seeks to explain the value of money by the command of the state. According to this theory the value of money rests on the authority of the highest civil power, not on the estimation of commerce. The law commands, the subject obeys. This doctrine can in no way be fitted into a theory of exchange; for apparently it would have a meaning only if the state fixed the actual level of the money prices of all economic goods and services as by means of general price regulation. Since this cannot be asserted to be the case, the state theory of money is obliged to limit itself to the thesis that the state command establishes only the Geltung or validity of the money in nominal units, but not the validity of these nominal units in commerce. But this limitation amounts to abandonment of the attempt to explain the problem of money. By stressing the contrast between valor impositus and bonitas intrinseca, the canonists did indeed make it possible for scholastic sophistry to reconcile the Roman-canonist legal system with the facts of economic life. But at the same time they revealed the intrinsic futility of the doctrine of valor impositus; they demonstrated the impossibility of explaining the processes of the market with its assistance.”

This difference between valor impositus and bonitas intrinseca: the nominal value of units imposed by the state–such as the dollar or shekel–and that which holds real intrinsic value; such as the metals, minerals, or other storage of value.

The best example of how these two values act against one another would be a gold coin that has a lower face value than what the coin is worth on the open market–it is not the stamping of the metal that creates value, but the amount of gold that it is comprised of.

Mises spoke further of the historical difference between the nominal value of coins, and their weight as metal:

“Nevertheless, in defiance of all official regulations and prohibitions and fixing of prices and threats of punishment, commercial practice has always insisted that what has to be considered in valuing coins is not their face value but their value as metal. The value of a coin has always been determined, not by the image and superscription it bears nor by the proclamation of the mint and market authorities, but by its metal content. Not every kind of money has been accepted at sight, but only those kinds with a good reputation for weight and fineness. In loan contracts, repayment in specific kinds of money has been stipulated for, and in the case of a change in the coinage, fulfillment in terms of metal required. In spite of all fiscal influences, the opinion gradually gained general acceptance, even among the jurists, that it was the metal value—the bonitas intrinseca as they called it—that was to be considered when repaying money debts.” Part 1, Chapter 3

Today because of the structure of late capitalism, where the state monopolizes the currency, and the banks monopolize the exchange of currency, there is no way to demand repayment in anything other than more fiat. It is from the insidious brilliance of forcing all exchanges into legal structures with no alternative payment forms, that fiat money both creates its own value, and also becomes a legal power.

We can see that money today is not valued because of its bonitas intrinseca, but only its valor impositus. This means that the only way that the state can make its money hold value is through explicit legal means, which are reliant on repressive legal enforcement, and nothing else.  

Physical World Against Digital Laws

There is a glaring issue with this mode of money creation when we start to consider for a moment that the world that we live no longer is orchestrated by legal enforcement of the state, but digital communications.

There is no physical footing in this world, no place for the apparatus to establish itself.The repressive violence states use to enforce their laws simply cannot exist here.

If we return to Foucault in Truth and Power he provides us with more hints about the functions of the state and why ‘cutting off the king’s head’ has been impossible until recently:

Moderator: The King’s head still hasn’t been cut off, yet already people are trying to replace it by discipline, that vast system instituted’-in the seventeenth century comprising the functions of surveillance, normalization and control and, a little later, those of punishment, correction, education and so on. One wonders where this system comes from, why it emerges and what its use is. And today there is rather a tendency to attribute a subject to it, a great, molar, totalitarian subject, namely the modern State, constituted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and bringing with it (according to the classical theories) the professional army, the police and the administrative bureaucracy.

Foucault: To pose the problem in terms of the State means to continue posing it in terms of sovereign and sovereignty, that is to say in terms of law. If one describes all these phenomena of power as dependent on the State apparatus, this means grasping them as essentially repressive: the Army as a power of death, police and justice as punitive instances, etc. I don’t want to say that the State isn’t important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the State. In two senses: first of all because the State, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the State can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. The State is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks, that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth. True, these networks stand in a conditioning-conditioned relationship to a kind of ‘meta-power’ which is structured essentially round a certain number of great prohibition functions; but this meta-power with its prohibitions can only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations that supply the necessary basis for the great negative forms of power. That, is just what I was trying to make apparent in my book [“The Order of Things” which was originally titled “Words and Things.”].

To cut off the king’s head we must venture into a realm where a footing for his power cannot be found. A realm where the physical violence, repression, and thus the capacity to physical enforce nationalistic laws cannot exist. The meta-power of the state and their various laws end where they do–in physical territory, in a physical world. There is no need to cut the heads off of false prophets whom we are immune to.

Digital sovereignty departs from the theology of law, and builds a new economic system that operates from a critical bias of math, instead of physical enforcement. These systems are based upon non-physical knowledge alone (knowledge of the private key), which means these systems are built solely around their mathematical soundness. The code upon which these currencies are written is their own sovereign valor impositus. The computer code itself is the legal-mathematical structure that enforces the rules of bitcoin, and other digital currencies–no State or third-party is needed.

Digital Sovereign and The Banishment of Physical Force

Digital currencies are the kernel of power that a new economic and legal superstructure will be built from. Power is no longer something that comes from the sword, but from the pen.

Violence cannot be an explicit tool of enforcement or appropriation in a nearly-anonymous, digital system like bitcoin or other digital currencies. Economic independence outside of the control of the state or the banks is now a real possibility. This severely underminds the power of the State, the banks, and state-capitalism in total. Digital currencies allow for a new frontier of economic freedom and independence, that is not achievable with the current monetary and legal systems. With bitcoin, people are free to choose who they conduct transactions with, without the permission of the state, banks, or the violence they use to enforce their laws.

When we start to critically assess the current money systems of the world, along with the ideological and mythical structures of sovereignty, law, and the state; we find that they quickly break down under scrutiny. We come to understand that the dominion of the ideologies over our lives is not based upon some holy, progressive knowledge that protects us and gives us salvation; rather, it is barbarism wrapped in blanket, upon blanket of lies, obfuscations, and deceptions.

We see that it is not magnanimity or justice that governs the actors of the State; but selfishness, greed, corruption, and cowardice. We come to see the world as Angelus Novus did, and the horrors of what is stacked in front of us and growing with each passing day. To make whole that which has been smashed is possible, but we must wake the dead in our quest for redemption. The gate is strait, and it is our duty to show others the liberation that can come with each passing second.

In the declaration of independence of cyberspace we declared our virtual selves immune to state sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to the subjugation of our bodies. In the mean while we have spread to every corner of the global to ensure that our thoughts cannot be arrested, and so that the crimes of the state and capitalism will be seen by all, for all of history to come.

We now have the means to reappropriate our sovereignty, our economic independence, and ultimately our political organizations and the State itself. This can and will be done to end the era of state-capitalism, and usher in a new era of global digital organization. We are creating a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace, and using digital currencies to economically unite us is the first step towards this new world.

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Next: Bitcoin as a Commodity Money

Sovereign Violence and Legitimacy of Law

“Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.”

–Satoshi Nakamoto

This is one of the few political comments that we are offered from Satoshi. This is a reference to Micheal Foucault’s interview on power and sovereignty found in Truth and Power:

The monarchy presented itself as a referee, a power capable of putting an end to war, violence and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function, albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep. Sovereign, law and prohibition formed a system of representation of power which was extended during the subsequent era by the theories of right: political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign. Such theories still continue today to busy themselves with the problem of sovereignty. What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done.

Sovereignty, Legitimacy and How Violence Connects Them

The fundamental issue at hand is one of sovereignty–who has the supreme right of rule? Today, governments around the globe have anointed themselves with the supreme right to rule over almost every aspect of life. This is not because of their majesty or our consanguinity, but simply from their monopolization on violence, and the legal framework they use to justify it. There has been a long, and precipitous train of abuses that has created the world as it is today, and considerable injustice that has forced us to ask such questions.

We first must questions where this Right comes from. This Right is not only a historical residue impressed upon us from the evolution of society from feudalism, but also an ideological perspective that is reinforced incessantly throughout our lives. When we reduce this power down to how it operates on an individual and organizational levels, we can see beyond the garb of officialdom, legitimacy, and righteousness that it purports to be, for the crude, barbaric machine that it really is: violence organized under the banner of the state.

This action was legal for the police to carry out–no violence came to the officer for doing this.

Violence is the basis of power that governments use to project their legitimacy into the world. This is done through explicit means, such as police, military, prisons, laws, and regulations; but also through discreet means such as education, religion, bureaucracy, and especially elections. The discreet channels of what is seen as ‘correct’ or ‘legitimate’ is the most powerful form of controlling the conversations of ‘what is violence’ and who is entitled to it. This creates the context for which violence can be used, and thus justified. The utilization of violence to enforce the status quo (i.e. the law) is justified by the ideological discipline that demands authority to be respected, and obeyed for no reason other than that ‘authority should be respected, and obeyed’.

The fact that we are allowed to vote for one of two representatives that invariably represent the same corporate interest of the status quo, is part of the greater dialog that has us believe the legitimacy of such violence. We are told that we have ‘democratic power’ and that if we can just elect the right person (despite having no sort of electoral process for the police or army), that we will be able to solve our political woes. The truth of the matter is distinctly different.

There are people in this world that can initiate violence against others within explicit legal means with no form of recourse. We are subjects underneath the law and subject to it, and we have masters that are outside and above the law; which ironically calls itself the ‘law enforcement’.

It is the threat of this systematized violence in all capacities (legal, economic, personal) that governments base their power from. It is under this banner of legitimacy via legal violence that all governments have operated through all of history. That might shall make right, and as the official judicial decision, that is final. This is the legal bases of the laws of the state, and this is why they can command your death–because they have the power to do so.

Sadly, there simply has never been any other way to politically organize with the exception of sporadic, unsustainable revolutions that fold back into the same power structure that rely on violence. As revolutionary chaos grows, it harnesses the apparatuses of power for itself, and becomes the Specter of the State, legitimizing its own violence and corruption.

This is the theory of the sovereign–how political institutions create power over one another–it is done from the point of a sword, again, and again; through all of history.

This is the revolutionary struggle for sovereignty. As Foucault pointed out, so long as we are still grappling with this central issue in political theology of enshrining the power of life and violence one over another into a legal system, be it in the form of a senator, minister, police officer, judge or king; there will still be the problem of the great negative forms of power. Masters of all institutions seek to be good masters; but first and foremost, they seek to be masters. There is an alliance among the aristocrats that they all believe there is good reason for them to be masters over the world, and to hold power over all.

Sovereignty as we know it can only exist at the bequeathment from something or someone; or violently take from those same powers through revolution. Once entered into the subject of sovereignty, there is an immediate glaring flaw that a political body must offer sovereignty, or it must be taken by force. This force is what we seek to avoid in the first place, and what has locked humanity into a permanent struggle for power against and over itself–homos lupus homnium. For all of human history, this concept has battled between its two poles: one of accepting the sovereignty offered from another, or to fight that offering to take it for oneself. Violence and physical force are the tools used for the sovereign struggle to establish who is master, and who is slave.

Political History of Sovereignty

The most recent political revolutions of the late 16th century shifted the power by delegitimizing the divine right of kings, and enumerating that power into republican councils. Although there was resemblances of change within the structure of power, what really occurred was a shattering; a mutation of the system and a fracturing of power among many actors.  Sovereignty was stripped from kings, and that power was divided among the various ideological structures and repressive state apparatuses that make the modern state.

Screen Shot 2015-05-30 at 9.08.16 PMPower is no longer centralized within one body (The King), but is fractured into the government bureaucracy itself as a corporate body. Power, legality, legitimacy, sovereignty, the party as aristocracy, and state-sanctioned violence as a means to execute the law, are all part of this same political-government structure. However, these forces are no longer vested in the one body of the monarchy, but a new body of people outside the law itself. The decree of Divine Right that was once used to inflict the rule by Kings, is today being used to inflict the Rule of the State, but this time under the title of civil liberties.

Invariable, man finds himself under the bludgeon, chain, and whip, happy to oblige, for he no longer has one master, but many! And this time they are for the good of civil liberties! He fails to recognize that the defenders of civil liberties seek to protect their own rights first and foremost at the expense of his flesh.

Violence is the means that compliance with unjust laws are explicitly extorted upon the populous.  It is not the justice or majesty of contemporary legal systems that enforces the law; but ruthless, uncaring, violence. It is within the hidden manipulations of what is normal and appropriate that we also find apologists who demand to be ruled as a subjects, not people.

If people are to liberate themselves from such an insidious and total system of rule, it must be upon their own merits to help themselves. People must arm themselves with knowledge, and a willingness to think critically to create a new, and better world. Using the internet, bitcoin, and strong crypto we can create a better world, and establish new laws from within the internet to help save us from global environmental catastrophe that is coming.

Cryptography and Self-Legitimacy

Digital currencies retreats from the theology of sovereignty via violence through creating a new mode of sovereignty. Intangible and non-physical, this new form of power is created through a destituent form of power, one that withdraws and refuses to cooperate with any form of violence.

Legitimacy within cryptography is created from knowable and provably unbreakable secrets that can only exist the digital realm or mathematics. It cares not for what occurs in the physical world, but only that of which it can experience in the digital world: provable mathematics and the sacrament of the private key.

Legitimacy no longer comes from an authority within the current political or economic system, but creates its legitimacy through explicitly existing outside of any states control and the violence they enshrine. 

The concept of sovereign is flipped on its head. No longer does legitimacy need to come from state institutions that are empowered via violence, but through provable mathematical systems that are not part of the violence power structure. This creates a new economy system with No God, and No Masters.

No longer do we need to pay for the privilege of our freedom to exchange with one another, or be extorted by the Gods of Government, or their Masters of Capitalism.  Bitcoin re-invents money into what it once was, and was always suppose to be–a network of legal and economic exchange for all people everywhere.

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Next: The Legal Politics of Money

The Absolute Value of Crypto

Secrets have a value. How much, it is hard to say, perhaps invaluable would be a more apt description. Invaluable because a secret can mean the difference between life and death; that which can lead to victory or defeat in war. Secrets have an absolute economic value as well because it can truly mean the difference between life and death. Cryptography understands that the security of communication is essentially to life and death, and there is real value to both privacy and secrecy.

Bitcoin and other digital currencies are built on top of strong cryptography for this reason. This cryptography is strong enough to be considered unbreakable at this point in time, and most likely for the next several decades. Due to the mathematically assured, provable secrecy that bitcoin is built on top of, bitcoin creates additional value outside of the energy spent mining bitcoins by creating a cryptographically strong system of digital exchange. The ability to exchange through strong cryptography, and the secrecy it affords is part of what creates the economic value of bitcoin.

This value comes from the commodity that bitcoin is made from. Just as gold’s secondary values comes from its fungibility; the proof-of-secrecy function of bitcoin gives each unit their fungibility, which in turn creates secondary value. The provable mathematical security of bitcoin means the system is totally secure from legalized theft. No state, banker, or military general can steal your securely stored bitcoin; no matter how powerful they may be, or how many guns they have pointed at you.

A Very Short History of Crypto and War

Cesar’s Shift Cipher

Even before Julius Cesar first used his simple shift cipher for encoding his messages; ciphers, and stenography were wide used to conceal information throughout ancient history. These tactics of hiding information and keeping that information secret, or Crypto, developed as a tactic for war, and has had a large role within power struggles throughout the centuries.

As Napolian Bonaparte said, “The secret to war lies in communication.”

Over several millenia the developments of stenography and shift ciphers got better and better, as they were used for diplomatic and military purposes. A major advancement in the field occurred when poly-alphabetic ciphers, such as Vigenère cipher in 1553. Several centuries later the developments of cryptography were culminated in Kerchoff’s “La Cryptographie Militaire” in 1883, which are now surmised in Kerchoff’s principals.  This was a scientific manifesto on the military application of cryptography, and how to understand the security of cryptosystems and breaking them. Of these principals that Kerchoff established was the need to make the system based upon mathematical principals, and the supremacy of keeping the secret key secret, as if you do not, the system will be know by your adversary.

Just as in war you have an enemy, in crypto there is an adversary–an opponent that is seeking to compromise your system, and break it of its secrecy. If your secrecy is compromised, and if the secrecy of this communication is based upon life and death, you will die. This value of secrecy is absolute, and nation-state’s wars against one another accelerated the improvement of cryptography at a startling rate. This arms race in crypto ran parallel to the arms race for nuclear weapons in the 20th century, and was just as pivotal to its outcome.

The Mechanization of Cryptography for Advanced Warfare

Enigma Machine

The mechanization of ciphers with the rotor machines were developed in the early 20th century. It was the first true attempt to apply a more robust computational principals to ciphering with machines. The mechanization of ciphering reached its apex during WWII with the German enigma machine. In order for the Allies to break the encryption of the enigma, they had Alan Turing develop The Bombe. This was one of the first computers ever created in order to crack the code of the German enigma machines. These ciphers had become so complex, they now needed computers to help with the complex mathematical calculations to crack their code.

Like the wars that the empires throughout the ages have fought; at first their tools were rudimentary and crude, but developed with sophistication, technology, and scientific precision over the ages to what they are today. States now command weapons of mass destruction that can wipe out millions of people in a moment, and they use this as a token of power within the realpolitik of statecraft against other states.

This is called brinkmanship–the art of pushing dangerous scenarios for favorable outcomes on ones own terms. It is within this same vein of power that the tools of cryptography were developed as a means of war. We must ask ourselves: why has this technology been so zealously guarded, with so much human energy expended upon it?

Privacy and Secrets as Power

It is because within the realm of secrecy and privacy that people can organize independently, and outsmart stronger, more powerful enemies. Encryption is a weapon for the weak against the powerful, and a way for individuals to be given a mathematical assurance against the invasions of privacy, both for personal documents, and communications.  It is a mode of mathematically assured protection. One needs not to trust people with money or secrets any longer. Now they only need to trust the code upon which their secrets are hidden. That code is only mathematical, and is binary in nature.

From being built on top of this mathematical encryption technology that cryptocurrencies create a true use-value. Proof-of-secrecy creates both fungible, and security. These features, paired with the limited number of bitcoins, and computational and electrical energy that goes into creating bitcoin units, creates the total concept that gives bitcoin, and other digital currencies, their value. Bitcoin and other digital currencies give rise to a new mode of sovereign economic power. It is this economic force that over the coming decades will deconstruct, and depose of the old concepts of money, value, banking, exchange, protection, and finally the state itself.

The Digital Sovereign

Digital currencies are the economic power that will become the bases for a new way of organizing. This new form of power will create new social, economic, and political organizations which together will create a new superstructure of power I call the digital sovereign. Echoed in the sentiments of the declaration of independence of cyberspace, this is the process of creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. The digital sovereign is the space in which the civilization of the Mind will make itself victorious over the world of flesh and steel.

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Next: Bitcoin and The Internet as Ideological Apparatuses