One way you can identify the potential of something is by examining its enemies. That is, how do they treat it? As a threat? Or do they ignore it? As a Chinese general once said, “it is good to be attacked by the enemy”.
The latest news about a wargame scenario played out by the Pentagon puts this idea in action. In the war game, members of generation Z, beaten down by an economic system that doesn’t care about their livelihood and instead puts profit above all else, utilize Bitcoin as a means of finance capital for their rebellion.
The wargame sees the “Zbellion” group utilize Bitcoin after stealing funds through cyberwarfare from established finance capital like banks and corporations intent on domination. Alongside this, cyberwarfare is said to infiltrate daily life, with official websites and government infrastructure loaded with disinformation campaigns, confusing citizens and creating distrust in "the security of information networks".
The wargame describes Generation Z as reliant on image-based media, and shun text-based media due to growing up with social media their entire lives. Despite this, they are said to still prefer person-to-person interactions. As the war game progresses, Zbellion breaks out, protesting around the country. Republican legislators freeze their financial assets as a means of social punishment and control. This forces them to rely on other assets like Bitcoin.
According to the wargame document, as the Zbellion group matures out of a decentralized and organic protest movement into an organized, politically ideological movement with goals and means of attack, Bitcoin is used not just to fund their movement and organization, but also as a means of crowd sourced donations and funding. To quote the document itself:
“Zebellion uses software programs to route any proceeds into luaundering programs that ultimately convert national currencies into Bitcoin and make “small, below the threshold donations” to “worth recipients” and, if Zbellion members claim financial need, to the member who conducted the attack. Zbellion “leadership” assures its members that their cybercrimes are “ultimately justifiable” and untraceable, and that it selects its targets and beneficiaries based on secure polling of “network delegates”.
As Forbes reports:
"One of the most important tools in the authoritarian toolkit is the ability to freeze the funding of legitimate political dissent," Nathaniel Whittemore, a bitcoin and cryptocurrency consultant and strategist, said previously.
"By separating the infrastructure of money from the infrastructure of state power, bitcoin makes it that much harder for this type of politically motivated confiscation."
Despite Bitcoin's price instability alongside the falling stock market, it's capacity as a means of independent, autonomous wealth transfer is a power tool for independence from authoritarian governments. Even our own authoritarian governments know this!
You can read the Pentagon's own war game document here.
