Yesterday I suggested that we should avoid the new Bitcoin ETFs… because they are antithetical to the big picture underlying Bitcoin.
That big picture is harder to describe. It took me a full year of reading and thinking about Bitcoin before I could see it.
Today I’ll do my best to share it with you. And it starts with this…
We all use space-age technology every single day and think nothing of it.
Text messages fly across the country. We send 2.4 billion emails every single second. Satellites bounce data all across the globe.
Now we can do video chats with each other – just like the old Jetsons cartoon envisioned. We all walk around with a device in our pockets that can access the entire store of accumulated human knowledge instantly, from pretty much anywhere.
And this device can do almost anything we ask it to. It can give us navigational directions. It can send money to a friend. It can play music and movies. There’s an app for almost everything.
If that weren’t enough, we can now buy virtually any item made anywhere in the world online, including food, and it will show up in a box at our door step in short order.
All of this would look like magic to my grandfather who died in 1994.
Yet our core civic institutions are stuck in the Bronze Age. Governments… banks… all of them. They are dinosaurs.
And all of these institutions have developed massive bureaucracies of middlemen. Their primary job is to collect as much data on everybody and then funnel as much money as possible to the institution.
They aren’t there to serve you. They don’t give a rip about what’s good for you. They only care about power, control, data surveillance, and monetization.
It’s the “skim” economy.
We now have entire agencies and industries set-up specifically to spy on us and skim money from our transactions, our investments, and our business endeavors.
Then if we factor in taxes at all levels (federal, state, local, sales tax, etc.), governments confiscate at least 50% of many people’s income year after year.
And what do we get for it?
A bunch of wars and a bunch of entitlements that make people dependent. And now we even see them pushing programs that undermine our culture and indeed civilized society itself.
Think about this – less than 5% of total government spending in the U.S. goes to useful civil service functions. By that I mean the things most people consider necessary. Courts… police… schools… roads… trash collection – those types of things.
Less than 5%. And they aren’t even good at most of these items…
Here’s what I want you to understand – the skim economy we have today creates artificial scarcity.
As a civilization, at least half of our productivity is wasted. The skim economy takes half of our income from us and blows it. Every year. And as part of this it redirects labor and precious resources towards uneconomical programs and projects.
Imagine what your life would look like if your income doubled over night. Imagine how much easier everything would be.
And imagine what our communities would look like if everybody’s income doubled as well. We’re talking about a new renaissance here.
Well guess what… we don’t need our income to double. We just need to get the government and the parasitic institutions out of our pockets.
Right now we all have to squeeze every single dollar we earn because so much is taken from us. And that’s true of small businesses too.
Unproductive middlemen are currently sucking trillions of dollars out of the economy every single year. Trillions.
That money could be used to start or expand businesses and improve infrastructure. It could finance research and development. And it could be directed towards mutual aid and constructive charitable work.
But right now it is being wasted on uneconomical and destructive programs. Our civilization is much poorer because of this… and so many people are struggling to pay the bills each month.
That’s where Bitcoin comes in.
Bitcoin gives us the ability to disintermediate the middlemen and transact with one another directly. It also allows us to store the fruits of our labor in an asset that cannot be inflated, manipulated, or controlled by any third party.
Thus, Bitcoin gives us the ability to create robust, circular economies at the local level.
That is to say, we can create ecosystems where people can pay for desired goods and services using Bitcoin. Then those ecosystems can sync up to form even larger networks.
The larger these networks get, the more practical it becomes for enterprising individuals to create alternatives to the core civil services provided inefficiently by the skim economy.
Then we can begin to disintermediate those institutions that create artificial scarcity… and that’s when we can build a civilization truly fit for humanity.
That’s the big picture.
Jesus of Nazareth was fond of saying: Behold – the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
And he would talk at length about the need for people to adopt a new morality and a new lifestyle – based on the Golden Rule.
Well, Bitcoin empowers us to move in that direction. Because it gives us the ability to create ecosystems based on voluntary transactions – transactions based on mutual benefit to all parties. Force and coercion have no place within the Bitcoin network.
And please note that all we’re talking about here is what America was supposed to be – and perhaps was for a little while. A land of free people conducting their lives and running their communities as they saw fit. This is the modern version of Thomas Jefferson’s vision.
Of course, those institutions who thrive on force and coercion aren’t just going to go away. And we can’t escape them entirely in the current climate. All we can do is mitigate their impact on our lives.
Bitcoin gives us a path forward to this end.
It is a tool with which we can build a world of abundance and respect for human ingenuity. But we are the ones who must do the building…
That’s the big picture of Bitcoin. I hope that I did it justice.
And with that, I’ll leave you with a quote from the late architect, inventor, and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller. Here’s Bucky:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
That’s the Bitcoin vision.
-Joe Withrow
P.S. One way to mitigate the impact that those institutions who thrive on data surveillance have over us is to up our game when it comes to privacy and cybersecurity technology. There are quite a few simple changes we can implement to shield our sensitive data and prevent them from building robust data profiles on us.
For this, there’s no better resource than Privacy Action Plan. The program is jam-packed with actionable suggestions that you can implement easily – no technology background necessary. I went through the program recently and learned all kinds of stuff I didn’t even know that I should know.
If you’re interested, you can learn more right here: Privacy Action Plan