Bitcoin and our Republic
By Mina Attaran
America, the idea, has been tested many times in its history. While it has changed a lot in that time, usually for the better, the core principles have mostly survived and extended to encompass a larger and larger section of our society.
I believe we are currently facing another battle testing our system to its core.
For me, as an immigrant who grew to love the American core values of Freedom, Liberty and justice for ALL, the specific battle lines are around The 1st and 4th Amendments of the US constitution, censorship and the systemic confiscation or inflation of our personal wealth savings.
Aside from the traditional way of attempting to tax the people more, when that’s not possible the system will just print more money thus leaving us completely exposed to a mistake that could rapidly erode our savings if that printed money doesn’t produce a productive outcome.
We are putting an enormous amount of trust in people and institutions that largely have lost the trust of millions of people. This is a very vulnerable situation we find ourselves in and the proverbial “tax payer” seems to be powerless.
They only have to get it wrong once and an entire generation of people will significantly lose their life savings, and in some extreme cases in smaller less advanced countries can lose it all, Lebanon being the latest example.
Bitcoin represents a technology plus an origin story that has developed into the ONLY framework that can not only secure our 1st and 4th Amendments with technology but is also propagating worldwide to anyone with an internet connection.
An unbreakable, resilient, independent record keeping system that cannot and has not been adulterated or manipulated by any power on earth.
This extreme level of integrity in record keeping, something that Gold does not even have (how many times have we joked about whether or not there are any actual gold bars at Fort Knox?) can and will develop into an independent store of value that cannot be meddled with by any Government or central bank. This is something that every liberty loving human should get behind, and it’s our duty to defend it as well as receive the benefits to our economy from this innovation and not let it get chased out to other jurisdictions by enacting stupid policies at home.
To be clear, I am not suggesting someone make wild speculations with large portions of their wealth and for certain I am not doling out any financial advice, I’m not writing about investment growth opportunities here.
What I’m advocating for is that we stand firm behind Bitcoin mining Proof of Work, which not only can generate a lot of economic activity to states that have abundant energy resources, but also helps to secure the entire network along with the thousands of nodes that operate worldwide. We should defend this system with good policies and resist burdensome regulations.
This immutable ledger does not protect one from the law when a crime is committed, nor should it. Instead it protects one from unreasonable search and seizure!
It also protects against the government run amok and if the spending is too much and too wasteful, there is no entity that can simply change how inflation is calculated to hide the fact.
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Minna Attaran, Republican resident of Potomac, is a Persian-American women’s rights activist and a 1st, and 4th Amendment Activist.
