Cryptocurrencies: 1984 dystopia, or money liberated from the banksters?

[ThePythonicCow]

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We have been hearing warnings of the dangers of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which could lead to total surveillance and control of all our monetary holdings and transactions, in real time, down to the second and the penny. That sounds scarier to many of us than the dystopia of the '1984' movie.

This warning risks missing the point. We get to choose.

It's not "crypto bad". It's how do we want crypto to work?

If crypto works like the Web, then China might choose one way, as they have with WeChat, while America might choose the other way, as they have with the varied social media and alternative news sites (Project Avalon being a modest example) that led to the more informed populist movement that just re-elected Trump.

On the monetary/crypto front, we in the U.S. have a choice, whether:

1. a central bank digital currency (CBDC) which enables the Federal Reserve to centrally surveil and control all movement of US dollar money, from a child's allowance on up, or
   
2. connecting America's wide array of local, regional and national banks up to a robustly reliable and independent network of crypto currencies and exchanges, while they continue to pursue the wide variety of available individual, corporate and government "customers" for their services.

This second alternative resembles the current network of large (well, too large, in the case of Alphabet/Google, which just lost a landmark antitrust lawsuit in August 2024 and is being broken up) and small Web based services, servers, media, news and other sites that serve the market, in the U.S. and beyond.

As Trump has already declared against a CBDC, and is well supported by such techies as Elon Musk, who pried Twitter from the hands of the "woke" minions of the oligarchs, I am optimistic that America will do a reasonable job keeping its monetary infrastructure free, as it has done with its public communication (aka Web) infrastructure.

[ThePythonicCow]

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So, if we Americans choose to develop crypto currency technology and institutions as we mostly have done with the Internet/Web, then how might that look?

Just as the Web has profoundly, over the last several decades, reshaped the social, news, and marketing landscapes here in my country and around the world, so I predict crypto currencies will profoundly reshape the monetary, financial, and investing landscapes here and abroad.

How might crypto reshape our money?

First, let me answer that question by describing one aspect of the current central-bank controlled debt-money systems, used in various ways around the world.

One major role that traditional banking provides is "term conversion".

If you hold major assets in long term investments, such as industry, farming, mining, "service" (law, tax, investing, marketing, ...) firms, or (what's well known to the middle class) residential real estate, how can you make use of that investment for short term opportunities, needs or profits, without having to sell the long term holding?

You can borrow short from the bank, which is lending out against a portfolio of longer term assets it holds.

That way, for example, the farmer can borrow money for seeds in the spring, without having to sell the field to be planted, just to pay for those seeds.

We all, from the five year old first getting an allowance, to the world's largest governments and corporations, to the world's (at least publicly) wealthiest individuals, risk mismanaging that borrowing, and forfeiting our collateral when our future cash flow no longer covers our loan payments ... but this seems to be the way of our world (until the "day after" the micro-nova and pole flip, at least).

• As broadcast media, radio and TV rose to dominate and over shadow print media, and
• as the Web rose to over shadow broadcast media ...
• so will crypto currencies reshape and over shadow major portions of the traditional banking system.

Let me introduce an acronym used in the crypto currency world for this new technology: DeFi.

To quote Investopedia.com:

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an emerging peer-to-peer financial system that uses blockchain and cryptocurrencies to allow people, businesses, or other entities to transact directly with each other.

One of the critical areas of infrastructure now being built in this new "DeFi" world is lending ... whereby you can hold some of your wealth in crypto currencies backed by bonds, gold and other allocated assets best held for a long period, and still borrow against that wealth to handle short term cash flows, coming and going. Already the Tether crypto currency holds $84.5 billion in U.S. Treasury bills, and another $105 billion in cash and cash equivalents. There are also various crypto lending facilities, that let one borrow against one's Tether holdings.

Similarly one can borrow against one's Bitcoin holdings, which for income tax reasons if no other, one might not want to sell outright. The total value of the Bitcoin issues so far is about $1.8 trillion ... that's starting to become serious money.

This DeFi lending is becoming a much tighter affair than traditional bank lending. The substantial profit margin that banks make, between what they pay on savings and what they charge on loans is being replaced by the much tighter margins on lending against any asset that can be reliably tokenized on some crypto blockchain.

Any unallocated wealth, that would have been held in stocks, bonds, and other securities and derivatives can now or will instead be able to be held in Bitcoin or a similar crypto, where it will provide robust, rock solid collateral for lending, cutting out the middle man (the banks that build some of the "nicer" buildings across our landscape).

Lenders will earn more, and borrowers pay less, with near-zero delay, cost or risk lost to some "loan shark" intermediary.

As with self-driving cars, building a robust connection between the digital world and the "real" world will be a long and challenging task, and some will lose their shirt, or have their car erupt in flames, along the way.

Another big change is coming with DeFi, and those of us who identify what will be the "Amazon" and "Google" successes of the DeFi saga will have great opportunities.

Some of the DeFi "winners" will not last ... Just now, I had to ask Google's AI bot for the name of the social media company that distributed millions of free CD-ROM's in the 1990's. I had forgotten the name "AOL" (America Online) ... even though I had not only been an early user of AOL, but I had also been the first lead engineer at the Boulder Colorado company Access Unlimited that did some of the early CD-ROM development work, back in the early 1980's. So it wasn't like I wasn't "aware" of what was going on then. Now AOL, a huge winner at the time, is almost forgotten history.

[ThePythonicCow]

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In summary again:

Debt-money is not going away (no matter how hard I wish it were).

It's going global, directly connecting buyer and seller, sender and receiver, lender and borrower. Diverse national currencies will become no more an impediment to ordinary transactions than diverse national languages are becoming to ordinary communication.

As one example, conversion between various national currencies will go online, nearly instant, and nearly "free", integrated into the various systems that can make use of it, with the backend of the conversion directly tied to the next evolution of the "Forex" (foreign exchange) money conversion markets, dynamically adjusting the conversion rates in real time.

Comparing the Web's history and what might be Crypto's history:

Just as the Web and its antecedent Arpanet are globalizing communication, so will Bitcoin (which, rumor has it, came from the same organization, by then called DARPA) and its crypto derivatives globalize money.

Such globalization, in each case, rebuilds major industries with entirely new structures.

ARPANET, the granddaddy of the Internet, decentralized communication over long haul wires and radio by providing a standardized Internet Protocol (IP) defining how the data packets should be formatted, so that anyone with sufficient skill and training could encode and decode and use to communicate with anyone else they could connect to.

Bitcoin is decentralizing banking away from the mainframe computers running proprietary databases each tightly controlled by their respective corporate owners, to globally public and shared databases, by providing standardized globally shareable database architectures which anyone with sufficient skill and training can query and modify, while automatically keeping the "books balanced", and safe from "bank robbers."

Standardized internet data packet protocols and globally shared databases (e.g. blockchains and similar) have been two key software innovations, along with semiconductors at the hardware level.

[ThePythonicCow]

A significant portion of the inspiration for the above came from commentary by Tom Luongo, who has been gaining substantial insights into

• the change in the role of the Federal Reserve that Jerome Powell has been orchestrating, from being subservient to the London bankers, to working for the large U.S. investment banks, and
• the role that cryptocurrencies might play in this ... whether (1) used by the overlords of the London bankers to enslave and depopulate humanity, or (2) used by the U.S. banks to expand and render more efficiently their services.

I've been following Luongo for a few years now, as his insights matured. Here's the most recent Luongo presentation of these insights:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dJ1ajvAWAC4

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
If crypto works like the Web, then China might choose one way, as they have with WeChat, while America might choose the other way, as they have with the varied social media and alternative news sites (Project Avalon being a modest example) that led to the more informed populist movement that just re-elected Trump.

On the monetary/crypto front, we in the U.S. have a choice, whether:

1. a central bank digital currency (CBDC) which enables the Federal Reserve to centrally surveil and control all movement of US dollar money, from a child's allowance on up, or
   
2. connecting America's wide array of local, regional and national banks up to a robustly reliable and independent network of crypto currencies and exchanges, while they continue to pursue the wide variety of available individual, corporate and government "customers" for their services.

It turns out that the U.S. just made that choice, when a significant portion of the money of formerly Democrat Silicon Valley tech investors decided to support Trump's Presidential campaign.

Zerohedge documents the moment when this decision was made by one major investor who had historically voted Democrat reliably. This happened as the result of a face-to-face meeting in which Biden administration officials explained how they planned to control AI through government regulatory capture—a strategy reminiscent of Communist policies in China.

Recall that California has been the leading high technology state for the last half century, and has been brought under Chinese influence more than perhaps any other state in the U.S.

Biden administration officials planned to control AI through government regulatory capture—a strategy reminiscent of Communist policies in China.

This is directly what's reported in the Zerohedge article Marc Andreessen Describes "Alarming" Meeting With Biden Admin That Prompted His Trump Endorsement:

=== Begin quoting from Zerohedge ===

Marc Andreessen, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, revealed in a new episode of Joe Rogan's podcast that after an "alarming" meeting with Biden administration officials earlier this year was the moment he would have no other choice but to support Donald Trump.

For decades, Andreessen has supported Democrats, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. However, a troubling spring meeting with Biden administration officials caused major concerns. During the meeting, officials explained their plan to control AI through government regulatory capture—a strategy reminiscent of Communist policies in China.

"We had meetings [Biden officials] this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in. Where they were taking us through their plans, and it was - basically just full government - full government control - like this sort of thing, there will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government, they told us. They said don't even start startups - there's just no way that they can succeed - there's no way that we're going to permit that to happen."

In mid-July, Axios reported that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had donated to President-elect Trump's campaign. At the time, their support was attributed to Trump's pro stance on crypto and AI regulation. It's another telling example of just how far-left Democrats in the White House spooked Silicon Valley heavy hitters, such as Elon Musk.

[In a podcast, Joe Rogan] asked Andreessen: "When you leave a meeting like that, what do you do?"

Andreessen responded: "You endorse Donald Trump."

X user Ben Averbook condensed Rogan's three-hour podcast into a series of the most important highlights:

• Biden's administration laid it all out:
• Only 2-3 AI companies would be allowed to exist.
• Complete control over development.

Andreessen told Rogan about the federal government's rogue "Operation Choke Point." He described it as a move by the Department of Justice that initially targeted marijuana businesses and gun manufacturers. He said under Biden, it was then weaponized to destroy political opponents, tech founders, and the crypto community.

[Ben Averbook continued:]

• They’ve uncovered a new way to destroy companies:
• 30 tech founders were secretly debanked.
• No warning. No explanation. No appeals.
• Pure, silent government power.

=== End quoting from Zerohedge ===

Marc Andreessen made his choice that day, regarding AI in this case, though I figure this applies to crypto as well. Andreessen chose American style capitalism, with multiple companies, large and small, startup and established, competing in the market place, over Chinese style centralized control.

At least for someone such as myself, who spent nearly thirty years working in high tech Silicon Valley companies, the immediacy of this decision point that Marc realized could not be more stark.

In 2008, I realized that Silicon Valley (California) no longer fit me, and I moved to Texas. Elon Musk moved his Tesla headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas in late 2021, for reasons similar to mine, though his reasons were on a much larger scale.

[Vangelo]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
...
[Ben Averbook continued:]

• They’ve uncovered a new way to destroy companies:
  
• 30 tech founders were secretly debanked.
• No warning. No explanation. No appeals.
• Pure, silent government power.

...

Thank you ThePythonicCow for this thread. The Zerohedge article about Marc Andreessen "Alarming" Meeting With Biden Admin That Prompted His Trump Endorsement is very disturbing.

I have been concerned about 'DeBanking' since the Canadian Trucker fiasco and as a result I have opened a Bank Account with Old Glory Bank whose sole purpose is to offer an alternative to the mainstream banking cartel and protect myself from being snooped on or DeBanked.

[Vangelo]

The US House Judiciary Republicans Drop Video About Weaponized Debanking

Source: https://www.rumble.com/video/v5un3wh

[onawah]

Catherine Austin Fitts | Smart Money Buying Up Real Assets, Not Bitcoin

Posted by onawah (here)
Catherine Austin Fitts | Smart Money Buying Up Real Assets, Not Bitcoin
The Flyover - PROPHETIC WORD
82 subscribers
Dec 3, 2024

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Gxlrjk1Gdoo