The Declaration of Monetary Independence

In Cyberspace, July 4, 2026, and in Every Block Thereafter

The unanimous Declaration of the Sovereign Peers of the Bitcoin Network, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the monetary bands which have connected them with States, banks, central issuers, and privileged intermediaries, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature, of Mathematics, of Energy, and of Time entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all persons are created equal before the ledger; that they are endowed by their Creator, their conscience, and their proof of work with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, Property, Privacy, Self-Custody, the free exchange of value, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, monetary systems are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, the verification of the users, and the voluntary cooperation of those who choose to participate.

That whenever any Form of Money becomes destructive of these ends, whenever it debases labor, confiscates time, conceals taxation, rewards proximity to power, finances war without consent, or converts savings into melting ice, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Money, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Security, Sovereignty, and Peace.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Monetary Systems long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the currencies to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce mankind under absolute financial dependency, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Money, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of savers, workers, builders, families, dissidents, activists, refugees, entrepreneurs, conscientious objectors, and free peoples; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Money.

The history of the present fiat regime is a history of repeated injuries and breaches of trust, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over time, labor, property, and exchange. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

It has refused its Assent to the most wholesome and necessary principle of money: that no ruler, committee, sovereign, banker, or emergency should possess the arbitrary power to create claims upon the labor of others without their consent.

It has forbidden the people to save in a unit whose supply is fixed, whose rules are known, whose ledger is auditable, and whose issuance is not subject to the passions of men.

It has imposed upon future generations debts to which they never consented, and then called the burden prosperity, stimulus, liquidity, rescue, and growth.

It has erected a multitude of new offices, bureaus, mandates, forms, disclosures, surveillance regimes, and compliance engines, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our transactions and eat out our substance.

It has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies of financial intermediaries, gatekeepers, rent-seekers, censors, custodians, and credit allocators, without the consent of the people whose labor gives their notes value.

It has affected to render the monetary power independent of, and superior to, the civil power; a fourth branch without election, a priesthood without confession, a throne without crown, a printing press without restraint, a Cantillon exorbitant privilege without constraint.

It has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our consent and unacknowledged by our conscience, giving its assent to their Acts of pretended legislation:

For protecting banks by bailouts, against the consequences of their own errors;

For quartering debt upon the household balance sheets of free people;

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world whenever our transactions offend the policies of those who neither know us nor represent us;

For imposing silent taxes on us without our consent;

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of final settlement;

For transporting our purchasing power beyond seas to fund wars, debts, deficits, and dependencies;

For abolishing the free system of exchange in favor of licensed corridors, privileged rails, and trusted third parties;

For taking away our charters of self-custody, abolishing our most valuable laws of property, and altering fundamentally the forms of our monetary sovereignty;

For suspending our own judgment, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

It has abdicated Government here by declaring us incapable of holding our own keys and preserving our own time, energy, and value.

It has plundered our savings, ravaged our purchasing power, burnt the future, and destroyed the lives of our people through inflation, debt, debasement, and compulsory dependence.

It is at this time transporting large Armies of debt, credit, and war finance to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of a free people.

It has constrained our fellow Citizens to become instruments of their own impoverishment, to borrow what should have been saved, to speculate where they should have stored value, to chase yield where they should have possessed property, and to pay interest upon money created from nothing.

It has excited domestic divisions amongst us, turning citizen against citizen, class against class, party against party, debtor against saver, present against future, and worker against wage, while hiding the common wound: broken money.

It has made price signals false, corrupted the language of value, and converted the unit of account into a political fiction.

It has punished prudence and rewarded leverage.

It has socialized losses and privatized profits.

It has treated money not as a measure, but as a weapon; not as a language of human action, but as an instrument of command.

It has rendered saving irrational, debt irresistible, speculation compulsory, and time preference high.

It has made war easier to begin and harder to end by funding violence through inflation, borrowing, and monetary concealment.

It has transformed taxation without representation into debasement without comprehension.

It has forced the poor to hold melting money while the powerful stand closest to the spigot of new credit.

It has converted the bank account into a loan to the bank, the pension into a promise from a politician, and the currency into a debt instrument from a government.

It has compelled the free person to ask permission to transact, permission to save, permission to move, permission to speak value across distance.

It has mistaken surveillance for safety, compliance for virtue, custody for protection, and control for order.

It has presumed that people cannot be trusted with freedom, while demanding that all people trust the institutions that have repeatedly failed them.

It has declared that money requires faith in rulers, when the age now proves that money may rest upon verification, consensus, energy, and code.

In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms. We have voted. We have saved. We have worked. We have paid. We have complied. We have endured. We have watched committees convene, experts pronounce, bankers rescue bankers, and politicians promise discipline while printing tomorrow into yesterday.

Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

A monetary power whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a system of financial dependence is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our fiat brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their regulators and central bankers to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over our savings. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our common labor and common fate. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity. We have conjured them by the ties of blood, commerce, conscience, and posterity to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.

They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.

We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind: Enemies in monetary coercion, Friends in voluntary exchange.

We, therefore, the Sovereign Peers of the Bitcoin Network, in General Consensus assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People who verify, mine, build, save, transact, and hold their own keys, solemnly publish and declare:

That these Peers are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent Economic Actors;

That they are Absolved from all Allegiance to fiat monopoly, central issuance, fractional-fictional reserve privilege, coerced debasement, and the false necessity of trusted third parties;

That all monetary connection between them and arbitrary issuers is, and ought to be, totally dissolved;

And that as Free and Independent Peers, they have full Power to save, send, receive, verify, mine, run nodes, hold keys, publish code, audit supply, reject invalid blocks, establish channels, form markets, make peace, contract value, adjust difficulty, and do all other Acts and Things which free monetary persons may of right do.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Providence, Mathematics, Open Source, Proof of Work, and the Nakamoto Consensus, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, our sacred Honor, our private keys, our full nodes, our honest blocks, and our low time preference.

We pledge to verify, not trust.

We pledge to obey rules without rulers.

We pledge to defend a money no one can print, a ledger no one can alter alone, a network no one can own, and a protocol anyone can join.

We pledge to secure monetary finality, promote the general conservation of energy and currency, provide for the common defense against debasement, and secure the blessings of economic liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

We pledge to preserve Twenty-One Million.

We pledge to protect censorship resistance.

We pledge to keep the source open.

We pledge to keep access permissionless.

We pledge to keep ownership pseudonymous.

We pledge to keep all sats equal.

We pledge to keep confirmed history immutable.

We pledge that no crown, no Congress, no committee, no central bank, no corporation, no custodian, no consortium, no church, no emergency, and no priesthood of experts shall stand between a human being and the peaceful possession of the value they have earned.

For money is not the root of evil.

Broken money is.

Easy money is.

Debt without consent is.

Inflation without representation is.

War financed by debasement is.

Credit made from nothing and collected with interest is.

We therefore separate Money and State.

We choose proof of work over proof of war.

We choose consensus over coercion.

We choose final settlement over endless debt.

We choose private property over political privilege.

We choose open networks over closed empires.

We choose the metric system of value over the imperial system of fiat.

We choose an indestructible bank in every mind, a public ledger for every people, and a peaceful exit for every conscience.

We choose a sly roundabout way to introduce a good money that they can’t stop.

We choose money by the people, of the people, and for the people.

We choose Bitcoin.

Tick tock, next block.