Bitcoin and the Conquest of Privacy
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Bitcoin and the Conquest of Privacy
By Erik Cason on Citadel21
Posted May 21, 2020
The Personal Decision to Use Cryptography to Protect One’s Privacy, Property, and Wealth
“All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.” - Carl Schmitt
Our privacy was never for sale.
We never agreed to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, and identified by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.
Through the constant and considerable violations of each and every single one of our constitutional rights, personal dignities, and human liberties; we can see these were to only be taken, never given. In this time of great need, we are seeing that among nation-states around the world, there is no nation to be found where liberties are not threatened, where people are not under the sinister gaze of the digital panopticon with nowhere to hide.
Satoshi Nakamoto was able to understand the total state of emergency that we all live under; as citizens of the modern, technologically advanced state, and how cryptography could help end this emergency. He understood that through cryptography and the protection of privacy it can assure; a new kind of social contract could be created. This social contract would require a new kind of theology, which could offer us protection when no other sovereign power could. Satoshi saw the secret of power that Hobbes always knew to be the true hidden power of sovereigns, and is the only real obligation that any subject has to any sovereign power:
“The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished.” - Hobbes, Leviathan
What Satoshi Nakamoto created with Bitcoin is a theology of cryptography which guarantees privacy, and the ability to protect one’s wealth beyond any physical power. No matter what government rules over you, what state claims you are its citizen, or which currency you are forced to pay taxes with; all may own bitcoin equally without regards to their station of birth, the laws that claim to command them, or emergencies that are enacted over them.
Bitcoin is a common form of wealth and power that assures privacy beyond any corrupt law. Bitcoin is an idea whose time has come, and that nothing can stop. Bitcoin offers itself as a form of economic order that that guarantees privacy through cryptography, and how bitcoin’s timechain uses cryptography to verify that all bitcoins are fairly accounted for through its consensus and protocol.
This radical, unstoppable force that is Bitcoin, and the cryptography that empowers it, is not only a new system of wealth and privacy protection; it is the very foundation of a new society.
Bitcoin is an economic order for the internet alone, making banks and fiat money no longer needed, nor desired. It is a new form of digital contract that assures its order through cryptography, and verifies each truth with the work of the timechain. This allows for any person to choose this new system of economic power, to verify the truth of its facts for themselves, and to join the revolution to overcome the old corrupt systems of the dying age of fiat money.
Satoshi understood that in order to restore order once again, he had to find a way to evade the sanction of physical identification. Through the power of cryptography and the personal privacy it guaranteed, Satoshi was able consummate both a new form of wealth and a contract from which order may be restored. This new order is beyond any sovereign power, as there is no kind of violence, statist or otherwise, that can destroy or change the truth of its timechain. Bitcoin is a new form of personal sovereign organization that uses cryptography to go beyond the physical power of any nation-state, and the brutishness of their violent powers of law. Bitcoin returns economic power and personal privacy directly to the hands of anyone who chooses to use it. Through choosing bitcoin, anyone can reclaim the rights that are rightfully theirs and become the sovereign owners of their property once again.
Privacy As The Final Banishment of State Law
“If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.” — Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence
This is the power of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is this divine power that can be lethal to all nation-states without spilling a drop of blood. It is the non-violent revolution that we have been hoping and praying for. It is a way for humans to meaningfully reconnect and organize digitally, and anonymously if they choose, against the tyrannies of the modern age. Through using Bitcoin to economically organize ourselves, and the cryptography it contains to protect our personal privacy, we create a new kind of social agreement that is beyond any sovereign power of the modern age.
Bitcoin is a means for anyone to use these memetic techniques of cryptography to protect themselves in a way that no nation-state, no police, no political system can guarantee to its citizens. In every form of state law there is always a chance of a ‘state of emergency’ in which any person may become an ‘enemy of the state’ and stripped of their very right to life, liberty, and property for whatever reason the state sees fit.
Through the constant, rampant, and gross violation of all civil liberties by all states to all people; we can clearly see that our personal privacies, rights, and dignity have been totally liquidated by the security state in every form.
We are told these violations are for our own safety and security, and under the pretext of public utility; in the name of the general interest, we are to be fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted, robbed; and then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, the first utterance of ‘No!’ to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, disarmed, bound and imprisoned.
That is government today; that is its justice; that is its morality, and that is the crime that they want us to roll over and simply take.
And it is in this very same vein that we should totally and completely reject whatever fiat money our respective government’s print, whatever amount they offer to bribe us as common whores. They have no right, nor any claim over the kind of wealth each of us should choose. Through rejecting their disgusting and corrupt money with Bitcoin, and blinding their violating technology with cryptography, we can reject these corrupt monetary, economic, and political systems.
Using the technology of Bitcoin and asymmetric cryptography to organize ourselves, we WILL win the new territory of freedom that Satoshi spoke of. A territory where our privacy will truly be preserved, our property protected, and our order guaranteed through the oath that is Bitcoin, and the power of cryptography, but only if we can keep it. There is only one chance to encrypt the internet and preserve it as a bastion of freedom and liberty for all future generations - and that time is NOW!But only if we can keep it!
The Coming War Over Privacy
The war for privacy is already here, and they are already spying on you, cataloging your data for the day they choose to use it against you. The question is what are you going to do about it? Do you let them take everything, or do you choose to fight back? Bitcoin offers an answer to this question, and it is the final power which will allow anyone to throw away the yoke of economic slavery and corrupt, violating state powers.
As this conquest of privacy evolves, it will come to the inevitable, dangerous, and insane conclusion that all people, everywhere, should always be monitored and spied upon, ‘for the safety and security’, of the state. Only the most sinister and evil deeds may be produced through such radical authority.
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
It does not matter if there is good in their heart initially; as the machinery of politics will turn the hearts of men into cold stone; it will make evil become a reasonable thing. We must remember that we are dealing with men, not gods - we should not expected godly behavior from them. And as all of history will tell us, rights that are freely given are not won back so easily.
This is why it is so imperative for us, as free people of this earth, to banish such tyrannical and banal authoritarianism from this planet once and for all. To complete the final messianic task where man takes his rightful place as the master of himself, for himself alone. This task is not just to save us from the evil that is the global total surveillance system that all governments are becoming; but to redeem us from the fall of humanity and the grievance that all contemporary forms of politics have become.
We now have the means, the technology and the kind of economic security to create this radical privacy, and the time to act is now! Bitcoin allows for us to create a radical, and totally new form of politics using the internet as its heart, Bitcoin as its mind, and privacy as its soul. As with the production of the medieval commune of the 11th century, and the nation-state that came from the Peace of Westphalia in the 17th century; we are on the cusp of a totally new kind of human organization that can change the course of human history forever.
If we are to live as free people, to have the liberty and dignity to discuss and decide exactly what freedom and liberty means; we must have the power to protect our privacy and property against state power and any emergency they enact.
Through the power of cryptography, and the dignity that is Bitcoin, we have a chance to stop this psychopathic system of rampant economic corruption that has defiled and debased our system of politics across the globe.
With Bitcoin as our mutual form of money, and foundation for our new social contracts, we can change everything.