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Thank you very much for your answer, it is very inspiring and it is refreshing to see someone who believes in a new world order as a potential end game for the blockchain rather than an easy way to make a quick buck.It has been a while since I have seen someone mention the cypherpunk movement.
Depending on how you define "new world order" I agree.
Cypherpunks basically believe that through certain mechanisms and coding, the people
can be protected from institutions that have slowly become corrupted or malicious to
those that they originally represented or led. When fully established, many things that
we consider today to be normal, like privacy and certain rights, will be seen as suspicious,
not important, and if performed, worthy of imprisonment or torture. As technology
improves and evolves over time, it is inevitable that those improvements will be used
against the people to the point in which they will become no different than watched slaves
who shortly become guilty until proven innocent. At that time, humans will only exist to
perpetuate that future totalitarian system and their controller's power. Those humans will
never again have the ability to overthrow them and institute a free and fair government/
society. The belief of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness will be a pipe dream.
Cypherpunks, IMO, are the last group of freedom fighters who have the capability
and means to prevent that potential future oppression from actualizing. They are the
final safety valve that releases from time to time to counter balance and prevent that
potential future. Bitcoin, in this light, is much bigger than just a financial instrument.
It is a form of redemption that the world will not fully understand until it is actually
needed. For example, in Venezuela, Bitcoin's true need and use has manifested
in our modern day. So, Bitcoin is already changing things and creating a better
tomorrow.
I used to think that too. But I think otherwise now, and I'm quite pessimistic about this.
I'll tell you why. I have two different vectors of why bitcoin and freedom from state will potentially fail.
The first one is that states will become extremely mean. Although it is true that for the moment, we still enjoy some forms of freedom that allow us to communicate, write open source code and do computations on our on devices, that freedom is already under a menace. Under the all-encompassing excuse of terrorism, we've already given up a lot of fundamental freedoms, and the "freedom to write code and do computations" is not guaranteed to stand a long time. Indeed, it is sufficient that, as in the past, cryptographic calculations are simply forbidden without a license, and it is game over. How could that be ? Well, it is sufficient to say that terrorists use cryptography. Yes, cryptography is useful, but I don't see how totalitarian states (all states are totalitarian apart from Switzerland) could be prevented from implementing this. The UK already can imprison you if you don't give all your cryptographic keys upon demand. They could simply ask you for all your cryptographic keys of your crypto currencies. If you refuse or fail to comply, you will go to jail for 2 years. In the UK. After 2 years, they ask you again. So the "freedom to write code and do calculations" was granted because nobody thought that one day, that freedom could be used against the state's authority. With the advent of cryptography in general, and cryptocurrencies specially, they may change their minds.
States can also become mean in another way: they might consider that you can shift tokens as much as you can, but right at this moment, almost nobody has the slightest form of economic freedom. In most western countries, economic exchange is forbidden, unless allowed, that is, you have to declare to do business, or you have to declare a working contract. "doing something for someone else" is simply forbidden if you do not have a permission. In France, it is even forbidden to help working in a house if it is not for a family member of less than 3 degrees. You can help your parents, your children, your brother and sister. But if you help your cousin, that's in principle illegal, because "black work". You can do so, if you declare it, if you pay 50% or so taxes and social security on the *estimated market value* of it, even if not a penny changed hands.
The law prescribes that if you give me some math courses against bitcoin, I have to declare this, pay social security on this and so on, and you are not allowed to do so unless you've declared your activity. For the moment, you can still do so, if you declare it. But it is not difficult for the law to simply forbid activities if they are not paid in regular money, killing the very possibility of paying with crypto. Without that possibility, crypto has absolutely no value, because you can't do anything with a crypto token. I can imagine one having to declare, hour by hour, one's activities during the day and the night, so that it can be judged whether those activities do not generate economic value. Of course you can consume, you can shop, you can enjoy leisure. But you are strictly forbidden to do anything useful. I wouldn't even be surprised that you are soon taxed, and have to ask for permission, to do something useful *for yourself*. Maybe you are still allowed to read fiction ; but maybe learning, and reading non-fiction, will become taxable, because a potential investment in your own economic abilities, and hence, liable to economic production for yourself. Maybe if you read a math book for an hour, you are taxed upon giving yourself a math course at the market price of an hour of math courses, because that's the value you've created. You would have the right to watch entertainment TV ; but if ever you looked at Wikipedia, you would have to pay for the time you try to educate yourself, as a "useful activity". You would have to declare, hour by hour, that you've done nothing of use during the day, except for those activities where you got a permission from, like being an employee. Of course, in order to enforce such things, there would be the necessity of strict surveillance of what you are doing in your home, on your computer, and everything, and people would be randomly selected to be verified in their declarations, with all the in-house camera and other tracers of activity. In such a world, it would not only be entirely forbidden to write open source code, which would be considered a forbidden useful activity, but of course, crypto cannot exist in any meaningful way. In a horrible, resource-limited world which we are heading to, "useful economic activity" would be in general considered dangerous, unless strictly regulated, because potentially resource-consuming. Actually, this would mostly be popular with the huge masses of extremely uneducated people that are entertained and are absolutely not capable of understanding anything else than the few "truths" they learned in "school". Economic anarchists and terrorists that want to do useful things for themselves would be the culprit of everything that goes wrong. You would get popular support for every measure that forbids people to do anything for themselves, and especially, instruct themselves. Most probably, even learning to read would be a forbidden activity.
In other words, the very existence of the liberties we still have that allow us to write code and do calculations, are maybe under threat ; but even if they still leave us that, as we have no economic liberty at all without state permission, any economic exchange against crypto currencies can be killed off legally. For the moment, that's not the case yet, but if pushed, states can be very mean - even western states like the UK and France.
But my second angle of pessimism is that I think that bitcoin has in it, an even much worse form of totalitarianism than human states. I'm pretty convinced that, if not stopped by states earlier, crypto will take over most of finance. I'm also convinced that machines will take over most of human intelligence. If machines are now taking over crypto, they will dominate us in a way against which we don't have the slightest defence. Crypto machine states are orders of magnitude worse than the meanest of human states. I see smart contracts develop that are pyramid letter equivalents of hired murder: you get a fortune in crypto if you go and kill Mr or Ms X, and if you don't, you're the next on the list. Oracle verifies whether you actually did so. Smart contracts (that will be our intelligent machine states) will bribe politicians, company CEO etc... to do the things that fit in their plans, and eliminate those that resist wit a pyramid killer contract. We will not know until it is too late.
I think crypto was the missing piece in the puzzle for the Singularity. I always wondered how machines could take over command on earth with us humans letting us subjugate. Now I know: through crypto. Political decisions, taken by crypto-bribed puppets, following the strategies thought out by smart intelligent contracts deploying their own crypto currencies, acquiring the funds through smart trading and market manipulation by their own intelligence to fund their strategies, their procreation, their improvement, are unstoppable, decentralized, omnipresent and will end up being far more intelligent than any of us. Not right now. Several decades from now, for sure. I don't know what such contracts will think of that funny notion of "human liberties". Probably just as much as we think about "mosquito liberties".
So I'm not very optimistic for the future, but in fact, I prefer the demise of humanity through the singularity and with crypto. At least, a new species will take over: smart machines.
