“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” — Johnny Rotten
Today’s post is excerpted from the August edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist Letter – get a special deal for Bombthrower readers here »
I’m starting on this month’s Bitcoin Capitalist Letter fairly early into the month – when we’ve just heard from on high that, yes, Jeffrey Epstein killed himself and there’s “nothing to see here”.
It’s been astonishing, if not disappointing, to watch some of the most vehement “MAGA” berserkers flip from: “Release the Epstein files and convene tribunals” to “Of course he killed himself!” – literally overnight.
Dinesh D’Souza and Ben Shapiro were among the MAGA all-stars who suddenly found it distracting to be navel-gazing over who the Epstein clients actually were and whether anyone in power was compromised by their involvement with sexual predation.
Now, some of the most ardent, supposedly red-pilled influencers are literally doing the meme…
Since then, Trump has issued a series of rather long, rambling missives via his Truth Social network, which I can’t help but think sounds like someone “doth protest too much”; that, and they read like the screeds of somebody who is mentally ill.
A bi-partisan effort sprang up to force the release of the remaining Epstein files, but voting on it was scuttled when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called an early start to the summer recess.
Suffice it to say, we shouldn’t be surprised when our elected officials – even the “anti-establishment” mavericks, once they find a place within the machinery of government – end up being in on The Royal Scam.
If you’re wondering what that is, just pick up a copy of Murray Rothbard’s “Anatomy of the State”…
“Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion”
“The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively ‘peaceful’ the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.”
In other words, once you’re part of a system that is structurally rigged to embezzle wealth from the public and create a systemic racket to perpetuate it, there is no “changing it from within” or any meaningful reform in the offing.
It’s just there, hardwired to protect itself, which it will do until it completely goes off the rails or implodes.
So either Trump is, like Elon Musk once taunted on X, “in the Epstein files”, or else he’s found himself having to horse-trade around a bunch of other people who are in there; either way, this whole deal is up to its neck in intelligence agencies, dark budgets and the hidden side of power that us peons will never know the truth of — and those in political caste are completely beholden to.
Add to that further information that the entire Bitcoin Strategic Reserve was either a fantasy or an epic fail, after US Marshals revealed the total stash in possession of the US government wasn’t 250K BTC but rather 29K. Under Trump’s March 6th Executive Order to establish the BSR, all Bitcoin held by law enforcement agencies were to be transferred to it.
So far, no Bitcoin has been transferred to the BSR, and there have been no “revenue neutral” accumulations of any to put into it.
How it’s started:
BIG UPDATE ON THE BITCOIN STRATEGIC RESERVE TO DROP THIS WEEK
How it’s going… pic.twitter.com/7rSTgKZLWh
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@MarkJeftovic) August 2, 2025
It’s just all been hot air so far. The President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets released their report July 30th which was anticipated as including an update on the BSR, all it did was rehash what we already know (full report here).
Coincidentally, I recently started re-reading The Sovereign Individual because my Grey Swan Fraternity colleague Addison Wiggin and I are undertaking a collaborative study of it.
A fresh look, nearly thirty years in, wondering out loud, “How well is it holding up?”
Chapters 4 and 5 on the last gasps of nation states as we understand them seem pretty bang on. At the risk of over-simplifying their narrative arc, the nation state arose providing “protection” services to its customers – the citizens. However, over time the democratic process iteratively cannibalized the productive capacity of those customers, in order to preserve itself, until it was wholly captured by those who operate the government:
“Those who pay for democratic government seldom set the terms of government spending. Instead, government functions as a co-op that is both outside of proprietary control and operating as a natural monopoly. Prices bear little relation to costs.
The quality of service is generally low compared to that in private enterprise. Customer grievances are hard to remedy. In short, mass democracy leads to control of government by its “employees.”
In other words, the inmates are running the asylum – and the cost of running it gets more expensive by the day, so ever more wealth has to be stripped from the “tax cows” (David Stockman’s term) to keep it running.
Canada – where our politicians act with imperiousness and mind-boggling tone-deafness – is arguably further down the road than most countries.
The public is being squeezed from all sides: taxation consuming most of their income, rising cost of living taking what’s left – and anyone fortunate enough to have actual savings to preserve is faced with a collapsing economy to invest it into, not to mention a hurdle rate of about 8%, minimum, to out-pace inflation.
The country’s largest telecom, Bell, is sounding the alarm on a “growing crisis that is endangering public safety and disrupting essential communications infrastructure.”
What is it? People are stealing the copper out of telecom lines – something I saw happening in Panama after the global financial crisis.
Rampant copper-stripping is third-world economic collapse shit. And now it’s sweeping Canada.
The thesis of The Sovereign Individual is that the gunpowder revolution dramatically increased the returns on force, which set in motion all kinds of dynamics that swept away the previous era – one where the Church reigned supreme – and gave rise to the nation state.
That’s just the setup: today, The State takes the place of the church and it’s hard for most people to imagine any other form of governance.
But the information revolution – public key cryptography and computer networks catalyzed a new set of dynamics that actually reduces the returns on force. Now the returns come from information (and as Addison and I are coming to suspect, distributed intelligence).
The last gasps of the nation state today eerily resemble the final days of the Papacy’s geopolitical supremacy. The overpowering tax burdens and regulatory overhang of the modern nation state are expressing the same dynamic as the religious prohibitions, endless indulgences and tithes demanded by the clerisy of yore.
Today, many point at everything that’s happened since Covid as proof that the State, the Deep State, the super-state structures (WHO, WEF, et al) are further consolidating their power.
However, if you’ve read The Sovereign Individual, you may rather think we’ve seen this all before – the excessive overhang of the ruling class and the public resentment toward it are precursors to the end of their hegemony, not proof of its increasing power:
Disdain as a Leading Indicator
Moral outrage against corrupt leaders is not an isolated historical phenomenon but a common precursor of change.
It happens again and again whenever one era gives way to another. Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain.
This widespread revulsion comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change.
As we write, there is as yet little evidence of an articulate rejection of politics. That will come later. It has not yet occurred to most of your contemporaries that a life without politics is possible. What we have in the final years of the twentieth century is inarticulate disdain.
The Sovereign Individual was first published in 1997 – when “there was little evidence of an articulate rejection of politics”. But that has since happened — and I would argue that it’s because of another one of the predictions made in the book. They called it “cybercash”:
Now the advent of the Information Age implies another revolution in the character of money. As cybercommerce begins, it will lead inevitably to cybermoney.
This new form of money will reset the odds, reducing the capacity of the world’s nation-states to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual.
A crucial part of this change will come about because of the effect of information technology in liberating the holders of wealth from expropriation through inflation.
Soon, you will pay for almost any transaction over the Net or World Wide Web at the same time you place it, using cybercash.
This new digital form of money is destined to play a pivotal role in cybercommerce. It will consist of encrypted sequences of multihundred-digit prime numbers. Unique, anonymous, and verifiable, this money will accommodate the largest transactions. It will also be divisible into the tiniest fraction of value.It will be tradable at a keystroke in a multitrillion-dollar wholesale market without borders.
Since the rise of Bitcoin, the memetic zeitgeist for the entire comic tragedy around the decline of the nation state is embodied by “Clown World”, alternatively “clown car” or “clown show”.
Our shorthand for all of this becomes more valid with each passing scandal, each campaign lie exposed, every heroic letdown and the endless revelations of institutionalized corruption and venality:
Bitcoin is a short on Clown World 🤡.
Today’s post is excerpted from the August edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist Letter – get a special deal for Bombthrower readers here »
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