Sure this has been posted before, but its worth repeating that Mark Baum from the movie the Big Short believes the next big short is the loss of faith in central banks. Whilst he doesn’t say specifically I’m counting on certain cryptos along with other assets (PM’s, etc) being on his mind…
The real Mark Baum aka Steve Eisman on ZH
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-19/big-shorts-steve-eisman-reveals…
If anyone is truly wishing to prep for the future I suggest buying farmland in the US is actually a rather retro move. There was a person named Eric Townsend who posted here quite frequently. (I believe he was a fairly large financial supporter of this site) He caught a lot of flack for his positions but I think he was quite prescient. He lived in Hong Kong. Jim Rodgers sold his property in the US and moved to Singapore. He got his daughter started learning Mandarin.
These are just two examples of real “preppers” for what is coming and coming sooner rather than later. The New American Century will exist in the shadow of China. Coincidentally the largest mining enterprises for BTC are in China. The large run up of Bitcoin cash was/is fueled by South Korea.
There is a tectonic shift taking place and it is shifting east. Were Horace Greeley be alive he would be saying go east young man.
The smart money is following the gold east not following charts.
If a small investment in crypto can get you there then so much the better. As the collapse happens and picks up speed Mad Max might seem tame as Amerikans elect hyper Trumps promising a return to happy days.
Mohammed Mast wrote:
Charles has a new article out, Regulating Cryptocurrencies–and Why It Matters. Excerpt:
Governments tax income and capital gains. This is how they fund their activities. Clearly, gains reaped from cryptocurrencies are no different from gains reaped from other speculations and investments, so they should be recorded and taxed in the same manner. Some enthusiasts of cryptocurrencies seem to think that regulations requiring the reporting and taxation of gains made buying and selling cryptocurrencies is tantamount to destroying cryptocurrencies. I think this view has it backwards: fully legalizing and regulating cryptocurrencies as financial instruments legitimizes them in a much wider circle of potential users, and common-sense regulations are to be encouraged and welcomed, not viewed as threats to cryptocurrencies. I want to stress that beneath all the speculative frenzy we see in the cryptocurrencies, what will retain value and remain scarce and in demand is whatever solves problems. Cryptocurrencies have the potential to solve two problems: 1. reducing the cost and friction of financial intermediaries. 2. holding value as the $250 trillion in phantom wealth created in the asset bubbles of the past 12 years vanishes.
Mike Maloney of GoldSilver.com, he’s also been recommending BitCoin and Cryptocurrencies for 3.5 years, here’s his latest video out today.
Very interesting, also answers the question on the massive energy that BlockChain based systems use. What does this mean for the price of BitCoin and other AltCoins???
I suggest its well worth watching how this progresses…
More info on a technology that could replace BitCoin and other Blockchain coins?
https://cryptoslate.com/hashgraph-vs-blockchain
Mark - if your reading, how many layers of contrarian is this idea?
Bitcoin as it is currently configured, makes some economic sense but zero political sense. Central banks will not sit idly by and allow capital flight to take place, nor vast pools of taxable money tied up in it, go unaccounted. That’s just for starters.
My intuition is that governments are allowing Bitcoin to prototype digital currency, soon to be replaced by their own highly regulated form of same.
I watched a film about crypto a few days ago and was struck by how remarkably naive the techno-libertarians involved with these schemes are.
It is most likely this will follow the telecom collapse trajectory, with a lot of carnage and tears. Out of the ashes will emerge a crypto currency that is a joint govt/big bank venture. Likely Goldman, but could be JP Morgan.
Fade libertarian viewpoints. They are not describing the world as it is or even should be, but their version of Utopia which is at odds with reality.
You know what the needs are, now how are you gonna settle YOUR mare? no need to answer publicly, just think about it.
Am appreciative of your insight!
husband,father,farmer,optometrist,robie
agitating prop,
Let me butcher one of Winston Churchill’s quotes: Libertarianism is the worst form of political philosophy, except for all the rest. Last I saw, nothing was perfect. Please correct me if you think your personal choice of political philosophy reaches perfection and comports with reality. (I won’t hold my breath.)
I saw an article that fits with your intuition: https://www.naturalnews.com/2017-12-10-evidence-points-to-bitcoin-being-an-nsa-psyop-roll-out-one-world-digital-currency.html. Granted, the article is almost all speculation. It is just a few printed pages long and worth the read. Here’s what I consider the meat of it.
GroverTen steps to crypto-tyranny: The “big plan” by the globalists (and how it involves Bitcoin)
In summary, here’s one possible plan by the globalists to seize total control over the world’s money supply, savings, taxation and financial transactions while enslaving humanity. (And it all starts with Bitcoin.) 1) Roll out the NSA-created Bitcoin to get the public excited about a digital currency. 2) Quietly prepare a globalist-controlled cryptocurrency to take its place. (JP Morgan, anyone?) 3) Initiate a massive, global-scale false flag operation that crashes the global debt markets and sends fiat currencies down in flames. (Hoax alien invasion, hoax North Korean EMP attack, mass distributed power grid terrorism network, etc.) 4) Blame whatever convenient enemy is politically acceptable (North Korea, “the Russians,” Little Green Men or whatever it takes…). 5) Allow the fiat currency debt pyramid to collapse and smolder until the sheeple get desperate (i.e. Venezuela-style desperation with people eating out of dumpsters). 6) With great fanfare, announce a government-backed cryptocurrency replacement for all fiat currencies, and position world governments as the SAVIOR of humanity. Allow the desperate public to trade in their fiat currencies for official crypto currencies. 7) Outlaw cash and criminalize gold and silver ownership by private citizens. All in the name of “security,” of course. 8) Criminalize all non-official cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, crashing their value virtually overnight and funneling everyone into the one world government crypto, where the NSA controls the blockchain. This can easily be achieved by blaming the false flag event (see above) on some nation or group that is said to have been “funded by Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency used by terrorists.” 9) Require embedded RFID or biometric identifiers for all transactions in order to “authenticate” the one-world digital crypto currency activities. Mark of the Beast becomes reality. No one is allowed to eat, travel or earn a wage without being marked. 10) Once absolute control over the new one-world digital currency is achieved, weaponize the government-tracked blockchain to track all transactions, investments and commercial activities. Confiscate a portion of all crypto under the guise of “automated taxation.” In an emergency, the government can even announce negative interest rates where your holdings automatically decrease each day. With all this accomplished, globalists can now roll out absolute totalitarian control over every aspect of private lives by enforcing financial “blackouts” for those individuals who criticize the government. They can put in place automatic deductions for traffic violations, vehicle license plate taxes, internet taxes and a thousand other oppressive taxes invented by the bureaucracy. With automatic deductions run by the government, citizens have no means to halt the endless confiscation of their “money” by totalitarian bureaucrats and their deep state lackeys. How do you feel about your Bitcoin now?
I like Mike Maloney. But after this, I want to call him Mike Baloney
The first half, great. Second half, I think what???
Blockchain is protocol that should survive anything that is thrown at it. It’s like a language. There is nobody controlling it, nobody forcing it, and impossible to stop. Who do you point a gun at then demand they tell everybody to stop speaking English?
Languages have a network effect. If you want to be included in the language of business, you are better off learning English. Putting a gun in English Speakers Faces and demanding everybody speak Chinese isn’t going to do much for you. Maybe China’s power and influence will attract most people to do things the Chinese way and it’s beneficial to learn and speak Chinese.
Distributed Ledger Technology is NOT blockchain. They want you to believe it is- but it’s not. This is a COMPANY not a language. It has a CENTER, not an outgrowth of network effect.
Open, public, free to develop and CAPITALISM is why blockchains grow and people innovate on them. They include a VALUE TOKEN to keep people all aligned through Crypto Economics. These are basic principals Mike continues to struggle with.
Metcalf’s law continues to work as expected. Then some centralized company thinks they are going to get everybody to unhitch their wagon and move to something that continues to use FIAT and run the status quo has another thing coming.
Maybe the next episode Mike Baloney can consider the entire show in trying to understand the concept of crypto-economics. That will help him evolve.
Crypto world moves very fast. 1 month in crypto-time is about 10 years of ‘regular time’. Set your stopwatches. You watched a show about the beginning history of bitcoin’s early beginning. In the first few years, you saw the only population that might actually give something like bitcoin a chance as it met their political views.
In just a few years, the Libertarians have been supplanted by Wall Street and the rest of the world that caught the bug. Many of the early Libs are now rich and playing with their Lambos, they were ahead of the game - but you don’t see a ton of them touting the benefits any longer as it’s moved mainstream.
Think of it as watching an old movie about cowboys and indians and thinking that is the current state of the USA. You’re several decades behind in crypto-time.
I’m all for freedom and letting people do what they want … with their money, but not “our” money.
If folks want to speculate on BTC, I say, you are braver then I , but have it and good luck!
In the modern era of seemingly infinite available credit, the leverage problem always can creep in to make any “investment” a systemic risk requiring a bailout.
Say 10 million people max their credit card (or even helocs) to buy bitcoin, say $500 billion of leverage is uses to buy BTC - and then BTC crashes, the borrower’s default on their loans and then the banks are insolvent and we have voila, systemic risk entailing a gov bailout. - Same pattern of the 1920’s, and 2007 RE bubble, and same result.
This is not about bitcoin per se; this is the fraud that is modern finance/banking/gov; failure to regulate and failure of those who provide credit from doing their due diligence to prevent losses, and everybody loves it - just gamble and maybe win, but worse case get bailed out; privatize the gains and socialize the losses.
The old rule applies, never, ever use your own money to speculate - use someone else’s money - Bastiat wrote about plunder, and this is what we have to day, everyone trying to live off of everyone else.
You never know exactly what’s going to happen after you stick your neck out by making a declarative near-term forecast.
But this warning from the original article above turned out to be quite timely, given the ~40% price decline in Bitcoin that has happened since it hit its $19K+ high two weeks ago:
It is highly, highly likely for the reasons mentioned above that a painful downwards price correction is imminent. One that will end in tears for all the recent FOMO-driven panic buyers.Bitcoin and its crypto siblings are in a major downdraft today. Where will the carnage end? And will margin calls on the new futures exchanges add to the selling pressure from here? We shouldn't have too long to find out. But as I wrote in the article:
If you've been feeling like the loser who missed the Bitcoin party bus, you've likely done yourself a favor by not buying in over the past few weeks.John Hussman nailed how bubble markets force you to make a choice: to look like an idiot now, or an idiot later. For those who have felt an idiot by sitting on the sidelines, perhaps it's time to take off the Dunce cap and hand it over to the cryptomaniacs. It's increasingly looking like "later" has just arrived...
https://hashgraph.com/
Hashgraph The Future of Decentralized Technology
Hashgraph is data structure and consensus algorithm that is:
Fast: With a very high throughput and low consensus latency
Secure: Asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant
Fair: Fairness of access, ordering, and timestamps
These properties enable new decentralized applications such as a stock market, improved collaborative applications, games, and auctions.
Reading this, I wondered whether the fact that it is getting harder and harder for millennials (and others) to financially make their way in the world is making manias like bitcoin even more pronounced than they would have otherwise been.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-29/stunning-look-inside-world-sou…
Libertarianism is the worst form of government. Period. Totally brain dead.
What you have in the U.S is a society where some states, like Ohio, are becoming more libertarian by default. The state is falling apart because those who could support the social and physical infrastructure would rather see the place turn into a rotting carcass of ideology based on greed than pay taxes to support it.
You can bet that “less government,” will always end up equaling more coercive control. Prisons will never be underfunded. What looks good from a philosophical perspective isn’t mirrored when put into practice.
And thus you have Bitcoin. Same. Operating as if the founders are above nation states and nation states will just allow them to undermine the financial system. And why? Because they have somehow been outsmarted? Or because the government that has committed all kinds of atrocities to maintain their hold on financial dominance has just shrugged and gone, “whatever!?”
I suspect a certain amount of this thinking comes from the fact that many of the nerds who have promoted this currency live in an almost purely digital parallel reality that doesn’t intersect with the real world very often. There is nothing to stop them from doing whatever they want, in simulations – but it just isn’t real.
Block chain prototyped with the enthusiasms of the freedom loving will be outlawed after being allowed to prototype the tech and act as a Guinea pig. Then governmental controls with no freedoms whatsoever will swoop in and create a digital big brother coin that we will be forced to use
agitating prop wrote:
Libertarianism is the worst form of government. Period. Totally brain dead.
agitating prop wrote:
What you have in the U.S is a society where some states, like Ohio, are becoming more libertarian by default. The state is falling apart because those who could support the social and physical infrastructure would rather see the place turn into a rotting carcass of ideology based on greed than pay taxes to support it.
agitating prop wrote:
You can bet that "less government," will always end up equaling more coercive control. Prisons will never be underfunded. What looks good from a philosophical perspective isn't mirrored when put into practice.
agitating prop wrote:
And thus you have Bitcoin. Same. Operating as if the founders are above nation states and nation states will just allow them to undermine the financial system. And why? Because they have somehow been outsmarted? Or because the government that has committed all kinds of atrocities to maintain their hold on financial dominance has just shrugged and gone, "whatever!?"
I suspect a certain amount of this thinking comes from the fact that many of the nerds who have promoted this currency live in an almost purely digital parallel reality that doesn't intersect with the real world very often. There is nothing to stop them from doing whatever they want, in simulations -- but it just isn't real.
Block chain prototyped with the enthusiasms of the freedom loving will be outlawed after being allowed to prototype the tech and act as a Guinea pig. Then governmental controls with no freedoms whatsoever will swoop in and create a digital big brother coin that we will be forced to use
In Post #90, Grover wrote:
Let me butcher one of Winston Churchill's quotes: Libertarianism is the worst form of political philosophy, except for all the rest. Last I saw, nothing was perfect. Please correct me if you think your personal choice of political philosophy reaches perfection and comports with reality. (I won't hold my breath.)