Like the unconventional approach of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to combat the Soviet missile threat of the 1980s, Bitcoin is an unconventional technological leap capable of defending against the legal but unlawful taking of private property. Learning what Bitcoin is, owning it outright as opposed to an ETF proxy and applying good savings practice can make the difference between protecting the value of what you have earned and losing your assets as their value declines toward your impoverishment and yes, eventual enslavement.
Educating for Adoption and Advocacy
Like the challenges of effectively communicating to the American public about SDI and that program’s potential role which contributed to President Reagan’s consequential negotiations with the Soviet Union, engaging with people’s imagination about the meaning of value decoupled from currency price and value’s relationship to Bitcoin is a tall order.
While opening for the Pacific Bitcoin Festival 2023, Cory Klippsten echoed his fervent plea imploring us to improve our messaging toward Bitcoin adoption and advocacy. For the previous year’s opening, the CEO of Swan.com drew upon dark but accurate imagery. The appeal was earnest, the message was clear—time is of the essence. We are in a race to avert a high handed smack-down from the financial and governmental establishment keen on preserving the status quo of fiat currency dependence. Fully utilizing Bitcoin may be inevitable, eventually. But this may occur later rather than sooner unless concentrated and focused efforts are applied to educate and to persuade.
Discouraging Financial Independence: Redistributing Stolen Value
Two examples reflect the lack of ability (or the will) of our current governing powers. Not only is our value of earnings and savings lost by weakening our buying power through our currency inflation, the injustice of our authorities favoring squatters taking up residence in private property real estate, seems to have no recourse. Here, policy makers and law enforcement authorities equivocate between the ethics of lawful ownership while comparing them to the “virtues” of non rent-paying occupants who have less, and are therefore more deserving. Property devaluation results and foreclosures soon follow. From here, the faceless functionaries of bureaucracy thrive upon value confiscation, redistributed to the favored beneficiaries of the day. Alarms may be raised by some, but if the public at large is baffled in compassionate confusion spurred by inaction and pronouncements from public leaders refusing to assert ownership and property rights, the private means to pilot the course of our lives will be lost.
Comparing SDI to Bitcoin
In very broad terms, the SDI of the 1980s was, like the long development process preceding Bitcoin, the result of continued missile defense systems research begun decades earlier. Once revived, this research provided the ability to intercept incoming missiles launched toward the United States and its allies. Instead of relying on the hope of peace through a balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union and other policies such as mutually assured destruction through an exchange of nuclear weapons, SDI was preferred for its defensive capabilities as opposed to the negative incentive of global obliteration.
The national discussion then pivoted to center around whether the US could or should defend itself from nuclear attack. Here, foreign policy critics chose to equivocate the position of peace through strength and compare it with a foreign power’s known amoral designs of global domination at any cost. Enhanced self-defense capability may anger the aggressive bully, the critics seemed to reason, so we mustn’t antagonize an aggressor lest we make him angry. Surely we can reason with him, even if he’s unreasonable.
Breaking the Impasse of Absurdity
Appeals and assurances seem to have always been the only thing available to good people who are without power while wishing to avoid conflict. But such appeals have their limits, relying on promises that always seemed to fail by bad faith and cunning sleight of hand. We have relied on principle-minded authorities, hoping those authorities were in positions of power to heed and act for the good of all for peace and prosperity.
Fortunately for us, a technology that doesn’t depend on the cooperation of corruptible authorities is available. In this way, we have the very real opportunity to avoid the financial, political and economic disasters suffered by the previous generations of past centuries.
Solving Difficulties with the Help of Technology
Both innovations were and are still savagely ridiculed for being silly and without merit. Whereas SDI was criticized as a “Star Wars” fantasy, Bitcoin is ridiculed as false and scoffed at, indicted with the charge of having no intrinsic value and therefore deserving little or no respect. SDI sought to neutralize an international threat, Bitcoin is poised to shelter the real value of our assets and private property from the threats of a domestic one.
While being realists, we have every reason to be optimistic. With the help of Bitcoin technology, futile demonstrations of self sacrifice to gain attention for the cause of true economic freedom aren’t necessary. The CEO of MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, delivered this point in his keynote speech at the 2022 Atlas Society Gala signaling, like the flash and sparkle of a sky rocket: “We don’t want to be a martyrs. We want to be winners”.
To preserve the freedom of choice and the agency to act as a free people, humanity doesn’t need to cry out for an answer in despair. Though the wolf is at the door, he need not be allowed to cross the threshold. The time to learn about Bitcoin is now. Use it.