July 18, 2024
Why Bitcoin Will End the Worst Heist in History
Time Traveling Thieves
Here’s a cool idea for a movie:
Criminals from the past get their hands on a time machine that lets them travel to the present to steal money which they then take back to the past. Their victims are helpless to stop them. The criminals can’t be prosecuted or sued by the victims because they exist only in the victims’ past. Another cool twist is this: the victims wouldn’t remember they’d ever even had that money in the first place. They’d just be poorer by the amount that was stolen from them.
But the victims would know they had been robbed because the crooks left a mark so obvious that the only possible explanation is that someone in the past had stolen this money. Everyone would know they had money stolen from them because they each owed money for things they never bought or agreed to buy. They simply found themselves owing money for something consumed before they were born. It, therefore, had to be that someone in the past bought something they were now on the hook for.
Ready to have your mind blown?
This money-stealing time machine and the crooks who use it exist in real life. The thieves used it in the past to steal from you, and there are more crooks like them in the present using it right now to steal from people in the future.
You can see the unmistakeable mark of this crime: every person now born owes money for things they never bought and will never get to use.
The Money Stealing Time Machine
The money stealing time machine is called “government deficits and debt”. Each annual theft is called the deficit, and the total amount stolen across history is called the debt.
Now there is nothing wrong with borrowing money if you have the intention and the means to pay it back. If you need some money now that you don’t have, but will earn in the future, you can borrow it from someone who has some but doesn’t need to use it yet — As long as you pay them back.
However, if you intentionally deceive that person by spending the borrowings without any intention to pay them back, you’re committing the crime of fraud. That crime carries with it a penalty of being fined, forced to make repayment, and potentially even jail time.
If you acted even more outrageously by borrowing money which you said someone else would pay back and that someone never agreed to paying it back and never even knew you’d made that claim on their behalf, you’d also be guilty of fraud, one that is easier to prove.
Yet, THIS DESCRIPTION OF FRAUD IS PRECISELY WHAT GOVERNMENT DEFICITS ARE. Politicians keep borrowing and not paying back what they borrowed.
There is no evidence that they ever had any intention of paying back what they borrowed. None of them have ever paid it back. Worse, they don’t personally assume the responsibility of paying that money back but instead make the debts the obligation of future generations — generations that couldn’t have agreed to take on the responsibility of the debts because those people weren’t even born yet! Every baby born in the United States today is immediately saddled with a debt liability of over $80,000, which they obviously never agreed to.
Somehow nobody gets arrested or charged for this fraud. Nobody who commits this fraud is made to repay the money they stole, nor are they thrown in jail for their crimes. Why?
Maybe it’s because everyone who should put a stop to the crime is an accomplice to it. The police are paid with this stolen money. The judges are paid with it. The prosecutors are paid with it. The lawmakers are paid with it. The economists who say it’s okay to steal even more money in this manner are paid with it. Also, the recipients of government benefits are paid with this stolen money.
And so, for that matter, are banks that get handed this money to loan it out to more and more people who then find themselves even more helplessly in debt.
Consider this: our money system is so thoroughly corrupted that theft from unborn children has become normalized. This should cause moral outrage in any system possessing an actual spirit of justice.
Angry yet? There’s more than just money that’s being stolen from the future.
Are you angry at this terrible injustice going on? If you’re not, is it because you’ve rationalized that this was done to you so you can do it to others? Remember, just because you were abused does not give you the right to abuse others who have done you no harm.
Let me ask you this instead:
Do you sympathize with Greta Thunberg when she says, “How dare you!” as she accuses our leaders of stealing her future right to a planet with a sustainable environment?
She is accusing them of stealing her future. Since we’ve already discussed in this article that time traveling crooks exist, let’s try another fact on for size too: in stealing the money from the future, it turns out the thieves are also stealing the sustainability of the environment.
Human impact on the environment and the economy are very much aligned. An overheated and exhausted economy is one side of a coin whose other side is an overheated and exhausted environment. When the economy is forced in the present to over-produce and over-consume, it does so by using more resources in the present than are actually needed to satisfy its needs, leading to unnecessary consumption of resources. And how do you think one overheats and exhausts an economy?
Why, of course, with money stolen from the future.
The Cost of Short Term Focus
From 1971 until today, politicians have been hell-bent on maximizing immediate consumption at all costs. They have achieved that goal through reckless, fraudulent borrowing from the future.
You know this is true.
The politicians and bureaucrats who try to manage the economy panic if even one month goes by without economic growth. If six months in a row pass by in which we don’t consume more than in the previous month, they call it a recession. They use this as justification to further increase their theft from the future, without any regard to either paying back that money or to the consequences this “economic stimulus” will have on the environment.
And they keep stealing from the future until they get the results they are after, which is more consumption now.
Why are we stealing what we don’t even need or want?
Why doesn’t this madness of stealing from the future and damaging the environment stop? Because our money system is broken. Because our money system allows this to happen.
The system was broken on the day it was created. The date was August 13, 1971. It was the day that money worldwide ceased to be tied to the present supply of gold. Instead, after that day, money could be conjured by bureaucrats and politicians and left as debts for people in the future to pay.
The US president at the time was Richard Nixon, whose most famous quote is, “I am not a crook!”
What I hope this article demonstrates, in fact, is that he was such a crook that even though he died in 1994, people being born today owe money he stole from them before they were born. And the system itself is so crooked that this crookedness increases almost every year.
Here’s Exhibit A: The Federal Deficit per year, also known as the amount stolen from the future per year in millions of dollars.
If Nixon had told the truth and understood what he’d actually done, he would have said while holding both his hands up in a gesture of victory, “I am the greatest crook in history!”
What We Need To Stop This Madness
We have to replace our kleptomaniacal, environmentally destructive, broken system of money.
However, we cannot go back to the system that existed before. That predecessor was called the gold standard.
That system failed. Gold has been used as money throughout much of history, but it has an Achilles heel — a vulnerability that has been exploited time and again throughout history. That vulnerability is that gold is a physical asset that can be seized by force.
“Watch this video for just a minute as Michael Saylor reviews history’s largest seizures of gold from ancient times until August 13, 1971 (from 39:39 to 40:35).”
Bitcoin Smashes the Money Stealing, Environment Destroying Time Machine, Forever
The good news is we have a solution to the broken money system and the vulnerable gold standard that preceded it. The good news is that we don’t have to ruin our children’s futures — neither financially nor environmentally. Thanks to Bitcoin.
Unlike gold, Bitcoin is an unseizable asset. Literally, neither all the military power in the world nor all the computing power in the world can seize even a single bitcoin. Nor can those forces conjure up non-existent bitcoins and make them a liability to future generations.
Stealing money from the future only works because the thieves can seize real money that exists in the present and replace it with dishonest money that they can get away with lying about — a lie that they’ll pay back the money they borrow, which in truth they have no intention of and no ability to repay. But without the possibility of seizing the honest money, they cannot replace it with dishonest money, and they cannot commit fraud in the first place.
When the Bitcoin Standard replaces our current system, all of this destructive behavior will end. We will benefit from a sane economy that is permitted to cool down when overheated. We will benefit from an economy that can become more efficient without having those efficiencies pilfered away on unwanted and environmentally harmful stimulus. We will benefit from Bitcoin’s incentives to generate abundant, clean energy.
Bitcoin will rid the world of the institutions and practices that dared to steal from the helpless, unborn citizens of the future. It will bring about the end of the economically and environmentally ruinous system that was imposed upon the whole world on that dark day in August 1971.
You play a part in this. You should no longer be an accomplice to nor a victim of the fraud. Your part in bringing about a Bitcoin Standard is to choose Bitcoin over today’s broken system. You do this by purchasing or earning Bitcoin and then using it instead of crooked, broken money.
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Tomer Strolight is Editor-in-Chief at Swan Bitcoin. He completed bachelors and masters degrees at Toronto’s Schulich School of Business. Tomer spent 25 years operating businesses in digital media and private equity before turning his attention full time to Bitcoin. Tomer wrote the book “Why Bitcoin?” a collection of 27 short articles each explaining a different facet of this revolutionary new monetary system. Tomer also wrote and narrated the short film “Bitcoin Is Generational Wealth”. He has appeared on many Bitcoin podcasts including What Bitcoin Did, The Stephan Livera Podcast, Bitcoin Rapid Fire, Twice Bitten, the Bitcoin Matrix and many more.
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