Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property

An often overlooked feature of the American experiment is the significance of property rights. ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property; was the original wording of the Declaration of Independence and indeed, the founding fathers knew the power of this feature in the founding documents of a new country. American property rights are protected in our founding documents but also in our common law system, a system we borrowed from Britain, which sets forth at its outset a modest set of rules that protect the maximum amount of liberties of citizens that only cease when the inalieble rights of another are encroached upon. When it is not clear whether further expansion of one persons rights are in fact encroaching on anothers, a law suit follows. The result of that law suit is a new precedent. Today, we have a 250 year set of precedents that allow for a complex yet robust system of property rights in this country which are the foundation of the unparalleled social stratification for which this country has become known, and which is also the bedrock of our success

When I was young, this country’s foreign policy was still anchored in the concept that our greatest export was the American way of life. Specifically, we sought to be a nation built on meritocracy. But more than two centuries into this experiment and the majority, roughly 54% of the worlds people, live under authoritarian rule with no inalieble access to property, bodily autonomy, or free speech. This is less an indicment of the ideals that made the American experiment great and more an indictment of how slow world leaders have been to change.

The great revolution happening in Web3 is not only the allure of new and exciting mathematical discoveries that make the once impossible, possible. It is that the culmination of applied mathematic discoveries in delivering more inalienable rights to global citizens. Bitcoin is a mathematical discovery. It is the first time in history that we have discovered a way to scale value exchanges without the need for a middleman i.e. a government or central bank. This is the intrinsic value. In a perfect world that would not be needed. But we don’t live in a perfect world. The threat of centralized power in the hands of the ‘money changers’ was existential two thousand years ago as it is yet again today. We had no solution to this problem until Bitcoin.

Building on the discovery and philosophy of Bitcoin, other technologies are arising in Web3 that are also enabling a global distribution of individual sovereignty, privacy, freedom of speech, and property rights.