Noelle Acheson is a veteran of company analysis and CoinDesks director of research. The opinions expressed in this article are the authors own.

The following article originally appeared in Institutional Crypto by CoinDesk, a weekly newsletter focused on institutional investment in crypto assets. Sign up for free here.

If there ever was a week when crypto narratives got confusing, it was last week.

Those who believe in bitcoins safe-haven narrative (fewer in number by the hour) are struggling to make sense of the correlated slump which left the bitcoin (BTC) price down even more in percentage terms over the past two weeks than the S&P 500 (-15 percent vs -12 percent). Gold, bitcoins analog counterpart, actually went up (4.5 percent).

Those that maintain it is a risk-on asset (growing in number by the hour) are transfixed by the jump in correlation between bitcoin and the S&P. Whatever happened to the pitch on the importance of having an uncorrelated asset in your portfolio? (True, its still at a low level, but its no longer negative.)

While analysts and fund managers produce arguments for bitcoin being both risk-on and risk-off at the same time, the bigger crypto story is happening beyond our markets. And it is worth paying attention to.

The stock market's shellacking last week seems to have been triggered by concerns about the economic impact of supply chain disruption and production slowdowns caused by coronavirus prevention measures. While these factors are unlikely to have a big impact on bitcoin fundamentals (no matter how delayed mining equipment deployment gets, the protocol will keep doing its thing), in times of fear investors exit riskier assets. They also exit liquid assets, and bitcoin is probably easier to offload than other high-risk holdings such as thinly traded stocks or private equity.

Supply chain impact

Moving beyond markets,the disruptions will have a deeper and longer-lasting impact on global supplychains. This threat, combined with building tensions elsewhere, couldeventually consolidate cryptos risk-off status, and endow it with the use casethe market has been waiting for.

Unless the coronavirusspread is quickly contained, global supply chains will need to be reconfiguredto more local variations. This will most likely accelerate the already-presentunwinding (due to trade tensions and increased border controls) of the globalizationtrend in manufacturing that had led to lower costs all around.

This unwinding will mostlikely push up costs for consumers, as low-cost manufacturers (usually based inAsia) are replaced by less efficient or more highly taxed local suppliers. Thiscould finally produce the inflation that central bankers have been longing for.

However, this inflation could manifest just at the time central banks are yet again lowering rates and flooding the markets with new money to combat the market slump. Last weeks fall may be temporary but it was the largest since the 2008 crisis, which is understandably ringing alarm bells.

Running in parallel, we have political uncertainty. The market rout, if it continues, could end up having a significant impact on the upcoming U.S. elections. A large driver of Donald Trump's support has been the strength of the S&P 500. Should that evaporate, support could swing. And an increased likelihood of a victory for Bernie Sanders, for instance, could further spook the markets, perhaps making that victory even more likely.

Climate of uncertainty

Uncertainty in theU.S., both economic and political, is likely to spill over into other regions,perhaps pushing countries further towards populism as economies struggle and localtensions escalate.

You see where Imheading with this? Its not towards a fog of doom and despair. Its toward the growingrealization that there is an alternative. The mix of rising inflation, moreprinting of money and growing populism should heighten global interest in analternative asset that is immune to inflation, monetary depreciation andpolitical manipulation.

The likely eventual outcome,after tragic suffering and wealth destruction which is never a good thing, willbe a new type of narrative, one with greater clarity and acceptance, not tomention urgency.

Bitcoin may be a risk-on asset now, as uncertain narratives, contained liquidity and limited awareness put it in the optional bucket of most portfolios. But as its use case becomes even more obvious, given macro developments that highlight the vulnerability of fiat-based finance, it could finally rise to become the safe haven or necessary hedge that we have been talking about. This is the kind of scenario that bitcoin was created for.

Disclosure: the author holds a small amount of bitcoin and ether, and no short positions.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Bitcoin, Uncertainty and the Ultimate Narrative - Coindesk

42% of Bitcoin has not moved on-chain for at least two years, the highest concentration of hodling since June 2017.

HODL Waves are periods of heavy bitcoin accumulation which can be monitored by Bitcoin Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs). When block rewards are given to a miner, a UTXO is created. When BTC is spent, the UTXO becomes an input to the user receiving the Bitcoin, and any change is sent back to the spender as a different UTXO.

Every BTC transaction consists of inputs (spent BTC) and UTXOs (unspent BTC). My spent UTXO becomes an input sent to you, and that input becomes your UTXO to spend as you please.

UTXO analysis enables analysts to roughly gauge how much Bitcoin is actively being hodld by investors, by analyzing how long it has been since a UTXO has been used to make a transaction. The longer the time period, the more it indicates cold storage and long-term saving.

Coinmetrics just recently published a cryptocurrency valuation report. In this report they use UTXO age analysis as a valuation metric. They discovered that as of March 1st, 42% of Bitcoin UTXOs have not moved in 2 years or more.

This is the highest this number has been since June 2017, shortly before Bitcoins bull run to all time highs in December of that year. This could be a fundamental indication that Bitcoin is preparing for an epic tear towards new all time highs after Mays halving.

HODL Waves are identified by what are called Bitcoin Age Days(BADs). Basically, if a Bitcoin UTXO is not spent for 30 days, it has 30 Bitcoin Age Days, if it gets spent on the 30th day, 30 BADs are destroyed.

There are 3 major Bitcoin HODL Waves, the oldest of which are BTC UTXOs which have not moved in 5 years or more. These are the hodl stashes of the first people who mined Bitcoin, Bitcoin OGs, and early adopters.

This also includes a concentration of lost coins, or coins that early adopters lost access to the private keys; a common occurrence in Bitcoins early days. Chainalysis, a blockchain forensics service, estimates up to 4 million BTC have been lost permanently.

HODL Wave 2 is the UTXOs that are between 3-5 years, which was the wave of new adopters that came into the Bitcoin markets after it first began to capture headlines with its first major bull run to $1200, as well as the people who entered during the 2017 bull run to 20K.

HODL Wave 3 is made up of UTXOs that are between 18-24 months of BAD. These are the investors who sat on the sidelines during Bitcoins 2017 bull run, but who bought BTC during the crypto winter, taking advantage of bear market lows to accumulate.

As hodlers increase, the lead cryptocurrencys scarcity is magnified. This adds upside price pressure, especially with the incoming halving, which will reduce the supply new BTC produced. This could be a perfect storm to cause prices to explode.

What do you think about the concentration of hodld BTC? Let us know in the comments!

Images via Shutterstock, Twitter @natemaddrey

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Almost Half of All Bitcoin Has Not Moved in 2 Years - Bitcoinist

It's 'Super Tuesday' in the U.S., and as Democrats take to the polls to pick their nominee, @nlw polled Twitter to see who the crypto community thought would be best for bitcoin (BTC) and the industry.

Today is Super Tuesday - one of the biggest days of the U.S. election primary season. Increasingly, prediction markets and pollsters suggest its coming down to a two-person race between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders (although Mike Bloomberg has insisted hes staying in).

In this episode, NLW breaks down each candidate in the context of their positions vis a vis cryptocurrency, and looks at the possible role of three other fallen contenders during the rest of the campaign.

As Bernie leads the Twitter poll, the question arises: Do people think Bernie will be good for bitcoin because he shares the same values of prioritizing the little guy over big banks, or because his programs will demand so much quantitative easing (QE) it will send bitcoin to the moon?

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

See the original post:
Super Tuesday Special: Which US Election Outcome Is Best for Bitcoin? - Coindesk

Its been hard to avoid the coronavirus this week, at least in the news, as the US confirmed its first death this morning. If it turns into an all-out pandemic, youll be glad that you sealed yourself away and stocked up on bitcoin you did do that, right?

What can be said? Not a great week for bitcoin price at the risk of stating the obvious. So how did it play out?

After gains last weekend, Monday trading saw these wiped out after $10k was rejected again. Analysts predicted a pullback, and price continued to fall on Tuesday, breaking $9.5k, with some expecting a drop to as low as $8,300.

Krakens Director of Business Development, Dan Held, remained bullish, however, believing that bitcoin could be on the edge of a super-cycle that would quickly take it to $100k and beyond. Meanwhile, a cash crunch in Lebanon propelled bitcoin price to an inflated $15k between local peer to peer sellers.

However, on global markets losses continued into Wednesday, breaking $9k support, and also dragging down most altcoins, and threatening to wipe out the years gains so far.

Stock to Flow proponent, PlanB, predicted that bitcoin would not fall below $8,200 during this crash, and we all hoped he was right, although prices didnt seem to stop falling during early trading on Thursday.

Thankfully bitcoin did then find some support at $8,600, bouncing up as high as $8,900, before tailing off again on Friday. This time solid support was found at $8.5k, and the price has been trading in a range between this level and $8,800 ever since.

However, at a macro level, there are concerns that bitcoin is still in a bear market. Certainly, the bulls must defend key levels to stem the recent flow.

The Bank of Englands chief cashier voiced her support for a Central Bank Digital Currency this week, saying that governments must act fast to avoid losing out to tech giants such as Facebooks Libra.

Meanwhile, Chinas proposed CBDC faced delays due to the coronavirus outbreak, although officials were still aiming to launch a pilot in 2020.

Although Canada has decided that it doesnt need a CBDC at the moment, it has put in place a blueprint for one, just in case.

YouTube continued its assault on channels related to cryptocurrency, this week suspending Ivan on Tech until after the May halving event.

Craig Wright faces more questions about the purported Tulip Trust and Bonded Courier, as the estate of Dave Kleiman wants to expose what it says are just more lies. Meanwhile, Binance CEO, CZ, called Wright a fraud in no uncertain terms earlier in the week.

Amid major losses for Ethereum this week, the community also came to blows over the approval of a controversial change to its mining algorithm. The Programmatic Proof of Work (ProgPoW) algorithm is supposed to reduce the advantage of ASIC hardware but caused a big discussion online as to its implications.

Exchanges OKEx and Bitfinex were both hit by DDoS attacks this week, with OKEx CEO Jay Hao offering a bounty for information on the attackers.

Bitfinex claims that it has repaid $100 million of the $700 million it borrowed from Tether last year. And Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex & Tether, will be speaking at the Digital Asset Summit next month, marking the first time that a Bitfinex/Tether exec has spoken at an industry event.

The SEC denied Wilshere-Phoenixs application for a Bitcoin ETF, which was disappointing, but not entirely unexpected given its track record.

Warren Buffett appeared on CNBC this week, telling the world once again that he will never own cryptocurrency.

This caused Justin Sun, who Buffett said was very polite at their recent charity lunch date, to call foul play. After all, the joy of blockchain meant that he could show the bitcoin and Tron he gifted Buffett at the dinner had not been moved.

To which, Buffett responded that he had given the phone away on which Sun had loaded the wallets to his favored Glide charity.

Surely its time to stop trying to teach the old dog new tricks already.

What was your favorite bitcoin or crypto story of this week? Let us know in the comments below!

Image via Shutterstock

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Sunday Digest: Bitcoin Price Crash and Other News - Bitcoinist

What happens if the internet goes down?

Youve heard it, Ive heard it weve all heard the refrain. Its a favorite of FUDster journalists like Frances Coppola and David Gerard, and they treat it like the ultimate trump card when debating Bitcoins value.

Correct! If the internet goes down across the globe, Bitcoin would be in trouble. But so would the global banking sector, the healthcare industry, the food industry and basically the entire fabric of our hyper-connected existence. If the internet is kaput, then you should probably be worried about stocking supplies and ammo, because its going to get wild.

But what if I told you that, in the event of a mass internet outage, theres a good chance that Bitcoin would survive? That chance is real and growing thanks to the promise of mesh networks.

Put simply, mesh nets are networks of peer-connected nodes that offer offline connectivity by means of radio signals. Depending on the bandwidth of the network, you could do things like send a bitcoin transaction or download the Bitcoin blockchain.

When coupled with something like the Blockstream satellite network, which broadcasts the Bitcoin blockchains data across much of the surface area of the globe, you could architect a nearly foolproof, decentralized infrastructure that could be used as a makeshift web in case the actual internet goes down.

The goTenna team may come to mind when you think of mesh networks. So, too, might Locha Mesh, an open-source mesh network project kickstarted by Randy Brito, the philanthropic entrepreneur behind the non-profit Bitcoin Venezuela.

For this weeks issue on the use of Bitcoin through dissident technology, we talked to Brito and Blockstream developer Grubles about the promise of mesh networks. Grubles has published demonstrations on how you can use mesh networks in conjunction with Blockstreams satellite to send transactions and messages on Bitcoin offline. The satellite is a boon to the mesh network use case here because, as Grubles put it, The coverage area is enormous. We can practically blanket an entire continent with Bitcoin data with just one of the satellites in the Blockstream Satellite network.

Our Q&A with the pair below covers the what, why and how of mesh networks, along with what situations they can ameliorate and what conditions need to be met before they can bring offline Bitcoin access to the masses.

Bitcoin Magazine: For those who might be unfamiliar, what are the benefits of mesh networks?

Grubles: In a traditional network, like the one you likely use today at home or at work, youre connected to an ISP [internet service provider] which is typically controlled by a for-profit corporation. Your ISP then has its own providers which it connects to, also owned by for-profit corporations. Sometimes these corporations are pressured by governments to filter, or otherwise censor, information on their networks.

A mesh network is, at the most basic level, a peer-to-peer network. Peers in the network provide connectivity to other peers they are connected to, and the peers of their peers gain connectivity, and so on. The result is a network without a central entity, and if you visually graph the layout of the network, it resembles a mesh, rather than a hub-and-spoke-like traditional network where everyone is eventually connected to a central ISP.

BM: How are they good for Bitcoin?

Grubles: How mesh networks tie into Bitcoin is pretty straightforward. Currently, there is a reliance on the traditional ISP-controlled networks. Not just for Bitcoin but for most things on the internet. If a network is controlled by a central entity, it can be easily shut down or censored. A mesh network is resistant to parts of the network going offline, so peers can route their data around the parts that have gone offline. This kind of resilience is important for a system like Bitcoin because it means that transactions can keep flowing and miners can keep producing blocks. If youre a merchant or a miner and your ISP decides to shut off your connection, youre kind of screwed.

BM: To you, which is the more important side effect of mesh networks: the privacy they provide or the benefit of not having to rely on the internet?

Grubles: Different people will have different answers for this but, for me, its the added redundancy and the breaking free of the reliance on traditional ISPs. Privacy is important, but if you have a network which provides privacy but is bottlenecked by a central entity, then the central entity can just be pressured to shut the network down altogether. If we focus on building out mesh infrastructure first, we can always overlay something like Tor on top or bake privacy into the mesh protocol itself.

BM: On that note, what are some of the pitfalls of mesh networks? Where are the weak points?

Brito: For using Bitcoin via mesh networks, the amount of data that needs to be transmitted could be its weakness. If you are in the Locha Mesh but you dont have an internet connection or a satellite dish, you will need to get the latest Bitcoin block data from a peer in the mesh and the number of hops you may need to do and bandwidth will be key for you to accomplish this. If there isnt anyone offering you this service, you would be isolated from the Bitcoin network itself.

Fortunately, the Bitcoin community doesnt stop innovating in the network side of Bitcoin, so improvements like Erlay, FIBRE and more will make transmitting Bitcoins block data over the mesh achievable. You will still be able to pretty easily use your Electrum wallet within the Locha Mesh as far as you can reach an Electrum server that serves you with your wallets latest balance updates, or you could make offline signed bitcoin transactions, reach a push-tx gateway and then receive a message when your transaction has been added to a block.

BM: Do you have anything to add to that, Grubles? And do you think that mesh networks will enjoy greater development and adoption, or do you think they will always be a fringe interest?

Grubles: Mesh tech is still in its early stages. Setting up most mesh technologies requires some technical proficiency, so the vast majority of people will have a hard time getting connected. This means the total size of a mesh network will be relatively small to begin with. Once its easier for the average person to get set up and connected to a mesh, then I think it will really start to take off.

I think mesh networking is one of those things that you dont really care about until you actually need it. But I think that as the internet and communications become more and more of a necessity in our lives, there will be more awareness for mesh networking as a side effect.

BM: Randy, youve been working on Locha Mesh specifically with your home country of Venezuela in mind. What needs to be done for something like Locha Mesh to be adopted in parts of the world that need it most?

Randy Brito: The decentralized nature and censorship resistance of the Locha Mesh are very important, but without a way to incentivize people to offer these services of Bitcoins blocks data and latest bitcoin transactions, Electrum servers, Lightning Network watchtowers, offline push-tx services and gateways, all within the mesh, the Locha Mesh would be limited to mainly messaging and would need people to have their Locha Mesh nodes always online with the only incentive being able to send messages within the mesh.

To solve the incentivization problem, weve been thinking from the start on how users will be using the Lightning Network to pay for these services, and well continue researching any available options to make this possible. One of the other methods we are currently looking at, with the support of other members of the community, is, for example, the use of Moneros new RPC-Pay feature. Well continue researching this matter and welcome anyone who would like to suggest or test their incentivization ideas for Bitcoin and the Locha Mesh sustainability and availability.

BM: If I recall correctly, Locha Mesh relies on radio signals broadcasted on the ground. Grubles has used the Blockstream satellite for his own mesh networks. In what ways does your design differ, and what are the pros/cons of your approach?

Brito: What the Blockstream satellite does is beam Bitcoins blockchain data and messages to Earth. You could use this service to get the latest transactions and blocks using a satellite dish on your rooftop and then transmit this important data to others through the Locha Mesh to allow people to transact in Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, even if they dont have an internet connection. They just need to be inside the Locha Mesh and get the Bitcoin data from you.

This is the same [solution that] Grubles has demoed, but the mesh hardware he has tested it with is not capable of transmitting Bitcoins blocks data due to hardware and bandwidth limitations, only short messages. We are working on the needed capabilities for the Locha Mesh to be useful for Bitcoin in a worst-case scenario.

Continued here:
Bitcoin Off the Grid: The Promise of Mesh Networks - Bitcoin Magazine

The U.K. hearing of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assanges U.S. extradition on the week of February 24, 2020, presented a test of Western liberal democracy. The indictment of Assange under the Espionage Act for publishing classified documents which exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan is recognized by free speech groups as an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.

With the governments criminalization of journalism, we are seeing a deepening crisis of legitimacy that had begun to unravel a decade ago. Bitcoin emerged during the 2008 financial meltdown as a response to bank bailouts and a cycle of austerity. Over its 10 years of existence, the technology has steadily maintained its fundamentals of censorship resistance and permissionless usage. Now, more than ever, Bitcoin shows these defining features as its value proposition.

As the government becomes more authoritarian, those who speak truth to power are being punished more harshly. Bitcoin as a technology of dissent provides alternative forms of resistance that are much more peaceful and joyous. It offers an avenue for people around the world to express their opposition against their government without directly confronting with power; instead it is simply creating a new world that makes the old system obsolete.

The invention of Bitcoin didnt happen overnight. It was built on cumulative efforts of the past. The development of this technology of dissent can be traced back in the history of peoples liberation from the arbitrary power of the king and despotic government. In the United States, after the victory of the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers rejected the rule of British monarchy. In the Declaration of Independence, the premise was given for unalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, expressed in the words of Thomas Jefferson that is to be applied equally to all people.

In establishing the U.S. constitutional republic, these premises remained no more than ideals and they were constantly threatened. The original Constitution ratified in 1787 lacked the guarantee to secure individual liberties that inherently belong to all people.

The proponents of the Bill of Rights demanded a safeguard against the government. They articulated the protection of essential parts of unalienable rights in the First Amendment to the Constitution as a freedom of expression; freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Erosion of civil rights took place through a loophole in the security within the Constitution. While a wall of separation between church and state is placed in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, separation of money and state was not. Under the First Amendment, individuals right to create, choose their own money and transact freely was not recognized as a part of freedom of expression that needs to be protected.

The central control over money production faced a major security breach. Attorney Ellen Brown explains how most people think money is issued by fiat, declared to be legal tender by the government, but the creation of money has been taken over by private corporations like the Federal Reserve.

Privatized national and corporate currencies, created out of thin air around the world, came to function as a medium of control, allowing big business to create market monopolies. This began to debase the intrinsic value of the natural rights of a person evidenced in the nations founding document. By transforming those inalienable rights into a permissioned form of legal rights that can be infringed upon by the government, corporations and private banks began to steal individual liberties. Freedom of expression became further stifled through economic censorship and financial blockage enacted by payment processing companies like Visa and MasterCard.

As the states assault on civil liberty has increased, rebellion came from the internet. On February 8, 1996, when Congress enacted the Telecommunications Reform Act that enabled media consolidation and monopoly of flow of information, John Perry Barlow, internet pioneer, wrote a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Addressing it to governments of the Industrial World, he called for a creation of a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Those who revolted against the arbitrary power of the national government became dissidents in the new frontier of cyberspace. They found each other and formed an association that came to be known as cypherpunks: loosely tied online activists who advocate social change by the use of strong cryptography.

Tim May, one of the influential cypherpunks and the author of The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto recognized money as speech. At the Computer Freedom and Privacy Conference in 1997, he described how Digital Cash = Speech. He then noted how untraceable digital cash is indistinguishable from speech and explained how any laws intended to control it will almost certainly impinge on speech in general. Cypherpunks began envisioning a stateless digital form of money that is uncensorable and their collaborative pursuit created a movement for a new Enlightenment.

Philosophers in the Enlightenment era advocated for conceptions of democratic rights based on natural law. In his seminal work The Spirit of Laws published in 1748, Montesquieu wrote,

Laws in their broadest sense, are the necessary relations which are derived from the nature of things: Once free from the yoke of religion, we should still be subject to the rule of Justice Law, like mathematics has its objective structure, which no arbitrary whim can alter, before there were any enacted laws, just relations were possible.

Cypherpunks understood that while alienable rights that are bestowed by law can be taken away by legislation, inalienable rights are not to be created but can be discoverable by reason. Thus, laws that secure inalienable rights cannot be created by man but can be found in nature.

Like Enlightenment thinkers who tried to explain the laws of society and human nature through scientific methods, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin instigated a scientific process of discovering a way to restore money in its original form as an enshrinement of an unalienable right.

Bitcoin is free software that gives the user full control of the program. Anyone can observe, share knowledge and contribute to the development of protocol through participating in reviewing, testing and experimentation.

Here, principles of nature that were discovered were applied to create a decentralized digital currency and a market that is free from the control of the government. They included breakthroughs in computer science that led to the invention of a consensus algorithm, the laws of thermodynamics (study of science concerning heat, temperature and their relation to energy), and three natural laws of economics (self interest, competition, and supply and demand) that were identified by Adam Smith, a father of modern economics.

In Bitcoin, based on the principle of game theory to create fairness, miners engage in a broadcast math competition. Aligning self-interests of all in a network, with a careful balance of risk and rewards, rules are enforced without applying any external pressure. Bitcoin regulates itself through the spontaneous force of nature, flourishing healthy price discovery and competition in the best interest of everyone.

As the British court wrapped up its fake judicial process in the deliberation of the U.S. extradition request for the persecuted and tortured journalist, Julian Assange, Western democracy shows its final decline. This irreparable system continues to suck people into an electoral arena trying to keep them under its control. While many engage in protest or petitioning, busying themselves with cheering on their favorite candidates in political contests, Bitcoin provides a formidable tool for dissent, allowing people to simply opt out altogether from this corrupted system.

The bureaucratic system of the modern nation-state, administered by central banks, magistrates, presidents and prime ministers, has alienated us from the harmonious state of the world we belong to, depriving us of our innate rights and liberties. Now, imagination from computer science inspires us to rediscover intrinsic value within ourselves the wisdom of nature that governs our behavior and our rights to express ourselves freely and create our own life.

We, Bitcoiners, are all dissidents in the Old World of trusted third parties. We defy the rules of empire states in order to trust our ability to become our own authority. Laws of nature that are higher than man-made laws, being enforced by mathematics, have begun to reorganize a society. The frictionless flow of bitcoin allows us to diverge from the mainstream of national currency that keeps us in a debt spiral; it allows us to transcend borders and bypass checkpoints. Voluntary association formed through this free speech money is creating a new economy, fueling innovations and opportunities for jobs.

Every 10 minutes, the heart of Bitcoin beats, setting computers around the world in motion. From developers to miners and users running full nodes that relay and validate transactions, together, all engage in computing as an act of civil disobedience, keeping the network decentralized. As we collectively dissent, the wealth of the network rises, securing equality and liberty as unalienable universal rights for all people.

This is an op ed contribution by Nozomi Hayase. Views expressed are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bitcoin Magazine or BTC Inc.

More here:
Bitcoin Is the Technology of Dissent That Secures Individual Liberties - Bitcoin Magazine