Remember that things were not always this way. Up until 1933, you could exchange your paper money at any time for its worth in gold; until 1968, you could do the same in silver. Silver dollars were once made out of silver. Even pennies were once made out of copper. This way of thinking crawled to an end in 1971, when president Richard Nixon took the US off the gold standard. Since then, US coin and currency has been fiat money, that is, money backed only by the "full faith and credit of the United States government".
What do those words mean? They mean that the issuer promises to repay debts in a timely manner. The dollar bill itself states, "Reserve note", wherein "note" means "a promise to repay a debt". It might strike you, perhaps oddly at first, that a dollar bill is functioning here as an IOU, where the federal government is promising to repay the note (currency) holder. That nothing now backs the dollar seems to have escaped the notice of the typesetter; for if the government is not going to repay the note (currency) holder with something of actual (not societal) value, then what are the words "reserve note" actually for? They seem to be an echo of a bygone time, words now desiccated of meaning, comforting anachronisms.
Where does the power to issue currency come from? It is a power granted to the government by the people to safeguard their interests (article 1, section 8 of the US Constitution), for the people established the government (as opposed to a military junta, or a king). Given that the US government is federal republic and thus representative, its officeholders represent the people, and so it has a debt of honor to its citizens to honorably use the resources it acquires, for it exists only at the consent of the governed.
So is the federal government acting in good faith with our money? We support it through paying our taxes (automatically deducted from paychecks since 1943, but that is another topic), and in return, it has run a debt in the trillions for nearly 30 years. Those we have elected have not shown any serious desire to reduce the debt; although officeholders have occasionally manifested the desire, there has been no shared will across the three branches to allow real debt reduction to occur. Even Reagan managed only to achieve a temporary hiatus in the rate of increase of the budget.
If I ran a trillion-dollar debt, I'd be in jail. So you would you. None of us can long live beyond our means, certainly not for 30 years. From this we can conclude that the federal government is not serious about repaying its debts, and is simply passing on the responsibility from one generation to the next, trying to forestall an inexorable and devastating day of reckoning.
"Fine," you might say, "but that's just the debt and the currency. The purchasing power of the currency is sound!" Let's look at the way that the value of the currency has been manipulated. President Obama flooded the marketplace with extra currency in a scheme called "Quantitative Easing"; this resulted in a recession and the slowest economic recovery in American history. That was an egregiously inflationary tactic, but even small increases in inflation year after year lower the value of money over time, and in turn, lower the wealth of money-holders over time. Evidence of this can be found in your favorite docudrama that states that $1000 in today's money would have been $10,000 in 1968, or something similar. Such long-term policies drive wealth out of the hands of middle class, but to where? If you guessed the rich, you'd be wrong. It all benefits the federal government, and the rich are just the ones whom that alligator eats last.
So we have several striking examples of the infidelity of the federal government as stewards of our wealth -- fiat money, debt without serious intent to repay, and long-term inflationary policies. How then can citizens respond when all their other cries on this have been ignored? One way is to invest your dollars in valuable objects -- silver, gold, art, or other collectibles. Another way is to sink your dollars in other currencies. However, those tactics do not take the axe to the root of the tree; you are still bound by the dollar and its faithless tyrant. If the government has betrayed our faith by pursuing destructive currency policies as a matter of course, then it is time for us to break faith with the government. Cryptocurrency is the voice of economic dissent and economic liberty.
Inherent in every cryptocurrency transaction are the same charges that fired the American revolution itself. No administration can honestly tell you that cryptocurrency is unpatriotic; they may attempt to strangle it with regulation or outlaw it, but banning something only works when society speaks with one voice against a great evil. It would not work here. If people declare their independence from a tyrant of currency, what is more American than that? Americans once dumped British tea into the Boston harbor in currency disputes (onerous taxes). Though the greedy tentacles of an everpresent government never rest in seeking out competing power structures to destroy, they never manage to suffocate liberty entirely. This too will slip through their fingers, and surpass them. Cryptocurrency is one more vote of no-confidence in the federal behemoth, one more ring of the Liberty bell, one more way to live free.
