An Open Letter To Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England
June 26, 2023
Bitcoin Block Height 796,011
Dear Andrew,
I hope you’re cool with me calling you Andrew. I use your first name because I speak to you now as a colleague and fellow international banker. It may seem strange to you that an anonymous Twitter persona calls himself a banker and considers you a colleague and an equal. However, because I am a Bitcoiner, and I hold my bitcoin in my own custody, I have effectively become my own bank. You are the head of the Bank of England. I run my own Bitcoin node. That means that I can verify transactions on the Bitcoin network on my own. Thus, for all intents and purposes, I am also the head of a bank. My own bank, expressed in code by the node that I control, and protected by over 10 gigawatts of power, decentralized and globally distributed. Just for comparison, that is twice the power capacity of the United States Navy. Quite a bit more power than your bank.
One of the mottos we have as Bitcoiners is “be your own bank.” I first learned this phrase and concept by following the work of fellow Bitcoiner Anita Posch, who travels in the Global South, mostly in Africa, to help fellow world citizens become sovereign unto themselves, and become their own banks, just like she and I have. I very much like this motto: Be your own bank.
Let us now speak more of mottos.
A cursory Internet search shows me that you attended the Wyggeston Grammar School, whose motto is Labore Et Honore: Labor and Honor. Excellent. To be honorable is to be truthful. It is to provide proof for things you say. And it is to allow the things you say and do to be questioned and verified by others. And labor is the work we perform. And of course, the best work is that which is enjoyable and proves useful to us and our communities. I imagine in the years since you graduated from Wyggeston, you have frequently reflected on these principles. I am sure they have motivated you to try and do work that is truthful, verifiable, and that helps the world to grow in good ways.
I also note that you attended Queens College, Cambridge, for further study. I like the motto of this school very much: Floreat Domus. May the house flourish. Simple and beautiful, but it offers much to ponder. I imagine that the school’s founders did not think of a flourishing house as limited to the university itself. Nor simply to the geographical borders of England. Something tells me that founders of a great institution of learning, in their own laborious and honorable pursuit of truth had something much more expansive in mind. I think they thought of “the house” as all human society, as our planet itself, as poet Gary Snyder called it, “The Earth House Hold.” In that sense, we all occupy the same magnificent house.
And as fellow bankers, we really must ask ourselves: How can we help the house flourish?
As we know, despite some of your comments in recent interviews, economist Milton Friedman said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” And so now, Andrew, this is where I think our ideas diverge, I am afraid. You have blamed workers’ rising salaries for inflation, whereas you and I both know that inflation is due to the overprinting of unbacked fiduciary media.
I am speaking banker to banker now, so I would never use a word like “counterfeiting” to describe what you and your fellow central bankers have been up to. After all, it’s not counterfeiting if, when you print money out of thin air, we can still go buy a loaf of bread or a pound of steak with it, right? It just takes a whole lot more than it used to. But it seems ironic and a bit unpleasant when you, in your public comments, pin the cause of inflation on the pay raises of honest laborers, as they struggle to deal with the cascading effects of decisions made by central bankers themselves. It seems you take a page out of the old Handbook for Rascal Debaters when you accuse your victims of committing your very own offenses.
But now let us move beyond all that nastiness and discuss something bright and positive. It is Bitcoin, of course. Unlike the Bank of England, or any central bank (which can issue money without having to perform difficult, strenuous, verifiable work) the issuance of new bitcoins requires quite a bit of real-world energy. It is therefore very much a digital commodity. And in that sense it is stronger and more robust than any fiat currency you may currently control. Additionally, the issuance of new bitcoins is regulated by globally enforced code and cannot be increased or decreased by any individual or shadowy group of super bankers. With global availability, fixed issuance, and a dwindling inflation rate, Bitcoin preserves the value of our labor over time… unlike leaky fiat.
And so, Andrew, having said all this, I urge you to help the Earth Household flourish. I implore you to honor the labor of your fellow humans, by studying this wondrous new digital asset, Bitcoin. It is only 14 years old but is already known worldwide as a means by which humans can honor their own labor and protect it through time and across space, because of its programmatic scarcity. And its censorship resistance promotes freedom of expression and democracy too. A pretty sweet bonus! Truly an ideal property to own, by individuals and central banks alike. (Hint, hint!) And, just like Bitcoin, freedom, truth and honor are in scarce supply these days. But I believe that as the people of the world throw off the yoke of decaying fiat currencies and the misinformation they engender, we will begin to enter a world where truth and freedom are more abundant. Then even central institutions can let go of “the pain of the work of wrecking the world.”
Sincerely, your pal and fellow banker,
Cosmo Crixter (Bitcoiner)