I've given Bit-coin a long rope against my morals. I have done this because frankly the other options were not nearly as good. Also it has been easy in most years as it has always been this great hope for society to get away from central banking and bring financial equality to he masses. Just like the most powerful Oligarchs you and I could enjoy the ability to move money around the world with the easy push of a button. An just like them it would open up great new opportunities to us for financial independence. Away from a system where your working for a financial product that disappears while its sitting in your bank account. On the other hand my fear is that it may be doing as many great hopes like the, USA both during WWII and after the revolutionary war did and slowly morphing into the same enemy we claim to fight. Lets look at each one. USA once the vanquishing power of the fascists and the OG over turner of abusive Oligarchical powers and elitists just as recently as last year had a murder after a fascist rally and we dam well have oligarchy and secret organizations that practice elitism don't we. We have literally fought wars about both things but we cant get rid of these evils can we.
they crop up time and time again not because the movement failed. Some would say it is because we stopped and declared victory or because we didn't systematically eliminate them. Enter the hard right in American politics and the push towards running our country as a Christian nation. Truth is I don't think that works. While evil is a constant and in the bit-coin revolution were fighting greed make not mistake we can't systematically eliminate the nature from its source. So how do we win. With all the pump and dumps that a present in the space and even flat out Ponzi Scheme coins.
Its had to say as a movement that we don't have a problem with greed but before I go on let me pre-answer the "that isn't what bitcoin was all about club". Frankly all we have to know what bit-coin was about are a few people in the space during the early days and one thing that is clear from satoshi's white paper is it was always meant to be a cheaper alternative to most money moving systems we have today. The crux that I am going to lean on thought is that bit=coin was primarily sold to libertarians as a anti central reserve system and latter morphed into a black market rage because of it's Anon principals. However you slice it was born out of the ideals of extreme freedom. I'm going to argue that satoshi did what she/he did because of what they saw as unusual greed leading up to and during the 2006 Global collapse. If you disagree with this then we can simply agree to disagree but I am not debating the point and I am assuming this as true.
So greed is the enemy. However the king him self BTC suffers from bit of it too also dose it not. There was a reporter from the Financial times Isabella Kaminska who once critiqued BTC for trying to replace one oligarchy with another. It seems some of her words have become prophetic as BTC Core maybe positioning its self to be data oligarchs more than financial.
The truth is that BTC in it current incarnation with lightning network enabled is going to distill out major payment recipients as primary parties. This in effect creates honey holes for Government and other entities who want to monitor payments. Not only as a form of law enforcement but also data as a form of behavior analysis. This to me is the antithesis of what was sold to the original user group. The reason this has happened is simple the parties involved have large amounts of bit-coin meaning they will be able to open many channels. I almost guaranty at some point Greed will rear its ugly head and people will start selling data from there payment channels if they can. A little snippet of legal mumbo jumbo here a bit there and suddenly your payment is no longer anon. In short people who have spent tons of time developing Bitcoin are currently seceding ground to win an there making this moral compromise out of fear if not greed. Plain and simple.
This story is important because this is how greed works it pats you on the back tells you how great you are and then issues a list of demands for how you are to change to meet its needs. Its friend fear shows up and tells you all the bad things that could go along with your none compliance. While i give these things more personification than they deserve. This has been the constant route of evil. While some of you may be atheists for the purpose of conversation evil and the devil can be summarized as all the negative social actions we take in society to enforce our stature or other social advantages.
For this reason we have to keep our tack as far away from what we have been warned the devil or satans plan is. This is shown both biblically and in mythology. It is always the work of evil miasmas to enslave mankind usually threw some means by our own foolishness or stupidity rob us of the autonomy we were given. For this reason I can't stand by and support BTC any longer. For me this is the end of my hoping BTC is the solution we all wanted. As i am vested I will wait to see what happens to it but I know that we must not stop fighting and some new form of the hope we once had instilled in BTC will arise I have had some thoughts on this. I think we can sure up the attack vectors that greed and fear use against us but i will cover that more in my next post.
As a foot note to this post (and because I was just reading principals by Ray Dalio and he said "where your principals are unclear write them down so they are") I wanted to make my self clear on some-thing I am not admonishing cores efforts as evil. I am simply living my own set of principals and core has stepped out side of that set of principals. Many would argue that complete opacity towards the forces I mentioned, goverments data miners. is not necessary and IMO they would be wrong. I quote warren buffet when I say "we have nearly half a million people working for us in some capacity in our wholly owned subsidiaries. Now I guarantee some one some place isn't doing the right thing." ! I think if we look at the size of governments and data mining operations we cant guarantee fidelity which defeats the point of a trust less system! This is not to say they will not have great success threw the attritions that they have made and it may be a fools bet to sell. In pure wall speak for me my interests weighted against my principals make BTC a Hold not a Buy.