This post is an extension onto my last post and will explore and discuss how new distributed technology developments of the last ten years soon to realize their full potential will end the counter-party or middleman, and how profound that development is for Human Liberty, specifically freedom from government, banking and all other centralized cartelized parasitic industries… I will elaborate on three specific technologies and applications that make you fully independent and isolated from the crumbling Status Quo, and more importantly fully anonymous thus rendering the Status Quo reduntant, never to return… So let’s get to it…

Blockchain Technology – The Biggest Game Changer In Human History

A big claim I know, but understand this revolutionary technology and you start to see what the future will look like… We are roughly twenty years into the long term trend of decentralization that started with the internet initially decentralizing information sharing globally, which morphed into decentralized global trade (internet + trade)… From decentralized trade will naturally follow the decentralization of the means of exchange for trade, the currency (internet + money)… To properly explain how Blockchain Technology will fundamentally change our relationship with money (and soon everything else we consider property), we need a quick recap of previous posts and contents…

Step By Step

We start from Barter and its inherent limitations for voluntary exchange because of the double co-incidence of wants… The limitations of Direct Exchange (Barter) lead to Indirect Exchange by way of a medium of exchange, which evolves into common mediums of exchange, and to the Origin of Money… When the money that originated in the market is controlled by the market it will be scarce and thus lead to an increasing standard of living, which is The Essence of Money… This increase in the standards of living that scarce monies create leads to increasing wealth and an increasing need to store this wealth somewhere else other than on your person, which naturally leads to the Origin of Banking and the centralization of the money industry… The centralization of money in a bank has its advantages in that it provides on the one hand safe and secure storage of private property (gold and silver), and may lend out its own reserves to others looking for investment to be repaid with interest… A clearing house for money… Banks provide useful services, otherwise history wouldn’t have invented them… The biggest advantage of banking also happens to be its biggest disadvantage, in that now you are dependent on trust, on trusting someone else, a counter-party… Your property is not on your person anymore, but kept for you by another… Some bankers will inevitably take advantage of this trust and start issuing excess paper tickets (paper money) over and above the private property (gold and silver) they hold in reserve, which evolves into Fractional Reserve Banking, from where all bad things flow…

To take this one step further if you already have a State, which is the monopolist of “Law and Order” over any given territory (the State I would argue is born with Absolutist Monarchy), the monopoly usurped from the people “granted” by the people to the King or Ruler for their protection from each other (LOL), allows the same Ruler to create legislation (and taxes naturally) to his own benefit at the expense of his own subjects… Once an Absolute Monarchy has claimed (or a Constitutional Monarchy has been “granted”) monopoly of Law and Order over a territorial area, it can be called a State… A State which has a monopoly over Law and Order, can Legislate and Enforce that same Legislation… A State by its Decree can therefore enforce a Central Bank and Fiat money system upon its citizenry otherwise known as Legal Tender Laws, which History has borne out… And once you control the money supply you can then completely corrupt and control the same Legal System that gave you life… From there on it is a simple matter of Legislating into existence Compulsory Education, a Public Service Broadcaster (BBC), Public Healthcare, Public Everything, as more of the State is legislated into existence by itself, with the costs for these “Public Services” to be paid for by inflating the currency supply, with the stultifying costs being shouldered by direct taxes and the invisible insidious tax of inflation when you get mugged over generations… This is the CRITICAL POINT, Government (Elites) and Central Banking (Elites) work together, mutually dependent parasites on the same unfortunate hosts (its citizens)… When the host dies (the imminent economic collapse), then both mutually dependent parasites must also die… One gives birth to another who gives it control of everything, but both die together… In quick conclusion, I would argue that Capitalism (the voluntary exchange of private property) died at the end of the Feudal Age of localized (mostly) voluntary Rule by Princes and Aristocracy (Natural Elites), to be replaced with Socialism (the abolition of private property) with Absolute Monarchy and a monopoly state… While equating Monarchy with Socialism might sound absurd, it really isn’t… Socialism is a legal monopoly, and the State is the first monopoly… Once monopoly over Law and Order is established, as a Ruler (King) you can Legislate to enrich yourself by abolishing the private property rights of others (taxation, confiscation, execution)… Central Banking is but the biggest and most destructive symptom of the ultimate cause of slavery and the abolition of private property, and that cause is the State…

Back to banking after that long but necessary diversion… Banking as a clearing house between exchanging parties is inherently corruptible and inherently wasteful (Modern Banking comprising approx 10% thereby of United Kingdom Gross Domestic Product, for example)… In other words, ten per cent of the economy is controlling and clearing the medium of exchange… Nothing is created (apart from inflation), it is just regulating and controlling the medium of exchange for REAL goods and services that consumes ten per cent of G.D.P… As an industry from its inception, banking has become ever more wasteful, costly and decreasing in utility of service, as they have become more entangled with government and coercive monopoly… But you couldn’t hope to run a monetary system or economy without banking, without centralized counter-parties, they say… Banks are a necessary evil, they tell you… Well they were a necessary evil until along came a programmer called Satoshi Nakamoto, who solved the following problem…

Byzantine General’s Problem

The Byzantine General’s Problem is a simple one; In co-ordinating an attack on the enemy, you must get the attack messages out to all the Generals, for all Generals must advance on the enemy together for the attack to be successful; but how do you know if all your Generals have received the message without receipt of that message back from every General? You cannot trust that they have received it, you have to know that they have received it… Now apply this problem to an electronic currency… For that electronic currency to remain scarce there must be some mechanism to make sure it stays scarce… If you can print this currency yourself and everyone else can print it as well, then you are going to print as much as you can, and so is everyone else… You would have hyperinflation before you start, the currency being worthless… You need a mechanism for counting this currency, to make sure that currency isn’t being created in an infinitely copyable digital and electronic space, and to clear transactions carried out in that currency also… The obvious solution is you have clearing houses, or exchanges, or in simpler words, banks… To stop that currency from descending into mayhem of counterfeiting and counterclaiming, you need counter-parties…

A Brief History of Electronic Currencies

Bitcoin is far from the first iteration of digital currency… These digital currencies have existed in one form or another, since the dawn of the internet… I will use the Wikipedia entry here, and quote

“Origins of digital currencies date back to the 1990s Dot-com bubble. One of the first was E-gold, founded in 1996 and backed by gold. Another known digital currency service was Liberty Reserve, founded in 2006; it let users convert dollars or euros to Liberty Reserve Dollars or Euros, and exchange them freely with one another at a 1% fee. Both services were centralized, reputed to be used for money laundering, and inevitably shut down by the US government.^[3] Recent interest in cryptocurrencies has prompted renewed interest in digital currencies, with bitcoin, introduced in 2009, becoming the most widely used and accepted digital currency.”

The problem as highlighted above is for the digital currency to remain scarce and accountable you need centralized counter-parties… And this was the fatal weakness of these early digital currencies, counter-parties can be easily targeted by those that do not want competition in the world of currencies, by you know who… When you have centralized exchanges or banks that try to muscle in on the monopoly of the Central Banksters, they simply print the money to pay for the Police to shut that exchange down, arrest the owners for money laundering (because only the biggest banks get to do that), and throw the upstarts in jail for the nerve of trying to compete with Legal Tender privilege… Any digital currency operating with centralized exchanges is as good as dead before it begins, it’s only when it gets popular enough to alert the Status Quo to its existence will it be mercilessly dismembered… Blockchain Technology is fundamentally different…

Blockchain Technology – Digital Currency Without Counter-Parties

The Byzantine General’s Problem was claimed to have been solved in 2008 by a shadowy programmer with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto… He claimed to have solved the problem of double-spending (counterfeiting) without use of centralized exchanges, and in 2009 he released the open source software for the Bitcoin protocol… In simple terms we have a chain of blocks (hence block-chain) which acts as the ledger onto which transactions are recorded and checked… One block containing the transactions is checked for double spending and processed every ten minutes by the miners… These miners provide an enormous amount of computing power to solve a very difficult puzzle and as reward are given a set amount of bitcoins for solving a block every ten minutes (25 bitcoins every ten minutes currently, dropping to 12.5 bitcoins every ten minutes sometime in 2016)… The only actors that can “issue” bitcoins are the miners who sell these bitcoins into the markets creating bitcoin liquidity… To be crystal clear, bitcoins cannot be created or printed by anyone looking for control of the network, they can only be mined, so when I hear the gallery of “experts” banging on about the FED covertly taking control of Bitcoin, it does amuse me… Bitcoin cannot be regulated by Central Banks or by Governments, but Governments and Central Banks can regulate the Legacy Banking gateways into the Bitcoin Ecosystem, however avoiding all these State mandated Capital Controls is as easy as accepting Bitcoin directly as your medium of exchange for your goods and services…

The Bitcoin protocol solves the Byzantine General’s Problem through having the miners carry out the traditional work of banking (clearing house) while not being centralized; they are a decentralized pool of computing power that contribute the resources to the running of the ledger and its currency (bitcoins)… That in a nutshell is the monumentally ingenious creation of Satoshi Nakamoto, to create a digital asset transfer protocol for both digital and physical property ownership, eliminating ALL counter-parties… The use of the Bitcoin blockchain as currency is only the first application… Bitcoin the currency eliminates banking and the biggest parasite on the back of the productive workings of the market, but Bitcoin as a blockchain allows so many other potential applications… Storing property deeds on the Bitcoin blockchain, and the coming developments in Smart Contracts will allow you to exchange physical property (real estate, car, and really anything else) peer to peer; what I’m saying in simpler terms is the elimination of the Legal System…

Just to take this critical point one step further, let’s take this from the top… If we take the Hobbesian state of nature of the Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes (the war of all against all), that hilarious thought experiment by a State funded Intellectual in attempting to justify his masters existence, as a starting point… The premise is that society consists of two wolves seeking to devour each other, and that the only solution to turn these two ravenous wolves into peaceful and co-operative sheep, is to appoint a third WOLF as ultimate (and monopolist) decision maker over both… A wolf is like any wolf after all, and give one wolf the power of ultimate decision making over other wolves, and he will eventually devour them both himself… The State then is established as a “protector” of private property, to protect the private property of wolves from each other, even though the ultimate “irony” of surrendering (or giving up) the protection of your property to a MONOPOLIST of ultimate decision making, is your private property is now effectively abolished and subject to the whims and fancies of your new Ruler… Law can now be perverted through legislation so that it strips you of more and more of your property rights, until we hit Communism which is the complete abolition of private property… The “Legal” System is therefore the counter-party in “defence” of property rights, but uses the same Legal System to plunder property as you now must register your property for “Legal” purposes, and be compelled to pay taxes for “services” rendered… In simple terms a whole parasitic industry of Lawyers and Courts of “Justice” spring up around the monopolist to “regulate” (steal) and control your property… The Blockchain renders the Legal System obsolete, in that now you only have to upload all your property deeds to the blockchain which stores them there in perpetuity… These property deeds can be transferred from one owner to another instantly by means of a Smart Contract on which both parties agree, transferring the deed on the one hand, and the bitcoins (currency) on the other… A completely peer to peer transaction which doesn’t require Lawyers or Banks or any other middleman… The Blockchain will privatize and give sovereignty to property like nothing else in History… If you’re a Banker or Lawyer reading this, maybe start thinking about finding a new job because you won’t be around much longer…

Technology Game Changer No 1 – Blockchain Technology (Bitcoin)

I call the Blockchain the biggest game changer in Human History for the reasons I have articulated above, be that Bitcoin, or if Bitcoin dies, whichever blockchain succeeds it… The Blockchain has been invented and the simple yet insanely ingenious digital ledger than eliminates counter-parties will change our futures, maybe not tomorrow but in the next five years certainly… The biggest drawback to Bitcoin currently, is that it is NOT anonymous, but pseudonymous… In English, every transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain is visible to anyone at any time, so it cannot be anonymous… So the transfer of Bitcoins and property within the blockchain can be monitored and tracked and traced, and could lead to identification and subsequent targeting and shakedowns by State minions (if you were to really stretch your imagination)… The point is Bitcoin is not an anonymous (and foolproof) method of registering and exchanging private property, and therefore will not give you total sovereignty over your property, unless…

Technology Game Changer No 2 – Decentralized Internet

While there are a few competitors in the developing decentralized internet space and no doubt many more to come, I will focus on Maidsafe for the reason that I have looked into how it works relatively deeply (although I definitely wouldn’t call myself an expert), and I will outline and expand on the Maidsafe system and its huge implications for the future of Liberty…

The concept of Maidsafe is a decentralized distributed interconnected network of nodes… When you download the Maidsafe Operating System (OS) (like Windows or Apple or Linux are Operating Systems), you become a node, which connects to any other node that uses the Maidsafe network… When you boot up the OS you will be asked to insert an Username, a Password, and a PIN number, which allows you to verify your identification as the user and connects you to the network…

When you use Maidsafe, your information is never stored on your computer, it is stored on other computers… As crazy as that might sound, this is the major advantage of this system… When you connect to the network, you loan the network your hard drive memory, becoming a network farmer, for which you receive the Maidsafe network internal crypto-currency, Safecoin… The more of your hard drive memory you loan to the network, the more Safecoin you receive… Now you will also want memory for storage of your information, and in return you pay the network in Safecoin… As in life if you produce more than you consume (loan more memory to the network than the network loans memory to you) then you will produce a surplus of Safecoin, which can be used to purchase more memory, or applications (apps) on the network… All the information you upload to the network is stored on the computers of others and the information of other users stored on the hard drive of your computer, is fully encrypted with numerous shredding algorythms and dispersed randomly into the network… All the information stored within the Maidsafe network lies randomly in encrypted deconstructed data chunks on various hard drives, and can only be reconstructed by the authentication key, which only you have in your Username, Password, and Pin Number… Each chunk of encrypted data has numerous backups so that if one network computer with a data chunk on it goes offline, then another backup chunk on another computer automatically activates…

To give a real world example of how this type of internet would work on a practical basis, imagine going on holiday to a far distant climb… While you are there you decide to check your e-mails and go to an internet cafe… You fire up the Maidsafe Operating System on a random computer in the cafe, and you are greeted with a request for your Username, Password and Pin Number… You fill in the information and instantly you are on your familiar homepage exactly as you left it at home, containing all your e-mails, documents, pictures, music, and whatever else you decide to store on the Maidsafe Network… If your computer breaks down you don’t lose your information or need to back up your files, you merely repair or change your computer, boot up the Maidsafe (OS) enter your personal authentication keys, and your are once again reunited with your personal digital effects… The easiest way to describe Maidsafe is a distributed cloud of information stored over the network of its users, everyone contributing to the strength and capacity of the system… It is a pretty mindblowing concept, is it not?

This distributed cloud of information is completely encrypted with various algorithms, which gives you sovereign private property rights in the most important of areas in life, that of your private information… There are no servers or IP addresses on the Maidsafe system only distributed and encrypted peer to peer nodes, which makes backdoors and snooping impossible… Let me repeat that again… There are no central points and weaknesses where the Elite Controlled Intelligence Services can spy and snoop and violate your privacy in the name of “security”, everything is decentralized, distributed, encrypted… What Blockchain technology will soon do the Banking System, a decentralized internet will do to Government Intelligence Services; render them obsolete and powerless…

Now let’s take this one step further… Maidsafe allows you to sync your smartphone with your laptop, giving you an encrypted inter-connected device pair, containing your private effects… Now add Bitcoin into the mix… The previously pseudonymous (and therefore transparent and traceable) currency, is now an anonymous encrypted untraceable currency… Your mobile phone and computer are transformed into an encrypted and unhackable bank account that the Swiss could only dream of… Your smartphone is a mobile bank to utilize when out and about and in the mood to spend, with your digital savings being stored on your laptop… You will easily be able to shift funds from one to another as and when you need it… Your financial wealth and freedom lies securely within your grasp, and with no counter-party risk (Banks)… You are sovereign over your private property… It takes a while to sink in…

Technology Game Changer No 3 – Decentralized Applications (OpenBazaar)

So we have in the decentralized internet/blockchain system the future of property ownership, digital, sovereign, encrypted, distributed… Of the many applications of property ownership that Bitcoin affords, currency as a medium of exchange will be the first widespread application, and the Banks are (amusingly) waking up to the fact that their rape of Humanity is over and their “services” are no longer required… Bitcoin as a medium of exchange will be exchanged for goods and services, a decentralized global currency for decentralized global trade… Global peer to peer trade… You will be able to exchange goods and services locally through face to face exchange using smartphones as banks, but Bitcoin as a global currency allows you to buy/sell with everybody else on earth, depending if your tastes are Russian Vodka, Scotch Whiskey or Virginian Tobacco… Whatever your pleasures in whatever far distant region, you can now be connected with an anonymous buyer/seller network and currency network… It is only a matter of time until applications or tools are created and built that let you utilize this technology…

OpenBazaar – A Decentralized Marketplace

OpenBazaar is an open source application that I would describe as akin to E-bay… You have buyers and sellers which download a mobile app to your smartphone say… You will have a buying section and a selling section, depending on if you are buying, selling, or both… Let’s say you are buying… You type your search query and up comes a list of sellers of your query… You click on an item and decide to buy it… OpenBazaar uses Bitcoin as the medium of exchange, so debit your account with bitcoins and click purchase… You enter your address and complete the purchase… You have just purchased an item from anywhere else in the world from someone you don’t know with an anonymous currency on an encrypted network, for no fees… And governments will be able to tax their citizens with this technology?! Give me a break!

As for user fraud, OpenBazaar and the new generation applications will utilize some tried and trusted methods of minimizing fraud as far as possible… The bitcoins you used to purchase your product could be held in escrow and not released to the seller, until the product has arrived and satisfactory feedback given by both parties… Only with feedback from both parties does the transaction lapse, and the bitcoins released to the seller… A user feedback system like E-bay and Amazon would soon weed out the bad actors… This is decentralized global peer to peer trade on an absolutely mind blowing scale…

Conclusion

So there are your three Elite killer technologies for a future of Human Liberty; blockchain technology which makes property (both physical and digital) sovereign without any counter-party risk, decentralized internet which anonymizes all of your information, financial dealings and market transactions behind a distributed cloud of encrypted data, and an application (the first of many) that affords you voluntary exchange with any other party on earth as long as he has internet, and you have bitcoins, or vice versa… Those that choose to exit the dying Central Banking system of fraud, theft, and State Capital Controls upon your property (money), are at once freed from control, paranoia and fear of their government… But currency is only the first app, which will be followed by property deeds for physical property, that can be transferred peer to peer without Lawyers and Bankers…

To illustrate this, imagine being an average man which has a bank account, a home, a car to get around, etc… You work for fiat money (dollars, pounds, euros, etc) which goes directly into your bank account and is subject to income tax theft without you being able to do a single thing about it, not to mention being robbed of the remaining value through inflation, and subject to capital controls on what you have left… If you want to sell your car to buy another one, your deeds are registered with a Government (Legal) Driving License Agency, which leaves your property subject to “taxes” to transfer ownership… If you own a home (outright or mortgage) your property deeds are “registered” with a Government Land Registry, which leaves your property subject to real estate “taxes”, and so on and so on… Everything you own you own only to the extent that the government tells you what you can do with it, and how much you have to cough up in tribute (taxes) to do what you want with it… You are a prisoner of your own “property”, which is controlled through the monopoly “Legal” System of Central Government, bolstered by a Central Banking System that controls your money (bank accounts) and allows Central Government access to it at will… Now imagine life with your property on the blockchain, utilizing a distributed internet… Your currency is scarce, instantly transferable without any fees or taxes, and cannot be controlled or issued by Central Banks… You can send a hundred pounds or a million pounds for the same fee because you are not subject to any capital controls or counter-party (Banking) fees… Your Bitcoin bank account cannot be accessed by anyone except you, which gives you complete financial freedom… In addition to currency, you could put the deeds of your home and car on the blockchain, which you could then transfer to anyone instantly in exchange for bitcoins through a smart contract… They are not registered with a Government Agency, so there are no taxes or “Licenses” to be paid for, just peer to peer voluntary exchange of sovereign private property instantly and securely… If Government (The Elites) cannot control your property they cannot control what you do with it… If they cannot control what you do with your property they cannot “regulate” and shake you down for property “taxes”… Without Legislation and Taxation, the Government (Elites) loses the power and the funding it cannot exist without, rendering it redundant and obsolete… Freedom is Private Property, and blockchain technology gives you exactly that which is why I really do not call it the biggest game changer in Human History lightly, and without having endlessly thought about it before making that claim…

Does all this happen today, or tomorrow or before Christmas? Well no, obviously not… I would consider myself at least somewhat of a realist… But we will soon be faced with a global financial crisis that will impoverish generations in a huge wealth grab that in my opinion will turn public opinion against Central Banking and towards free market solutions… I can’t see the Lamestream Media (which is in terminal decline) being able to spin this (how do you “spin” hyperinflation lol?!), without sending ever more disaffected voters and citizens to seek out other sources of information in the booming and improving Alternative Media, especially considering that we live in the Age of Social Media where an idea (Bitcoin) that has been proven to work the last six years, can go viral in hours or days… Without Central Banking to fund it, Big Government dies, and so the levers of control over your property are loosened allowing you to seek out other decentralized methods of property ownership and transfer… How long will all this take? In my opinion, this plays out in the next three to five years, possibly a lot sooner… Government (Elite) legitimacy is based on CONfidence, and CONfidence can be lost in the space of hours and days… We will soon see…

Technology is a double edged sword… Technology can be used by Governments (Elites) to enslave and robotize a population, but technology can also be used to free and enrich the same population… Technology is just a vehicle, that depends on your mindset… It’s about you controlling technology, not technology controlling you… With a free mind, (the belief in government and banking is a cruel trick of the mind, and a curable mental disorder) distributed decentralized technology can change your life for the better, giving you exclusive control once again over your private property, and therefore life… Get ahead of the curve and start experimenting with Bitcoin, and see how easy it is to transfer wealth… It took the Internet twenty years to mature to this level of information, in my opinion it will take a lot less than that for distributed technology to change all our lives…

Further Recommended Research For This Post

An Excellent Bitcoin Primer (20:26): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2CsJ2HMA2I

Maidsafe: Technology Overview – Short Version (5:38): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdGH40oUVDY

Maidsafe: Technology Overview – Full Version (12:03) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtb6L7Bg3zY

OpenBazaar: A Free and Open Marketplace for the Digital Age (1:04)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuRgHbTU9pk

Bitcoin Donations Gratefully Received:

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