#freedom #XMR #Satoshi
In order to survive outside of tyranny, you have to have a trusted monetary system that is non-governmental, right?
Humans moved away from barter early and easily due to some of the inherent complexities. Many things have been used as currency since then, from seashells to precious metals to government issued fiat (our current majority currency solution). Good currency needs to have or balance four elements: security, scarcity, fungibility and transportability.
Modern digital fiat is very transportable compared to any past system. My belief is any replacement will have to maintain or exceed that level. However fiat completely fails the other three criteria. It’s security depends on the government backing it, if the government changes, fails or (hopefully) is abolished the currency isn’t secure any longer. Inflation is the inverse of scarcity, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about the money printer going brrrrr. Fiat isn’t fungible either. Ask people who donated to the Canadian freedom convoy. The government can and will decide which dollars can or can’t be spent at a whim. Even cash has its serial numbers to ensure specific bills can be tracked.
Gold on the other hand is everything except transportable! It has great properties for secure-ability, it has to be mined in order to increase the supply, and it can literally be taken apart and reconstituted with no change of value. If only it was trivial to send to another person far away with sacrificing most properties of security.
Decentralized CPU power of work cryptographic currency is (my opinion) the best attempt conceived yet for money that meets the required principles of sound money. It takes the transportability of modern digital fiat and then reasonably compromises on many of the aspects that make gold wonderful.
The scarcity is literally hard coded transparently into the system. So that can mean perfect control on inflation in a way that not even gold can achieve.
The security is provided by making sure the broadest range of people can participate in securing the network by chasing rewards and thereby harnessing greed and competition to ensure the best way to profit is to keep the network secure. Power of work (PoW). It is the problem that Satoshi provided the brilliant solution to. As long as ASICs are kept at bay by aggressively removing their profitability PoW is a spectacular replacement for the security corrupt governments otherwise supply.
The fungibility requires a blockchain that isn’t transparent. As long as block chain analysis is defeated on the first level by the technology of the project all digital cryptographic currency is exactly the same as any other. As long as ‘history’ can not be accrued they are perfectly fungible.
So hopefully that helps give you a few ideas about currency and money outside of that provided by the ‘masters’ who can devalue and even control your access to fiat currencies. The technology (thanks to Satoshi) is now available to achieve something that 100 years ago wasn’t even conceivable.