The magical fairy dust known as Bitcoin is back in the news as its price has soared to a record high in the last few weeks. Currently one bitcoin is worth 35,000 USD, which is close to double its value of a month ago. If last spring, when the Covid panic hit, you decided to get into Bitcoin, thinking it was a safe haven for your money, your return would now sit at 700%. Of course, if you were an early adopter when the price was a few hundred dollars, then you are now quite rich.
Of course, whenever Bitcoin is on the rise, the paladins of cryptocurrency are out evangelizing about the glorious future where currency is no longer controlled by those evil bankers rubbing their hands in their secret lair. Karl Thorburn has been making the rounds on this side of the great divide. Here is a podcast he did with Greg Johnson last week that is worth a listen. Bitcoin is popular among dissidents, because the bankers cannot get you deplatformed from it like they do with credit cards.
One problem with Bitcoin is right there in those huge gains. There are wild swings in its value as people rush in and out of it. Three years ago, Bitcoin had a similar surge then lost half its value over the next six months. A similar boom and bust happened the following year. As a means of exchange, it suffers from the same problem that all commodities suffer. That is, it tends to increase in value over time, but it also suffers from the cyclical tendency we see in these booms and busts.
One reason for this is that all cryptocurrencies are designed around a math problem that gets exponentially harder to solve as time goes on. Put another way, each new coin costs more to produce than the previous coin. If the first coin cost X, the next coin costs x+n with n being the slight increase in cost to produce it. If the first ten coins average out to 10 USD and the next ten are 20 USD, then the average value of each coin has gone up by 50% just by the mere fact of their creation.
Demand for Bitcoin, however, has tendencies that do not always correspond with the supply of Bitcoins. That explains the cyclicality. For reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent value of Bitcoin, demand rises, so the price rises with it. At some point, people with Bitcoin begin to cash in and the price starts to fall, leading to a rush for the exit as we see with any asset bubble. Like hard money, Bitcoin has cyclical tendencies that get increasingly wild over time.
The other problem with Bitcoin, in terms of it replacing dollars or euros as a currency is that it is not actually money. It can be used as a medium of exchange, but only because governments tolerate it for now. Otherwise, it lacks the key attribute that has defined money since the Phrygians started producing coins. It lacks the backing of a sovereign who will enforce its value. Legal tender is an item that must be accepted as payment and that is enforced by a government with a monopoly of force.
Now, this does not mean that things like gold or precious stones cannot be used in exchange, but they are not legal tender unless the government of the jurisdiction where the exchange occurs agrees to it. In the United States, for example, it is illegal to demand payment in gold. The legal tender of the United States is those bits of metal and paper we carry around with us. A check or credit card is just involving a third-party (the bank) to pay the merchant in dollars.
Now the crypto-evangelists always respond to this point by saying that governments can’t do anything about cryptocurrencies. That’s the beauty of them. Because their creation is independent of government and their value is set in the marketplace, the state cannot prevent people from using Bitcoin. They will also note that Bitcoin is anonymous, so the state will have a tough time tracing the source of Bitcoin, even if they try to crack down on its use and possession.
This argument has several problems, one of which should be obvious. The government can simply arrest people for using Bitcoin and throw them into prison. If merchants are told it is unlawful to accept Bitcoin, they stop taking Bitcoin. There is a reason no merchant accepts gold dust for payment. Not even a pawnshop will accept gold as a form of payment and most of them trade in raw gold now. One necessary quality of money is that it be widely accepted for payment.
Governments have a primarily interest in protecting their monopoly on the supply of legal tender. This goes to something called seigniorage. This is the profit the sovereign makes from the issuing of money. In the days of gold coin, the miners of gold brought their bullion to the king’s mint, where it was turned into coins. The value of the coins was more than the value of the bullion. This is one way the king could finance his government, without having to physically control the gold supply.
In modern times, seigniorage has evolved into something else, namely the stability of the money supply, especially in relation to other currencies. A stable money supply makes for stable credit markets. The standing and legitimacy of a government is determined by the stability of its currency. This is why central banks have become the most important institutions on the planet. It is also why the major central banks will never cede control of the currency to cryptocurrency.
Note that stability does not mean fixed. The supply of money in its various forms can expand and contract. When the Fed changes interest rates, they are changing the supply of one or more forms of money. This is done in concert with the European Central Bank within an agreed upon structure. This means the supply of money is stable in that it is predictable. In the Covid crisis, everyone knew the central banks would aggressively expand the money supply in response.
The response to this is usually something about the immorality of government manipulating their currencies to finance debt. While true, the morality of the crypto advocates is not the morality of the people in charge. Since the people in charge have a monopoly of force, it is their morality that matters. The golden rule of power is that no one is ever talked out of retaining power. The United States gives up its control of the currency when someone more powerful takes it away.
There are other problems with crypto that prevent it from becoming anything more than a digital tulip bulb. Money, by definition, is self-verifying. You can examine currency and determine if it is authentic. Crypto requires a third party to validate the coin. That is done by examining its provenance. Each use becomes part of the coin’s validation, so it carries the history of its usage. The argument here is that government cannot access this, but the threat of prison will easily solve this problem.
The bottom line is money is about power. A ruler powerful enough to issue his own coin is powerful enough to enforce its use. The more powerful the king, the more valuable his coin, even outside his realm. This has always been true and will remain true. The reason the dollar is the world’s reserve currency is that the rulers of the American empire are the most powerful and the most predictable rulers on the planet. The Euro is the second reserve currency for the same reason.
That said, crypto is not worthless. For dissidents looking to get around the financial restrictions placed on them by agents of the state, crypto is a solution. If you are looking to invest in a risky asset, Bitcoin is a good play. Over time it will keep going up, but in between it will be a rollercoaster. If you like that action, then crypto is a cheap way to get it. If you want to anonymously fund a dissident, crypto is also a good way to give someone money without easily exposing your identity.
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I’m probably shawdow-banned … another warning message! “Awaiting for approval” … hmm.
So, my comment and Herbert Marcuse’s comment was wiped from the record. Maybe sent to the Biden administration. There’s some real sensitivity to The Small Hatters here. Say the wrong word and get your comment deleted! Oh well, it’s Zman’s site so he can do what he wants … he seems very protective of them, though … very protective … hmm.
<I>The golden rule of power is that no one is ever </i> <b>knowingly</b><I>talked out of retaining power. </I>
I might have FIFY
In the early 20th American men gave women the vote.
Never mind all the young virgins talked into giving up their chastity, their self- respect, and a genetic future.
Glad that you mentioned that … I’ve always wondered how that happened. I tried to do some research into how/why men would vote to allow women to vote because that was the beginning of the end, and certainly the men of those days would know that. Well, now we know how much stock we can put into elections!
I like Bitcoin, and own some, but 2020 was revealing. It’s highly unlikely that the merchants who in the space of a day went along with mask mandates or shutdowns will buck the government if it ever issues a crypto-ban.
None of the claims made for bitcoin are true. It was predicated on no one party being able to “capture” more than 50% of the mining market. Oops, China has more than 50% of the mining market. Bitcoin “split” a few years back…ooops. When etherium was getting started a smarty noticed a vulnerability and took advantage of it with a legal operation. So the consortium controlling the ledger just backed out that transaction.
It is a classic con, and everyone is going to be left holding the bag eventually.
I’m not sure if anyone remembers the MAGA DC protest of about a month ago, where Trump decided to buzz them with his helicopter before retreating to the White House. It should have dawned on them by then. Who is this coward doing this? Why isn’t he down here with us with a megaphone? Because he’s the guy who will start a bar fight by running his mouth and then slip out the back door. Had his supporters turned on him like wild animals around 2017 when it was clear that he was lying his ass off on everything, he may have shaped up. Trump is, in the end, a politician. And these politicians only understand fear. They need a constant drumbeat “you’re my whore, I’m not your whore. You got it?” But we don’t do that. We fall in love with the whore. We try to kiss her on the mouth.
A man who gets manicures and sports coiffure was never going put his neck on the line in any physical way
And like the police, Trump just lost whitey
Now his only friends are black felons he got out of jail
And he will go to jail on bank fraud in Manhattan. Speaking of the police, I hope we start seeing far fewer “thin blue line” flags than we have. That’s the worst part of the Trump-tards. Worshiping the jack boot that will take everything from them.
If the power goes out, it ain’t worth shit.
Well I see from the latest addition to Sponsors that Z-Man’s place has a somewhat unexpected Healthy, Wholesome, Artsy-Farstsy thingie going on.
I may have to fuck-off elsewhere…
that soap looks like cheese
Makes me hungry
You’re a lonely little creep, you’ll never leave.
It’s good to leave something dangling to see what rises to the bait.
Photo analysis of the stormers showing possible Antifa:
https://twitter.com/rising_serpent/status/1346911882108522499?s=19
A young woman was shot in the face/neck point blank by an officer as she was entering the Capitol.
Fuuu…k da cops, filthy PIGS, paying taxes to keep their traitorous bellies full
Breitbart is hardcore pearl-clutching from all sides about, “violence bad and un-American!”
Op confirmed.
Today was not an Op.
Breitbart are bitches, yes.
What a dumb ending to another dumb Presidency (until the Alzheimer’s patient tops him). So I guess Qanon predicted that the BIG event today was Pence unfollowing Trump on twitter? Or perhaps it was about Tom Cotton thundering away that the protesters in Congress should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of that law? Many red pills today.
Right wingers are eternal cucks.
True.
A quick glance at my FB feed indicates today’s optics seem to have moved the needle the wrong way for a lot of center/center-right normies.
Not good.
I think what it has done is throw a bucket of cold water on the faces of people who believed in Trump. Now they are going to feel betrayed and become furious.
We can only hope so.
Dear God i HATE the GOP and the US Government with a white-hot passion.
Is it true he called the NG on his own voters?
If true…..
Trump folded like a cheap suit
He has a sterling, iron-clad record in doing that.
and so now why did he bother protesting the election if on the day when it mattered most he’s nowhere to be found? Why even go through the motions if he never planned on doing anything?
He’s weird
He’s a fraud. Total fraud. With fraudster kids.
The New York Times called Tom Cotton a “fascist” when he said the same about the other side — even fired the guy who approved his op-ed. The problem with the right is that they hold themselves to standards the other side does not. It results in a string of losses. That demographic is hopeless. Word of advice: don’t stick your neck out for these people.
New info coming out…the Capitol storming may be a staged op by the Deep State.
Twitter is censoring Trump’s call for calm.
Cuckservatives are clutching their pearls harder than ever.
Looked just like the Kavanaugh hearings without the pink hats, the Handmaid’s Tale outfits, and the squealing.
But the Kavanaugh hearing ruckus was simply “peaceful protesting”…
That was not an op, that was reality.
Regardless of whatever nonsense is circulating, ie ‘Antifa’ tats on some protestor.
This is basically true but somewhat muddled. The Bitcoin mining reward halves approximately every four years.
In addition there is a protocol mining variable called the “difficulty”. The difficulty variable is set, NOT based on the number of bitcoins mined, but on the running average of the extent network mining power. If the network mining power doubles because more people are mining it, the difficulty increases so that new blocks are mined, on average, every 10 minutes. The current global mining power is 7,983,858.406 Thash/s, that’s ~8*10^18 hashes/s. A recent article last year said the global network consumes 7 nuclear power plants worth of energy, https://news.bitcoin.com/the-bitcoin-network-now-consumes-7-nuclear-plants-worth-of-power/
Take that to it’s logical conclusion and it’s going to make the Dutch Tulip Mania seem as quaint as … a bunch of Dutchmen bankrupting themselves raising tulips.
This seems about right.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-01-06/coming-woke-american-theocracy
Now that Pence has betrayed us, this discussion somehow seems irrelevant. The truth about the GOP has been revealed. We are in another age. Plan for it.
Now that Pence has betrayed us? He never was FOR us. And neither was orange fuck, or his fake titted daughter, or his staff. And neither is anyone, of either party in the Congress. We’ve been ALONE for a long time.
I believed Trump was at least on his own side… until today when he told his supporters to obey the government officials instead of Draining the Swamp via the torches-and-pitchforks method. Which after November 5, was the only way it’s ever going to get drained.
Unarmed and lightly armed continuing the fight? Women and children?
No, it went as badly and as well as it could’ve gone. The mask is off, the establishment exposed, the government illegitimate, and the people sacked the Capitol peacefully, and only a patriot died. Mittens was called a traitor on a plane for hours. They will never fly commercial.
Monero solves this problem in that the provenance is also hidden by strong cryptography at the protocol level, and not available to anyone, so the coins are truly fungible. So “coins” can’t be tainted, blacklisted, or tracked, i.e., there is no way to tell if the money is “dirty” by looking at the blockchain.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=monero&ia=cryptocurrency
The best way to look at a blockchain is like a public ledger. This means that you can circumvent the Federal Reserve, but it also means that everybody can see what you’re spending your money on, scrutinize your every single transaction.
There’s a lot of uses for blockchain, not just as barter chips. You could use them for contracts, for instance: “This blockchain certifies that Mr. Seller has transferred ownership of a car, make and model so-and-so, engine serial so-and-so, license plate so-and-so, to Mr. Buyer.”
The big problem is not as such that the government won’t force business to accept them but that the government won’t accept them as payment of your taxes. This means you cannot avoid government money altogether, because at some point you have to exchange your Bitcoins for dollars when they taxman comes calling.
In the end, ZMan, I did follow your advice and I did NOT vote in the GA Senate election runoffs. You were right and I was wrong, but that did not become clear to me until a week or two after I posted here to say that we HAD to vote GOPe to prevent these niggaz from getting the chance and the funds to set up machines within what remains of my native state, to which my family has given two governors and two First Ladies, starting in 1795 and running up to the 1840s. So what has just happened is a *very* bitter pill for me to swallow, as you might imagine, but you were right to advise boycotting the GOPes, and I was right to heed your good advice, painful though it be. Thanks for your insight and advice. (You may publish this or not, as you see fit. It’s really only for you.)
For every vote, there would simply have been an extra vote manufactured, going in the other direction. The game is easy to see, once you understand the ground rules.
Now, because they won, legitimately or not, we get to live in Mexico, if we are lucky. If we aren’t lucky then the dems import sub Saharan Africa here and we live in the replication of the real Lagos.
I will say one thing
Now that people have broken into the capitol, and are rummaging around in their desks etc, it’s like a home invasion. They won’t feel safe for a LONG time.
HOORAH !!!!!
https://www.revolver.news/
If they rise, those who rose – support them.
The Capitol is lit right now.
This is what these things – revolutions or revolts – look like.
Pelosi denied National Guard deployment by Pentagon:
https://twitter.com/AuroraIntel/status/1346910379650138117?s=19
Alleged active shooter in the US House:
https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/1346905489561579532?s=19
Ya love to see it
In Pelosi’s office, reading her staff’s emails:
https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1346905425543917573?s=19
The ((( Money Men))) have bought into crypto currency in order to manipulate it any way they wish it to go.
Could be a trial balloon from the Fed.
The government already has the power to shut any one down using anti-money laundering regulations. See E-Gold. This doesn’t apply to large banks as regulations exist to protect large players, so they can launder billions in Mexican cartel money and it’s fine and dandy. Maybe a slap on the wrist. Maybe.
I remember reading the 9/11 Report that said “Ultimately, identifying the source of funding for the hijackers would be of little practical value”.
People like that use Hawalas in the back of meat markets. You can’t police that. Except with immigration controls like Japan.
That’s why the kept the infamous “28-pages” of the JIST report redacted for fourteen years after the attacks.
This then is the only currency with any relationship with Math.
Everything is downstream from power. Where there is sword there is civilization.
Where there are altars there are priests and the decay has begun.
With Math or Meth?
will 10 foot tranny losing her senate race to a warlock nog have any effect on your Bitcoin?
I’ll take a proud black man over a white race traitor any day of the week.
Fuck Loeffler, glad she lost tbh.
Same here. I was pulling for the preacher
I wonder if VD thinks losing both houses of Congress and the presidency while never bringing anyone from either the Clinton campaign or the deepstate to justice was all part of the plan?
ProZNoV (as in, no VD)….LOL’d.
Bitcoin is promoted as a medium of exchange but is traded for its “store of value” as it keeps going up. Big disconnect there.
The biggest promoters of this thing are the Winklevoss twins. Tulip Mania came from the Dutch as well…
John Law and the other Ponzis got busted because they promoted something tangible but didn’t have it to deliver. The beauty of Bitcoin, from the promoter’s standpoint, is that nothing except the value of the coin itself is being promoted. So when Bitcoin goes “phhht”, there is no tangible promise and failure to deliver that can be prosecuted.
same stupid boomer nocoiner retardation we’ve been hearing for over a decade by people who don’t understand crytpo. you had 12 years!
all of these smoothbrained nocoiner arguments have been responded to over and over but instead of updating their opinion based on new information nocoiners choose to stay ignorant despite being proven wrong over and over. you would think after a decade of being wrong they’d at least come up with some new arguments at the very least. it’s pretty sad. have fun staying poor
Responded to with hand waving and promises of magic beans. You crypto loons are just libertarians living a different fantasy where you are the hero.
No electricity = no bitcoin
No internet = no bitcoin
Not exactly rocket science
Good points, Falcone. Also, EMP, sabotage, malware, no electricity = no bitcoin
what good is a mound of BTC or dollars when a can of tuna and a loaf of bread costs $2,000…if you can find it. Stockpile now.
BBBBB Beans, bourbon, bullets, bandages, bullion
What’s the value of a record album if there is 1) nothing to play it on and 2) no electricity
just sits there. I have a closet full of old record albums. And CDs and DVDs When the power it out, they’re dead Same for a Tesla car.
why I also have a growing library of books. Always useable. And why the elites probably hate them. They exist beyond their control. And why I will always have a gas powered car of some kind and a spare gallon of gas in storage.
I have battery powered CD/Mindisc players, and plenty of batteries
If there is no internet or electricity, how many people are going to be trusting the government? Federal Reserve Notes will still be used for a while because of availability and familiarity. But other media of exchange will gradually replace as the bills disappear from circulation.
Special Agent Smith saying “hand over your password and user name or we lock you up with Ja’quandius, Destroyer of Buttholes for 20-to-life = no bitcoin.
Troll?
Nope, true believer.
Yeah, but the posting contained no info to help me understand, nor convert my thinking. If a true believer, he posted like a troll and simply vented.
Bad Touch Joe will charge up our EBT cards.
Bitcoin? We don’t need no stinking Bitcoin.
Let them eat rainbow stew bubble up on the road to Ozymandias.
The crypto world is a fascinating space, and the ‘value’ of bitcoin is simply that someone else will happily buy your bitcoin from you. Same as the value of fiat.
I do see a future where govts want their own version of crypto but whilst it will be on a blockchain, any distributed leger will be owned and run by them. A crypto version of an intranet as opposed to an internet.
I can see more and more people moving money out of the financial system and into semi-liquid assets, which are then sold, and converted into fiat/govt crypto as required. This will solve the upcoming inflation problem due to covid combined with modern monetary theory (magic money tree). It will also increase the velocity of money as fiat becomes a game of pass the parcel.
The big problem will be how to support dissidents without being guilty of wrongthink, losing social credit score, doxxing, arrest, or put in an asylum (like that Doctor in France who challenged the covid narrative). Essentially we’d have to launder the money like criminals now do – but on a much lower scale.
Interesting times ahead. Plan accordingly.
Bottom line. I think the guy who invented Bitcoin his last name ends in a stein or a berg.
if that alone doesn’t raise a bunch of red flags in your mind then your parents didn’t raise you right
i thought it was a jap
perhaps but the guy I remember getting the credit for it was a curly haired you know what
right then i shook my head and thought “lots of white guys gonna get screwed”
Satoshi Nakamoto – although some guy who actually was a S. Nakmoto denied any involvement. Some speculation that Nakamoto was actually two different people. Apparently whomever Nakamoto was/is – hasn’t been heard from for several years.
I guess he bit the dust
no pun intended 😉
“There are other problems with crypto that prevent it from becoming anything more than a digital tulip bulb”.
I wasn’t there for the tulip bulb balloon blow up and pop, but from the tea leaves I can read – cryptocurrency seems to be on a similar trajectory
One way we’ll know for sure that Bitcoin has gained cultural acceptance and is here to stay is if the special people begin adopting a permutation of it as a surname.
If we ever see a law firm or accounting company called “Cashman Goldbaum Silverberg Bitcoinstein” we’ll know it’s legit.
Ah, just listen to AC/DC..
I see the United States creating their own crypto currency. They will still call it a dollar in order to not frighten the old people who hold onto the idea of paper currency. The computer symbol on your IPhone of the digital currency will be Obama shaking hands with George Washington wearing a dress.
In time all currency will only be digital.
To a large extent, it already is. For the average Joe who gets his paycheck direct deposited to his account, pays bills online, uses credit cards and then pays those online, how often does he actually use or even see cash? The occasional lottery ticket?
Who is the waiting monster? Which commenter? I see you guys are laughing it up at my expense!
in the ancient regime, currency was backed not just by the power of the sovereign, but also the metallic quality of the coin. That was the whole point of silver and gold and copper being used in coins. You were receiving something of inherent value. The power of the state factored in with how reliable the metal content of the coin was. That’s why the Spanish piece of eight was so sought after; Spain was a great gold rich empire at that time that never shaved or diluted its coins. You knew you were receiving real gold. They say the Roman talent was so diluted by the late empire that it contained no gold. Dilution of currency whether literal or thru inflation implies national decline.
in those days, the coin might be used to settle debt far outside of the kings realm, perhaps in a far away place like China.
even later, paper money was backed by gold or silver, in that the money could be redeemed by the government for gold, thus giving confidence in the currency. This gold window was closed by Nixon in 1971 and now the US dollar is completely untethered from any commodity. The book currency wars by Jim Richards has a good history of the gold standard.
I’m not laughing at you. I love silver and gold. And I always make sure I have some of it close to me.
But other day I was thinking I would be having to help my daughter move from California to a new house in Florida. And I also planned on offloading a lot of my stuff over to the new house.
I have pounds and pounds of silver coins and so forth and thought about moving some of it to spread out my risk. But What if someone breaks into my car when I’m asleep at the hotel? Do I lug it around me at all times? Etc etc. it never crossed my mind before how I would actually protect my gold and silver if I had to move it. Sounds stupid of me, but is what it is
As has been noted, silver is currency, gold wealth. You quickly run out of space storing wealth in silver—but gold? $1M in gold is what…about 500 (troy) oz? You can carry that around, albeit somewhat unpleasantly. And you can store it in any number of places in a dwelling, from safe to a concrete pad burial (think John Wick). Besides, who the hell here has a million dollars?
Some jogger or meth head would kill someone for a single ounce of gold
i never thought about, but if I move I have to secure it’s transport. Whom do I trust? Will someone get the word out that I have gold on me? Etc etc.
yes, I can secure it at my house. But as long as I don’t have to move around too much bringing it with me. I guess I could sell it then buy an equal amount it back when I arrive But I’ve grown attached to my coins lol. I don’t want to sell them
I know coin collectors who would starve for weeks before selling their collections.
So true
So much emotion becomes involved
Funny how people work
One of the key attributes of cryptocurrencies (and their ancient kin in black/grey markets) is that these alternatives serve as a useful barometer of people’s trust in their government. When governments are more honest than corrupt, and the value of money is stable & predictable, no one thinks twice about using official currency in daily life. But when people get anxious about government malfeasance, they naturally look for a backup. The rise of Bitcoin is tangible evidence that trust in government is falling precipitously.
I query my investment banker occasionally when I get antsy after reading another of the ubiquitous articles warning of the impending crash of the USD and the response is always “it’s still the best house on a bad block”. I wonder though, as someone mentioned above, what the election of Dementia Joe and his Floozie sidekick will do to that equation.
Here are some tangible facts should be considered when evaluating near-term decision-making options. Firearm sales are once again through the roof and ammunition is hard to find, regardless of price. California is experiencing an exodus like never before in it’s history. TV viewership is cratering across the board, as is trust in MSM reporting. Cops are retiring in record numbers. Civic trust is nearly extinct, as is the means to maintain law & order. Chaos is coming. Are you ready? If not, you only have yourself to blame.
Saw a cop today with so many tats that he was indistinguishable from a convicted felon larping in a cop uniform. Let that sink in.
I like Raoul Pal’s description of Bitcoin – ” a store of value that trades like a commodity”.
The idea of Bitcoin being a digital currency that could replace Fiat is gone. I don’t know anyone in the crypto space that actually believes that anymore. What Bitcoin has become however is something like digital gold.
Bitcoin as first mover in the space has the advantage of being, well, first. It’s always good to be first. Ethereum being second.
Take it for what you will but there is huge amounts of money moving into Bitcoin. That is enough to convince me that I need a position in digital assets. It’s a fascinating space with a ton of f****** scams and some genius ideas.
Here’s an excellent summation of bitcoin’s pros and cons.
https://youtu.be/PWtaYg_OCb4
I guess crypto is great until there is a power outage or your internet goes down
As with everything digital, I’m skeptical that you ever actually own it in the full sense of the word. Rather, you own rights to it. I noticed this with digital video games; I decided to play an old game and it required all sorts of updates and I had to create a new gamer profile, new account, had to download various updates — and if I didn’t? I couldn’t play. Then they flash all these crazy warnings on the screen to make your ball sack tighten. And I imagine Bill Gates’ face getting all sad with disappointment like I am being a bad bad boy for not following up on my updates. He wants me to feel safe! He’s doing it for me!
moral of the story. Anything having to do with computers means it has to do with weird sadists who get their jollies making you jump through their hoops like they own you.
Probably admonish you for not being vaccinated against The Greatest of Yellow Perils too. I can in fact imagine such coercion being used – enough people are addicted to video games to do anything for their hit.
So long as you are the only one who knows your bitcoin private key, and internet connectivity is unrestricted, and no 51% attack on bitcoin succeeds, you own your bitcoin as much as you own your own body.
I don’t own anything if I have to walk through government property (the internet) to access my money
I own the rights to it. But I do not own the internet. If denied internet services, I’m pretty much screwed
That’s perhaps my sticking point on this whole matter. I don’t stock up on alternative currencies-except for SHTF scenario. So in that scenario, is bitcoin better or worse than say, gold?
Bitcoin, as a hedge to inflation in a relatively benign environment, I have no problem with. Go for it. I’m in the market of all places…I should lecture you on Bitcoin? 😉
This was your worst post I’ve read. All the faults you lay at the feet of cryptocurrencies and gold easily apply to Fed fiat money but without the reinforcement of the Fed’s power.
Wait until the Fed rolls out it’s digital Dollar which will give it total control over which transactions will be allowed for its use. And it sure won’t be anonymous. The bright side is that, foreign users of Dollars will be very reluctant to a medium of exchange subject to the whims of the US government. They will have alternatives and will use alternatives which will surely be available.
The entire power of the US empire and its criminal minions rests on the widespread use of the dollar.
At least you don’t accept bitcoin so you’ve got consistency going for you.
I think you answered your own question
the moment the feds say those paper dollars and coins mean nothing is the moment they mean nothing.
If I were intelligent I’d have put the little I had into Tesla and Bitcoin in 2012 and have retired with 8 figures in 2020.
Well, the vision through one’s ahole is always 20/20, ‘innit?
Easy come, easy go
never fails. All that money would have been blown on stupid shit .
shopping malls are now attached to casinos for a reason
Oh, I’ve certainly improved my money management and personal spending and now live well below my means.
I still live a comfortable life and could easily cut my monthly expenses 50 or even 75 percent.
If I ever made fast easy money, and I’m pretty good too at money management, but no way I wouldn’t blow 75% of it
but better than blowing all of it I guess. I ain’t no nogger being nogger rich 🤪
Are you saying cocaine and hookers are useless shit?
I imagine “green” technology is about to be hugely funded in the US given the change in DC. While it’s a fool’s errand, plenty of fortunes will be made.
Might want to think about that play.
That stuff is already bought all up
you can probably make some money on the margins, but the major companies are already set up
I’ve been doing well generating income with Tesla options.
Have definitely missed out on growth by not simply buying and holding Tesla.
Good on ya Howie, but you are probably better off having to slog it out. Builds character as my pops used to say.
Something from nothing is a mental orientation trap that our guys need to keep in check. As is retiring to Elysium.
Already there are too many onramps capturing men’s potential and yoking it to the leverage and arbitrage of Dimon’s dancing monkeys. Robin hood donkeys or pronhub wristies, same same.
The other side of the debt slavery coin is one that fomos and ponzis and “trades” atop the very same financialization of everything our side claims to abhor.
Playing poker with the money changers as a hobby is one thing, but we will never cast off the reigns of schlomo if the “smartest guys in the room” keep elevating the status of the casino in the cloud above that of serving our people and communities with actual skills our people value.
We can tell our young boys all day long how they should learn a trade and marry young and have huwhyte babies, but if the religion of muh capital gains and “you shoulda bought bitcoin” is what the see their dads and brothers doing, well good luck with that future for our children thing.
Maybe I am missing all these bitcoin billionaire ourguys who are reinvesting all those gains into local community initiatives and businesses that support our values and traditions and help to onboard young men toward practical and rewarding careers serving their people.
I came real close to pushing that send button but then i chickened out. One thing that made me hesitate was in regard to privacy. Just who exactly was i sending my Driver’s license image, personal information, account numbers, even a selfie – who was i sending to? Then on to who else? What if they found out that i once pulled Peggy Sue’s hair back in third grade or uttered something as despicable as that it’s OK to be white?
I almost bought some bitcoin back when it was a few dollars per, but something never sat right with me about it.
My sister used to be into that SETI thing where they scan the sky and send packets of info over the internet to your computer to parse instead of using a supercomputer. Blockchain reminds me of that.
Maybe I was being paranoid, but I thought maybe the whole thing was some kind of encryption-defeating scheme disguised as digital freedom.
I’d have a pile money now if I’d done it. Oh well.
You need to provide all of that to buy Bitcoin?
lol. Talk about Facebook 2.0. Now you KNOW the feds are involved in Bitcoin.
That is the comment of the day, Falcone. If Bitcoin functioned as advertised, it’s inventors and users would be dead.
One of the most intriguing parts of the bitcoin story is that no one knows who invented it. Bitcoin was defined in a paper whose author used a Japanese pseudonym.
I have examine the bitcoin code enough to see that it was probably implemented by a team of coders, not just an individual. But no one knows who they are.
An ex Secret Service Agent stole Bitcoin from the Federal Government’s wallet (as well as Silk Road users) when he was part of that investigation.
https://tinyurl.com/y53ch7ss
You must provide that information if you buy from an exchange. If you know someone with bitcoin, you can purchase it from them without revealing your identity.
thanks for info !
Much as I read and try to absorb, I don’t understand Bitcoin. It seems Bitcoin assumes a necessity for stable (and eternal) computing power? Not a likely scenario but does Bitcoin still exist after an EMP strike?
I expect cryptocurrency may be here for awhile, particularly as globalism runs its course and implodes, but I have a hard time imagining it being around for centuries.
We of the gray-hairs remember the tangible value of an LP album, despite the snaps and crackles. Heck, even the younger set are starting to like the vinyl vibe. This goes along with the title of a decent book, “The Revenge of Analog.” Apparently homo sapien likes tangibility – it’s hard-wired. Handling an ounce of silver is satisfying, but bits and bytes? Zeros and Ones? Anything that smacks of virtual … well, it’s virtual, right? What am I missing other than short-term gains?
For the short term I want wealth – those things I can eat/shoot, or trade for things I can eat/shoot.
Not being able to understand brings to mind a magician dazzling you with tricks you can’t understand
or some fast talking bernie madoff
no thanks.
There probably are people who lost their wallets due to an irrecoverable hard drive failure that are pulling their hair out.
Bitcoin is not the savior many dissidents think it is, but cyrpto smart-contract technologies like Ethereum, Polkadot, and others will make it an order of magnitude more difficult to silence dissidents on the internet. If your web site is running as part of a massive cluster consisting of millions of PCs with no central authority, good luck getting that shut down.
While they are mostly payment to miners and Proof of Stake holders for processing power, these tokens can become de-facto currencies in their own right, especially if markets start running on these chains. The only real way to stifle them would be to remove the Dollar to Token on-ramps, and arguably that ship has sailed.
Internet is government property.
they can shut it down and shut you out any time they want.
dissidents only exist on the internet because the cost of enforcement and regulation is not worth the hassle
Dissidents are also not a threat to them yet. They have been able to infiltrate and co-opt any movement before it gets off the ground.
YET. Not worth it YET.
Very true
The Internet is a electronic utility and is easily regulated. Faggots and Trannies do it with ease, never mind Govts. Dissident speech is a harmless venting mechanism and is thereby allowed. If it were dangerous it would not be allowed.
I always thought it as a form for out-in-the-open money laundering; I wouldn’t even count it as a commodity (like gold).
One slight addition: from what I recall what really cements fiats use as currency is that the government accepts it (and nothing else) as payment for taxes. Even with the most laid back government in regards to currency usage that one fact is enough to force pretenders out of the market.
The thing with gold is that it has for a very long time and most probably always will retain some value. It also something that, if you have it, can easily be seen and felt and perhaps more readily protected, God bless it. I do not know how it came to have such value, but it just seems to. It gleams and bedazzles people in a way that a cryptocurrency never could. It is, from chemical perspective, incredibly resilient adding to it’s value which I believe to be both a practical and mythical thing. It’s going to take Bitcoin a fair while to catch up, current prices be damned.
And if all else fails one can drop an ingot from height onto a wokist’s head with satisfactory results.
Indeed. Which is sort of the old ‘force them with the threat of violence’ argument. Just thank your lucky stars that your US Dollars are not under siege by forces determined to stick LGBT and BAME representatives onto their faces… yet.
Value of gold is in its beauty.
it’s intoxicating
and rich people want it
yes, it’s anti corrosive property is also valuable but that is perhaps an effect of its beauty.
Its also rarity, if the price dropped low enough the rich would lose interest, its a Velben good
I used to think that, until….
Have you ever been in the presence of lots of it? Not a coin or two, but maybe a hundred or a thousand gold coins, or vases, or what have you?
Put it this way, if you visit a guy with 100 gold coins shimmering on a table in front of him and it doesn’t enter into your mind that you could just kill him and run off with all of it, you’d be lying.
The stuff grabs you in a way little else does.
Gold is valuable because it can be made into jewelry that you can give to women and increase the likelihood that they have sex with you.
That is the entire value of gold.
…and that’s the bottom line
and bourbon
Why bother with taxes then? Why not just create the money if people are forced to use it?
Because it’s a government income that bypasses the Central Bank. Just in case ((central banks)) refuse to print more money for you.
The tax code has also become an effective behavior modification tool.
“The tax code has also become an effective behavior modification tool.” It is also an effective surveillance tool.
THIS is why.
You might say that, with MMT providing the actual financing of government, the primary purpose of the tax code has become behavior modification.
In the early days of colonial paper money in say Virginia the money was printed, collected in taxes then burnt by Colonial Govt. MASS and New England preferred hard money. When VA was caught not burning some of the money was scandal.
In no small part the Revolution was war debts by colonies that could not be paid off, French and Indian Wars. 60% of cost borne by colonies.
Taxation was increased by London to claw back the money it had spent on imperial defense.
A lot of plantation owners were in debt to the money markets of London.
60 % of the 7 years war’s costs were not borne by the colonies.
It’s a currency whose value is in the continual churning of it through millions of transactions and supply growth
If it stops moving around it stagnates and loses its value. Why inflation is a way for the government to make sure you don’t stuff it in a mattress or hoard it but instead keep moving it around. Taxes do it too. You have to move it around for tax benefits.
Basically it is a machine with two main goals: no one can hoard it without being penalized and no one can accumulate too much on the pretext of paving the way for upward social mobility. Bezos may be the richest man in the world, but it’s “on paper”. He does not compare to say the queen of England or someone like Putin who have their wealth stored in massive amounts of property and precious metals and the like, ability to call out the army, etc. He is not a threat to them in a real sense the word but a useful tool. And he knows it. He is beholden to the political powers.
Bitcoin: the lolbertarian barter system. Trading in (supposed) freedom! Good lord, even ideas get commodified.
There’s this thing called force. As in, don’t mess with these guys or they’ll mess with you. Some find it distastefully brutish, but it looks to me that’s how the world is going. The nerds had their day, and now it’s over. The future belongs to the street fighters.
Disagree. Look at how the enemy wins today. Yes, they have the street toughs, but then a bunch of nerds to “decline to prosecute,” deliver melee weapons, post bail, and write propaganda narratives. Combined Forces continues to be the most successful: we actually do need more “nerds,” especially those that are strategically positioned.
Point taken, but we’re clearly heading to a situation that can’t be thought out of.
Not exactly. The mining difficulty can go up and down, depending on total processing power (hashrate). In practical terms, it’s indirectly adjusted based on the crypto-currency price and cost of processing power.
The mole ate my tulips, then the dog ate the mole. I broke even.
Eat the dog.
“Dog is a fine meal”
Benjamin Martin,”The Patriot”
So the threat of the American Military is behind the use of the worldwide dollar? Is that right.
Shocking, isn’t it?
To an extent. It at least is seen by all comers as the dominant player in the world. In military, economic and perhaps social terms I think that Joe Average and even Joe Informed in his mid-level role in the EU bureaucracy still see the US as unassailable. I suppose it is the belief of the threat of US everything.
Naturally, the bigwigs will trade in the dollar, but the plebs of the world will find local commodities to be also of value. I am reminded of one event from the book I mentioned in my comment above:
Who knows how true this is. But doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.
Iran has a central bank so they should be safe. Although I believe they prohibit usery so who knows?
Most of the islamic work arounds to prohibit usery are BS IMO, that said I doubt they allow credit cards charging 20% interest or payday loans and other (((scams)))
I married into a Persian family, some of them quite educated, and none of them can explain to me how Iranians transact in real estate without lending money at interest. Yet they do.
iran has no rotschild bank, we all know what the us military has in store for them.
then there’s irak, libya, afghanistan, who were already destroyed by us military.
north korea doesn’t have one cause north korea.
and cuba, who will probably get reformed in the future.
You forgot syria
It’s not even that.
It’s the presumption the US has the largest, most effective nuclear arsenal.
As Mao said, “True power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
Maybe. The US hasn’t field tested a nuke since 1992, modernization is an issue, and the US struggles to produce tritium triggers that boost blast yields.
Say, rather, we have a sufficient amount.. Given the change in political winds, we may all find out soon enough as the new boss starts some new wars.
At one point I believe Trump raised the idea of a new nuclear test to build confidence in the US arsenal and to send an obvious message to the rest of the world.
Tritium supply is now based upon recycling from old weapons supply—if I read correctly—as GB supply for tritium is being eliminated. Bush II when in office was told the number of nukes we had was 15k+. It’s now, what, 2k+? I suspect we are good for a bit.
But dial a yield, small nukes are an advanced weapon development. The crap we dropped on Japan required none of that advanced technology and we’ve got plenty of plutonium sitting around. On the other hand, sending bombs weighing several tons over to our adversary might be a pain. 😉
Tritium has a half life of 12 years so recycling is not a long term option.
No, but if the stockpile of nukes was at 15k in 2000, and we profess to need 2000 today. I’d bet reprocessing tritium can buy us time to find a substitute. Obama actually signed the EO to refurbish and modernize our nuke stock pile so we are working on it. I’m also not educated enough here to understand if doing without tritium is possible, or if the deplenished nuke is new worthless.
But in order to pay for that military they have to create ever increasing Dollars which must be disposed of overseas to avoid massive inflation. Military spending overseas solves part of this problem as does a huge trade deficit. Buying cheap goods from China masks inflation and when some of these Dollars return, they go into US government bonds to keep taxes and interest rates low or real estate and stocks to maintain the illusion of prosperity.
However, the US Dollar and the US military are like two climbers joined by a rope. If one falls it takes the other with him.
Partly, If you don’t trust the local currency the US dollar is a good alternative, in parts of Europe back in the day the DM was popular the Swiss franc too
Somewhat. It is also the tax man. Come April 15, IDGAF how much crypto, gold, or lead you have: you better have Louis Lerner’s money, and in US Dollars, or else you will know pain and suffering. This, for most of the Titans of Industry and Tech, is a powerful force.
Well yeah. This, the size of the market and its relative affluence allowed for dollar supremacy. We should be able to keep this for a while but its only because everyone else including China is just as sick.
Much of this madness over Trump and the “Great Reset.” is an attempt to keep the system running and the people at top, on top despite a low birth rate and low velocity of money.
I don’t know how long the economy can remain this irrational though. No one does and anyone who did me included would cash in on it ASAP and not tell anyone anyway.
“For reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent value of Bitcoin,”
What is the “inherent” value of Bitcoin?
There is a real cost to creating a coin, so it has that value, plus whatever utility it could have for buying heroin on-line.
Cost of creating doesn’t lead to value. You can spend a lot of money creating worthless shit.
Indeed. Pay a visit to the Tate Modern for a prime example.
That’s kind of ironic, because the high end art world is just a big money laundering scheme.
Indeed! But that worthless shit has made some cunt rich nevertheless.
Is not bitcoin the modern equivalent of the wheel?
In the sense that it is an impliment that will be used to torture to death enemies of TPTB, yes, they are similar.
Bitcoin specifically, and blockchain in general, is the greatest example of engineering creativity of this century.
The computing hardware and all the associated energy consumption that go into one BTC are stunning.
There are reasons BTC miners were migrating to zip codes with cheap electricity and running parasitic mining operations off the output from the local power plant or their employer’s backup generator.
If the cost is just compute cycles, seems like AWS could start minting its own digital currency much cheaper and more profitably than anybody else.
Yep
as the government gave Bezos a break on the costs of postal delivery to give him an insurmountable competitive advantage, so they can cut the electricity costs and so forth to allow a Bitcoin Bezos to snuff out the competition
And I bet that is a lot of what Bitcoin value really is; the chance of putting oneself to be first in line to be acquired by some deep monied or sovereign interest. The typical Silicon Valley mindset; shoot only for 5% market share so Facebook wants to buy us for billions
“Yep, as the government gave Bezos a break on the costs of postal delivery to give him an insurmountable competitive advantage.” Actually, they give him a break because the additional volume gives the USPS political cover for not cutting a bloated agency.
whatever the reasons, he was able to pass by everyone else on people mover to riches
Thats not real value IMO, Gold/Silver ect will always have some value because of marginal utility, if Elon Musk captured an asteroid of pure Gold and parked it at LEO he would crash the Gold price, but Gold would still have value because it has industrial uses, I don’t see that with bitcoin
An asteroid of pure gold would increase demand
Prices would follow
There is a primal or emotional relationship with gold that cannot be underestimated. You also see it with views of oceans among other things that drive human desires.
Note that the base utility of currency is that it is a store of value of work provided (mining gold/ mining bit coin/ running a mint and paying people with guns to stop other people from running their own printing press…).
Honey, a dozen eggs and leather all have value. However, you can’t put any of them in your pocket or exchange without a big mess.
The reason the pawn shop doesn’t accept a bag of gold dust is because the utility of converting is not worth the effort. If you walked into the same pawn shop with 10-50 round boxes of .556 ammo (not the crappy Russian stuff) a savvy proprietor would readily exchange that for approximately $500 worth of goods and services.
The reason the pawn shop does not accept gold as a payment is they go to jail. That said, they will buy your gold at spot minus their profit and you can then pay them with the money you received.
Good point, Mr. Z-Man. The tax man must be paid.
Some States I believe have allowed for gold as legitimate payment. I lost track of such laws years ago and don’t know wrt Fed’s how this worked out.
In any event, I’m not sure it matters. My general thinking is that alternative currency is used in conjunction with the “King’s coin”. I’m not overly concerned with the government knowing how much my grocery bill is or what those items are. There are other transactions, I prefer to keep to myself. 😉
The Pawn shop can accept anything he choses to accept for payment. He merely has to record and report its accurate dollar value,
I recall years ago, some clever types would try to pay their tax bills with pennies and the government would refuse to take them. Goes to show the government can do whatever the hell it wants.
I had not thought of this before. Presumably, the same cannot be said of gold. Does it cost more to mine later gold? Most likely it gets cheaper or stays the same. Although the cost of surveying, building and making profitable a gold mine are probably far greater than the costs of mining one’s first Bitcoin. Apparently for a gold mine to become profitable can take up to 10 years, maybe more.
There is a book called The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous which discussed how Bitcoin could be some sort of new gold standard, but I never finished it. I do not know if he confronted the fact that whoever is boss can make you trade in what he wants. Of course, that is where parallel black markets come in. As more things that people consider normal become illegal, perhaps such markets will grow in importance.
Good essay.
nm
The increasing cost of production is true of almost all commodities. The first gold from a mine is the easiest to get at with equipment. As that runs out you need better gear, more men and so on, so the cost goes up. This is true of oil and gas too. The thing is, technology makes getting at the expensive stuff cheaper over time. Mine operators also balance their production based on price. When prices for gold shoot up, they switch production to the expensive mines. When prices fall they move to the cheap mines. This is not currently possible with crypto.
EROEI is a huge issue in the oil industry, especially because modern fracking has never been very profitable, even at triple-digit oil prices.
Of course, WuFlu hysteria serves as a very convenient distraction from this reality.
The whole fracking industry is dependent on massive injections of capital. My theory is that the US is trying to overproduce natural gas to suppress Russian export earnings and get importing nations dependent on the US.
The US did something similar in the 1980s by getting the Saudis to overproduce oil to the point where the US oil industry went into a depression. This probably caused more trouble for the Soviets than Afghanistan or Star Wars.
Renting out servers to “mine” bitcon was a play a couple of years ago. Legal, paid in cash, reportable to IRS.
Like selling supplies to the gold prospectors. They’re the one’s who really made reliable income.
There are still surface silver veins you can see from I70 in the Rocky Mountains. It is just too poor ore to be worth the price of extracting. Yes, marginal costs apply to essentially all production, including mining (otherwise we would never have an ammo shortage).
There’s an exponential factor on this. Eventually all cryptos will get to the point that their chain cannot be expanded since doing so would require all the CPU cycles on the planet to accomplish it. The irony is that Bitcoin might still have some sort of face value, but you will be unable to buy it.
Another issue is that while banks can act as a low cost arbiter for payments by snagging a piece of the transactions flowing through them, crypto cannot do that which is why these clearing houses are all sketchy since the only way they can make payroll is by renting out their customer’s crypto.
ES, this is an intriguing observation. The very first thing that is mentioned in the original Bitcoin paper is that is solves the ‘trust’ issue – that is the need for any third party during a transaction. Am I correct in interpreting your statement as something that has arose as a result of the sheer power required and scale of the current Bitcoin network. Would it then be fair to say that this is a problem that Mr Nakamoto did not anticipate? Forgive me if I’ve read you wrong.
Already cryptocurrencies consume a measurable percentage of electricity production.
There have been many attempts to create consensus algorithms that don’t require huge expenditures of electricity to validate transactions and they have all failed.
I was involved in one.
Cryptocurrencies (the tech) are a totalitarian dream. Every transaction tracked and stored forever, the information immutable, unless you own the processing power.
Once the technology matures and can actually handle high traffic without using up all energy of a small country, the governments will issue their own cryptocurrencies as the only legal tender, while outlawing paper money and all non-government cryptos.
Anybody caught providing processing power to non-government cryptos will be considered a counterfeiter.
Yep. From Z:
The government can simply arrest people for using Bitcoin and throw them into prison.
Monopoly of force allows monopoly of the currency. It is the bottom line.
You could say much the same thing about credit cards. If TPTB decide to get rid of paper currency, everything becomes trace-able through debit and credit cards. So, same thing. They are already promoting this idea.
Technology of crypto-currencies is much more robust than the mess that is the current banking software. It also has a lot more rabid fans that will love their enslavement.
An unexpected ally in the :Keep Cash” movement came from the Central Bank of Austria
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/austrian-central-bank-unleashes-pro-cash-attack-ecbs-digial-euro-agenda
The clearly recognize the dangers.
Precisely.
Near to medium-term dissidents need to focus on cash, bullion, tradeable items, and tradeable skills.
The cryptocurrencies like bitcoin offer anonymity. Not so with the digital Dollar envisioned by the Fed.
Bitcoin isn’t anonymous. And even if it were, it would be irrelevant to what I wrote.
“Offer” anonymity. Every criminal conspiracy offers anonymity. It usually breaks when one of the members gets caught and tries to save his own skin. If you believe crypto is anonymous, then Im sure you think the Michigan election was clean and free of any fraud as well.
Yep, a future where every online move your make and every purchase you make is recorded will be a nightmare. Couple that with hate speech laws and a social credit score that can cost you the ability to get a bank account or loan or even shop at stores – and, of course, get or keep a job – and we’re staring down the barrel of a world that even Orwell couldn’t imagine.
Luckily, the people running that show will be either fanatics or idiots or both, so the whole show will be run into the ground soon enough. But the decade or two before that happens will be a mess.
yes, people forget the blockchain was designed for legal record traffic. But greed is the strongest irrational force in the universe.
Molyneux rubbed some of his listeners noses in this investment telling them that he told them years before to get into bitcoin when it was cheap.
Smart guy saying this to people he begs money from.
If you want to listen to something sad and pathetic, listen to Molyneaux. All he does now is take listener calls, and has the same idiotic advice about how everything is the listener’s parents fault and the principled “libertarian” stand is disconnecting from them. There is literally no more content about current events or big think philosophical/moral/science issues. He clearly lost any sort of passion he had for podcasting and by and large hates his audience, but simultaneously needs the cash bad. But because of bans and terrible content, he can never recreate the wonder years and huge cash of like 2016. That seems to be the life path of almost every social media celebrity, especially the political ones. Ralph, TDS, alt right and alt light figures all fall into that camp too as minor social media personalities.
Haven’t listened to Moly for years. He had some interesting “truth about” podcasts, but his libertarian outlook, well really his inability to move past his libertarian outlook, got too frustrating.
I always guessed that he was trying to stay on the good side of YouTube, which, in the end, didn’t help him anyway. He’s a good example of what happens to CivNat types who think that they can continue to hide from the Progressives. Those days are over. You either confess your sins or you’re banished.
Stop punching right. If you have a substantive and helpful critique, voice it. If you just want to publicly twist your panties because everyone isn’t as far right as you are, please keep it to yourself.
It’s not about punching right. It’s about intellectual honesty. I don’t believe that Moly is a gatekeeper exactly, but I find it hard to believe that he walked up to the line of ethnic differences and culture being downstream from biology, and he continues to be a libertarian/colorblind CivNat.
But, hey, Steve Sailer still seems to be HBD-aware CivNat, so who knows maybe Moly really believes what he says he believes.
In the end, he helps our side, so I’m fine with him. But he’s an entertainer first and foremost, so I’m always a bit skeptical.
As to punching right, the big questions for me are whether 1) the other guy is a gatekeeper (intentional or unintentional) or not and 2) is he intellectually honest. (Obviously, those two are often related but not always.)
Sailer is 100% intellectually honest. He’s also not intentionally a gatekeeper, though I wish that he’d occasionally write about moving past the system.
Moly is a little sketchy on both questions.
Its a good point but Libertarians like Molyneaux are not Right Wing.
Libertarianism is an inherently individualistic Left wing philosophy only with more corporate rape on top of that.
The DR is broadly Socially Conservative, Traditionalist and Economically Nationalist not Libertarian.
He didn’t stand up to the censorship and it’s costing him now. It got hard to listen to him talking around and eventually avoiding certain subjects. Hope he finds his mojo again, wish him the best.
did molyneux ever say anything interesting? I watched him way back, before trump got elected, he just kept on annoying me with his interpretation of aristotle and the importance of not spanking kids.
Yes, Molyneux did say interesting things. Or at least had some very interesting guests, such as the series he did on race differences. He did several interviews on the subject with people like Helmuth Nyborg, Linda Gottfredson, Steven Hsu, Charles Murray, Jason Richwine, Jared Taylor, and others. He also did a video, which is now gone, announcing he was now an ethno-nationalist. This was all pre-purge of course. I’m not sure why he’s so timid now. It’s not like youtube is going to take him back for being obedient.
I’ve always hoped that Steve Sailer got some of the Bitcoin gravy train. He’s been accepting it for a long time. Maybe he kept a few coins around.
Someone sent the Derb a few coins a few years back, AFAIK he still has them
Come on, David. We all whinge endlessly about being thrown into the void for badthink, and you cut down a guy who found a way to float in the void without sinking? Yes, charity to your own brothers is a virtue, especially the truthtellers doing the yeoman’s work of bringing our people across the river. What’s he supposed to do, get a Simon & Schuster book deal, maybe a netflix show? Come on.
How about him quit scolding his viewers. Of course since his banishment I am not sure what he is doing.
The first law of monetarism is that the bad money drives out the good. At this stage, the value of bitcoin is not so much increasing, as is the converse – the decline in prospects of stable reserve currencies as MMT and other financial experiments come into vogue.
Because of our post-scarcity society, inflation manifests itself through asset inflation. And that is what we are seeing. And this is why the value of these coins will continue to surge. For a while.
Eventually, governments will come after them and depress the value… on the short term. China tried this. South Korea did too. But on the long term, so long as stupid policies are run by reserve currency governments, there will be value in alternative mediums of exchange. Not to mention the infrastructure to run smart contracts and settle them in the digital money – the place where you CAN demand settlement in crypto.
This is what I think as well. In fact I’ve used BTC and the other cryptos as a kind of informal poll of the smart and cynical about the stability and legitimacy of our government(s), so much so that when my BTC is shooting up, I check the news to see what fresh insanity is afoot. The current run-up has tracked the election chaos and stimulus freebies pretty well. More chaos and free money, fatter BTC.
This is all part of the larger problem you mention, asset inflation. Why is housing so ridiculously expensive? Well, what do we call that thing that keeps you warm and dry regardless of whether you have a job? This seems to have been the main way inflation has manifested in the West for years in fact. Wages haven’t dropped (much) and food is still relatively cheap but you now pay a premium just for the privilege of being near sources of employment. In practice this degrades the value of wages just as much as if the government were pumping up the money supply. Since the government is now doing exactly that with stimulus checks, you can expect further surges in things that keep you alive and comfortable or offer an alternative to the fiat.
According to Catherine Austin…the financial poobahs are phasing out paper and coin; digital is the future, whether we like it or not. Old school types (in this instance, read independent thinkers) will always keep several media of currency, I think. Great challenge to ponder.
The fools! I’m putting *my* money in tulips!
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not putting my money into something I cannot understand or control. At least I know what a tulip bulb is.
If you don’t understand Zman’s point about crypto not being an unassailable safehaven against tyranny let me boil it down for you.
For most of you, the ideas you have about God, nation, country and race would, 35 years ago, place you in the majority and by most measures you’d be considered “good people”
Those same beliefs y’all hold now make you unemployable, dissident, subversive and possibly amenable to prosecution.
Same here. And what if you can’t access the internet? I would never want my fortune dependent on me having 24/7 access to the internet. I lose signal driving through canyons as it is. Power outage hits and you’re screwed like a Tesla owner
bottom line. Bitcoin is valued in dollars. Dollars aren’t valued in Bitcoin.
That’s the big problem of Bitcoin for me. You need internet access to make transactions. The Bitcoin itself might be anonymous but you’ll need a gatekeeper just to get into the marketplace in the first place.
Exactly. That’s why I still tend towards gold and silver in a SHTF scenario. Yeah, G&S are not “investments”, but in uncertain times—who the hell is gonna part with a usable commodity (gas, food, car repair) for a handful of greenbacks (IOU’s)?
And when/if all exchange transactions become digitized by edict—or simply “technological advancement”, how would you avoid complete monitoring of your economic life?
We talk of building small, closely knit communities of like minded people. How could economic independence occur in an environment totally dependent upon a government for its medium of economic exchange?
As has been speculated in a lot of post apocalyptic fiction that actual currency of a post collapse society will likely not be shiny metals at least in the first few years where even those would have little value.
The currency of the early post collapse will be measured in calibers. Because that currency has immediate life-saving value. 9mm will be your George Washington and .223 will be your Andrew Jackson.
If you are existing in a country w/o government and have some extra food to trade to a stranger on the road who doesn’t decide to just kill you and take it what are you going to want more? 20 rounds of 5.56 or 20 oz of silver?
This gold & silver thing is another prepper LARP for people who don’t understand the grim and awful reality of what that world will look like. If you’d like a brief glimpse of it go watch ‘The Road’ for a preview.
The Road is well written like all of Cormac McCarthy’s works but it’s a sad, scary symbolic apocalypse fantasy, not a preview. A better preview, because factual, is Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which shows that even in the worst conditions people survive through communities. This is Zman’s message for these gates-of-Vienna times–keep forming communities. Take advantage of the internet while we can to connect with like-minded individuals so they are no longer just individuals.
“The currency of the early post collapse will be measured in calibers.”
You lost me at arming random strangers who might not always be friendly. If you’re only going to trade with trusted allies anyway then you don’t even need a currency.
Alcohol and cigarettes have a proven record as currencies for day-to-day trading in a SHTF scenario.
Under no circumstances is ammo to be used as currency in SHTF.
Every transaction with anyone you don’t have long standing ties to is a fraught with risk as the sketchiest drug deal. Assuming anyone you meet will behave like a Fallout Raider and try and kill you for your stuff at some point is just sound.
Extra ammo is for your people and you’ll never have enough of it.
Eventually market towns will spring up or some areas where trading is safe and possible will occur. In those cases trade ammo you can’t use for ammo you can or something you must have.
Till a real life Auntie Entity or your local government can keep things safe, break ammo down for components or whatever keep your ammo to yourself.
Kind of my point which I think people took too literally. My example was probably bad re: rando stranger. My point is that ammo will become ‘king’ as a currency in a de facto manor. So ok, trade it within your walled enclave. Gold/silver for external trades, happy now? But everyone will know that ammo will be the most fungible and most valuable asset you possess to be traded for the best goods whereas gold/silver will be nowhere near as valuable initially.
German occupation of western Europe is a closer analogy to what we will face. You’ll need gold, booze, and diamonds to get the “equity redistribution inspector” to ignore the fact you and yours aren’t starving like the townfolk, and to ignore that for some reason your house is the only one in the area that escaped the roving Vibrants. Trying to bribe the Commissars of Woke with ammo will be a hilarious slapstick routine that ends with you sitting in a camp or rotting in a ditch. Your resources will be needed to evade being “noticed by the people in power” and to keep your family alive and healthy, at least in the middle term.
Yep. Bullets, food, fuel, etc. All the stuff the French and Dutch Underground smuggled on the black market during german occupation are a good idea to have. Collapse isnt necessarily the most likely outcome, and the same “teowaki” items are equally useful to staying alive under oppressive occupation.
Zman’s point about the government “just throwing you into prison” for using Bitcoin is valid – until it isn’t. The problem with any government doing that is that at some point it becomes a matter of making war on ants. As the government diverges further in its priorities from those of normal people it begins to find that, while people seldom confront it directly, they (at least the ones with any independence of mind) all tend to have schemes running in the background to dodge most of its influence. This was the end point in the Soviet Union. People still feared the KGB and police but they were all also buying and selling anything from CDs to AK-47s on the black market.
The only way to stop this is to go with the North Korea option and shut down basically anything that is outside the official system. The lockdown nonsense, especially here on the West Coast, actually seems like the first steps towards this. The idea is to crush independent business and with it, any source of wealth or opportunity outside the corpo-government machine. The problem here of course it that they are strangling the golden goose that lays their eggs for them. North Korea might “work” in some sense, but it’s a typical East Asian tyranny. I don’t think that model works anywhere else.
So the “answer” to Bitcoin (and other cryptos) will need to turn out to be something drastic, like a near total shutdown of the internet. Are our rulers that insane? Unfortunately I think they are. A lot of the ruling elite seem to be nothing other than degenerates and not particularly smart ones. When I imagine our local tyrant, I always picture her giggling about what she’s done to Oregon. These are unserious people but they are setting themselves up for very serious pushback. The Coronascam in particular, is something they seem to have no exit strategy for and will probably end up just trying to flee the country over like typical third world looter-kings.
So I’m not as down on BTC as some here but I would also say that the best way to survive a real SHTF event is to “focus on the physical”. Gold? Silver? More like non-perishable food, gasoline, chemical stocks, electrical generating capacity, defensible farmland (or connections to people outside the problem areas who have it), and of course guns and ammunition. I’ve done some (very small) trading in crypto recently but I would say that the best thing to do with crypto-gains is to turn them into things like the above – buy a generator (big enough to sell power to others as well as yourself), get a better vehicle with some off-road capability, guns are fine but the thing now is ammo, buy some reloading equipment and learn to use it.
Unfortunately I’m not in a good position to take my own advice until I can escape the Wrong Coast.
As the uppity preppers say, if you’re getting to the planning stage now, the grasshopper better better bring big bars of gold (and proof of ideological purity) to get the barest of help from the ant who thought ahead. M4 16″ barrels are a good idea, too; you can make a lot of things in a garden shed, but chromoly barrels ain’t one of them. There’s lots of speculation that the left is going to try to Holodomor the rural areas.
You need an internet escort, essentially
Sure, but that’s everything. The USD, Euros, Pesos, whatever is only useful if you can go to a physical merchant to exchange it for goods. You can’t necessarily do that now or in the near future, can you, without a “covid passport” and a tracking/monitoring app on your phone? Or gold: your bullion is worthless unless you find someone to buy it and can get the metal to them. Same for a credit card, or crypto, you can only use it if you can connect with a willing taker. As an enemy of the Enemy, you could be cut off from any one of these avenues of exchange at any time, without notice. Prepare accordingly: Diversity (of media of exchange) is our Strength.
True, but speculation in Btc this spring got me a new used chevy pickup. Take advantage of the bustout as they loot our former country: we’re going to need every scrap we can scrape together.
I don’t trust bitcoin for a lot of reasons already well elucidated here
Truth is after today and things get to stroppy I’m not sure the internet would be reliably on for much longer
After Pence punked with the electors which was entirely expected, apparently pissed off Right Wingers enough that they storming the capital building and have pushed through multiple layers of defenses.
I’m not sure what to make of the footage shown on Gateway Pundit and it could be just riot season . However I’ve never seen middle aged and older White men riot before and yes I know the Hard Hat riots. That was half a century ago.
They aren’t armed having forgotten the old Gorean proverb “Where weapons are not allowed, it is wise to carry weapons.” but next time?
Such scenarios will render high complexity currency like Bit Coin nigh useless and if it gets bad enough, dollars valueless.
Bitcoin is far too complicated to ever be a widespread medium of exchange. The stories are always changing too.
When I see they have run Bitcoin up to 35k, I just shake my head at myself for not buying back when it was consistently under $100.
But there is a whole lot of crazy stuff getting stupid amounts of money thrown at it. Maybe all just another sign of the money bubble.
Bingo. The flood has to go somewhere. And the first thing the new regime will do is print more greenbacks.
Bitcoin is too risky. I’m investing in tulips.
How many bulbs would you like?
I’ve got some extra saffron bulbs. Worth more than gold by weight for some reason.
I’m just mad about saffron.
You so old!
I remember when Mellow Yellow was the southern Mountain Dew. Kid me wondered why somebody would write a song about soda 🙂
Quite rightly
haha good one.
The whole bitcoin thing is a lot like Curtis Yarvin’s idea of the “Multiversity”, an institution (or website, it was never really clear) that would enlighten the people with politically incorrect truths, and hence weakening the regime. There’s no doubt that spreading the truth is an important part of any strategy, but we all know that the second any such site or institution started seriously inconveniencing the powers that be, it would be shut down ASAP. Same with Bitcoin. It’s good for what it’s good for, but it’s not “The Answer”, any more than Yarvin’s hobbyhorse was.
And the key lesson to be learned from this example is that if you seriously wish to degrade a corrupt government, you must do so surreptitiously and not with a clear target painted on your back.
You’ve got to do it from the inside.
I threw a small amount of money in crypto Monday morning and I am up 20% right now. I assume the rug will get pulled out from under this at some point by the feds, but maybe not. Jamie Dimon is setting up a crypto currency through JP Morgan after calling Bitcoin a scam several years ago. The big banks and the government may opt to try and control this instead of crush it.
A good rule of thumb is that whatever rich insiders say they are doing is certainly not what they are doing. They did not get rich by giving away their insider information.
Correct.
“A ruler powerful enough to issue his own coin is powerful enough to enforce its use. The more powerful the king, the more valuable his coin, even outside his realm.”
America is about to crown a potato for its president, and a trollop for its VP. Its ruling class is peopled by similar cretins. There is now a voracious power vacuum in both our nation’s capitals, and only a motley crew of queers, pedos, and unstable psychotics to fill it. The stage is set for big changes.
In short order, for the short term… any investment or transaction you make will have to maintain profitability after these mooks bump up their cuts in your action. After the last election, the Dissidents will have to become fluent with black markets, bribe economies, and hiding their assets from gubbimint predation. FDR tried to force Americans to use his funny money and most rightly told him to shove it up his ass. It is historically true that all fiat currencies fail.
I stacked metals. Gold and silver will be around when the dollar is only pieces of metal and paper. I’d look less at investing my wealth and more at protecting it in the days ahead.
FWEEEDOM!
Good points all.
i would include arable land in with that. You can’t eat dollars or bitcoin.
Actually, JP Morgan and other companies setting up their own cryptocurrencies is an interesting aspect to all of this.
I don’t claim to know anything about cryptocurrencies, but let’s just say that they are the equivalent of a king/country minting their own coins. You have JPM Coin and Facebook’s Libra. There may be others. My point is that several of the big Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs are beginning to mint their own coins.
Normally, the big concern with this – as with Bitcoin – is that the government can shut them down, but, perhaps, these oligarch cryptocurrencies are showing where the real power lies. They don’t fear the government shutting down their mints because they control the government.
Perhaps like in feudal times, we’re seeing the nobles exert power over the king. They control their domain, not the king. Indeed, the king only sits on the throne because of them so he better not mess with their mint.
Interesting. With power like that though… what point is there in having a king? Consider: you’re a Zuckerface or Bezos. Washington bends to your every command… for a fee.
At this point the sham is obvious, the number of red pilled normies is exploding exponentially. Washington is rapidly turning into an increasingly dysfunctional liability. At some point an effort to cut them out of the deal will be made… and perhaps that is what we really saw with Trump?
The swamp is in the eye of the beholder…
The king takes the blame when things go wrong. Then he is replaced. Also need a spokesfigure for their edicts. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Meanwhile, pay no attention to those lords of finance.
actually the successful King has a convenient scapegoat and remains in power. Read Machiavelli for details.
Because the DOJ can arrest Zuckerbezos and throw them in a deep, dark hole at any time, and I dont care how many exSF body guards you buy, they aren’t going to face down the FBI HRT for yah. It’s the same as the NCAA racket: there are 3000 pages of rules so that if you get on their bad side, they can jam you up on whatever violations they can find (and they can always find some) until you relent. You play ball, you get filthy rich. Try to screw around or cut the other guy out, the system choaks you out until you come back into the fold.
As Mal Reynolds once said “Half of everyone are middlemen and they don’t take kindly to being cut out.”
As for the dark hole, yep. Absolutely. That is till the tech lords start selling combat robots and war gear
If you think that “certain people” won’t have a kill switch in them you are nuts “Sorry unlawful target.” and you can sure still send human HRT guys but given what happended the last time the FBI had big losses in 1986. It falls apart.
Worse they’ll know who the friends, family and allies were and something akin to an automated package delivery system , something that exists right now can just drop off some slaughterbots which are near future tech at the kids school.
And note these things can navigate the woods also. The only defense is a bunker.
At that point, your government is Facebook and Amazon basically.
The only thing preventing is laziness, growing American stupidity and the Left’s stranglehold over institutions. They won’t do that kind of work.
Much wisdom in this comment
I don’t know, the gov’t-oligarch partnership has worked pretty well for most of them so far. Why mess with it?
There’s always some greedy bastard who wants a 26% slice instead of his 25%. That’s why the system is self-reinforcing to keep equilibrium. See what Pence and McConnell are doing today for an “In Real Time” example. They know what side of their bread is buttered by the system.
They have lots of influence, there is no denying that. But the king can do something they cannot do. The king can order they be shot on sight or thrown into a cell.
Well, that’s going to be the fun thing to watch. The nobles back in the day had their own armies that were loyal to them. Our oligarchs only have money.
Once in office, what happens when President AOC or someone similar realizes that she can sick the Justice Department or the FBI on Zuckerberg or Dimon. Will the other oligarchs fight back by threatening to withdraw money from AOC? If they do, will she just send agents to their house as well?
Can the oligarchs control their POC pets with just the threat of money or will those pets realize that they have the power to just take the money?
Google has over 100,000 employees. Amazon has millions of employees. Soon, if not already on a limited scale, Big Tech will provide the campaign funds, volunteers, and votes to install politicians, just as the union bosses did in the olden days. Two guesses on how those politicians rule.
Yes, but if the king does that, his hundreds of millions of dollars in consulting, board, book, and speaking fees vanish. Obama is worth hundreds of millions now, because he played ball. Clintons got hundreds of millions too, as did the Bush Crime Family. You squeeze, you get squeezed. You stroke them, they stroke you back.
Always do the exact opposite of any public statements made by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.
This actually has some science behind it. You only learn about their recommendations after they have traded out the inefficiencies, and the other lemmings create a bubble. Doing the opposite takes advantage of the inevitable correction.
They do tell you the correct information, but after they have made their trades, and any advantage has been priced in. The bandwagon effect then gives them a nice bump in their returns.
I recall someone tracked the returns of that Cramer guy on CNBC, based on every recommendation he made for a long time period. He basically performed at the market rate of return, which is pathetic given his twin advantages of 1) the bandwagon effect and 2) the risk premium he should have earned due to a more volatile set of holdings.
The moast important day in the history of /Our/ Republic, and retired jewish SUNY professor of behavioral psychology, (((Zman))), tries to redirect the spergtarded defeatest goyische idiots via the “Look, Squirrel!!!” psycho-sociological gambit.
Hey (((Zman))), check out what the real Patriots are doing to (((your))) precious (((democracy))):
https://i.imgur.com/kcv9Frn.png
Eat that, you filthy stinking (((yid))).
Most important day my ass
Next comes the anti-right crackdown, then during left wing consolidation the anarcho-tyranny goes up to 11 and the right wing’s support of the system goes to 0, then the complete defeat of the GOP and we enter one party rule, then the “and your little dog too/because I can” legislative, law enforcement, financial, and social oppression, then the backlash. This is a long slide down, buckle up. Ask the Spanish.
In an alternate universe, we didn’t “trust the plan.” Instead, we seceded and formed our own country back when we had the chance. That society removed the left from society whole-cloth (via emigration and legislation), so now that society has freedom and liberty instead of the tyranny of the USSA.
… what could have been. Was staying and fighting over scraps (and losing in the end) really worth it?
You are cracked brah. Your Chateau Heartiste days were great stuff but you’ve gone full retard now swinging the j00 bat around at anyone and everyone thereby becoming more of a disinformation agent yourself than anyone else. Ironic, innit?
Dude.
What’s the functional difference between a retired jewish SUNY professor of behavioral psychology and a Christcuck or a LOLbertardian which dutifully regurgitates the esteemed (((professor)))’s demoralization campaigns?
Millions of ostensible “Russians” were all too happy to murder in the name of (((Marx))) & (((Ulyanov))) & (((Bronstein))) & (((Finkelstein))) & all the rest of (((the gang))).
You g@yn!ggerphagg0ts have all been played.
But to a “man”, you lack the ballz to confess to yourselves that you’ve been played.
Muh pride.
Muh psyche.
Muh AMOG skillz.
Muh precious cynicism.
SMDHing.
Shoulda stopped caring.
Shoulda gone to That Dark Place.
Shoulda re-invented your Inner Frame.
But muh pride.
Muh psyche.
Muh AMOG skillz.
Muh precious cynicism…
i do believe this day will affect the minds of many whites when trump bails on them, they’ve wasted so much energy on trump, who’ll let them down(cause he’s a puppet).
Also, protests without violence are useless, when in history has anyone achieved anything through peaceful protesting. Protesters should’ve brought guns, then things would’ve gotten interesting.
It was a very important day … the last chance, however small, to stop this stolen election and those people were there to support that effort. I’m not sure what Herbert Marcuse’s angle is, but Zman is a bit overprotective of jewish malfeasance … I’ve definitely noticed that.
Did you see where Simon &Schuster has cancelled their contract to publish Josh Hawley’s book? Ironically, his book on Tech censorship is being censored! By the usual suspects … hmm.
They’re being used as useful idiots to advance the progressive narrative.
The investor Chris Cole probably got Bitcoin about right. He figures that Bitcoin is a lottery ticket investment. It’s either going to earn you 100X or go to zero, so why not keep 1% or 2% of your portfolio in it. If it goes to zero, no big deal. But if it hits, even a 1% or 2% allocation will dramatically improve your returns.
That said, I’ve never invested in Bitcoin.
The asymmetry of the trade is what intrigues me. It is a speculation but I’m comfortable with that. I don’t trade I just, to use the vernacular, hodl.