The Great Escape

The world powers rest uneasy. The global geopolitical order teeters on the brink and a once all-powerful US government is no longer able to leverage its financial or industrial base to lay down the law.

As ancient rivalries are resurrected and opportunists enter the fray, these localised flashpoints risk immersing the world into chaos. In an increasingly uncertain world, where nothing can be trusted, lies a globally distributed computing network producing cryptographically verifiable order every 10 minutes – The Timechain. Is it any surprise its value is increasing?

The price momentum is quite something to witness and we suspect it may continue for some time yet. The key to really understanding why, though, is not in the ETF, the bitcoin halving, regional conflict, a likely Fed pivot and so on. It is in the nature of the system itself.

Bitcoin at its core is a ledger, open to all and controlled by none. In other words, it is an independent monetary system, one engineered to rival analogue gold and the manipulated dollar. An independent monetary system is so valuable because independence engenders freedom, and freedom in turn builds prosperity. As long as bitcoin is synonymous with freedom, its price will increase.

Since inception, bitcoin has quickly blown past most fiat currencies, and not just the low hanging fruit like the Argentine peso or the Egyptian pound. Its aggregate economic clout has grown to surpass all but the strongest nation-states. Over the next 10 years, it appears likely that zones of consolidated regional fiat dominance will emerge. For those under the American sphere of influence, the dollar will continue to reign supreme. For those in the Chinese sphere of orbit, it will be the yuan. Perhaps the rupee will preside over the Indian sub-continent and its substantial diaspora. Each monetary order will come packaged with the values of that quite distinctive culture and civilisation, and those values will be enforced through the tech stack on top of which the currency is run. The relative value of each currency will be determined by the strength of the underlying society’s industrial and resource base and perhaps even by the amount of bitcoin in their treasury.

Life under the yuan, and thus under control of the CCP and its social credit score system, is probably what we fear most in the West. However, it is saddening to admit we cannot be sure the dollar will be much better. With the US government and a completely unaccountable state apparatus pushing legislation written neither by the people nor for the people, what exactly are the values enshrined in the greenback these days? Once a country of Rock ‘n’ Roll, fast cars and freedom, its bureaucratic elite now appear more focused on exporting growth-nullifying ‘ESG’ mandates and a Marxist ‘DEI’ agenda than the traditional American values of individual sovereignty and free markets.

Disturbingly, India has pulled off a feat the European Union is probably no longer capable of imagining, let alone executing – a digital identity (Aadhar) and payments (UPI) infrastructure for every citizen. UPI is already capable of processing quick and cheap international payments, and given the vast Indian diaspora, it has as many as 100m users outside of India itself. Each system is effectively a prototype ‘Central Bank Digital Currency’ (CBDC), simply with differing mechanisms of value enforcement (from social ostracism in the West to outright coercion in the East). As we described in Timechain Newsletter #5 ‘Business Model of the State‘, the erosion of the financial bedrock of each system under a mountain of debt means that governments will have to resort to increasingly authoritarian measures to prevent outright collapse; as a result, one should expect the embedded restrictions within each fiat system to only expand.

Bitcoin stands in stark contrast to them all. It is a monetary system with few embedded restrictions. The only restrictions are determined by the laws of physics themselves and follow naturally from its core principles of decentralisation and permissionlessness. And therein lies its value – a monetary network that is independent of the rest and a bulwark against creeping authoritarianism, regardless of location and regardless of whether that authoritarianism comes under the guise of environmentalism, AI-enabled communism or religious extremism.

Our singular mission at Timechain is to encourage the development and adoption of this independent monetary network, as well as associated freedom-expanding technologies on top of it. True wealth creation stems from human freedom, which is the precursor to innovation, creativity, and progress; the civilisational stack that Timechain is seeding on top of the bitcoin network is thus also the largest possible addressable market in existence. To build atop any other monetary network is not only limiting oneself to a smaller opportunity but also means participating in the construction of our own digital gulag.

Given bitcoin represents the freedom, sovereignty, hope and integrity for which the human spirit will always yearn, there can be no question as to who will prevail.

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