the spark that just might end the state...

history creeps up on ya. No-one foresaw the collapse of the soviet union. CIA docs evidence as much. quite often historical change appears to erupt from nowhere because the contributory factors are almost infinitesimally and imperceptibly gradual. Imagine a worn tap dripping into the bath of an abandoned house. the drain is blocked and, even though the tap drips perhaps only once a day, eventually all those drips add up. Over time the bath fills, it overflows and the water permeates the floor. The timbers become sodden and begin to rot. The weight of an overflowing bathtub is too much and the floor collapses taking with it the corner of the house. The neighbours are shocked - what on earth caused the apparently sudden collapse of the house!?
Life is what happens when you're making other plans and that is no more true than when applied to anarchist dilletante whitterings over 'strategy'. Should we back Ron Paul, is politics the answer, what about agorism, seasteading, freeman legal challenges, survivalist escapes, expatriation, secession?
When the state ends (some states, a state, any state), and it will end - just a matter of when not if - I surmise it will be the result of a number of factors but the time and manner of its collapse will be unexpected. And the following is one such possibility. Just a tiny fragment of news to which I imagine most people, even within the bizarre, intertwining, otherwise unrelated worlds of interest that I follow, will ascribe no great import. Mobile Money Africa - How Bitcoin will Revolutionise the way Africans Transact.
We all know fiat currency is one of the foundations of the state. Any alternative is a lightning strike of hope for the prospects of individual freedom. Every school of thought you follow (and I say this because I guess my small readership come from a variety of freedom loving backgrounds - Freemen, Libertarians, Anarchists, Conspiracists and any mixture of these and more)will have theoretical, critical explanations of fiat currency and the evil it enables. if this foundation is weakened then the inherently unstable edifice of the state will come crashing down.
As Africa develops apace, new demand is outstripping old supply. I refer to infrastructure. Millions of people are beginning to climb from the poverty that hundreds of years of the shitty end of statism has foisted upon them. As markets emerge and commerce develops, the infrastructure of banks, currency and their attendant systems is non existent. In the ageing western world our now woefully corrupted supply systems developed symbiotically alongside demand. Africa, China, India and South America are bootstrapping and fast. In Africa they do not have to invent the telegraph, then the telephone, then the mobile phone and then mobile internet. As soon as individuals could afford such technologies they could be purchased from ready developed markets such as the far east, just across the Indian Ocean. So now you have millions of people, their commerce untethered from the shackles of outmoded communications but restricted by factors beyond their control. Namely security and banking. the state reserves such essentials for itself lest anyone think their parasitical institution dispensable. How can a travelling salesman, lorry driver or fisherman transact, exchange, transmit and store the capital necessary for commerce in a state barely capable of anything other than the crudest forms of extortion (thats taxation if youre new here). These economic actors are coercively prevented from fulfilling the market demand for banking and security that they and others clamour for. Instead they are left to operate their peaceful win/win exchanges without the mechanisms we take for granted. Imagine how much business your company could do without BACS payments? Without being able to 'wire' money to your suppliers or receive such from your clients everything rather grinds to a halt. Economies regress to geographically limited primitivism. Africans cannot trade in cash as the physical environment is hardly conducive to the secure transportation of large sums.
As a result Africans have rapidly and wholeheartedly taken to "Mobile Money'. In the absence of the ancient wired communication networks the west has in the past benefited from and now, is restrained by, Africa uses mobile communications. Those cheap tv ads you see offering to buy your old mobile phone handset? thats where theyre all going. If you were to instigate a nation-wide communications network right now today starting from a blank canvas, by far the most economic choice would be wireless. No-one in their right mind would spend millions digging holes and burying mile upon mile of semi-precious metal. The state still does but then what do you expect? No, Africa is connected by mobile phones and it is this technology that also came to be utilised to overcome their other problem - banking. Some of the early mobile networks had functions whereby users could exchange and even transmit their Pay As You Go credits - the key word being CREDIT. 'Money' has taken many forms throughout history from nuts, to shells, to coffee beans, to fancy rocks, metals, coins, promissory notes, and now phone credits. the original idea behind enabling users to transmit their credits was that family members could spread and share phone usage but this quickly became used to transmit meaningful sums for the purposes of trade and payment. It became possible to charge credit to your phone and both store and transmit that capital to others from the handset. In some highly developed urban areas people no longer had to carry cash. Phones had become the African debit card. I read an excellent article on this phenomena (sadly i can no longer find the link in my notes). As ever do not take my word for it. do your own research - it is a fascinating development and one which you will find few MSM outlets covering.
But finally i must come to the point. These transactions and credits are currently denominated in terms of nation state fiat currencies. Funds can be and are tracked for the purposes of extortion (taxation) and regulation (racketeering). The article to which i linked above has excited my interest as it hints toward a historical development of seriously large scale implications. If the African mobile money networks move toward a decentralised, non-state, 'uncontrollable,' incorruptible currency system like Bitcoin, we may see gigantic ramifications. As it stands Bitcoin has huge potential to bring about the kind of change we desire. Right now it is of interest for a small number of technology and economics geeks. We do not have the critical mass to push it over the edge into the widespread uptake the currency is capable of. The above article may suggest that this impetus is coming and coming soon but from a source unexpected by the forums of geeks and trolls who mutter about such things.
Before i get too carried away i must say that Bitcoin is widely misunderstood even by those who support it. Again please do your own research and draw your own conclusions (as if I need deign to even suggest such a thing). Bitcoin is not natively 100% anonymous but it can be made so very easily indeed. Now imagine however many hundred million Africans in fast moving economies beginning to transact in untaxable, uninflatable currency! The agorist dream come true. As the old heartlands of statism - Europe & America - decline in entirely predictable super inflationary corruption, the new rising markets in Africa, India, China and South America may, just possibly, break free of state control.

what is it good for? absolutely nothing. say it again!

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron…Is there no other way the world may live?

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

shamelessly ripped off from the excellent http://attackthesystem.com