Some days I wake up feeling like crypto has the momentum to escape from the world’s innovation-stifling regimes, forcing them to bend a knee. Other days I see little hope that anything beyond a global catastrophe could reset our freedoms.
The Rabbit Hole
When I first learned about Bitcoin, I was relatively green to the ideas of free market capitalism. I hadn’t heard of Rothbard or Hayek, and the word “anarchocapitalism” would have likely made me uncomfortable. Almost everyone around me recited how regulation was necessary to solve all the world’s problems; we just needed either one more layer of regulation, or we were just one more tweak away from the regulation finally working and fixing things for good. They simultaneously ignored more simple solutions that would inconvenience them. Sure, they agreed that borrowing money from the yet-to-be-born was wrong, but stopping this sin was a carefully-avoided topic.
Fast forward to now.
After living for some time in the depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole, I did eventually get drawn into more traditional free market theory. However, I found that I had already leapfrogged much of the traditional libertarian curriculum. I was approaching the theory having already lived and breathed many of the ideals pursued by the libertarians and minarchists. Spending a majority of my time freely exploring and transacting on the mostly-unregulated web provided me with a taste of freedom that was hard to let go of when shocked back into the regulatory reality of the “real world”.
And I wasn’t alone. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people around the globe were sharing this same experience.
An Antidote to Coercion?
People often say that the way to gain control is to chip away at your freedoms one by one. Each small loss is not worth a big fight, and soon you find yourself limited and hindered while asking yourself, “what happened?”.
And there will always be looters advocating for a monopoly on violence.
So how can we hold them back and defend (and better yet claw back) our freedoms?
This is, of course, at least to the libertarians, minarchists, and ancaps is the biggest unanswered question.
What if we’re staring at the answer?
Living Two Lives
What happens when millions of people live two lives simultaneously, one as free men and one as captives?
This is what we’re in the middle of finding out!
As millions log into their web3 wallet or activate their pseudonym in the metaverse, they’re conditioning themselves to be comfortable with the concepts of personal responsibility and its joyful derivations.
And when they then hit the sleep button on their laptop, venture into the real world, and immediately come up on red tape, it will piss them off.
And this isn’t just happening with crypto. Why be forced to fund crappy schools when we spend our time learning from the smartest people in the world online? Why pay for expensive health insurance when most of it is bureaucratic overhead and bad behavior subsidies, when Elon can use technology to deliver a more affordable and better product?
Will enough people be red-pilled by these technologies to tip the scale and see liberties increase?
Peace or War?
I personally think that these parallel worlds cannot exist in such proximity for long. They are too radically different, and when contradictions become so glaringly obvious while still defining mainstream culture, it’s a sign of impending revolution.
Technology and progress can only be held back for so long before it rears its head and pounces on both proponent and foe.
But will it be a peaceful transition or a violent revolution?
Today I’m optimistic. And I’m optimistic because of the rate that free market education is spreading. It is no longer boring, but fun. It is no longer a burden, but a way to reduce financial and social frictions.
And we haven’t seen an opportunity like this in many decades.