A Bitcoin Declaration of Financial Independence

On US Independence Day, it’s worth looking back at the history of bitcoin, because both origin stories share a fundamental impulse: freedom from a system that controls our lives without giving us any input.

That impulse led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

Without trying to imply that the two are equal in historical weight or cost – no lives were lost in the battle for cryptocurrency – Bitcoin Whitepaper, which launched both crypto and blockchain, was in many ways a declaration of financial independence.

The pressure for independence is from a financial system rather than a political system, to be sure, but a financial system that, its pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto and many of his cyberpunk supporters and colleagues thought could be just as oppressive and inevitable, and which had co-opted and corrupted the government in many of the same ways that the founding fathers of the United States believed British government without representation had done in the 13 colonies.

The Genesis Block Message

The clearest sign of this is the message encoded on the Bitcoin Genesis Block that launched the blockchain on January 3, 2009.

It is short and simple, and refers to a headline in today’s newspaper Times of London, and it served two purposes.

Usually it was a kind of cryptographic timestamp that showed that the blockchain was launched when it said it was. This is important because the timestamp associated with each block in the blockchain uses that timestamp – along with cryptography that connects it to past and future blocks – to show its place in the chain and make it immutable. This function means that with sufficient decentralization it is impossible to change the data or the order of the blocks.

See also: Crypto Basics series: What is a blockchain and how does it work?

But more importantly, it was a declaration of principles. The message read: “The Times 03 / Jan / 2009 Chancellor on the brink of another rescue operation for banks.”

It referred to the massive rescue of banks that took place in many countries in the wake of the subprime lending crisis that started in 2007, and created and then created a real estate bubble that led to the Great Recession. Not only was it caused by obvious greed and lies about the quality of debt that was sold as safe, but no banker, broker or credit rating agency was ever prosecuted for it.

Bitcoin was seen as a way to get around this system – and eventually destroy it.

Read more: The Blockchain Basics series: What is Bitcoin, and how did it come to be that way?

The first line of the Bitcoin Whitepaper describes it as follows: “A pure peer-to-peer version of electronic cash will allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

The goal was to create an “untrustworthy” system, or one where two parties could act with confidence without having to trust or even know the other party, and do so without a “reliable third party” – a bank or other financial institution – between them.

See more: Crypto Basics Series: What’s a Consensus Mechanism?

“The central bank must trust not to devalue the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust,” Nakamoto wrote in a post about a month after the launch of bitcoin. “Banks need to be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.”

So without further ado, and with apologies to Thomas Jefferson, et. al, here is a Bitcoin statement on financial independence:

We believe these truths are self-evident: that all consumers are created equal, that they are endowed by Satoshi Nakamoto with certain inalienable rights, that among these are immutability, pseudonymity and the pursuit of distrust.

– That in order to secure these rights, blockchains are established among the people, who draw their just forces from consensus among miners,

– That when any kind of financial system becomes destructive to these goals, it is the people’s right to change or abolish it, and to introduce new financial systems, lay the foundation for such principles and organize their forces in such a form, as for them will It seems most likely to affect their privacy and financial freedom.