How My Generation is Getting Screwed Once AgainDavid Seaman Were one of the first generations since the Great Depression that is expected to live a lower quality of life than our parents. Significantly lower. We all got suckered into paying $160,000 we didnt have for a piece of paper that entitles us to apply for a bunch of entry level jobs that dont even want us on account of our lack of experience. Entry level receptionist or social media position. 3-5 years experience required. The US job market is crazier than one of Jigsaws rusty machinations. So now theres a generation of us, walking around in a debt daze, unable to start families on time or leave the nest or invest in new businessesor do any of the things that Americans in their late twenties and early thirties should be up to. The war machine fucked us. The banks fucked us. And yes, the media fucked us: by failing to acknowledge these problems exist, instead were all jovial Paul Rudd slackers who move back home or remain unemployed by choicehaha, alrighty then. My generation never thought wed have to protest anything. This is America. But when you only have debts and long-term unemployment and some of your friends are coming back in body bags from Afghanistan and Iraq and the media doesnt really explain why except MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, protest doesnt sound so crazy anymore. The federal government did an impressive job of disabling the hacktivists by striking fear into their Tor-loving hearts. Anything you do on a keyboard today, some old J. Edgar Hoover type can drag up a law from the 1970s or early 80slaws clearly designed for people like Pablo Escobar, not peaceful Internet activistsand find a way to put you in a cage, so you no longer have a voice. Examples: Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond, and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz. The latter committed suicide by hanging himself, as he was facing decades behind bars if convicted for a crime that had no victim. I dont think this cheerful public tech personality just decided out of the blue to hang himself. Its quite clear the legal harassment drove him to end his lifeit first drained his finances, then his morale, and finally his confidence in the future. Occupy and the Tea Party fell victim to a combination of government infiltration and good old fashioned mission creep: Occupy became too full of itself. The Tea Party became part Water World, part Koch Brothers shill factory, and part convenient way for old school GOPers to pretend to be something new and different. So, without any judgment on what these organizations accomplished or did not accomplish, I think its fair to say they are neutered at this point. Something else emerged parallel and yet separate from all of this: Bitcoin. Globally decentralized currency thats fair because every line of its code is open source, able to be reviewed and built upon by anyone with the interest and the time. The media keeps painting Bitcoin as precarious and unfair to distract us from the core fact we arent supposed to learn: cryptocurrency is one of the most radically fair things humans have ever created. Comparing central bank issued government currency to a digital cryptocurrency running according to impartial algorithm is like comparing a witch doctor ceremony to a modern operating room. There is no comparison. Make no mistake: the technology that runs Bitcoin is one giant Fuck you to the corrupt banking establishment that drove my generation into debt, foreclosed on our parents generation, and has the nerve to take money from the Fed practically for free and loan it out to us at a 20% mark-up but only if youre a good boy or girl with a perfect credit rating and assets. Over the last few weeks, many have noticed what appears to be a shift in government policy toward Bitcoin. I think they are trying to crush it, by offering regulatory guidance that is so contradictory no honest business entity or individual user will be able to stay on the right side of the law. (More specifically, the Treasury Departments FinCEN is treating Bitcoin as currency, complete with all the cumbersome KYC/AML requirements currency transmission requires while the Treasury Departments tax collectors at the IRS have ruled Bitcoin is property and not currency at all, meaning the accounting and recordkeeping for this electronic non-currency has now gone beyond the point of practicality). This is unacceptable, and we need to speak up. If the idea of cryptocurrency fails in the United States, because no one can afford to remain in compliance, two things will happen: In a sense what the government is doing is like that Greek myth about the king who receives prophecy his son will grow up to kill himso he exiles the son to a distant kingdom. In so doing, he seals his own fate: years later, the son kills his father in battle, because he doesnt know what his father looks like. We are trying very hard to make this work, to peacefully improve the state of the world through more fair technology and more distributed networks for transferring and recording financial value. If that is taken away, I dont think the average person will have anything left to lose. The government has set itself up as an adversary of the common citizen, which I dont understand. When the IRS Lois Lerner pleaded the Fifth before the House oversight committee, that was a wake up call. It made my stomach turn. IRS officials shouldnt be pleading the Fifth when asked if they are involved in political targeting and harassment of citizens: the answer should be a clear no. When the Director of National Intelligence lied to the American people while testifying before Congress, that was another wake up call. When Obama unveiled his much awaited NSA reforms earlier this weekand it only applied to landlines, not our cell phones, text messages, Facebook accounts or Twitter activityanother wake up call. Who are these people? And what do they have to gain by turning the American people into an enemy? What do they have to gain by keeping us shut out of what could be an enormous new growth sector of the economy? The government has already spent a ludicrous amount of time kneecapping Bitcoin, yet lets real financial hucksters like HSBC off the hook (whose executives knowingly laundered as much as $670 BILLION! 67 times Bitcoins entire market capitalization). Again, I dont understand. Bitcoin and whatever currencies come after it cannot be stopped. The governments complex approach only hurts American businesses and consumers, and will lead to less tax revenue for the government itself, because people are becoming afraid to use Bitcoin. With such a hostile government stance toward innovation, it makes it very hard for the US to remain the birthplace of companies like HP, Microsoft, and Apple. Steve Jobs built computers in his garagetoday thats probably a crime. Unlicenced computer manufacturing, and lets throw in a CFAA violation or twohows life in prison sound? Were becoming a ludicrous Ayn Randian short story filled with vindictive regulator fiefdoms and unelected IRS thugs and NSA agents who spy on their own fellow citizens using euphemisms like two hop analysis to describe what is, without question, a wholesale violation of millions of our private communications. I hope we wake up in time. These are not American values. The government needs to provide decisive leadership on Bitcoin: its either a currency or a property. The community can find a way to comply with either of those categorizationsbut cant be treated as both, because that makes no sense. And its hypocritical for President Obama to call for all students to learn computer code, when those who do so face prosecution under the anti-computer, archaic CFAA and see their digital currency businesses face destruction from agencies like the IRS. Maybe Obama should be calling on every student to become an oil company lobbyist or NSA snoop, because those seem to be far more certain career paths in America at the moment. 