{"id":14933,"date":"2021-08-25T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-25T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci028b80f720002426"},"modified":"2021-08-25T01:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-08-25T01:00:00","slug":"bitcoiners-know-something-you-dont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/culture\/bitcoiners-know-something-you-dont","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoiners Know Something That You Don\u2019t"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The longest chapter in Machiavelli\u2019s masterpiece, Discourses On Livy<\/em>, is titled \u201cOn Conspiracies.\u201d He praises conspiracy as the finest mode of overthrowing any regime, because, \u201c\u2026 to be able to make open war \u2026 is granted to few; to be able to conspire against them is granted to everyone.\u201d In typical Machiavellian fashion, the chapter praises fraud, deception, and lying to further one\u2019s private advantage as the proper mode of action – that is, if they seek to effect regime change.<\/p>\n

Contrast this with the doctrines of anarcho-capitalism, which are founded from principle and deduction, the root principle being that of natural law<\/em>. It begins with assertions, all of its ethics, politics and economics growing from that root.<\/p>\n

For decades, their prospects looked grim. Cries to return to the gold standard, grow the libertarian \u201cparty,\u201d run in local elections, and infiltrate think tanks \u2014 or worse, the Senate \u2014 was the predominant strategy. By their logic, even revolution was questionable, as it would essentially be \u201cthrowing out one gang of thieves for another\u201d (\u201cDemocracy, The God That Failed\u201d). The study of natural law is reached a priori – that is, knowledge deduced from principles alone, for example: no two parallel straight lines can ever cross, 2 + 2 = 4, etc. On the other hand, their a posteri conclusions (empirical observations) were this: the world is governed by a tyrannical elite utilizing the central bank, resulting in the perpetual destruction of wealth, continuous warfare and an expanding bureaucracy hellbent on regulating every aspect of the individual\u2019s private life. They made it clear what the actions of these tyrants will result in, and what they intend to do. They never made it clear what we ought to do about them. It took bitcoin, a technology, to reveal the path of greatest effect.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve heard bitcoin referred to as everything from a \u201cmacro hedge,\u201d to a protocol that redefines time and space. Here\u2019s another \u2014 a tool for maximum effect in our conspiracy to overthrow the useless ruling class of bureaucrats. As the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis stated, \u201cThe secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.\u201d <\/em>Replace \u201cbusiness\u201d with \u201cdistributed monetary engineering protocols” and you have the universe of Machiavellian Bitcoiners \u2014 focused only on effect, not principle or ethics. Here to win.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve been buying bitcoin for any significant period of time, ask yourself, what do you know that bureaucrats don\u2019t? There are the obvious answers: hardness of money as a determining factor in storing value over time, reaching final settlement without a third party, gaining control over your property through the magic of cryptography. But note what\u2019s on the other side of each of these value propositions \u2014 outwitting the people debasing money\u2019s value storage capabilities, circumventing any and all third parties, making property seizure at the hand of bureaucrats impossible. On the other side of the wonderful things bitcoin can accomplish for an individual, is what it can accomplish for our collective: to defeat a clearly defined enemy.<\/p>\n

The road ahead is long, and certainly not over, but Bitcoiners can say with confidence that, thus far this enemy has been swiftly outsmarted. With only approximately 2.5 million BTC currently floating on exchanges, this means the great majority of BTC is already secured and held, likely by individuals who knew something their respective bureaucratic overlords didn\u2019t. If the bureaucrats knew, the price would have already skyrocketed, considering there are millions of them in the United States alone. Bitcoiners, by their sheer hard-headedness and fitness to reality, are collectively insisting the entire world compete in an arms race over roughly only 13% of the total supply \u2014 i.e., our scraps. History will read this as a checkmate. As demand increases, and price soars, bureaucrats will be left with one option, how to cleverly get Bitcoiners to sell their bitcoin. I encourage you to not, so that when the time is right, we can take effect and build a world free of these parasites, and for once, actually win.<\/p>\n

This is a guest post by Henry Behar. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or <\/em>Bitcoin Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The great opportunity presented has only been absorbed by a hard-headed few, leaving the bureaucrats of the world at a global checkmate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3242,"featured_media":11943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[1470,1364],"class_list":{"0":"post-14933","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"tag-ideas","9":"tag-philosophy"},"author_data":{"id":3242,"name":"Henry Behar","nicename":"henry-behar","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/041c5a7a2af5ff20e6e8da14e922b9b14d4a11a190bfd258c2a54f95c587d8e4?s=96&d=robohash&r=g"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/img_6312.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3242"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}