The post The Financial Anarchist Manifesto appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Privacy Issue”. Subscribe to receive your copy. “Anarchy is order; government is civil war.” – Bellegarrigue The advent of decentralized money gave rise to an intriguing cognitive bias among early adopters. Bitcoin’s success is convincing many that we can do away with trusted institutions altogether—that trust itself can be engineered away. This hubris is reflected in how we deploy our collective resources and capital. In the absence of appropriate social structures, we have become risk averse and generally mistrusting of each other. As a result, Bitcoin commerce has become marginalized and many revolutionaries have retreated into techno-utopianism. This complacency has deprived many of the tools needed to navigate this digital economy. Between regulated platforms and half-baked scaling solutions, there is little room for alternatives. The situation is bleak: the majority of Bitcoin’s commercial activity still revolves around fiat interfaces. Inertia has left users vulnerable to highly organized state actors. While our technical elite fantasizes about theoretical constructs, progress around practical solutions has stalled. Instead of stimulating market functions to replace current financial institutions, we have allowed them to further entrench their position, passively accepting their authority. This pattern is all too familiar in revolutionary movements—once wealth has been seized or obtained, ideals often become lazy. Fortunately, the convergence of two technologies—one old and one new—holds the potential to challenge the status quo. Chaumian ecash, decades in the making, and Nostr, a novel, decentralized, social network could provide the groundwork necessary for emergent behavior to trump central planning. The Financial Anarchist seeks to harness this potential and challenge the incumbent system with decentralized alternatives. He embraces the risk entailed by this duty because he believes it is right and just. He believes we can embrace and wield trust rather than reject it outright…

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Filed under: News - @ September 16, 2024 8:27 pm