What does the Tao have to do with crypto?

Money IS Life!

The Tao is often translated as meaning the Way, or the Path, of harmonizing and balancing seemingly polar opposite forces. Referred to as Yin and Yang, feminine receptive energies and masculine generative energies. My realization has been that the unique perspective I bring to the crypto realm is one of understanding and being equally comfortable operating in both a private, unenumerated, underground manner, and a public, enumerated, above-ground manner.

Far too many in my opinion have become attached to operating in only one paradigm or the other, what I refer to as our Dark-Knight selves keeping to the shadows, and as our White-Knight selves keeping to the light. My realization has been that just as each side has the seed of its opposite within it when it reaches its peak, so must our Dark-Knight create and maintain at least one point of Light-side operations to move our private business endeavors into the public realm. And conversely our White-Knight selves would be wise to create and maintain a Dark-side portal to allow for moving public operations into the private realm.

The metaphor that I use to help me understand the various manifestations, of not only our personalities, but also our capital, is that there are 3 phase states that each may take. Many times our Chi is described by using water as a metaphor and likewise, so is our capital, as demonstrated by the terms, liquidity, volume, and flow or pools of capital. My realization is that just as water can take on a solid, liquid, or gaseous form, so does our money and our personalities. We have physical money that manifests as cash bills or coin, as liquid money manifesting as credits, debits, and bond contracts, and most recently manifesting in vapor form as cryptocurrency.

Another concept that I've come to understand when it comes to money is that we often hear money described by how it is used, i.e. as a unit of account, a store of value, & a medium of transfer of that value. Or by the traits that “good money” has been found to have, i.e. scarcity, divisibility, portability, durability, and fungibility. None of these descriptors actually tell us what money really is, and we often are taught a supposed Truth, (designed I believe to keep the poor and downtrodden, as the poor and downtrodden) the mistaken and incomplete quote often repeated that “money is the root of all evil” leaving out the 1st part of the sentence, “love of money above all else, is the root of all evil”…

What my personal experiences and ongoing studies of money, economics, and entrepreneurship have taught me is a very different truth that may not be well received by many, “Money is Life”, it is our Chi, our creative life-force over time made measurable, storable, and transferable. It is the exchange of our creative life forces that creates value in another’s life actually creating Money, not the issuance of debt notes through fiat fractional reserve banking, as is taught in mainstream economics courses. This language of value that the receiver of that transfer of Chi can recognize, reward, and balance the scales by transferring value back to the creator of that value through the measuring stick we call Money. In this manner our Money begins to mirror Speech, a data record of value in a ledger that can be physically transferred privately person-to-person through cash, privately by 3rd parties on paper ledgers, and now on publicly verifiable virtual distributed ledgers we call the blockchain.

Experience has taught me that in Life there almost always are one set of rules followed by the “Informed” and an entirely different set of rules followed by the “Uninformed”. The Golden Rule is interpreted by some to mean that “the one with the Gold makes the Rules”, those that have historically controlled the most money in the form of Gold have written the rules so that they may personally achieve and maintain their own personal privacy regarding their finances. And have written the rules so that those that do not have the resources to create and maintain private business structures are required to forfeit ALL financial privacy.

Most of those that have accumulated new found crypto wealth tend to imagine that their financial operations are finally private, yet they fail to realize that the very nature of a transparent, immutable, public blockchain means that unless one operates effectively at a Jason Bourne level of cybersecurity it is almost inevitable that those pseudo-anonymous wallet addresses can be de-anonymized by anyone with resources who decides to look into the transactional history, the devices, and access points used to record those transactions on the blockchain. Once our enumerated selves are connected to those wallet addresses our entire transactional history and the balances of those accounts are exposed in far more detail than our current banking account systems.

Understanding that, I have actually come to consider our cryptocurrency operations as the Public side of the coin, with our physical coin and cash transfers as the ONLY truly private transactions. The infatuation many technologists have with the new cryptocurrency capabilities often leads them to the belief that physical cash is obsolete and no longer has a place in the future of our business operations. What I believe that is often being missed, is that by combining the Old and the New money technologies we can truly achieve monetary freedom, privacy, and control over our measurements of value. This can be done by utilizing our own form of what has been known historically by the Informed as “Bearer Bonds”, that we create and load with value in the form of our own Paper Wallets. These Paper Wallets effectively act as digital versions of what our cash bills originally were, certificates of deposit representing the Gold or Silver kept in a secure deposit facility.

What I see happening as the “powers that be” attempt to co-opt the cryptocurrency revolution is that they are enacting capital controls by forcing our private physical cash to flow through their Paper systems so that our names and numbers can be attached to the virtual wallets storing and transferring our cryptocurrencies. The popular aphorism “there are 2 sides to every coin” is actually mistaken, there are actually 3 sides to every coin; heads, tails, and the edge between them. What is happening when we participate in the use of a centralized exchange and perform the KYC/AML documentation they are requiring is that our private cash operations are getting tagged so they can be tracked, taxed, and censored if we do not know how to move our Public money back into the Private realm. Doing so is possible by using coin mixers and the privacy coins but if one is not very proficient in one’s operational security protocols our devices and access points will still give our identities. Only by engaging in face-to-face peer-to-peer transactions physically handing over the private keys to our crypto can we bypass the Paper realm and anonymously transfer our own Crypto Bearer Bonds, as paper wallets created and used as a form of crypto money orders that we load, verify, and unload ourselves.

This is where I see the use of the historical tactics for private business operations coming into play, applying the principle that it is Control, not Ownership that truly matters. One of my favorite cartoons used to describe asset protection strategies depicts a millionaire in a top hat and tuxedo being driven in a limousine through the gates of a mansion estate, with a bum in rags on the sidewalk looking for handouts next to the entrance of that estate. The caption underneath reads, “What does the millionaire in the mansion and the bum on the street have in common? The answer is, Neither one OWNS anything!”. This leads to what I find very interesting about language, the tool that families maintaining their wealth for generations have used are referred to as Trusts. And for those that have been taking advantage of the new-found capability for trust-less transactions, trust becomes a form of capital that is rare, easily lost, and often never regained (just as is true anonymity and privacy)

When studying the rules written by those with the Gold, I have discovered that Trust entities themselves have both a Public and a Private form. By the IRS’s own admission any banking entity, which the centralized crypto exchanges basically are, there is a requirement for the documentation of the “Ultimate Beneficial Owners” of any statutory entity. BUT for non-statutory Trusts that exist only in private contract form and are never registered with any State entity there is NO requirement to discover anything more than the name and address of the Trustees!

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In Summary:

This brings me back to the point that our Public and our Private operations require a portal through which to move our capital through the Paper realm from crypto to cash and back again. By strategically creating layered and compartmentalized Trust entities, we can use a Public statutory Trust for business operations of our White-Knight selves and a Private contract Trust for privately holding titles to our physical assets such as our real estate, vehicles, and Whole Life insurance policies (historically used for creating and operating self-service Family Banking arrangements, but that is a topic deserving its own discussion). Only by recognizing that just as we have Physical selves, we also have Paper selves in the form of birth certificates, driver’s licenses, passports, and so on, as well as Virtual selves with our social media footprints, so does our Money exist as cash, credit, and crypto mirroring the phase states of water that takes on the form of ice, liquid, and vapor.

The recognition of our money as life energy made liquid, storable, and transferrable, and that it exists in various phase states each with its own benefits and liabilities, allows for one to harmonize the polarizing forces of Public and Private business operations. One of my Tai Chi teachers pointed out to me that balance does not just happen naturally, it must be purposefully created and actively maintained. This applies equally well to following the Way of Crypto, if we wish to achieve enduring stability in our financial operations we must actively balance our Public and Private endeavors and create what in Permaculture design we appropriately call “Invisible Structures”.

Becoming rigid in our mindsets and acting as maximalists in any manner does not lead to balance or lasting stability. We must become like water and adapt to the shape of the containers we use and create multiple vessels to operate our Chi exchange through.

Do not rigidly follow any doctrine, it is only by becoming privacy, platform, and currency agnostic that we follow The Way of Crypto!

I am the Taoist Cryptobanker and shall be sharing my perspectives on balancing public and private banking operations through this channel. As a long-time Tai Chi player I cannot help but interpret everything through the lens of the Tao and Yin/Yang theory. I'll be using this platform to share my insights into cryptobanking, cryptotrading, and occasionally my own personal chi kung and tai chi practices.

Follow me if you've any interest in any of those subjects, my instinctive method of operations is as an investigative researcher of technologies and I've not had cable TV for nearly 30 years now spending my time mostly reading instead of consuming mainstream programming. Instead I've been applying myself to studying longevity, movement, nutrition, excercise, and philosophy since 1991 and over the last couple years have dived deep into studying cryptocurrency, cybersecurity, trading for speculation and for hedging, and private banking arrangements. There will be more to follow on all these subjects in the days to come.