Friends, WO-men (apud '@Bob'), sovereigns, lend me your ears.
Bitcoin has often been described as an unstoppable force like gravity. satoshi hadn't created it but had discovered it, pulled all the available information together, and proven it mathematically. Sure you can go against it for a short time, the rich by pouring huge numbers into space programs, they get 2 of their employees that floating feeling for a few seconds, and the poor for a sweet moment or two by bouncing back from the bottom of a bungee jump. (apud
@tc)
As with the bungee cord, the analogy cannot be stretched too far. We can by overcoming gravity for a moment, get beyond this poor abused planet, and start to think about other worlds. Bitcoin is earthbound, and relevant to us here and now. It is the unstoppability that compares now. It is always there, and no decision, no army, no movement can stop it.
The minute this discovery was made, those in power saw the danger and started to adapt. You adapt to bitcoin, or you lose your power. You gain power by gaining coin. The USGov is often thought to be the planet's most powerful entity with China's coming up. Neither nominally hold any coin. But they do use their shadow organisations and individuals, their proxies.
The one entity that might just, just have stopped it early on was the NSA, an autonomous organ of the USG, like a giant cock waving around with different motivations than the centre; but they didn't even try after ~2011. (Whether they did before, or they could have been successful, let's leave it for another rant.)
They will be doing the accumulating of coin to hodl power in their grasp. Amongst the early whale bitcoiners are some very unsavoury characters (@apud
shinobi) and the spooks can easily control them by threat of exposure to bring about their desired behaviours, facilitating the coin-gathering. Those whales are not just people with pasts, but with futures, they may want to thin out the herd in alarming ways for example. It does not bear thinking about who was clever enough early on to see the power on offer and to grab it by grabbing the coins. They also accumulate through conventional proxy means, banks, funds and persons.
Ethereum and the big altcoins, btc price manipulation, ordinary classical psyops within and without the btc camp, technical debates such as the fork war, extant tax and control structures*. These are amongst their tactics to get hold of more coin than you and me, and than the Chinese proxies, than the very few billionaires who want to hang on to their realms, and are un-co-optable. It remains to be seen whether the NSA etc. key controllers give away their power, back to existing and nominally legal government structures. I won't be doing that.
Few of us, who hold by the creed of the Wall Observer, do that. Give back the power in our grasp, the coin in our wallet. We don't give in to that* list of tactics of theirs. We know they are merely the accumulation tactics of fellow holders, albeit cunning and ruthless ones. We don't do altcoins or New York agreements. We pare to the bare minimum our selling to their exchanges and to their tax man, in a knowing game for peace of mind and to protect our realms. We know these super-accumulators will be more powerful than us, but that the world is a big place, and it needs little captains (apud
@MP) to deal with village matters. For now, we bank for our future and we wear our
hats with hope and courage in our hearts.
Poll
