For those who are not yet seeing the rot in the monetary system, it might be somewhat confronting to read about money being so bogged down in falsehoods that it “pokes you right in your axiom” as Peterson puts it. Nobody likes to find out that significant amounts of what they understand about their world could be a few degrees outta whack, it's quite unnerving. So if money, the shared belief structure of how we settle value between one another, is not what it purports to be, would you want to know about it? If significant change is just around the corner, it’s better to be prepared for the change, yeah? I believe fiat money is rotting, festering, feeding on its own foetid corpse, based in a lie, and possibly won't survive into the next century.
If I haven't lost you with that first paragraph, I want to go one level further in the hunt for where it’s all gone Pete Tong by theorising which came first, trade or social reciprocity. Which is the precursor of what - is simple trade with one another our base layer, or is social interaction itself the more primal pattern? Was the formation of social hierarchies a process of trade, or is trade the offshoot of our having developed social hierarchies via trading? Whilst preening cooties off each other, did our primate ancestors learn social bonding or was it beneficial trade of simple favours that was learned? Was it better to transact in acts of mutual care as a function of social unity, or was this care simply driven by an innate social sense, and the mutual action later evolved into what we now call trade? This is a question for another time, but I wish to highlight the depth of axiomatic similarity between these primordial processes. The point being, our patterns of social behaviour are so deeply embedded in social transacting of some kind, that to cheat at the game of trading can be offensive, down to the core of our consciousness.
So then, what if the cheating is embedded in our medium of exchange? What if the money we use is cheating the users every time we use it, but the grift is disguised and made normal by calling it inflation? Governments create inflation when they print money by diluting the supply of monetary units, predominantly disadvantaging those who have least of it, coercing the poor into unsustainable debt. In turn, cheating becomes the baseline orientation for all the political decisions we make, prompting low quality value assessments, poor choices of value relative to time as a consequence of not having a reliable store of value, i.e. the purchasing power of the money we use is decreasing so quickly that it is better to spend it in the short term rather than saving it up for future use.
If there is one thing we all share it’s an inner sense of fairness, more commonly known from its inverse insofar as we all know when we are being shafted. Toddlers recognise a fair share, as do monkeys. Give either a smaller treat and uncomfortable glances will be shared. Scale this to a community level where a certain group is advantaged over others, or to the global stage where one country feels at liberty to interfere in the governance of another, and the intrusion is clear to all that have eyes to see beyond the propaganda. We all know wrong from right in a pattern of behaviour, however it becomes more difficult to discern when the behaviour is embedded in an abstraction. Money, as an abstract representation of fair value, should be a verifiable constant in the hands any user. Whilst the money itself is inert, it reflects the behaviour of its users, which is showing up in the world today as disharmonious to say the least.
Above all of this, trade trumps politics. No matter how strong the division between individuals, nations, companies, enemies, in times of need the inclination toward mutual trade overrides the most intense rivalries. It sorta goes beyond that insofar as trade is the snide handler jockeying the players on the diplomatic landscape so that deals can be made. The West is fighting its proxy war against Russia in the hope of weakening it as a nation but does not cut off trade as Western economies have too much to lose by doing so. We know this. We can see the cheating going on at international levels, the manipulation of foreign debt, the forcing of nations to settle payments using the petro-dollar, the revolving credit paid to US politicians by Zionists as payoffs for approving grants to Israel, and if any are to oppose it they have their livelihood and families threatened. Whether bottom-up embedded in our psyche, or top-down right in front of our eyes, trade between one another is primal.
Returning to the possibility of falsehood in the monetary layer, is there any puzzle more complicated than trade and/or money movements across the entire planet? Trade across all of humanity is infinitely complex, so much so that economists generally accept only one absolute truth in the marketplace which is known as a price. The price of any item at the moment it transacts is the only verifiable measure of ‘economic certainty’, or ‘truth’ in the economic sense. Once again, if this fleeting truth is based in falsehood, i.e. represented by a distorted value medium, then we're screwed. The complexity of trade interactions can never be pinned down to any one trade or pattern of transactions which makes tracing any origins of deception practically impossible, providing the cover for hucksters tasked with facilitating the fiat fraud.
Just how complex is it? From the feeble fiat currency system enabled by money printing, spring forth the governmental leaches wilfully blinded by their salaries who permission it, then the corporate looters profiting via lobbying the leaches, the woke grifters high on marxist ideology who shun objective reality in favour of feelings, to the deep state ghouls furtively sewing divisive dissent, and the overlord wealth puppeteers dictating narratives for an unsuspecting public to follow. Oh yeah - it’s complex. We are all generally playing somewhere within this convoluted mess, just by using money, whether we are part of it’s creation, it’s distribution, consenting to it’s policy, or simply as an end user. It’s a complicated web of influence and deceit, never clear in its intent nor recognisable as a whole.
To go one further and drill down on the financial system alone from that list of suspects above, we could consider interactions between currencies, stocks, bonds, repos, reverse repos, mutual funds, precious metals (and it's counterfeit paper certificates), oil, crypto, treasury bills, real-estate, commodities, derivatives, FX, CDs, CFDs, ETFs, and others, all interacting with each other while simultaneously influenced by the equally complex political groupings mentioned. Perhaps it is due to this increasing complexity that the system has been able to hide it's fraudulent foundations for so long? Categorisation alone would be sufficiently difficult if one wanted to pick out an area of trade between only a few of those suggested as there are no clear borders, i.e. there are as many distinctions as there are boundaries (scale, cultures, coercive states). We can map the complexity of DNA, yet the complexity of human trade remains beyond any intent to be mapped as far as I can tell. When there are multiple malignancies in our trade media, systemic pathologies in the base layer are easily overlooked.
So then, if every facet of our trade is founded in fraud, we must wilfully forgo that fraud, and just trade. We also tell ourselves that everyone else is doing it, so we all must cheat as one. We must overlook one of our most primal settings, that being the sense of fair play, to ignore the fact that money men gain more than the rest of us while simultaneously ignoring that they are the only sector or industry who bares no culpability for their indiscretions. When the financial institutions are (mis)managed by those who gain most by enabling its mechanism of distortion, and punishment only comes to those who can be proven guilty, the incentive is to act as poorly as one can without breaking the law, to push legal definition to its absolute limit, to ‘get away with it’. If stealing a loaf of bread was able to be made indistinct somehow, theft would become undefinable, and would cease to be a criminal offence. This is effectively what has happened to money and its support network of financiers, it has become so deeply embedded in our social trading medium that the complexity obscures the criminality. Theft via printing money is the maximal lie, too nebulous for definition, enabled by government, at the behest of a banking elite, and well out of reach (or comprehension) of the common man.
Consider the distortions in our social institutions at present, then consider the increasing narrative distortion which permits it. The most powerful nation on the planet is managed by sycophantic morons and fronted by a fool. When a government chooses to fund foreign wars (abetting genocide) ahead of domestic expenditure, there is a clear management misalignment. Medicine has become a political pursuit, whilst the pharmaceutical industry stimulates illness in order to garner profits. We have a climate change industry which can barely define the problem let alone agree on a solution, yet takes no issue with the destructive process of forever-wars which are more harmful to the environment and human life than any of their fear inducing CO2 modelling will ever be. Democracy is a power pantomime played out within narrow corporate narrative channels funded by elite wealth. Politics is merely the stage upon which politicians perform for their pennies. Policy is only a pretentious permission slip for cronyism. Diplomacy is the distraction behind which deceit can be downplayed as acceptable. We're expected to believe men can menstruate, and the modern woman needs nothing better than a shiny new dick. These are examples of a stupidity which is embedding deeper and deeper into our institutions, which would not have stood as acceptable half a century ago, so why now? Here is where I want to restate the argument that money has become untethered from reality, i.e. is merely a governmental promise backstopped by the threat of state violence, and is the facilitating font of social unrest we see in the world today. Again, to overlook this distortion in the base layer of how we settle value between each other is to deny an essential part of how we orient ourselves toward our fellow man.
This is why Bitcoiners believe strongly that a new type of money with zero cheat capacity is a game changer. Bitcoin outsources the cheat optionality to an internet protocol which does only one thing - confirm transactions. The various miracles behind the programming are discussed by vastly more knowledgeable peeps than myself, but in a nutshell the key upside is that Bitcoin returns fair exchange of value to a social interaction between two parties, with zero chance of being influenced or extorted by the leeches and looters. No intermediary can alter or interfere with the processing of transactions, nor affect who wishes to trade with who. No tyrant can manipulate the supply in order to fund a war, no slick banker can dictate the issuance rate (print money) such that the most influential can mesmerise the bulk of society via media perversion, and no state can silence the views of dissenting voices by switching off their bank accounts. Bitcoin is an opt-in revolution against the tyranny of monetary manipulation, where the rules are permanently fixed, set in ‘cyber-stone’ one might say.
Adopting ‘internet money’ is as challenging as embracing the world wide web was a few decades ago. Moving into the digital world is confronting enough when considering computing, communications, the internet, gaming, and artificial intelligence, all of which digitise old world processes like the abacus, telephone, indexing, competitive combat and pattern recognition, …to bytes. The mental leap required to trust a buzzing confusion of electrons with our most intimate information requires a baseline faith shift which rivals belief in the transcendent, so it’s not an easy leap. Learning that ‘value only exists in the human mind’ prompted a profound change in how I understood money, insofar as it spurred me to consider everything has only relative value, understood by the individual, and shared by the collective. This is when I sussed that the paper promissory notes which we hand to each other as cash, is primarily a promise, and has no actual value beyond the cost attributable to printing and distributing it. ‘Value’ denominated in dollar terms is a promise moonlighting as value. Gold has a value denominated in dollars, as do diamonds, or oil. That house price of $1M is this same mind-forged promise of relative worth denominated in a value medium we collectively understand as the house’s value. Likewise, changing to Bitcoin is a shift to a different value medium, but without the corruptible promise of government behind it. The value will still be held within the collective human psyche, just that it will be a verifiable ‘machine-managed’ algorithm, rather than a man-manipulated promise.
Unfortunately, for Bitcoin to live up to my expectation, the incumbent fiat money will have to die, or at the least, sink slowly into its own cesspool. Money printing is accelerating, so much so that it must now print money to cover interest payments on the debt it is creating. The ascending pile of paper promises risks rising so high it will be scorched by the sun and burned to ashes. This is a truly ominous prospect, as the pain and misery of a collapsing monetary system will be immense. For mine, it is only a matter of time, but how much time? If it burns down gradually over the next 50yrs there will likely be time to reshuffle the deck chairs on our sinking ship. Most currencies have steadily lost purchasing power over the past century, most of them by more than 99%. That may seem ludicrous, but consider what an ounce of gold bought 100yrs ago, then consider what it bought 1000yrs ago – it bought approximately the same things, a fine tailored suit, or a cow, and it still does today. This anomaly is glossed over as being due to inflation, yet the relative value of the basic commodities mentioned have not altered one jot. Inflation is merely the exemption card raised by Keynsian economists who want to hide their pee-brained scam within academic jargon devised to prop up the money printing, driving us closer to a dystopian nightmare.
My guess is that there will be some kind of arms race between the financial hucksters peddling their baseless currency, and the new kid on the blockchain who is based AF. The hucksters will want to maintain their money machine monopoly and all the trickle down treats that come with controlling global finance, therefore won’t be at all enamoured with any threat to their high n mighty position. The fiat currency game has relied upon centralised control over money, politics and the populace in order to sustain the charade of fair value, so an alternative anchored in absolute truth will expose the incumbent system for what it really is. Hence the revolution is developing as fiat money fails and Bitcoin rises. A groundswell of social angst is welling up, even if basis nor target are not yet explicitly obvious to most. Bitcoin is the pitchfork being honed and distributed in cyberspace, whilst the hucksters are the king at risk of losing his head. The lesser part of me wants to see that head roll, however the power seems to be still accruing to the establishment, for now.
Those hucksters now include supra-governmental organisations which have crept into power during the past half century alongside the fiat money printing era. Entities like the WEF who are nothing more than wealth pigs tipping the elbow of government as it feeds dollars into their trough, or the WHO, a slush fund retirement program for government officials who have proven themselves capable of parroting wealth interest talking points, the IMF banking racketeers, or the UN which bedazzled the world with it’s incorporation as a feel-good global political policeman but in actuality is little more than a pity-party pretending to be effective. These and other entities represent wealth interests whilst masquerading as elected government bodies, or at least the extension of such. They have their influence agendas which massage weak-minded bureaucrats into bending governmental policy in favourable directions, for their own gain. The unbounded greed of the wealthy elite will stop at nothing to secure its dominion, something which control of fiat money has provided them for more than a century at least, so what can slow them down?
A last gasp attempt at ‘one world’ control is coming in the form of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies). Recognition of blockchain technology has the money men scrambling to emulate Bitcoin …somehow. They can see the potential, but just can’t work out how to oppose it, or put a bridle on it. CBDCs have the potential to provide the control mechanisms which play into their grubby mitts, diminishing issuance costs, allowing limitless currency creation, and a kill-switch to freeze the funds of ‘bad citizens’ at a keystroke. These qualities have endless appeal to greedy power brokers profiteering from the fiat gravy train. But money should simply be apolitical, it must be a neutral commodity that serves the same function in the hands of any user. Once it becomes a weapon for the privileged it has ceased to be neutral and has lost its goodwill as a social tool. When that goodwill is lost from the tool, the goodwill is diminished in society. Perhaps CBDCs will eventuate to be the purity test which delineates between those willing to swallow the lies and deception propagated by mainstream, verses those who are able to observe the distorted nature of our antiquated money system, sensing that something just ain’t right?
In the battle for hearts and minds, all the best propaganda counts for little if the obvious truth stands out by itself. When the truth underlying every financial transaction we make is founded in falsehood, it may be time to reboot. Bitcoin is absolute truth, verifiable at any instant by a quick glance at the ledger which has been functioning every second of every day since January 3rd, 2009. I believe this new verifiable form of truth will alter how we interact with each other, as the base layer of our social structure will be dragged back into the same alignment we all feel deep inside of us. We like to think of ourselves as honest and integral beings, so to live in a world which is so deeply distorted by the institutions which rule our lives is to live a lie.
Welcome to Bitcoin.
(this post covers many themes and have been appraised as very dense, if you would like any of the ideas expanded upon or need more info, let me know or leave a comment:)
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