The Race to Avoid the War

We Bitcoiners are in a race. Perhaps the most important race we will ever run. We are racing against time to drive the adoption of Bitcoin as fast as we can. We are racing toward a future in which the U.S. Government never coordinates a concerted attack against Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. This is a race to avoid a war.

Let’s be clear. Bitcoin is going to win no matter what. Bitcoin is the best money we’ve ever had. Its properties were purpose-built to enable it to function as the primary store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account for every human and machine on planet Earth. It is designed to withstand and survive all attacks, and in fact, it gets stronger when challenged. Bitcoin is replacing money that is already in the process of collapse, money that would collapse independently of Bitcoin’s existence. Bitcoin is engineered to be the orderly, antifragile alternative to a chaotic collapse.

How far into the future does Bitcoin’s victory reside as money for all of the world? It could be as soon as the 2030s, but only if we sprint hard.

And what if we lose this race?

Although Bitcoin is destined to win, if we lose the race to avoid the war, victory will be far more costly. This would be the long way — and the hard way. Instead of a sprint to a bright, orange future, we would be embroiled in a long, hard confrontation with a government desperate to hold on to the power of the monetary printing press. If we lose the race, the long, hard path will be a war in which hundreds of millions of people will suffer the decivilizing and impoverishing effects of hyperinflation.

So, for those of us alive, for those of us ready and able now, it is vitally important to run this race as well as possible.

How do we do this? There are many ways.

First, we drive adoption forward. Nearly three years ago, we launched Swan with the mission to recruit Ten Million Bitcoiners: the intransigent minority — people who store a meaningful amount of their net worth in the Bitcoin protocol AND who understand it well enough to want to fight for it. We are fully committed to both of these goals — enabling bitcoin acquisition and building Bitcoin comprehension. Together, these are what build the intransigent minority.

Furthermore, when Bitcoiners develop privacy and scaling technology for Bitcoin, we make it substantially more challenging for anti-coiners to make the case that a war on Bitcoin is winnable. When more of us demonstrate the unmatched power of Lightning Network payments in small nations, influential legislators and bankers in the U.S. take note and are far less likely to support an adversarial strategy towards Bitcoin.

When another bitcoiner writes a book, makes a video tutorial, or promotes a decentralized gamified stacking movement like Stackchain, they push Bitcoin that much further ahead in this race of races.

When Bitcoiners excel in their fiat jobs, consistently pushing more and more of their weekly paychecks into their Bitcoin saving accounts, they push the Number Go Up technology to new heights, pulling in more grassroots adoption.

All of these activities move us toward the inevitable success of Bitcoin on this rational, collaborative, and peaceful, yet revolutionary, path.

However, when people lie about Bitcoin and Bitcoiners in order to line their pockets with altcoin pump-and-dump gains, like the “crypto” VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, or attempt orange-washing affinity marketing projects like STX, they make war on Bitcoin that much more likely.

When they fund misinformation campaigns with millions of ill-gotten dollars, they increase the likelihood of a fight that can and should be avoided for the sake of all of human civilization.

When others bury their heads in the sand and pretend that gold can still do what it has been proven to be unable to do in a modern, global, digital economy, they hold back others who understand the benefits of sound money but haven’t yet learned to distinguish gold from Bitcoin — a sound money that works exceptionally well in our physical and digital global reality.

Bitcoiners must stand up and call out those who actively slow Bitcoin’s adoption because they risk knocking us off our path toward the peaceful adoption of a sound, global monetary standard, which the world needs as soon as possible.

All these activities are parts of our historic, collaborative effort to guide civilization on the best of all possible paths — we write code, we educate, we help others, we donate, we stack, and we build — all to win the race against the war.

As Michael Saylor declared so eloquently:

So let us proceed — together, united, yet decentralized — and win this race, for one and all, so that we may never have to fight the war.