Beware Bitcoin Arguments

[osan]

Not sure this belongs here, so move it if you see fit.

I ran across this today:




BIG error made at about 3:57 where he asserts that gold could not even keep up with inflation, the larger assertion being that gold has failed as money. To that I call foul. The error lays in his ignoring the fact that gold is no longer either currency or money, but whose market value is stated in terms of, say, FRNs. This in NO WAY speaks to gold's efficacy as either currency or money. So sorry, but an error this wild begs my extreme doubt as to the soundness of the argument in general. This cannot be ignored as it is fundamental to the nature of things.



So long as gold is not the economic lingua franca (FRNs are) of an economy, there is no possible way of knowing how it is going to fare in that role. My strong suspicion is that it would bring a stability to world economies that would lead the globalist tyrants to declare all-out war on the entire world... That, or they'd just go home, kill their families and then themselves for woe.

In the global case, FRNs serve as a market-distorting noise factor in relation not just to the actual current market value of gold, but in terms of the potential of gold as the global economic lingua franca - the foundation of all economic transactions.



Don't be fooled by the convincing sounding, but error-ridden arguments that say BTC is going to save the world. I promise you that the global tyrant already knows how to defeat BTC if and when it becomes a threat to their position in the world. If *I* can dream up ways of scuttling it, ANYBODY can.



Now once again bear in mind that we live in the era of the ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: Theye, upon their pleasure, can administratively castrate BTC by any of several avenues. THEYE control corporate entities, ultimately speaking, through policy and not through even statute, much less Law. Theye can effectively destroy any incorporated business with the stroke of a pen. Theye can sic the tax felons on businesses, effectively ending those businesses via the tax courts. Theye can send men with guns to haul away flesh and blood human beings pursuant to the rules THEYE make regarding human culpabilities, regardless of the corporate veil because there are endless regulations regarding such arbitrarily contrived obligations relating to ethics and tax statutes. Did I mention the tax courts?



Theye have a million ways to make life impossible for corporate entities who defy their policy mandates. When those mandates require things that will bring BTC use under THEIRE effective control, corporate entities will do NOTHING to defy them because their own balls rest in the hands of the Tyrant and his agents who not only don't give a rat's sphincter about you, they are likely champing at the bits to drill you a passel of new ones. This is the plain and glaring truth of things. $#@! with Theire will and they will put you over the wood and give your sphincter the exercising you cannot afford to absorb.



As for non-corporate business, if that is also deemed as needed to be reined in, that, too can be accomplished, the demons more than happy to make garish examples of those who defy the Whipmaster's command.



I will repeat myself unto your nausea: so long as we live under an administrative tyranny, the likes of BTC, gold, or anything else you care to offer up as money or even just mere currency, has no chance of standing against Theire will. We see this every minute of every day. Do yourselves a great favor and stop engaging in wishful thinking because it hampers you, rather than helps.



It is only until and after we oust the tyrants and get our heads out of our $#@!s that good and honest economic infrastructure has a chance, and that only so long as we the vast majority remain true to what it right and proper between men. This translates directly into a grim intolerance of the intolerable, which further and inescapably implies an even more grim and merciless treatment of those who transgress against their fellows, most particularly in terms of that which tends to have widespread effects. Government behavior at all levels is perhaps the greatest and most salient example of this, but counterfeiting money or currency is a close second-place candidate. These are not exhaustive, but methinks you get the point.

Gold failed?

Bull$#@!.

Gold was the basis of the Byzantine economy. It succeeded perfectly for 900 years, the eventual failure of said economy attributable not to gold, but to the scoundrels who rediscovered the quick-fix of debasement, having completely ignored the lessons of Rome.



Gold doesn't fail. It CANNOT fail. Only people can do that, and if anyone thinks that bitcoin cannot be debased, you are $#@!ting in your own hats. ANYTHING can be defeated, and until you wrap your brains around that somewhat daunting truth, you will continue to fall for the same old carpetbagger tricks that have thus far never failed with the population at large. I point to the "pandemic" as the most recent and globally pervasive exampkle.



I'm not against BTC, but I am more than aware of its vulnerabilities, just as is the case with almost anything one might care to name.

Don't make a chump out of yourself. Invest if you will, but at least do so with awareness of the raw truth about things. Gold isn't the problem. BTC isn't the problem. FRNs are not the problem. Human beings are the problem. Until we figure out how to effectively neutralize the human gone criminal, and it can be done if we decide to have the stomach for it, nothing is going to change no matter what endeavor you care to name, BTC included.



TANSTAAFL, motherfuckers.

TANSTAAFL, and don't you ever forget it.

Freedom ain't free, and there is always someone, somewhere, seeking to take it from you by one means or another.

I see a potentially optimal case where gold is restored as the economic basis of global money and BTC becomes the transactional medium by which gold is traded in real time and in arbitrarily large or small amounts. This, however, would require trustworthy storing agents who would be good for their words as to the size of their holdings and as to the purity standards of them, which is to say that there would be no debasement. Given the general current standard of men's MQs (Moral Quotient), those last two bits show as rather tall orders... unless enough of us get right with God, so to speak, and get up the stomachs to do horrific things to those who transgress in such manners, and here I mean the death penalty and the economic destruction of their families. Some may chafe against that last bit, but I maintain that such people, let us call them the "criminal class" understand nothing less than such rude and merciless treatment. Nothing else dissuades them, and in some cases even that is not enough.

Mr. Swan Bitcoin makes yet another unforgivable error beginning at 7:52. He states:

Schiff is a smart guy, but I swear he drops fifty IQ points whenever he talks about bitcoin... is basically making the infinite pizza debate, which says bitcoin isn't scarce because it can be infinitely divided... Bitcoin IS divisible, but that doesn't change the fact that there is only twenty one million whole parts.

Talk of logic blown to bits. The fallacy here lies in the conflation of bitcoin with a real, physical entity such as gold. In principle, BTC is infinitely divisible, thereby making the number of EFFECTIVE ECONOMIC UNITS infinite. In this respect, BTC is functionally no different than, say, FRNs, the only difference being the directions in which potential asset supplies expand. In the case of FRNs, it is outward and inherently inflationary. The difference with BTC, and it is potentially a VERY important one, is that there would be both an inflationary and DEflationary effects. The inflation should be obvious, as the number of effective economic units grows, thus affecting real-world economic transactions. The kicker, however, rests with the deflationary aspect, which greatly effects those with savings... to a point. But as good as that new sounds, the ultimate effect insofar as actual market conditions goes (all else equal), is inflationary. As the value of savings grows, purchasing power rises. With greater power usually we see greater demand, which in turn raises prices. Does that rise take a bit from the asses of savers? Certainly from spenders. What is the net.effect? I submit that this cannot at the moment be known. My suspicion is that it would all come to a balancing point eventually, but there is not way to predict what effects may be experienced on the way to that welcome state of stability. In this respect, BTC actually complicates matters in ways we cannot as yet predict as the complexities are virtually guaranteed to constitute a set of nonlinear factors, rendering reliable predictions nearly impossible.





Now, and perhaps finally, there is a practical factor here that in fact tends to limit divisibility, and it is called "machine epsilon", which is a fancy way of denoting the absolute smallest number that can be represented by a computer. However, the degree of practicality is likely a material irrelevancy here because even a 64-bit machine is able to represent a very small float. HOWEVER, and I have never once seen this addressed by BTC proponents: the problem of rounding becomes very significant as one further subdivides BTC. The smaller the division, the more instances of rounding that will have to be executed and the more significant becomes the issue of rounding of blockchain data, which may lead to upward supply growth, downward, or maybe a statistical push if proper algorithms are developed to deal with the problem. I'm sure this has been discussed in serious comp-sci circles, but BTC advocates seem to have been a mite silent on the matter.

Anyhow, my thoughts on the matter on a Sunday morning.

[ClaytonB]

tl;dw -- some notes on the overall topic:

BIG error made at about 3:57 where he asserts that gold could not even keep up with inflation, the larger assertion being that gold has failed as money. To that I call foul. The error lays in his ignoring the fact that gold is no longer either currency or money, but whose market value is stated in terms of, say, FRNs. This in NO WAY speaks to gold's efficacy as either currency or money. So sorry, but an error this wild begs my extreme doubt as to the soundness of the argument in general. This cannot be ignored as it is fundamental to the nature of things.

To paraphrase Mises on the matter of the divisibility of the monetary medium (gold, silver, etc.): Any total amount of money is as serviceable for the use of the monetary medium as any other amount. That is, there is never a need for "more money". For coinage, we do want more of the monetary metal as population grows, simply because coins can only become so small before they become too small to handle. However, there are solutions to this, such as using non-precious metals for very small transactions, which is why copper used to be used for pennies, nickel for 5cent coins, and so on. Thus, even if you had just one gold bar for the whole world, it would still be possible through subdivision to give every nation in the world their one small piece of that gold bar, and that small piece would be the gold reserve of the nation. Obviously, that is an exaggerated situation. In reality, as population grows (thus, increased demand for coinage) the demand for precious-metal mining for coinage also grows, and so more resources are invested into that, and the low-dilution mining sources that were formerly unprofitable, become profitable. IIRC, there's vastly more gold dissolved in the water of the ocean than all gold ever mined by humans added together, many times over. Obviously, the cost of recovering that is very high, but if the population really grew to be so enormous that the amount of gold available today would not suffice for coinage, then it would become so precious that mining it directly from the ocean, even at great expense, would become profitable.

So long as gold is not the economic lingua franca (FRNs are) of an economy, there is no possible way of knowing how it is going to fare in that role. My strong suspicion is that it would bring a stability to world economies that would lead the globalist tyrants to declare all-out war on the entire world... That, or they'd just go home, kill their families and then themselves for woe.

The assumption that gold is no longer money is not correct. Gold is no longer popular money in the West, that is, it is not used hand-to-hand by most people, most of the time. But this is not actually historically unique, as bimetallism in Britain and Europe caused many gold outflows during the era where those laws were being imposed. Sometimes, gold would disappear from a bimetallic economy and silver would have higher legal value than gold, and vice-versa. So, yes, it is true that people don't use gold very often in hand-to-hand transactions in the US/West but this says nothing about whether gold itself is still money. Go to Dubai and find out whether gold is still used as money. It is commonly-used money there. While less common, it is still used as money in India, among the upper-class. They do transactions in gold. In Russia, it is used as money for large transactions. In Africa, it widely used for all kinds of large transactions. In Switzerland, it is actually used as money in purchase transactions. Gold never completely stopped being money.

In the global case, FRNs serve as a market-distorting noise factor in relation not just to the actual current market value of gold, but in terms of the potential of gold as the global economic lingua franca - the foundation of all economic transactions.

The FRN is basically the fiat money token of the American-West MIC. It is money in the Austrian definition, because it is used in transactions (ordinary purchases). But the fact that it is money does not lend it any kind of permanence... all paper monies quickly die. The current incarnation of the USD is just over 50 years old, the previous incarnation collapsed when Nixon closed the gold-window. In fact, one could argue that the USD soft-collapsed in 2008 and it has really been in a kind of "rolling collapse" since then because QE-forever is really just a euphemism for never-ending hyper-inflation.

Don't be fooled by the convincing sounding, but error-ridden arguments that say BTC is going to save the world. I promise you that the global tyrant already knows how to defeat BTC if and when it becomes a threat to their position in the world. If *I* can dream up ways of scuttling it, ANYBODY can.

Well, they can make it a major PITA to use Bitcoin and this will keep 90+% of people away from it, but actually crushing it is not as easy as it sounds. Unless you really understand the bits and bytes of Bitcoin, you don't really understand just how hard it really is to kill it. It's much harder than you probably think.

Now once again bear in mind that we live in the era of the ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: Theye, upon their pleasure, can administratively castrate BTC by any of several avenues. THEYE control corporate entities, ultimately speaking, through policy and not through even statute, much less Law. Theye can effectively destroy any incorporated business with the stroke of a pen. Theye can sic the tax felons on businesses, effectively ending those businesses via the tax courts. Theye can send men with guns to haul away flesh and blood human beings pursuant to the rules THEYE make regarding human culpabilities, regardless of the corporate veil because there are endless regulations regarding such arbitrarily contrived obligations relating to ethics and tax statutes. Did I mention the tax courts?

Yes, but none of these are things that the architect(s?) of Bitcoin overlooked. All of this was built into Bitcoin from Day-1 in the sense that Bitcoin is "gamed out" for all these various scenarios. This is what I mean when I say that it's much harder to kill Bitcoin than you probably think. Did you know that there is a network of satellites whose only function is to broadcast the Bitcoin network from space? These satellites were launched by "Bitcoin whales" (unknown Bitcoin zillionaires) who have an enormous stake in ensuring that Bitcoin continues operating even in the worst-case scenarios. The entire land-based Internet can go down... and there will still be Bitcoin. Yes, the US military could shoot those satellites down but, once again, game-theory: are they really benefiting so much from killing Bitcoin to go to all of that effort? The answer is almost certainly no. It almost certainly doesn't "pay off" to kill Bitcoin. This is why they are shooting themselves in the foot by mocking and trivializing Bitcoin. The more they mock it as a worthless pyramid scheme, the more ridiculous they look trying to justify why "shooting down the Bitcoin satellites is a matter of National Security!!!" Their other alternative is to take it seriously, but they know that if they take it seriously, so will private investors, and the market will start piling out of FRNs into Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is harder to kill than you think!

Theye have a million ways to make life impossible for corporate entities who defy their policy mandates.

True. However, Bitcoin is really about enabling non-FRN-based economic order. Remember the Canadian Freedom Convoy? Remember how they shut that down (by freezing bank accounts)? That is what Bitcoin was really built for. It will take a while for the salt-of-the-earth conservatives, who are understandably wary of treating digital bits flying around as "money", to understand this. As far as I can determine, Bitcoin was built as a bullet-proof escape-valve from the coming Beast System and MOTB. I am fully convinced I will see the MOTB imposed in my remaining years. I don't want to live through that, but if that's where God has put me in history, then that's what it is. God never throws his children into the flames without also providing the way of escape (see the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego).

When those mandates require things that will bring BTC use under THEIRE effective control, corporate entities will do NOTHING to defy them because their own balls rest in the hands of the Tyrant and his agents who not only don't give a rat's sphincter about you, they are likely champing at the bits to drill you a passel of new ones. This is the plain and glaring truth of things. $#@! with Theire will and they will put you over the wood and give your sphincter the exercising you cannot afford to absorb.

True enough. But go back to the Freedom Convoy -- in that convoy, just by itself, there was the entire bones, sinews, heart and lungs of the entire Canadian economy. What do WE THE PEOPLE need from them anyway? Paperwork? Safety inspectors? Regulators? For what? So, if they (Deep State / Beast System) want to push this to the existential limit (and every appearance is that they are in fact doing that), THEY LOSE. That's the word of God and prophecy, not my opinion. And Bitcoin/gold/silver can absolutely make the way for this to happen.

As for non-corporate business, if that is also deemed as needed to be reined in, that, too can be accomplished, the demons more than happy to make garish examples of those who defy the Whipmaster's command.

True enough, but the solution to this is fraternity. This is why Jesus said we (the sheep who believe in him, the Great Shepherd) must become ONE. We must become one brotherhood so that "they" cannot rip us apart, even through persecution. Forcing brother to rat on brother is their oldest trick in the book. We will have to build a brotherhood that can resist their most desperate attacks and that will only be possible through faith in Jesus, you can be sure of that. This is one reason I keep sounding the alarm on this forum for the need for ALL liberty-lovers to come into the Gospel. There is no reason not to believe the Gospel, and there is every reason to believe the Gospel. So just believe, it really is that simple. How bad do things have to get, and how many prophecies have to be fulfilled, before liberty-lovers realize that the 2,000-year-old prophecies of Revelation were not a "lucky guess"?? It's all coming true before our eyes, word-for-word...

I will repeat myself unto your nausea: so long as we live under an administrative tyranny, the likes of BTC, gold, or anything else you care to offer up as money or even just mere currency, has no chance of standing against Theire will. We see this every minute of every day. Do yourselves a great favor and stop engaging in wishful thinking because it hampers you, rather than helps.

Naw, that's the black-pill. Spit it out. The government has many terrible weapons, but they have no idea where the gold and silver are buried. They might know where some of it is, but they have no idea where 99.9% of it is. When the day comes that they're ready to "throw down", they'll find out who is the real 800-pound Gorilla in the Room. It's not them, it's We The People (in humble submission to God). Always has been. They have not even the first inkling the fire they're playing with.

It is only until and after we oust the tyrants and get our heads out of our $#@!s that good and honest economic infrastructure has a chance

There have been plenty of oustings in history and they've landed us right where we are now.

I find the structure of the Vatican college of cardinals to be instructive in this regard. Every cardinal is a potential Pope. You can assassinate the Pope, if you want, and this would be a terrible blow to the church, obviously. But it would not kill the church, because the college of cardinals will simply convene and elect the next Pope. This system arose back when "politics" basically meant raiding the village on the other side of the hill. Is it any wonder that the power of Rome has survived for thousands of years? It's an un-killable hydra, at least in human terms.

But it also points the way to its own futility. Assassinating the Pope is an exercise in futility. "Oust the tyrants!" is poetically equivalent to "assassinate the Pope!", just in other words. The core of the Beast System is a multi-headed hydra, it is un-killable in human terms. But that doesn't mean there is no way out. It's just that the way out is not what many patriots think it is -- the way out is Jesus. The more you think about it, the more obvious it becomes. The Lord Jesus was 2,000+ years ahead of his time. He knew this day would come and prophesied it, in photographic detail. That alone is proof enough. But the more you think about all the gears-and-levers of earthly power, and how intricately engineered they are, the more obvious it will become than no human being or human organization could ever "just happen" (as by evolutionary lottery) to prepare for all of this. It's far too vast, far too intricate for any human mind to comprehend. It is, in fact, nothing less than the mind of Satan manifesting in material reality. The more you understand that fact, the more you will realize why the Gospel is as it is, however "strange" it may sound to the skeptic's ear.

Gold failed?

Bull$#@!.

Correct, gold has not failed at all. We don't have honest money in America (by-and-large). The spiritual cause of that is that we are not honest people and we do not do honest business. Cause-and-effect. Thus, the real change that we need is first and foremost a change of heart, spiritually. We need to repent of our dishonesty (dishonest daylight business practices) and we need to return to traditional values (that is, Christian values). Then, honest money will return.

FRNs are not the problem. Human beings are the problem.

Well, FRNs are the problem. It's like someone who has slashed their wrist open, and saying that the slash itself, which is spurting blood, is not the problem. Well, it is the problem right now, and if it's not solved, they will surely die. Yes, the root problem is in their heart, not on their wrist. But the root problem is not what is causing them to die this very moment. So, staunch the bleeding, and treat the wound urgently, before they bleed out completely. Then, after they begin to recover, send a pastoral team to give them biblical care and help them begin the process of real healing so that they do not end up in the same situation again, or worse.

I see a potentially optimal case where gold is restored as the economic basis of global money and BTC becomes the transactional medium by which gold is traded in real time and in arbitrarily large or small amounts.

STEAL THIS IDEA AND BECOME RICH:

In an honest money state, set up a network/consortium of coin dealers who transact with each other using Bitcoin. The purpose of this network is to enable efficient transportation of commodity precious metal. Market it is a green-energy thing or green-energy offset of Bitcoin or whatever. The goal is to allow coin shops to essentially become mini bank branches by allowing them to transmit coins between each other via Bitcoin (transmit the market-value of the coins, then convert the Bitcoin immediately back into coins). [NOTE: DO NOT USE THE WORDS "BANK" OR "MONEY TRANSMISSION" ANYWHERE! Market it under some other description.] So, if I want to send you 10 silver coins, I go to my local coin shop, deliver the 10 coins with the destination shop they are to be transmitted to, and the name of the individual to pick them up (you). My coin shop transmits the equivalent of 10 silver coins of Bitcoin to your coin shop. You can then come down and pick up your 10 coins from that shop at any time. Each shop gets a small fee obviously. [DON'T CROSS STATE LINES, this only legally works in-state (in honest-money States).] The consortium itself would need to charge a membership fee and keep lawyers on staff to help with legal charges that the Feds will surely file to harass the honest coin shops. That's the part that requires a little bravery, but I think this is very doable, politically, financially, etc. I think this idea is literally an untapped gold-mine.

Now, and perhaps finally, there is a practical factor here that in fact tends to limit divisibility, and it is called "machine epsilon", which is a fancy way of denoting the absolute smallest number that can be represented by a computer. However, the degree of practicality is likely a material irrelevancy here because even a 64-bit machine is able to represent a very small float. HOWEVER, and I have never once seen this addressed by BTC proponents: the problem of rounding becomes very significant as one further subdivides BTC. The smaller the division, the more instances of rounding that will have to be executed and the more significant becomes the issue of rounding of blockchain data, which may lead to upward supply growth, downward, or maybe a statistical push if proper algorithms are developed to deal with the problem. I'm sure this has been discussed in serious comp-sci circles, but BTC advocates seem to have been a mite silent on the matter.

(a) The satoshi (smallest divisible unit of Bitcoin) is an extremely small amount of real value (USD 0.0002616 or 1/33 of a penny, as of this writing). It's just not a serious worry at this point. (b) There have been some BIPs (I can't remember the number and not going to search it up) where an additional field is added to the transaction to even further sub-divide the satoshi (e.g. add another 64-bit field). This would make the number of sub-satoshis so enormous that we would have to colonize the stars before hitting the limit again. If it becomes a serious issue, that BIP would just be put on the pipeline to add a new field to the transaction format for this purpose (this kind of thing happens regularly). (c) Lightning and other "second-layer" solutions are really the best way to address this issue. Lightning goes down to zillionths of a satoshi (I don't remember the exact limit, it's extremely small). The reason that this is probably best handled on a second-layer is that the Bitcoin network bandwidth cannot scale to handling global transactions. This is not a bug, it's a feature. Bitcoin is designed to act more like a global, public record of central bank transactions. It's for "big stuff". Just watch a live feed of Bitcoin transactions, the number of 6-figure and 7-figure transactions scrolling across your screen will blow your mind. Billions of dollars moves over BTC per day. But the virtue of Bitcoin is that it's an "all-to-all public record" for anyone connected to the Bitcoin network. This means that Joe-schmoe can watch every single Bitcoin transaction just by logging onto the network. Again, that's a design feature, not a bug. And that imposes a technological limitation that you can't have every single penny-size transaction in the entire world going over a network like that because the bandwidth and latency requirements are absolutely prohibitive. Bitcoin can't be a Visa replacement, not without a second-layer. The solution to that problem is Lightning (or something equivalent). And since Lightning is designed for the smallest conceivable transactions, it is able to divide a satoshi down to zillionths of a satoshi. And remember that a satoshi is already an extremely small unit of value.

[osan]

Firstly, I take all your points quite well and will not make large responses, but would like to respond to a tiong or two.

tl;dw -- some notes on the overall topic:


The assumption that gold is no longer money is not correct.

Technically, you are correct, but it is no longer currency and currencies no longer represent gold, so for all practical purposes. Perhaps I should have been more explicit.

Gold is no longer popular money in the West

I wasn't referring to camel caravans in middle-Asia.

Well, they can make it a major PITA to use Bitcoin and this will keep 90+% of people away from it

Methinks it would be significantly more than 90%, but that's just speculation, so let's just agree on 90. Theye don't have to stamp it out, but only to cross a threshold. Control is the name of the game here and if BTC threatens that control, Theye will go to war, literally and figuratively.

but actually crushing it is not as easy as it sounds. Unless you really understand the bits and bytes of Bitcoin, you don't really understand just how hard it really is to kill it. It's much harder than you probably think.

I understand blockchain data structures OK enough and data structures in general, but once again the issue is not the technology, but the administrative state; the TYRANT. They are ushering all manner of new methods of control. China has their "social credit" system which is likely to make it to these shores. Imagine not being able to leave your neighborhood without permission, or not at all if you displease the Whipmaster. I've seen where AI can go, and that was 23 years ago. It isn't pretty. Those pigs will stop at nothing to keep you in the chute.

Yes, the US military could shoot those satellites down but, once again, game-theory: are they really benefiting so much from killing Bitcoin to go to all of that effort?

This is just a bit naive. Firstly, all else equal the military does as it is commanded by Themme. Their interests in this may well prove irrelevant. The satellites don't need to be killed, but only coopted. If the owners refuse to cooperate, shoot a few before the rest of the owners and the latter will sing like canaries. But it doesn't have to all be stick. As always, the carrot on the other end of the deal could be very large and very tasty. Promise the relevant parties that their families will become "in", whereas to refuse will result in flaying your children alive as you watch, and then move on to your siblings, parents, aunts... You get the picture. As I always say, those bastards are playing for keeps and to put ANY felony past them is a dangerous error.

The answer is almost certainly no. It almost certainly doesn't "pay off" to kill Bitcoin. This is why they are shooting themselves in the foot by mocking and trivializing Bitcoin. The more they mock it as a worthless pyramid scheme, the more ridiculous they look trying to justify why "shooting down the Bitcoin satellites is a matter of National Security!!!" Their other alternative is to take it seriously, but they know that if they take it seriously, so will private investors, and the market will start piling out of FRNs into Bitcoin.

Do you think Theye care what you or I think of them?

Bitcoin is harder to kill than you think!

I hope you're right.

True enough. But go back to the Freedom Convoy -- in that convoy, just by itself, there was the entire bones, sinews, heart and lungs of the entire Canadian economy. What do WE THE PEOPLE need from them anyway? Paperwork? Safety inspectors? Regulators? For what? So, if they (Deep State / Beast System) want to push this to the existential limit (and every appearance is that they are in fact doing that), THEY LOSE. That's the word of God and prophecy, not my opinion. And Bitcoin/gold/silver can absolutely make the way for this to happen.

Once again, I hope you prove smarter than myself.

True enough, but the solution to this is fraternity

We agree, but we must qualify that with "sufficient". We have have it, but I'm not yet convinced of it. We are divided deeply and I'm not sure I see how we can cough up enough fraternity to get the job done. I'm just being realistic based on what I see of people anymore. There is indeed a lot of good sounding talk, but I've yet to see substantive action. And don't forget 1/6. A bunch of people go to the Capitol, get a nice tour, and end up in prison for an "insurrection". These bastards stop at nothing.

Naw, that's the black-pill.

I'm not a black pill kind of guy, but I am a realist. Rational optimism is a great thing; a powerful thing. But all the wishing in the world isn't going to fit ten gallons into a five gallon hat.

The government has many terrible weapons

I know first hand of at least one that is by no means public knowledge, and its potential is staggering. I've seen NOTHING of it since I left the project in 2001, but I'm very much certain it lurks out there, sharpening by the day.

When the day comes that they're ready to "throw down", they'll find out who is the real 800-pound Gorilla in the Room. It's not them, it's We The People (in humble submission to God). Always has been. They have not even the first inkling the fire they're playing with.

I hope you are right^3

I would point out, however, that Theye would have no compunction to kill 7.5 billion people off the bat if we corner them. Theye don't have to start a hot war. Pathogen warfare will do the do. Couple with media backing them 100% and things begin to look a mite grim for the 800# gorilla.

Once again, I hope you are right^4

Well, FRNs are the problem.

I must disagree on this point. Properly administered, FRNs are as good a representation of value as any, including BTC. The problem, once again, is people. Technically speaking, BTCs grand virtue is its decentralization. Coupled with the blockchain, it keeps people at arm's length, so to speak. It keeps things clean, which is a great thing, but again the problem isn't technological, but that of filthy governmental policy that would seek to bring it under Theire control, at least to the degree necessary to maintain their hegemonic position. I would also point out that Theye could simply deplete the BTC supply. Theye begin taking tax payments in BTC and then sit on it forever, never to release it back into the economy. All they have to do is continue printing more FRNs and keeping that pyramid standing.

STEAL THIS IDEA AND BECOME RICH:

Actually, I like it.

Just to be clear: I like bitcoin and I'm in no way against investing in it. I'm just big on keeping things real, understanding the challenges, and going about things like this rationally and with eyes open.

Anyhow, I did wander a bit off topic in the OP. I was initially pointing out some of the fubar'd arguments in favor of BTC. The better BTC really is, the less I like seeing such. poor reasoning applied to it.n There's no need, and if people really want it to take off, errors such as what I pointed out work against that goal.

[ClaytonB]

As I always say, those bastards are playing for keeps and to put ANY felony past them is a dangerous error.

To assume any less is naivete. In a game of chess, the goal of each player is to checkmate the other. To assume your opponent would show you mercy at the last moment is ridiculous. Obviously, he only aims for victory and nothing else and will play every available move on the board. For these psychopaths, the word "law" is a meaningless sound, something more like a dog's bark. They have no concept of what law even is, nor would they care even if they did.

Methinks it would be significantly more than 90%, but that's just speculation, so let's just agree on 90. Theye don't have to stamp it out, but only to cross a threshold. Control is the name of the game here and if BTC threatens that control, Theye will go to war, literally and figuratively.

The problem is that there are grave economic consequences for focusing too much official attention on Bitcoin. Suppose they were to go absolute scorched-earth and announce the equivalent of the War on Terror but, this time, make it "War on Crypto". Now, I will grant you that they could stamp it out. But the problem is the same as executing a popular political dissident... you don't actually defeat his movement, you make a martyr of him and he becomes even more powerful in death than he ever was in life. That is the chess-position on the board. If they could just order a Delta black-ops team to kick down some doors in various countries overnight and decapitate the Bitcoin network, they would have done that long ago. But that's just not how Bitcoin works. There is no central head to decapitate. This is by design. It is literally decentralized and that's something that fries the Evil Empire's brain-circuits. They literally do not comprehend "decentralized cooperation" because their world-model is based on the false belief that the only possible form of cooperation is by subjugation. Once I make you my slave, we finally have a "cooperative" relationship ... I make you cooperate, and you cooperate because you have no choice. Since this is their world-model, they literally cannot believe that it is possible for a truly decentralized cooperative network to exist. And so they continue to misunderstand and underestimate Bitcoin, over and over. I watched all the live charts in 2017 as they were doing combined cyber-warfare and economic warfare on the Bitcoin network. They had hundreds of millions or maybe billions of dollars "in-flight" in the Bitcoin network (they were just transferring the money back to themselves), and they were using it to DDoS attack the network. It was astounding to watch. The Bitcoin network definitely felt the blow... to get a transaction through the network within an hour or so was costing as much as $20 during peak demand times. But it survived.

I understand blockchain data structures OK enough and data structures in general, but once again the issue is not the technology, but the administrative state; the TYRANT. They are ushering all manner of new methods of control. China has their "social credit" system which is likely to make it to these shores. Imagine not being able to leave your neighborhood without permission, or not at all if you displease the Whipmaster. I've seen where AI can go, and that was 23 years ago. It isn't pretty. Those pigs will stop at nothing to keep you in the chute.

I get it, but again, Bitcoin reduces the problem to an "all-or-nothing" bluff. The only way to truly stop the flow of Bitcoin is to do a global shutdown of the entire Internet, shoot down the satellites and then send kill squads out to kill all known major holders, major miners and other major actors in the Bitcoin network. Not saying they wouldn't do that due to any moral limitations on their part... if they could logistically pull it off, I have no doubt that they would gleefully do so. No, the problem is how do you sell to the world this idea that the entire Internet needs to be shut down for several days, and Bitcoin satellites shot out of space, in order to eradicate some kind of weird digital Pokemon trading system?!? The global public won't get it because it just doesn't add up. Bitcoin is simultaneously a pyramid scheme being run by online Magic Card-trading neckbeards... and it is also a global national-security threat?! How do you sell that, politically? Literally nobody is going to understand this. So, they have to find a more effective strategy and they've already started on that for the last 5-ish years or so. Just as with drug busts, they're doing "federal agents pose with seized Bitcoin" photos and publishing those to create this new perception that Bitcoin = criminal-money. They will try to build this up until they have a pretext for the kind of Delta-force assassination operation you have in mind. But failing that, they are still building a case for a "War on Crypto"... so they could create a new "Federal Bureau of Cryptocurrencies" and then use this new agency to start whipping Bitcoin hodlers/etc. using the long game. Instead of a quick decapitation, it would be a slow-and-steady game of attrition. And long-run, this does appear to be the most likely scenario. However, I think that El Salvador and other heavily Bitcoin-favoring states are creating crypto safe-havens where it's going to be extremely difficult even for a hypothetical FBC to hunt people down and punish them for their crypto "crimes". In which case we have something more like a stalemate, where Bitcoin cannot defeat FRNs but, at the same time, even the combined might of the entire USG and other western nations hostile to Bitcoin is not sufficient to actually shut it down.

If the owners refuse to cooperate, shoot a few before the rest of the owners and the latter will sing like canaries.

That works for the satellites themselves. But those are just a fallback system... the main Bitcoin network itself operates with or without the satellites. You don't even have to be online to transact Bitcoin, you can literally hand a physical USB stick to someone to trade Bitcoin with them. This makes Bitcoin extremely difficult to kill. To be absolutely sure it was eradicated, you'd practically have to hunt down every wallet and every copy of the blockchain anywhere on the planet and destroy it.

I'm not a black pill kind of guy, but I am a realist. Rational optimism is a great thing; a powerful thing. But all the wishing in the world isn't going to fit ten gallons into a five gallon hat.

Agreed. I just think the Bitcoin story is more subtle than a lot of libertarians/conservatives realize. There are a lot more moving parts here than the casual observer might think. If you think some lone cyberpunk dreamed this all up in a basement, you're not really understanding the actual terrain of the battlefield.

I would point out, however, that Theye would have no compunction to kill 7.5 billion people off the bat if we corner them. Theye don't have to start a hot war. Pathogen warfare will do the do. Couple with media backing them 100% and things begin to look a mite grim for the 800# gorilla.

How sure are you that COVID wasn't that? It fizzled and backfired. What now?

I must disagree on this point. Properly administered, FRNs are as good a representation of value as any, including BTC. The problem, once again, is people. Technically speaking, BTCs grand virtue is its decentralization. Coupled with the blockchain, it keeps people at arm's length, so to speak. It keeps things clean, which is a great thing, but again the problem isn't technological, but that of filthy governmental policy that would seek to bring it under Theire control, at least to the degree necessary to maintain their hegemonic position. I would also point out that Theye could simply deplete the BTC supply. Theye begin taking tax payments in BTC and then sit on it forever, never to release it back into the economy. All they have to do is continue printing more FRNs and keeping that pyramid standing.

Naw. They kind of tried this with Bitcoin Cash and it just didn't work. You can hard-fork to your heart's content but unless the classic users actually sell their Bitcoin (and why would they?), you can't get them out of it. Bitcoin Cash was a total flop.

Actually, I like it.

This is one of the aspects of the Bitcoin debate that many libertarians misunderstand. They think that Bitcoin is some kind of "universal digital money" but it's not. It's just a technology you can use, or not use, as you see fit. Of course, the Internet has become almost mandatory in a way, because we all need it for so many things. And you're right they might try to do the same thing to Bitcoin that they did to the Internet. But here's the thing: that's their least-preferred option except for a total takeover by Bitcoin. They don't want to be forced to have to try to "corner the market" on Bitcoin, because that's what they spent 10,000+ years trying to do to gold and they only finally managed to mostly destroy the power of gold in 1971AD! So, resetting all the way back to square-A with having to fight the monetary power of Bitcoin is a 10,000+ year setback for them. Plus, it allows the door for gold and silver to be opened up and for precious-metals to be taken seriously again and come back into common use. That's the worst-case scenario because FRNs will go to their true market value which is $0 or whatever the price of an individual square of toilet paper is...

[dannno]

Gold is fantastic, it will always be a valuable commodity as long as I can tell.

Bitcoin is only superior to gold in that it is easier to secure and it is easier to send, securely, long distances. That is a pretty big deal in the global economy, hell, even in a state economy. Who wants to drive 3 hours to pay somebody for a digital service, or have it sent through the mail? I mean, you could send them some e-gold, or a gold note, but then you have the issue with security, and knowing for sure the gold is still in the vault. Crypto avoids this problem.

Gold has advantages over bitcoin in that it is not dependent on the internet and electricity. If we lose that, and you are stuck transacting in your local economy, you will want gold and silver.

Also, gold and silver both have a lot of value with regards to technology - such as batteries and other newer technologies.

That gives gold its "intrinsic" value.

However, one thing I would mention is that last fact is an advantage for bitcoin. Gold would be cheaper if bitcoin and other cryptos were used for transacting so that gold is cheaper and can be used for industrial use. If gold becomes too valuable, it won't be worth putting the necessary amounts in batteries and different devices that could make our lives better.

I don't know if it gets much more complicated than that.

[jmdrake]

Meh. Seems like a silly debate. If you have money to spare, which currently I do not, it makes sense to buy both and to have other assets as well.

[Bern]

Tangentially related:

https://www.pmbug.com/threads/the-se...of-money.6960/

[Brian4Liberty]

...
"Oust the tyrants!" is poetically equivalent to "assassinate the Pope!", just in other words. The core of the Beast System is a multi-headed hydra, it is un-killable in human terms.
...

You just described the US deep state. You can fire all of the department heads, but a like minded individual will step in.

[ClaytonB]

I don't know if it gets much more complicated than that.

It's really not complicated, I don't know why people make it complicated. Let's say you have $5,000 of "bug-out money". That might be a bit high for some people, but it's just for purposes of illustration. One way you could divide it is as follows:

$1000 USD
$1000 Silver coins
$1000 Gold coin (1/2 oz or whatever)
$1000 BTC
$1000 Gift cards (prepaid Visa/whatever)

That last one is for urban preppers who might be stuck in a situation where the grid is "mostly" down, and urban shops refuse to accept physical cash but still have operating Visa-card terminals. For urban preppers, I think this is an under-prepared scenario. Banks down, cash refused, but Visa-payments system still operating I consider to be a highly probable scenario.

The point is to arbitrage your risks. You don't need to put all your eggs in one basket and prep will be favored by increased diversification.

[osan]

It's really not complicated, I don't know why people make it complicated. Let's say you have $5,000 of "bug-out money". That might be a bit high for some people, but it's just for purposes of illustration. One way you could divide it is as follows:

$1000 USD
$1000 Silver coins
$1000 Gold coin (1/2 oz or whatever)
$1000 BTC
$1000 Gift cards (prepaid Visa/whatever)

That last one is for urban preppers who might be stuck in a situation where the grid is "mostly" down, and urban shops refuse to accept physical cash but still have operating Visa-card terminals. For urban preppers, I think this is an under-prepared scenario. Banks down, cash refused, but Visa-payments system still operating I consider to be a highly probable scenario.

The point is to arbitrage your risks. You don't need to put all your eggs in one basket and prep will be favored by increased diversification.

Afford yourself as many options as possible.

Warren Buffet once quipped that diversification is for chumps. Easy to say when you're sitting atop billions and almost certainly have insider information. I cut my teeth on Wall Street. I know what goes on there.