A Second Sunrise: Taiwan of 2020 Sent Back to 1911

[ChrisProvidence]

"The Fall and Rise and Further Falls of Cryptocurrency," by Dr. Martin Li, Popular Science, December 1943

It was the "new thing" on the rise when Taiwan was sent back during the Great Journey. But the Second Sunrise that would led to China's rise would also lead to crypto's fall.

The main reason was just how power-intensive it was. Taiwan can produce a lot of things, but we've always imported energy. When we got sent back in time, we had to ration what we had until supply chains were set up.

Crypto was one of the first on the chopping block. It was pretty energy-intensive, and crypto is pretty much useless when the rest of the world doesn't even have computers. Fortunes were wiped out overnight, but the miners made some good money selling off their now-finite GPUs once the government started buying them up for recycling.

Some proponents tried to bring it back after the Revolution as a "stablecoin," a cryptocurrency that was pegged to the Chinese Yuan. It was called "Sanmin," and many of its backers were members of the pre-revolutionary crypto community.

Nanjing shut that down within a month. Like Taiwan, the mainland was being electrified, and the government wasn't willing to "waste what little power we have on an experimental money printer," as Wang Jingwei called it.

The decision to tie Sanmin to the Yuan was a direct response to the old cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum becoming next to worthless once we got sent back in time. But the fact that it was tied to the Yuan meant that new coins could be "minted" by somebody who was neither the government nor accountable to it.

And while it wasn't exactly counterfeiting, Nanjing sure thought it was. Cease and Desist orders were issued by the end of 1912, and the Ministry of Finance ordered raids against those who didn't comply.

That would be the end of Revolution and, by extension, the beginning of the end of cryptocurrency in China. There have been other attempts to create new cryptocurrencies as energy became less scarce and computer use spread to the mainland. However, most would tend to be niche outside of the subculture and dark web transactions. The latter would eventually lead to Nanjing banning it in 1916.

Similar attempts around the world met similar success, despite the global adoption of computers. France and Russia's leftward shifts in the early 1910s would lead to it banning cryptocurrency in early 1917, and this would be followed by much of Europe after it was occupied by France the two nations after the Great War.

The two nations where cryptocurrency had any success were the United States and Russia. This could be attributed to the rapid adoption of computers, a more/individualistic culture, and a guaranteed energy security once miniature nuclear reactors were deployed in both nations.

There, cryptocurrency reached a wider, more-receptive audience that was willing to invest in the futuristic currency. While it had its critics, cryptocurrencies like Atlas would be bought and sold for over a decade by more than just enthusiasts and the dark web.

That would change with the Russian Civil War and the Second American Civil War. According to forensic accountants, Atlas was used to covertly fund the buildup of far-right terrorist groups in the previous decade. In response, both nations' provisional governments have drafted legislation for full band on cryptocurrencies.

What had once been held up as the currency of the future died after a life of lost fortunes, accusations of counterfeiting, bans, second chances, and funding extremists. It is a niche subculture in the few countries it isn't banned for counterfeiting, wasting energy, or funding extremists.

That is what happened to cryptocurrency.

 

[ChrisProvidence]

"The Dominant Schools of Libertarianism and Anarchism," by Elise Brodeur, l'Humanité, January 1944

When the phrase "Libertarian" is used, the Islanders from the future had a joke that the next sentence involved the words "abolish" and "age of consent."

But in our world, the phrase is synonymous with "Anarchist," and both are used both interchangeably and in a purely leftist sense. What the Islanders would call "Libertarian" is what we would call "Objectivist," and it is far from any of the flavors of what we would call Libertarianism.

In light of of the American Civil War (and on account of the ongoing nuclear cleanup of Washington DC), we begin with Agrarian Libertarianism, the more-dominant type in the United States. This flavor of anarchism is the epitome of Nestor Makhno's ideal: agrarian communes that cooperate with one another while maintaining a sense of independence and self-sufficiency.

It was these two traits that also allowed the communes to quickly resist the Nationalist forces and their aligned militias during the first days of the Second American Civil War. The communes, who were already producing their own food and providing their own defense, were well-positioned to begin guerrilla attacks against the Nationalists almost immediately despite the frontlines being a confused mess of various shades of grey.

The successes of these attacks, coupled with their previous experience fighting Nationalist whenwe homesteader militias, effectively validated the Libertarian movement in the Americas as a viable, if rough-and-tumble, alternative to the usual American lifestyle in the cities and suburbs.

Then there is the Integrated Libertarianism that is more common in Europe, particularly the Ukrainian oblasts of the Eurasian Republic. Whereas the Agrarians of the Americas tend to organize themselves as parallel self-sufficient rural communes, the "Integrationists" of Europe operate as an interconnected network of communes that encompass everything from resource extraction to refinement to manufacturing, with everything in between. In doing so, Integrated Libertarianism provides a viable alternative to modern society that is able to provide a similar standard of living through a cooperative network of supply chains and cooperatives.

Ironically, Integrated Libertarianism got its start from the agrarian communes organized by Nestor Makhno in the 1910s. However, the complexities that came with organizing communes throughout the Ukrainian governorates demanded that the Libertarians of what is now Eurasia expand their focus from simply rural agriculture to the rest of the supply chain and the cities. This initially took the form of a cooperative fertilizer plant in the city of Kyiv and a tractor factory in Kharkiv, but it quickly expanded to non-agrarian cooperatives until they organized themselves into the massive Eurasian Cooperative.

What had once been a network of rural subsistence farming communities is now one of the largest corporations in the world and the largest workers' cooperative. Despite its massive size and its all-encompassing nature, the EC maintains its commitment to direct democracy, with elections being as commonplace as tractors rolling off the assembly line.

While both schools of Libertarianism acknowledge the validity of one another, this has not stopped their members from having disagreements and arguments. Agrarians have been known to call the Integrationists "red and black bourgeois," and even Makhno himself has expressed concerns that the increasingly-bureaucratic Integrationists were "forgetting their roots in the land." Meanwhile, the Integrationists see themselves as the natural evolution of the rural agrarian commune and point to their higher quality of life in their communities, often joking that the Agrarians are "too stupid to understand supply chains."

Nevertheless, this rivalry is largely ideological for the most part, and both schools of Libertarianism regularly cooperate with one another. Agrarians tend to seek out Integrationist cooperatives as their first choice for goods they can't produce on their rural communes, while Integrationists flocked to the Americas to fight alongside their Agrarian brothers and sisters and everyone in between.

While it is likely that both schools will continue their disagreements and friendly rivalries, their participation in the Russian and American Civil Wars has vindicated both as viable alternatives to modern society. Come what may, Libertarianism is here to stay.