I sometimes open a random paper book to a random page for a spark of inspiration, or just to break the trance of staring at my screens (mostly hoping problems solve themselves). This morning, I opened The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg and read:
First in scores, then in hundreds, and ultimately in the millions, individuals will escape the shackles of politics. As they do, they will transform the character of governments, shrinking the realm of compulsion and widening the scope of private control over resources.
It struck a deep chord inside me. Here we are in November 2025, and we’re just in the “hundreds” phase. XmrBazaar has ~5.7K real users: people actually opting out, building a Monero Circular Economy, not just trading funny imaginary virtual tokens between themselves. This is the cybereconomy the authors predicted back in 1997, over a decade before Bitcoin’s white paper:
…much of the world’s commerce will migrate into the new realm of cyberspace, a region where governments will have no more dominion than they exercise over the bottom of the sea or the outer planets. In cyberspace, the threats of physical violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish. In cyberspace, the meek and the mighty will meet on equal terms. Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction. An economy with no taxes. Bermuda in the sky with diamonds. When this greatest tax haven of them all is fully open for business, all funds will essentially be offshore funds at the discretion of their owner. This will have cascading consequences. The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings.
Do you see what I see? Being among these first hundreds of cypherpunk pioneers (future millions strong!) filled me with a grateful happy smile this morning. Yet this joy is shadowed by a profound and terrifying sorrow: there will be martyrs — victims of a desperate state apparatus — among us, like the Samourai devs, facing max sentences from the US government, or Roger Ver, held for ransom. We’re living out that dire warning from 1997:
Lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, governments, even in traditionally civil countries, will turn nasty. As income tax becomes uncollectable, older and more arbitrary methods of exaction will resurface. The ultimate form of withholding tax–de facto or even overt hostage-taking will be introduced by governments desperate to prevent wealth from escaping beyond their reach. Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval fashion.
Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption.
Arbitrary forfeiture of property, already commonplace in the United States, where it occurs five thousand times a week, will become even more pervasive. Governments will violate human rights, censor the free flow of information, sabotage useful technologies, and worse. For the same reasons that the late, departed Soviet Union tried in vain to suppress access to personal computers and Xerox machines, western governments will seek to suppress the cybereconomy by totalitarian means.
Yet, here’s the good news for all of us, backed by math, human brain studies, and another spot-on prediction from James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg:
…we all stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nationstate, creating new forms of social organization in the process. This will be far from an easy transformation. The challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happen with incredible speed compared with anything seen in the past.
Exactly: it IS speeding up. Check this chart of XmrBazaar’s real users (counted only after PGP key setup, since bots can’t PGP... yet). Doesn’t it look like a perfect exponential curve?
Exponential growth is our secret weapon: not just for markets, but because states won’t spot the threat until it’s way too late. As Albert A. Bartlett said:
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
We humans are notoriously bad at wrapping our heads around exponential growth, and luckily, politicians aren’t even our sharpest minds ;) Here are three classic riddles to prove it (sharing in case you haven’t seen them yet), because grasping exponentials might be the most underlearned lesson in history.
Bacteria Doubling Riddle: A Petri dish starts with a smattering of bacteria. Every second, their numbers double. The dish fills completely after one minute. When was it half full?
Paper Folding Riddle: Grab a sheet of paper and fold it in half. Then fold it again. If you could keep at it 50 times, how thick do you think it’d end up? ;)
Chessboard Wheat Riddle: Perhaps the oldest tale of exponential growth hails from ancient India. Legend has it a king offered the chess inventor any reward for such a marvelous game. The inventor asked for one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard (64 squares total), two on the second, four on the third, and so on — doubling each time. How many grains at the end?
I won’t spoil the answers here: you can easily search them or ask an AI. But I love this 2-minute excerpt from the IBM film Mathematics Peepshow (guaranteed pre-AI era) on the chessboard legend:
Imagine those bacteria with a brain: they’d panic way too late. Now try to imagine those politicians with a brain (I know it’s much harder): same story — by the time they wake up, we’ve already won.
So, please, look around and appreciate your fellow Monero Circular Economy pioneers. We’re the early birds. Support each other as the angry farmer (the state) starts hobbling the herd with desperate tricks.
Like an angry farmer, the state will no doubt take desperate measures at first to tether and hobble its escaping herd. It will employ covert and even violent means to restrict access to liberating technologies. Such expedients will work only temporarily, if at all. The twentiethcentury nationstate, with all its pretensions, will starve to death as its tax revenues decline.
That XmrBazaar growth chart really shows the power of people voting with their wallets for actual privacy. The exponential curve is beautful when you realize states won't even notice until it's way past the tipping point. Those bacteria riddles nail why this approach works better than trying to convince politicians.
That XmrBazaar growth chart really shows the power of people voting with their wallets for actual privacy. The exponential curve is beautful when you realize states won't even notice until it's way past the tipping point. Those bacteria riddles nail why this approach works better than trying to convince politicians.