The Covid-19 pandemic that blazed across 2020 has thrown the world into disarray. Economic damage that has triggered the breakdown of the system signals a dire need for change. As the old system is getting dismantled and global leaders jump in to fix the problems, Bitcoin is now gaining traction, increasing in price and welcoming new users everyday.
Bitcoin, invented during the financial crisis in 2008, is free from the central authority of governments and banks. In its 12 years of existence, the technology, with its unique feature of censorship resistance and permissionless use, has allowed people to store value securely and transact with one another freely in a way that is unprecedented in human history.
Born and raised on the internet, Bitcoin is stateless money that is now even considered to be the best candidate for the world reserve currency. Some see the significance of this innovation and its impact that goes beyond finance. Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, who became bullish on Bitcoin in 2020 remarked, “A bet on Bitcoin is a bet on human ingenuity”.
The issues that we are now facing, from poverty and climate change to conflicts among nations and human rights abuses are global, and cannot be resolved by any one country. In this article I will argue how Bitcoin is a gift for humanity that can help ordinary people around the world to work together collaboratively to meet those challenges, and is perfect money that can guide us into the next stage of our civilization.
Rejection of Nature’s God
The roots of the problems that now confront humanity have to do with our modern world’s loss of its connection to nature. We now have created a highly technological civilization and our way of life has become out of tune with the natural world.
Society’s separation from nature is traced back to the birth of the modern nation-state. The major events that broke civilization’s harmony with nature took place in the continent of North America when European settlers encountered Indigenous peoples. Back then, a true meeting of cultures did not occur. The possibility of creating a civilization through dialogue, by opening and integrating other perspectives did not happen.
Led by the God-ordained manifest destiny, European colonists crusaded toward the westward expansion. They destroyed the life of the indigenous people and their culture and they declared nature dead. Philosopher Jacob Needleman (2002) elucidated how in their conquest of the land, men who were influenced by Enlightenment ideas failed to understand the indigenous culture that “was resting on a different state of consciousness than does our modern civilization” (p.202), one that was more deeply connected to the earth.
This placed America in the trajectory of its development away from the original vision that lived in the land. At the time of the revolt against the British monarchy, Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence that the separation of 13 colonies from Great Britain was entitled by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”. In their assault on nature, founders of the constitutional republic betrayed the ideals that inspired their own independence, and denied the source of legitimacy that granted them their sovereign existence.
American monotheism
In America, the New World, that promised to liberate people from the arbitrary power of the King, a force of monarchy – the political system based upon the rule of a single figure has quietly persisted. In establishing the US constitutional republic, there was recognition of the importance of the state’s ability to function independently, free from church’s influence. This was articulated by Jefferson’s concept of a “wall of separation” between church and state, and was placed in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, as the premise of religious freedom that prohibits the government from either advancing or hindering religion.
Despite this safeguard against the creation of a church-state, the European colonists’ unconscious bias against the indigenous people’s way of life and a relationship to the land that was radically different from theirs, influenced the establishment of a predominant religion in America.
Jungian psychotherapist Rafael López-Pedraza (1990) noted how the Bible has become a basis of religious belief of Westerns and described its essence as “monotheism: the worship of one God, and the jealousy and wrath of that God if any other is worshipped” (p. 29). To the frame of mind shaped by Judeo-Christian tradition, Native American tribes’ animistic worldview that regards all things –animate and inanimate possessing a living spirit as an embodiment of the divine was considered primitive and inferior.
This European’s one-sided beliefs and attitudes, without having been carefully examined, formed a religion of American monotheism. The federal government worked to enforce this national religion by confining Native Americans to reservations, banning them from practicing their worship of nature, ceremonial dances, and rituals that were deeply woven into their everyday life. In the name of assimilation, their children were put in boarding schools and those First Nation people were made to adopt European cultural values including conversion into Christianity.
The doctrine of materialism
One god that has now occupied America denounces the supernatural world that underlies the natural world. It preaches the doctrine of materialism – a belief that only the things that can be perceived through external senses exist, and denies the reality beyond physical.
The republic, under monotheistic persuasion has charted a path of development that stands in opposition to nature and measures its progress through the advancement of physical comfort. In this, money became an instrument for the ruling elites to maintain their exclusive control over people’s choices of faith.
The US dollar that was declared as legal tender by government decree, with the symbol of the Eye of Providence watching over humanity began to circulate across the nation. Later, through the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, private corporations took the power to create money away from the government.
Central banks have become the overlord to remake the world according to its own image. Economists, with the idea of unlimited growth and the concept of gross domestic product (GDP), began their evangelism to promote a materialistic view of the world.
The invention of GDP
The GDP was created as a common denominator to assess the health of the nation’s economy. It is defined as “the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period.” This concept has transformed economics into empirical science.
Physician and activist Vandana Shiva spoke how the GDP was invented during the war as a part of the war machine, and was used by economists as a weapon to support war economy. She explained how the GDP which was called the “Manhattan Project” of economics, creates a very artificial production boundary that says “If you produce what you consume you don’t produce”.
Shiva noted how nature produces and consumes in an amazing cycle that sustains life, yet according to this arbitrary defined growth measure that excludes economic activities such as services and goods for personal consumption, this nature’s regeneration is treated as non-production.
The GDP as a key concept in economics was used to create a Pyramid Ponzi scheme that extracts from nature, turning it into lifeless objects to increase the material wealth of those on the top. It is a system of enslavement, in which people are deprived of their ability to produce for themselves and be self-reliant. Instead, they are made to depend on large corporations to deliver the goods and services that they need.
Creation of model citizen
This plunder economy has been accelerated by 21st century consumer capitalism. The state sponsored orthodoxy of materialism denied the internal life of man, making people find value and meaning outside of themselves. Through sales marketing with advertising and branding, big business found a way to create in people a desire for consumption, and manufacture a need for mass production.
Through Hollywood, celebrities became idols for people’s worship. With their glamour, they presented to the public the myth of American Dream that promises everyone equal opportunities to achieve a materially affluent lifestyle. One by one, people were lured into the market, and began to look for meaning through material acquisition.
This abstract concept of the GDP that now drives this consumer economy has been used to set a standard for a model citizen. Now the market sends a message; ‘the more one engages in mindless consumption, the more one contributes to the increase of the GDP and becomes virtuous’.
Guided by the invisible hand of this engineered market that incentivizes passivity and obedience, people were made to chase after products striving to become good citizens, to be accepted and be recognized as being valuable.
Petrodollar hegemony
While keeping people insulated in a bubble of consumer culture, the US government under the thumb of private corporations carried on their missionary work around the globe to advance the dominance of their single-minded faith. In 1933, the US abandoned the gold standard for domestic transactions. Then, through the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, the dollar was accepted as the international currency for most trade.
What appeared to be the final victory of supremacy of matter over nature came in 1971 when President Nixon severed the final link between the dollar and gold, by ending international convertibility of the dollar to gold. All those developments led to the creation of the petrodollar, a hegemony of one currency backed up by the military, which was acknowledged by Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s telling comment that US fiat currency is “backed by men with guns”.
The all-seeing eye of the godhead that floats at the top of the currency index has a limited vision. It can only see a mechanistic view of the future, and aims to create a world of machines that enslave humanity. In its own self-righteous American exceptionalism, one nation under a single god acts as if it is the absolute moral authority of the world.
Crisis of the Western view of the world
With an abstract sense of moralism that creates a duality of evil and good, the US empire projects external enemies. By creating the axis of evil with lies of weapons of mass destruction, the nation with the most powerful military power spreads fear and hatred, keeping the world under a perpetual state of war.
With an edict of “You’re either with us or against us”, the superpower state divides the world, coercing all to accept the doctrine of War on Terror. They demonize countries that challenge their petrodollar moral superiority and ostracize them from the international community, subjecting them to sanctions and military invasion.
In ways other than outright violence, this tyrannical god weaponizes finance against innocent people. Calling it “Jihadi of banking”, Max Keiser, a host of a popular show that reports on finance explained how the heads of central banks commit fraud and blow up the economy. He described that they are trained in madrasa of Ivy League schools, and they misinterpret Adam Smith and use it instead of the Koran as a religious pretext to commit “financial terrorism”. They lower interest rates for investors, allowing large companies to take away jobs and people’s livelihood, and destroy the whole economy.
As the expansion of West’s single vision of the world became destructive, its extractive war economy now meets the earth’s finite reality. As the end game for their money printing nears and world leaders frantically try to reset the system to bail out their god, Bitcoin has begun to shine a light on a new path where the materialistically driven civilization reaches its limit.
Separation of money and state
The invention of Bitcoin made the separation of money and state for the first time possible in history. This ended the oligarchy’s monopoly of faith that denied people an access to a true nature of reality, and freed people from the moral insanity that has turned the world upside down.
This breakthrough in computer science revived Nature’s God that has been made to disappear from our society. Bitcoin is money backed by nature. While fiat money is debt-based and subject to printing at will through ‘fractional reserve lending’, Bitcoin is a new asset class and as a digital gold, it has intrinsic value derived from energy that is required for computational work, in a way no different than the energy used to dig gold from the ground.
Unlike the US dollar that infinitely expands through the money printing press, Bitcoin with its fixed monetary supply of 21 M has a built-in scarcity being tied to real resources. In the article “Bitcoin and thermodynamics”, author Kunt Svanholm described Bitcoin as a battery, one that was the best ever invented. He noted how Bitcoin “offers a way of converting energy into a small part of a specific number”. He describes it like a kind of “mathematical battery” and how it converts electricity into digital scarcity”, which “then can be programmed to express value”.
The world’s truly free market
At the heart of creation of this mathematical battery is Bitcoin mining. It is a broadcast math competition engaged by a network of computers (called miners) around the world with clear rules including the total number of bitcoin created and a predictable issuance rate. In a decentralized network where rules are applied to everyone equally, miners use their precious resources (harnessing computational power) to engage in Proof of Work- a process of solving difficult mathematical problems.
With economic incentives that align everyone’s self interest and make the rewards for playing by the rules higher than the value of attacking the network, it incentivizes all to act honestly and follow the rules of consensus. Every 10 minutes, a math problem is solved and whoever solves the problem first wins a fixed number of bitcoins. This process creates bitcoin, clears transactions, and most importantly provides the security of a system.
The creator of Bitcoin known by the pseudonymous name Satoshi Nakamoto used bitcoin as a token of value and with a combination of cryptographic hash functions and game theory created the world’s first truly free market. While economists with their modern monetary policy insulated the market from any feedback, Bitcoin regulates itself algorithmically and enables organic price discovery.
The market adjusts mining difficulty according to demand with a tight feedback loop that resets every 2 weeks. It is programmed to regulate and maintain the rate of bitcoin creation, and corresponds more naturally with the demand and supply of the market, creating efficiency in the market. This brings an alternative to the existing model of economy based on the idea of infinite growth that creates a destructive cycle of endless consumption.
Nature’s economic standard
Bitcoin introduces a new economic standard that is different from a gold standard or any other economic models that came before. Mathematics that is enlivened through imagination reunites matter that has fallen from its original source.
With Bitcoin, money becomes energy. At the kernel of Bitcoin capital is the production of the mathematical battery. It is based on non-material consumption in the form of energy and this process is facilitated by nature’s act of giving.
Nature provides abundantly. With her selfless love, she both produces and consumes to regenerate energies. Bitcoin invites us to participate in an economy in a manner such that we all live up to this nature’s standard of altruism.
The genesis of Bitcoin was Satoshi’s generous act of releasing the open source protocol online and making it freely available to anyone in the world. In responding to this act of altruism developers around the world brought their skills and intelligence to work on Bitcoin. Miners began contributing their precious resources to build a network.
This creates a new model of economy based on reciprocity, in which everyone makes a contribution to the network through voluntarily sharing his or her labor, time and resources and mutually benefit from each other’s gifts.
Individual sovereignty
Bitcoin, with its new economic standard, now frees us from the orthodoxy of materialistic economics and its scientific dogma of infinite growth that keeps people as passive consumers in the global debt Ponzi scheme. Globalization has created a race to the bottom where transnational corporations that do not have allegiance to any nations have abandoned workers, by shipping jobs and manufacturing bases overseas, and lowering costs with cheap labor to maximize their own profit.
As people become indentured servants being exploited in corporate feudalism, Bitcoin restores the sovereignty of people and nations, allowing them to claim their power to actively engage in economy on their terms. The ecosystem fueling innovation and entrepreneurship has created opportunities for people to exit from this autocratic fiat control system that keeps them in slavery and steals from their labor. Many are able to walk away from 9-5 jobs and start up their own businesses to create values and share with one another through trade.
Now, through a network of free and sovereign individuals around the world, Nature’s God begins to reveal itself as the supreme judge of the world. New economic activities that are emerging around this technology are creating a currency of revolt like a Tsunami against a warmongering god, whose legitimacy is backed by violence.
The “survival of the fittest” brutal mining market, channeling energies that have been funneled into weapons manufacturers, begins to defund the Pentagon and move a global society into building peace. From Iran to Kazakhstan and Russia, nation-states have now joined the Bitcoin mining race, accelerating the non-violent destruction of the military industrial complex. The hash power generated largely by renewable energies, being subordinated to the laws of thermodynamics began to secure sanctity of life for all beings.
Perfect money for humanity
Founders of nation-state treaded the path of developing a civilization that was divorced from nature. Modern man has become estranged from the world that birthed him. But this separation was necessary. The act of rebellion against Nature’s God was the right entitled by Laws of Nature, granted to everyone in order for each of us to become independent and free.
Now, through Bitcoin’s computer programming language, nature that has become silent begins to speak again. Each 10 minutes, through distributing accountability across the network, the heart of Bitcoin performs checks and balances of power keeping a harmony among all living beings.
The Internet of Money transcending borders protects people of all nations from resource wars, exploitation and dictatorship. Bitcoin surrounding us everywhere 24/7 can guard us against hyperinflation, theft and wealth confiscation, helping us steward this precious planet for the Seven Generations to come.
For so long, we have tried to compete and outsmart nature. Now, the pristine protocol of Bitcoin calls us to become a co-creator with Mother Nature and invest in her wisdom to engineer a new civilization. As the old fiat world begins to collapse, Bitcoin now provides a superior form of money that is secure, censorship-resistant, and self-sustaining. It is perfect money for humanity, for we are a part of the divine nature and that we are all Bitcoin.
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