After the Immutable, Uncensorable and, Unbribable Judge Algorithm: Self-Sovereignty
Regardless of what you call a political system, when any elite monopolizes the use of violence, regulatory authority, monetary creation, and inside information, it grabs its benefits, at the expense of the rest. As these asymmetries grow, real economic growth vanishes, and living standards drop for the majority.
In economies where fiat money is the medium of exchange, monetary intervention leads to information asymmetries that reward malinvestment, distort pricing, incentivize corruption and expand poverty. Information Asymmetry also means letting centralized players encroach on the private information of citizens whose personal data, belief-system, time-expenditure, private assets or political choices should be solely under their own control. Fortunately, information symmetry and thus, self-sovereignty across centralized-interest barriers is within reach through bitcoin’s immutable, uncensorable and unbribable ethical foundation.
Equal access to information among all economic agents worldwide would bring sustained growth in living standards to the 90% of global population, whose future is already compromised by Information Asymmetry. The more pervasive Symmetry becomes, the better informed our long-term assessment of present-day decisions and higher our chance of producing future value for everyone in the global economy.
Just like the wheel, metallurgy, telecommunications, computers and so many other inventions that have enriched humankind, bitcoin brings with it a new form of life: self-sovereignty. As Ralph Merkle, the extraordinary brain behind The Merkle Tree says: “Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of life. It lives and breathes on the internet. It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. It lives because it performs a useful service that people will pay it to perform. It lives because anyone, anywhere, can run a copy of its code. It lives because all the running copies are constantly talking to each other. It lives because if anyone copy is corrupted it is discarded, quickly and without any fuss or muss. It lives because it is radically transparent: anyone can see its code and see exactly what it does.”
Without Sound Money, Self-Sovereignty Will Not Last
“Sound money is money chosen freely by the people who use it, and whose value is determined through market interaction, and not through government imposition” ―Joe Salerno, “Money: Sound and Unsound” 2010.
Sound money provides a stable unit of account for pricing the cost of goods, services or complex value calculations. From the time of Greek King Croesus until 100 years ago, gold had been best able to fill the role of sound money.
Yet, since the dawn of the 20th century, when governments nationalized gold reserves, gold is unfit to guarantee individual sovereignty, a virtue that along with the properties of sound money listed below, only Bitcoin provides today.
The Four Key Properties of Sound Money
Salability
The quintessential characteristic of sound money is that it is money chosen freely on the market by the people who use it, and whose value is determined through market interaction, and not through government imposition (Salerno, 2010). Thus, the relative Salability* of goods (used as money) can be assessed in terms of their salability across scales (small to large denominations), across space (geographic acceptance), and across time (inter-generational stability). *The ease with which a good (used as money) can be sold on the market whenever its holder desires, with the least loss in its price.” ―Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of economics.
Unit of Account
The operation of a market economy is dependent on prices and to be accurate, prices are dependent on a common medium of exchange: A Unit of Account. In an economy with a medium of exchange, all prices of all goods are expressed in terms of the same unit of account. In this society money serves as a metric with which to measure interpersonal value, it rewards producers to the extent that they contribute value to others and signifies to consumers how much they need to pay to obtain their desired goods. In economies with no recognized medium of exchange, pricing economic value or trade-offs between production choices becomes unfeasible.
Store of Value
For a good to be “salable” across time it must have physical integrity. Being immune to rot, corrosion, and other types of deterioration helps maintain its value, yet it is also necessary that the supply of the good not increase too drastically during the period during which the holder owns it. In essence, the ratio between the new production of a good and its existing stockpile is a fair indicator of how well that good is suited to playing a monetary role. Thus, if the production of new units of the good is restrained due to natural or logistical causes, it will maintain the value of the existing units. In fact, the only monetary media that have survived history’s test of time, are those whose supply growth is severely restricted.
Individual sovereignty
Gold solved the problem of “salability” across scales, space and time by becoming centralized and thus, falling prey to nationalization at the start of WWI. Conversely, Bitcoin’s first and most important value is its aptness for Individual Sovereignty. Being the first form of digital money, anyone who owns Bitcoin achieves a degree of economic freedom which was not possible before its invention. Bitcoin gives access to sovereign base money by (i) allowing anyone to send value across the planet without anyone else’s intervention, (ii) maintaining value that doesn’t rely on anything physical anywhere in the world and thus (iii), can’t be impeded, destroyed, or confiscated by the physical forces of the political or criminal worlds.
Help Launch The Bitcoin Standard
Let’s bring the world to an era of self-sovereignty through an immutable currency
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world in statics
Help maximize Information symmetry worldwide
The more pervasive the symmetry, the better informed our long-term assessment of contemporary decisions.
For Our Kids, Let’s Become Self-Sovereign
TWO WORLDS
1. For over 30,000 years, the majority of Modern humans lived in functional or declared servitude of small power elites or if ‘in the state of nature’ as Hobbes (1588-1679) describes in Leviathan, the life of man, [was] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short…”
2. In 1609, Amsterdam, in its zeal to compete against other commercial ports along the North Sea shore, decided to offer foreign merchants and creditors, a concrete system to hedge against the chronic currency debasement carried on by Dutch banks owned by municipal Dutch feudal lords. Thus, began the methodical sustenance of currency value across time, geography, social hierarchy, etc., the Information Symmetry that eventually magnified the power of fractional-banking and led to the modern era.
Self-sovereignty for Venezuelans
Wealth or Income redistribution policy consistently leads to behavior that is
detrimental to innovation, productivity, and economic growth. Much worse, it involves, precisely the arbitrary dynamics that create Information Asymmetry.
Unfortunately, the philosophical thought influencing both sides of the political spectrum today, come from a time in history, when it would have been hard to separate the exclusively mathematical origin of financial value from the uneven impact its influence exerted on the European social fabric, after the 17th century, Fortunately, unbiased research and a vast supply of empirical data leave no room for controversy. Massive wealth creation correlates to information symmetry expansion throughout the charts, tables, and videos shown here.
Estonia, Blockchain Nation!
Fortunately, there are countries like Estonia, whose Blockchain Model since 2012 provides citizens and residents with secure digital identities through which they can access their national registries for health, judicial, legislative, security, and commercial code systems and all public services. In Estonia, the word “secure” means that for instance, teachers can enter academic marks onto someone’s record but cannot pull up their medical history, and there are rigorous filtering and restrictive processes in place that allow this to take place. So, if someone views or accesses another’s data without authorization, they can be prosecuted. Another thing that allows so much of Estonian life to be done “on the blockchain” is its use of verified digital identities. Nearly every one of the country’s 1.3 million citizens has an ID card, which functions as much more than simply a driver’s license or passport.
In Estonia, a Self-Sovereign Identity Model has been in operation since 2012
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Most identity systems have large centralized databases containing millions (or billions) of identity records. Because of their sheer size, these centralized databases are high-value targets for hackers. If everyone already has a verified digital identity, the runway is cleared for businesses and the government has a tool to fight nefarious activity. Creating an environment where verified digital identities are the norm makes things easier for blockchain to grow and thrive. For those wondering if these identities couldn’t be forged and misused, the answer is not 100% no – but it’s highly unlikely.
Good Corp.
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A sustainable digital identity model for our evolving global society is now essential. Most identity systems are centrally planned and managed, do not integrate or link to other systems, and do not place the identity owner in a place of entitlement and power. These systems lead to inefficiencies, data leaks, threats, loss of privacy and identity theft which have left billions without financial accounts of any kind.
School Teacher
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So much of Estonian life is done “on the blockchain” that through its verified digital identities, nearly every one of the country’s 1.3 million citizens has an ID card, which functions as much more than simply a driver’s license or passport. This ID uses a 2048-bit public key encryption and allows a person to be verified in an online environment. This is what allows a person digital access to things such as the voting system or the ability to fill a pharmaceutical prescription.
Estonian Company owner