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Thread: Letter to my Congressman: Free Crypto, the new Silver, the common man's money

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    United States Administrator ThePythonicCow's Avatar
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    Default Letter to my Congressman: Free Crypto, the new Silver, the common man's money

    .
    My congressman, Michael Burgess, of the 26th district in Texas, sent me (and likely many others) an email reporting on recent Congressional investigations into regulating cryptocurrencies.

    This inspired me to reply to him with the following, urging him to support free crypto, exchangeable between common people as silver coins were in the past, without legal constraint or government surveillance or control.

    Here's what I wrote to him. Perhaps some other Congressman should hear this too?

    === ===

    You wrote:

    Quote Security trades are strictly regulated, meaning that issuing, selling, or trading tokens could be a violation of investment laws.

    Currently, cryptocurrency markets have no overarching and centralized regulatory framework, leaving investments in the digital asset space vulnerable to fraud, manipulation, and abuse.
    As with firearms, so with crypto:

    If the regulators have the surveillance and enforcement authority to remove all other "fraud, manipulation, and abuse" from cryptos, then only the regulators will fraudulently abuse and manipulate cryptos for the purposes of the tyrants who will seek and obtain covert power over them.

    At our founding, Americans could freely own and use both guns and silver. Their use was never ipso facto a crime; even if used in a crime, their use was not itself the legal offense. As with a knife or a rock, if I killed someone in pre-meditated cold blood with such a tool, the fact that I possessed that tool wasn't the crime, rather my act of first degree murder was the crime.

    Now our rights to bear small arms remain, admittedly with various restrictions, licensing, and practical limitations to far less potent weapons than any major nation or police force likely has.

    Our legally free use and minting of silver was taken from us in the "Crime of 1873."

    There is now a great struggle going on regarding crypto currencies and other such distributed ledger assets.

    1) Will crypto currencies be the "return of honest silver", freely used by the people, or

    2) will crypto currencies become just another more easily surveilled and controlled form of the present day Dollar, within some all encompassing state controlled regulatory, surveillance, control, and criminalization framework?

    I favor the former - cryptos should be as freely traded as paper Federal Reserve Notes are now. If I use such in the commission of a crime, it's the actual crime, that caused unjust harm to another, not my choice of tool, that is the punishable offense.

    Not only do I not want a government sufficiently powerful to "protect me" from all such fraud, I want a government sufficiently restrained in its power that it could not do so if it tried. Such power leads to tyranny, and such absolute power leads to absolute tyranny.
    My quite dormant website: pauljackson.us

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    Default Re: Letter to my Congressman: Free Crypto, the new Silver, the common man's money

    .
    On thinking about the above more, and after telling my son about it, I realize I was being rather hopelessly idealistic.

    My son, an adult now, but once upon a time, a typical PC game player, looked into crypto a little last year, and made a few dollars playing with the Shibu coin.

    When I got to telling him the part in my above story where cryptocurrencies could be like silver coins long ago, or paper currency now, able to be transacted person to person without any surveillance, control or legal impositions by the government, my son was surprised. He had no idea that cryptocurrencies could be exchanged privately, between any two individuals on the earth, over the Internet, without being open to mass surveillance and control by some powerful entities.

    My son's rule of thumb was:
    If its on his computer or mobile then its as good as public knowledge There is no real privacy on the Web.
    That's not a bad rule of thumb for most folks actually. Typically its only the few techno-geeks that have a pretty good idea who can see what and when on the Web, or how they can censure or leverage it for their own purposes.

    Moreover, cryptocurrencies use an increasingly complicated infrastructure, with layers and layers of software and protocols interacting across all sorts of programs running all over the planet and interacting with existing, more easily surveilled and control, traditional, money systems in numerous ways. You have to geek out on this stuff quite a bit to have a reliable understanding of what can, or cannot be seen by whom.

    An attache case full of $100 bills provides a far more easily understood technology for clandestine monetary transactions.

    === ===

    So where I now think we're going is this:

    One or a few of the layer one blockchains (bitcoin, solana, fantom, ethereum, hashgraph, ...) will end up being long term useful for large dark money transfers, while also providing the core infrastructure for the next item, just below.

    The publicly visible layer two and three software built on top of this layer one will provide the masses with numerous "digital currency" applications, just as we now have numerous "internet" websites and applications. "They" will spy and censure ... "they" just might not tell you.

    These applications, widely used by the masses, will be more or less completely tracked and controlled by the major corporate/government powers. The degree to which this tracking and control is visible to the public will be more of a public marketing question, than a technically constrained capability.

    The "Big (Dark) Money" crowd will add genuinely (pseudo-)anonymous, peer to peer, layer one cryptocurrency transfers to their tool set, along with attache cases full of cash and (probably fake) fine art pieces. The recently evolved NFT cryptos, which rather mimic fine art pieces, may also be useful for such "dark" transfers.

    === ===

    In short, especially with the increasing phasing out of real paper money, the common man will have even less availability to money, outside of corporate/government surveilled, controlled, legally constrained, and taxed means of handling money.

    We will be one small step for technology, one giant step for mankind, even further from the classic freedom of the common man to engage in private commerce using silver coins.

    The Big Boys will be one juicy step closer to their desired nirvana, of a practical monopoly on free, private and secure money, while at the same time they will have engaged an army of young, freedom loving, programmers world wide to build the infrastructure for the digital monetary system that (they expect) further enslaves humanity.

    The common man's "free" currency, silver coins, received their fatal blow in the "Crime of 1873". Cryptocurrencies will not provide a straight forward path to return to those times.

    === ===

    We cannot fight this war primarily on that cryptocurrency battle field, just as we cannot fight the virus/genetic/bio-war on that medical "science" battlefield. Not enough people even realize when they are standing right in the middle of such a battlefield, getting "shot at" (pun intended), much less are competent to engage in extended battle there.

    We must fight this battle primarily on fields where we are strong, in numbers, in love for our families, children and communities, and in connection to to a higher spirit.

    This means seeing that our children are taught reading, writing, arithmetic, history and science in school, and faith, patriotism, integrity, honor, and the nature of sexual love between man and woman (when age appropriate), at home

    This means ensuring that our government "sticks to its knitting", tending to such public affairs as we assign it, such as building public infrastructure, policing the streets, defending the borders, running fair elections, and keeping corporations from becoming private tyrants (rather than selling out to them).

    This means trusting one's own experience, wisdom and insight at times, when your view feels well founded, but conflicts with what some "expert" says.

    This means taking down several notches the fake, fraudulent and phoney Elite Evil Bastards that have grown way too big for their britches of late.

    This means the techno-geeks doing as they have done rather well with some software as Linux, providing mostly reliable and secure software, that does what you'd expect, that resists centralized corruption, and that does its job so well that it largely displaces the corporate gulags such as Windows. Mostly secure, reliable and widely used cryptocurrency applications and infrastructure must eventually dominate, that are highly resistant to corporate and government surveillance, control, legal constraints and taxation.

    === ===

    A sufficiently awakened humanity, engaging in their various ways, sufficiently motivated and informed, will form the foundation for a more healthy civilization.

    Now if only I had the talents and audience of a Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, ...
    My quite dormant website: pauljackson.us

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    United States Avalon Member Vangelo's Avatar
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    Default Re: Letter to my Congressman: Free Crypto, the new Silver, the common man's money

    Quote Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
    .
    ...
    When I got to telling him the part in my above story where cryptocurrencies could be like silver coins long ago, or paper currency now, able to be transacted person to person without any surveillance, control or legal impositions by the government, my son was surprised. He had no idea that cryptocurrencies could be exchanged privately, between any two individuals on the earth, over the Internet, without being open to mass surveillance and control by some powerful entities.

    ...
    Here is another real example of a problem crypto can solve

    GiveSendGo is Hacked and Taken Offline
    After raising over $9 million for the Freedom Convoy movement and having their funds blocked and even seized by private banks...

    The ability of crypto to bypass the middleman and send the money directly to the recipient would eliminate the possibility of funds being blocked or seized by a private bank.

    I believe someone posted a link to a new crowd funding site that exchanges money via crypto. Does anyone have the link?
    Happiness comes from within, nowhere else.

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    United States Administrator ThePythonicCow's Avatar
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    Default Re: Letter to my Congressman: Free Crypto, the new Silver, the common man's money

    Quote Posted by Vangelo (here)
    I believe someone posted a link to a new crowd funding site that exchanges money via crypto. Does anyone have the link?
    My recollection is that the request for crypto donations came from the group handling donations from the Ottawa Truck Convoy.

    That still leaves two problems:

    1) Would that group distribute those donations to the actual truckers?

    2) Hardly any truckers can directly receive crypto, or then purchase food and fuel directly with crypto, so would the state intervene in the truckers or organizing converting crypto donations to Canadian dollars?

    Not until such time as crypto can be and actually is being freely exchanged and used by most ordinary people, as silver coins were a couple of centuries ago, will crypto be realistically out of government reach for day to day use by the common person.

    I don't expect that will happen.
    My quite dormant website: pauljackson.us

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    Default Re: Letter to my Congressman: Free Crypto, the new Silver, the common man's money

    Quote Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
    I don't expect that will happen.
    Just call me Larry:



    (Above was a Super Bowl ad ... kinda fun to watch.)
    Last edited by ThePythonicCow; 15th February 2022 at 13:21.
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