ANALOG REBELS IN DIGITAL TIMES. THEY WERE BORN TOO SOON. If Lysander Spooner, Henry David Thoreau, and Samuel Edward Konkin III were alive in 2025, they wouldn't use banks or touch Bitcoin. They would laugh at KYC and embrace a single tool. For them, privacy wasn't a “feature,” it was the only form of resistance. Let's see why they would choose $XMR. -Lysander Spooner: The Enemy of the State. For him, the government was literally a band of robbers. He challenged the postal monopoly to prove that the state was unnecessary. Today: He would use Monero not for business, but to nullify monetary authority. If the state controls your money, it owns you. Monero takes that power away. His logic: “The constitution has no authority.” $XMR is anarchy in code. -Henry David Thoreau: The Fiscal Ghost. He was imprisoned for not financing the state with his taxes. Today: I wouldn't just go to a booth, but I would be walking the streets with a non-custodial wallet. Cash is devalued, and banks are snitches for the state. For Thoreau, modern civil disobedience is financial. His “Walden” today would be a Monero seed phrase: unreachable and invisible. -Samuel Konkin III (SEK3): The Shadow Architect. The father of Agorism and counter-economics. Today: He would consider Bitcoin and its public ledger to be the IRS's wet dream. Doing counter-economics on a transparent blockchain? No way. Konkin would choose Monero because it is the only technology that fulfills the agorist promise: undetectable commerce and zero accountability. These guys dreamed of tools that didn't exist in their time. We are lucky to have them at our fingertips. Spooner, Thoreau, and Konkin wouldn't ask for permission. They would use $XMR and let the system do the talking. Freedom is not asked for; it is exercised.
Spooner vs. Thoreau: Two sides of the same coin. Lysander Spooner (the lawyer) stayed in the city, using cold "legal logic" to try and declare the State unconstitutional. Henry David Thoreau (the philosopher) retreated to the woods, appealing to "moral conscience" to reject the State.
Most people think of cryptocurrencies as the price of tokens. I think of money, which is why I think of XMR.