A history of the solutions so far
Part 2 of this series defined the problem. In Part 3 and 4 we will summarize the solutions that have been attempted and discuss why they have failed.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” in 1787 after the declaration of independence, he was conscious that without some mechanism to give tyrants a reason for restraint, Liberty would not survive. This echoes Plato’s warning that “"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
What would follow, of course is the Constitution, but it would take another few years before the bill of rights would enumerate the things government is not allowed to do to its people.
Unfortunately, even with such vigilance - clearly many people are aware of what is happening - the inexorable march toward tyranny has not stopped.
In part, this is because the politicians have long figured out that small incremental loss of your freedoms, wealth or health is usually never enough to warrant an uprising, such as Jefferson considered. It’s commonly referred to as “boiling the frogs”.
If you have read The Dawn of Everything , you know that ancient civilizations had experimented with ways to handle this problem with their ‘rulers’. They limited the scope of their powers to religious ceremonies or their abuse to certain days of the year or even to a certain distance.
The United States founders also tried to set up a system that separated the powers into three branches, but as Lysander Spooner famously wrote in The Constitution of No Authority:
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”
In other words, this new experiment has also failed.
So, what can we do ?
Sedition, Subversion, Sabotage
Sedition, Subversion, Sabotage is a famous anarchist book by Ben Stone, which advocates various levels of resistance to preserve liberties and frustrate the system’s expansion.
First, with Sedition, you should criticize it, the objective of it being that of waking up others. We all know how effective that gets. This didn’t stop the State from attacking those who sought to resist censorship. The COVID pandemic saw a record number of de-platformed podcasts, journalists and even scientists, causing an exodus to blockchain enabled platforms such as rumble and others as the market answered by inventing decentralized file storage, peer to peer distribution and several other technologies.
Yet again, these platforms remained isolated with a tiny fraction of the user based enjoyed by mainstream media. This changed a little with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X only because Twitter was already a successful network and with the caveat that X is not blockchain based and could be the ideal spying and censorship platform if the State wanted it.
Subversion was the next level. Providing services that compete with the State’s own (often mandatory) offering. I should note here that Subversion is inherently more dangerous to your health than mere Sedition. Although seditious speech (such as graffiti on bridges) is somewhat permanent, it is often repressed first, because it signals to others that they are not alone in dissenting. In other words, it can spread at almost no cost, so the State will make it costly as a defense mechanism.
One of the obvious first subversive offering has been money.
States have always manipulated the money by monopolizing its issuance, first, then debasing it. Again, I won’t go into the details. If you want a decent background on this, I highly recommend Saifedean Ammous’ two books: The Bitcoin Standard which explains the idea behind Bitcoin and The Fiat Standard, which explain how many of today’s problems stem from the State having control of the money and its continual debasement as well as its manipulation of interest rates and escalation of its public debt.
But Subversion isn’t limited to money, it extends to many other services people need: Healthy food, education of children, reliable news, financial advice, medical services, are all obvious areas where a decent amount of delegation is demanded to lead a modern comfortable life. Not surprisingly the State has taken over these services for two reasons: your dependence is its power and its constant debasement has made you more dependent. Funny how that works.
In other words, if you look at what a family needs to eat healthy food, it can certainly grow its own food, but that’s time consuming, there are restrictions and rules. If most of your time is spent growing the food, you might consider selling it to supplement your income and fund your other needs, but there are rules and restrictions there too.
The interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution was once used to give the Federal Government the power to regulate a Farmer’s own food production for his own consumption. I’m not making this up.
If you wouldn’t consider growing the food yourself, then you need some reliable information about where and how it was grown. Again this is an area full of restrictions and rules, where government has stepped in. In a free market, people would gladly pay for an independent source of expertise in the matter to evaluate and inspect food sources and provide dietary guidelines. Instead, the government has stepped in to monopolize these functions, leaving no room for a business to exist to keep providing advice on the remaining areas is has neglected.
I think the State has done such a terrible job of it, with its regulatory capture getting exposed recently, that this area is actually seeing a decent amount of push-back with renewed interest in alternative diets.
The same happened in the News sector, with push-back emerging in the free media and podcasting sectors, while the Medical industry discredited itself spectacularly during the COVID fiasco, in which government had to step in to censor information.
Education of children has also seen some push-back, which the rise of attendance to Charter Schools, definitely a consequence of poor academic results despite their increasing budgets and certainly as a result of increased negligence or outright defiance of school boards across the country when their actions did not align with the wishes of parents.
What’s really interesting about this is that all of these services were once provided privately. There is nothing inherent about them that requires the State to be one of the providers, and certainly not the only one.
This is perhaps because the school system has done a good job of indoctrinating children, now adults, into thinking this is the only way, depriving them of basic understanding of economics:
“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law
The Crypto Revolution
We have witnessed an important moment in history with the invention of blockchain and Bitcoin. Contrary to popular belief, this wasn’t an accident, many people had tried for decades to create a digital currency that could subvert the official currency of the State, which empowers it to abuse its citizens far more than the founders tolerated. With the birth of Bitcoin, a lot of cypher-punks saw the potential for a money that could be insulated from the theft of inflation, but also the promise that the State could be thwarted in its never ending intrusions: taxation might be impossible, rolling back the clock to 1913 when the United States had no income tax, making wars much more difficult to fund and therefore difficult to start or to extend. Many people went to jail over these attempts in the past and Bitcoin’s inventor was careful to remain anonymous.
I won’t go into further detailing of the history of Bitcoin, since there are countless good stories written about it. The key thing to remember here is that Bitcoin is a chain using Proof of Work for mining blocks, with an ultimate limit to the number of coins in existence.
Other blockchains were also born to expand the functionalities offered to the public, also with the benefits of being decentralized: blockchain contracts. Much has been written about this as well, I’ll just summarize the main functionality that is usually at the core of the offering: un-censorable code execution.
This was in effect, an enormous opportunity for sedition as well as subversion.
The reality set in slowly as government figured out they couldn’t stop Bitcoin but they could stop and monitor the Fiat Ramps, exchanges that let you buy with US Dollars or other currencies, by requiring them to abide by Know Your Customer (KYC) regulation they had just passed. It’s funny how that works, they just pass a law then just enforce it, claiming you are a criminal if you disobey their latest edict. They also quickly enlist those corporations to do the policing for them. The blockchain ecosystem was forced to split. The majority of those who never got the original Satoshi memo, VCs that didn’t mind investing in the pan-opticon or just wanted to get rich quick with NFTs, DAOs , Meme coins as well as the dozen Decentralized Finance platforms that peddled stable coins, and yields from the on boarding of new users - i.e. a Ponzi by definition.
On the blockchain contract side of things, we saw the rise of centralized chains that promised to become decentralized one day soon, the chains that catered to woke agendas by switching to Proof of Stake, the chains that sacrificed the solidity of the framework in exchange for mining speed, with an eye on commercial application.
Those who still cared about decentralization had to keep working. We saw the rise of privacy oriented coins and chain. The transparency of ledgers became more problematic than the original strength it conferred the original concept. We saw the rise of Zero-Knowledge Proofs and all sorts of Semi-Homomorphic computations to counter the rise of surveillance.
With a much smaller addressable market - those concerned with privacy and security - the space had to race to drive adoption, which came with security risks mostly in the form of hacks. With a much smaller market potential, the need for Fiat to pay their developers and the prospect of earning crypto rather than Fiat money, this put them all at a disadvantage over those companies that would earn Fiat and could promise to repay in Fiat.
In summary, the promise of freeing people is far from realized.
Most people have very little understanding or care for it until it hits them: they hold their crypto balances in exchanges, even knowing there have been hacks. They let google and social media houses track them, trust their medical information in the hands of doctors and hospitals. All efforts to secede from the State provided infrastructure have remained mostly digital. You can consume digital entertainment on blockchain enabled web sites, gamble on decentralized prediction markets and perhaps get paid a little for sharing your internet connection with someone else. Beyond that, real markets remain black markets as the blockchain based ride sharing, house sharing and farm share markets on blockchain are extremely small, limited to those seeking forbidden products such as raw milk.
In the next article, we’ll go over some of these things, because it’s about to get a lot more complicated.
