Reading has been a fundamental part of life from a very young age. After moving to Arizona from my hometown at the age of twenty-two, a significant change occurred in my choice of reading material. As a child, my reading interests revolved around subjects of entertainment. But after moving, it was more focused on things that have been instrumental in defining who I am. One document in particular is the United States Constitution. In article one it speaks of the legislature. Section eight lists the various powers of the Congress. One of those powers is to coin money, and regulate the value thereof.

What this was telling me was that since the Congress exists to represent me, and they have this power, it is because I have the power to coin money, and regulate the value thereof. They are simply acting in my behalf to do this as a service to me. About a year or so later, it was brought to my attention that Congress has since surrendered this power to another institution called the Federal Reserve that is not subject to Congressional oversight. Not only that, it isn't even a government institution, but a privately held corporation.

Needless to say, this didn't go over very well with me. At the time of learning this, I was also learning about the difference between being a business owner in contrast to being an employee. Some of the business owners I was associating with at the time had a shared vision of doing away with the Federal Reserve, and returning the power of money creation to the Congress. The proverb was often quoted, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Eventually, I looked that proverb up, and was surprised to see that it was only partially quoted. What it says in its entirety is: "Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." Proverbs 29:18.

What this was showing me was that there is a connection between having a vision come to pass, keeping the law (specifically the Ten Commandments), and being personally fulfilled in the process of it. One of the precepts of the law is the Fourth Commandment which says to remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Until the spring of 1999, I thought that going to church on Sunday would suffice. After seeing that the Sabbath hours are from Friday sunset until Saturday sunset, life began to change in a drastic and rapid way.

Some of these changes revolved around the subjects of wealth and money. The biggest change was the removal of the burden of anxiety that comes from being focused on money, or the lack thereof. Stepping into the Sabbath was like walking back into the garden of Eden in that this move brought with it the assurance that all things would be taken care of, even if I didn't see how at the time.

Keeping the Sabbath also made me a peculiar person, and that brought me in contact with other peculiar people. In January of 2003, I moved to New Mexico to live among such people. For five of the nine years of living there (05-10), it was in an agreement to share things commonly as the early church did (see Acts 2:44-45). During that time, my reading increased exponentially. Much of subjects had to do with the history of money/banking, governments, and christianity.

While cleaning my house one Friday morning in November of 2011, a podcast was playing on the computer of a financial commentator that I had recently been made aware of. While speaking on his subject matter, he mentioned something in passing called Bitcoin. Upon hearing that word, I immediately stopped what I was doing in order to look into this thing called Bitcoin. It sounded like Bittorrent, which is a peer-to-peer file sharing network that I was aware of, but would ideally be a peer-to-peer value sharing network. As it turns out, that is exactly what Bitcoin is.

Bitcoin is simply a computer program that functions as money. At the heart of the program is a system of accounting that is called the blockchain. This blockchain was invented by an anonymous source that calls itself Satoshi Nakamoto, and was first introduced to the public in the form of a white paper that was published on a cryptography discussion forum on October 31, 2008. What this white paper shows is how to have a peer-to-peer cash network where there is no way of counterfeiting the cash, and double spending it on the network. As each block of transactions is confirmed, it is added to the chain of the previous blocks, and new bitcoins are produced by the program which are given to the bitcoin wallet address associated with the computer that created the block. Such computers are called miners. What gives these digital coins value is that work is required to produce them in the same way that work is required to retrieve gold from the earth. That is called hard money because there is a challenge to produce it. This is in contrast to having money arbitrarily printed by a central bank, which is easy money that doesn't accurately represent the value of the work being produced.

With the discovery of Bitcoin came a new word to my vernacular: decentrailzation. The act of centralization was well known to me because it is the natural method of organization of the world's power structures. And, such a method has a means of breeding corruption. The Bitcoin network is decentralized in that there is no need for a central authority to hold the ledger, and be trusted to keep it honest because each node of the network holds the ledger, and they all come to a concensus on the transactions before each block is confirmed. This network essentially makes the Federal Reserve, and all the other central banks of the world obsolete. But more than this, since anyone can acquire the computing power necessary to perfom the work of mining, they can essentially coin money, and regulate the value thereof. This in turn makes the Congress (and the rest of the central government for that matter) obsolete too.