Economic Freedom — Crypto's Number 1 Value Proposition, Bitcoin's 'Killer App'

There's always a lot of buzz in crypto land about this or that new platform, this or that new functionality, and this or that new opportunity to make a quick fiat buck by means of investment or arbitrage. But folks — in disturbingly large part — have forgotten. Crypto's number one selling point was never any of this bullshit in and of itself. No, bitcoin's number one value proposition to those that understand it properly is and always has been: economic freedom.

Economic freedom is a scary concept even for many of the showy "influencers" and so-called crypto luminaries that peddle the phrase. Centralized exchanges like Coinbase love to talk about it while giving private customer information to law enforcement agencies and tax collectors. Rug-pull con artists use talk about permissionless exchange and ideas of liberty to sucker in countless unwitting noobs who then find their money immediately erased.

It's a whole lot of noise, and the noise has started to implode as of late, whether by organic market forces or state intervention/manipulation. Endless leverage and credit and astronomical yields which are ultimately based on the traditional, fiat banking system have begun to crash and become insolvent: see Celsius, Terra, etc. Such implosion and cataclysm of course is always the end result of fractional reserve banking and endless money creation and credit expansion.

The idea of bitcoin was never about any of that. The idea of bitcoin was to avoid such things, and also to render interference in one's private finances difficult or untenable. Bitcoin is limited in supply, and transactions can be sent without the sanction of nation states or concern for borders.

(There is a conversation about obfuscation and fungibility to be had here, but that goes beyond the scope of this post.)

From the bitcoin whitepaper: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

"Without going through a financial institution." This doesn't mean you can't go through one. It doesn't mean you have to fight the banks. It simply means what all freedom means: you don't have to if you don't want to.

As stated earlier, this idea of permissionless exchange scares people. From the laser-eyed phonies who talk big shit but want nothing more than to please regulators and Visa, to the statist zealots who think you actually owe taxes to war-happy, systematically-violence-initiating, corrupt nation states.

You don't owe anybody shit, except for non-violence.

This is why economic freedom matters. And the further crypto advocates drift from this central truth, the more they find themselves up the same shit creek they initially claimed to be rowing away from: violent state and bank control of the natural tools of peace and human exchange.

This is bitcoin's killer app. This is the number one value proposition: It's my goddamn money, and I will do with it what I please.