Tyranny noun /ˈtɪr.ən.i/ government by a ruler or small group of people who have unlimited power over the people in their country or state and use it unfairly and cruelly.
I have written several articles in the past regarding why decentralization is so important in Decentralization: A Kingdom of Conscience or Nothing, how blockchain technology can be use to unite people on different side of the political spectrum in Blockchain’s Potential to Unite People and more recently how the invention of bitcoin gives us a fighting chance against the current financial system that only benefits a few insiders while screwing everyone else in What happened in 1971?. With this new article my goal is to summarize how blockchain is a weapon that can be wielded against the increasing tyranny of centralized government structures and unelected bureaucrats.
What may seem as unconnected events during the last decades are actually a series of plays by a globalist agenda that wants to gain total control over people’s lives. The rise of surveillance capitalism is the alliance between Big Tech and the Surveillance State in order to make people dependent on products and services for day to day life. Behind the facade of making your life easier is the dark reality that you are being harvested of the most valuable commodity in the 21st century: information. This information may seem irrelevant, but with enough of it and data points of daily habits and contacts you interact with, enough private information can be extrapolated. This danger is ever increasing due to exponential growth of AI capabilities. If generating AI images is surprising to you, you don’t want to know what the secret AI of intelligence services are capable of.
If you think I’m being paranoid just take a look at China and how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has built an information and surveillance bubble around the country. The famous Great Firewall of China is the name given to the legislation and technology used by the government to control and censor every aspect of digital life in the country. This grasp of total control over the digital life has only been exacerbated by the development and advancement of technology for the past two decades. Every aspect of a Chinese person’s life is now being monitored and logged by the State. If a person jaywalks in China a camera will capture it, identify the person with facial recognition and discount points in their social credit score. This social credit score is tracked for every single individual, you do something the State doesn’t like, it discounts points but if you behave as the State wants you to, you gain points. Access to residence buildings is dependent on the credit score, this means that if the State doesn’t like what you have been doing they can deny access to your own home.
The dystopian mechanism of social credit has taken this real life Black Mirror episode into new heights with the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the form of digital yuan. Now the credit score is also used to determine if a Chinese citizen is worthy of using their own money. Low credit score means you can’t buy products that would be considered as luxury items. If you misbehave, the CCP punishes you by only allowing you to buy rice for example. Trying to buy anything else from the supermarket will get your payment revoked. This also applies to the ability to use public transport and the ability to save money. Since CBDC can be programmed by the State, they can set an expiration date meaning if you didn’t spend the entirety of your wage at the end of the month then it disappears.
If you think these policies would only be possible in an authoritarian State like China then think again. In the UK the government wants to limit saving capacity to only twenty thousand pounds utilizing the digital pound. This is not only in the UK, the European Central Bank (ECB) is preparing to launch the digital euro with similar capabilities. The proposed holding limit is three thousand euros, you may think “what’s wrong with that?”, well at the same time the ECB wants to make cash illegal under the pretext of “fighting money laundering”. Like every authoritarian regime, changes are introduced gradually to the population in a true boiling frog syndrome fashion. First they limit the use of cash, then they introduce the CBDC, later on cash is completely removed from society and the only instrument to exchange value is the digital currency controlled by the government. Or is it? That’s where blockchain and cryptocurrency comes into the picture.
Blockchain is a tool that was invented by an anonymous person or people by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. This tool makes it possible to maintain a global ledger without a central authority. This means anyone in the world can participate in it to keep the ledger secure and the rules enforced. These rules are not enforced by a central authority rather by the community as a whole. These rules are written in the bitcoin source code for example, the first implementation of this technology. Satoshi invented bitcoin as a response to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, in which banks went under for gambling with people’s savings. Bitcoin permits anyone to transact, receiving and sending value, over a network where no one can prohibit you from participating. This is what brings fear to the financial establishment, whose power comes from their grip on the international financial system. Blockchain technology, bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies present, for the first time in history, a real threat to their power.
Many people confuse blockchain and crypto with CBDCs, and that’s what the establishment is counting on because at the end of the day, they took the blockchain technology and corrupted it for their own interests. The only similarity between cryptocurrencies and CBDCs is that both are digitally native. This means they were created from inception to function as a digital form of payment. Actually fiat money (dollars, euros, pounds, etc.) is also mostly digital nowadays, but their inception was analog.
Why do I say CBDCs are the corruption of cryptocurrencies? Because they were created as a direct response to the rise in popularity of crypto and the threat they present to the status quo. CBDCs don’t run on blockchain technology, they run on a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). This is the name that corporations gave to a private implementation of blockchain technology. Because blockchains by nature are public, meaning anyone anywhere can opt in and participate in it. Meanwhile DLTs are private, meaning there is a centralized authority that decides who participates and who doesn’t. Makes sense right? A private corporation doesn’t want their competitors inside their network, the same principle applies to Nation States who don’t want other countries messing with their finances. This means that the State that issues the CBDC has complete control over who uses this new form of digital legal tender and who is not allowed, based on nationality, political views, ideology, ethnicity, etc.
The invention of blockchain and cryptocurrencies was a long process that took several decades of technological advancement and trial and error. It was incubated and nurtured by a group of people, that would later be known as cypherpunks, who came together in the late 1980’s because they were noticing the use of technology to control people instead of setting them free. They realized that the ability to transact freely and to be the real owner of your money and wealth were indispensable to have freedom. Because the moment that the State has the power to weaponize money against dissidents, civil disobedience would be impossible. As we have recently seen with the trucker protest in Canada.
The famous phrase “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” is in full effect when it comes to the battle over the sovereignty of your money and wealth. In a world increasingly digital, control over digital money means complete control over the population. In the initial days of bitcoin the mainstream media said it was an occult currency of hackers. When the dark web site known as Silk Road became famous, the media said bitcoin was only used by drug traffickers. After the 2017 market top, crypto as a whole became more popular than ever and this attracted scammers to the space. What did the mainstream media say then? Crypto is only for scammers. Now we are reaching the “they fight you” part and they are fighting back with CBDCs. Guess which argument the media will use next? Crypto is only used by money launderers or more recently it’s only used to fund terrorism. These are all coordinated action plans between the mainstream media and the establishment to deter people from learning about bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
I hope that with this short article I was able to convey the dangers that Central Bank Digital Currencies represent to a free society. If you hold dear the principles of freedom of conscience, freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the right to security and liberty, freedom of speech, the right to privacy, the right to equal treatment under the law and due process, the right to a fair trial, and the right to life. Then I highly encourage you to learn more about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. It may seem complex at first, but with time everything will start to make more sense and you will see the current international financial system for what it is, a huge scam perpetrated for decades with the only objective of making rich and powerful people richer and more powerful than ever before while making everyone else into a slave of the system.
