Bitcoin is the Revolution You've Been Waiting For

Yesterday, President Obama stated that “we tortured some folks” in the aftermath of 9/11. Later in the day, he expressed his full confidence in his CIA Director, a man several pundits have pointed out was supportive of such torture during the Bush administration.

Obama pointed out that torture is against our “values”.

No. A long wait at the grocery store is against our values. Abduction and torture without trial, on the other hand, is illegal.

Warrantless surveillance of the American civilian population, more than a year after Edward Snowden first came out with his “revelations,” is illegal. Using the IRS to intimidate and slow down political opposition is illegal.

Governments have become far more powerful than their people. The NSA, a military agency whose metadata analysis was instrumental in ordering lethal strikes against insurgents in Afghanistan, is now sifting through your — and without a doubt my — emails and text messages. This is so far removed from the American system of checks and balances I learned about in school, and civil liberties enshrined by the Bill of Rights, that is hard to know where to begin in analyzing how we got to this point.

And the tyranny is not limited to the United States. The E.U. has become an economic cage, with prohibitively high taxes and regulations holding back European countries from experiencing the explosion of wealth that American tech entrepreneurs enjoyed pre-9/11. In some of Europe’s once proud nations, such as Spain and Greece, youth unemployment is now in the 50% range. Many young people my age have turned to prostitution and crime to survive there. Not in India or Pakistan. In Western Europe.

If only there were some supranational currency you could safely buy online, with a few clicks, that simultaneously undermines the E.U. and U.S. money printing presses. The surveillance, war, and taxation authority abuse end the moment they can no longer be financed.

And if only that currency were strictly limited in nature, leading to deflationary pressure over time — instead of your money turning into toilet paper, it turns into science fiction currency, valuable beyond belief. That’s what happens when a currency takes off and the keys to the printing press are destroyed.

This is a revolution, make no mistake. The only difference is this revolution has already been endorsed by our masters (the federal government recently auctioned off more than $18,000,000 worth of Bitcoin, and shortly before that Bitcoin was made legal for federal political campaigns). And this revolution, instead of sending participants to the guillotine, sends them to Park Avenue and Beverly Hills. I have zero doubt that many of the people involved in cryptocurrency today, at its birth, will become fabulously rich within the next couple years.

And this revolution is peaceful, organized, and mathematically guaranteed to succeed. I’ll sound like a r/bitcoin neckbeard here, but so be it: Bitcoin is the instrument of your liberation. And the more we hear banks and their water boys at the regulatory agencies saying Bitcoin enables “criminal activity,” ask yourself this: what kind of criminal activity does the dollar or euro in your wallet enable?

That’s right.

Finally, this revolution isn’t limited to the young tech savvy. Anyone can take part, and many are. Bitcoin attracts young, old, white, black, Democrat, Republican, anarchist, you name it. Attempts by the media to label the “typical Bitcoiner” are as absurd as describing the “typical computer user.”

And with a current market cap of $7.7 billion (less than half the price at which Facebook acquired Whatsapp), make no mistake, we are still pioneers.

Those betting against cryptocurrency don’t realize the enormous odds and mathematics against them. It’s like trying to stop a tsunami with a fly swatter.

We won’t stop at $100 billion market capitalization, nor even at $1 trillion, or $5 trillion. Cryptocurrency wants it all. And it will take it all.

The senseless foreclosures, murder, torture, surveillance, dead-end jobs, political propaganda, desperation. They’re all about to be made as obsolete as a CD player the moment after Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s first iPod in October 2001, promising “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Bitcoin is 1,000 revolutions in your pocket.