Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

“Rich people have small TVs, small cars, but big libraries.”
—Manoj Arora, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom

Three extraordinary things happened at the end of December.  A friend of mine completed a white paper on a second generation crypto-currency project that he worked on since 2008, and which I helped him with a few times over the years.  A friend of mine sent me a link to an article on self-sovereign identity And a group of gentlemen in Ohio agreed to let me revise a white paper and write a business plan for their crypto-currency project.

The white paper is currently hosted here: https://cryptowealth.com/ascension-white-paper-2017-dec-29/

In it, my friends Kevin Wilkerson and Sean Daley describe a network of independent servers running a distributed software system called Ascension. It provides extensive financial autonomy for the individual. It is, as far as I can see, as close to digital cash in its features as any system out there. Furthermore, it has linear scaling, so it can actually process as many transactions a second as the entire Bitcoin network does right now, and as many more as the people involved want to process, simply by adding hardware (virtual servers for the most part).

The article on self-sovereign identity is important, I think, because it clearly recognises the need to have private information kept private. It also brings the important distinction between what an individual is and what passes for identification.

It used to be, a thousand years ago, that your identity was who you said you were. You were known to be that person by the people in the communities where you lived. Nobody pretended that your fingerprints were unique, nobody asserted that you had to have a photograph of yourself in your wallet with mumbo-jumbo from some government agency, nobody assigned you a number and pretended that it substituted for your name, and very few people cared to ask when you were born. From 420,000 years ago up until about the time of Bismark, there were no passports.

Since his time, however, people following the path of Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Rockefeller, Bismark, Ataturk, Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Mao, Pol Pot and many others have tried to create a "managed society" where the managerial class makes all the rules, enjoys all the luxuries, and completely disembowels everyone else as they see fit. Frederick W. Taylor and HG Wells wrote extensively on the idea that people must be leashed, limited, led, and, as necessary, extinguished "for the common good." In response to Rousseau's book on the social contract, which he clearly saw as a work of fiction, Voltaire wrote that Rousseau was "the enemy of mankind." The subsequent centuries have proven Voltaire's point.

It is time to get back to a healthy sense of identity. It is time to reclaim your individual sovereignty. And the basis for that reclamation is your financial autonomy. Finally, now, a great many thousands of persons are working on that topic. As a result, Bitcoin has soared above $19,000 per coin; 1,429 distinct crypto-currencies are now trading on nearly 8,000 private markets; over $740 billion is now capitalising these currencies; about $39 billion of them traded hands in the last 24 hours making the crypto-economy over $14 trillion annually in trading activity alone, plus economic spends involving the currencies. The only national economy larger than crypto-currencies on an annual gross domestic product basis (which, as an Austrian economist, I have trenchant criticisms regarding whether GDP is a valid measure of anything) is the United States, and in recent weeks, the 24 hour volume has exceed $52 billion, making the crypto-economy larger than any national economy in the world.

In sum, people are making financial autonomy a priority right now. The madness of the Feral Reserveless Scheme and the nationalist central banks from England to Japan to China is about to be ended, not by revolution, not by war, but by technology. And there is literally nothing the people in power can do about it. There system is over, their day is ended, and whether they realise it or not, people will soon be finally freed. The schemes which have financed the bloodiest wars and the most disgusting array of military technologies the world has ever seen is coming to an end.

You should be a part of it. You should, in a phrase, free yourself.

Jim Davidson is the founder of sovereign mutual aid response teams (SMART), Kansas search and rescue teams, the Resilient Ways Foundation, and several companies. He works in private equity, business planning, and has been a crypto-numismatist since 2014. He and his friend Courtney Smith are organising a New Countries Conference for Summer 2018.