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Page 201
Government regulations and taxes are becoming less powerful as individuals can live or work where it suits them and deliver their work via telecommunication.
Page 202
Productive capital becomes more embodied in the individuals themselves, making the threat of violently appropriating it increasingly hollow, as individuals' productivity becomes inextricably linked to their consent.
Page 202
Humans can easily move to jurisdictions where they are not threatened, or can be productive on computers without governments being able to even know what they are producing.
Page 202
Bitcoin, and cryptography in general, are defensive technologies that make the cost of defending property and information far lower than the cost of attacking them. It makes theft extremely expensive and uncertain, and thus favors whoever wants to live in peace without aggression toward others. Bitcoin goes a long way in correcting the imbalance of power that emerged over the last century when the government was able to appropriate money into its central banks and thus make individuals utterly reliant on it for their survival and well‐being. The historical version of sound money, gold, did not have these advantages. Gold's physicality made it vulnerable to government control. That gold could not be moved around easily meant that payments using it had to be centralized in banks and central banks, making confiscation easy. With Bitcoin, on the other hand, verifying transactions is trivial and virtually costless, as anyone can access the transactions ledger from any Internet‐connected device for free.
Page 203
Bitcoin offers the modern individual the chance to opt out of the totalitarian, managerial, Keynesian, and socialist states. It is a simple technological fix to the modern pestilence of governments surviving by exploiting the productive individuals who
happen to live on their soil. If Bitcoin continues to grow to capture a larger share of the global wealth, it may force governments to become more and more a form of voluntary organization, which can only acquire its “taxes” voluntarily by offering its subjects services they would be willing to pay for.
Page 204
Bitcoin, being completely voluntary and relentlessly peaceful, offers us the monetary infrastructure for a world built purely on voluntary cooperation. Contrary to popular depictions of anarchists as hoodie‐clad hoodlums, Bitcoin's brand of anarchism is completely peaceful, providing individuals with the tools necessary for them to be free from government control and inflation. It seeks to impose itself on nobody, and if it grows and succeeds, it will be for its own merits as a peaceful neutral technology for money and settlement, not through it being forced on others.
Page 212
If the modern world is ancient Rome, suffering the economic consequences of monetary collapse, with the dollar our aureus, then Satoshi Nakamoto is our Constantine, Bitcoin is his solidus, and the Internet is our Constantinople. Bitcoin serves as a monetary lifeboat for people forced to transact and save in monetary media constantly debased by governments. Based on the foregoing analysis, the real advantage of Bitcoin lies in it being a reliable long‐term store of value, and a sovereign form of money that allows individuals to conduct permissionless transactions.
Page 229
Bitcoin's value comes from it having an immutable monetary policy precisely because nobody can easily change it. Any coin that begins with a group of individuals changing Bitcoin's specification has with its creation lost arguably the only property that makes Bitcoin valuable in the first place.
Page 230
Bitcoin is to be taken as it is, accepted on its own terms and used for what it offers. For all practical intents and purposes, Bitcoin is sovereign: it runs by its own rules, and there are no outsiders who can alter these rules. It might even be helpful to think of the parameters of Bitcoin as being similar to the rotation of the earth, sun, moon, or stars, forces outside of our control which are to be lived, not altered.
Page 253
In other words, after the Bitcoin genie got out of the bottle, anybody trying to build an alternative to Bitcoin will only succeed by investing heavily in the coin, making them effectively in control of it. And as long as there is a party with sovereign power over a digital currency, then that currency cannot be understood as a form of digital cash, but rather, a form of intermediated payment—and a very inefficient one at that.
Page 254
With a group of developers in control of the majority of coins, processing power, and coding expertise, the currency is practically a centralized currency where the interests of the team dictate its development path. There is nothing wrong with a centralized digital currency, and we may well get such competitors in a free market without government restrictions. But there is something deeply and fundamentally wrong about a centralized currency that adopts a highly cumbersome and inefficient design whose only advantage is the removal of a single point of failure.
Page 255
If the second largest network in terms of processing power can have its blockchain record altered when the transactions do not go in a way that suits the interests of the development team, then the notion that any of the altcoins is truly regulated by processing power is not tenable. The concentration of currency holding, processing power, and programming skills in the hands of one group of people who are effectively partners in a venture defeats the entire purpose of employing a blockchain structure.
Page 267
Blockchain is a reliable and tamper‐proof database and asset register, but only for the blockchain's native currency and only if the currency is valuable enough for the network to have strong enough processing power to resist attack. For any other asset, physical or digital, the blockchain is only as reliable as those responsible for establishing the link between the asset and what refers to it on the blockchain.
