I am sending this message from the year 2089. Things have not gone well in all of human history and some of you will still be here to see it.
If you don’t believe me, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.
I know you are all busy building and I don’t want to waste your time, so I will simply explain what happened.
On average, each year, the value of Bitcoin continued to grow with an annual return of more than 250%, that is, of course, until the excessive use of digital currencies began in earnest. Arguably, the currency hyperbolism started with the Genesis block, but when the US government began printing trillions of dollars during the old pandemic of 2020, the world collectively began to lose faith in their unit of account, the US dollar.
The largest demographic in the United States, baby boomers, is beginning to retire. They kept most of their fortunes in their homes and retirement accounts (which consist mostly of stocks) and while they watched the financial markets and real estate constantly pumping and emptying – due to money printing and government grants, exacerbated by dissociative fiscal policy – they realized there would eventually be no demand for their extravagant homes. Price and Amazon shares (not sure what this company did, but I read about it being too big), and I started cashing in.
This, along with smaller countries starting to adopt bitcoin as a currency, has led to the expansion of dedollarization. China tried, for a few years, to use the digital yuan, but the civil war ended their dream of destabilizing the introduction of the central bank digital currency. Countries indebted to China’s Belt and Road Initiative realized that they could simply convert their coffers into bitcoin, and settle their debts in the weakened yuan after a year or two, thus guaranteeing their financial freedom.
Back in the States, everything exploded when Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab began measuring retirement account recovery. I don’t want to oversimplify those years, but tricks abounded and confusion was the norm. Many lost their savings while others lost what they had by buying bitcoin as quickly as possible. Altogether, it became clear as the dust settled that bitcoin’s digital scarcity was the only actionable unit of account.
A famous couple whose son has been telling them to buy bitcoin since 2020, have lost everything in their retirement accounts. That is, until Thanksgiving when he logged into the long-forgotten Swan Bitcoin website and realized that their automatic DCA of $50 per week had been running continuously for the past 10 years. They quickly bought a plane ticket and moved into the Bitcoin Citadel community for their remaining years.
“What is a castle?” you may wonder.
The concept began as a technical term to describe the difficult money response to the fiat world before Bitcoin. Today you might think of the “compulsory world” when you see overly processed foods, low-quality imported products designed with planned obsolescence or overly bureaucratic organizations that seem to produce little. These things are foreign to us in my time. I’ve only read about them, but I think you’ll understand what I mean when I mention them. The concept of Citadel has become a cornerstone of Bitcoin, and most people of our time see the concept of Citadel as one of the following:
- Bitcoin’s Personal Castle: This is the high level of personal care and sovereignty that Bitcoiners (everybody nowadays) hold. This includes exercising, eating clean foods, maintaining healthy relationships, and working on emotional and spiritual improvement. Using bitcoin as a standard, people are starting to realize that they are very capable of taking care of themselves and diving in the first place. The personal castle movement extended outside the self to the immediate family, one’s home, and the work or school environment. People became empowered with the responsibility of earning and owning their own wealth and developed a culture of protecting it while respecting what others have.
- Bitcoin Citadel Community: Developed as both free and paid communities dedicated to improving members and expanding Bitcoin’s social mission. Some organizations like what you would call, in your time, worked as an encounter group, focused on developing specific skills, self-refinement or community issues, or other organizations developed like what you might call investment clubs. After excessive cryptocurrency trading, many bitcoiners, who are now extremely wealthy, have dedicated their lives to allocating capital to build a hard cash world. These groups worked on the principles of non-aggression, decentralization, non-authorization, and participation. Sometimes it was meant to generate income, other times it was pure donations. The best example I can use is when I once read about the great capitalists of the twentieth century who often spent the last half of their lives giving up what they earned. You probably know Max Keizer and Michael Saylor. These two men, having become some of the richest individuals ever, spent their last years campaigning for self-sovereignty, energy independence, and universal education for the world. They are the reason why every country on earth now has fully funded liberal arts and research businesses.
- The physical castle community: During and immediately after the hyper-cryptocurrency, building physical castles became very popular for early adopters seeking to shake off the volatility and confusion that prevailed. Some individuals lived in mountain houses in abundant safety, some on tropical islands they bought and others simply bought entire apartment blocks in the city and modified them to become completely self-sufficient. Many of the later adopters of Bitcoin initially disliked these castle builders, seeing them as elitist or isolationist, but as the over-boosting process was completed, most realized that physical castles were meant to be protective and self-sustaining structures, and were never used to inflict physical harm or damage. Aggressive or attacking anyone. Moreover, many of these post-hyper-currency castles began operating with an “open door” policy to provide shelter, food, and health care to both ordinary citizens looking for something to eat for lunch or a place to stay on a road trip, as well as a few of the poor who are still struggling in our day and age.
Initially, governments tried to combat the hyperinflation by ostracizing early bitcoins and denigrating them as dissidents or extremists. The Federal Reserve printed tens of trillions of dollars and distributed it widely, believing that it could turn the average person away from bitcoin. This sparked dangerous inflation and the plan backfired when the federal government shot and killed 25 peaceful protesters who had gathered in front of the White House to call for the underbanked banks in major US cities to be dealt with bitcoin. After this event, it became clear to almost everyone that they cannot defend a government that practices violence against those trying to improve the lives of others.
As more and more individuals pulled out, government receipts faltered. The United States, full of cash but lacking any purchasing power, gave up and announced that it was buying bitcoin. This announcement, along with the influx of baby boomers transferring their wealth to younger, smarter people from Bitcoin and smaller countries choosing the Bitcoin standard, is still seen today as the moment Bitcoin won a peaceful revolution.
After governments realized that they could not defeat Bitcoin as a network, they became obsessed with producing energy and manufacturing chips as a way to participate in the network. The geopolitical advantage went to a country that was able to produce huge amounts of energy at low cost and low environmental impact. The consumption of natural gas and oil does not exist in my day. Some people still drive around in vintage internal combustion cars, but this is seen as an expensive hobby due to the difficulty of finding oil. Today we use different forms of fission and fusion reactors to power everything from our homes and appliances to our cities, planes and ships. Our chips are 100,000 times faster than the fastest quantum computers and are suitable for mobile devices that do not require charging.
What you would call my mobile phone – the device I keep with me most often to communicate, work and play – runs an entire bitcoin node and mines bitcoins! Only three to six sits are born per month. I chose this model, which is one of the most expensive on the market, because there is a more powerful 3500 terahash mining computer inside. It won’t pay for itself and it’s nowhere near as advanced as the 1,000,000 THUs that some of the major energy companies have, but it’s nice to have a few sit-downs a month for lunch or a coffee date.
Even the most vocal anti-Bitcoin people gave up when they saw what was happening in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. With the introduction of the hard money standard, the availability of nearly unlimited energy and computing available to all, slavery and governmental tyranny have completely disappeared as the demand for rubbish “compulsory goods” produced on these continents has dried up. These sites in particular prospered enormously as their people were able to utilize their skills and resources at home, own their wealth and labor, and keep the rewards nearby. Markets for services that relied on geo-arbitrage such as design, programming, marketing strategy, or building websites became more equitable when everyone was dealing with a common currency and governments around the world had to compete for citizens. Some later scholars interpreted this as a global redistribution of wealth while others saw it as a major social turning point when governments around the world began to think of their citizens as customers to be served rather than taxpayers to be scrutinized.
You may be wondering, what is our plan now? To say we live in a utopia is incomplete. Some individuals tried to use their newly discovered wealth to create militias, seize territory, or attack and control others. But these types of attacks are running less and less as the years go by and Bitcoin has become more and more decentralized. While the countries themselves are essentially struggling to innovate, they are fighting less and less for dominance. They focus more on serving their citizens and protecting basic rights. This has led to widespread de-radicalization in politics and the media, where businesses and governments insist on maintaining peace, or else their citizens will simply leave for a better country.
Of course, to some extent, excessive cryptocurrency conversion is not yet complete, but we live in a more just and peaceful world because of what I created in the early 2000s.
This is also the reason why I contacted you.
Keep moving forward. What you see now as a vision becomes a reality. I don’t know how to explain to you that it was all worth it; You win and the human race itself becomes a better thing for your business. I can’t imagine the hardships you’ve been through and the hardships you’re about to go through.
However, you have seen where it leads us.
– RW
This is another guest post by Robert Warren. The opinions expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC, Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.