You have been stolen. Your money has been devalued, your labor has been devalued, your civilization and all its institutions have been devalued. You have to work longer hours, but your salary is lower. The frequency of seeing friends and family is decreasing. You eat worse food, sleep less, and your neighbors become more indifferent every year. Your life is getting worse and worse, and you are still paying for others' excessive consumption. How did this happen and why did it happen? Legal tender destroys everything "is an analysis of the depreciation of the modern world, from our banking system and real estate to our education system and art. Understand why these systems are getting worse and why Bitcoin is making things better.
The book 'Legal Currency Destroys Everything' dealt a fatal blow, exposing the widespread damage caused by the legal currency system and emphasizing the hope of Bitcoin. The captivating story directly points to the core of social ills, revealing the dark truth of our current financial system, while also providing a transformative vision for the future. For anyone who feels deceived by the current system but knows deep down that prosperity and abundance can still be achieved, this is a must read.
For the vast majority of people living in modern society, sustaining their livelihood has become increasingly difficult. Few people understand that this is a direct consequence of central monetary planning. We do not live in a free market economy - we live under the monopoly rule of central banks and their preferred weapon: fiat currency. When currency is monopolized and systematically devalued, currency users need to offset the burden of savings depreciation by obtaining other sources of income.
Due to the systemic inflation and theft of legal tender, there has been a net decline in productivity, making it more difficult to generate new sources of income, and their demand has become increasingly widespread. In other words, inflation in the legal currency supply not only steals wealth from savers, but also suppresses their ability to create new wealth. The only way to get rid of this well-known "dilemma" is to deepen our understanding of currency and then choose to exit the pyramid scheme of legal tender.
Bitcoin is completely different from fiat currency, as it is not subject to arbitrary control by national governments. Moreover, it may also be a manifestation of public ownership.
There was a Soviet joke. The American delegation visited the Soviet Union. At the gate of the Soviet automobile factory, they asked: "Who does this factory belong to.
In the Soviet style planned economy system, the directors of state-owned factories held the power to dispatch the means of production, and this institutional loophole gave rise to the "shadow economy"; Similarly, during the early stage of China's reform and opening up, the price dual track system was implemented, and the resellers of government documents completed their primitive accumulation through rent-seeking. These cases confirm Bourdieu's "Capital Conversion Theory" - when public ownership provides certain individuals with institutional channels to access capital, power capital will spontaneously transform into economic capital.
The answer given by Mao Zedong, the leader of China at that time, on how to defend public ownership was: to have the people constantly supervise the managers of public materials, achieve comprehensive supervision of the Party and state-owned enterprises, and ultimately launch the "Proletarian Cultural Revolution". But it has been proven that even revolutions with great ideas, in an era of mismatched productive forces and production relations, will only turn into a 'ten-year catastrophe'.
In the 21st century, anarchists led by Satoshi Nakamoto, known as "crypto geeks," seem to have found another form of algorithmic public ownership in the cyberspace, which is Bitcoin. As a part of Bitcoin, blockchain has also been brought into the public eye.
The UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) model in blockchain ledgers echoes Marx's vision of a "union of free people" in a wonderful way. The asset changes of each Bitcoin address are confirmed through cryptography, just like the ideal of "equal ownership of the means of production by everyone" in public ownership. However, the transparency constraints that traditional public ownership lacks are perfectly complemented by the Proof of Work (POW) mechanism in the Bitcoin network.
On May 22, 2010, when Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two pizzas with 10000 BTC, Bitcoin completed its first value loop. This classic case reveals the essence of Bitcoin's public ownership: private key controlled digital signatures may seem absolutely private, but the circulation of each UTXO enters the public ledger through network wide broadcasting, forming what Deleuze called a "smooth space" - a quantum superposition of ownership private and circulation public.
The new governance community composed of miners is more revolutionary. Bitmain and other mining machine manufacturers have attempted to influence the network through a monopoly on computing power, but the SegWit upgrade in 2017 proved that when miners' interests conflict with coin holders, the soft fork capability of node operators can balance the centralization of computing power. This dynamic game perfectly embodies Ostrom's theory of autonomous governance of "public pond resources".
The fixed supply of 21 million bitcoins has created humanity's first absolute scarce digital resource. This characteristic has given rise to a unique Habermann tax mechanism: when holders face a halving cycle of block rewards, they must dynamically balance HODL (long-term holding) and transaction demand, forming the paradoxical unity of "non exclusivity" and "competitiveness" in Samuelson's theory of public goods.
In 2021, El Salvador conducted a constitutional experiment to designate Bitcoin as a legal tender, further strengthening the institutional tension of the new form of public ownership. When the government attempted to push a $30 Bitcoin red envelope through the Chivo wallet, the public spontaneously turned to the non custodial Muun wallet. The confrontation between this government led "public ownership reform" and folk encryption fundamentalism precisely verifies the genetic characteristics of Bitcoin's resistance to power infiltration.
When the market value of Bitcoin exceeded trillions of dollars, its underlying UTXO collection had become the "public means of production" of the digital age. Each participant is both a "private owner" who controls assets with a private key and a "public person" who maintains consensus across the entire network. This paradoxical existence may be the cyberization interpretation of "rebuilding individual ownership" - under the protection of elliptic curve encryption algorithms, private property rights have truly become the foundation of public ownership for the first time rather than the opposite.
Bitcoin ensures absolute private ownership, but brings the dawn of public ownership.
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