Despite being a peer-to-peer cash and payments system it appears bitcoin is actually quite anti-social after all. Anti-social credit, that is.
Socially unacceptable
Earlier this month freedom loving Canadians got a taste of the Canadian Chinese Communist Party’s social credit system when the the Canadian government froze bank accounts of donors to the trucker’s Freedom Convoy. People who were caught donating to the trucker’s GoFundMe or GiveSendGo campaigns were cut off from their own bank accounts and hard earned money, unable to provide for their families.
In the eyes of the Canadian government their behavior was simply not socially acceptable, despite being lawful, so their accounts were illegally and unethically frozen. The freeze of course didn’t last long as the heat of public outcry got to our fickle Prime Minister. The frozen accounts have since thawed out.
Puns aside, this event was a wake-up call to the sleeping masses of the dangers of “anti-social” behavior in the modern age of the surveillance state. People are finally starting to realize that not only can you be cancelled from your job if you said the wrong thing on Facebook back in 2007, but you can be cancelled from buying food at the grocery store now as well should you step out of line. This is scary stuff.
CBDCs are not money
Recently Joe Rogan and his millions of listeners learned of the sinister social credit system being planned by governments and central banks all over the world. Maajid Nawaz outlined the plan for a new kind of social credit money designed to control everyone, something that us hardcore bitcoiners have been shouting to the rooftops about for years now:
In a future on Central Banking Digital Currencies (CBDC) the money you earn will not truly be money, it will be a social credit. A permissioned access token, if you will.
Real money, like gold or bitcoin, can be produced or earned by anybody without permission simply by doing a proof-of-work. For gold miners they dig it out of the ground at significant expense. For bitcoin miners we produce it by computing, also at significant expense. For individuals and business owners we earn it by trading our producing goods and services for it. Unlike CBDCs and unreserved fiat money, real money is always produced at a cost and once produced nobody needs permission to use it.
Real money open to everyone no matter what their politics may be and anyone can prove for themselves that the money they receive is indeed real. For example, anyone who receives either gold or bitcoin as payment can verify for themselves if the money is actually legitimate or if it is fake. We can self-verify by either evaluating the physical properties of the gold we receive or by referencing our own computer software in the case of the bitcoin we receive.
What happened to real money?
Over the last two centuries we have seen a rapid deterioration in the soundness of money.
In the 19th century money was stored and distributed by a free banking system without a central ruler, the convertible notes issued by these banks were backed by gold.
In the early 20th century the system transitioned to central banking which still retained the gold reserve backing but introduced a central ruler over all the free market banks - a central bank authority who dictated interest rates and backed the deposits of each free bank.
Later in the century they stripped away the gold reserve and introduced fractional reserve banking, the monetary unit was only partially backed by gold.
Today our money is totally unreserved, that is, backed by zero gold. Countries maintain their own central bank and money printer and dictate interest rates and the money supply for the entire market.
We are now quickly entering the next and final phase of unreserved fiat money - CBDCs.
As with all unreserved fiat monies, CBDCs have no inherent value because they are not created by any productive effort or cost. Fiat monies are reserved by the people who control the most guns and the biggest armies. Use it or else. They print their fiat out of thin air and “lend” it down the Cantillon hierarchy, where it eventually trickles down to the common man, much diminished in value (google the Cantillon effect to learn more).
CBDCs take the fiat money we know and hate today to another level entirely, they combine each monetary transaction with individual identity. You thought identity politics and cancel culture was bad? Just wait for identity money.
Social credit money
In the frightening future on CBDC social credits the property you own will not truly belong to you. You won’t be able to afford a house, a car or a family without permission, even if you have the “money” in the bank. Everything you do will not be of your own design but merely a reward granted to you by the State, should it shape up to their arbitrary and shifting social measuring stick. Sort of sounds like communism doesn’t it?
On CBDC’s if you misbehave or step across the social lines everything you thought you owned will be taken away. You will have quotas on the things you want. Scarce assets will be rationed to the most “deserving” acolytes. You will become black-labelled and anyone who transacts with you will be punished in the same way.
Social credits require surveillance
The surveillance state is already upon us and has been for years. The owners of the central banks, the people I loosely call the Fiat Maximalists, have been planning to transition to a social credit money decades. It is the natural progression for an unsustainable monetary system like unreserved fiat, though maybe only obvious now in hindsight.
The key to enforce a social credit system is to track everything about everyone using the money, to identify every person to a transaction and every transaction to a person. KYC compliance and permissions on everything we do at every level of the economy.
Let’s be honest this system is pretty much already in place with the digitization of the dollar, but at least today we still have cash if we want to conduct our business relatively privately.
Every day that passes their databases continue to compile, overflow and leak our data to the public. Not only can they now creepily identify people by tracking faces and gaits, they even have our DNA on file. Remember those inconvenient nasal swabs we all took last year for the right to travel? Yeah, it really is as bad as it looks.
Hold up, this all just sounds like another conspiracy, right?
Well, the Canadian government has proven itself to be nefarious when it was caught last year illegally monitoring the movements of 33 million Canadians without their consent, under the convenient excuse of just another invasive Covid policy. Whatever that was really about it was one hell of a useful war game to prepare this new world order on CBDCs and social tracking.
Imagine a future where walking your dog outside your designated zone means your funds get frozen and your credit rating plummets. We aren’t far off.
Stop funding the CBDCs
Folks I don’t know how this all plays out but I do know one thing - stop using their money.
They are using their money printing machine against the public in what economic scientists call ‘seigniorage’. By holding their monopoly money (dollars) in your savings account they are able to debase it and pay for deficits and surveillance programs that no citizen ever commissioned them to do.
Remember that time they confined you to your home and and shut your business down for two years from 2020-2022? That wasn’t your tax dollars that paid for that lockdown, is was your savings and future income paid that funded those expenses. We’re all paying for it now in the rising prices of goods and services and the loss in the purchasing power of our income.
You see, the government pays for their deficit spending by borrowing money from the central bank who “earn” money by debasing everyone’s savings and real earning potential via seigniorage. If you or I tried to do seigniorage on the money we would go to jail for counterfeit. Central banks literally have a monopoly on theft.
I bet you see where I am going here.
Buy bitcoin. Mine bitcoin. Accept bitcoin as payment.
All fiat monies require absolute compliance and cannot suffer any competition whatsoever. Competing money, should it be adopted, will cause unreserved, unreal fiat money to hyperinflate to nothing if enough people switch over to using it. I think we are already seeing the beginnings of fiat hyperinflation with cryptocurrencies doing more to debase it than we realize. The inflection point is hard to see now but it will probably become very clear in hindsight.
Every day more and more people use bitcoin, I use it every day in my work. At Upstream Data Inc. we always prefer bitcoin as payment because we want to hold our treasury in a money that is open, ethical and which generally appreciates over time. It is particularly awesome to use in business, especially for cross-border payments.
In my opinion bitcoin is the anti-social credit system. It cannot be printed or counterfeit. It cannot be produced from nothing and it cannot be cancelled. It is Karen-proof. Everyone has to earn it on the same playing field, there are no parasitical Cantillionaires.
Bitcoin thrives on privacy and openness. It literally represents the polar opposite of fiat and CBDCs. Freedom vs Captivity, it really is that simple.
If you are worried about your continued loss of freedoms and don’t want your kids living in a social credit dystopia then accept bitcoin as payment for everything you do. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to accept dollars, I accept both because not everyone has bitcoin to pay for what I produce.
Start accepting bitcoin, it is just the beginning.
<3 Steve