Building on solid ground

in times of uncertainty

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
~ Matthew 7:24-27

As promised, I have no intention of making it make sense. What is being done to you is madness, perpetrated by maniacs intent on your harm. Naturally you find many aspects of current events to be very troubling. If you don’t, then you either are blissfully unaware of things going on, wars, rumours of wars, abominations, voluntary sterilisations, suicide pods, mutilations, and horrors; or you are untroubled by these things because of the fervour of your faith in God. God provides, praise God, amen.

It may seem odd to suggest, as the title of this essay does, to build on solid ground given that we live in times of uncertainty. Nevertheless, that’s the opportunity today. Things have been liminal in some ways and horrifying in others for quite a long time, because of some of the great sins of mankind. It was a long time ago, and God has chosen to change the arrangement so that the children are not responsible for the sins of the fathers, but the fathers and mothers of all who live here on Earth today did sin, did choose, and choices have consequences. Had there been repentance and a willingness to atone, things would have been different, but that wasn’t so, and here we are. You should feel blessed that we have within our days a time ahead of us, not so long from now, when we can move beyond the consequences of those choices two hundred thousand years ago.

We can free the slaves, stop the wars, end tyranny, cast out all demons, translate the Gospels into every language, care for the young and the old, the sick and the dying, with dignity and respect, out of a place of humility, and carry the Gospels to the farthest star in every direction and to all souls in between. We live in a time made possible by the devotion, the goodness, and the sacred heart of Jesus. We live in time made possible by the immaculate hands, the goodness, and the bountiful blessings of Mary. Many of us live in Christendom today - as many as four billion Christians are on this world at this time. So we can build great things without fear. We need only choose to act.

Why Not?

You should be aware that there was a time of great darkness. The people who led the Roman republic chose poorly and the republic was destroyed. The servile insurrections which you may have read about in a book about Spartacus, or saw depicted in a film of that same name, should illustrate the extent to which the republic was unjust. If you’ve seen the film “Gladiator” you would be aware that Marcus Aurelius wanted to restore the greatness of the republic, but had utterly failed to provide for intelligent management of his affairs at the time of the succession from his reign. Besides which, he treated Christians monstrously and was inconsistent in his application of his own chosen philosophy.

You may perceive, incorrectly, that the fall of the Roman empire was a bad thing. You’ve been told as much by people who want the gluttony and avarice of empire, the abundant corruption, the enormities of abuse of power. Many such people are having this week a festival of sorts, in Chicago, sacrificing the unborn and the young to Moloch, sterilising young men, and paying homage to those they believe have worldly power to share in some small measure with them. They seek crumbs from the tablecloth. (“Why do they always send the poor?”)

Instead, you should become aware that Rome was transmuted before the battle at Milvian bridge. Constantine was shown miracles and led another way. Sound money made the Byzantine empire great, not as much as a military empire of road based domination, but as an empire of trade, commerce, and ties of amity and friendship. The “bezant” or solidus gold coin was a stable money from the time of its introduction by Constantine in Anno Domini 310 until the sack of Constantinople at the end of the fifth month in AD 1453. Many fine things were built in those 1,143 years, including an Italian renaissance of knowledge, many cathedrals and palaces, great universities, and families of good people.

“Fiat currencies don’t float. They sink at differing rates.”
~ Clyde Harrison, 2002

There was a dream that was America. Amerigo Vespucci did some truly useful work with astronomy to actually find the longitude, making his maps extremely accurate for the time. So two continents in the Western hemisphere bear his name, as is tradition.

The dream that was America was that men and women who had been hounded by evil authoritarian aristocrats out of parts of Christendom in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries Anno Domini would be able to forge a new reality, closer to the heart. For a time, it was good.

It began well, with a declaration of independence that called upon God in four places. In that document, it was recognised that George the third had abdicated government by making war on his people. (You should definitely do some reading on the Peasant’s Revolt of Anno Domini 1381 and other similar rebellions going back to the servile wars of the late Roman republic if you want to understand current events.) It continued somewhat roughly under articles of confederation through a treaty of Paris that recognised the independence of 12 of the colonies (but doesn’t even mention Delaware).

My views on the constitution are actually ambivalent in some ways, not because of the results, but because some of the wording is quite good. “No state shall make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debt,” is a really good concept. There was a time when “thaler” represented a unit of weight, and “a dollar of silver” meant 371.25 grains of fine silver (in a system where 480 grains is an ounce from the apothecary faire at Troyes). Despite the conversion of the republic to a tyranny in 1871 as an outcome of the war between the states, many good things were built during the dream which was America. Standards of weights and measure are ordained by God, making good constructions and artefacts possible.

But those things are not being built any longer. We have entered a twilight period, which a very wise man named Rod Serling recognised and discussed in his introductions to his television series, the Twilight Zone. The show gathered fictional portrayals of real problems and showed solutions in a captivating way. Unfortunately, parable and metaphor are not well understood. So the old America peaked right around 1972. Since then, thousands of actual metal forges have been shuttered. We stopped making greatness here.

America had already begun to decay thanks to the establishment of the Feral Reserveless Scam, the imposition of the unratified sixteenth amendment income tax, the orchestration of war powers over industry, trade, and commerce, and the disreputable act of revaluing the dollar from one-twentieth of an ounce of gold to one-thirty-fifth. The final nail in the coffin, to borrow a term of phrase from undertaking very much appropriate to the situation, was Nixon closing the gold window, nationalising passenger rail services, and magnifying the scope of the bureau rat infested state by creating osha, epa, and many other agencies. Nixon did not get nearly the kicking around he deserved, should have been executed for treason, and his heritage of perfidy should not be rehabilitated posthumously at all.

New Money

We did try to build the new money on the measured excellence of gold and silver. I know. I was there, I helped lay some of the foundation stones, and we built at an exponential rate for a time. But it was not sustainable because of the three aspects of what we came to call “the e-gold problem.” 1. The gold was stored where it could be seized by court order. 2. The servers were centralised and the effort in AD 2000 to offshore them was damaged by the perfidious Ian Grigg. 3. There were men who had all the keys to the e-gold kingdom, as it were, who could be kidnapped and extorted, and were.

When I say “we” I mean the cypherpunks. To some extent we were masqued by my friend Steve Jackson’s “generic universal role playing system (GURPS)” cyberpunks game. We didn’t call ourselves cyberpunks, though most of us read and enjoyed the novels by William Gibson. We learned cryptography. We understood the need for cyphers.

When I say “we” I mean men like Tim May, who wrote our manifesto; men like Ralph Merkle who grew some trees; men like John Draper who understood what 2600 meant; men like Phil Zimmermann who coded wisely; women like Christine Peterson who knew a good way to describe open source software, and did. I corresponded with, met in person, or worked with the people just mentioned, and built projects atop their wisdom. Which is another set of stories for another set of days.

Bitcoin doesn’t have an author. We refer to its progenitor as “Satoshi Nakamoto” because of the third aspect of the e-gold problem. Bitcoin doesn’t have a single server, and it isn’t rational to suppose it can be stopped, even with a grid out attempt to slam the Internet into a stump of itself, stymied by censorship and mandatory identification for entry. Value created by electricity and computation can be stored offline and electric power and connectivity are resources not difficult to produce. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS), virtual privacy networks, zero knowledge exploits, and micropayment-motivated self-extending wireless networks make central control impossible.

Moreover, privacy coins like Monero, Zcash, Pirate coin, and tools like Enshroud make it possible for you to exchange value with anyone, anywhere in the world, reliably and frequently, without anyone else being able to detect that you have done so. You can, through techniques developed by people much smarter than me, not only keep the existence of your transactions unknown, but burn the derivative records if you so please. On chain transactions are embedded in distributed ledgers in a way that those aspects of transaction history that represent real economic events cannot be altered nor lied about, forever.

Today there are 2.4 million cryptocurrencies traded on over 800 exchanges representing more than $2.2 trillion in value, moving at tens of billions of dollars a day, representing a global crypto economy of $18.7 trillion per annum. The industry that has been built by millions of entrepreneurs and tech people is now larger than the economy of China, and second only to that of the United States in the world. It is totally out of control.

Which is important, because the people who want to control you also want to murder 7 billion people and enslave you. So you would not be able to build anything of value without getting out from under their control. Now, today, you can. You’re welcome.

I say “you’re welcome” not because of my part in building automated exchange systems, managing private venture capital exchange companies, teaching cryptography for thirty-two years, minor software development, work on anonymous remailers long ago, and bearing the torch of freedom with a public presence on social media and Internet relay chat sites in my own name, but on behalf of the millions of others who wanted to make these things available to themselves and to you and to our posterity. You’re welcome not at my leave nor by my permission, but because the vast numbers of us had seen and still see beyond the horizons imposed by demands for permission and the limitations desired by those who covet control. We built decentralised, distributed, public ledger, encrypted tools and techniques that you can use to build anything.

It’s your future and welcome to it

I didn’t come here to tell you what to build. I didn’t come here to tell you what is possible. I’m not in charge of your works. You are.

I did come here to show you how big the universe is, and to remind you, by mentioning things you should already know, that out in the big wide world it is raining soup. As my late friend Jerry Pournelle used to say, “Grab a bucket.”

Get you some.

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That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.