Freedom has never failed humanity. What has failed, repeatedly and catastrophically, is the decision to outsource freedom to people who promise to protect it.Warren Buffett is quoted as having said, “You cannot make a good deal with a bad person”, a sentiment most people would readily agree with. We accept, often painfully, that character matters.
Yet this wisdom is typically confined to our interpersonal commercial dealings with service providers or potential business partners. While applicable in that sphere, the truth is it’s even more crucial in the relationship between the state and its subjects. Most politicians that people vote into office are manipulators, dishonest, incompetent, and fundamentally untrustworthy. Wouldn’t it make sense to apply the same wisdom here? You cannot make a good deal with a bad politician, no matter how enthusiastically you vote. This is a simple truth that most people have yet to grasp.
We are told, explicitly and implicitly, that trust is not only necessary, but virtuous. That obedience is civic duty, that skepticism is extremism and that freedom is dangerous unless supervised. This inversion lies at the heart of our civilizational decay.
A World Built on Bad Deals
One of the primary reasons our world feels so broken is because so many foundational deals were made with bad actors.
Every country has one or two major political parties, but the question most people never ask themselves is: “How did party X become dominant in this country?” Was it through efficient service delivery? Because the people love them so much? Or was it through propaganda, patronage, coercion, media capture, and the slow normalization of failure?
Campaign promises are routinely broken within the first hundred days of a new administration taking office. The tragedy is that we’ve normalized this betrayal. We allow ourselves to get hyped during campaigns while knowing we’ll receive, at best, thirty percent of what was promised. The rest will be blamed on the opposition, illegal immigrants, corrupt judges, billionaires, or whatever scapegoat proves convenient. While there may be kernels of truth in these excuses, these obstacles existed before the candidate took office but were conveniently never mentioned in the sales pitch.
The Cycle of Managed Disappointment
Ours is a society built on broken promises. We’re more shocked when a politician or institution actually follows through with half their commitments than when they deliver nothing at all. Once we realize we’ve been bamboozled again, we wait for the next election to “vote for change.” We elect the opposition’s candidate and receive a different flavour of the same betrayal, as if trapped in a loop. Ten years pass, then twenty, then fifty, and before we know it, an entire century has elapsed with no real or fundamental change, just the same campaign promises recycled endlessly.
Occasionally violent revolutions interrupt this cycle and turn things in a different direction for a season, but eventually the same pattern takes root and becomes normalized again. It’s easy to understand why the establishment loves this cycle. The question is: why do freedom-loving people with functioning brains accept this status quo? Why do they find themselves in voting booths being forced to choose the “lesser of two evils”, which is still choosing evil? Why do they keep placing their trust in people and institutions that have revealed themselves to be untrustworthy time and time again?
The Trust Trap
“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.” Satoshi Nakamoto
This insight applies far beyond money. Trust is not morally neutral. In adversarial environments, trust is a liability. Trust is embedded into the functioning of our political and financial institutions. We’re supposed to trust that when elected officials make decisions, these decisions are carefully considered. We’re expected to trust that every policy is made with good intent and that it’s in our best interest to comply. During COVID-19, many trusted the guidance of public health officials, from social distancing (which isn’t even a medical term) to mask mandates to vaccine requirements. Meanwhile, the same officials gave themselves and their allies exemptions to all of the above. Despite the obvious hypocrisy, we were still expected to trust them, and some did, to their own detriment.
We were supposed to trust financial experts in government when they told us inflation was transitory and that the economy was thriving, even as they continued printing money to fund new wars. How do you continue trusting leaders who constantly lie and gaslight you about things you know to be true?
We have now entered the timeline that Alexander Solzhenitsyn accurately described, “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
It’s only a matter of time until what we call civilization unravels before our eyes and chaos becomes the order of the day. You cannot build a functional, thriving society on a foundation of lies and expect it to endure.
The Catalogue of Deception
Our political system is a lie. Democracy, as practiced, is a lie. Our justice system is a lie. Our money is a lie. For some of us, our relationships are lies. Corporate media manufactures and peddles lies. Our schools teach children lies. Our healthcare system is driven by lies. The climate change narrative is a lie. Our financial system is one colossal lie. The stock market is a lie. Our consensus-driven science is a lie. Most of our wars have been started with lies. Our recorded history is selective at best. I could go on but I’m sure you get the picture now.
We live in one giant bamboozle, where we’ve turned over the reins of management to some of the biggest liars on the planet, and we’ve made peace with it.
Truth will never prevail in a society built on lies and deception. You may find pockets of it where people have decided to honour truth, but in general, truth becomes extinct where lies are honoured, and boy oh boy, the world has been honouring lies with remarkable dedication!
The Failure of Reformism
Every generation is told the same lie: “The system is broken, but it can be fixed if the right people are elected.” This is reformism’s fatal flaw. It confuses structural incentives with individual virtue. It treats corruption as a bug rather than a feature. The question is not “Who should rule?” but “Where can coercion be eliminated entirely?” The goal is not to trust better people, but to build systems that do not require trust at all. Trustless systems.
At its core, reformism mistakes personality for structure. It assumes that corruption flows from bad individuals rather than from the incentives embedded in centralized power itself. This belief persists despite overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary. Good people enter politics and either adapt, are neutralized, or are removed. The institution remains. The incentives remain. The outcomes remain.
Reformism is haunted by a ghost that refuses to die: the fantasy of the benevolent ruler. Whether packaged as the philosopher-king, the technocratic expert, the populist outsider, or simply the “lesser evil,” the story never changes. This time will be different. This candidate truly cares. This administration will finally deliver.
It never is. They never do. It never will.
History is a graveyard of well-intentioned leaders whose names are now synonymous with failure, repression, or betrayal. Not because they were uniquely evil, but because no human is competent to centrally plan the lives of millions without resorting to coercion, lies, or violence. Reformism also serves a psychological function: it acts as a pressure-release valve for dissent. By promising future improvement, it pacifies present resistance. People are encouraged to wait, to trust the process, to remain peaceful, patient, and compliant.
In this way, reformism stabilizes the very systems it claims to oppose.
Each election cycle resets outrage. Each new leader absorbs hope. Each disappointment is framed as premature judgment. The machinery grinds on, lubricated by deferred accountability. At its deepest level, reformism is an argument for trust: trust the right leaders, trust the institutions, trust the process, trust the plan, but in reality, in an adversarial environment (which we exist in) trust is a vulnerability.
Any system that collapses when trust is withdrawn is fragile. Any system that requires trust in centralized authority is destined to be exploited by those least worthy of it. The goal, then, is not to place trust more carefully, but to eliminate the need for trusting the untrustworthy.
The belief that broken systems can be redeemed by better people is one of the most persistent and damaging myths of modern civilization. It keeps humanity trapped in cycles of hope and disappointment, progress and regression, reform and relapse.
True freedom abandons the fantasy of benevolent rulers and replaces it with a harder, more honest question, what would a society look like if no one had the power to lie, steal, censor, or coerce at scale?
Just in case you’re new here, this isn’t a blackpill to start the year with. On the contrary, it’s a diagnosis of where we find ourselves today. We cannot cure an ailment we haven’t accurately diagnosed.
The question becomes: how do we extract ourselves from this cycle of broken trust and broken promises? How do we build systems that don’t require us to trust the untrustworthy? The answer lies not in reforming the existing paradigm but in making it obsolete through the creation of trustless alternatives.
Building on Truth: The Trustless Revolution
There are solutions emerging that can reduce the damage inflicted by this architecture of lies. Bitcoin and Nostr represent a new paradigm, not because you should “hodl” or “join” (though that would be beneficial), but because of what they fundamentally represent.
Bitcoin is honest money built on universal rules that everyone can verify. These rules apply whether you’re a billionaire or a pauper. There are no special privileges or favours for the “elites” of the fiat world. This is something we sometimes take for granted. Bitcoin is a permissionless monetary protocol that allows anyone with an internet connection to transfer value from one part of the world to another without navigating a labyrinth of middlemen charging exorbitant fees.
That said, Bitcoin’s existence speaks to a larger truth, which is that in the twenty-first century, we can invent new trustless institutions that aren’t subject to political manipulation. We can build systems where trust is replaced by cryptographic proof, where transparency is enforced by code rather than promises by politicians, where the rules cannot be changed to benefit the connected at the expense of the powerless.
Nostr is a decentralized communications protocol inspired by Bitcoin’s architecture, designed to allow the transmission and broadcast of messages without a big tech platform controlling that interaction. No central authority to ban you. No algorithm designed to manipulate your perception. No corporate overlord deciding what truth you’re allowed to hear.
Bitcoin does not ask central bankers to behave better. It makes their role obsolete. Nostr does not demand that platforms respect free speech. It removes their ability to censor. These systems succeed precisely because they do not depend on virtue. The broader principle is this; wherever trust is currently required, we should be building trustless alternatives. Wherever gatekeepers exist, we should be creating permissionless systems. Wherever opacity allows for manipulation, we should be demanding radical transparency.
The Transition
The existing system won’t collapse overnight, nor should we necessarily wish for that, collapse usually brings unnecessary suffering, and suffering is not evenly distributed. Instead, we should be building alternatives that make the old system irrelevant through superior functionality and integrity.
This is not about tearing down before we’ve built up. It’s about constructing a parallel infrastructure that operates on fundamentally different principles. When people have access to honest money, they’ll increasingly reject debased currency. When they can communicate freely, they’ll abandon platforms that censor and manipulate. When they can verify rather than trust, they’ll stop accepting promises from proven liars.
The transition happens one person at a time, one transaction at a time, one message at a time. It happens as people realize they don’t have to keep choosing between bad options. They can opt out of the rigged game entirely.
Trustless Doesn’t Mean Cold
A common misconception about trustless systems is that they’re somehow inhuman or anti-social. The opposite is true. These systems don’t eliminate trust between humans; they eliminate the requirement to trust fallible and often malicious intermediaries.
You can still trust your friends, your family, your community. In fact, trustless systems enable more authentic human trust by removing the predatory institutions that exploit trust for profit and power. When you’re not forced to route your interactions through untrustworthy middlemen, your direct relationships become more valuable, not less.
Building trustless alternatives to our corrupt institutions is not easy work. It requires technical innovation, social coordination, and the courage to be early to a paradigm shift. Most people will continue operating within the old system until the new one proves undeniably superior. That’s fine. This is not a revolution that requires majority buy-in to begin, it requires dedicated builders and early adopters willing to smooth the rough edges.
The developers writing code for these protocols, the entrepreneurs building businesses on these foundations, the educators explaining these concepts, the early users providing feedback and liquidity, all are part of constructing something fundamentally different.
This is not about perfection. Bitcoin has limitations. Nostr has limitations. Every trustless system we build will have trade-offs. But the question is not whether these systems are perfect; it’s whether they’re better than the alternative; and compared to a world built on broken promises from untrustworthy institutions? The answer is increasingly clear.
Conclusion: From Diagnosis to Cure
We’ve diagnosed the problem: our civilization is built on a foundation of lies, maintained by broken promises, and sustained by our willingness to continue trusting the demonstrably untrustworthy. This diagnosis is uncomfortable but necessary.
The cure is not to fix the liars, they cannot be fixed, and even if they could, the incentive structures that created them would simply produce new ones. The cure is to make lying irrelevant by building systems where truth is enforced by mathematics, transparency is guaranteed by cryptography, and promises are replaced by protocols.
You cannot make a good deal with a bad person. So stop trying. Instead, build systems where bad actors cannot break the deal even if they want to. Build systems where the rules are transparent, where changes require consensus, where no trusted party can rug pull the users.
This is the work of our generation: to construct trustless alternatives to every institution currently demanding our trust while proving itself unworthy of it. Not because we hate humanity, but because we love it enough to stop feeding it to wolves.
The broken promises will continue. The foundation of lies will continue to crack. Broken promises were inevitable because the foundation itself was broken. It’s time to stop repairing the cracks and start building on something solid. Something new that doesn’t require us to choose the lesser evil, to vote harder, to trust the next charismatic liar.
The future belongs to systems that assume human failure, not human perfection.
It’s time to build systems that work because they must, not because someone promised they would. And that makes all the difference.
