A few moments ago, MWC's first block was mined. We chose the start time of 9 am UTC on 11/11 because it's exactly 101 years after the Armistice agreement went into effect in France at 11 am (9 am UTC) in 1918 putting an end to World War 1. November 11th is Veterans Day in the United States and known internationally as a day of peace.
We believe that hard money, such as Bitcoin, makes it harder for Governments to fund wars and thus is a peaceful form of money. The 20th century was both a century of war and fiat currency. It's no coincidence that the fighting in WW1 started about a year after the founding of the Federal Reserve and that the Federal Reserve was involved in funding the war through war bonds and providing preferential rates to banks purchasing treasury certificates. When Governments can't print money, they have to go to their citizens to fund the wars through taxation and that's a lot harder because people are naturally peaceful and would rather see the money spent in their community.
So, what does this have to do with MWC? Well, if Bitcoin is to be adopted as a global reserve currency and it successfully starts to make it harder for nations to fund wars, it has to be really good. It has to be better than the existing fiat system. Today, I can make a wire transfer, for any amount and only the banks involved in the transaction will know about it. It's not published for the world to know. That's not the case with Bitcoin. Anyone who has subscribed to the whale alerts on twitter gets notified any time anyone sends a large amount of Bitcoin. To make matters worse, there are companies like Chainalysis that track the individual flows of Bitcoin. Their advanced analytics can unwind all but the most cautious Bitcoiner's transactions. Even if you take the steps to conceal your transactions, a single slip up and any point can reveal years worth of transactions. If you ever make an in person Bitcoin payment today, the person you are paying, can potentially see your net worth. That's not the case with a debit card. Either the amount debited is accepted or rejected, there's no change address. These issues cannot be resolved with the current proposals for opt-in privacy in Bitcoin and Litecoin because most people don't opt-in and those that do get more scrutiny as they are in the minority. We're not saying we have the one answer to these problems, but we're exploring. We hope the MWC experiment will encourage others to experiment as well and come up with many proposals to improve Bitcoin and that the market ultimately decides on which is the best one. That's as it should be.
But we fear that some Bitcoiners are scared of privacy and that they hope to "cozy up to regulators" by not supporting privacy and fungibility in the base layer of Bitcoin. That's not how Bitcoin works. Regulators will do anything to stop Bitcoin. They know they can't ban it, so they have to achieve their goals through other means. If regulators could shut down Bitcoin, they would have already done so, just like they shut down Liberty Reserve and other digital currencies that were centralized. All of Bitcoin's predecessors were shut down because they were operated by a central authority that could itself be shut down. In short, regulators are not our friends and we should not act in any way to appease them. On the contrary, we should do whatever is needed to make Bitcoin better. Mimblewimble is a powerful upgrade to Blockchain. It not only improves privacy and fungibility, but also improves scalability significantly. Right now, it's the clear choice and we are surprised that more Bitcoiners don't think it should be investigated to the fullest and developed to a point where it's ready to implement in the base layer of Bitcoin. That's ok, in time more and more will come to understand what we have been saying.
So, as I said in a previous article, "the same influences that wanted to ban gold in 1933 want to prevent Bitcoin from incorporating strong anonymity and privacy technology (i.e. Mimblewimble).". The launch of MWC is a message to them. We will NEVER allow that to happen. We will keep coding and working to promote strong privacy and anonymity technologies because that is how we maintain our financial sovereignty. As the old saying goes, Freedom isn't free and if we get complacent, we will not be able to keep it. If you think like us, support MWC by contributing to our project on github, telling others about the project, or hodling MWC.
In the coming days and weeks, we will be releasing a 4 part series of articles explaining the benefits of Mimblewimble and why it's so important for Bitcoin holders to understand it. We will make our full case and explain how MWC fits into the picture. And as a reminder, airdrop claims are scheduled to open on December 11, 2019.
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