Bitcoin & the legend of Prometheus
Bitcoin Times Ed 3
Now a motion picture by Emerson Spartz:
The dawn of a new decade has a knack for conjuring up visions of endings or new beginnings, each which seems to have an affinity to the legendary or supernatural.
Two decades since the turn of the century, the dotcom bubble and the twin towers, and just a touch over a decade since the GFC we’ve seen the world continue to hurtle toward disaster; economically, morally, socially & structurally. All the while catastrophe has been kept at bay via the counterbalancing forces of innovation, production and free speech.
2020 now ushers in the new decade along with a timely reminder of how precarious things actually are beneath the surface.
The kicking of the proverbial can down the road, the incessant hiding of risk, the welfare-isation of the economy, the unprecedented levels of monetary expansion, the censorship of speech, group identity politics, the introduction of dangerous and draconian mandates for ‘safety’ and the subsequent moral hazard associated with each have all but hollowed out society and made it more fragile than it ever was.
The world has continued on this trend, blissfully ignorant to the consequences of such decisions and oblivious to the fact that the next catastrophe would entail not only decades of social & economic destruction through the erosion of personal, private & natural capital, but that the mandates & precedents from past events would steepen the slippery slope of tyranny & send us to darker depths.
Well. It’s 2020, and reality caught up to us….again.
We are reminded of how thinly veiled the freedom and stability of our modern societies truly are.
But there is hope.
We understand darkness, because we’ve seen the light. We know hot because we’ve felt the cold. We can call out tyranny because we’ve experienced freedom, and we know right because we’ve all done some wrong.
So long as we’re not beyond the event horizon, we exist in a realm where reality is duality.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction and it should come as no surprise that the creation & proliferation of the ultimate tool of personal sovereignty and liberty is happening alongside the rise of the ultimate collectivist techno-dystopia.
There is never an evil large or dark enough to be all encompassing.
Humans have always risen to the occasion, and this time it’s no different.
The darker the night, the brighter the day. The more suffocating the oppression, the more powerful the spirit of freedom. The more fearsome the enemy the greater the hero.
Satoshi is that hero — and we are all Satoshi.
In the chapter of history now being written, Satoshi is the modern day Prometheus who stole fire from the arrogant self-proclaimed gods of the modern world, and gave it back to the people.
He ‘planted’ Bitcoin in 2008, giving us a decade to learn to use it and set the foundation. That prescience is awe-inspiring and legends will be told of it in the centuries to come.
Bitcoin has become the light that will carry us through the hardest of times, and it could not have arrived at a more appropriate time.
2020 accelerated every draconian state agenda the few more prudent of us have been warning or rambling on about for years:
- The decimation of biological private property rights (ie; mandated vaccinations & tests for a virus for which you have no symptoms),
- The forced closure of private businesses that people have put their entire life’s work & savings into,
- “Great reset” communist agendas and propaganda telling you that “you’ll own nothing & be happy”,
- Unhinged monetary and social policies like UBI & MMT that will erode the remaining human capital & natural resources the world has,
- CBDCs that give central authorities complete control over what you can & cannot earn, what you can & cannot spend your money on and how much they will pilfer from your accounts,
- An all out war on privacy, encryption & free speech,
- Social distancing so that local communities are decimated and there is no more connection with your fellow human beings,
- No more say in whom you can spend your precious time with,
- Heavy regulation of opinions and discussions across both online & offline mediums,
- Complete control of the media and the mainstream narrative,
And worst of all, the support by people who’ve been blindly swept up in the hysteria.
Despite the evident overreach of the state, the blatantly obvious mistakes and the series of erroneous mandates made along the way, there are still millions of people supporting the imposition of ‘more mandates’ on themselves and their fellow man or woman!
Not a moment is taken to scrutinise the claims made by pseudo scientific epidemiologists that want to treat all human beings as if they’re numbers on a spreadsheet, but online shaming, dobbing on neighbours, calling people “grandma killers” or “conspiracy theorists” has become the part time job of many.
These are the same people who will be the first to line up and take a rushed vaccine, for a virus with a 99.6% survival rate.
Ignorance, hypocrisy and fear have truly consumed the masses, but in Bitcoin we find the ultimate counter-balancing forces of truth, consistency and reliability.
The contrast is as stark as can be, which is why I give thanks to Satoshi.
He birthed something that is tied to the very substructure of reality.
Something that lives at the nexus of chaos and order, embodies the flow of entropy into structure, and clarifies how we understand time, energy and objective Truth with a capital T.
Whilst the sovereignty of the individual and the nature of truth is being decimated from the top down by governments, media & the intelligentsia of the old world, a tool for ultimate individual sovereignty and pure objective truth emerges from the bottom up, for a new world.
Like a modern day Moses coming down from atop the mountain, Satoshi delivered the Whitepaper to the world on October 31st of 2008, and subsequently changed everything.
There has likely not been a more transformational time to be alive, and whilst the decade ahead will surely come with a serious set of challenges and the continued erosion of natural law, logic, truth, private property and freedoms, we should all take a moment to be deeply grateful for the introduction of an ark upon which we can board, and from which we can later rebuild.
This fire, immune from darkness, will illuminate all that is.
People will see it from every corner of the world. They will be drawn to its brilliance. They will come to it because it will shine brightest where and when it is darkest.
Bitcoin is the fire.
Satoshi was Prometheus.
He took it back and passed it on to us.
What we do with it now, is up to you and I.
By @AleksSvetski
December 2020
The Bitcoin Times Ed 3 is now live.
Be inspired by ideas on bitcoin, philosophy, economics, sovereignty and freedom.
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Aleksandar Svetski
Jeff Booth
Erik Cason
Giacomo Zucco
Jimmy Song
Parker Lewis
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