Bitcoin, not bombs for Tehran: Why it’s time to return to crypto’s anti-war roots

“Pro-bitcoin” President Donald Trump has praised the Israeli state’s deadly missile strikes on Tehran Friday, calling the attack “excellent.” Innocent people being murdered on both sides of the unnecessary conflict illustrates a sad irony: BTC is now held in massive quantities by pro-war politicians and their cronies, even though it was originally about peace and celebrated as a means to stop funding bankers and their wars.  The deadly strikes against Iran on Friday, June 13, said to have killed at least 78 people, were praised by Donald Trump as “excellent” with promises of “more to come.” Speaking on the victims of the Israeli attack, UN ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani detailed: “The overwhelming majority of them [were] civilians, including women and children.”

Bitcoin for bombs, Satoshi inverted

“Pro-bitcoin” Trump pretended to be for peaceful resolution of the so-called Iranian nuclear issue until mere hours before the strike, posting to Truth Social: “We remain committed to a Diplomatic Resolution to the Iran Nuclear Issue!” However, some Israeli officials have been quoted saying this was a deception designed to lower Iran’s guard. “We had a clear U.S. green light,” one of them allegedly told Axios. Similar comments by “senior Israeli officials” were also made to The Jerusalem Post.

Whatever the truth is, if there is any left in the poorly written drama called mainstream news these days, one thing is clear to O.G. bitcoiners: Politicians and bankers make wars, and innocent people on both sides are slaughtered to enrich them. As Major General Smedley D. Butler famously declared in War Is a Racket: “Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die … No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here.”

Bitcoin was originally meant to fix this. The genesis block gives us a hint about this with its headline message: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks.” Crypto was meant to separate money and state, and as early Bitcoin investor Roger Ver once said, it was meant to potentially “undermine every government on the entire planet’s ability to wage war.” Now, BTC is held largely in the hands of the same murdering psychopaths from whom we were meant to take the power back. Blackrock, which invests heavily in defense companies profiting from war, had roughly 575,810 BTC in their Bitcoin ETF as of March. The United States government holds about 200,000 BTC that we know about. Even the individual whales, like Michael Saylor, are strongly pro-state and pro-fiat money. Saylor, who privately holds well over 17,000 BTC, has called Trump “pro-crypto” and criticized advocates of permissionless use and privacy. States and their crony banks. State-embedded mega-corporations. The trend is clear. These entities now hold persuasive amounts of crypto not to be used as permissionless, peer-to-peer electronic cash but for purposes of socioeconomic control and power. Another example is crypto’s unprecedented use for directly purchasing weapons and military supplies in the Ukraine/Russia conflict. As for major centralized exchanges, they are regulated via statist legal systems. So, in essence, if the U.S. continues helping Israel in its war on everyone around and in funding terror cells like Hamas, BTC will be right there behind the cause.

How to take crypto back in 2 steps

While the masses rant and cheer like it’s a football game for either “Israel” or “Iran” to destroy the other, everyday people like you and I will be killed like dogs in the streets, in their houses, in hospitals and schools and while sleeping, in both countries. Bitcoin was supposed to “fix this.” Even “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver, the original voice of “Bitcoin Not Bombs,” now says he wants to help Trump “make America great again.” Maybe he hasn’t connected the dots yet on Trump’s warmongering, though that’s hard to imagine. Maybe it is (somewhat understandably) a desperate bid to regain his freedom. Or maybe there’s another, more disappointing explanation. Regardless, it makes bitcoiners who got into crypto for the prospect of freedom and peace reel with bewilderment. Was any of this ever real in the first place? Were we put on by state interests somehow? Perhaps Satoshi’s creation has just been co-opted. Luckily, it doesn’t matter either way if the tech works. It seems to me crypto still can bring us the separation of money and state. But we’ve got to focus on two things: uncaptured networks that can work for instant, permissionless cash transactions, and most importantly, understanding the true, inviolable source of freedom — self-ownership. The truth is, no government on earth cares for the people it professes to rule. Not Israel, not Iran, not the United States. This is a bitter pill but should be quite obvious, given the evidence. Further, no state is anything but a grouping of single individuals, no better than you or I. States aren’t some abstract, all-powerful deity, though they would have us believe them to be so (much like the old man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz). At the highest levels, even with Israel and Iran, there is a fraternity in the shadows. The enmity played out in the news keeps you distracted.

When we come to understand that we own ourselves, that our lives, bodies, and property acquired by non-violence are ours, it makes no sense why some “special” individuals should arbitrarily be able to rule us violently, appoint themselves masters over us, force us to kill strangers in another country we have nothing against personally or extort money from us via “taxes” to pay for bombs via and all other kinds of evil refuse. Like decentralized payment protocols, decentralized networks of societies and communities can order their own lives and make their own sensible rules. They already do. Bitcoin and crypto present a way out of this mess if combined with the above Voluntaryist ethos. Networks like Bitcoin Cash, which are fast, efficient, censorship-resistant, and cost next to nothing to use, can help individuals take their economic freedom back, little by little. Developing privacy tech makes this more possible than ever. How? By refusing to finance violence in whatever small or large way possible until a critical mass of non-compliance is reached. In the same way, individuals can wake up and simply refuse — one by one — to become soldiers to kill and die for Trump, Netanyahu, Ali Khamenei, violent religion, or anyone else who thinks murder is “excellent.”