Bitcoin and Necessary Invention (for Liberty)
The Bitcoin Wars Part VII
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves." -Henry David Thoreau
Let us agree for the moment that (1) viewing the conflict between Russia and Ukraine from this distance is difficult, and (2) war sucks. I'd like to skip past the politics of (1) to talk about (2). Sometimes the going gets tough. It's great if the tough get going, but better if the tough minds invent technology that allows for people to operate outside of the confines imposed by the often cruel landscape of the world.
We could debate all day about the follies of top-down governance, but the statistical trap is decades old: bottom-up governance hasn't seemed necessary (or even a good strategy) for a very long time due to a historically unusual period of lower levels of major wars. Sure, there are conflicts all over the globe, but the probability that any one person dies as part of one of those wars has taken a several-decade nosedive—particularly for those living comfortably in the West. So, here we are with central technological systems on which even local economies depend to a high degree.
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is part of a larger global economic meltdown. This is merely the first move of the various conflicts that those watching a trapezoidal talking head on CNBC can recognize—the other moves are more purely economic.
Bitcoin Magazine recently ran a story about Bitcoiners building mesh networks in Ukraine.
Again, let's skip past (1), and allow me to choose my side: people.
What should the people do as their governments trade blows?
In the past, they mostly suffered, emigrated, or died.
Does it have to be that way?
We'll talk about mesh networks in a moment, but first…
A Passport is a Key Between Cells in a Global Prison
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” -Frédéric Bastiat
We've recently heard a lot about the dangers of digital passports.
H/T Metatron
But I'd like for you to consider the following: most of the damage was already done. And by that I mean that passports were themselves introduced as a method for the construction of an open air global prison.
While passports existed from time to time in limited form at various times and places throughout history, they were documents that allowed foreign travelers safe passage through the local port. It was after World War I that the League of Nations organized a degree of standardization of the passports as combination intra/inter-national documents. This was pushed internationally, including where passports previously did not exist, often sold as a temporary measure in a tense world. But after World War II, they remained in place.
Cui Bono?
As with most laws, it's the criminals who abuse the system.
From the article, which might as well be any one of a hundred that I've read (they're not heard to search):
The family never paid her as they promised and they took her passport and told her to forget about going home.
When asked why she didn't try to leave the house and escape, Cindy said, "I didn't leave the house because I was scared," she said. "I didn't know where to go."
Her situation grew even worse when Emmanuel Nnaji sexually assaulted her. "He raped me in the house," she said. "Ngozi was not there." Cindy says the sexual abuse continued but no one knew.
Vaccine passports are no different. People are already held out of work, putting the livelihoods of their families at risk. If somebody without such a passport were to manage to travel, they could get caught in any of a number of legal binds.
And if they don't travel, they are at a competitive disadvantage in every possible way.
Sure, these measures can be resisted.
But the economic cost of every act of resistance is borne asymmetrically by those trying to remain free. The costs in time and savings are enormous. Economically, there is no chance that such resistance can succeed long-term within the current economic framework. It's worth asking, "Was that the point?"
This is worse for Ukrainians, nearly two-thirds of whom are unvaccinated. Can they be safe as refugees?
They need other solutions.
Medical Tax Collectors
"The power to tax is the power to destroy." -John Marshall
It's a tax. The vaccine and the acceptance of a digital passport system are taxes on life.
You may trade your post-retirement, least healthy years for greater freedom during the years when you're working for the corporate-governance system. Save for what? You'll own nothing, and survivorship bias suggests that you might even be among the happily obedient.
Bribe the doctor for a vaccination card, and that's a tax, too. You might have to pay further taxes if there are testable ways to prove vaccination status. Unless you give in, and let the government inject you with whatever it wants. Because that's the implication.
Is that because the dollar is dying?
Don't worry, it won't happen, yet. As the global economic destruction spreads from Russia-Ukraine through the overly-dependent global supply chain, fiat currencies elsewhere will fail first, and their values will largely be siphoned into the dollar banking system as economic participants demand stability. If that sounds odd, understand that this is the expectation in global markets, and it will make intuitive sense to experts in monetary policy. When other fiat currencies weaken faster, the value of the dollar can rise, and that can mask the weakening of this corner of the fiat currency system. But that cannot continue forever.
Governments around the world will have no solutions as billions of dollars worth of food that would have been exported out of Ukraine and Russia both are taken off the markets. Even worse, the price of natural gas has exploded in Europe, reducing the production of fertilizer. This will only get worse as gas pipelines connecting Russia to Europe are destroyed (and they will be) during the conflict. This will force the end of a great deal of oil production in Russia.
The consequences will cascade. If you thought 2008 was bad, this might be ten times worse. Forget the Arab Spring. We could see a tumultuous period all over the world.
Lockdowns pushed 100 million people into "extreme poverty" during 2020 alone, according to the WHO's virtue signal. How many now? How many more a year from now? A billion? How many of those will die of starvation, or in conflict over dwindling resources? In an environment of skyrocketing food prices, how many more will be sucked into that quagmire? If you thought six million COVID-19 deaths (a historically ominous number, indeed) was a tragedy, don't stop to think about what six hundred million deaths might look like.
The Ukrainians need solutions. They have no government to depend on.
Half the world or more may have no government to depend on soon. Policy cannot meet demand.
We need technological solutions to combat the current state of technological asymmetry and monopoly. We needed them yesterday, but tomorrow will be good enough [for some].
What is a Mesh Network?
"There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about." -Margaret J. Wheatley
Currently, most global communications are locally distributed in centralized network formations that we call "stars" (in graph theoretic terms).
Source: Wikimedia under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
When that central node becomes unavailable, the network disappears for all local nodes. On the other hand, a network that forms a "complete graph" or "clique" allows any two nodes to communicate. Examples of "mesh" cliques with 3, 4, 6, or 11 nodes:
In such a network, there is no point of failure unless all the nodes fail [but one]. Such an "internet" cannot be made dark by a politician or technocrat. This flips the script and levels the playing field. During an emergency, that could save millions of lives, not to mention the suffering.
How can such a communication mesh be achieved?
Not to be snarky, but it's called a "community", which is what we all gave up while being plugged into the global system that could be folded up and collapsed. We need a symmetric technological solution to re-establish communications as community cliques.
If people cannot participate in markets, they cannot leverage their skills for technologically superior levels of productivity. If people cannot communicate due to censored networks, they cannot participate in markets. If communication channels are censored, people cannot communicate.
Mesh networks have been experimented with by Bitcoiners during crises already, such as the one in Venezuela in 2019. They can be run with raspberry pi's or other small devices. While a mesh node need not involve cryptocurrency, the use of cryptocurrency as a payment to pass messages along may enhance the system by encouraging nodes to remain online. Such a system could conceivably tie the entire world together without the ability for a central authority to shut it down.
While companies are engineering devices that turn phones into mesh networks for the purpose of transacting Bitcoin, the use of a phone is a technological convenience only, and not a fundamental piece of the process.
While Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopouos wrote in 2016 that Bitcoin powered mesh networks were "at least a decade away", we saw the proof of concept less than three years later in Venezuela. The conflict in Ukraine may provide the motivation out of necessity that spurs results. After all, getting a critical mass of users on board is the hardest piece of the puzzle.
In case that tweet gets censored, the link is to here.
"Half the world or more may have no government to depend on soon. Policy cannot meet demand."
It's a lot worse already than you might think. For example, the Netherlands right now, effectively, has no government. Neither does Austria. Both countries have a "government" pasted together with some mighty thin glue. Italy's government is also skating on some very thin ice.
These "Western" countries are just the tip of the iceberg - start with Lebanon and keep going south to see the true state of affairs on this planet. In ten years, I estimate at least 50 countries will disintegrate.
First off, I always appreciate your quotes, Mathew, and I’ve been adding them to my growing collection.
Secondly, regarding the “open air global prison,” have you seen the conversation between CJ Hopkins and “Planet Lockdown” director James Patrick from last May? I included it and discussed the concept of building our own open-air concentration camps in my second essay:
• “COVID IS OVER! … If You Want It” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/covid-is-over-if-you-want-it)
Lastly, I paged you in the comments of a recent Steve Kirsch post ;-)
• https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/ed-dowd-millennial-age-group-25-to/comment/5545119
I’m hoping you can answer this question—perhaps in an upcoming post if you wish to dig into the Edward Dowd data:
So if a 40% rise in mortality among 18–64-year-olds is a 12-sigma event (https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/why-are-non-covid-deaths-at-historic), what does that make an 84% rise in millennial deaths?
Thanks, Mathew!