The battle for Bitcoin is very simple, and it goes right back to the days before I launched it. My vision lies in a system that will utterly destroy crime. I designed Bitcoin not to avoid government, but to act within law. It is a system that will bring down activist criminal groups and more mainstream traditional criminals for what they are. As we saw with the collapse of Silk Road and — just the other day — the arrest of hundreds of people involved with child porn rings, Bitcoin enables the tracing of criminal activity, allowing law enforcement to shut such activities down.
If you believe Bitcoin is a system that takes down government and brings about anarchy, you have been sorely deluded. The design of Bitcoin is one that allows individual users — across simplified payment verification (SPV) — to act as peers. It is a system that allows individuals to have privacy. It is a system that artfully removes any trace of anonymity in the manner that some people seem to understand it:
In time, governments will understand the true power of Bitcoin. It is not something for the 1 or 2 per cent of outcasts that seek to parasitically benefit from the hard work of others.
Bitcoin is a system designed to ensure that the scenarios of ‘free’ web offerings and tokens developed within the 1990s end with investors having rights against the people who conned them. It is a system where any ICO, which is really just a new name for a web IPO of the 1990s or a pink sheet scam of the previous era, is recorded. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, all of the scams allowed the conmen creating them and saying that they were innovation to get away by destroying records. Bitcoin brings an end to this, and makes the creators of such tokens accountable.
The creation of yet another token is not innovation, and it never will be. It is not the ability to invest in a token that allows the creation of wealth, it is the creation of an industry and goods and services and a company that delivers what it promises that do so. The creation of a simple token to democratise finance is the same catchcry we heard around hundreds of false investment systems in the 1990s, and it is the same con job today. The difference is, in the 1990s people could delete logs and get away with it; today you can be tracked down a decade later.
I created Bitcoin to be honest money. I had envisioned a system that would act to record information, secure data, and allow people to transact through micropayments in a way that has never occurred before. Bitcoin was never about decentralisation for decentralisation’s sake. The call for decentralisation doesn’t even make sense. It’s a religious catchword of a cult based on people saying that government is bad and calling to expel society.
Bitcoin is a system designed to encourage long-term gains rather than short-term misguidance, that we have seen develop as people seek zero-sum games to rip off others. Bitcoin is a system designed to create real capitalism — the way it was meant to be and the way it used to be. Not the form based on fast profits and milking companies, but one built to create long-term value.
Bitcoin is a system of stewardship. It is a system where people improve the land they work on so that they can leave something better for their children. Not one where you take money now, but one where you create a business — designed not to last months or years or even decades, but generations.