Bitcoin is Programmable Money. But!

Bitcoin is Programmable Money. But!

How does the involvement of the Federal Government and Corporations in the Bitcoin Stakeholder Community impact the evolution of the technology and monetary function?

Rules Without Rules — But Not Without Influencers!

The current development and evolution of Bitcoin have been described as birds flocking, disorganized and chaotic but purposeful. I lived through the Block Size Wars, stakeholders stratified into groups that roughly had the same agendas. Still, numerous parties outside the stakeholder groups expressed differing views; individuals who saw themselves in a leadership role felt like they were herding cats.

Bitcoin Development Post Strategic Bitcoin Reserve

Most open-source projects have some chaotic ebb and flow, but when you add money to the mix, the stakes are higher for everyone involved. When most stakeholders are technical nerds, there is a common baseline of communications. Add big money, and the conversations get weird when stakeholders are international government officials, diverse banking professionals, endless market speculators, and technical professionals.

Bitcoin Ethos & Values

Think about this: Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto was, He/she/it or they understood that they could not benefit from this project, or it would be doomed to fail. The millions of bitcoins in that account are a gift to the world, billions of dollar value that someday could be trillions in monetary value gifted to us all. Why?

2009 was a time of global financial turmoil, and bankers were burning whatever trust had been placed in them. The first block of the Bitcoin blockchain hints that the system was designed to be a new monetary system. Millions of people understood that the system was unfair, and not only was there no alternative, but the government was not going to step in and help them.

Volumes have been written about how governments mismanaged people’s trust and how fiscal and monetary policies could be improved. Not long ago, Friedrich Hayek wrote “The Denationalization of Money.” Satoshi, whoever they she or he was, took notice and wrote a program that Satoshi’s followers improved on. It’s a program, programmed money, streaming money, not your grandma’s quarterly clunker. It works well, ticking off transactions about every 10 minutes, and it has been doing this flawlessly for over 16 years. If nobody changes the programming, it will do this securely for the next 100 years.

There is no middleman to take a cut or muck it up if you want. You could also leave your Bitcoin money in Coinbase, Kraken, or one of the big exchanges. Other systems are being developed between these two choices, like Fedimint, a shared custodial solution, an open-source, transparent new system of money. With the repeal of SAB 21, you will see your favorite banks getting into the game, the modern equivalent of tits on a bull. And yes, Jamie Diamond will be milking that baby.

New Financial Order

But when Bitcoin grows from 2 trillion to several hundred trillion, and all those big banks and nation-states are playing in this sandbox, will the rules that have served it so well remain intact? Will big money demand changes to the program to favor them, even at the expense of security? You can bet your inflated dollar they will say, “Damm, it’s code, a program, for god’s sake, we should make it better!” Translation: Trust us, the crash in 2008 was a fluke.

Early holders of Bitcoin learned about it and decided to buy in because they saw something that was not purely financial; in 2009, they were talking about considerable risk unless they knew and understood the future implications of Bitcoin. So those early adopters who will be the new 1% knew about the Bitcoin ethos of fairness, transparency, and immutability, and they had faith that this would be better money someday. Will they hold on to those values and promote them in the future?

And will all those nation-states quietly race to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible and want to have the code modified in their favor? Now is the time when we all need to put on our big boy and big girl pants and learn to get along for the benefit of all of us. We can mess this up!

Here’s the thing about Bitcoin money: it favors value creation over wealth extraction. That is a lot to break down, and we don’t have the time now but stay tuned; we will drill down into that very