Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

“The truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract. It becomes thus, in certain circumstances, a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists, as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context, ‘in substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract, and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts, an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law.’”
— F.A. Hayek, Denationalisation of Money – The Argument Refined: An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent Currencies, 3rd Edition, 1990

The time continues to be a good time to end the money issue power monopoly of the evil psychopaths who run central banks like the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank. These banking gangsters finance endless wars for the profit of their cronies and they make everyone else miserable. The best way to end their monopoly is to work on or make use of free market money alternatives. And the best way to make rich people regret their behaviours is to cause them to become poor people, as Eddy Murphy noted in Trading Places.

There are now thousands and thousands of free market money systems. Some of them work very well. A few are based on gold and silver, and Anthem Hayek Blanchard is working on at least one of those at Hayek Gold. Some of these crypto-currencies have been around since 2009. Others are more recent, and include privacy-protecting features worth talking about.

Very recently, a new one, the Ascension.Foundation system, made its announcement on BitcoinTalk.org and has not received much attention. I’ve worked closely with the co-founders of Ascension, Kevin Wilkerson since 2002 and Sean Daley since 2014. Both are good men who know their stuff, care about freedom and privacy, and want to make the world a better place. You would do well to visit their site and have a look around. I have not worked directly for Ascension for pay since February 2018, but I continue to be an unpaid member of their board of advisers.

You will be hearing more about TravelCashInc.com in the next few weeks, I believe, and I am the first to admit that I recommended they build their system on the Ascension platform. So far, that seems, to me, to be working very well. They have even completed some test transactions using TravelCash at a retail store in Dublin, Ohio.

But you need not focus on Ascension—which inter-operates with Bitcoin and Litecoin. You can go directly to those sources. Bitcoin has been around since 2009 and Litecoin a little later. Both have seen ups and downs in their dollar price, as the dollar changes in value, and so do they. There are also many “hard forks” of Bitcoin, such as Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, and several more.

A good friend of mine, Jenna Baxter, and I are working on a book reviewing many of these alternatives. We have opened a blog, though neither of us has much time this week, at Crypto-Fools.com and we have had some help from a Dayton, Ohio writer, Alex Jaruk. Lots of bad coins exist, and we hope to analyse a few hundred of them before we publish our book.

Take a look, please. I think you’ll find there is a lot going on, and that a lot of freedom oriented projects are banking on staying away from banks. My friend Kurt Hanson of Mu Aye Pu in the Karen Free State of Burma just announced his intention to raise $100 million with a coin offering.

What would you do with a few million dollars of funding from a crypto-currency? I’m always interested in new ideas.

Jim Davidson was recently named Chief Technology Officer for TravelCash. He lives and works in Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, and travels extensively.