The below is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1281: “Posture from a position of strength.” Sign up for the newsletter here.

Monday night was the inaugural Bitcoin Jawn meetup in Philadelphia. I had the pleasure of being in attendance and participating in the discussion. The topic of the first gathering was “Bitcoin and Freedom,” which is very fitting considering that Philadelphia is the birthplace of the United States of America, where revolutionaries thrust their flag into the earth and said something along the lines of, “We will no longer be ruled by an unaccountable despotic king unfairly taxing us while living in a foreign land. We will be free men.”

As a native Philadelphian, I have always been drawn to the Founding Fathers, what they believed and how they imposed their will on the largest empire in the world to ensure they and their families could live a life rooted in the free will of the individual.

During the meet up, the conversation landed on the topic of what can be done to lobby policy makers to protect bitcoin from overbearing regulation. What can we do to protect bitcoin mining from climate hysterics? How can we get a de minimis spend tax exemption? How can we get bitcoin labeled as free speech, which would eliminate capital gains taxes altogether so individuals can transact freely? These were all interesting topics and definitely things I would like to see. However, I couldn’t shake the irony that we were gathered in a small…