Issue #015: The Assange Edition
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
So wrote George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 about a future of total suppression of human freedom. The quote has become known as “Orwell’s Dictum”
What he meant was, power in the present gives you power to rewrite history to favor yourself. For example, if you hold political power you can manipulate a past event such as the results of an election results. If you get an election outcome that doesn’t suit you, you can retell the past: “The election was fraudulent”, then harness that moral outrage to manipulate future events.
Julian Assange was “very aware of Bitcoin’s ability to be a time stamping tool” that could stop this threat to democracy, and that “this ability of bitcoin broke Orwell’s dictum”.
With Assange’s release from jail, every Bitcoiner should know that a group of Bitcoiners is right now fulfilling this potential for bitcoin that Assange saw.
Their story is so important to Assange’s vision for Bitcoin, and for democracy and human freedom itself that this special newsletter is going out to everyone today.
Everyone in the bitcoin community should know that Bitcoin is already breaking Orwell’s dictum, and that only Bitcoin can.
You may not know it, but the Bitcoin blockchain is now integral to the democratic function of Guatemala, and about to spread to many other jurisdictions to uphold democracy.
How did this come about?
Well, democracy is underpinned with one basic tenant: we must have confidence that elections have been held in a democratic way.
In the digital age, physical voter tallies get replaced by digital voter tallies and stored in databases.
The problem is, what happens if an opposition party is unhappy with the result and claims that those digital voter tallies have been digitally altered? This accusation is now being leveled in more and more nations, including the US. It also happened in Guatemala in 2019.
Even if the claim is baseless, there has been no way to counter that claim. The result: faith in democracy itself is weakened. With AI attacks, this threat is only growing.
Guatemala’s democracy was under threat in this way. So in 2023 they took action to try to break Orwell’s dictum, bringing in SimpleProof to solve the issue.
Their solution was to use the Bitcoin blockchain to timestamp the digital voter tally. This meant that if anyone accused that voter tally of being altered, it could be proven that the document was the original.
For the first time ever, voters were no longer being asked to “trust” the IT provider who was digitizing and storing voter tallies, anyone could verify that the document had integrity.
What’s incredible about their solution is that this would have been impossible using any other blockchain. Why? Because Bitcoin is the only decentralized transparent public ledgers. Other blockchains have centralized equity holders, investors and founders. Had another blockchain been used, accusations could now simply be passed on to the founders or equity-holders in that blockchain company.
Are you getting this? Bitcoin has now proven itself to be a method of upholding electoral integrity, and therefore democracy. How important is that? It cannot stop corruption, but if false claims are made about digital voter tally alterations, it can reveal those claims to be false. That’s a weapon to uphold democracy in the digital age we’ve never had before.
Simpleproof are not stopping with upholding electoral integrity though. As documents are digitized, there are more issues that can happen. For example, a corrupt port authority can digitally alter a shipping container’s scanned documents. Why would they do this? When those containers were being used for drug, gun or human trafficking.
If anyone questions the document, they can point finger at the IT provider of the scanners and digital document storage. With that timestamped record held on Bitcoin’s blockchain through Simpleproof’s timestamped method, that is now impossible. The IT provider has insurance against false claims, and can prove the documentation has or has not been altered, putting the burden of proof back onto the port authority.
Again, it can’t eradicate human trafficking, but it can remove one of the easiest ways that corrupt port authorities have used to dodge accountability. The Bitcoin blockchain makes it much harder for corruption to continue.
Satoshi didn’t just solve the “double spend” problem for money, he solved it for documents. If you try to “double spend” a document, ie: create a fraudulent copy, it will be rejected. We’ve never had that before.
Proof of Work anchors money to something real (energy). But it in fact anchors any digital asset to something real. That digital asset could be money. But it could also be any record of importance: such as a container scan, or a voter tally.
Peer-to-peer + open source is by definition “participatory democracy”, because only through consensus can rules be changed. So it is perhaps no surprise that one of the unintended consequences of Bitcoin’s creation is that it is now helping uphold the very principles of democracy.
Already other jurisdictions, and IT providers to port authorities are now eager to use Simpleproof’s solution. They are currently raising capital to expand their offering, so get in touch with them if you want to help democracy safely enter the digital age.
When democracies break down, so does the environment
At CH4Capital, we are now able to operate in El Salvador because it has a strong rule of law and corruption has been largely removed. We’ve also had to turn down projects in Haiti and Venezuela because democracy has broken down there. We’ve had a partner who’s said they are uncomfortable operating in Columbia. Unfortunately that means landfill gas vents directly into the atmosphere and we can’t stop it.
So by ending corruption, and upholding a democracy, environmental work can be done that is otherwise impossible.
Freedom is our birthright. Upholding that birthright means breaking Orwell’s dictum. Bitcoin’s timestamp breaks Orwell’s dictum. Simpleproof is the group who have turned the theoretical potential to break Orwell’s dictum into a reality.
PS: Simpleproof are about to raise investment so they can accelerate their vision. So if you’re an accredited investor reach out to them.
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