The Personal Responsibility of Bitcoin

“There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and innocence make sense only if applied to individuals.”

–Hannah Ardent, Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship

The only way we can change the world is if we take responsibility for ourselves first.

In a world of totally corrupt money where the criminals and gangsters freely negotiation with prime ministers and politicians for what price we will be sold poisons and for what excuses we will be caged; we have the greatest personal responsibility to steadfastly refuse any form of monetary relationship with these monsters. The truth is that the individual men and women–who have names, locations, and soft fleshy bodies like yours and mine–have made the decision to work with and for governments that preform these works of genocide, oppression, and terror all for a price. Whatever price it maybe, it will always have the weight and worth of thirty pieces of silver, for we all know what the value of blood really is. These monsters are the enemies of all humanity, and we must let their authoritarian ideals and ways speak for themselves and testify to the guilt of their actions and participation in this affair even if they cannot understand the true works of horror in which their hands participate. Let them take responsibility for the absolute shame and sham that is their life’s work and where it is housed upon the graves of untold billions for all of human history. Our ancestors will know the truth, and they will spit and curse when saying their names.

When we see the full-scale of the unprecedented catastrophe that is unfolding before us through the abject fear and terror that is the latent authoritarianism of any and all governments today; we must demand of ourselves as human beings to take responsibility for what is happening in this world. This is not a responsibility of ours, but that of our Beyng that is shared by all morals at all times, everywhere, and it is the absolute plight that has encircled all of biological life, and subjected it to The Danger which threats our very forms of life. It cannot be understated just how dangerous the conditions are becoming, and the lack of escape if we are to be ensnared.

We must accept that we are cursed by the sins of our fathers, but blessed by the wisdom of our ancestors; and we must heed their call and undo this catastrophe we find ourselves trapped within today. It has only been with the development of fiat money and their pernicious and oh-so-cunning apparatus of fractional reserve banking that we have found ourselves impoverished in both material and spiritual terms–which is of no coincidence. Only in a world where real value has faded away to a distant memory of generations past, where God is dead, and it is we who have killed him; does the worthlessness of fiat money show its nakedness for the truth that is our being-in-the-world.

We can change all of this, but it requires a new kind of courage–the courage to refuse to participate, to retreat into ourselves and to build private lives that are outside and beyond the means of the state, the brutality of their cudgels, and the cage of their panopticon. To reorganize upon a telluric front both digitally and physically, and to prepare for the responsibility that is Bitcoin and the new commonwealth it opens all beings to. It is a new beginning of thinking in the world that allows for us to come into contact with Beyng, and to allow for each of us to take upon the full responsibly to care for the future, and harbor the security of wealth for those future ones who are yet to come.

By taking real responsibility for ourselves and the future that will be birthed from our actions today, we must full and absolutely reject the inherent lies that are fiat, and accept the truth that nature demands. To become one with nature again and to believe with full veracity and conviction in what it means to wholly care for ourselves and the futures ones forever. It is to remember the power of our hands and the strain of our body against the immovable and limited time that we are on Earth in order to prepare for our final rest which is our death. It is our responsibility alone to understand the world is ours to inherit, and we must take upon ourselves individually to be responsible for that in which we take part with it. Through the means that is Bitcoin, we can now create our private communities and friendships which will be the foundation for the new order of the ages, the digital commonwealth that will save humanity from the wrath and lawlessness of statism.

But what does it mean to save something, and why is it a kind of responsibility? For when we choose to save, we do it in assurance that what we have ‘saved’ it for an unnamed and unknown time in the future. To make something safe, to secure it, is to ask ourselves to be responsible for the future and the absolute security that it is, and that what has been saved is fully harbored and undiminished. This form of security is not something of material means, but social guarantee. It is something that has been assured through the existences of families and communities from before memory, and has now been expropriated totally by the state for itself alone. This expropriation has been handed down generation, after generation, which in turn has created a whole world of people who believe that it is the state who is responsible for their lives as a god, and they demand it as such.

We must demand of ourselves a responsibility towards The Future Ones that bows to them with respect and reverence, and says to them ‘We have saved this for you’–a meaningful agreement that has been made and will continue to function with a meaningful economic, social, and political predication for all of the future to come. With fiat money, that predication is based upon vile and insidious apparatus of statism which cannot be meaningfully separated from the violence and authoritarian decree it must use to empower its law. The state is a moral-less machine which demands our compliance to it as the only moral it understands. Obey, not think, and the state will save you.

The word moral comes from the latin mores, which means acquired manners and behaviors; having nothing to do with ethical or moral practice. This is why we find that those of a ‘respectable society’ who want to be upstanding and moral citizens are the same ones who stand ferociously against Bitcoin and the freedom it represents. The pliability from which the mores of the respectable society has been expropriated into compliance with the state has ensured the total breaking of any form of ethical practice to form state societal morals. It is the manners and behaviors of a people who refuse to think for themselves and who have elevated obedience alone to be the highest of all virtues. For the ‘respectable society’ has made sure that the only moral to be practiced is compliance radical and pedantically divorced from any form of thought. The morals of the respectable society are not only deplorable and contemptuous for what its very name is suppose to reflect, but such behavior has infected language and thought to their very roots, attacking the meaning of things in-and-of themselves so that the idea of any sort of moral compass beyond the state is obliterated and unthinkable.

To be responsible is to think for yourself. Sapere aude! Which in latin means ‘have the courage to think for yourself’, which is also the motto of The Enlightenment. It is the idea of sincerely contemplating, pondering, and wondering in the deepest and most authentic action of questioning in silent dialog with oneself, and for oneself alone to come to understand what the nature of something is. We call this thinking; and what we mistake for this is a cloud of constant parroting of dialog and talking points from media, talking heads, and experts. These external statements are so powerful, frequent, and persistent that we have truly forgotten what it means to think. We have taken upon ourselves the mores of a thoughtless and vacant society in order to satiate the machinery of modernity.

Thinking is not the action of coming to an answer, correctly routing a question, or the insufficient and misleading internal dialog of the ego. To think is the hesitant pondering that must tease out of the idea from its hidden resting place to ensure that the path of thought correct, and that no missteps have been taken. To think is to purge the all-encompassing, bombastic and brash egoism of modernity and the gangrenous infection of how fiatism poisons the mind, and to ask oneself if such a thing is really true. This is the only pathway towards Truth as no matter how much a concept may be declared legitimate over the factual evidence displaying otherwise can authority usurp the legitimacy of truth.

It is this mode of authoritarianism masquerading as thought that creates ridged obedience through the means of fear and terror. Fear and terror are the most important components of our current system of money and power as logic and facts would only lead to an understanding of how such a system only serves the grossest and most hideous monstrosities of the human race. Through the fear and terror of being insecure, destitute, and hungry, people are forced to comply with a system that ensures they remain impoverishment by means of their own inability to think. Obedience is the means by which man has become enslaved under the hypnosis that the state is his morals, and the decrees of it his thoughts.

In a world such as this, we can only cry as Cicero once did, “O tempora, o mores!” (“Oh the times! Oh the customs!”) towards the injustice of our cause and the plight of the world. As did Cicero, we also know that our Senate and forms of politics are all too impotent and flaccid to deal with the nature of crimes so grand and illustrious that only the gods may seem capable of such awesome horrors. In the light of such a truth, we must demand of ourselves to rise to the calling of what it means to be human in our day and age, and ask ourselves to take responsibility for the state of the world as it is and to demand of ourselves to think!

If we are to really think for ourselves with rigor and contemplation that is only worthy of a thinker, then we must deeply consider the role of money and states in our world. We live in a technologically advance global society, yet we are governed by fractured, geographically limited elite party-based political forms that serve the most pernicious and immoral forms of life. This is only possible because of how money functions today in our world, and how we think of wealth itself.

Another world is possible, but it will only come to fruition if we are to think for ourselves in the most serious and rigorous of ways. For each one of us to deeply consider the state of the world, the position of all states, the functions of fiat money, the hidden meaning of value, and how these all thread together in our globalized digital world where the internet is still free and open, as it may not always be. It is only through this rigorous thought that demand we take responsibility for the state of the world, that we can come to understand the awesome power that is Bitcoin and the sovereignty that is encrypted within it.

Choosing Bitcoin as your own personal vehicle of wealth preservation is about so much more than just money, wealth, or savings. It is about taking upon ourselves the responsibility for the state of the world and to demand the abrogation of all fiat money everywhere. This is not for the light and transient causes of personal riches, but to secure the value of money for the future ones in such a way that it cannot be unknowingly inflated away, seized in states of emergency, or guilefully stolen through the perniciousness of banking. It is our responsibility alone to rise the task that is demanded of our generation to secure wealth for the future, and to protect and honor it in such a way that no person, state, government, or institution can ever overcome it. Bitcoin is the only thing that can offer any being in our world this kind of security, and in that, it also demands our responsibility to cultivate, cherish, harbor, honor, and secure its flourishment and bloom in the world. Bitcoin is the personal responsibility for each of us to secure our own lives, wealth, and honor so that we may perserve that which is only destined for a world where the corruption of wealth has been solved and protected forever.

Erik is a crypto-anarchist, iconoclast, and thinker that has been working in the bitcoin ecosystem since 2012. His primary concerns are the intersections of political, economic, and social theory as they relate to bitcoin specifically and crypto generally.