The progression of human history is essentially the story of the unending battle between power and liberty. The terms “good and evil” are often used when making these very broad strokes statements, but those terms breed disagreement and everyone sees them differently. Power vs liberty, on the other hand, is easily definable. Power is the ability to force people through violence or the threat of violence to do what they otherwise wouldn’t or vice versa. Liberty is the ability of people to do whatever they want without exercising power.

Human history progresses in jumps rather than gradually. It’s the crazy people who really run the world, pushing history forward in the sense of outsized contributions to humanity. When I say crazy I mean people like Da Vinci, Volta, Tesla, Faraday, Edison, Einstein, Jobs, all people who were so insanely productive that it boggles the mind how they accomplished what they accomplished and still had time to sleep. When history takes a real great leap forward due to the genius of the few, living standards improve. The quality of life gets better for everyone.

And then power comes in and tries to tax it and regulate it and take as much of the pie as it can for itself so it can spend it trying to conquer other governments by destroying capital and savings anywhere on the planet. This battle between power and liberty will continue indefinitely until human history ends, so whatever great innovations have been made by the latest genius who has pushed human history forward, power will make its attempt to tax it and regulate it and control it in order to fund more conquering.

Yesterday, Australian professor Dr. Craig Wright confirmed to the world that he is the inventor of bitcoin. Like most geniuses, it is an open question whether he has any time to sleep. At 45, he holds two PhDs and eight Masters Degrees, is studying for a ninth in finance, all while inventing the world’s first and most successful cryptocurrency and holding who knows how many jobs over the years. Not surprisingly, immediately after revealing himself, Power in the form of the Aussie government came and raided his home in a “tax investigation”.