(Link to Ring of Gyges wiki page)
The founders of the United States ordained and established the U.S. Constitution in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty for themselves and posterity. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines the word constitution as a “system of laws and basic principles that a state, a country or an organization is governed by.” The authors of the U.S. Constitution studied Plato and understood the concepts he conveyed through the stories of the Republic and what the Ring of Gyges represented. They knew the Union would never be perfect because man is imperfect. They understood man’s innate desire for power, power’s ability to corrupt man, and demagoguery’s ability to undermine democracies. These were the problems the founders were attempting to mitigate when they designed and instituted a government of laws and basic principle that distributed and balanced power. Their constitution enabled the United States to become one of the freest and most prosperous societies in history but the principles it was founded on are being threatened all around us today. In 2009 a white paper was published that outlined another system of protocols and principles designed with the same lessons from Plato in mind; that system is Bitcoin and I believe it will be a key to securing the Blessings of Liberty for us and our posterity.
The type of subversive totalitarian takeover the founders feared can be seen throughout society today in the centralized fractional reserve banking system that encourages debt and help governments obfuscate taxation through money printing; in the fascist healthcare system controlled by pharmaceutical companies whose interest are not aligned with the individual’s, and in the oligarchical tech and media companies who siphon data, censor speech and manipulate information. The Academy of Ideas video, “How to Escape from a Sick Society”, talks about what can be done if we are “unfortunate enough to be living in a world flirting with the sickness of totalitarianism.” The video explains the “forward escape” which “requires the construction of a parallel society.” There are signs that the foundations for this type of parallel society are being laid and new bastions of this society are being constructed. The Oxford learners dictionary defines bastion as “a group of people or a system that protects a way of life or a belief when it seems that it may disappear.” In episode 13 of the CoinGeek Weekly Live Stream with Kurt Wuckert Jr., Kurt talked about building a Bitcoin co-working space known as “The Citadel” in south Florida. He referenced it as a haven and later in the stream said that he would like to see Bitcoin Citadels in every major city. The genuine Bitcoin is more than a tool patriots can use in the fight for liberty; it is a bastion for forming a parallel society and escaping totalitarianism.
The Bitcoin white paper is similar to the U.S. Constitution in that it establishes a system of rules (protocols/laws) that balance power between independent entities and do not change. Bitcoin’s Proof of Work consensus protocol creates competition between large companies who run timestamp servers (miners/nodes) and mitigates the Ring of Gyges problem by making it in those companies’ financial self-interests to act (validate transactions/maintain the network) justly. As a peer-to-peer electronic cash system is capable of exponentially increasing efficiency in markets and bring great prosperity a society but more importantly; it is a distributed and transparent public ledger capable of bring trust and honesty back to areas of our society such as banking, healthcare, media. This is the reason I consider Bitcoin to be the best system for promoting liberty and prosperity since the U.S. Constitution and an essential tool for securing the blessing of liberty for our generation and the next.