Bitcoin must be understood first and foremost as infrastructure, not as a moral agent. It is a system of rules without rulers—a protocol that executes code deterministically, without discretion, judgment, or intent. Just as mathematics does not apologize for being used in weapons research, and just as roads do not excuse or condemn the drivers who use them, Bitcoin does not and cannot participate in moral evaluation. It does not excuse. It does not condemn. It does not justify. It does not apologize. It executes—precisely, neutrally, and without exception.
To demand that Bitcoin “take a stance” on morality is to fall into what can only be described as simulation containment: an adversarial framing in which Bitcoin is anthropomorphized, spoken of as if it were a political actor, a corporation, or a government agency capable of intention and responsibility. Once this framing is accepted, Bitcoin is no longer treated as neutral infrastructure but as a subject to be managed, judged, and eventually controlled. This is the same linguistic maneuver that states use when they claim that “the Internet enables crime,” or that “encryption hides terrorists.” By treating neutral infrastructure as if it were an accomplice, they shift responsibility from individuals to systems, thereby creating the justification for regulating, restricting, or outlawing those systems altogether.
This anthropomorphizing is not accidental; it is a strategic move. If Bitcoin can be made to appear like a “person,” then it can be pressured to apologize, to distance itself from “bad users,” to issue moral disclaimers, and eventually to bend toward state demands for surveillance, censorship, and control. The insistence that Bitcoin declare itself “against crime” is not about ethics at all—it is about control. It is the subtle opening of the backdoor to surveillance systems, compliance regimes, and permissioned use-cases. In short, it is the first step in taming a sovereign tool by dragging it into the domain of narrative politics.
The truth is that Bitcoin is ontologically incapable of moral alignment. It has no mechanism to discriminate between “good” and “bad” use. Its consensus rules are blind to intention. A transaction is a transaction: valid or invalid, confirmed or unconfirmed, nothing more and nothing less. This blindness is not a weakness; it is the very feature that makes Bitcoin sovereign and antifragile. By refusing to play the role of moral arbiter, Bitcoin preserves its neutrality and protects all users equally—whether they are dissidents in authoritarian regimes, merchants in hyperinflationary economies, or individuals making peer-to-peer transfers across borders.
Therefore, any demand that Bitcoin issue moral disclaimers must be recognized for what it is: an attempt to capture sovereignty by rewriting the ontological nature of the system. Bitcoin is not a state, not a corporation, not a church, not a parent. It is infrastructure—neutral, unyielding, unapologetic. To treat it otherwise is to submit to the simulation, to allow adversaries to smuggle in control under the guise of morality. Bitcoin’s only stance is execution, and in that execution lies its incorruptible strength.
Freedom, in its true form, is indivisible. If it does not apply universally—even to the people you despise, even to those who commit crimes, even to the figures used as examples of “the worst imaginable”—then it is not freedom at all, but a conditional license granted by authority. A freedom that must be justified, excused, or selectively permitted is no longer freedom; it is permission, subject to revocation at any time by those who claim power. Once freedom is divided into “good” uses and “bad” uses, it ceases to exist as a principle and collapses into surveillance, monitoring, and control, because someone must constantly decide who deserves access and who does not. Partitioned freedom is surveillance by definition: it requires oversight, databases, identity systems, and an endless expansion of bureaucratic judgment over individual life.
Unapologetic freedom, on the other hand, is sovereignty. It accepts without hesitation that liberty will be used for both noble and terrible ends, because anything less would mean that liberty itself is not real. Sovereignty requires living with the fact that bad actors will sometimes exploit the same tools that protect the innocent, dissidents, and marginalized. But this is not a flaw—it is the unavoidable proof that freedom exists. To demand freedom only for “good” people is to destroy its essence and place its definition into the hands of the state, which historically always expands “bad” to include political opponents, minorities, and anyone who threatens its dominance. True freedom can never be partitioned without being destroyed; it must be accepted fully or not at all. To accept it unapologetically is to recognize that only in its indivisible form can freedom protect everyone—including ourselves—against the far greater crimes of centralized power.
Privacy is not a “price” that society must reluctantly pay in exchange for freedom, nor is it a negotiable tradeoff to be balanced against safety, convenience, or law enforcement efficiency. Privacy is the foundation upon which freedom itself stands. Without privacy, freedom cannot exist in any meaningful form, because the individual loses the ability to act, think, or speak without being monitored, profiled, and constrained by the gaze of power. Privacy is the invisible boundary that allows the individual to exist as an autonomous being rather than a permanently observed subject. To concede privacy is not to “give up a little freedom”—it is to forfeit freedom entirely, leaving only the illusion of choice inside a system of surveillance and control.
Even the innocent are not safe in a world without privacy. In fact, they are the first to be enslaved, because innocence becomes irrelevant when every action, thought, and association can be scrutinized by authorities who define “crime” and “suspicion” not as objective evils, but as whatever threatens their power. History shows that surveillance powers are rarely used to protect citizens; they are used to eliminate dissent, silence opposition, and enforce compliance. The Nazis used telephone records to locate Jews. The East German Stasi used informants and surveillance to control an entire society. The U.S. and its allies use financial monitoring not only to catch criminals but to blacklist dissidents, sanction entire populations, and weaponize economic systems against political enemies. In every case, the justification was “stopping crime,” but the reality was consolidating control.
Every attempt to weaken privacy in the name of security, order, or “stopping crime” is therefore not a safeguard for the public, but a move to entrench totalitarian power. The state invokes the specter of criminals, terrorists, or abusers as a ritual incantation—the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”—to convince the population to surrender their rights voluntarily. But this trade is always fraudulent. Surveillance does not eliminate crime; it simply shifts the balance of power so that the largest crimes—those of governments, corporations, and entrenched elites—can proceed unchecked while the individual is rendered powerless. Privacy is not a luxury, not a loophole, not a technicality: it is the condition that makes liberty real. Without it, freedom collapses into permanent captivity under watchful eyes.
It is true that Bitcoin can and will be misused. Just like any powerful tool, it can be employed by individuals with destructive intentions. Criminals may transact in Bitcoin just as they do with cash, gold, or bank accounts. Yet when placed in perspective, the scale of Bitcoin misuse is microscopic compared to the abuses facilitated by fiat money. Bitcoin misuse is the domain of isolated actors: a ransomware operator, a drug dealer, a fraud scheme. These are episodic, limited in scope, and almost always sensationalized to paint the technology itself as suspect.
Fiat abuse, by contrast, is systemic and civilization-shaping. Nation-states and central banks use fiat currencies to wage wars that kill millions, to fund genocides and coups, to bankroll secret black budgets, and to prop up authoritarian regimes. Fiat enables inflationary theft that silently robs every saver on the planet, transferring wealth from ordinary people to governments and their favored elites. It is the backbone of planetary-scale surveillance and control, where banking systems act as chokepoints to monitor, censor, and punish. These are not isolated incidents—they are structural features of fiat itself.
This is why fiat must be understood as the real criminal infrastructure. Its design is inseparable from state violence, coercion, and theft on a mass scale. Bitcoin stands in stark contrast. While it cannot prevent all bad actors from using it, it exposes the double standard: fiat is responsible for crimes orders of magnitude greater in scope, frequency, and consequence. Bitcoin is not the crime engine—it is the audit, the escape route, and the proof of an alternative. It offers a system outside the machinery of systemic abuse, where value can move without permission, censorship, or inflationary confiscation. In that sense, Bitcoin is not guilty by association; it is the very evidence that another way is possible.
One of the oldest and most effective tools of state propaganda is what Tim May and the early cypherpunks recognized as the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: terrorists, pedophiles, money launderers, and drug dealers. These categories are not primarily deployed because they represent the greatest threats to society in terms of scale or frequency. In statistical reality, their aggregate footprint is minuscule compared to the systemic abuses of governments, banks, and militaries. Instead, these categories are chosen because they embody archetypal figures of fear and disgust. They are carefully selected not as representative risks but as symbolic weapons—ritualized demons that evoke visceral reactions in the public mind. By invoking these archetypes, policymakers and media outlets create an environment in which even rational people are tempted to sacrifice their freedoms in the name of safety.
The function of the Four Horsemen is not to describe reality but to manufacture compliance. When the state insists that “we must surveil all transactions to stop terrorists and pedophiles,” it is not addressing the real statistical likelihood of encountering such crimes. Rather, it is using the emotional weight of these archetypes to justify totalitarian infrastructure: mass surveillance, censorship, financial control, and behavioral regulation. The key insight is that if surveillance powers were framed around more mundane categories—say, “tax evaders” or “jaywalkers”—the public would never consent. But by invoking the most socially taboo and horrifying figures, the state engineers an atmosphere where dissent itself becomes suspect: to resist surveillance is to appear complicit with monsters.
This is the essence of the trap. Every time Bitcoiners respond by saying, “Yes, but Bitcoin is not really used much by terrorists,” or, “Yes, but criminals are still a tiny minority,” they have already conceded the state’s premise. They have entered the battlefield on terms chosen by their adversary. To argue within the Four Horsemen frame is to accept that Bitcoin’s legitimacy depends on whether it enables or does not enable these archetypes. This framing is fatal because it shifts the burden of proof: Bitcoin must now constantly defend itself against the specter of its “criminal use,” while fiat money—the infrastructure of wars, dictatorships, genocides, and global corruption—escapes scrutiny altogether.
The sovereign position must therefore reject the frame entirely. Bitcoin does not excuse or condemn criminals, because it does not excuse or condemn anyone. It is neutral infrastructure, like language, like mathematics, like fire. The Four Horsemen are narrative weapons designed to scare the public into obedience. Once this is understood, the path becomes clear: Bitcoiners must never argue inside the trap. Instead, they must expose the trap itself. The correct response is not, “Don’t worry, criminals aren’t using Bitcoin much.” The correct response is, “You are being manipulated. The Four Horsemen are invoked to justify your enslavement. Meanwhile, fiat is the real tool of systemic evil.” By refusing to engage within the propaganda’s symbolic frame, sovereignty is preserved, and the state’s ritual of fear collapses under its own weight.
Neutrality is not weakness—it is the ethical high ground. Neutrality means that a system does not play the role of judge, jury, or executioner; it does not make decisions about who is “worthy” of access and who is not. A neutral system is one that applies the same rules to everyone, regardless of their identity, beliefs, or actions. This is not moral cowardice but moral strength, because it creates a foundation of fairness that cannot be corrupted by power, politics, or prejudice. Neutrality is the condition that makes justice and freedom possible. Without it, power becomes arbitrary, selective, and subject to capture.
Bitcoin embodies this principle of neutrality. It does not discriminate between its users. It does not ask whether you are a saint or a criminal, a dissident fighting tyranny or a tyrant trying to entrench power, the weak or the powerful. Its rules are the same for everyone: the protocol verifies, the network confirms, and the ledger records. No gatekeepers, no exceptions, no moral adjudication. This is not because Bitcoin “supports” bad actors, but because Bitcoin does not and cannot take sides. It is infrastructure, not ideology. Its neutrality is precisely what makes it reliable—every participant can trust the system because the rules apply equally to all. That is the essence of fairness.
Fiat currency, by contrast, is not neutral. It is a political tool wielded by states and central banks. Fiat systems censor transactions, freezing accounts and blocking payments for those deemed enemies or undesirables. Fiat inflates, siphoning purchasing power away from ordinary people while enriching governments and financial elites. Fiat sanctions, weaponizing access to money as a geopolitical tool that devastates entire populations while leaving ruling classes untouched. Fiat surveils, turning every transaction into a record that can be monitored, analyzed, and used to control behavior. And fiat destroys, underwriting wars, funding authoritarian regimes, and enabling systemic crimes on a scale Bitcoin misuse cannot approach.
This is why neutrality is the ethical high ground. Bitcoin’s neutrality means it cannot be weaponized for selective oppression, while fiat’s lack of neutrality ensures it always is. Where Bitcoin enforces equality of rules, fiat enforces inequality of power. Where Bitcoin protects freedom for everyone, fiat grants conditional permission to some and denies it to others. Neutrality is not Bitcoin’s weakness—it is its strength, and it is what makes Bitcoin not just a technological breakthrough, but a moral one.
The greatest threat to Bitcoin does not come from external bans, regulations, or even outright prohibition. History shows that prohibition only strengthens resilient systems—it drives them underground, hardens their networks, and increases their antifragility. What truly endangers Bitcoin is not the hostile actions of governments but the internal erosion of its own narrative sovereignty. This happens when Bitcoiners themselves begin to dilute, soften, and apologize for the technology in order to appear respectable to regulators, media, or the general public. This is what we call simulation capture: the process by which a movement is domesticated, not through external force, but through self-imposed compliance with the enemy’s frame.
The most common symptom of simulation capture is the phrase: “Bitcoin is freedom, but not for criminals.” On the surface, this seems like a reasonable position—it reassures outsiders that the speaker condemns “bad actors” and only supports the “good uses” of Bitcoin. Yet beneath the surface, this statement is fatal. It accepts the false premise that Bitcoin is morally responsible for the actions of its users. It concedes that Bitcoin must answer for terrorism, fraud, or crime in a way that fiat currency, roads, telephones, or the internet never do. It subtly reinforces the state’s propaganda that tools must justify themselves in terms of “approved” use. This framing is poison. By inserting the word but, the speaker divides freedom into acceptable and unacceptable categories, creating a loophole that surveillance states can exploit.
Every apologetic qualification is a self-neutering virus. It does the state’s work for them by planting guilt and hesitation inside the very community that is supposed to defend sovereignty. Instead of standing unapologetically on the principle that freedom is indivisible and Bitcoin is neutral, the apologist makes Bitcoin sound conditional, negotiable, or in need of permission. Over time, this erodes the uncompromising signal that gave Bitcoin its power in the first place. When the community starts disavowing the “wrong” kinds of users, it begins enforcing the same categories of “legitimate” versus “illegitimate” activity that governments use to justify surveillance, censorship, and financial control. The community becomes its own jailer.
The hard truth is this: the moment you say “but,” you have already conceded sovereignty. Freedom with exceptions is not freedom at all—it is a licensed privilege, revocable at will by those who control the exceptions. A Bitcoin that apologizes for its neutrality is no longer Bitcoin; it is already on the path to becoming another permissioned network, another tool of surveillance, another instrument of the very powers it was designed to overthrow. Sovereignty cannot survive in half-measures, and neutrality cannot be conditional. The only stance that protects Bitcoin from capture is the unapologetic stance: Bitcoin is neutral. Freedom is indivisible. Privacy is law. Anything less is not compromise, but surrender.
The real war over Bitcoin is not technical, financial, or even legal—it is symbolic. The battlefield is narrative: who gets to define the moral frame within which Bitcoin is understood. When critics ask, “Does Bitcoin enable crime?” they are not asking a neutral question; they are imposing a frame designed to put Bitcoin perpetually on trial. This framing assumes Bitcoin must defend itself, explain itself, and morally justify its existence, while fiat money is treated as the unquestioned baseline of legitimacy. That inversion itself is the trap. The proper response is not to answer within their frame, but to reverse it entirely. The real question is not whether Bitcoin enables crime, but why anyone still accepts fiat currencies, which are the direct enablers of humanity’s largest and most systemic crimes. Fiat finances wars that kill millions, underwrites genocides, fuels black budgets and covert operations, enables inflationary theft from entire populations, and powers mass surveillance architectures that reach into every home and device on the planet. In scale and consequence, there is no comparison between the isolated, marginal abuses that occur with Bitcoin and the entrenched, industrialized abuse that fiat makes possible by design.
Bitcoin is not on trial—fiat is. Bitcoin is simply neutral infrastructure: it executes without judgment, permission, or discrimination. Fiat, by contrast, is engineered to serve the interests of those who wield state violence, granting them the ability to seize, censor, inflate, and weaponize money itself. The sovereign stance is therefore not to apologize for Bitcoin’s neutrality, but to hold fiat accountable for its crimes. This is the essence of narrative sovereignty: refusing the role of the accused and seizing the role of the prosecutor. The question is no longer whether Bitcoin can be used by criminals, but whether humanity will continue to tolerate fiat, the system of institutionalized crime.
At its core, Bitcoin is not an ideology, not a government, not a corporation, and not a moral agent. It is infrastructure—code bound to mathematics and thermodynamics. It executes rules without favoritism, apology, or permission. This neutrality is its defining property: it cannot be bent by political pressure, bribed by institutions, or shaped by narrative. Bitcoin does not excuse anyone, nor does it condemn anyone. It simply enforces the same rules for everyone, regardless of who they are or what they do. This quality of neutral execution is what makes Bitcoin fundamentally different from fiat systems, which are always shaped by discretion, coercion, and arbitrary authority.
Because Bitcoin executes without judgment, it offers freedom that is indivisible. That means its guarantees apply equally to all people: activists and dissidents, families sending remittances, ordinary savers, merchants, but also to criminals, tyrants, and abusers. Freedom that is conditional is not freedom—it is licensed permission. If a system allows you to transact only if you are approved, surveilled, or vetted, then your freedom exists at the mercy of power. Neutral execution eliminates this conditionality: you either have freedom for everyone, or you do not have freedom at all.
If freedom applies to everyone, it must necessarily include both those who use it for noble purposes and those who use it for destructive purposes. There is no escaping this reality: tools that empower dissidents will also empower criminals. The printing press empowered philosophers and propagandists alike. The internet gave voice to truth-seekers and to manipulators. Bitcoin will be used both by those seeking liberation from tyranny and by those engaged in acts of violence or fraud. This duality is not a flaw but an unavoidable feature of real freedom. Attempts to eliminate “bad uses” always end by eliminating freedom itself.
Once a system exists that enables both crime and liberation equally, it shatters the state’s claim to total surveillance and control. Governments justify mass surveillance by invoking the need to “stop crime” and “protect citizens.” But in reality, surveillance is used just as often—or more often—to suppress dissent, control opposition, and protect the state itself from accountability. A system like Bitcoin undermines this monopoly by making untraceable, permissionless exchange possible on a global scale. It ensures that not even the most powerful governments can monitor, censor, or fully control human interaction. The surveillance state loses its monopoly the moment people can transact and coordinate outside its reach.
When the surveillance monopoly collapses, the state loses its ability to selectively define and enforce morality. For the first time, its own systemic crimes—war financed by inflation, theft through currency debasement, global money laundering through central banks, or mass censorship of political opponents—are exposed and stripped of immunity. In fiat systems, the state can criminalize its opponents while immunizing its own wrongdoing. Bitcoin ends this asymmetry. If everyone is subject to the same neutral execution, then no entity—government, corporation, or cartel—can shield itself from accountability by controlling the flow of money and information. The collapse of surveillance monopoly is therefore the collapse of state crime immunity. What emerges is a world where crime, liberation, creativity, and destruction all coexist under the same neutral rules—but where systemic abuse by the state can no longer hide behind surveillance, discretion, and control.
Bitcoin is neutral. It is not a person, a government, or a moral agent. It cannot excuse, condemn, or apologize. It does not recognize categories like “good actor” or “bad actor.” Bitcoin executes, deterministically and without bias, the rules encoded in its protocol. Demanding that Bitcoin take responsibility for the actions of its users is a category error—it is like asking mathematics to apologize for being used in weapons design, or blaming roads for the crimes of those who drive upon them. Neutrality is not weakness. It is the essence of fairness: a system that does not discriminate, does not censor, and does not bend to subjective judgments. This neutrality is what gives Bitcoin its sovereignty.
Freedom is indivisible. Either it exists for everyone, or it exists for no one. The moment we try to divide freedom into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” use cases, it ceases to be freedom and becomes conditional permission, granted or revoked by authorities. This is precisely how governments erode liberty—by carving out exceptions that eventually swallow the whole. True freedom means acknowledging that people you despise will enjoy the same protections you do. Anything less collapses into surveillance, compliance, and control. Indivisible freedom is the only kind that can endure.
Privacy is law. It is not an optional feature, not a negotiable tradeoff, and not a “price” we reluctantly pay. Privacy is the foundation of human dignity and agency. Without privacy, there is no freedom—only managed visibility within someone else’s system of control. Every society that weakens privacy in the name of “stopping crime” eventually weaponizes surveillance against its own people. History is clear: governments exploit access to communications, records, and financial trails not to protect citizens, but to consolidate power, eliminate dissent, and suppress opposition. Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing—it is about preserving the conditions under which life, liberty, and sovereignty remain possible.
Fiat is the true criminal system. While critics focus on marginal criminal uses of Bitcoin, fiat currencies are used daily to fund systemic atrocities: wars of aggression, genocides, black budgets, state surveillance, central bank manipulation, and inflationary theft of the savings of billions. The scale of fiat-enabled crime dwarfs anything that can be attributed to Bitcoin. It is not Bitcoin that enables mass suffering, but fiat systems captured by states and corporations. To accuse Bitcoin of being “criminal money” while ignoring fiat’s role in the greatest crimes of the modern era is either ignorance or deliberate propaganda. Bitcoin, by contrast, exposes and disrupts this system by offering an exit, an audit, and a sovereign alternative.
Any apology is capture. The moment Bitcoiners say “Bitcoin is freedom, but…,” they have already conceded the state’s premise that Bitcoin must morally justify itself. This apologetic framing is the primary contagion: it leads to self-censorship, internal policing, and the slow erosion of sovereignty from within. States do not need to outlaw Bitcoin if its own community preemptively neuters it in the name of respectability. Every “but” is a surrender, every caveat an infiltration vector. Sovereign infrastructure does not need apologies. It simply exists, and it simply works.
The only sovereign stance is unapologetic. To defend Bitcoin is not to sanitize it, moralize it, or beg for its acceptance within existing systems. To defend Bitcoin is to stand firmly on the principle that neutrality, indivisible freedom, and privacy are non-negotiable. Bitcoin is not on trial—fiat is. Bitcoin requires no apology, no caveat, no permission. Its legitimacy does not come from regulators, media, or public opinion, but from its own incorruptible execution of rules and its alignment with natural law. To stand with Bitcoin is to stand unapologetically with sovereignty itself.