Bitcoin is Absurd, Part I: Volcano Mining and the Banana Republic

Creating new property rights that do not require a State to enforce is a revolutionary act. What impact such a revolution can have on politics, economics, and the daily lives of people is to be determined. Developing nations around the world will be watching to see if the Bitcoin experiment in El Salvador is successful. If it is, a spark may well be lit that leads to an upending of the financial system as we all know it. Bitcoin domino theory.

Nothing about the future can be predicted with certainty. Just like the price of bitcoin, revolutions are unpredictable and volatile events with drastic moves in all directions. When revolutions happen it’s often the revolutionaries themselves that are most surprised where, when, why, and how the spark is lit. And how far things go.

In 1789, Maximilien Robespierre was a 31-year-old provincial lawyer that carried a copy of The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau with him at all times. He was vocally against the death penalty and supported a constitutional monarchy. As a 36-year-old kingslayer in 1794, he declared “Terror is the Order of the Day” executing his political opposition on both the Left and Right, chopping heads off counter-revolutionaries by the tens-of-thousands, and was finally shot in the face and met Madame la Guillotine as a tyrant. The tipping point was not the blood-drenched streets of Paris or the quarter-million dead in the Vendée. It was the absurdity of the Festival of the Supreme Being.

If events such as the Fall of Robespierre seem far outside the possibilities of magic internet money, consider the impacts of a protocol that Bitcoin is often compared to: the internet itself. Only a decade ago the Arab Spring began and the concept of the ‘Twitter Revolution’ was born. Protests raged, regimes fell, and civil wars ignited as images of rebellion were liked, shared, and retweeted. Social media disrupted the status quo. The social media of money, Bitcoin, could have impacts just as profound.

It wasn’t only dank memes that set the rocked the Arab world. Still in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, food prices in the region were rising fast. The spark was lit when a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire in a suicidal act of desperation against petty local corruption against his business. Social media and the internet gave regular people new power to organize and change their circumstances. Within months, decades-old authoritarian regimes were overthrown.

In a similar way, a Bitcoin Revolution will be shaped by the new power available to the individual and the circumstances it exists in. Instead of rising food prices, it could be inflation. Instead of a crisis in mortgage-backed securities, it could be a war in Taiwan or Ukraine. Or a global pandemic. Circumstances in some countries will lead to attempts to ban, criminalize, and control. Other countries will make another choice.

Source: https://medium.com/@__demipop__/bitcoin-is-absurd-part-i-volcano-mining-and-the-banana-republic-fe1d7272214f?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency