But the tech underlying bitcoin will have to become easy enough to use so that Andreas Antonopoulos's mom can swipe her finger to complete a transaction.

Bitcoin was designed to become entirely centralized but that control will be obfuscated by the anonymity of mining. That causes me to believe that the very elite we think we are fighting are perhaps the ones who designed Bitcoin.

Steem and any form of proof-of-stake are also centralized by the power-law distribution of wealth.

Our plight may be natural and preordained by natural laws such as the inability to form a fungible consensus that remains decentralized (although I have a new consensus algorithm design which I hope may overcome this but I am not certain).

I do however doubt their ability to succeed long term […] I've written in my blog that I think that the world achieves freedom because of the 3rd world.

I hope so but I live in the Philippines and I observe the people are embracing socialism. They want the government to provide more and more services and universal medical care. They are not at all concerned about rising taxation. And they do not at all identify with the problems in the devolution of the West. They are fighting to get their piece of happiness in the harsh economic conditions their grandparents and parents fought.

The global elite are much too smart to make such a fundamental error. If we’re to disintermediate them, it will require cleverness they didn’t anticipate.

Once I released my last project in 2016 (Delphic Oracle XPF), I started looking at cryptography again. This brought me finally to take bitcoin seriously (which was about the 3rd time I'd been admonished to buy).

In 2008 and 2009, I was manufacturing silver 1 oz rounds and selling them to Risto Pietilä for his silver business in Finland. I was more wealthy than him holding at one time 18,000 oz of silver (some rough estimate may not be entirely accurate). I even publicly predicted silver would go from $22 to $48 several months before it did.

I had become aware of Bitcoin sometime in 2009 or 2010 afair. I was also working on a similar concept before Bitcoin was announced and even publicly wrote about it (it is on gold-eagle.com but I don’t have time to dig up the link right now).

So when Risto approached me in 2010 or 2011 suggesting that we both sell silver and buy BTC at roughly $3, I was ignoring him because in the interim time my health had started to decline (swollen feet like papayas, low energy, feeling weak, etc). I nearly died of an acute peptic ulcer that suddenly burst in May 2012. People routinely die in the Philippines from conditions that are rarely fatal in the U.S.A. such as burst appendix. After that incident, my health went into a tailspin and I was acting as if I was in flight-or-fight mode so I made a very poor investment decision and lost $75,000 making a short bet on China (following some promoter named Graham Summers that I discovered on ZeroHedge).

So when Risto approached me in January 2013 and said he was going to sell $100,000 of silver and buy BTC at $10, I told him to do it and that it looked like it was about to explode upwards in price. He urged me to do the same, but I told him that my kids had been yanked from the Philippines and suddenly my expenses had increased because of that and that I had lost $75,000 and that my health was declining and I didn’t even have medical insurance. So I told him I was not going to risk the $100,000 or so I still had in savings.

So Risto went on to become a $10 millionaire within a year. He’s the guy who bought a castle in Estonia with $1 million in BTC. And I became more and more ill and depleted my savings which was all that remained from my CoolPage.com software business which had generated more than $million in revenues but had died by that juncture.

I didn’t discover I had Tuberculosis (confirmed in my left lung and on a gold standard blood test) until I managed to get funding to go to Singapore for testing in January 2017. Steem actually provided $6000 in funding for me in 2016. I had no coughing or symptoms of pulmonary TB. Actually it was never confirmed if the TB was in my gut, I just assume it was also there, because of my symptoms. By that time, my liver and spleen had MRI-confirmed cysts all over them and these don’t seem to heal quickly or possibly they never heal and it only gets worse. I am battling this now. I completed the 6 months of highly liver toxic antibiotics as of June 2017. Slowly trying to grind my health back with exercise and eating for example a lot of spinach, but the liver and spleen cysts may or may not go away. The effect of these cysts is to remove all the energy that the human body and brain need to function normally. I often feel like I am totally exhausted (as in no energy to bend over to take shoes off) and drunk/discombobulated/delirium/asleep-while-awake. Surgery for removing cysts can be fatal or the outcome can be worse than the cysts. And the surgery is often not successful in preventing the cysts from coming back. Thus it isn’t advised to do surgery unless the symptoms are dire.