Bitcoin is Hope

Hope moves us forward, and our values chart the way. Money is intended to be a safe haven for economic value — not a constant cause of stress, worry, and entrap­ment, as it is in the world today.

A funda­men­tally dishonest money, fiat currency ruins our relation­ships with the intrinsic entropy of nature and our fellow humans. To rejuve­nate hope for more harmo­nious human action in the world, we must set our sights upon the invalu­able aims of honest money, entre­pre­neur­ship, and civilization.

Hope is the Wind

Hope is the wind that carries us forward: an attitude to act instead of despair. Most of our lives are spent navigating from “what is” to what we believe “should be, ” each of us charting our way by what we perceive to be valuable. The ideal state towards which we are (hopefully) moving ever-closer is the pursuit of our own poten­tial — a seemingly ever-receding horizon no matter how rich, fit, or well-liked we become.

True progress is only possible by taking actions guided by clear valua­tions. Action is akin to a slicing scythe, which separates prover­bial wheat (the valuable) from chaff (the value­less). Sometimes, we may lose hope, but we can always redeem it through action.

Spanning the everlasting gulf between “here and now” and “a better tomorrow” is a bound­less ocean of space­time. All the aims of our actions can only target other places and other times. As we sail the stormy spatiotem­poral seas toward our desired desti­na­tions, we inevitably encounter unfore­seen stres­sors, setbacks, and challenges. 

Pain — the inarguable basis of being — becomes acute when the conse­quences of our actions diverge from our aims. Hamartia—this tendency to “miss the mark” so funda­mental to our sinful human nature — pervades precisely because our universe is one of entropy.

Entropy is uncer­tainty, random­ness, and disorder; it naturally pours forth from reality and destroys the works of man over time (just ask any homeowner). Forti­fying ourselves from the omnipresent chaos of nature within handcrafted systems of socioe­co­nomic order, we distin­guish ourselves as human by building civiliza­tions. Yet human flour­ishing can exist only along a knife-edge of order and chaos. 

Encoun­ters with entropy are the only way we can grow stronger, faster, and smarter — indeed, such adapta­tion to life’s many tribu­la­tions is our only hope of becoming better. Hormesis ensures that life improves its environ­mental fitness through failure; hence the old adage “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” The lessons gleaned in our contentions with chaos are struc­turally incor­po­rated into manmade law and order. In Talebian terms: individual fragility is insep­a­rable from ensemble antifragility. Adver­sity advances us. Absent the rough waters of life, our true compe­ten­cies could never emerge, nor our civiliza­tions thrive.

As the ancient African proverb says:

“Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.”

In moder­nity, the dominant insti­tu­tion in the world is central banking; its (osten­sible) purpose is to “smooth the seas” of markets by imposing price stability and low unemploy­ment. This misguided purpose inflicts depravity on market partic­i­pants by robbing them of the critical stres­sors neces­sary for learning and the devel­op­ment of compe­tence.

Cutting entre­pre­neurs off from the vital flows of infor­ma­tion engen­dered by well-measured exposures to entropy causes price distor­tion, inter­rup­tion of innova­tion, and suppres­sion of skill­ful­ness. Eleva­tion of the human condi­tion is achieved by break­throughs in engineering, not the art politic.

Polit­ical machi­na­tions can only divvy up the spoils gener­ated by our ingenuity. Innova­tion is the unleashing of human creativity, the fruits of entre­pre­neur­ship, and the restora­tion of hope when formerly benefi­cial systems of order fail us. Exper­i­men­ta­tion in the dark labora­tory of the unknown is the only way we can gain illumi­na­tion. Nature is terri­fying and volatile, but it is also the unexplored terri­tory where we hunt to enrich humanity’s treasury of knowledge.

Treasure Hunters

Life well-lived is a series of skill-building expedi­tions. Before any embarka­tion we must first set our desti­na­tion: a precise deter­mi­na­tion of where we want to go.

Desti­na­tion-setting is an inher­ently subjec­tive and value-driven decision. Equipped with the motiva­tional guide­lines encoded in our systems of value, we set our aim and set sail. Spiriting us along is the hope that our wits, skills, and instru­men­ta­tion will prove true in our trek. When faced with ambiva­lent courses of action, we take the path perceived to be most progres­sive toward our values.

As the heavenly maps of human action, our values are moral behav­ioral schemas intended to help guide us through the inexorable ambigu­i­ties, complex­i­ties, and trade­offs in our circum­nav­i­ga­tions across the tempes­tuous seas of space­time.

Consti­tu­tional to this cartog­raphy of action is the answer to one of life’s most ancient mysteries:

“Why did the chicken cross the road? Because the chicken decided being on the other side was more valuable.”

Life well-lived is a series of skill-building expedi­tions. Before any embarka­tion we must first set our desti­na­tion: a precise deter­mi­na­tion of where we want to go. Desti­na­tion-setting is an inher­ently subjec­tive and value-driven decision. Equipped with the motiva­tional guide­lines encoded in our systems of value, we set our aim and set sail. Spiriting us along is the hope that our wits, skills, and instru­men­ta­tion will prove true in our trek. When faced with ambiva­lent courses of action, we take the path perceived to be most progres­sive toward our values.

Mapping our values is a charting of aware­ness, a training of the moral compass, and a trimming of the sails toward the outcomes we ultimately desire. By estab­lishing an unwavering hierarchy of personal values, we are accepting the sacri­fices requi­site for forward movement.

All individ­uals and insti­tu­tions are finite. No entity can accom­plish all aims. Life is a series of decisions in which we face trade­offs and oppor­tu­nity costs. As both individ­uals and insti­tu­tions, we choose a single course of action at the neces­sary exclu­sion of all others: a rule of reality beyond excep­tion, even for the (allegedly omnipo­tent) central banks of the world.

Action is the sacri­fice of life to our higher values, in the hope that our aims hold true. All attempts to tamper with this calculus of sacri­fice neces­sary for progress can only fail.

Soon after embarking on any voyage toward a valued aim, we observe the congruity between our inten­tions and the conse­quences created by our actions.

Improving the fitness of action and expec­ta­tion is the highest hope of humanity; as conver­gence comes, man gains greater freedom to try his mettle on other forms of misfit­ness within a broader sphere of possi­bility: a principle expressed in adapta­tion, innova­tion, and evolu­tion. In this way, man circum­am­bu­lates himself toward his value-directed “North Star” through an itera­tive process of trial, error, and retrial — finding his proper path through exper­i­men­ta­tion and perse­ver­ance. Through this inher­ently non-linear and unstable process, man converts entropy into growth.

Paradox­i­cally, mankind can only succeed in advancing himself through a willing­ness to fail. The way of the warrior (and the entre­pre­neur) is the resolute accep­tance of death, the alacrity to confront the chaos of nature coura­geously with the aim of converting it into a good and useful order. Poignant to this paradox of progress is the ancient wisdom of warrior-sage Musashi, in one of his nine princi­ples for strategic living:

Training their minds, spirits, and charac­ters against the entropy of nature, entre­pre­neurs deliver to us all the hard-won treasures of erudi­tion earned in their explo­rations. Entre­pre­neurs seek knowl­edge by putting their skin in the game and adven­turing into the unexplored terri­to­ries of nature in search of better, cheaper, and faster ways of satis­fying wants for society.

Enduring the pain of failure, adapting to the unknown, and living to tell (and sell) the tale is the way of the entre­pre­neur. These infor­ma­tion foragers under­stand the inherent trade­offs of hunting and navigate them intel­li­gently to achieve growth. Antithet­ical to the entre­pre­neurial ethic is the central bank, which “chases two rabbits” of growth and stability, with delete­rious results in the long-run.

Growth is purely a market process, and it cannot be induced by decree (just try yelling at your garden to “grow faster”). By attempting to override Darwinian reality, central banking stifles entre­pre­neurial adaptivity — the most impor­tant aspect of survival for any species.

As we navigate the world, the fitness of our value-maps to the progress we observe is depen­dent on circum­stances both within and beyond our control.

For instance, if an entre­pre­neur leading a hyper-growth technology company is intent on disrupting an entrenched industry, he can control his own alloca­tion of time and capital with the aim of making a software solution that (he hopes) market partic­i­pants will prefer. But no entre­pre­neur can control broader market forces like customer prefer­ences, industry regula­tions, or competitor actions.

Indeed, he must strive valiantly even to “control” events within his own organi­za­tion. Clearly, we can exert some degree of influ­ence on the things outside our control, but to a much lesser extent than we can our own time, atten­tion, and capital. Truly, we can only ever (hope to) maintain control over our thoughts, attitudes, and actions as we live and learn.

Knowl­edge is treasure, and entre­pre­neurs — led by hope — its dogged hunters.

The Way of Hope

Hope — the ultimate motiva­tional emotion — propels each of us forward and indicates when we veer off of the optimal path to our value-mapped desti­na­tion.

All action is future-oriented and there­fore specu­la­tive by nature, requiring faith in a percep­tual model of an unknow­able future. When we take action, and the results play out in a way consis­tent with our inten­tions, then we experi­ence positive emotions and are motivated to move further forward by the hope of experi­encing more good feelings. 

In this way, goal achieve­ment reinforces our patterns of action. Contrarily, when our actions cause conse­quences divorced from our goals, we experi­ence negative emotions. We are motivated to change course in the hope of avoiding more bad feelings. Failure gives us pause to recon­sider our trajec­tory through lived experi­ence and the systems of value mapping us through life. In human action: pleasure is our preacher, and pain is our teacher. Or, to cite the stellar lyrics of Muse:

“Our hopes and expec­ta­tions. Black holes and revelations.”

Values deter­mine not only where we focus our atten­tion but also how we filter our percep­tions. Goals, by defin­i­tion, are the valued ends of games we play. 

In the Selec­tive Atten­tion Exper­i­ment, scien­tists proved that focused atten­tion can blind us to most other aspects of being when engaged in goal-directed action. This means that our values tell us where to look and partially deter­mine what we see. In any given situa­tion, if you’re feeling hopeless or lost, you could be the victim of bad circum­stances, or you may just be blind to the pathway forward due to a disval­u­a­tion of goals, since goal-setting, in part, deter­mines your percep­tions. 

Atten­tion is directed and refracted through the circuity of our values, an inter­sub­jec­tive reality which we commu­ni­cate with humanity’s most impor­tant tool — money.

Money is a tool of value expres­sion: it is used to denom­i­nate market exchange values (prices) and is a medium by which we commu­ni­cate inter­per­sonal values. When you decide a good or service is suffi­ciently valuable relative to its current price, you buy it, and the market responds by producing more of what you purchase or causing its price to rise (or both).

Through buying, the inter­per­sonal values and action patterns of producers you buy from are energized since your actions help achieve their goal of revenue gener­a­tion. Selling, of course, causes the reverse: declining prices, less produc­tion, or a general devital­iza­tion of producer values and action patterns (or all three). In this way, trade reshapes the relevance of elements in the world around us.

Reality: A Realm of Relevance

Most members of Western Civiliza­tion conceive the world from a materi­alist viewpoint, yet the reality of human experi­ence is perhaps best under­stood as a realm of relevance. Although our surround­ings are composed of matter, we perceive them as what matters in the sequences of our goal-directed actions.

When we press the accel­er­ator on an automo­bile, and it moves forward, knowl­edge of its inner workings is irrel­e­vant to our goal of trans­porta­tion. But when the vehicle has a mechan­ical failure, its inner workings become quite relevant since they now impede our goal of forward motion. The goal of innova­tion and civiliza­tion, then, is to make the opera­tions critical to want-satis­fac­tion less relevant to our active aware­ness, thereby freeing up our limited atten­tion spans to focus on ever-more valuable aims.

As Alfred North White­head poeti­cally elabo­rated this pathway toward civilization:

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they’re making speeches, that we should culti­vate the habit of thinking about what we’re doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civiliza­tion advances by extending the number of impor­tant opera­tions which we can perform without thinking about them.”

Civiliza­tion, to be sustain­able, must be maximally free from compul­sion. Control over the primary economic frame of refer­ence — money — means central banks can compul­sively reshape the relevance of objects for players in the socioe­co­nomic landscape.

As a medium through which mankind conveys value, money is a motiva­tional and percep­tual tool penul­ti­mate to our own five senses. When someone rests their drink on a table, it is a tool to them. At the same time, that table can be an obstacle to someone being paid to jump over it. Objects only matter in the context of our goal-directed actions. There­fore, a compul­sory command over money is the power to (at least somewhat) recon­figure relevance within the minds of human beings and rewrite history.

As Mises explains in his Magnum Opus Human Action:

“The course of history is deter­mined by the actions of individ­uals and by the effects of these actions. The actions are deter­mined by value judge­ments of the acting individ­uals, i.e., the ends which they were eager to attain, and by the means which they applied for the attain­ment of these ends.”

Since attain­ment of money is such a major goal in life (private property rights are a terri­to­rial imper­a­tive), control over money means central banks possess the power to twist our valua­tions, percep­tions, and goal orien­ta­tions. Monop­o­lized money mutilates our sense of meaning. Cowering to central­ized control over money forfeits all hope of humanity forming a free civilization.

The Destabilization of Civilization

Freedom is held to be the highest value of Western Civiliza­tion, where individual sover­eignty is super­or­di­nate to state sover­eignty. Pricing systems, denom­i­nated in money, are primary deter­mi­nants of the config­u­ra­tion of relevance in a free world. Relevance is always a relative and dynamic quality, and in the sphere of exchange, it is sculpted by prices. We can think of prices as commu­ni­ca­tion tools for gathering or dispersing atten­tion to the things markets want satis­fied or the problems its partic­i­pants wish to solve.

As prices increase (infla­tion), more atten­tion is drawn to resolving the under­lying “want” each repre­sents by dissuading buying and incen­tivizing selling. This is a healthy function in a free market, as price increases indicate wants that demand to be satis­fied. But when price increases are artifi­cially imposed through currency depre­ci­a­tion, they do not reflect real wants for which the market demands satis­fac­tion (except perhaps an unartic­u­lated want to elimi­nate central banking).

In a non-manip­u­lated market, prices tend to decline naturally (defla­tion) as we become smarter and better at satis­fying wants. As prices deflate, more atten­tion is liber­ated to seek satis­fac­tion of higher value wants for society. In this way, central bank induced infla­tion pumps up our socioe­co­nomic problems and desta­bi­lizes civiliza­tion: an ironic outcome for a “stability providing” insti­tu­tion. Defla­tion shrinks our problems by lowering prices away from our active aware­ness, freeing us to focus on higher value aims, and letting us grow more civilized (as White­head so brilliantly said in the above quote).

To state the argument succinctly:

“Artifi­cial price infla­tion is desta­bi­lizing. Natural price defla­tion is civilizing.”

Infla­tion is compul­sory and invis­ible theft — an insid­ious enemy of hope and an ampli­fier of socioe­co­nomic problems. When people feel that they are free and able to signif­i­cantly influ­ence the courses of their lives, they naturally develop higher hopes for the future.

Freedom matters for sustain­able social cohesion and skill-building. By placing freedom at the pinnacle of our social value hierarchy — as Western Civiliza­tion was meant to — we engender an environ­ment most conducive to cooper­a­tive problem-solving at both the individual and insti­tu­tional levels. All force by fiat runs counter to this core principle. A more hopeful world is equal to liberty minus legisla­tive force.

As Bastiat wrote in his infamous antis­tate treatise The Law:

“Try to imagine a regula­tion of labor imposed by force that is not a viola­tion of liberty; a transfer of wealth imposed by force that is not a viola­tion of property. If you cannot recon­cile these contra­dic­tions, then you must conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.”

Lack of unwar­ranted legis­la­tion in human affairs leaves us free to engage in the activ­i­ties we find relevant and meaningful. Liberty lets us render more satis­fac­tion from life and generate more wealth through work. Intuitively, a world where everyone works on what they love is better econom­i­cally, cultur­ally, and spiri­tu­ally. 

Freedom from compul­sion is an essen­tial ingre­dient of this ideal state. Vividly visualize your highest hopes and dreams. I am sure you will find freedom as an indis­pens­able element of your day-to-day existence. But this fading remnant of the American dream is diametric to our world’s present finan­cial night­mare caused by infla­tionary fiat currency.

Inflation is Despair

In the world today, the rules of money are bent and broken to favor a few cantil­lion­aires at the expense of everyone else. This has the conse­quence of sucking hope out of society, since no matter how well citizens run their personal or business affairs, they are perpet­u­ally pushed further off the path of progress to their valued ends. In life, progress feels the best, and hope for more propels us forward. Central banking inverts hope by causing a persis­tent regres­sion of civiliza­tion through the distor­tion of price inflation.

No matter how produc­tive society may become, or how many problems its entre­pre­neurs may solve, central banks steal vast swaths of economic surplus by imposing “positive price infla­tion” through fiat currency counter­feiting at scale. Further, and more devas­tat­ingly, these proceeds stolen from entre­pre­neurs are increas­ingly used to fund police states and perpetual warfare world­wide. The dishonest money we use today is asymmetric, and we are all victims of the most colossal fraud in history. Truly I tell you, infla­tion is most accurately described as any or all of these five malev­o­lent acts:

1. Theft

2. Taxation without Representation

3. A Legally Enforced Injustice

4. A Viola­tion of Natural Law (Inborn Rights to Life, Liberty, and Property)

5. An Act of Moral Turpitude

Fiat currency supply infla­tion perpet­u­ally plunders the economic surplus of produc­tive people, no matter how hard they work. Always turning up the tread­mill of infla­tion to outpace the real economy’s produc­tivity gains leaves people utterly hopeless. 

Debasing curren­cies forces everyone to fight their economic battles uphill on an ever-steep­ening slope: costs keep rising, wealth dispar­i­ties keep widening, and laws keep convo­luting. 

Infla­tion is toxic to truthful pricing, the natural environ­ment, and virtue-seeking. Without accurate prices, relevance becomes more a matter of dictate than discovery. By siphoning away people’s private property rights, incen­tives to care for the Earth and its many diverse ecolo­gies are broken, leading to mass pollu­tion.

And since value is more easily gained under a fiat currency standard through polit­ical positioning instead of problem-solving, decep­tion is rewarded, and devel­op­ment of virtue is largely abandoned. Modern civiliza­tion has come so far in so many ways, yet infla­tion remains our prime impetus to despair.

When you come to see the truth of fiat currency— a game with ever-shifting rules designed to disfavor those already dispos­sessed in the socioe­co­nomic hierarchy — it becomes clear why its victims are constantly drained of morale. All hope for a more fortu­nate future.

Central banking is an economic tyranny: a top-down bureau­cracy built on lies and theft, built to maximize the value of its share­holders at any cost; it is a monopoly that enriches itself by depre­ci­ating our money.

As the Red Queen told Alice in Wonderland:

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

A New Hope

Stripped of the sound money neces­sary for forward economic progress and its associ­ated positive emotions, citizens holding their savings in fiat currency are plagued by hopeless­ness. In this sense, and in many ways, Bitcoin is a new hope for the world. 

First, Bitcoin restores economic indepen­dence to entre­pre­neurs by giving them a way to store wealth that cannot be plundered. Working-class people now have a savings medium that does not force them to take unnec­es­sary risks or extend their working lives in a race to outpace infla­tion. 

Second, each incre­mental unit of reser­va­tion demand for Bitcoin is decre­mental to fiat currency since to save Bitcoin, you must divest your fiat. 

A shrinking market value for dishonest money can only benefit humanity since fiat currency is the stealth funding source for every dictator, world war, and intern­ment camp in human history. By nulli­fying the infla­tion-financing of govern­ment milita­riza­tion, Bitcoin repre­sents a restora­tion of hope for the retreat of global warfare and (re)advancement of civiliza­tion.

Finally, by disrupting the insti­tu­tion through which politi­cians enrich themselves and exter­nalize costs — the central bank — Bitcoin forces govern­ments to be more account­able to the prefer­ences of their citizens. In a Bitcoin denom­i­nated world, citizens would be treated more like govern­ment customers than slaves. Honest money empowers the realiza­tion of all our high hopes for civilization.

Such dramatic change can seem scary to people who are gener­ally conser­v­a­tive. Those comfort­able in the relative stasis of their socioe­co­nomic surround­ings are often reluc­tant to “rock the boat” even when infla­tion ensures it is (gradu­ally then suddenly) sinking.

Central banking is criti­cally depen­dent on an ignorant and passive citizenry to perpet­u­ally perpe­trate its scheme of plundering our private property rights to the benefit of their share­holders. This parasitic insti­tu­tion preys on the capital entre­pre­neurs accumu­late as a buffer against uncer­tainty with the aim of maximizing its own share­holder value.

Our compla­cency gives the entropy exter­nal­ized by fiat currency infla­tion an incuba­tion period to infect our socioe­co­nomic fabric, thus causing the future of civiliza­tion to become less certain with each new dollar produced. Infla­tion is a legally justi­fied policy of plunder injecting dishar­mony into the natural human capacity for collab­o­ra­tion.

Unfor­tu­nately, such a policy is orthodox, as Mises writes:

“Economic history is a long record of govern­ment policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disre­gard for the laws of economics… economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.”

Uncer­tainty is entropy, and money is an insur­ance policy on the uncer­tainty of the future. Since money can be used to buy anything in the market­place, it is an instru­ment of pure option­ality and the most effec­tive tool for dealing with uncer­tainty. By confis­cating money through infla­tion, central banks maximize certainty (negen­tropy) for their share­holders in the form of profits, growth, and dividends, all while exter­nal­izing uncer­tainty (entropy) onto society in the form of price distor­tions, capital misal­lo­ca­tions, and warfare.

Entropy is an inerad­i­cable property of thermo­dy­namic reality; when its imbal­ances grow too great through forced redis­tri­b­u­tions, our socioe­co­nomic insti­tu­tions can rupture. Razing our inter­sub­jec­tive struc­tures in this way is the essence of social revolu­tion: a disso­lu­tion of social conven­tions, an upending of our vener­ated insti­tu­tions, and a defiance of the values which previ­ously provided our bearings. All sinister yet unintended conse­quences arise from misguided attempts by central banks to suppress the entropy of prices and employ­ment. Fortu­nately, Bitcoin can help us elimi­nate the enforced socioe­co­nomic entropy imbal­ances caused by central banking.

To most effec­tively contend with uncer­tainty at scale, entre­pre­neurs — our economic heroes — need untram­meled liberty and a sound frame of refer­ence for values. “Measure twice, cut once” is the most impor­tant mantra of every effec­tive entre­pre­neur. With Bitcoin, we move away from an economic system premised on “stable prices” and toward one based on stable measure­ments of value. 

Imposing price and employ­ment stability, the (osten­sible) purpose of central banking, is ignorant of entropy and an exacer­ba­tion of long-run volatility. Bitcoin is engineered in accor­dance with the unavoid­able entropic reali­ties of price discovery, unemploy­ment, and growth insta­bility. Bitcoin is money rooted in thermo­dy­namics, optimized for measure­ment stability:

If we hope to thrive in this universe, we cannot centrally barri­cade unstop­pable flows of entropy and must instead learn to harness this innate cosmo­log­ical force in a decen­tral­ized way.

Righting the Ship

The way of decen­tral­iza­tion is the free market: a forum of free exper­i­men­ta­tion where problem-solvers make wagers to try their hands at resolving entropy for society. Entre­pre­neurial entropy resolu­tion comes in the forms of want satis­fac­tion and innova­tion. True entre­pre­neurs are those who play with fire and learn from their mistakes, growing the civiliza­tional treasury of knowl­edge in the process.

Entre­pre­neurs are tinkerers pursuing positive payoff convex­i­ties while hoping not to get burned, yet contributing to the enlight­en­ment of us all of us when they do occasion­ally go up in flames. Tinkering is antifragile action that trans­mutes random­ness into revela­tions. As Nassim Taleb states in the opening lines of his master­work Antifragile:

“Wind extin­guishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with random­ness, uncer­tainty, and chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”

My hope is that Bitcoin will help entre­pre­neurs regain their economic antifragility by giving them the ability to store savings in plunder-proof money and discour­aging undue debt accumu­la­tion. Maximally sover­eign, problem-solving-entre­pre­neurs, forti­fied by sound savings, are our best fighting force against eternal entropy. Let us honor them as true heroes and disavow the heinous bureau­crats under­cut­ting their achieve­ments through unnec­es­sary legis­la­tion and infla­tion. Let liberty, not legis­la­tors, lead us.

A leader­less civiliza­tion is, for the first time, possible with Bitcoin. As a means of preserving wealth through polit­ical sea-changes by perfecting our private property rights in money, Bitcoin gives the world great hope for renewing virtu­osity. Perfected private property rights are prereq­ui­site to the proper place­ment of freedom, growth, and respon­si­bility in our social hierarchy of values. 

My hope is that Bitcoin will help civiliza­tion perma­nently emblazon entre­pre­neur­ship and virtue-seeking as its highest values, as was true for some ancient Roman Stoics. There are no final answers to the world’s unlim­ited problems: our only hope is to empower more and more problem-solvers. Entre­pre­neur­ship is problem­atic to problems and, there­fore, our greatest hope. To this end, Bitcoin is money purpose-built for entre­pre­neurial account­ability, adven­tur­ous­ness, and (mental and finan­cial) enrichment.

Bitcoin suffers no kings. A money uniquely charac­ter­ized by a firmly fixed finitude of supply, Bitcoin is capable of commu­ni­cating an infinity of economic and inter­per­sonal values without being politi­cized, thereby bringing an unprece­dented harmony to human action across space­time. 

In Bitcoin, only our ideas matter, not our egos. Although entropic sailing is never smooth, a money composed by princi­ples of pure justice pushes us all to become more compe­tent by facil­i­tating an equitable arena for economic compe­ti­tion and cooper­a­tion. Removing the attack surface for would-be-plunderers of money is a great leap forward for the poten­tial prolif­er­a­tion and moral­iza­tion of civiliza­tion.

Bitcoin imparts a renewed hope for humanity as we navigate ever-deeper into the impen­e­trable horizons of the future.

Hope is the wind sweeping us all across the endless spatiotem­poral seas. Naviga­tion by strong values and seeking their instan­ti­a­tion in our charac­ters as virtue is the only way we can advance ourselves and our civiliza­tion. Seen this way, Bitcoin is a battleground to restore freedom, truth, and virtue in the world. 

In this global campaign for liberty, our strategy is simple: hold our savings in the hardest money in history to recon­sti­tute hope for the billions of sorrowful souls world­wide and all the gener­a­tions yet to come into being. Where our money goes, our minds naturally follow, leading each of us down paths we find uniquely meaningful and relevant: hopefully into our own entre­pre­neurial pursuits to profitably satisfy the wants of our fellow human beings. Through Bitcoin, we can redis­cover the value of unencum­bered entre­pre­neur­ship — the idyllic principle under­lying Western Civilization.

Saving in honest money takes the intel­lec­tual, polit­ical, and philo­soph­ical wind out of the sails of dishonest money, letting us right the “socioe­co­nomic ship” once and for all. In its ascent, Bitcoin promises to decap­i­talize the overly complex (by design) monetary, legal, and tax author­i­ties encum­bering entre­pre­neurial skill-building expedi­tions today.

By defraying frictions to free trade, Bitcoin gives the world hope for a future charac­ter­ized by true freedom.

Hope is the wind that moves us forward. Fiat currency is a false tempest: a destruc­tive windstorm tragi­cally affecting our civiliza­tion. By saving in Bitcoin we raise our sails stead­fastly as entre­pre­neurs racing toward sunnier skies.

Bitcoin is Hope.