Martin Luther King Jr. Day: How Bitcoin Makes The Dream Happen (Opinion)
Almost sixty years after MLK gave the speech, crypto embodies Dr. King’s dream. It makes a dream much like his substantial and available to us in code and computer network design.
How Bitcoin Currency Is About The Same Dream As MLK
“I was a drum major for justice, peace, and righteousness.” -MLK
Bitcoin is a technology united around equal and open access to financial opportunity and infrastructure. Crypto is designed to make prejudice irrelevant and discrimination impossible because of or over its networks.
The agnosticism of the valuable working elements of the network to the user is the pride of crypto. One could imagine MLK happy about its development.
Moreover, the idea of a financial intermediary that does not need to interact with any of the identifying information of the user to work for them was one of the early hopes of the Bitcoin community. This recalls the hope of MLK and his supporters that this information would not be used to discriminate.
Since 2009, Bitcoin created a system that respects universal human rights to use basic banking services. It’s something MLK could really appreciate if he were still alive today.
Bitcoin does not judge anyone by the color of their skin. But it’s even more radical than Martin Luther King’s dream speech. It doesn’t judge anyone by the content of their character, either.
Bitcoin doesn’t need to know about that to work. Bitcoin is there for anyone to use.
It doesn’t ask where you live. It doesn’t ask what your credit history is before working as advertised. Furthermore, you don’t have to wait to be approved by another human who might be too busy to get to you to use Bitcoin.
That’s how Bitcoin helps make the dream of financial easement and non-discrimination happen.
Parallels Between Bitcoin and Dr. King’s I Have A Dream Speech
Like MLK’s 1963 Lincoln Memorial Address, Bitcoin has aimed to be “the greatest demonstration for freedom” in the history of nations.
The problems MLK identified as their cause for grievance were segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and alienation. This was happening to African Americans in 1963 on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery.
Bitcoin exists to address these same problems that persist today in the global financial system. It is interesting to wonder what MLK would think about the technology if he were alive today.
It exists to solve the crisis of the unbanked. MLK might be interested to know how many unbanked Americans today have already used crypto.
It exists to end unequal or seriously unsatisfactory access to lending and banking services. It offers a way around fiat currencies of corrupt governments with perilously confiscatory inflationary schemes and discrimination based on sex, race, class, religion, caste, and political affiliation.
MLK said the March on Washington was to cash a check for the United States’ promise of unalienable rights. Bitcoin – this is distributed computer network architecture that encodes your cashed checks as your inalienable rights when you produce your private key to make a request to the network for your funds.
MLK continues on with his banking analogy in the speech so it’s very relevant to wish him a happy birthday and examine the parallels between the ideals of his speech and what crypto has started to accomplish.
Featured image courtesy of NPR
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