Author and Bitcoin expert Jimmy Song recently took the stage at the 2024 Bitcoin event in Nashville to denounce the topics presented on the first day of the event, including the encroaching banking sector, institutional investment, and the advent of exchange-traded funds in the United States as efforts by multinational corporations and the administrative state to co-opt the Bitcoin movement.

During the panel, Song appealed to the rugged individualism and pioneering spirit inherent in traditional American values and Bitcoin (BTC), sharply rebuking previous panels from deviating from those values to entertain speakers from financial institutions like BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world.

"What makes Bitcoin great is liberty, freedom, self-sovereignty. Those are the things that this country was founded on. And unfortunately because of the money, because of the power of the money printing press, what we've gotten is an administrative state that rules over us that thinks that they're better than us."

Fellow panelist and independent media personality Luke Rudkowski echoed Song's comments, explaining that Bitcoin "Really does provide an amazing opportunity for a lot of people to really see the problems that government created," before explaining that the scarce decentralized asset empowers people to help themselves and each other independent of state structures.

Related: How DePin Networks can decentralize law enforcement.

Centralized government is becoming a multi-headed hydra

The warnings from Song's panel come at a time when state surveillance and attacks on free speech are on the rise, particularly in the United States, which hosts the largest government bureaucracy of any modern country.

In April of 2024, whistleblower Edward Snowden sounded the alarm that the National Security Agency (NSA) was days away from taking over the internet due to the imminent reapproval of warrantless spying under FISA Section 702, which was signed into law by Joe Biden roughly one week after Snowden warned the American people.

Crypto fixes this

While completely decentralized technologies like Bitcoin have revolutionized money by removing the state's monopoly on the mint, other crypto technologies and digital assets further the cause of freedom by neutralziing the state's surveillance apparatus.

During an interview with Tucker Carlson in April 2024, Telegram founder Pavel Durov explained that the tendency for governments to build a panopticon of surveillance will drive developers to create novel communication devices inspired by crypto wallets to sidestep state surveillance architecture.