Bitcoin's Sons of Liberty

Coin Geek

01-07-2025

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This week, America again drapes itself in red, white, and blue.
We'll wave flags, ignite fireworks, and watch fighter jets streak overhead to celebrate our so-called Independence Day. But like most things, the popular story is a cleaner, sanitized version of the hidden truth.
We're taught the Revolution was sparked by a trifling tax on tea—which is not entirely untrue—or that a ragtag band of patriots threw off the yoke of tyranny in a single glorious summer. What we don't mention is that today, the average American surrenders more than half of their income to a government that props up military bases in 80 countries and funds both sides of nearly every war on earth. All while we cheer and toast our 'freedoms' or 'spreading freedom.'
But July 4, 1776, wasn't magic.
It was the violent culmination of decades of resentment: the debt from the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Boston Massacre… It was mobs dumping East India Company tea into the harbor. It was the First Continental Congress unsure how to even coordinate a militia. It was Lexington and Concord, and finally, Thomas Jefferson's pen slashing ink across paper in a defiant break with the greatest empire the world had ever seen while Ben Franklin and John Adams dictated anecdotes about freedom from tyranny!
The war that followed was unpopular. Loyalists preferred stability over liberty. Pacifists prayed for calm. Many farmers simply wanted to be left alone. The Founding Fathers themselves were a patchwork of contradictions. John Adams was a stern Puritan lawyer. His cousin Sam was a brewer and professional agitator who spent his time pamphleting and making fun of British soldiers in public.
'If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude more than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace.
We ask not your counsels nor your arms.
Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you.
May your chains rest lightly upon you, and may… — Naval (@naval) September 27, 2024
Ben Franklin was a printer, a wit, and a legendary womanizer in France. Patrick Henry thundered about liberty or death from the pulpit. George Washington was a stoic, aristocratic Brit who was a slaveholding land baron who reluctantly took up the general's sword. John Hancock was a merchant and smuggler. The British would likely have called him a pirate, and he signed his name large enough on the Declaration of Independence so that King George could read it 'without spectacles!'
.@pmarca on @joerogan:
'Ben Franklin printed newspapers before he was in govt. He had 15 pseudonyms. He was a pseud, an anon. He would have them argue with each other w/o telling people it was him.'
Nothing's changed. Burners and alt even then. Today's BF tweets among us! pic.twitter.com/jblRwqNpvl — JT (@jiratickets) November 27, 2024
They didn't share a monolithic faith or a single economic theory. They were Protestants, Catholics, Freemasons, deists, and even skeptics. But they all agreed on one core truth:
The Crown was wrong, and liberty was worth dying for.
Here's where my historian's heart breaks
The Revolution was short-lived. From 1783 to roughly 1789, the former colonies operated as truly independent states, loosely knit under the Articles of Confederation. Each was a sovereign little republic. But the old dream died quickly. The Constitutional Convention—originally convened just to tweak the Articles—turned into a quiet coup d'etat. Many founders, horrified at the power grabs proposed, walked out. The rest were locked in until they emerged with a compromise: a powerful central government, a Supreme Court designed to be an unaccountable aristocracy, the right to levy taxes, and eventually, the machinery for a central bank.
To sell it, they dangled the Bill of Rights, but it was a thin guarantee against abuses they knew were inevitable. The propaganda was masterful. The Federalists won. And the Revolution, in many ways, was lost right in front of the men who had won it just a few years earlier.
Before the United States Constitution was ratified, the Founding Fathers famously debated the merits and problems of the newly proposed government in a series of public essays that came to be known as the Federalist and Antifederalist Papers.
In this animated documentary,… pic.twitter.com/9QejwANH7l — Federalist Society (@FedSoc) September 21, 2023
In truth, the real Independence lasted less than a decade.
Back then, pamphlets were the blockchain of rebellion. Ben Franklin published scathing essays under aliases like 'Silence Dogood.' Others wrote as 'Brutus,' 'Cato,' 'Federal Farmer,' and 'Centinel' as they lambasted the overreach of the Constitution and Federalists like Alexander Hamilton. Sam Adams flooded Boston with incendiary broadsheets and cartoons. Thomas Paine's Common Sense lit colonial minds like dry tinder. The Sons of Liberty weren't just throwing tea in the harbor. They were plastering their peers with big ideas without tiring. They understood that to defeat the Crown, they had to own the narrative, and to do it, they had to print it themselves.
But The Sons of Liberty weren't just polite dissidents. They were a band of agitators who understood that fear could be as persuasive as reason. Beyond the famous Boston Tea Party, they ransacked loyalist businesses, smashed the windows of customs officers, erected effigies of tax collectors to burn in the streets, and carried out public tar-and-featherings that left men scarred for life, an early form of political theater that doubled as savage intimidation.
This 1774 British illustration depicts the Sons of Liberty tarring and feathering a loyalist tax collector. Good times. pic.twitter.com/Hx7Kzkyoib — The Free State Project (@FreeStateNH) December 13, 2023
In New York, they pulled down a statue of King George III, melted the lead, and cast it into bullets to fire back at British troops. In Rhode Island, they outright burned the HMS Gaspee, a British customs schooner, after luring it aground, which was an act of maritime sabotage that prefigured the full-scale war to come. Their defiance was messy, angry, and often brutal. It was proof that revolutions aren't sparked by polite letters alone, but by men willing to cross the line when justice demands it, and they were clearly crossing that line!
Today
And here we are, centuries later, with a new empire of surveillance and debt. We carry spy devices in our pockets. We pour our lives into social media platforms that will happily censor, demonetize, or algorithmically bury our speech. We bank at institutions that can freeze us at a keystroke.
So I repeat what I've always said: own your own data. In this age of artificial intelligence (AI), where LLMs scrape and remix without credit, where deepfakes blur truth, where centralized servers hold your entire digital life hostage, self-sovereignty isn't optional. It's survival.
Bitcoin was supposed to solve this. It was supposed to decentralize trust, let us transact without middlemen, let us record truth immutably. But BTC betrayed that dream. It became an investment vehicle for institutions, a 'strategic reserve' for big government, a speculative asset chained to ETFs and Wall Street approval…
It's BSV that still holds the original spark: unbounded block size, microtransactions at fractions of a cent, and a stable protocol that's set in stone so developers can build without gatekeepers. It's where you can permanently publish data, filter for facts, and build tools that don't bow to Silicon Valley or Washington. It's a ledger that can be searched, timestamped, and proven: censorship-resistant speech in a world that desperately needs it.
The Founders fought over everything amongst each other, but they unified when they saw tyranny. They didn't wait for consensus. They didn't wait for a poll to tell them it was popular. They threw their lot in, risked the hangman's noose, and went to war. Not because it was profitable. In fact, most lost everything.
Patrick Henry's star continued to rise as his oratorical style attracted supporters to the cause of liberty.
His most famous speech, at the Second Virginia Convention, agitated for freedom from the Crown (though without specificity of how that might be achieved).
5/8 pic.twitter.com/VOrk4bhxOB — joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) (@JoshuaSteinman) June 14, 2025
But because liberty was worth losing everything for.
So what are we waiting for? If we're the children of the Sons of Liberty, it's time to act like it. Stop treating Bitcoin like a stock ticker and start building tools that empower people. Stop waiting for permission to print your ideas. Use the chain. Start businesses. Store truth that can't be erased, and spread the inconvenient truths about Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big BTC that they have been trying to bury!
Because only when we stand firmly against the new Crown (the Fed, the SEC, the White House, Blockstream and Chaincode Labs, or the astroturf cult of small blockers) will we earn the right to celebrate true independence again.
Less fireworks. More fire in our hearts.
Watch: Power, Protocol, and Protection with Mitch Burcham