In centralization, we have seen only masks; we have seen only rogues who deceive fools; charlatans who come to governments to get some money, who send men to war while they go in to plunder their refrigerators with impunity, who plunge them into poverty through taxes, credits and debts, and who force them to pay their bills in exchange for allowing them to continue walking the Earth.
If it is unusual for a politician to exercise power without corruption, it is even more unusual to exercise power without centralization, especially if there is a type of decentralization such as Bitcoin, which bases its transparent and immutable government on mathematics and which, as such, is already mature and strong enough to be ashamed of depending on a government that is not interested in the progress of mankind.
The only Heracles against the economic and governmental monsters of this world is Bitcoin, with all its “decentralized” weapons, which do not benefit any bee without first benefiting the swarm, and which value human privacy to such an extent that anyone can put on the helmet of Hades.
Secrecy, at least in the Bitcoin blockchain, is not a manifest duty, but one of its main rights, since in it the word “privacy” means the same as “freedom,” and the collective benefit is not achieved at the expense of sacrificing any individual inclination.
Perhaps all men would be free and equal if they had no needs, but as long as misery subordinates some human beings to others, as long as they act out of strict necessity rather than by virtue of their freedom, as long as few of them belong to themselves, and others must be counted among their belongings, so long, we say, will dependence and inequality exist, and slavery will be a very real misfortune.
And yes, it is true, we know that, in comparison with other ages, the man of today enjoys much more freedom, and that the slave who at night kissed the same hand that in the daytime whipped his back is now a thing of the past; but still we are far from believing, as those addicted to the idea of progress believe, that the man of these times is entirely free by birth, an impartial child of the universe, who goes out to sea without a single wave pushing him back to the harbor.
It is surprising, on the other hand, the prodigious number of emphatic speeches that have been made in all ages against slavery among the ancient Greeks and Romans, but it is still more surprising to find that those peoples did not have even one-third of the slaves that Europeans and North Americans still have today.
We know that whatever price is paid for freedom is a good price, that the freest man is the one who has the greatest relative independence of his forces, that he is the one who lives best and desires best and feeds best, the one who is most detached from himself and renews himself.