Over the last several years I have worked on this body of articles in an attempt to create a cohesive Theory of Bitcoin. Here is my abstract:
The Internet is a sovereign territory that exist outside and above the control of all state governments. Due to the international nature, and economic dependence that all states have on the internet; the internet has now become a spectre that is beyond any of their control. This combine with the imperious nature of bitcoin forms a new kind of money and power that can render the state useless. This power can supplant state institutions, and allow for all people of the world to economically and politically unite in 21st century, but only if we struggle to make it so. Using the internet and bitcoin we can create an international digital sydicate that will allow for the free economic and information exchange of all people around the globe as a single political body.
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I have divided my writings into three (I, II, III) distinct sections. Part one explores the legal history of money; part two covers the economic functions of bitcoin; and part three covers the radical political, social, and economic ramifications of bitcoin.
Part One
This rather long section is of necessity to understand what exactly money is and how it functions from a legal and historical standpoint. There is a long and complicated legal and economic history of money and we must have some understanding of it in order to see how money is a distinct and separate object from value. We must understand that legal power over a long history has literally striped the intrinsic value from money, and replaced it with a false idol of fiat money. This is a form of theft that is only possible through legal means. This has allowed for all States to steal from their citizenry with great sophistication and guile through their alliance with the bankers. It has been over the course of several generations that money has ever-so-slowly lost its power as an intrinsic vehicle for wealth, and been enshrined in the legalist framework of state-capitalism. It is through the State’s monopolization of the mode of exchange–money itself–which has allowed for the State to divorced fiat money from intrinsic value. This in turn has created the great number of economic issues we face today.
To divorce intrinsic value from money itself is an incredible feat for the state; however, it is not without its problems. The state can only monopolize money through force and ideology, not majesty or science. States will always be unsuccessful with the monopolization of money, and history can testify to that.
This is where understanding the mechanics of bitcoin becomes extremely important. Because of bitcoin’s known, fixed monetary supply, infinite divisibility, and imperious security through cryptography; bitcoin becomes something much more than just money, wealth, or value. Bitcoin creates a totally independent, stateless system of economic and information exchange that is pseudonymous over the internet. This is extraordinarily revolutionary, as it creates the basis for a new economic system built on top of cryptography outside of the mortality and corruption of law. This will usher in an epochal change that happens only a few times each millennial!
Once we understand the mechanics of bitcoin we can see that it is truly digital gold. And just like gold, it will be impossible to eradicate from the world. However, there is one feature that dramatically separates bitcoin from that of other commodity monies: its non-physical nature.
The power of the non-physical nature of bitcoin eludes to what I have taken to calling The Digital Sovereign. This is the real power of the internet to affect and change society from without, as a sovereign force. It is with bitcoin that the internet has an economic mode for itself. This economic mode is what will start to radicalize the internet on a whole. When the internet sees the true power that lies within it to change the world, how it can do it with its own money, there will be nothing to stop it.
Part Two
Section two mainly covers the economic functions of bitcoin. First we will explain the mathematical and cryptographic features that make bitcoin provably better money than any money that exist today. We will go into detailed analysis of the features of good moneys, and how bitcoin exudes and embodies all of those ideals in the most scientific manner. This will allow for us to go into a detailed analysis of current system of fiat monetary exchange as a commodity itself. This commodity is the network that is money. Through treating fiat money in this way, we can directly contrast and analysis it against bitcoin.
It is from this lens that we can drive a wedge between the value of money itself as a network, from the value of the legal force embedded within that money. This is explained in the first section in regards to bonitas intresica, and valors imporium. Once we can see all money as being only a network of exchange, than we can see how that network operates both inside and outside of the hands of governments, and their limited economic control.
When we take various economic theories such as Grehmsham’s Law, Course’s Transaction Theory, and the works of Keynes, Gesell, Hayak, and combine them with the praxis of crypto-anarchism, we are given a radical new understanding of bitcoin. It is once we understand how bitcoin functions economically, and why it is superior to other forms of money, that bitcoin shows itself to be the technological tour-de-force that it is.
Finally, taking Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, we can see laid out before us the radical and revolutionary technological power that bitcoin will use to change the world. This is not an opinion, but a fact of economic function. This is given to us by Hayak, who offers us a glimpse into the future with liberated money. In his magnum opus “The Denationalization of Money,” he describes how a world of competitive, non-state currencies would work, and how it can answer the economic and political crises of today.
With the application of understanding bitcoin as a commodity money, we can apply classic banking practices within bitcoin to create a new form of money through transparent fractional banking. This will be the model that will allow bitcoin to become the rails of the financial system, and for bitcoin to build its own debt-based units. This will spell the doom of the contemporary banking and monetary system.
This new form of money is the bridge to the future, and is the core nexus of the ideological development that will be the next epoch of humanity: The Digital Sovereign. It will be the answer to how humans are going to solve all of the monumental and heart-wrenching issues that plague our world today. With the historical and economic ramifications of bitcoin explained from the first two sections, we can now go into the third and most important of the three sections: The political power of bitcoin.
Part Three
Bitcoin is not about money at all… it is about our core values of human-beings and what it means to be free people. Freedom is a condition and identity that is acknowledge through condition alone, and today we are not free, but we can be. Through organizing around the use of bitcoin for ALL of our economic exchange and holding of bitcoin as a form of economic resistance, we can exert true political pressure on a corrupt system through economic means. If just 1% of the world’s population would be militant enough to use bitcoin in this way, as a revolutionary tool to help people organize against the machine, it would be but a week before the system started to seize, and less than a month before it were in cataclysmic turmoil.
This is the power of revolutionary syndicalism on a transglobal scale; we can use the internet and bitcoin to organize ourselves and achieve revolutionary ends. We can organize politically, independent of one another, while having economic solitary together against our respective governments. Using bitcoin as an economic weapon against the corrupt state-capitalist machine to which we all belong, we can realistically create dramatic change in our world. Pulling from the historic traditions of anarchism, we can ultimately organize around the theory of the general strike. This will cause for a complete collapse of the State-capitalism as we know it so we may transition to a new way forward.
This is only possible if we proactively start building towards a better tomorrow now! We must do this through the formation of a revolutionary political union, and advocate from this seemingly radical stance. Through the use of the internet as an ideological tool, we will create a new class consciousness. This class consciousness will fully contain and represent the international proletariate through the ability of all people everywhere to use, interact and organize with the internet itself; and to use bitcoin as the economic vehicle to bring about change.
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Next Section: Sovereign Violence and Legitimacy of Law
“The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U. S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation-if I may use that biological term-that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”
Once upon a time, storing your money within a bank to offer you the security of knowing that your money was safe and secure. In addition to helping one secure their money, banks also found the opportunity to make the use of money sitting in their vaults through allowing easier access to the funds through services like checks, debit cards, and credit cards. As these services evolved, the banking system started taking more and more ‘convenience fees’ for access your very own money! But what is one to do when all banks are part of the greater monopoly that makes up the various national money systems? Until now, nothing–but now because bitcoin challenges this monopoly, and it is much more efficient than this monopoly, it is going to break this monopoly. The fiat money system just cannot compete–it’s too slow, too prone to fraud, and there are too many fees. This is in addition to inflation that has proven itself time and time again to destroy the savings of all the general public. When one see all of the benefits that bitcoin offers and understands how it works, there simply is no good reason to keep using fiat–it’s just shitty money.
Bitcoin Theory 