The 100,000 BTC Challenge – Part I
Anti-IMF for Worldwide BTC Adoption by 2035
Now, I should warn you that the opinion I am about to express is far from the popular socially accepted echo-chamber sentiment, glorifying Bitcoin whales. But I am going to put it out there anyway, lest we continue slipping down the slippery road (or drain pipe) that got us to where we are—the funeral pyre of the fiat experiment fiasco.
TLDR: Bitcoin is a scarce and precious resource. Humanity as a whole must come together and denounce the attempts by greedy corporations to corner the market and exercise centralisation. Stop applauding the advent of the so-called institutional investors and see these actions for what they are: a hostile takeover of our future freedom.
“You don’t own “web3.” The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label. Know what you’re getting into…”
— jack⚡️ (@jack) December 21, 2021
Web 3.0 is still in its infancy and quite malleable, its fate is as yet undecided. However, if we don’t watch out, this sentiment could easily become applicable to Bitcoin itself, a decade from now. For those who own the supply will make the rules.
Part I – Freedom or Financial Slavery 2.0? Make your choice.
Let us first analyse the problem to the bare bones. What is so wrong with the world? Why are most of us born into bondage and doomed to lead unhappy lives?
Scarcity? No, in a word, what poisons the world is fear, the gateway drug to greed, to which the majority of us are already hopelessly addicted… Or perhaps there yet remains a sliver of hope? A ray of optimism? Ego-fuelled greed and fear are the underlying causes of the atrocious wars, nightmarish pollution and every social injustice wrought onto itself by mankind. Greed is FOMO distilled into a caustic venom. The venom fed to us from infancy by the grubby ladle of ignorance.
The media encourages us to cheer on our own demise. We applaud and share articles such as The 3rd largest BTC Wallet Buys the Dip, or GigaChad Goes on a Tear, In One Go Buys More Bitcoin Than The Entire El Salvador Stash Combined or BTC Whale #3 Strikes Againnnn! For the sake of sanity, let us pause this carnival of the absurd for a second and ask a few poignant questions starting with: WHY should we cheer? Is this de facto centralisation good for Bitcoin? Is this good for the world of tomorrow? Has our once pristine vision of glorious mass adoption been corrupted to having the vast majority of Bitcoin’s supply hoarded by a handful powerful, ultra-wealthy (in fiat) individuals, corporations and institutions? If so, how is that tomorrow different from the filthy fiat swamp we’re drowning in now?
Ah, yes, of course! Because Bitcoin is scarce, therefore no more of it can ever be made… right? So… if it becomes currency and fewer than a thousand people own 99% of the supply, we will promptly revert to a neo-feudal, monarchic system where we will live and die at the whim of GigaChad degen masters? This dystopia sounds FAR more terrifying and insane than the one we’re living in now. Scarcity does not equal justice. In fact, it can so easily equal tyranny, if rational balance is not applied, as clearly illustrated above.
“I call it techno-feudalism. I don’t call it capitalism anymore. We need to distinguish what was going on before 2008 from what was going on after 2008. Amazon is not a market; it’s a fiefdom. And it’s a fiefdom that’s connected to other fiefdoms, like Facebook, through the cloud services of Amazon, which are much greater and bigger than Amazon.com. It’s like a much more technologically advanced form of feudalism. And this is completely sustained by central bank money. So you have the combination of the king, the sovereign, the state, the central bank and the feudal lords, the techno-feudal lords. You can see that this system is constantly doubling-down on our extinction as a species. We had the pandemic and what did they do? More of the same...
Jeff Bezos is getting rich not because of the profits of Amazon, but because of the increase of the share price. You’ve heard that he made what, $60 billion since the beginning of the pandemic? That’s not because of the profits of Amazon. Amazon is not that profitable. They have huge revenues, but they also have costs. The actual profits are nothing like that. It’s maybe one billion altogether, but he made 60! From the share price.”
Greed Inc.
Do you remember when we were trained in the 1980s to bark, jump through hoops, wag tails and grovel at the ‘trickle-down’ economics whistle? Oh, what a roaringly marvellous idea that was in Reagan’s time! Indeed, comrades, let’s as a society work our fingers to the bone to elevate a few corporate accounts of a few nobs to rival entire nation states and when they splurge about ‘their’ wealth on mansions and yachts, we, the unwashed plebs can squirrel away a crumb or two, to tide our hunger over until the next pay-check. Alas! Too bad we forgot to inquire about the exact composition of that ‘trickle’ we were promised…
“…they [ruling class] represent corporate power and they represent the neoliberal capitalist view, that that is a great economic model. Which we know it isn’t. It causes only misery and pain for the 99.9% of the population who don’t benefit from it. There IS no such thing as ‘trickle down’. We all know that.”
—Roger Waters, in an interview on Afshin Rattansi’s Going Underground
Wake up. Don’t consent to being just another brick in the wall.
Warren Buffet pays fewer taxes than his secretary, but this is fine… Right? Move along, there’s no injustice to see here. After all, the ethos of capitalism is “Give as little as you can and take as much as you can, because you can. Everyone else be damned!” Especially if everyone else is damned. So we’re all just envious of ‘success’ and would do exactly the same thing in his mighty shoes, right? This slavish mentality IS the problem. No, no, capitalism is not evil, but how we use it mostly is. The issue is not that corruption or capitalism/greed exist, the problem is that we kowtow to them, accepting them as our status quo. As though there is no better way.
‘Remora’ and ‘plover birds’ be like…
Must we couple our sense of achievement and satisfaction to the failure and misery of others? Must it always be us versus them? Eat the rich! Or be eaten by them. Can’t we all get along and be happy? Why must scarcity be the whip with which we flail ourselves day-in-day-out?
“I am not the kind of central-state, tax-the-rich type of person. I just believe that real inequality, rampant inequality needs to be controlled. And that when you have huge enties hoovering up wealth transfer, mass wealth transfer such as has taken place during this pandemic, that there needs to be some regulation to stop it. I am not talking about ordinary people, who have like built a business and done well, who are people like personal development-style folk. I am talking about corporations. Centralised corporations, that are amassing obese, glutinous, surfeit, unnecessary wealth, that is like a kind of disorder. You know already that the three richest people in America have as much collective wealth as the lowest 50% of earners… That is the kind of thing that you could address with the stroke of a pen. And in any sensible society, worthy of that name—you would.”
—Russell Brand, on Woke Hypocrisy
Why do we, as an advanced, evolved civilisation,
Choose this self-loathing hell… generation, after generation?
Have we considered taking a peek into the alternative door of abundance? We might like it better there. Just sayin’.
“You got the right key, baby, but the wrong… key… hole!” Aerosmith, Eat The Rich
Imagine if Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos… or Michael Saylor found a way to monopolize/suck up unlimited amounts of oxygen or water from the planet. Would you still think that they should take all they can just because they can? Imagine if Superman suddenly showed up and instead of using his powers for good, built a Dyson Sphere-style solarium for himself, because the sun gives him invulnerability and power and… yes, because he would have the ability to do so. Would you just chill in the perpetual shade and still think him a worthy hero? Have you seen David Yarovesky’s Brightburn? Yes. He had laser eyes too.
Too sci-fi an analogy for you? Well, here’s a reality check: think 50 years down the road and imagine a world where a dozen corporations like MSTR EACH control some 10% of all of the wealth in existence. Nation states? Pah! Which nation states?! Just as a thought experiment, how would that grab you? What would be your dream ghetto?
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The difference with revolutions is that this groundswell of negative public sentiment, as a reaction to gratuitous inequality, gluttony and oppression, builds for decades and then erupts in a searing volcano of righteous revolt that decimates and vaporises the ruling echelons of society. Then we reset, pick up the chairs and… do it all over again. Century after century, millennium after millennium the same tired game of the Haves versus the Have Nots. Throughout history rapacious glut has always reaped its just rewards and met its demise at the hands of the awakened and outraged, formerly oppressed masses. It is never a question of “if”, rather a certainty of “when”. We all know that politicians, as a class, are toady, soul-selling puppets, dangling from the strings, at the fingertips of blood-thirsty banksters. Bitcoin is supposed to signify freedom from this perpetual tyranny… And yet, we are watching our utopian dream being stolen and violated before our very eyes.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing...”
I would like to end this segment of the article with a few deep thoughts from the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, who really brings this thought home.
“We have a pretty big check that we wrote as an industry. If you look at the valuation, 2 trillion dollars. You look at the statements, the books, the articles, the blog posts, the videos, the courses… They all say the same thing. Change the world! Change the world! Change everything! Re-imagine everything! Decentralisation. And that’s what we were promised. And what did we get? Pictures of rocks that sell for a million dollars. Buzzword-buzzword-buzzword. Networks that purport to be [de]centralised, but when they stop working, somebody kicks them to restart everything. But hey! Great returns, right?! So yeah, just keep doing that. Make billions of dollars of losses because of incompetence and malice, wilful theft and criminal conduct, and a mentality that it is better to be first than best. That is a pretty big check that we’ve written as an industry and we haven’t cashed yet. Somebody has to.
So, we’re going to do that, as a project and then everybody else will come flooding in. Competition will come in. And then it’s over. Because it doesn’t matter who wins. Because WE win. Humanity wins. The people win. We set this whole thing up as an industry to do better. To live in a more fair world. A more equal world. We did this as an industry, so that we, together don’t have to pessimistically, cynically accept what has been given to us. That is the rallying cry. Just do better. Don’t accept mediocrity. Don’t accept evil. Don’t embrace it. Don’t tolerate it. Speak up against it. Don’t accept hypocrisy. Don’t accept lies. Don’t accept the status quo.”
—Charles Hoskinson Christmas Eve address
At this stage the problem is crystal-clear. What is the solution?