Author: Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and author of The Network State; Translation: 0xxz@金财经
History is reversing.
Ninety years ago, Roosevelt and his government embarked on the path of centralization in the 20th century. The bottlenecks of the time's mass media and new technologies for mass production allowed them to control the population, recruit top talent for their "think tank" and, after a series of epic legal battles, seize the gold.
These golden executive orders Forgotten today, but at the time it received as much coverage as 9/11 or the Apollo moon landings. They are America's most important issues, receiving more coverage than similar contemporary Supreme Court decisions such as Roe v. Wade. Why?
Source: David Glick article from Princeton University
The reason is, The transition from a gold-backed system to a fiat-backed system amounts to a soft communist revolution, as the "tangible" capture of gold is replaced by the "intangible" capture of wealth through money printing Foundation.
The classically trained judges of the day fully understood this. Justice McReynolds, a well-known dissenter at the time, condemned the ruling in the harshest terms, stating that "the Constitution has disappeared" and that "the dollar... may be 30 cents tomorrow, 10 cents the next day, and 1 cent the day after tomorrow." ".
< span style="font-size: 14px;">From McReynolds' biography
McReynolds was right. Although Roosevelt threatened to pack the courts (Note: The Judicial Procedure Reform Act of 1937, often referred to as the "Court Packing Plan"), was a legislative initiative proposed by President Roosevelt to add more justices to the Supreme Court of the United States to gain support for the New Deal. (favorable ruling), the court was forced to make institutional capitulation, but the 6102 Gold Executive Order affected every economic decision-maker in the United States, because it was equivalent to the U.S. government clarifying its bond default by confiscating citizens’ gold assets and providing A century of currency devaluation laid the foundation.
It's all relaxing now. Roosevelt's team could ride the wave of centralized technology and build megastates around the world.
But today, today's technologies favor "decentralization" - personal computers, end-to-end encryption, mobile phones, and, of course, cryptocurrencies.
As a result, top talent will not be included in government think tanks. Talent is being "drained" from American institutions. So, overall, an epic legal battle is heading our way.
This is not just a D.C. Circuit decision. The ideological conflict between decentralization and centralization is reflected in the approval of the Bitcoin ETF itself in a 3-2 vote. Read SEC Commissioner Peirce’s brilliantly liberal approval statement, Crenshaw’s scathing denial, and SEC Chairman Gensler’s reluctant approval.
You will see echoes of the Golden Executive Order, but in opposite voices. This time, it was the centralized state that was forced to reluctantly capitulate institutionally. As Crenshaw's dissent illustrates, this is a capitulation:
"...the Bitcoin spot market has no primary regulator. Spot Bitcoin ETPs will not participate in the A regulated, fragmented, constantly traded, global free-for-all market. Even if there are major regulators in this market, much of this is probably beyond the scope of US regulation..."
Let it sink in! This is what those in power in the United States are really worried about: not Bitcoin as “fraud,” but Bitcoin as freedom. They not only want to rule you, they want to rule the world, so they fear the prospect of a "global free-for-all...beyond the reach of U.S. regulation." They know that, as Satoshi intended, any spot ETF would drive up the price of self-custodial Bitcoin over which they have no control.
So: Since Roosevelt seized gold, our lives have revolved around centralized states rather than decentralized markets . The state has controlled for so long that we have forgotten what freedom looks like. But now the gold is slipping out of their hands and back into yours.
History is being reversed.