Building a Bulwark
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
‘The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty’
— Thomas Jefferson
And so we find ourselves in an original position — one that will define the next epoch of fiscal policy in the United States of America.
And as the vox populi cry out for clarity, the hidden hand reveals its mouth is empty.
Financial freedom is undetermined unless sovereign individuals relinquish their ability to participate in free markets. Your voice is your wallet, your vote comprised of the assets contained within it.
Digitally, this idea must be maintained — strengthened even.
What we hold onto is our freedom to choose, willpower must not be a derivative of law — it must be definitively constructed by the people that agree to operate within the structure of such systems.
The original position is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice…
In taking up this point of view, we are to imagine ourselves in the position of free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to principles of social and political justice…
The people’s power within an original position is being deemed an investment by the SEC? No, I am sorry but it is a fundamental right.
The current era of the digital asset ecosystem is a unique living experiment towards the realization of a more free economic system based around market accessibility and yet, federalized regulations are being propped by an inflated bureaucracy that would make an ecosystem less free because it has failed to understand how innovation operates in a digital age of globalism.
Have we all agreed to relinquish such freedoms? Have we resigned from our campaign towards liberty? Have we stopped attempting to understand how things work?
Is America admitting that it cannot establish basic facts around a new technology in an attempt to distance itself as a leading voice in fiscal policy? Has globalism been rejected by the Securities and Exchange Commission?
If the answers to these questions inspire us to grow our own comprehension around digitally accessible marketplaces then congratulations, we remain rational free agents.
However, if such questions inspire us to adhere to flawed guidance based on the interpretation of bad faith arguments over a period of more than 10 years, accepting what we are told to be true — when facts show a different picture — then there is no point is debate, accepting a truth-untrue is how we have convinced ourselves that 2+2=5.
I personally refuse this outcome — I personally, and systematically, reject this notion. To be forced to even consider such untruths is an affront to my sensibility. The SEC has overstepped its own bounds in an attempt to wrestle the power to choose a more free future away from the people.
We, as citizens, remain the originators of power in this Republic. We are free to experiment with systems that enable us to choose our own futures built around technology that we can access with less limitations than before.
To give power to an authority which deserves none is to give up the quest for liberty through utility.
We, as free people are the architects and arbiters in a system we design and define. We are the peers in a protocol that can dissolve counterparty trust and enable an environment built on more utilitarian principles. The nodes in a network that must be maintained individually, this is the basis of natural rights.
We are now in a system in which these natural rights are being threatened.
Ripple developed a unique path — a third way. A new approach to an old system of ledger based checks and balances between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, without the need to establish counterparty trust. That system remains open and free; it remains valid under state, federal, and international law.
What remains to be seen is which regulatory entity may claim to oversee that raw power for the good of the public welfare through the establishment of authority where none should exist.
One cannot hope to compete for a more free financial future unless we, as liberty seeking peoples, are allowed to challenge the rules of less free systems. One cannot hope to defend freedoms if those freedoms are redefined based on erroneous observations.
Ripple is a compliant company operating under a tangled patchwork of government conceptualizations.
These are concepts because the United States government has been less than transparent as to the actual tests used to classify what framework can be trusted to operate within for the same period of time.
Ripple has committed no crime; most users of the XRPL seek no damages. Those who claim to have invested in something that they do not understand, do not deserve to project that misunderstanding upon others. Ripple must challenge this irresponsible charge— and it will.
Regardless of the outcome, how can any person — any entity — follow rules that refuse to materialize across the jurisdictions to which they are applied?
Every technological system must be defined and reviewed by rational actors. Systematic shifts only occur through consensus. The ground-up approach requires critical mass to achieve a state change, any attempt to bypass that process is an unnatural attempt to subjugate the will of the masses.
This is a lazy attempt to project authority and it is laughable.
The absence of clear policy from the American Republic is a spectacle of incompetency that underpins the period of decline from a free market into one that chooses winners in bad faith.
What is Ripple now? A traitor to itself? No, the system overseen by the SEC has betrayed its own senses. The tail is attempting to wag the dog. Ripple plays by another set of rules as outlined by Fincen as overseen by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/Ripple_Remedial_Measures.pdf
When logic is abandoned to progress special interests operating between the thin fold of an undefined concept of justice then the thin fold becomes the instrument in which a free market is destroyed. It becomes the razor in which liberty is bled with.
And what tree is being refreshed? The tree of liberty remains dry while the trough of ignorance runs full.
If one thought these statements to be hyperbolic then they underestimate the importance of sovereignty enabled by the people, for the people. This starts with individual will and is enabled by consensus, continuing with a cycle of progressively more freedom over time.
If the process is reversed, if we are told what sovereignty must be, instead of shaping what it becomes, then we have lost our place at the round table.
Ripple, as a corporate entity, has participated in every level of government — in nearly every conversation from local, state, federal and even interagency power struggles. These levels of red tape are barely interoperable, they are built on archaic protocols protecting walled gardens in a high castle of ideocracy.
This is not a new process. Destroying new science has been the role of government since the origination of the social contract. The leviathan consumes rationality and excretes fear — it must do this to justify its own authority.
The SEC is wrong and yet, this was never going to go down without a fight. The stage was set as the battlefield for control over securitized markets started to shift towards the Federal Reserves through times of economic uncertainty.
Every new social contract must be justified through extreme scrutiny. Every observation must be discoverable and ontologically secure. To claim that something is what it is not — that XRP is a security — is to erode the process that allows innovation to exist.
To shackle new ideas to the definitions of their precedent is to ignore the spirit of what makes innovation practical in the United States.
There are two actions that must occur now. The first action rests in the hands of the users, and remains the most fundamentally important to the outcome of any decision moving forward.
That decision is to incorporate our own interests and make them heard in the same channels that are filled with such chaotic erroneous noise; to maintain our own instances of the open sourced system we expected competency and logic to at least take root in before coming to a regulatory conclusion based on bad facts.
We as free people must maintain the Rippled library. We as free people must run validator nodes independently. We as free people must reclaim the ability to move forward, and through, such regulatory hurdles because technologically they do not effect the outcome of the processes that have already begun.
It is being projected that the XRP ledger is centralized. It is not.
However, can the XRPL become more distributed? Yes.
Who is responsible for such empowerment?
We the people. We must act to preserve our own definitions of liberty.
The second action lies in the power of the people to communicate their intentions. Any community must understand the costs associated with creating friction when expressing its own ideas.
To express ourselves through thought is commendable, to express ourselves through action is virtuous. The true value of communication does not exist on Twitter. It exists in the groups that you have all built privately to learn and educate others around the choices you have made. The public and the private must remain separate.
To share these thoughts intimately with those you call compatriots is to establish union through utility. Let your actions speak more than your words.
Design, develop, and deploy around the projects ongoing to ensure support of the base protocol layers which do not require Ripple to progress — this is a decentralized protocol publicly available to all.
Those existing independent developers and cohorts that already do develop publicly need just as much support from the community as Ripple has enabled in the past.
Seek out those who have been vocal in the development space. Ask not what they can do for you — but what you can do for them to enable their continued services to be made publicly available.
My words are a basis onto which future actions can be justified. Let your current actions flow like your words do on Twitter. Refer back to the first action for an outlet of that flow. Break the dam — release the river.
Publicly state that you are not, nor have ever been, under the impression that you are entitled to shareholder rights for purchasing the virtual currency XRP. Seek the public and private threads that are misleading towards this end and provide the rebuttals necessary for public discourse to overcome private misconception yourselves. This is the way.
It is time that we act as individuals defending their right to access innovative technology that enabled the pursuit of financial freedom.
I do not come with only words, I come with action. That action being made real by the subtle and continuous calls for organizing the agents that deem the ledger something that protects their financial freedom.
To continue to enable our financial freedom, we must embrace educating ourselves first. The system will not give up first mover advantage easily. That is for us to claim individually first, and systematically only after consensus is reached.
Holders of the virtual currency XRP, exist in what could be considered an orchard by wary onlookers. Stocked with fruited trees that started first as wild seeds.
But the orchard only really exists conceptually in the minds of those who had never seen a true forest. What we really exist in is a wild forest left untamed.
That forest grew to enable an ecosystem to be naturally built around it, and the energy that came from that ecosystem is bountiful.
The onlookers, with hungry eyes, imagine tasting that bounty. But they cannot enter the forest, they are afraid of it — for it is dark and full of terrors.
And so they call for the culling of that forest. And you are all the trees. They say that the trees want to be pruned and tamed, and put into rows.
They claim that it is to protect the good of the many, to protect them from the wild growth of natural selection.
They argue that the trees, having been naturally wild, surely and secretly must hope to become a secure orchard protected by the SEC.
And so they come with axes, and they become the artificial selectors. They say this in the name of protecting the interests of investors laying claim to the bounty held in the forest.
The bounty that they had no hand in maintaining, because they refused to step foot inside. The trees are not the investors of the forest, they are the originators.
And the trees scream. They gnaw at the axes and protest becoming an orchard. The trees wail and flail deep into the night.
But the axes are sharp and many of the trees grow tired and fall from their own weight at the slightest hack.
And the regulators rejoice because they never had the authority to actually cut through the entire trunk — they relied on the tree felling itself under stress.
Until the trees woke up. Such terrible and awesome trees! These trees that are actually alive — only sleeping.
Asleep through the racket of intruders claiming to be protectors, overstepping their bounds, harvesting the boughs of a living forest in the name of building orchards to taste a forbidden fruit.
And as the trees woke up they remembered they are connected at the roots.
These connections are stronger than the axes could ever hope to be. As the forest woke up and moved as one system, all of a sudden there were not as many axes left willing to challenge the state of nature.
Some trees have been awake longer than others, but the calls have been sounded in the deep, and those who answer that call have two actions that they can take:
- Protect the forest by nourishing the roots. Run Rippled; Reach Consensus.
- Align your education with those around you. Reach new heights under the cover of the canopy.
We must increase distribution of our own liberties. We must not wait for axes or razors to carve into us the meaning of financial freedom.
The XRP community needs to abandon being an army. Instead, it needs to wake up as a forest — so seek the trees.
