Bitcoin Magazine
A Peaceful Revolution
I consider myself a progressive person because I look around the world and I see that it is not just, fair, equitable, or peaceful. I have always looked for ways to make the world better, and I have always done that from within the systems I recognized as broken. For most of my adult life, I have expected the government (one example of a broken system) to make rules and laws that nudge the system closer to justice, fairness, equity, and peace. Isn’t that the best we can hope for?
One reason why I encourage you to learn about Bitcoin is so you can question the current system through another lens. Learning more about how and why Bitcoin works is only one half of the journey. Bitcoin also provides an opportunity to examine the unexamined, study the water around us, and ask tough questions about the systems we have always lived with. It presents the opportunity to ask questions we never really ask. What is money? Who controls it and how? Who should control it? Learning about Bitcoin empowers you to imagine what things might be like if we replace a structure we intuitively know is unjust but have never had the vocabulary to question before.
The idea that the monetary system might one day be all the way fixed has never seemed like a real possibility. The idea that the entire system could be replaced—the water around us that we don’t notice—has never been a possibility either. Yet while many of my liberal friends are very adept at pointing out systemic inequities, proposals for systemic change to replace the systems that cause those unfairnesses are few and far between. Certainly financial and monetary systems are systems that one doesn’t usually examine, but a better understanding of Bitcoin interestingly offers you a better understanding of the systems it seeks to replace, and why incremental change won’t fundamentally address its unfairnesses. It also allows you to imagine, perhaps for the first time, a world without those inequities.
The world is controlled by political, social, economic, and military systems that both create and depend on the hegemony of the United States dollar. Unfairness, inequity, and violence are woven into the fabric of these systems. They are inexorable parts of those systems, not just unfortunate externalities that exist on top of otherwise healthy structures. To take just one example, wealth inequality is not just an unfortunate thing that happens because some greedy people break the rules and get away with it. It is a necessary and integrated feature of a system that depends on a hegemonic United States dollar being a global reserve asset (see Chapter 7). But now, for the first time in human history, we have a potential monetary invention that could overhaul the system, not just tweak it from within to be a little more fair.
In my experience, the more a person knows about the legacy financial system, the more they dislike it. Henry Ford is credited, most likely incorrectly, with having said, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”5 Bitcoin could be the nudge to help you learn about our banking and monetary system and start a peaceful revolution.
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5: “The Truth Is Out: Money Is Just Created, and the Banks Are Rolling in It,” Underground Network, accessed November 29, 2022, https://underground.net/money/the-truth-is-out-and-the-banks-are-rolling-in-it/.
This post A Peaceful Revolution first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Jason Maier.
