While some have compared Bitcoin to a tool of war, it is more like a defensive weapon that protects those who use it from authoritarianism and overreach.
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast,” hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by Erik Dale to talk about how bitcoin can be used as a defensive weapon and the positive effect of Bitcoin’s incentives on the alignment of morals across humanity.
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Q: I need you to defend your claim that Bitcoin is a weapon.
Erik Dale: You try to drag me into these “Jason Lowery” conversations.
P: Choose your words carefully, sir.
Dale: But this is the best way to become popularized in Bitcoin, right? If you wanna go on a lot of podcasts, just say something like this. So you know, Jason is a security expert … I’m maybe sort of a philosophical linguist and the way language shapes the way we see things and the way we understand and conceptualize things and so on.
I am definitely one of these people who use language in very broad senses. And so when I conceptualize Bitcoin as a weapon, weapons have two functions: To attack or to defend. Traditionally today, maybe the blurring of the lines is stronger than they have [been] and attack of aggressive weapons have had a huge advantage in the last 500 years with scaling. They have been able to scale much more than any other kind of weapon. Shields not so much, but guns, yeah. Bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger, all the way until we can annihilate the fucking planet.
And so you’ve had a very big imbalance between this defensive and aggressive weapon and what Bitcoin defends of course, the thing that it defends is the thing that people might want to take from you. The very motivation for war. The very motivation for conflict itself. So not only is Bitcoin defensive in the sense that it reduces the incentive to cause aggression or conflict, because potential profitability is much lower, it’s much harder to take the bitcoin, even if you take the country. But it is also a tool where if somebody does take your country, it is indeed something that you can bring with you to anywhere else or send to somebody else or whatever. And thus defend and protect that life energy, that life force, regardless of how tough your assailant might be. Of course, it’s not a perfect theory, and again this is not an angle that I’m particularly interested in. This weapon thing is just like I use it this much with much less thorough thought than some people have.
