₿itcoin is Galt’s Gulch
“Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.”
- Peter Thiel, Cato-Unbound: The Education of a Libertarian (2009)
Frontiers matter because they are where all the action happens. Inventions and innovations have always been developed primarily at the frontiers of civilization. For Europeans living during the Renaissance Era, the frontier was the New World, America. For Americans, our frontier moved continually westward with our country’s explosive expansion from the Louisiana Territory to the West Coast. Then our frontier moved to Outer Space and once again to the virtual world of the Internet.
Bitcoin is enabling a new frontier on the Internet, a virtual Galt’s Gulch where pioneers and builders can escape to experiment and build marvelous new creations.
Galt’s Gulch
“We are not a state here, not a society of any kind - we’re just a voluntary association of men held together by nothing but men’s self-interest. ”
- Midas Mulligan, Atlas Shrugged
In the fiction novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), governments place ever more burdens on businesses and entrepreneurs through higher taxes, regulations, and even confiscation of wealth and property. The heroes and heroines of the story, society’s “prime-movers”, go on strike, retreating with their minds, bodies, and wealth to a valley hidden from the external world in Colorado, Galt’s Gulch.
Source: First-Timer’s Guide: Ouray. Galt’s Gulch was inspired by Ouray, Colorado.
Galt’s Gulch offers a safe-haven for builders and innovators to be left alone, free of the shackles of society. It is a self-sufficient community, engaging in no trade whatsoever with the outside world. It is served by a single bank that deals exclusively in gold and silver. There are no taxes or regulations of any kind. There are no rules, except for one: all who live in the valley must take the oath, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Galt’s Gulch is a high trust society without crime; the predatory violence and expropriation of wealth of nation-states is nonexistent.
The fundamental problem with Galt’s Gulch is that it is too small to save the world. Civilization crumbles as the most productive minds retreat from the external world to Galt’s Gulch. Atlas Shrugged does not have a happy ending; the protagonist of the story, Dagny Taggart, literally watches from a helicopter as the power stations of New York City fail, plunging the entire city into darkness forever. The most virtuous and productive individuals are left to rebuild the world from the ashes of civilization.
Bitcoin’s Potential: Expanding Galt’s Gulch to the World
“Exit amplifies Voice. Exit is an extremely important complement to Voice. It's something that gives Voice its strength."
- Balaji Srinivasan: Startup School (2013)
The dystopian universe of Atlas Shrugged does not have to be the fate of our world. Civilization does not have to collapse so that we can rebuild it; we can save it without leaving it. Bitcoin has created a new space for human freedom in cyberspace, a virtual Galt’s Gulch. Bitcoin offers us an Exit, a way to scale the freedom of Galt’s Gulch to all people in all corners of the planet.
In today’s world, only the wealthiest individuals have access to Swiss bank accounts to protect and preserve their wealth from confiscation by governments. Bitcoin enables anyone with an Internet connection to hide their wealth and financial transactions in an almost impenetrable fortress outside of nation-state interference. Even former President Obama has acknowledged this new reality:
“What mechanisms do we have available to even do simple things like tax enforcement? Because if in fact you can’t crack that at all, government can’t get in, then everyone is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket.”
Bitcoin is not just Digital Gold, a technology for wealth preservation; it provides the Internet with a stable foundation for state-free commerce. A Trust Anchor in a Sea of Blockchains, backed by the thermodynamic immutability of its Proof-of-Work, it enables any imaginable financial transaction. Over the coming decades, more and more of the world’s commerce will move to the Internet. Trillions of dollars in value that currently moves on technology rails manipulable by nation-states (SWIFT, Fedwire, ACH, etc.) will flow in a mass exodus to the Bitcoin blockchain and its children like Ethereum and Cosmos.
Bitcoin consuming the world’s Wealth and Commerce.
This new virtual frontier, enabled by Bitcoin, has the potential to unlock opportunities for people to create value that was never possible before. Capital will become unleashed; untaxed, unregulated, and uninflated, it will flow to the investment opportunities with the greatest potential, accelerating economic progress at a rate never before seen in human history. This frontier will spawn a myriad of multi-billion dollar, if not multi-trillion dollar, businesses and protocols, creating tremendous value for human civilization.
Given this possibility, I now find myself asking 2 questions inspired by Peter Thiel’s Zero to One:
What valuable business is nobody building that could not be built anywhere but in this new digital frontier?
What valuable businesses exist in this new frontier that nobody is investing in?
How would you answer these questions? What possibilities excite you in this New World?