Jesus Christ is the most powerful man who ever lived, yet he never lifted a sword and he never ran for office. To understand why, you have to understand that power has three forms. Physical power is the physics definition, energy per unit time. The force of a punch, a bullet, a bomb. The power of the body. Social power is the ability to influence others through persuasion, charisma, or a strong argument. Think of Elon Musk. People listen because he's been successful and built a platform, so his voice carries. That power is earned from the respect of others. Political power is different. It's the coercive power of the statesman, backing his decrees with the implicit threat of force so people have to comply. It's fear-based, and it disrespects the autonomy of the people it controls. Christ used none of it. He never relied on physical power, with one telling exception, flipping the tables of the money changers. The word made flesh used force exactly once in the entire Bible, against the men who corrupted the weights and measures. And he never touched coercion or political power at all. What he had was supreme spiritual power, the force a man has over himself. In the desert, fasting 40 days, the devil tempted him three times, with bread, with a miraculous spectacle, and with all the kingdoms of the world. Even in acute scarcity, Christ resisted every one, and proved his total power over himself. Without a sword or an office, through that power over himself alone, he became the most influential human being in history. If you don't believe me, ask yourself what year it is. Whatever year you're reading this in, it's that many years since what event? The entire timeline of the human race is synchronized to this one man. So ask yourself, whose definition of power are you living by, and which form are you building every day?

Someone breaks into your house, puts a gun to your head and demands your Bitcoin. You physically can't hand it over. That's what proper custody looks like, and it's why one of the most radical ideas in Bitcoin is that it could bring silence to systemic violence. Bitcoin won't stop crimes of passion. But no man is better than his incentives, and the uncomfortable truth is that crime does pay. You can acquire assets through stealing and extortion, and physical property is what makes that profitable. Gold in your closet can be seized by any man willing to threaten you for it. Bitcoin is the first non-physical property that can be directly owned, which makes it far harder to seize by force. Domain names came close, but a centralized third party controls them, so they can be seized by legal coercion. Bitcoin has no third party to coerce. Hold your own keys and you hold a bearer asset, like gold coins that aren't physically there. Ownership comes down to keeping a secret. That secret only protects you if you custody it properly. Write your private key (the password to your coins) on paper and lock it in a safe, and you've turned non-physical property back into physical property, seizable like the gold. Multi-key solves this. Picture the nuclear launch scene, men with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists, 2 or 3 keys turned together in sequence before anything fires. You can hold Bitcoin the same way. Break the private key into 3 pieces, or 5, or 7, called shards, and require a simple majority to move funds, 2 of 3 or 3 of 5, in a sequence you designate. Then distribute them across your circle of trust. Your accountant holds one, your lawyer another, you hold the third. Nothing moves without you, so you keep full control, and you gain redundancy, since losing one shard still leaves 2 of 3 between you and your accountant. Which brings it back to the gun. You can't hand over what you can't move. Pre-designate a safe word with your key holders, and when the thief forces you to call them, that word tells them to refuse. It's a custody schema as immune to coercion as anything you'll ever get, and it's what we trust with nuclear launch codes. In a Bitcoinized multi-key world, crime pays less. Even warfare becomes less profitable, and therefore less prevalent, thanks to Bitcoin. Bitcoin lowers the profitability of force, and humans do whatever is profitable, so the businesses built on force thin out. There are only two ways to acquire wealth. Making, where you produce and trade by consent, or taking, where you seize by force what makers have built. Bitcoin tilts the landscape of human action toward making.

If you make over $250K a year, your single biggest bill every year is your taxes (often $60K to $100K+). Here's the completely legal strategy that wealthy people like Donald Trump use to shrink it to almost zero (THREAD):