Thread by @gladstein

1/ Why is Bitcoin a Trojan Horse for freedom?

Because it stealthily co-opts actors who do not care about or do not even like freedom and forces them to promote it anyway 🧵

bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoi…

2/ It begins with wealthy individuals, corporations, and governments who see Bitcoin as glittering digital gold.

Out of self-preservation and greed they are incentivized to buy, mine or one day tax this new prize to accumulate the soundest money and gain an advantage over rivals

3/ But Bitcoin is not just “number go up” technology.

Hidden behind the eye-popping gains is a powerful “freedom go up” technology that its new adopters are, knowingly or not, pushing forward.

NGU and FGU are inextricable.

4/ Bitcoin’s decentralized digital cash did not emerge from Y Combinator, but rather was the holy grail of the cypherpunks, a group of civil liberties advocates concerned about how personal freedoms could survive the great electronic transformation of society.

5/ Their goals were to separate money from govts + corporations, check the growth of the surveillance state, and preserve freedom in an increasingly digital age.

Satoshi’s greatest trick was to animate these aspirations into something that looks like + functions as digital gold.

6/ So, while, yes, BTC gives anyone—regardless of nationality, status, wealth, gender, race or belief— access to the best savings tech on the planet, it also gives them unstoppable, programmable money that can't be debased/censored and that fights surveillance and confiscation.

7/ As human rights advocates know well, it can be hard to effectively promote freedom in a society that willingly sells morals out for profit.

Bitcoin sneaks in and rewires the system from the inside, aligning profit-seeking with permissionless financial liberation.

8/ In a world of increasingly-centralized control and social engineering, Bitcoin provides a check by empowering the individual at the expense of the authority.

Yes, billionaires and dictators can buy a lot of BTC, but they cannot control the base system as they can with fiat.

9/ Unlike with the dollar, euro or yuan model, governments and the ultra-rich cannot tweak Bitcoin issuance, censor transactions, make special rules or bailouts for the aristocracy, or perform mass remote confiscation or debasement.

10/ Bitcoin is more clever than any Trojan Horse that Virgil or Homer could have imagined.

Individuals can custody BTC by moving it to addresses they control.

6102 attacks fail if hundreds of thousands or millions of citizens hold their own keys.

Math is a powerful shield.

11/ The ancient Greeks and Romans would appreciate the irony of megacorps and governments willingly and even enthusiastically letting the one thing that can erode their growing power into their city gates.

Number Go Up is one hell of a drug.

12/ With Bitcoin, self-interest and freedom are aligned.

Even if you have zero altruism, as you buys or mine bitcoin, you drive up the network’s security model and make a more robust freedom tool for everyone else.

13/ Refreshingly, Bitcoin does not care about one’s intentions.

It enables greater liberty and empowerment not by some ambitious humanitarianism but by each participant’s honest self-preservation.

14/ All governments, including authoritarian regimes, will inexorably want to stack sats.

Some already have found Bitcoin a helpful tool to escape sanctions, perhaps including Venezuela, Iran and North Korea.

Nayib Bukele is even displaying strongman behavior.

15/ But over time, the officials tasked with storing and spending the bitcoin will learn what it is — money the government cannot control — and they will share that knowledge with others, trickling it down through society.

16/ Just like “Trojan Horse” computer viruses, Bitcoin will infect authoritarian regimes, appearing helpful at first but proving debilitating over time.

17/ Bitcoin will, eventually, erode the control that tyrannies like the CCP have over their citizens.

And given that Bitcoin checks arbitrary power and the surveillance state, it may help steer open societies in a better direction, too.

18/ At its core, Bitcoin was built to break us free from the existing system.

It is the red pill.

And all adopters are going to play a part in the revolution, whether they want to or not.

19/ Some may already realize what is concealed in Bitcoin’s Trojan Horse.

There are plenty of Lacoöns and Cassandras saying, “We need to stop this thing!”

But, just like in the original tale, these words will fall on deaf ears.

The prize glitters too brightly.

20/ This thread was adapted from my @BitcoinMagazine essay "Bitcoin is a Trojan Horse for Freedom":

bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoi…