Digital fungi system that separates Money from the State.
Throughout history, technology has allowed humanity to reduce human effort to carry out work, and has reinvented the way our species organizes itself. Take a look.
PSA: Many historical periods have been left out of this writing for reading time, and… We will not talk about fungi, but their structure is similar to a peer-to-peer network (P2P).
Let's start from the church
The way information is acquired plays an essential role in how the entire human species evolves.
Before the invention of the printing press, reading and writing were considered a prestige that only the most powerful could afford to learn. Creating text files was hard work, and most of these books were created by monks belonging to the church.
You see, apart from the cost of making a book using materials like tanned lamb and cattle hides, there was also the price of the time the monk took to write or copy it. There was no method of copying text before the printing press, and the monk had to recreate it as close as possible to the original written work. A true art. Therefore, the price of a book was approximately that of a pair of oxen.
The scriptoriums of the Benedictine monasteries can be understood as an alternative technology to the printing press, which did not yet exist. Despite how expensive and inefficient the scriptoriums were, they were practically the only mechanism for reproducing and preserving written knowledge in the feudal period.
James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual, 1994
Johannes Gutenberg, by creating the movable type printing press, provided a solution to the copying system of the time. The information that was previously monopolized by the church and high ranks of the medieval state, information stagnated in status quo by definition ... Acquired a new channel of dissipation, like a virus out of control; it inspired billions of people around the world and opened the way for rational thinking, which was the catalyst that began the disintegration of the links between the church and the state.
Some of the most important achievements propagated by Gutenberg's printing press:
It allowed the mass production of manuscripts and books at low prices.
Literacy of the population.
Made possible (or anticipated) the arrival of the Renaissance that began in Western Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. That is, the transition between the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age.
The cultural change caused by the diffusion of information is unimaginable, the advancement in natural and human sciences, art, literature, among others ... It opened the way for rational minds to spread their ideas and reach the population that could now acquire these books. The church could no longer monopolize information, it could not stop the liberation of the population from the yoke that the corrupt religion represented in that historical period.
Remember: information (not adulterated) in all its forms is truth, and truth sets us free.
The Internet and Government
Since the creation of the Internet over 20 years ago and its expansion around the world, it has become clear that the way we consume information has taken a giant step. We no longer just use our imagination to recreate scenarios described by writers, now we can literally see and hear what other people want to express with their creations, through the different multimedia formats offered by the different layers of the Internet's base protocol.
Governments around the world have had to use various tangles to hide information they do not want to be disclosed, just like the medieval churches.
The digital era, a world where we are all interconnected and the speed of information travels at lightning speed, where everything and everyone learns through the constant feedback of our mobile devices.
The powers that be, on their part, seek to make us foolish, ignorant, and docile with cultural illusions and smoking mirrors that are completely aligned with an idealistic agenda: propaganda. This is how governments have been able to manipulate their citizens for hundreds of years, and with the Internet, a massive weapon of altered truths and rehashed scripts has been created. Incentives are wrong, honesty is not paid for because debt is the pillar of everything. Debt as a monetary system lacks true work (at least for those who can create more debt with an entry in the database).
Cryptography, decentralization, and digital scarcity
Just as Gutenberg, an anonymous inventor(s) under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto discovered a way to launch a project that separates the monetary system from the Nation-State.
Bitcoin is a discovery that found itself by uniting several pieces of a puzzle. Just as Gutenberg with the movable type printing press improved existing inventions and launched its adoption to the heavens.
PSA: for more information on this topic, visit bitcoinmagazine. The first two images were taken from here https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-and-the-printing-press
Bitcoin, a project that had been launched time and time again under different names but without any momentum; made it possible to adopt a money without a central or third entity that could manipulate the rules of the protocol, paving the way for honest money cryptographically verifiable by each node on the network.
Just as printing technology reduced the power of medieval guilds and altered the power structure of its time, cryptographic methods will change the nature of corporations and limit government intervention in economic transactions.
Timothy May, 1988
They say that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. While governments will try to cling to power, just as the church in medieval times tried to make the use of the Gutenberg printing press and the dissemination of information through books illegal... Governments through big banks and pseudo-monopoly tech giants like Google, Meta, among others; will try to unbalance the signal and balance of the free market to choose honest money. They will fail extraordinarily in this, due to the nature of the Bitcoin protocol, there is no single point of failure. There is no CEO, no boss, no one in charge. It is an entity that seems to have a life of its own, similar to the fungi kingdom (the family to which mushrooms belong).
The revolution begins with self-custody
If you understand how Bitcoin works, you will understand that the only way to have it is by knowing your keys. Here, information is property at the most explicit and literal level of the sentence.
If the private key to your public key is in your possession, no one but you and only you can access the sending of computational energy through the Internet. It is you who decides when and how to spend your money. The scarcity of the protocol was written since the Genesis block was mined and can never be changed again. There is no entity that will devalue its value, both the technology and the Bitcoin monetary system are deflationary.
The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the central design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Whether it's in cold storage (wallets that store your private key inside the device and never touch the Internet) or a wallet in the form of an app on your mobile device, self-custody of your Bitcoin is the only way to separate from the ramps controlled by the legacy system.
Exchanges are a convenient purchasing method, but they remain a point of failure because they can easily be captured by state regulations.
In conclusion, history teaches us that power lies in information. Decentralized information is happening again in the digital age. Apple, Google, Twitter, Meta; just to name a few, are like the church and Bitcoin is the printing press... The books coming from that press will change the world.
Remember: If it's not your keys, it's not your house or Not your keys, not your cheese.
If you have getalby or any Lightning wallet feel free to send me sats if you like it! or use lurusan@getalby.com