In the recent months the topic of financial sovereignty began to become a central theme and priority in my life . This December I entered my Thirties and while I have no regrets about the priorities I pursued in the span of my 20's, building up financial independence was not one of my priorities. At the age of 18 my father passed away and I received a tiny chunk of inheritance, nothing tremendous although it could have been if I had managed it with all that I have come to learn about money now especially very recently.
I used a large chunk to pay university fees, which was more or less wasted money since after a few years I broke off leaving without any qualifications. Mind you I had entered university having left high-school in my final year so I did not even have a high-school degree. I left because I realised the current education system did not offer me the tools, information or skills that I was actually seeking. Still not having properly dealt with the death and at loss for a structure and meaning in my life that satisfied me, I jumped into a frenzied quest and intense years of discovery.
During this time I ended up discovering all sorts of creative crafts and also schools of thought/spirituality. I used the funds I had to get myself all of the essentials I needed for anything that I wanted to learn. I got interested in crafting jewellery and working together with metals and gemstones, so I taught myself how to silversmith. Being someone who has been surrounded by perfume from a young age, I eventually was curious to learn that too, especially when I realised that what I had encountered until then were merely synthetic imitations of what perfume used to be before the chemical industry got involved. So I ordered all the materials and equipment and learned how to do that. I published a Book and a Magazine, and used my own funds to print copies, so ecstatic about my work that I gifted hundreds of prints and sold maybe a handful. Also basically setup a studio-worthy range of devices and produced music, invested in plants and seeds and began discovering gardening. And much more.
While I do find I gained a lot in value from those years on a personal level, I certainly did not accumulate any value in regards to my financial levels. I had started with a big balloon and deflated it to nothing in the span of a decade. Although I do feel like it did fill up my internal balloon of resources that is capable of manifesting tremendous value once I begin learning how to cultivate and nurture my finances properly. I had been tremendously curious about all sorts of subjects regarding the world, yet I had never felt interested enough to wrap my head around economics and finances. Not in any meaningful way. I understood it on a very superficial and disempowering level, and with perhaps even negative associations attributed to the pursuit of money through my own limited perspectives at the time.
These last 2-3 Months though I feel like I have been riding a crash course of deprogramming as I explore the World of Crypto. As I look ahead realising it is time now to set my priorities straight and decide where I want to be heading in the future.
Realising that if I want the world to start heading in a more healthy direction, that I need to do the same. Somewhere along the way it has begun to dawn on me, that finances are what gives the elites the greatest power and it is my voluntary ignorance in regards to the financial system up to this point that had kept me in a state in which I did not know the correct mode of operation to balance and wield money properly in my life in a way that was empowering to myself and to the community at large.
My initial thought when launching on this quest of independence was to simply participate a little bit more on HIVE and blog about what I do/create/offer, earning a passive income through that and to invest a small portion of my money each month into cryptocurrencies. At the same time by engaging with the different communities also gain insight regarding the financial dimensions of crypto. Certainly I was curious to understand what makes this technology valuable.
I wanted to understand the difference between a CEX and a DEX. I wanted to understand and participate in DeFi. I wanted to figure out how people judge the value of a certain blockchain. I wanted to find out why whitepapers were so important. I also wanted to know why the ELITES seemed to hate, fear and want to regulate blockchain technologies so bad and why they also seemed to be highly interested in them.
My wish to explore and understand finances, is based around certain core values that led me to even want to move out of my ignorance, namely the themes of "decentralisation, individual sovereignty, privacy, liberty, freedom and a notion of there needing to be a free market." Even just doing art in my country, to be properly recognised by the central-institutions as one, you need to be qualified and certified as an artist by having an appropriate degree to earn the right to claim to be one, these kind of notions had always seemed absurd to me. They do not want artists they want propaganda designers for upholding a false image that makes the corrupt institutions they are made to work for look glorious and divine.
Regulatory Centralised Institutions and Governments have become parasites to the Free Market of Humanity. Regulators want to control currencies to avoid criminal money laundering, yet who regulates the government and their criminal use of our taxes into fuelling wars and conflict all across the globe by using our finances? Who steps in to withdraw the funds from the hands of the military when hundreds of thousands of us protest in disagreement with every new war that is announced by some government? How come a handful of men can send down SWAT teams of personnel on a citizen for supposed tax evasion and money laundering charges or other petty crime, but when they commit genocide and murder we are supposed to not just pay our taxes in full to finance them, but give a little extra on top every time so that it breaks us to ruin just to make sure they have enough bullets.
Initially taxes were sold as if we were investing in our own future. As if we we are just financing the infrastructure, water supply & health care etc. But honestly how can we just accept that, knowing it is a big lie? Those expenditures probably make up a penny drop in the vast amount of liquidity they milk from us, and with each year they reduce the services our taxes should have paid for, but they increase their spending in building a real life prison out of every aspect of our communities. The nature of our Fiat currency today is built upon a hacked version of natural economy. They hijacked the natural chaotic order of transactions and wove a web of increasing transparency that allowed them to have deeper and deeper insight into where assets are being held and how much.
This helped them target hotspots of wealth and gave them ways to amass through all sorts of corrupt means a steady flow of riches into their own pockets but diverted away from the natural pool of wealth that would have in a free market circulated throughout and within the community instead. Would it not flow to corrupt power hungry central entities we would be living in a Value-Creating Sovereign Economy instead of a Debt-Based Enslaving Economy.
The first month back in Crypto I invested originally in some standard Coins and projects,LTC, BCH, ADA, DOT, ALGO, but the more I read about crypto. The more I began to look into all of the issues people were having in trying to be in order with the regulatory authorities and managing their tax reports properly etc, the more I began to ask myself whether that would be the end of crypto, just another currency eaten up by big government and big data, turned into a Orwellian profit monster for them?
I hoped this would not be the case, so I began to look into protecting ones privacy and what to pay attention to when dealing with crypto.
The most important essential factor is, if you do not own your own private keys, someone else is holding your crypto funds for you. Regardless of whether a transparent or private coin.
Owning a Privacy coin like $ARRR and Monero, if you are holding it on an exchange renders whatever privacy capabilities it has useless, especially if the exchange is one in which you registered with an ID.
The Vast Majority of Cryptos are super transparent and easily analysed. The Privacy-Coins do a better job, but may of them have the inherent flaw that their privacy-features are opt-in, meaning if you do not choose to use their privacy features, you will be transacting transparently by default. The only coin with an anonymity-set that outperforms all others is $ARRR run by the Piratechain. Here Privacy is Opt-Out, if you wish to make a certain transaction transparent you can share a viewing key, but unless you do that specifically, nobody can ever look up who sent what amount to which address. It is literally traceless both in terms of origin and destination and also quantity/transferred amount.
The amazing technology behind this feature not only makes it a valuable asset and crypto for the simple reason of being the digital currency nearest to cash in fungibility. But also a valuable bridge with which you can render other cryptos traceless. It could be used to do so by Trading BTC for example from a wallet you used in connection with an exchange that had your ID, trading it for ARRR, sending the ARRR to your private wallet and then sending it from there to a DEX and trading it back into BTC and sending that to another wallet disconnected from your identity.
Also I have mentioned the term fungibility, which is actually a property that a currency must have to make it truly worthy of being a functional currency. Fungibility is basically the property of all units of a currency to be the same. Meaning a 2 euro coin is no different than another 2 euro coin, there is nothing to inherently differentiate the value of both. But if one of them say was a special marked coin, which would raise an alarm in a shop having it be refused as currency, then it has lost fungibility. For some reason this 2 euro coin, does not hold the value of a 2 euro coin, it is exceptionally worthless. The best currency is fully fungible and does not become non-fungible due to its past or history or who it is connected to.
In the early days of blockchain most Cryptos were fungible enough in the sense that there was no network setup to analyse the blockchain efficiently, regulating the space was not possible, but as blockexplorers got fleshed out and central institutions began to become annoyed at the crypto industry and all the wealth they were missing out on in terms of taxes and mafia extortion money, they have over the years built the missing technologies to begin to enforce their regulations on these transparent blockchains.
In many ways this is perhaps a welcome change of events, since this will force a lot of people to begin to contemplate the value and importance of privacy in their own personal lives. And it will ideally accelerate a beautiful process that started with the rise of blockchain, namely the greatest wealth distribution in human history. As we literally are bankrupting our governments and corrupt institutions by devaluing their source of illusionary power that is their debt-based inflationary FIAT currencies. And as we are forced to migrate to more secure and privacy oriented cryptos, we will also find that they will provide the much needed missing functionality of being an ideal replacement for person to person p2P private and anonymous transactions and freedom from financial extortion.
The Project which I have the most love for in terms of their philosophy and vision, is $ARRR running on the Pirate.Chain. It is the most secure of all privacy-coins sofar on the market, followed closely in 2nd place by Monero. I have also discovered HUSH which seemed interesting for those looking for an alternative to signal and telegram since they are focusing their coin on enabling 2encrypted-private-communications, and then there is Wownero also privacy-focused. It is these Coins that are upholding the vision that originally birthed BTC, namely wrestling the financial world free from the hand of the corrupt and evil central mafias that have parasited the globe and enslaved humanity with their monopolies for far too long.
It is time to turn our backs on our own self-chosen Voluntary Ignorance. And to Face exploring the Unknowns that we were told to ignore, since we were convinced of the belief that perhaps "Ignorance could really turn out to be Bliss"! It might be as a short term solution. But it will never last or endure in the Face of Reality and its Impulse for Curiosity, Growth, Freedom and Adventure.
Ps.
If you are a merchant or even someone looking to pay with Crypto, I would highly recommend also checking out the Arrrmada which is a directory of merchants which accept ARRR and other cryptos for payment. If you are a shop and you accept ARRR you can be listed there for free. They have a wealth of information with a lot of guides and resources on how to setup your shop to accept $ARRR and other Crypto.
Pirate.black is the official Pirate Chain Website. You can Download the different private wallets from there, and you will find exhaustive guides on how to set them up. Not only that but there is a a ton of information for absolute beginners to blockchain technologies an crypto, presented in a very understandable manner, that will get most people informed about the essentials and some of the history of blockchain and crypto.
Originally posted on my Hive-Blog
Visit our Artisan Perfumery and Mystical Arts Store and pay with Crypto.
We Accept $ARRR, $BTC, $LTC, $ETH, $HUSH,
