Is Bitcoin (or the love of Bitcoin) the root of all evil?

[Elwar]

So you think that Bitcoin is the root of all evil?

Have you ever asked what is the root of Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Bitcoin is the virtual shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Bitcoin is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Bitcoin is made possible only by the men who produce.

Is this what you consider evil?

When you accept bitcoins in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to bitcoin. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those bitcoins in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those bitcoins, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of Bitcoin,

Is this what you consider evil?

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions–and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

Or do you say that bitcoin is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is bitcoin made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is bitcoin made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Bitcoin is made–before it can be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

To trade by means of bitcoin is the code of the men of good will. Bitcoin rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Bitcoin allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Bitcoin permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Bitcoin permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Bitcoin demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Bitcoin demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your bitcoin can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is Bitcoin.

Is this what you consider evil?

But bitcoin is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Bitcoin is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality–the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

Bitcoin will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: bitcoin will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Bitcoin will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his bitcoin replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his bitcoin.

Is this the reason why you call it evil?

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his bitcoin, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that bitcoin corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his bitcoin? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Bitcoin is a living power that dies without its root. Bitcoin will not serve the mind that cannot match it.

Is this the reason why you call it evil?

Bitcoin is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your bitcoin by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your bitcoin will not give you a moment’s or a satoshi’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that bitcoin is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity?

Is this the root of your hatred of bitcoin?

Bitcoin will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Bitcoin is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Bitcoin will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit.

Is this the root of your hatred of bitcoin?

[Elwar]

Or is it the love of bitcoin that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love Bitcoin is to know and love the fact that Bitcoin is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a millibit, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of Bitcoin and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of Bitcoin are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns Bitcoin has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that Bitcoin is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another–their only substitute, if they abandon Bitcoin, is the muzzle of a gun.

But Bitcoin demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their Bitcoin and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich–will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt–and of his life, as he deserves.

Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted Bitcoin–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then Bitcoin becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the hacker. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that Bitcoin is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed. Bitcoin is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying Bitcoin, for Bitcoin is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers deny Bitcoin and only allow a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Bitcoin has an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.'

When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?' You are.

You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood–Bitcoin. You look upon Bitcoin as the savages did with gold before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the love of money being evil, which you repeat with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves–slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers–as industrialists.

To the glory of mankind, there was, for a brief time in history, a country of money–and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to early America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being–the self-made man–the American industrialist.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity–to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the bitcoin and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide– as, I think, he will.

Until and unless you discover that Bitcoin is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When Bitcoin ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men.

Blood, whips and guns....or bitcoins. Take your choice–there is no other–and your time is running out.

--slight changes made to "Francisco's Money Speech" from Atlas Shrugged.

[yogi]

What is done out of Love is beyond Good and Evil.

[Elwar]

What is done out of Love is beyond Good and Evil.

To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love Bitcoin is to know and love the fact that Bitcoin is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a millibit, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of Bitcoin and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of Bitcoin are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

[yogi]

To be honest Elwar, I like the post, but I don't think I understand the point you're making.

[Elwar]

To be honest Elwar, I like the post, but I don't think I understand the point you're making.

Perhaps the shortened version is easier:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYJtHd28BXU

[yogi]

Thanks for the link, but I still don't get it  . What's the main point/s of the OP?


[EDIT]

Ah, I get it, you've taken a manuscript and replace the word 'money' with 'bitcoin'.

[The-Real-Link]

Thanks for the link, but I still don't get it  . What's the main point/s of the OP?


[EDIT]

Ah, I get it, you've taken a manuscript and replace the word 'money' with 'bitcoin'.

Yep .  Caught that video before and I'm like "wait, isn't he just replacing "money" with "Bitcoin""?  But, no, still a good read.

[virtualmaster]

Bitcoin is just functioning and is needed.

[RagnarDanneskjold]

Thanks for the link, but I still don't get it  . What's the main point/s of the OP?


[EDIT]

Ah, I get it, you've taken a manuscript and replace the word 'money' with 'bitcoin'.

I don't think the point was just to be clever and replace a word. The 'Frisco money speech is essentially the foundation and starting point in the Atlas journey..even though it is at least a few hundred pages in.  This speech was probably mankind's first ever comprehensive, intelligible justification for the philosophy and morality of capitalism available to the masses. The group of men inspired by this speech and the novel have gone on to create the majority of the world's existing wealth/infrastructure and have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Her novels are at times quite difficult/cathartic to read, but anyone who wants to understand the language and culture of success should try to read this book.  I'm a recruiter by day, hire a few hundred people a year, almost every one of my otherwise qualified candidates who don't get hired, I can directly attribute to the fact that they do not speak the language and culture of success - its more important and useful than an ivy league MBA.

Any btcboys who have not read the book should take off the next week and get ready to think different.  Do not reccomend cliffs notes - the story's value exists mostly in the dialog/monologs like this speech.. so the main plot points/storyline (sci-fi/industrial thriller) aren't esp. relevant to the philosophy.

More BTC Rand MadLibs - Bitcoin in lieu of 'civilization' and 'free market'

"Bitcoin is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Bitcoin is the process of setting man free from men.
The precondition of a Bitcoin society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement."

"The Bitcoin represents the social application of an objective theory of values. Since values are to be discovered by man’s mind, men must be free to discover them—to think, to study, to translate their knowledge into physical form, to offer their products for trade, to judge them, and to choose, be it material goods or ideas, a loaf of bread or a philosophical treatise. Since values are established contextually, every man must judge for himself, in the context of his own knowledge, goals, and interests. Since values are determined by the nature of reality, it is reality that serves as men’s ultimate arbiter: if a man’s judgment is right, the rewards are his; if it is wrong, he is his only victim...
A Bitcoin is a continuous process that cannot be held still, an upward process that demands the best (the most rational) of every man and rewards him accordingly. While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane. The majority learn by demonstration, the minority is free to demonstrate. The “philosophically objective” value of a new product serves as the teacher for those who are willing to exercise their rational faculty, each to the extent of his ability."

[AliceWonder]

So you think that Bitcoin is the root of all evil?

Well, it is a little worrisome that they want my QR code tattoo'd on my right hand or forehead...