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Monopolies canβt exist unless they are supported by governments that protect them from competition.
Monopolies in security and defense services have the same type of effects as other monopolies - poor quality products with high prices.
Governments particularly enjoy monopolies on security services because it prevents citizens from being protected from the government.
One of the most effective ways that corrupt governments steal from their people is through printing money after they establish a monopoly on money.
A side effect of money printing is the boom and bust cycle that results in massive bad investment and great destruction of human efforts.
Government intervention into the economy has greatly held back humanity from solving problems in the same way it hindered citizens in Soviet Russia under communism.
And the removal of government intervention into the economy will result in rapid advancements in technology and quality of life in the same way the fall of communism resulted in great advancements in these areas.
All nations are currently at war with one another economically. They are all attempting to starve each other through trade restrictions and this occasionally erupts into violent warfare. This is also a consequence of governments controlling the money supply.
Money does not need to be provided by government. Rather, it is another example of a solution discovered by the interactions of free people (the market) that was monopolized by government.
Money is used as a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. These are are specific attributes of what we mean by the word βmoney.β
Money must be one thing. If a society uses many monies it has begun to revert to a barter economy and money does not exist. Currently monies end at national borders, but this is also a result of government intervention.
Money is a useful tool that facilitates better decision making and enables fruitful trades that would not otherwise take place. A barter economy is an underdeveloped economy.
We expect a money, that is not subject to cost effective government intervention, to become a global money in the same way gold was once a global money.
We believe that a sound money will have a greater impact on human flourishing than anything else likely to occur in our lifetimes.
Technology
We are cypherpunks. We believe that the state died when encryption was invented and we are living through the death rattles.
One of the great advantages of open source software is that the best ideas are copied by competing projects.
It is improbable, if not impossible, to create a secure protocol (such as a cryptocurrency) without the peer review enabled by open source code.
Bitcoin, and the ideas of the contributors to bitcoin, have been copied by various βalt coins,β but no ideas from these projects have been copied by bitcoin because these projects have created nothing worth copying.
For every competent engineer working on an βalt coinβ there are more than 10 working on bitcoin so this is not completely surprising.
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that is government hard and this is the critical feature that makes cryptocurrencies good choices for money.
While it is possible that a new technology will be created that works better as money and that canβt be adopted by bitcoin, this is unlikely.
A new technology will need to be more than marginally better than bitcoin to overcome its price history and other head starts. This seems even less likely.