1/ My essay "Bitcoin and the American Idea" is now live.

🇺🇸 was born 245 years ago but strayed from its founding ideals.

Can Bitcoin help it get back on track?

An African American activist (@bitcoinzay) and an Iraqi refugee (@faisalalmutar) say yes 🧵

bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoi…
2/ On July 4, 1776, the Founding Fathers declared independence from the British Empire.

It was a bold and risky action.

Never before had a colonial state defeated its overload, especially one at the apex of its global power.

But America won.
3/ Today is still a cause for celebration across the US and beyond.

The values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence continue to animate resistance struggles worldwide.

But for many, July 4th seems like a hollow festival.

American history has betrayed the American idea.
4/ Slavery, genocide, prison camps, Vietnam, Iraq, the forever wars, foreign coups, the electric chair, the War on Drugs, the prison-industrial complex, and the surveillance state.

These are just a few examples of how America has strayed from its founding values of freedom.
5/ In 1961 President Eisenhower gave a prescient farewell speech predicting that the forces of centralization would gain even more power in the digital age.

By the 1980s the Cypherpunks saw his vision unfold with the rise of the surveillance state.

They decided to fight back.
6/ Their work culminated in Satoshi Nakamoto's Declaration of Monetary Independence.

Bitcoin is the instantiation of a revolutionary idea: a neutral, peaceful, decentralized, unstoppable money open to anyone.

The animating spirit of America, available to everyone in the world.
7/ Early American leaders foresaw the dangers that could develop if the US government grew too powerful, at home or abroad.

One of Thomas Jefferson's biggest regrets was signing off on the centralization of the American financial system during the Compromise of 1790.
8/ Unlike America, which was unable to hold off the powers of centralization in its early days, Bitcoin *won* its first big battle against centralization in the Blocksize War.

Today, Bitcoin is controlled by its users, and provides true freedom where politics has failed.
9/ Isaiah Jackson (@bitcoinzay) is a passionate believer in this idea.

His book, Bitcoin and Black America, is a searing critique of the racist and exclusionary US financial system, and a rallying cry for the black community to use Bitcoin to claim sovereignty and freedom.
10/ Jackson isn't celebrating today in the same way as many. As someone who is half African American, and half Native American, with a family tree tracing back to enormous oppression, he views July 4 as a consumerist holiday.

He says even the idea of America is "their idea"
11/ Growing up Jackson saw a broken school system, where kids got brainwashed into thinking the settling of America was just like how it was in Pocahontas.

He remembers when he was 14 years old, when the US invaded Iraq, seeing that it was going to cost more than $1 trillion.
12/ He wondered: why are we spending all that money when so many needed help at home?

18 years ago the war was promised to be short, but the US just bombed Iraq last week.

Where America ultimately failed to deliver, though, Bitcoin has given Jackson and so many others hope.
13/ Jackson says Bitcoin is "more American than apple pie" and is based on the initial idea of overthrowing oppressors and challenging tyranny.

He says Bitcoin does the same, for everyone.

Today he works to help black communities across the US gain independence through Bitcoin.
14/ Half a world away, @faisalalmutar's first introduction to America was a tank in front of his house.

In 2003 America invaded Iraq when he was 12 years old.

Al Mutar grew up under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, which used a police state to instill a climate of fear.
15/ At first, Al Mutar even couldn't access the internet or watch more than a couple propaganda TV stations. He said it was hell.

But eventually, he found ways online, and developed an appreciation for reason, science, and freedom.
16/ The first foreign political text he read was Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason"

America's founding values resonated deeply with Al Mutar.

He started a blog to explore secular ideas and even passed out copies of the Bill of Rights at school.
17/ Speaking his mind was a dangerous thing in post-invasion Iraq.

Al Mutar received threats from religious radicals. He survived three attempted kidnappings. Friends and family were killed in sectarian violence.

In 2012, he fled Iraq and was admitted into the US as a refugee.
18/ Since then Al Mutar has worked to spread enlightenment values and text into Arabic and into the Middle East where, he says, people are surrounded by propaganda, fake news, and hate.

He teamed up with @MsMelChen to launch Ideas Beyond Borders (@IdeasB2) to expand this work.
19/ Today Al Mutar is a strong defender of America's founding values, despite all its flaws, and feels very privileged and proud to be an American.

He is enormously proud of gaining US citizenship in the summer of 2019.
20/ Al Mutar has grown an interest in how Bitcoin can expand freedom where politics may fail.

He sees the same innovation, anti-censorship, and openness in it as he saw when he read the Declaration of Independence.

It could spread American values better than any war, he says.
21/ The idea of America continues to grow distant from the reality of America.

Just as Al Mutar defends the greatness of America's founding vision, Jackson shows how the nation has a great rot inside and asks us to think about how its systems are fundamentally broken for so many
22/ Jefferson and Adams both died on July 4, 1826, 50 years after signing the Declaration of Independence.

The tradeoffs they and the other founders made to make America happen grew over time into civil wars, foreign occupations, and an increasingly centralized financial system.
23/ If the Founding Fathers were alive today, perhaps they would agree that the original Declaration of Independence was not enough in the digital age.

A new declaration is needed to keep the spirit of 1776 alive.
24/ A declaration rooted in personal freedom, openness, prosperity, opportunity, property rights, and free expression; opposed to slavery, discrimination, theft, double standards, confiscation, and censorship.

One that builds bridges, not walls. One that empowers, not oppresses.
25/ In the end, could Bitcoin be the new Declaration of Independence that we need to protect the American idea in the digital age?

To read the full essay, and learn more about @bitcoinzay and @faisalalmutar's remarkable stories and advocacy, click here:

bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoi…

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More from @gladstein

1 Jul
1/ It's worth repeating that 1.3 billion suffer under double or triple digit inflation.

This is a humanitarian crisis greater than (but not unrelated to) the lack of access to clean drinking water (785M) or extreme poverty (689M).

But it is ignored by global policymakers 🧵
2/ The following terms are not mentioned in the 10,000+ word manifesto of the 17 @UN Sustainable Development goals:

-Democracy
-Journalism
-Privacy
-Elections
-Free Expression

Neither is inflation, which didn't deserve mention by the governments who wrote this document.
3/ The massive social damage that high or extreme inflation inflicts on citizens everywhere from Argentina to Turkey to Iran to Ethiopia to Nigeria wasn't on the "Davos Agenda" this year, last year, or the year before.

It's almost as if they don't want to talk about it.
Read 8 tweets
23 Jun
1/ My essay "Fighting Monetary Colonialism with Open Source Code" is live.

France controls 15 African nations and 180M+ people through the CFA franc currency. The details are shocking.

Can Bitcoin be a way out?

@Farida_N 🇹🇬 + @diopfode 🇸🇳 think so 🧵

bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoi…
2/ It begins after WWII, when the French empire started loosing chunks of colonial territory. Indochina, the Levant, North Africa... but they refused to let go of West + Central Africa. After 1960, political colonialism was unacceptable, so they settled for monetary colonialism.
3/ The primary tool of monetary colonialism was the CFA franc, first introduced in 1945. By 1948, each CFA franc was worth 2 French francs. But by the time the CFA franc was pegged to the euro in the late 1990s, it was worth .01 French francs: a total devaluation of 19,900%
Read 25 tweets
11 Jun
1/ Bitcoin is a powerful tool for human rights.

What is happening in El Salvador will have a huge impact on the lives of people there and across the world.

A nation adopting Bitcoin is a big step forward for global human freedom.

But that's not the full story 🧵
2/ It is important to separate appreciation for this historic milestone, and celebration for the march of open source technology, with any such appreciation or worship of the president of El Salvador.

In Bitcoin we don't trust, we verify. That approach is needed more than ever.
3/ Today I spoke to a Salvadoran lawyer and law school teacher. She is representative of many Salvadorans, living in the capital with family in the country.

Many of her students do not have internet access. The last year has been very hard on them.
Read 27 tweets
26 May
1/ My latest essay is live:

"The Humanitarian and Environmental Case for Bitcoin"

Could Bitcoin reduce "middleman" corruption in aid, bootstrap electrification via untapped renewables, and help developing nations end dependency on foreign powers?

🧵

bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoi…
2/ Helping those less fortunate is noble.

Since the 1960s, more than $4 trillion has been sent from rich countries to poor countries in what is now a $200 billion foreign aid industry.

But does humanitarianism sometimes help create the hardship it is supposed to solve?
3/ Three of aid's major flaws:

-Much of it is skimmed off along the way, or ends up propping up dictators
-Aid creates dependency + discourages economic independence
-Donors rarely help nations become *energy* independent, as renewable farms aren't quickly sustainable/profitable
Read 22 tweets
17 May
1/ **A World Without Bitcoin**

What would the future look like if Satoshi had never invented decentralized digital scarcity?

If we didn't have open-source, non-discriminatory money beyond the control of corps and govts?

Here's a sci-fi look into that parallel universe 🧵:
2/ The year is 2040, and cash is gone. The money you use on a daily basis has fully transitioned into a tool of surveillance and control.

In midtown Manhattan, you tip sidewalk performers with a scan of your wearable, your face, or your fingerprint.
3/ Coins and dollar bills are now curiosities—fossils from a forgotten age.

In Beijing, the government-issued Yuan has long since been digitized into the ubiquitous DCEP.
Read 44 tweets
5 May
1/ It is *really important* to understand that Bitcoin is very different from Dogecoin.

Some are making jokes comparing the two, especially as Doge has outperformed BTC + ETH this year.

Many of you already know, but for everyone else, here are some of the key differences 🧵
2/ Bitcoin is absolutely scarce. There will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin.

Dogecoin is infinite. The system is on track to mint 14.4 million new Doge each day and 5.2 billion more Doge each year, forever.
3/ Bitcoin’s issuance is predictable. The users, who are self-interested to preserve the system, control the rules.

Dogecoin’s issuance is unpredictable. It can and has been altered. For example, in 2014 the creators simply changed the monetary policy from finite to infinite.
Read 19 tweets

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