We made a mistake at the dawn of the internet revolution by not requiring encryption at the base layer of TCP/IP and now we’re paying the price. What is that price you might ask? That’s being revealed to us in stages. As Andreas Antonopoulos said…
“…and so over the years, democracy starts getting sick. It gets a cold, and then it gets the flu, and then it gets the bubonic plague, and eventually it gets a bad case of the Trump.”
There’s a reason why bitcoin has a hard time achieving scale to serve everybody and that’s because there’s a metaphysical tradeoff between convenience and efficiency, vs liberty and security. We went for convenience and efficiency. We complain about high transaction fees not realizing that when a service costs “nothing”, that nothing happened to be… our privacy, our security and our freedom.
Banks are the most efficient way of settling transactions, far more so than using a decentralized network. However, it comes at great cost. Fascism. Go to the wrong protest? Say something against dear leader? Sorry, but you must now be erased from the system. Welcome to your new home in SuperMax.
The following video "Delivering Liberty at Scale" by Andreas Antonopoulos explains this tradeoff explicitly...
We hope this time we won’t make the same mistake. People have forgotten that it’s nobody else’s business what goes on in private life. We’ve somehow accepted that “this is the price we must pay for security”. But really this is an illusion. You’ve been taught to fear ISIS when the far greater danger is the power that is centralized in the largest governments of the world. You’ve traded terrorists wearing turbans and wielding machetes for terrorists wearing business suits and wielding nukes.
Terrorism is a byproduct of the state. ISIS is but a small manifestation of statehood, and the phenomenon only gets worse the bigger the organization gets. The solution is to stop centralization of power. We hope to get it right this time by disintermediating the financial system which is at the root of the state’s ability to do harm.
Bitcoin transactions will scale, but we must do it the right way because the wrong way will create another bank, whether that bank contains your money, your personal information or be a bank of your slavery.