I was looking up some quotes from some US "founding fathers" and found some really interesting ones from Thomas Jefferson. He would have loved Bitcoin for sure!
Here are some I found:
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
Thomas Jefferson, (Attributed)
3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)
"The eyes of our citizens are not sufficiently open to the true cause of
our distress. They ascribe them to everything but their true cause: the
banking system... a system which if it could do good in any form is yet
so certain of leading to abuse as to be utterly incompatible with the
public safety and prosperity."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Paper is poverty,... it is only the ghost of money, and not money
itself." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1788.
"The incorporation of a bank and the powers assumed [by legislation
doing so] have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States
by the Constitution. They are not among the powers specially
enumerated." --Thomas Jefferson: Opinion on Bank, 1791.
"If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody,
it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight
or ten per cent on it. As to the public, these companies have banished
all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had
without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and
would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which
they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we
are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air... We are
warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of 'a
public debt being a public blessing,' and its mutation into the blessing
of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original
principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be
produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will
propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper." --Thomas
Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813.
