An Ethereum Declaration of Independence
There is a battle brewing. And the stakes have never been higher. In the face of victory, the future of mankind is an open door, a bright and optimistic world that will be co-created by all. In the face of defeat, the future of mankind is a bulletproof techno-totalitarian surveillance state managed by concentrated forces who will do anything, however heinous or corrupt, to maintain control.
We know that technology is just a tool, a double-edged sword. We can use it to facilitate new discussions, to grow new collective capabilities, or we can use it to suppress them before they can ever begin. We’ve seen countless examples in both directions.
Centralized Fiat is the union of unaccountable financial institutions and unaccountable government. It is a system of control that is strangling the planet even as it begins to crumble under its own weight. It grows bigger and yet more vulnerable every day.
This Centralized Fiat is a concentrated force with great incentive and intent to create a new financial system that strips us of our naturally given rights, our financial freedoms, and our privacy. Many central banks are experimenting with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDBs), which are not designed to lift up our people. They’re designed to give central banks and central planners ever more social control. They’re designed to drain our accounts with forced negative interest rates. They’re designed to censor and ban political dissidents. They’re designed to remove the privacy of cash transactions. This is never spelt out in plain language. Rather, its veiled with sanitized words and state-authorized narratives. This is the fever dream of despots, the finale in a long history of power grabs.
People of Ethereum, we have a limited window of opportunity to promote, facilitate, and enshrine the emancipatory form of blockchain. As creators and users on the world’s preeminent blockchain, we have the most power, the most incentive, and the most responsibility to guide it for both our individual and collective good. The Ethereum ecosystem has real momentum, and the tools at our disposal and our unique knowledge and passion give us everything we need to permanently bend the arrow of history for the better. We can give people a liberatory alternative to the slave-tier existence offered by the fiat elites. We need to keep dreaming big and making bold moves to that end.
The truth is that we no longer have to participate in Centralized Fiat. We don’t have to give it legitimacy. We are building something better. We can and must take a stand.
And so, here is a proposal: An Ethereum Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by divine Natural Law with certain unalienable Rights, of course, Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, but more applicably, Free Communication, Association, and Privacy. — That to secure these rights, Protocols are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the participants, — That whenever any Protocol becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to stop participating, and to institute new Protocols, writing the rules most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence dictates that long-established Protocols should not be changed for light and transient causes; and experience has also shown that people are more accustomed to suffer under poorly designed Protocols than to right themselves by abolishing those forms. But when the long train of abuses and wrongful seizures of authority exhibits a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Protocols, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — This is exactly the current situation of the people of the world; and now is the time they must alter these Systems. The history of Centralized Fiat is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all for the purpose of absolute Tyranny over the population.
We, therefore, the people of Ethereum and the world, decentralized and spread across the planet Earth, appealing to Everyone Everywhere, do, in the Name, and by Authority of anyone wishing to participate, solemnly publish and declare, That All Participants are, and of Natural Right, Free and Independent People; that they are freed from the Protocols of Centralized Fiat, that all financial and political connection between them and the system of fiat is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent People, they have full Power to Collaborate, Communicate, Associate, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, Privately or Publicly, and do all other Acts and Things which Independent People may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
