Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

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It surprises me how little the intention and philosophy of Bitcoin's creators and early adopters is discussed. For the most part, they were anarchists and libertarians with the explicit intent of destabilizing the state by offering a stateless alternative to one of the state's primary functions. Often this comes with specific economic beliefs that reject fractional reserve banking. It was a political manifesto in the form of software.

While some of the wilder takes on it would prove a little too optimistic -- the scaling problem, in particular, seems intractable -- in many ways it was still a success. You can carry $10 million across an international border in a brain wallet, and if you do it just right, there's no way for a government or similar actor to even know. It's very hard to estimate something like this, but I've seen estimates in the $20 to $150 billion range for 2019 or 2020 for the volume of Bitcoin moved for the international drug trade. This is Bitcoin working exactly as intended, of course.

I'm a Bitcoin early adopter and anarchist and it wasn't about destabilizing the state. It was (and remains to be, for many of the OGs) about making a space for peaceful people which was outside of the manipulation of large institutions, both corporate and governmental.

In other words it's not about forcing a new system on everyone, it's about creating a new system which people can opt into if they didn't like the old one. And there are many reasons not to like the corruption and coercion of central banks, financial institutions, and the surveillance state.

> It was (and remains to be, for many of the OGs) about making a space for peaceful people which was outside of the manipulation of large institutions, both corporate and governmental.

I agree with this explanation, and would add that I think the simple point is that people should be able to save their hard-earned money and accumulate value in a way that's divorced from technocrats manipulating the economy.

Precious metals have served this purpose for a while, but obviously a virtual system dispenses with the huge inconveniences of storing heavy physical objects. You've got gold that can be transported at the speed of information.

The institutional system we have now has essentially decided that saving money is wrong, that deferring consumption is pernicious.

Of course, this is a boon for "consumer capitalism", which last I checked is reviled.

There's not much discussion because not much is happening. Ross made a political statement and is now serving life. A few more bros have gotten redpilled into believing in goldbug Austrian economics (without living it). A decent amount of money is probably escaping from China but the people doing it want to keep their heads down for obvious reasons. I guess any actual challenge to the state is likely to be invisible until it becomes overwhelming.

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