In-te-res-ting…
Think about it.
Why Everyone Missed the Most Mind-Blowing Feature of Cryptocurrency
There’s one incredible feature of cryptocurrencies that almost everyone seems to have missed, including Satoshi himself.
But it’s there, hidden away, steadily gathering power like a hurricane far out to sea that’s sweeping towards the shore.
It’s a stealth feature, one that hasn’t activated yet.
But when it does it will ripple across the entire world, remaking every aspect of society.
To understand why, you just have to understand a little about the history of money.
The Ascent of Money
Money is power.
Nobody knew this better than the kings of the ancient world. That’s why they gave themselves an absolute monopoly on minting moolah.
They turned shiny metal into coins, paid their soldiers and their soldiers bought things at local stores. The king then sent their soldiers to the merchants with a simple message:
“Pay your taxes in this coin or we’ll kill you.”
That’s almost the entire history of money in one paragraph. Coercion and control of the supply with violence, aka the “violence hack.” The one hack to rule them all.
When power passed from monarchs to nation-states, distributing power from one strongman to a small group of strongmen, the power to print money passed to the state. Anyone who tried to create their own money got crushed.
The reason is simple:
Centralized enemies are easy to destroy with a “decapitation attack.” Cut off the head of the snake and that’s the end of anyone who would dare challenge the power of the state and its divine right to create coins.
That’s what happened to e-gold in 2008, one of the first attempts to create an alternative currency. Launched in 1996, by 2004 it had over a million accounts and at its peak in 2008 it was processing over $2 billion dollars worth of transactions.
The US government attacked the four leaders of the system, bringing charges against them for money laundering and running an “unlicensed money transmitting” business in the case “UNITED STATES of America v. E-GOLD, LTD, et al.” It destroyed the company by bankrupting the founders. Even with light sentences for the ring leaders, it was game over. Although the government didn’t technically shut down e-gold, practically it was finished. “Unlicensed” is the key word in their attack.
The power to grant a license is monopoly power.
E-gold was free to apply for interstate money transmitting licenses.
It’s just they were never going to get them.
And of course that put them out of business. It’s a living, breathing Catch-22. And it works every time.
Kings and nation states know the real golden rule:
Control the money and you control the world.
And so it’s gone for thousands and thousands of years. The very first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang (260–210 BC), abolished all other forms of local currency and introduced a uniform copper coin. That’s been the blueprint ever since. Eradicate alternative coins, create one coin to rule them all and use brutality and blood to keep that power at all costs.
In the end, every system is vulnerable to violence.
Well, almost every one.
The Hydra
In decentralized systems, there is……
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