Modernization is not in the government’s best interests because that will lead to less funding, more transparency, and less control.
March 10, 2025
By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP
It’s crazy to think that the US could be such a hub for innovation, have the Silicon Valley where technology is moving at the speed of light, and still be so antiquated in areas that make no sense.
What is the reluctance of the US government to modernize its operations? Well, it would mean less bloat, less funding, fewer employees, more transparency, and consequently less control mechanisms by which to manipulate people. One major relics the government will fight tooth and nail to defend is the fiat currency system, and the idea of a country being the reserve currency of the world.
In other words, modernization is not in the government’s best interests.
Examples of Outdated Government Systems
Remember “The Mine” in Pennsylvania with all the federal employee retiree records? It’s nearly 50 years old now. We wrote about it in 2014, and at that time it was a $55.8 million system. Imagine what it is 11 years later.
“The staff working in the mine has increased by at least 200 people in the past five years. And the cost of processing each claim has increased from $82 to $108, as total spending on the retirement system reached $55.8 million.”
We can complain about the manual nature of this process, but when the government tries to digitize or modernize anything, they manage to make things worse. Look no further than the debacle that is healthcare.gov or computerized voting that is totally unaccountable.
The DOGE team recently ran into issues with the programming language COBOL in the Social Security Administration. This is still used in large mainframe computer systems, but it’s barely taught. It’s like the Gaelic of programming languages. Some can still speak it, there are those trying to preserve it, and so they teach it, but English has largely replaced it. In COBOL’s case, it’s being replaced by Java, Python, and Cobalt.
And lest we forget the United States’ arcane air traffic control system. OOMPH. If you have a fear of flying, it’s best not to know how this particular sausage is made. But, sufficient to say, they are still using floppy disks and paper flight strips to manage American airspace. Compound that with the dubious hiring restrictions which has kept the FAA chronically understaffed, you have a shocking amount of near misses happening regularly.
Modernizing any of this would be a major undertaking, but we’re dealing with a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats who think the broken window fallacy is sound economic policy. What would become of the jobs? What would become of all the dark administrative corners where money mysteriously goes and is never accounted for? Indeed, modernization is not in the government’s best interests.
Fair Warning… or Ver Warning… or Fair Verning?
Roger Ver is someone worth remembering. I would liken him to Ross Ulbricht in that the US government is making an example of him because he challenged the status quo. Remember, it’s not just Ross. It’s Julian Assange, the Branch Davidians of Waco, Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge all have been targeted by the US government to warn Americans what it means to challenge the government.
We wrote about Roger Ver last year, in fact. He ran as a libertarian candidate in California in the early 2000s. During his campaign, he called the ATF and FBI murderers for the incident at Waco. It hadn’t even been ten years since the incident. Next thing he knew, he was being charged with selling fireworks without a license and threatened with seven years in prison. The offense wasn’t for the fireworks themselves as plenty of other vendors were selling them. He simply didn’t have a license to do so.
He took a plea and served ten months. He then proceeded to start the process of severing ties with the US, and later began advocating for Bitcoin. He was at the ground level of all the Bitcoin activity, investing in various crypto and blockchain projects, including Kraken, purse.io, Blockchain.com, bitcoinstore.com, and Ripple, he’s best-known for managing Bitcoin.com from 2015-19.
He even went on the record with Tucker Carlson saying he sold his Lamborghini so he could buy more Bitcoin. He’s a true believer in alternative, and competitive currencies, to the point of evangelizing it, which is how he got his moniker “Bitcoin Jesus”.
He didn’t spend much time in the US, and eventually became a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis in 2014. He wrote a book called “Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC” in 2024, and coincidentally now is out on bail in Spain waiting to see if he’ll be extradited back to the US to serve up to 109 years in prison for tax evasion. The charges were leveled on activity that took place after he’d already renounced citizenship.
No one is safe from the US tax regime, as it turns out.
He contends that the vision to make Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency an alternative to fiat currency was cooped by US Alphabet Bois to quash any competition to the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world. With a private, means of doing business, that isn’t made volatile by political winds and whims, governments would be cut out as an unnecessary middle man and their largess would dry up.
This is something no government wants to give up. Fiat currencies and central banks are their control centers for every business and individual. The undoing of Bitcoin as a private alternative currency by the feds is obvious. The desire to break away from fiat currencies is palpable, but modernization is not in the government’s best interests.
What is Chokepoint 2.0?
To know what Chokepoint 2.0 is, you gotta know what Chokepoint 1.0 is. It’s a gambit run by the US government against businesses or industries they don’t like to essentially debank them. Cointelegraph reported:
The news broke on Sept. 4 when the Federal Reserve issued a cease and desist against United Texas Bank due to “significant deficiencies related to foreign correspondent banking and virtual currency customers, specifically risk management and compliance with … the Bank Secrecy Act.” To get back into compliance (and the Federal Reserve’s good graces), United Texas Bank was ordered to undertake a comprehensive plan spanning everything from ensuring the bank has adequate staffing to ensuring those staff members verify the identity, source of wealth, and business activities of all customers.
Dan Spuller, the Blockchain Association’s head of industry affairs, was quick to point out that the Federal Reserve’s enforcement actions appear to be only the latest of Choke Point 2.0 policies under the Biden administration. Referring to the original Operation Choke Point —in which the US government pressured banks to refuse service to politically controversial (yet legal) businesses such as gun shops and cannabis dispensaries, the term “Choke Point 2.0” has come to refer to more recent government efforts to choke off cryptocurrency-related businesses.
The government denies this, and yet it’s reported that 30 tech founders were “secretly” debanked. That doesn’t comport.
There are law suits and FOIA requests in to the FDIC and SEC demanding to know what “due diligence” protocols were used and information pertaining to the investigations and enforcement actions taken against crypto businesses. Neither of these agencies have been forthcoming during this discovery process.
And why would they? The evidence is going to be damning. Their effort to quell the progress of crypto, and break down the barriers of privacy and anonymity would be jeopardized. Technology is moving at a much faster clip than the government, and all it knows to do is get in the way and bog it down. The days of fiat currencies are numbered. At some point, it will buckle. But the fact remains that modernization is not in the government’s best interests.
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