They said it would revolutionise money. They said that they would return us the sacred and ancient right of privacy. They said we would be serfs no more, for we all would be given the right to our own money. The power of monetary policy finally wrestled out of the grip of the ever-expanding states of the 21st century would be distributed to all mankind — free from the oppression of freedom from the Romans, so we may inch nearer to freedom, privacy, and equality.

Yet here we are.

The movement began with the realisation that like the Roman emperors that followed Nero’s strategy to debase the nation’s money supply by using the available supply of silver and gold to produce more coins so they could spend more without raising taxes, and like Zhuge Liang in Shu Han who exchanged a hundred for every five zhu-coins, the Roman Republic today, through its Federal Reserve, is debasing the monetary supply of the planet. “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” To fund their wars, to satisfy the population’s insatiable desire for luxuries, the states debased their currencies, like the Great Debasement of Henry VIII, like the production of the Schinderling by Balthasar Eggenberger under Emperor Frederick III in Inner Austria, like the Ephramititen by the Kingdom of Prussia. And so Satoshi was given to us to deliver us from this tyranny.

Fools of course claimed that private currencies weren’t stable, nor possible, and if possible then undesirable, etc. Exchange rates would be chaotic; people would not use it; state backed fiats would squeeze them out of the markets. And for a while, the public nodded in agreement with those with billions denominated in fiat. Of course, they did not remember that for a very long while, there were no national currencies. The British Pound for a very long while had nothing to do with the state — the face of the British Monarch did not even appear on the British Pound until the nationalisation of the Bank of England by the labour government in 1946. Because Britannia needed money for the First and Second World Wars, control over the bank’s activities passed to the politically appointed chancellor of the exchequer. From the Free Banking Era lasted between 1837 and 1866, when almost anyone could issue paper money, through the National Bank Act of 1863 that ended the “wildcat bank” period, the United States, the reserve of humanity’s free feudal traditions is now continent where private currencies are criminalisable and where money is money because “in God we Trust.” Only in some polities isolated from the center of monetary nationalisation, like Hong Kong, do we see the remnants of the past where currencies were issued by private banks, not by arms of the state.

Those of us who knew, knew something was indeed terribly wrong. There were attempts to disembody the state’s arms to endlessly expand its monetary supply. Against the federal reserve the disestablishmentarians fought, against the onslaught of globalisation did local currencies try to save us from — none were particularly successful.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Satoshi, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal wealth. As the poets immortalised him, “an electronic payments system, peer-to-peer, that’d lead us to a decentralized frontier bitcoin.org, he claimed the domain, and wrote the white paper that conceived the blockchain.” A set of communication rules, a protocol, to govern the status of money, was invented. And, combined with the invention of the smart contract — law codified in every sense of the word — law that’s hitherto subject to interpretational whims, the ebbing and flowing and overrunning of political waters, the cruel and unusual jurisprudence of judges and magistrates is no more. Law is code and code is law, to rule over our wealth and children evermore.

And so the technology to seize back the power of money and return back to the masses was born. Men could now become states in the markets. But of course, we knew that the state wouldn’t give up so easily. With no right, they resorted to their might, to delay, frustrate, and obliterate this great movement.

They first mocked and vilified us. They called bitcoin “worthless artificial gold”. And then they tried to strangle us, with their senatorial dramatic build up for regulation, their infrastructure bills, and their cease-and-desist letters. With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that they promised to build America greater and better by funding it with taxes seized from crypto traders. A bread-and-circus play to those who could see. They doublespoke, with one tongue they grouped us with money-laundering criminals and the wizards that caused the 2008 financial equivalent of Der Zauberlehrling, with another they in demeanors most friendly they claimed that regulation was the benefit of everyone, including us. “Regulation would protect everyone.” East Berlin had cold white streetlights instead of warm ones because that kind of light, the kind of light that fills the inside of the Ministry of Love, is the one that most discourages crime. It also discourages people — by making the streets as unromantic and as unpleasant as possible, there are no people left on the streets to be robbed.

They taxed us, be it our realised or unrealised gains. Alas — if they could, they would tax the planets. They set their IRS men to us, like they have with so many honest humble workers, whose work and labour they have no right to seize. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs department has even found buying and selling cryptoassets to not be gambling, convenient leaving gains on crypto trades to be most taxable — here’s even a github repo for you to do it. Nevermind the fact that our property is ours — and ours alone — none of their business. The state has made our property their business. And with every tax we inch closer and closer towards slavery.

Sovereignty, which by the laws of nature begotten by the individual, invested in the state since the Enlightenment, is now invested in that which holds all power over money. The returns of sovereignty invested, are now paid with money printed out of thin air. Our personal individual sovereignty was debased as our money was debased. And these overinflated states, bloated, and fat, increasingly turned their attention to taxing commerce and inheritance. Tax trickled down into debt. Inflation adjusts all increases of income levels since the 70s made it into nothing.

And the worst of cryptoskeptical moaning minnies would make the usual and tired complaints about cryptocurrency: child porn, terrorism, money laundering, drug and weapons and human trafficking, tax evasion — as if crypto had invented these evils. They conspired to make crypto to be known by its sins and none of its virtues: the Dark Web, the Silk Road, Pirate Bay. But as faith in fiat crumbled, the market cap of the crypto world ballooned. And as the Roman Magistrates realised their Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt could no longer work their magic, they began trying to use regulation to strangle us.

They cited crypto’s track record of scams. They pointed their finger at Tether, of which as of May 2021 apparently only 2.9% was backed by cash, with over 65% backed by commercial paper — possibly Chinese commercial paper and bonds, possibly from China’s property developers like the China Evergrande Group. They point to Mt. Gox, the theft of 850,000 bitcoins. They point to Bitconnect, OneCoin, AChain, Pincoin, Squidcoin, even ADA. They wave their laundry list of the many hacks and rugs in the history of crypto: the DAOMaker Hack, the Cream Hack, the Bunny Hack, the SnowDog rug. And so the argument goes: how could this space flourish as long as such behaviour is allowed?

Some tried to fight back. But not very successfully. Some tried to influence from within on the floor of the Senate chamber halls. But many who earned millions if not billions simply joined them. And why not? Like how the Federal Reserve was magicked into existence by some obscure senior partner at J.P. Morgan, crypto professors and devs joined the state to announce to the whole world “party’s over boys, let the adults handle this now”. For how many men could stay true to principles, ideals, and visions — not to be swayed by the Denarius?

While companies packaged themselves as champions of the people, (“let the people trade!” they cried), and fought battles with the most unrespected SEC, over whether tokens and lending services were securities and therefore beholden to the wrath of Howey, the reality was that they slept with the regulators. They educated them, and in return they forbade you from educating anybody else. They wanted to bring in the big banks and the institutional money and cement their rule. TradFi powers wearing the skin of crypto revolutionaries complained about regulation but in reality they were begging for it so they could dictate the schematics of the regulatory moat that will give them wealth for a thousand years. “If you can’t do it, we will do it for you.” Meanwhile, the West continued to march into its ever-greater expansion of its regulatory regime. From her Majesty’s Government to the Middle Kingdom, all states tried to keep their unholy monetary powers intact. And of course, while careful to juxtapose their respect for liberty and rationality against the autocracies of the Orient, Roman Magistrates argued that “stablecoins are like poker chips in the Wild West of crypto”, and therefore must be regulated. The dollar must reign supreme, so they could continue the looting of the common wealth.

We did not harken to Franklin’s warnings that those who trade a little freedom for some safety will eventually enjoy neither. With ACTs most PATRIOT they have already shut down e-gold, and with similar acts they shall turn their violence, their common law, their constitution, and the full power of their state machine towards citizens of the free world. And this they must do, for they have begun to exhaust the wealth extractable from peoples brown and afar, and so they must now enslave the people white and near. And crypto will capitulate, for it can exercise no force. The US federal authorities can USDT and USDC to only be transferable between KYC’d addresses, crippling DeFi as we know it; they can ban all fiat on-ramps. They unleash the hounds of the SEC to swing hard against pseudo equity tokens, cuckening DeFi as founders who already cashed out millions have no will or reason to fight. CEOs of the greatest crypto CEXs on the planet will be arrested, by states both Free and Unfree, on charges of money laundering, sanctions violation, aiding terrorism, unlicensed security offering, treason — the list of crimes Common Law, supposedly the oldest and most liberty-protectin legal system on the planet, lacks no supply of laws for the prosecutor. Those who have searched for one’s rights in Natural Law can of course find no violation there. Common Law, common supposedly because of it being rooted in common sense, in the common law of nature, in logic, and in natural rights, becomes all but Civil, subsumed under the ministers and bureaucrats. Strict and violent state crackdown betides the crypto shadow banking industry (BlockFi, Celsius, etc) at the first instance of fund mismanagement. Addresses and accounts will be censored on non-Ethereum layer 1s like Solana or Luna or Avax or something else, as the state jacks up their pressure. The on-chain snitching industry (Chainalysis), be it under bribe or duress, will greatly expand their partnerships with global tax authorities. And with this, crypto traders shall find themselves trading in a false sense of confidence, oblivious to the false figures of taxes owed. And of course, undemocratic, unaccountable, self-righteous and self-important agents like the FATF shall continue to steamroll over personal sovereignty as well as national sovereignty with their guidances over VASPs (virtual asset service providers). If there were regulations over what one assets may make with one’s hands there’d be riots everywhere. Yet, as these agencies shall continue to issue “guidance” to clip personal freedom, all the while supported by propagandists in universities who know nothing.

But of course, their claims’ of DeFi’s purposelessness and beguiling idealism apply not to the very same thing they’ve built with our technology.

No reason to fear Central Bank Digital Currencies — they say. “As long as people could sell snake oil, it turns out nobody really invested. Once we have an FDA to test these drugs, we have a whole lot more investment into drugs” said Senator Warren — with no realisation of the Big Pharma irony in what she said. “I don’t want a system where the big guys, and the shadowy guys, the guys you never quite see, can do pump and dump, can defraud people, can take in a lot of folk’s money and disappear.” “CBDC could be the answer to the unbanked.”

The unbanked have no banks to put their wealth in. The CBDC solution to unbankedness is to make all wealth not yours.

Nevermind how completely vapid and utterly idiotic their arguments are. Nevermind the fact that Indonesia’s Central Bank literally said that they want to fight crypto with CBDC, so much so they even had their islamic leaders issue a fatwa to label bitcoin haram. Nevermind the fact that the disintermediation of banks by the state necessarily implies the totalitarian control of all human finances. All things become the property of the state.

Like all government agencies, the CBDC is only good to those who cannot produce themselves and must rely on the fruits of others collected through purposeless, self-justifying, self-congratulating governmental bodies — no wonder the arguments their researchers produce is so philosophically vapid, dull, and materially thin. Those of us who could look into the future know that eventually not only will they prevent you from and punish you for “money laundering”, they will eventually simply dictate how you are to spend your money. The word “your” will cease to become a semantically viable determiner before the noun “money”. All money belongs to the central bank. All money belongs to the state. The individual is merely an economic vehicle, a mere means for money to figure out the most efficient channel of flow. We the people want to disintermediate the banks because we want to withdraw our money, send our money, and spend our money however we like — the state wants to disintermediate the banks because they want complete control over how we withdraw, send, and spend our money. Having extracted all value from the alliance with the banks established after the Second World War, the state is now bent on disintermediating the banks to completely seize control over all human wealth.

They had no interest in hiding their powerlust and their perverted desire to enslave. They wanted to literally control what we spend and how to spend, where we go and what we do with our lives, and the means for them to achieve that utter enslavement, while maintaining their tokenistic and symbolpolitik of freedom and liberty, is to establish a monetary system in which avoidance of and resignation from is impossible, and one where debt is effectively indentured servitude packaged in impregnable language. The Bank fo International Settlements, literally said that they advocate for a global digital identity system — the unmodifiable equivalent of the identity card; they advocate for vaccine rollouts to achieve economic recovery, personal bodily sovereignty be damned to the hells where the “stupid” dwell; and of course, they recommend that CBDC accounts be directly tied to a person’s identity. They would know who you are, and they would be able to control your entire life’s neighbourhood of monetary possibilities.

As the Bank for International Settlements said it loud and clear in their 2021 report, they want “account-based retail CBDCs” which will be a system where individuals have direct accounts with the central bank where all users are identifiable using a universal digital ID scheme, which would allow the Central Banks to have the power to “lay the groundwork for privacy assurances” and act “much as local authorities preside over their town marketplace.” They

“You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” — they literally said that, like a spell, or a commandment, a proclamation.

Those of us who are observant, who read history, already know that most of us own nothing. When the British aristocrats returned from the second world war to find their ancient manors occupied by the states, their paintings reduced to dartboards, their mahogany staircases torn apart to be used as firewood, the nation-state, this fantastic French invention, had succeeded in having their way with the aristocracy. And the machine of the nation-state turns to the Third-Estate. The rich scrambles to find shell companies on weird islands in the pacific to hide their wealth from the state, while the same laws that pursue them pursue the common person.

We are becoming the propertyless generation. We are becoming serfs.

Most people don’t own their home, they rent it. Your car is full of intellectual property, that the car makers owns more of your car than you. You are not allowed to repair it with copied parts. Your software on your PC is mostly proprietary and included in the EULA that they can take it away from you at any time (unless you are a Linux user, then you do own it basically). Your money are fantasy tokens lent by the government and can be devalued as they like it. Most people already own basically nothing.

And what is the CBDC? It is One crypto to rule them all. It is propertylessness programmed and made into a matter of national policy. It is fully centralised. It is the tool to grant the state complete control over where the money goes, who to deny service to, complete with all the whens and wheres and hows. It is the ultimate money-printer-go-brrrr. They can rob the masses with the tool of inflation like never before. It is the ultimate transparent ledge that subjects every transaction to the surveillance of the state. Your bank account can be shutdown whenever the state likes it. Only a fool will understand the separation of powers in this context to be anything other than a three-headed monster.

And with the CBDC, combined with the social credit, we will have arrived at a point system that determines your social status, where there shall be virtue points for stuff the government likes, penalty points for stuff the government doesn’t like. Your “citizen privileges” are determined by this point system. You want access to restaurants? Thou score needeth be over 100 or thou QR shall not work. Went to the wrong protest? Talked to a dissident? Or a political undesirable? No travelling for you, no supermarket for you… no school for your kids. And all of this will happen just like the Chinese covid passport. It is Hanfeizi’s totalitarianism made into computer programmes. The powers of Kings and Emperors unthinkable and utterly ungodly from the view of mediaeval political philosophy. Negative interests will become the norm, and positive interest will become unthinkable. Money will come with expiry dates — three months to spend salary before it’s gone. Safemoon reflection dynamics on every transaction, but of course this doesn’t mean the VAT will be gone. There will be a transaction tax, a gas fee, and a VAT. Tax upon tax upon tax, and tax on everything. No economic activity shall ever exist outside of the purview or control of the state. Social credit will become the fifth Chinese great invention.

“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.”

And how will they implement this complete utter form of monetary dictatorship? Why, by nothing but the UBI of course — the greatest and most sublime promise of freedom ever pedalled to the masses. Set up an account at the Central Bank, and you will be airdropped free CBDC. Free money! And so the masses, the poor, the tired, already robbed of their wealth through inflation, flock to be chained and enslaved, like cattle. While we shuddered at the People’s Republic’s social credit system, we sleepwalked into our blockchain-enabled nose-dive episode.

Eventually, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

All to be enabled by the CBDC.

So, would you like to help the Banco Central do Brasil to develop its CBDC? How about the HKMA? Or the ECB? Or perhaps the Bank of England? “A Central Bank Digital Currency Would Be Bad for the US Calls to “catch” China on digital currency downplay the promise of open financial technology”, so says Circle’s head of global policy.

But we all know what they ultimately want. A cashless society. A society where all money is traceable. A world where the great mixer of reality is disempowered.

The CBDC has spelt the death of financial privacy. But the metaverse, with the miscegenation of digital and physical assets, not only have our actions, be it financial or social or artistic, become visible to everyone everywhere, they have also become visible to everyone everywhere for all eternity — on the blockchain.

Virtue-signaling senators and representatives and congresspersons of the so-called free-world wrote to the great techno giants of old, protesting their expansion of power. Facebook’s Libra was of course the main “victim”. And yes, we were not happy with Facebook’s powers, and we debated about it, we knew about its dangers — and perhaps it was best to “provide public access to the Metadata being gathered by online multinational companies” — via something like the blockchain. We thought that if we somehow manage to make all underlying data of our activities accessible to everyone, everywhere, with no one endowed with the power to tamper with them, we would be free from the tyranny of the techno-giants — for they would no longer be in control of a vital resource that bars new companies and innovation from competing with them. And need not have to repeat their exploitative ways, for Satoshi has said,

“The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of individual trades, the “tape”, is made public, but without telling who the parties were.”

But we allowed KYC to be forced upon us. We have allowed them to stick their noses into our businesses. K. Y. C. Those three little innocent letters that have become the gateway to every single technology part of the modern world. Nobody asked if it was temporary or transitory, something to be replaced eventually by something less authoritarian.

Like the Visa, national borders, the masks, and the vaccine passport, that which was merely temporary, extraordinary, emergency, became permanent, ordinary, and the normal. Ancient freedoms were traded away, their memory forgotten. We have come to think it was just a normal aparatus necessary for modern metropolitan life, like the smart phone and social media. From centralised exchanges, then KYC gradually crept into every single payment gateway, decentralised social media, and so-called curated NFT platforms, eventually all socially respectable or necessary DApps. KYC, a process that is only possible given the rise of the techno nation-state which enabled huge technological bureaucracies, a form of tyranny and police-statehood unthinkable even to the most tyrannical Roman Emperors — like compulsory national taxation and conscription… it was something only known to the most tyrannical oriental empires. Yet, here we are — to have every function in society deniable to you unless you agree to have your identity exposed, recorded, and tracked — that’s the reality we have built for ourselves.

They said it was to prevent money laundering, to combat terrorism, to combat drug and human trafficking and child pornography. The charges never change. Nevermind that the American Dollar is the currency in which all crimes are done and denominated. Nevermind that the word terrorism is has literally no meaning and essentially the Lèse-majesté of the “Free World”. Nevermind the fact that drug trafficking and human trafficking and child pornography have all existed as long as humanity have existed. Nevermind the fact that the entire exercise to introduce KYC to combat money launder, is nothing more than a technological arms-race, a futile and expensive exercise. Freedom be damned.

We should have seen it coming. When they started to require your phone number for Facebook, we should have known. But then again, how different was it — to have Lord Zuckerberg’s and Google’s great algorithms scrutinizing every category of data that describes you as a person, and to have them required for every login that grants you access to what remained of what used to be “De-Fi”. Decentralised, for sure still, but not without KYC somewhere down the chain.

When they first found ways to make NFTs, which are essentially unique objects on the blockchain, the first major proof-of-concept was NFTs of cute, innocent, harmless-looking cats. The NFT would encode the DNA of the cat. And not before long, they found ways to encode the DNA of more and more objects, their qualities, their changes, and their derivatives… and eventually they found ways to map the attributes of physical objects onto blockchain. And thus, the universe became the metaverse. And eventually humans, became objects on the blockchain as well — in the form of personal social tokens. Of course, that process did not begin with some Orweillian plot where the government lines up every undesirable at gunpoint to inject them with some chip that pairs them with an NFT. But we were warned. We had it coming for ages. First it was identity cards. Then it was RFIDs. Then the RFIDs got replaced by NFTs. And then more and more data was encoded into the NFT, until every single datatype that used to be collected by Facebook to categorise us was collected and injected into the NFT and launched onto the blockchain by the state.

Nobody bothered to question if this was just, necessary, or even normal — in fact we have become so accustomed to it, thinking of it as so integral of modern life, that our language has no vocabulary to instigate anger against such offence or affront. As the walls went up and as the bars were installed,

Turns out human beings were veblen goods. The more expensive they are, the more desirable. And everyone wanted to be desirable. And so everyone tokenised themselves. What was an utterly lunatic idea, just inches away from slavery, became the norm, as social tokens exploded. Not long until lawsuits started flooding in the courts against the persons tokenised for their “reckless actions” that affected the price of the token. And what was wrong with it? And what powers have we against them?

And eventually social tokens shall be collateralised like mortgages are bundled together, and human finance will be born. Slavery repackaged into financial products.

Plenty of crypto brains out there are already developing solutions to prevent these scenarios from manifesting — Privacy and Finance and the development of physical crypto for example. Many others have written and will write about the viability and advantages of these technologies, no doubt.

However, it does not seem to be the case that these problems can be solved alone with mathematics or clever programming, for the ultimate executors are still humans. Decentralisation cannot save your layer 1 from being barred from fiat onramp. There is little reason for us to believe that in a technological arms race, the public will lose against the state — for the state ultimately holds the gun. They hold the ultimate pressure, and humans remain the points pleasurable. The state is willing to kill the game if it means they won’t lose. And they can kill the technologies that we use. For example, the export of cryptographic technology and devices from the United States was severely restricted by U.S. law until 1992. The law gradually became eased until around 2000, but some restrictions still remain today. Indeed, as Vitalik puts it, “the worst-case scenario would be that people flipping and going into moral panic mode, and go like, ‘crypto is used by insert-bad-group-of-the-day. I don’t think governments have the ability to ban crypto to the extent of preventing blockchains from existing, but they definitely can really marginalise it. They can ban all exchanges, ban all links from the fiat ecosystem to crypto, ban all kinds of mainstream employers from accepting or paying in crypto. And crypto will become a niche counterculture that has much less impact otherwise.”

Our problem is that our society today places unquestioned faith in the concept of the State. Because we believe the State should be omnipotent, we have programmed it to be omnipotent. Due process, the Rule of Law, separation of powers, human rights, are merely asterisks and footnotes in the operation rulebook of the nation-state, or Parchment Guarantees as James Madison called it. The nation-state, is the fetus of the totalitarian state — this was clear the very moment Rousseau penned his famous Social Contract. Invented by the French, and implemented by the French revolution, it has destroyed the decentralisation of the powers, the characterising feature of the feudal order, and concentrated them all into the state. The power over education and healthcare, and welfare, controlled and overseen by the Church, was transferred to the Ministries of Education and Health; the power over money and finances, held by banks and court jews, was transferred to central banks. Everything is done by the state, and whenever something is wrong, it is always the configuration of the state that we look to amend.

The problem is not the form of government. The problem is government itself. Mixed government with absolute power is still government with absolute power. Being mixed merely retards that government’s anacyclosis. We feel comfortable granting this amount of power to the state, only because we feel we can wield that power to do enable great projects to achieve Goods we desire. And that is the issue, we have a dangerous excess of faith in human design, in artificiality, in rationality. If the state is rational, it is justified. If it is justified, then there could be no limits to its power except for those necessary for its functioning. And limitless power is, almost as a matter of semantic consequence, totalitarianism. We are embracing totalitarian power, because we believe in the State. We believe in the rationality of the State; we believe in the rationality of the State because we believe in the rationality of Man.

Totalitarianism is total control of all human life by the State, and it cannot be defeated through compliance. Compliance is the vacuum of resistance which invites totalitarian power to flood in.

What we need is, the withering, the retreat of the State. We need parallel societies that offer pockets of freedom to nurture ideologies of resistance and form the basis of new societies. In short, we need to return to a more chequered, decentralised, forest-like political order. The Leviathan must be disembodied to release the individuals, the Shishigami must fall if the cedar forest is to be rejuvenated.

And the political forest that shall stand in the stead of our political order must be dark. There must be corners where you cannot see. Purest waters sustain no fish. For there to be freedom, we must live with dangers. The price of protection is freedom. And there is no lack of safety in prison.

Yes, it is danger and darkness that we are to embrace, but inasmuch as the main ill that besets us is random acts of criminality, like getting struck by lightning or getting into a car accident, it won’t be so bad — not as bad as systematic and justified state terror.

So let us learn to prefer the danger and darkness of the forest over the safety and the light of the state.

It is to reclaim freedom.

It is to not sleepwalk into dystopia.