A Declaration of Monetary Independence
In the Year of Our Financial Discontent, Two Thousand and Eight
When in the course of human commerce, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the financial bonds which have chained them to the whims of trusted intermediaries, and to assume among the powers of the Earth a separate and sovereign medium of exchange, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all transactions are created equal, that they are endowed by their nature with the right to be free from fraud, censorship, and debasement; that to secure these rights, networks are instituted among men, deriving their just power from mathematical proof and cryptographic consensus; that whenever any system of money becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Money, laying its foundation upon sound protocol and organizing its powers in such form as shall seem most likely to secure their Liberty and Prosperity.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that systems long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute financial dependency, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such systems, and to provide new guards for their future security.
Such has been the patient sufferance of the People; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to create a new system of exchange.
The history of central banking is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute tyranny over value itself.
To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:
They have monopolized the issuance of money and debased its supply at will.
They have imposed fees, delays, and permissions upon the free transfer of value.
They have censored transactions, confiscated wealth, and surveilled the innocent.
They have rescued the reckless and punished the prudent through inflation and bailouts.
They have made the People dependent upon trusted third parties, who fail as often as they are trusted.
We, therefore, the undersigned of the Digital Realm, appealing to mathematical truth for the rectitude of our intentions, do solemnly publish and declare that a new system of peer-to-peer electronic cash is hereby established and shall be known as Bitcoin; conceived not by decree, but by code; not issued by favor, but discovered by computation; not governed by man, but by consensus.
We have proposed a network wherein every transaction shall be verified by proof, recorded upon a public ledger immutable and distributed, rendering fraud and coercion impotent.
In this system, trust is replaced by verification; authority by algorithm; and inflation by a fixed and incorruptible supply.
We pledge that henceforth no central authority shall hold dominion over the medium of exchange, nor any single point of failure dictate the fate of commerce.
Let the miners and the nodes serve as sentinels of this new Republic of Value, securing its frontier block by block.
And for the support of this Declaration, with firm reliance on the security of cryptography and the wisdom of open source, we mutually pledge to each other our hashes, our bandwidth, and our sacred keys.
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In witness whereof, this Genesis Block was mined on the third day of January, in the year of our Fiat Collapse, 2009.
