Bitcoin represents the largest and most peaceful transfer of power ever seen in our history. To understand why, we must first explore what power is and how it has rapidly evolved over the last few decades.
Power is the ability to get others to do or stop doing something. Influence, persuasion, and coercion are the means by which this is pursued.
“A has power over B to the extent that A can get B to do something B would not otherwise do.” Author: Robert Dahl in The Concept of Power.
For a long time, exercising power has always had barriers, but now in every domain where power matters, it degrades and loses strength — thanks to new forms of horizontal organization.
Power is shifting from those with the most brute force to those with the most knowledge, from northern countries to southern ones and from the West to the East, from old business giants to younger, more agile companies, from dictators to the people, from men to women, from the old to the young… Author: Moisés Naím - The End of Power
Naím, in his book The End of Power, calls this phenomenon “The Rise of Micropowers” — those whose value lies in soft power and culture, who use the Internet as a multiplier of opportunities, and whose ability to challenge the powerful grows ever more effective.
For transcendental changes in public debate similar to those that took decades to develop in the 1970s — over the brutality of war, dissatisfaction with wealth distribution, the degradation of politics and the suffocation of the democratic promise — in 2011 it took no more than 3 weeks. Author: Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation. 2012.
The power of “Micropowers” is of a new kind. It is not the massive, overwhelming, and often coercive power of large organizations with abundant resources and long histories. Rather, it is the power to veto, counteract, combat, and limit the room to maneuver of major actors. Thanks to this, today’s powerful typically pay a higher and more immediate price than their predecessors.
It is denying “the usual giants” the spaces of action and influence that were once taken for granted. Author: Moisés Naím.
This is where Bitcoin enters the scene — not as a micropower itself, but as a tool for fostering it. By virtue of its technical and philosophical characteristics, Bitcoin is absolute property: private, digital, and unconfiscatable money. In other words, a tool that gives individuals the capacity to combat and limit any actor wielding coercive power, granting the full right to dispose of value without anyone being able to seize it.
If you strip someone of the ability to coerce, only one path remains for them to get anything from you: cooperation. In terms of power, that means influence or persuasion. This is undoubtedly a paradigm shift — the missing piece to reclaim the natural right that has been taken from us: Freedom.
For this tool to have value it must be used; there must be a genuine desire for change, and what better real catalyst for change than a system that fails — a system that has had the best-prepared, healthiest people in history, yet left them without work and frustrated. Bitcoin is without doubt that aggregator of the “common power” that Hobbes speaks of in Leviathan.
“He who intimidates and organizes so that we do not find ourselves in a state of war of all against all.” Author: Thomas Hobbes
When current power dissolves — because it will, thanks to the entry of new micropowers — we cannot be left in a world where everyone has enough power to block everyone else’s initiatives. That instability will pave the way for transforming the worldview of how we organize ourselves as a society.