Bitcoin, a Cosmic Ledger Bringing Karmic Justice
Bitcoin is an immutable memory storing technology. It allows each of us to actively engage in a force of equanimity that brings balance and harmony, helping us stop the wheel of karma.
Every action we make has an impact in the world, both positive and negative. We human beings, with our capacity for autonomy and freedom, can generate large ripple effects, changing both the situation we currently experience and the wider environment.
There appear to be moral forces inherent in the universe that helps us account for our actions. This is a principle of karma that is acknowledged among some Eastern religions. Both Buddhism and Hinduism teach it as their core belief. The word Karma in Sanskrit means both deed and its effect. It indicates that our thoughts, words and deeds have vibrations and that they will spread into the universe and will be reflected back at us.
The idea of karma does not belong just to Eastern philosophy. The Bible had a similar idea, expressed in the phrase “we reap what we sow”. It encompasses a divine law of justice that works to bring balance to our actions.
“Instant Karma's going to get you
Going to knock you right on the head
You better get yourself together
Pretty soon you're going to be dead”
- Instant Karma! by John Lennon
The force of karma, woven through our relationship to our fellows, generates ethical consequences for individuals. It is like a cosmic ledger that keeps track of our dealings. If you harm an innocent, then you incur a debt; an obligation to make it right in the future. If you do good to others, then you create credits, a balance in your favor in your karmic account.
We must pay for our remiss conduct in the past and settle what we owe to one another. By letting us experience the consequences of our actions, the law of karma gives us an opportunity to enact compensation, to neutralize the effect of our deeds.
The invention of double entry booking
If we accept the notion of karma, we can see how social justice is built into the moral fabric of the universe. Yet, when we look around the world, this spiritual principle of cause and effect does not seem to be working.
We see wars, exploitation and human rights violations caused by the powerful state. Those who placed themselves in a position of power frequently harm and inflict suffering on innocent people, without seeming to face consequences for their destructive behavior. Why is this the case?
This has to do with today's global economic system and the significant development in finance that occurred around the 13th century that provided its foundation. The invention of double-entry bookkeeping revolutionized accounting. Through this great intellectual breakthrough, human beings appeared to have been able to tap into the unseen and mysterious forces of karma working behind the scenes of our daily life.
A double entry system of accounting keeps transactions in order by requiring two entries (a debit entry and a credit entry) made simultaneously in two different accounts. It is based on the principle that every transaction in one account has an equal and opposite entry in the other. A debit (a left side entry) indicates ‘what you own,’ while a credit (a right-hand side entry) means ‘what you owe’.
This accounting book functions as a memory storing device, to maintain a record of our indebtedness to one another and consequent assets and liabilities. By tallying two sides and matching debits to credits, a bookkeeper eliminates an error in records and keeps the equation in balance.
The Cantillon magic spell
Perfected by Italian merchants using it to track their business accounts during the 14th century, the system of a double entry booking has become the basis for corporate accounting.
Double entry accounting method decreased the risk of bookkeeping error, adding a layer of accountability. Yet it has not fundamentally fixed the vulnerability inherent in the inadequacy of the rules (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), or the breaking of the rules, surrounding the valuation of entries recorded within the system. Assets can be overvalued, and liabilities can be understated (or simply ignored altogether). Both create artificial values within the accounts.
From the Enron scandal to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, we have seen the accounting scam, where companies engaged in gross misrepresentations of their financial position and their assets.
A major wakeup call came in 2008. The global economic meltdown has revealed systemic fraud. The corruption was facilitated by a debt-based monetary system, in which private banks create money out of thin air through the method known as fractional reserve lending.
Those who control the production of money create the “Cantillon Effect”; a magic of taking the money of the poor and giving it to the rich. It allows those who are closer to the money printing to benefit disproportionately, while those who are further away benefit less. With the trick of infinite money printing, they create inflation, which favors investors over wage earners and harms low-income people, to evade the eventual consequences of their actions.
It appeared as if they could suspend the principle of causality and rig the rule of karma, yet all they could do to simply compound the effects temporarily. They can’t keep increasing monetary supply without destroying the whole system. As the Fed Ponzi scheme began to crumble, the imagination of computer science emerged to further break their magic spell.
New system of accountability
The invention of Bitcoin brought forward a new system of accounting. Bitcoin is a public distributed ledger that is not controlled by anyone. With a hard cap of 21 million (total bitcoin supply) and prevention of double spending enforced by math, Bitcoin records a history of transactions accurately and securely stores it.
Basing its integrity on a protocol rather than on bureaucrats, the transparent nature of Bitcoin does not allow shadow banking. One can’t fabricate Bitcoin as its authenticity needs to be validated by the network.
Through economic activities that are created around this new currency, the equalizing force in the universe has slowly come alive. Being carried by the invisible hand of the market, it begins to guide actions of self-interested individuals.
For a long time, the Western hegemony, through militarism and financialization, has held down the growth of other nations. Bitcoin now brings on the game of karma being played with fairness.
We are now seeing this in the great redistribution of wealth in history that is happening in El Salvador, a country that first adopted Bitcoin as legal tender.
Here, under the president Nayib Bukele and his policy of economic liberty, the impoverished nation that has been oppressed by the IMF is now charting a path for prosperity. It is now bringing in capital, attracting investors and talents. It has achieved a remarkable transformation, becoming the safest country in Latin America.
Increased Bitcoin adoption is accelerating a cycle of karma. As the West faces a crisis of liberal democracy with increased poverty and declining living standards, the downtrodden Global South is rising. From Nigeria to Kenya, countries in Africa that have been defrauded are now entering into Bitcoin to claim their financial freedom.
Evading internal emptiness
As above, so below. Bitcoin, as an immutable memory storing technology, now replicates the cosmic ledger on the Internet. It now firmly places the law of karma into human hands, allowing each of us to actively engage in a force of equanimity that brings balance and harmony.
Many people associate karma with punitive measures. Yet, it should not be regarded as such. Karma is not a punishment. It gives us the possibility to rectify our deeds and make things right through love and understanding.
We, human beings, are co-creators of the universe. Intention and motivations behind our actions matter significantly. The fiat system is built on our lack of understanding of who we really are, as powerful and creative beings.
Not knowing of our true existence led to a spiritual vacuum in our society. We are made to fill up a sense of lack from things outside of us, and strive to become whole. In order to evade the emptiness at a core, many of us began to seek control and power. In a sense, we can view karma as our deeds created out of our lack of knowledge of the real self.
New enlightenment
For so long our ignorance has kept us in darkness. Our deeds that are misaligned with our own truth have been creating distortion and replicating negative events. Now, as the debt spiral begins, signaling the end of the fiat dark age, new wisdom is emerging.
What is coded in Bitcoin is a light, through which we can see and recognize our own perfection. This light reaches into the original starting point that spanned the negative chain reaction in the world.
“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” - By David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Bitcoin inspires love and forgiveness. It gently awakens us to our true nature and leaves us all in freedom to act in harmony with the whole.
Bitcoin’s innovative economic incentives that unite the tension of opposites (it allows greed and selfishness, while simultaneously rewarding the acts that follow the rule of consensus) bring equilibrium to our actions, helping us stop the wheel of karma.
Hyperbitcoinization brings an end to the karmic cycle, where we can now free ourselves from our collective debt perpetuated by our own blindness.
If we choose to, humanity can now align thoughts, words and deeds with truth. 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, day and night, without ever being interrupted, Bitcoin works to order human karma. By incentivizing an honest account of one’s own actions, it delivers justice, helping us create a future built on our own enlightenment.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank La Fleur Productions for her valuable feedback and proofreading.
Excellent and very thought provoking!
Profound and poetic. Thank you for this brilliant piece, Nozomi. And for stretching our understanding of Bitcoin.