Hrvoje Morić of Geopolitics & Empire interviewed Gabe of Libre Solutions Network and Mathew Crawford of Rounding the Earth on Bitcoin’s Rise & Its Future Role … Tulip Mania or Digital Gold?
will BTC will be the mother of all bubbles when it pops? at least with a tulip you potentially have a beautiful crop of flowers.
did “energy” to mine it go into solving the math/algorithms rather than stored somewhere to be tapped?
weird just-in-time timing of BTC to appeal to the youngsters disillusioned by seeing their parents suffer from the dot-com and then the housing busts, planned rollout?
was BTC purpose to lure investors away/siphon from real assets after the other bubbles?
or to get people comfortable with digital assets leading to wide acceptance of programmable CBDC? maybe El Salvador is the deep state’s pilot program?
even weirder coincidence that Satoshi Nakamoto just happens to translate to central intelligence?
also read how transactions on blockchain are really not private like advertised.
something doesn’t smell right.
there was an interesting article discussing how the gold “reserve” (me: if it even exists/existed) … actually gold “profits” from the Exchange Stabilization Fund… was never tapped for use until money market stabilization in the financial crisis and “COVID” financing and that adding BTC “reserves” would enrich the few mega hoarders at the expense of everyone else. (not that I trust the CATO institute either but they make some good points)
and does the situation where most average joes & Josephine’s hold it in an account with an intermediary sets them up for counterparty risk when everything folds house of cards style like outlined in “The Great Taking”?
kitten, you continue to amaze me. I see that soft furry face and am continually surprised by the sharp mind and deep research hidden behind those whiskers. Thanks for this knowledgable comment that picks up on my points and adds to them. And if you write about this when 'kitten is seeking answers', I'll be very interested.
"will BTC will be the mother of all bubbles when it pops? at least with a tulip you potentially have a beautiful crop of flowers."
I've been seriously concerned about this outcome. It's the reason I pointed out Bitcoin's technical flaws in the discussion. I would be much more on board with trusting the plan if it looked like the "fundamentals" were solid. As someone who was interested in how Bitcoin could change the game, I haven't actually heard any good news besides "the number is up!" since ~2016. (Which is interesting in hindsight)
"also read how transactions on blockchain are really not private like advertised."
Yes, cryptocurrency coins have effectively split between those that are private and those that are not. But even the nominally "private" coins have means in which a person and/or their transaction history can be identified. It's a very steep learning curve which is why I don't think it's practical to think of when it comes to resistance currencies.
"and does the situation where most average joes & Josephine’s hold it in an account with an intermediary sets them up for counterparty risk when everything folds house of cards style like outlined in “The Great Taking”?"
This is a non-trivial part of the equation. There's a huge difference between holding BTC in an offline (self-custody) wallet, and keeping it with an exchange or big finance money fund. All of those options have radically different considerations and I'd go as far as to say they're not even the same thing!
Mathew wrote: "If you think Bitcoin is backed by nothing, you haven't learned the basics. I recommend reading up on it. Otherwise, you're wasting both our time."
I watched that interview, and while I'm still a Bitcoin idiot, I think what Mathew is referring to is the idea that Bitcoin represents an expenditure of energy, in this case solving a math problem using ASICs.
This concept has always struck me as a bit surreal, especially after I built a house in 2012-2013 with my ex-wife. Up until that point, all the work I'd done for the previous 36 years had been simply encoded instructions for computers, which now seemd like "nothing" compared with the house. The work my wife and I did for 18 months produced something substantial that felt real, that was useful in a very real sense (shelter), and would last beyond our lifetimes. She was also a weaver, and produced useful and beautiful things that you could hold in your hands, and which would last. Compared with that, all the code I'd written felt unreal, and would likely be thrown away in a few short years.
Anyway, that's my take on your use of "nothing", which seems pretty valid when looked from the point of view of the nothingness of computer programs.
Hi, Mark. You're much more technically savvy than I am and since Mathew says you're closer to understanding this point than I am, I'll express my understanding to you. Then you can correct me if what you understand from him is different.
Mathew says that Bitcoin takes 1% of global energy to create. Every year? I assume that it will continue to be mined, especially if gov't is buying for the next five years. That's enough to support 82M people at an average energy consumption, doing things like heating their homes and getting to their jobs.
I don't think that 1% of the global population or 82M people will end up owning that Bitcoin. Maybe you can explain how it's distributed if it doesn't belong to the ASIC mining farm owners initially. The distribution will in some way go to those who have the money to buy it. Yes? So it doesn't change anything about the distribution of money or level the playing field in any way, unless there's something I'm missing.
The dollar, on the other hand, takes a few keystrokes to create when a bank issues a mortgage. The caret takes whatever your computer app requires to run ;-) Negligible, both. So the difference is in the savings when the Bitcoin is used instead of dollars.
To Mathew, this will end military expenditures at 50% of energy consumption. Can you explain how? I'd guess those Bitcoiners in the financial blob include oil and gas execs who still want to control the 'oil buried under someone else's soil.' Would they no longer control the foreign currencies like the CFA Franc? Would they let African countries have their own currencies? Why not do that now?
And Mathew says the lavish energy-consuming lifestyles of the rich will no longer be possible. Why? If Bitcoin goes to $10M, and it's being bought up by the financial blob and their gov't cronies, why would their lifestyles change--except to be more lavish? The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money for investors. That sounds like making the rich richer to me.
But I think that Mathew's 'irritation' with my questions is because the only thing backing Bitcoin is the perception you can sell it for more than you paid for it. I'm challenging that perception. If it had an intrinsic use-value, like a house, the speculative value could go up or down but your use and enjoyment of it would remain the same. Bitcoin only has a value when you sell it to buy something tangible.
But what do I know? According to Mathew, hardly anything. So explain it to me, please.
I am still pretty new at this stuff. But after the interview I spent some time looking at how difficult it would be for me, a novice, to buy and hold on to Bitcoin. I soon got overwhelmed by the sheer amount of research it would take to understand the pros and cons of managing the holdings on my own vs. letting a third party take care of it. Then if I chose the former method, I'd have to figure out exactly how I'd do that: a phone app, keys inscribed on metal tablets, etc. It became clear that Bitcoin is indeed something that, as it exists now, is inaccessible to all but the most savvy tech geeks. If it seems complicated to someone like me who uses Linux and manages their own web and mail servers, it's definitely out of reach for the vast majority of humans. Maybe this will improve over time, but I am skeptical.
Even though I conceded the 1% energy point, it still seems like a waste compared with caret. I'd prefer to see that energy be expended on making useable, tangible stuff, even if it is small compared with what Mathew calls the "status quo". Furthermore, caret doesn't require a huge technical education to be usable by ordinary people.
I'm afraid I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer your questions about military expenditures or the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
About the speculative nature of Bitcoin: Years ago, when my son-in-law was talking about what a great investment it was, my "Ponzi scheme" alert mechanism was triggered. In the interview, Mathew helped me to understand that ideally, Bitcoin is more than that, but it still bothers me that something that is supposed to be a liberating device is subject to speculative bubbles and crashes.
I know almost zero about bitcoin. BUT, I know “assets can disappear overnight, while debt is forever”. Can’t remember who said that, but it registered with me.
I have avoided unnecessary debt all my adult life. Now, my country stands on the brink of collapse, having devalued our $, whether it’s in our wallets or bank. Investments (whether Wall St or ?) are IMO a horserace, in which someone else controls every variable except how much I’m willing to lose! Once burned, twice shy comes to mind.
(Storing up treasure in heaven, where nothing can corrupt it is a far better reward.)
What I’m trying to say is, there is no earthly way for most of us to avoid the misery that seems to be around the corner, which has been & is, out of control govt corruption. I don’t see Bitcoin as apart from the overall corruption. This world will sell us as many fool-proof magic carpets & bunkers as we can afford. But in the end, we have to understand we have to do better, be better, be thankful for all the blessings we’ve had, & many we still have. God is the only One, the only Saviour. And things are going to get a lot worse before Jesus Christ returns as Judge to settle all the accountability problems. So, the important thing is to be ready to meet Him.
Oh, what a sad, sad quote, Anna Marie, and how true!
The avoidance of debt is something where the WEF Great Reset agrees, who thinks that you should own nothing and be happy. According to them, we should all be renters and carless, exist on a stipend that they determine.
And is a lack of debt the natural state of the world? I'd say that being given food, shelter, education, clothing for the first stage of our lives incurs a debt to care for your parents. If there's not an economic system that makes that debt interchangeable with other activities, we would all be living in our parents' homes and taking care of them in exchange.
When we move into a house, we instantly get the labor that went into building it (unless you build it yourself, like Mark and his ex) plus all the work that went into providing the infrastructure of the town. I think that incurs a debt to care for the previous generation who provided it and pass it on in a better form to the next generation.
But OF COURSE that's not what a debt to the bankers does, who've never lifted a finger much less a hammer to build the value of our homes. So I don't think it's debt that's the problem, but to whom we owe the debt.
And was 'treasure in heaven,' 'give unto Caesar' and 'the meek (aka compliant) shall inherit' another way of getting slave colonies--Judea for one--to not revolt against the theft of their labor and resources? I do believe there's an earthly way to avoid the misery around the corner, and I've written my book on it. THEY don't want you to believe that's possible.
"So I don't think it's debt that's the problem, but to whom we owe the debt."
That's a good point. Part of what motivated me to become debt-free was my desire to not owe a huge amount to some impersonal bank so that I could own a home in the insane Silicon Valley market.
Other reasons: my desire to save, and to reduce the risk of losing my home if I got laid off, which had nearly happened to me a couple of times. (There's really no job security in Silicon Valley. Even if you're an exemplary employee, you'll still get laid off when the latest bubble collapses.)
I think you're going to the core of the debt problem, which is social insecurity. I woke up thinking about the app you've so kindly offered to design and I think that it needs to be a user simulation for the next five years, so people can feel what it's like to live within the caret system.
It would add people to blocks of 12 houses as they joined, so that a neighborhood would emerge when 9 blocks were filled and start building the hamlet. People would get subsidies, transfer their own incomes into carets up to a certain limit, and advertise their job skills, linked to a profile on my retrometro.com site.
This doesn't need to all be done by you, but I think your app is going to be powerful. What it will show is that someone can easily and securely commit to a mortgage payment of ^500/mo per person, which is the standard I'm setting for the sim.
I'm thinking it will go through a month's transactions in a week, so it does a time-lapse of how much wealth, in skills, knowledge and relationships, can be built over time. Looking forward to working on this together!
Thanks. I hadn't heard that saying, but it's a good one. I have been debt free for a couple of decades. It wasn't easy getting there, but it was worth it.
"Even though I conceded the 1% energy point, it still seems like a waste compared with caret."
Because somehow the caret will not require the banking system, which will not require the military [and other branches of the syndicate] to protect it]?
The caret is a nonsensical system that nobody who has studied Economics well will spend much time discussing. Time is precious, most especially right now.
WRT "speculative bubbles and crashes," I do still worry that Bitcoin could be rug pulled, but less so with ANY artificially architected monetary system. However, the first 16 years of Bitcoin has *not* been speculative bubbles and crashes by the best definition. As I've mentioned, networks such as Facebook and Tencent would look similar in market capitalization ups and downs had they gone IPO on Day 1. But that "volatility" was masked by private holding. When BTC prices are lognormalized, it becomes clear that "volatility" should be measured against adoption trend, not against a line with an interest rate slope as is standard, and that the short term price is a perception game. It's human interest that is volatile, not the value of the network.
"but it still bothers me that something that is supposed to be a liberating device is subject to speculative bubbles and crashes."
Stop thinking of Bitcoin as "liberating". This is a hopium mistake that Gabe is making as well, which is most of his critique from what I can tell. This is partially due to inaccuracy of early conversation over Bitcoin, and narratives coming from some influencers. It may be liberating in some ways, but it's not going to fix all of the world's problems, and it should never have been viewed as a cure for privacy issues. And yet, that doesn't mean that Bitcoin does not solve a lot of very large problems.
Once we strip away the propaganda, criticizing Bitcoin for not fixing privacy makes no more sense than criticizing a newly marketed pickup truck for not solving the human condition. Despite what anyone says, Bitcoin is a public ledger, which is the only way to have asymmetric monitering of a monetary network system. We are in a world being spun in crazy directions because nobody outside of a small circle of people actually knows where vast amounts of money is going. If Catherine Austin-Fitts is correct, for instance, that theft in less than 20 years is equal to 10 times the current value of all Bitcoin. Even if she is not entirely correct, the levels of theft are mindboggling, and at a level of "Grand Theft Earth".
And the only way to ensure a monetary system works in the form of a public ledger is through code protected by a game theoretic mechanism that resists attack. Either that works, or the Military Occult Banking Syndicate (MOBS) is going to World War over control over the biggest poker game conceivable. I suspect that they might very well have created Bitcoin to avoid that war (even criminals understand the stupidity of destroying resources in order to control them), but I do imagine that it's possilbe that Satoshi was outside of the system, I just lean toward thinking it's a MOBS project that happens to align with the goal of making MOBS finance transparent.
What I would recommend for everyone, but most particular those like Tereza who are going to wade into public conversation about Bitcoin, is to read up on the basics. When I initially got irritated with Tereza, it was because she wanted me to hold her hand through google searches on the basics, then jumped to this message that, for anyone who has learned the basics, demonstrates that she did not bother to take that step. I suspect that her decade spent studying geo-economics was approached similar, and without any mentor guiding her, because she came up with a system that leaps over a hundred simple tests against reality that it would fail. It has the appearance of watching a person who hasn't learned how to balance an equation explain a new plan for operating a nuclear energy plant, except the risks and implications are much larger. She will think that I'm being insulting again, but I'm not sure how to say it except plainly.
I am REALLY not interested in you holding my hand, Mathew. You say that I will 'think' you're being insulting again, when you're merely stating the facts. Let's test whether that is merely my perception. You write:
"The caret is a nonsensical system that nobody who has studied Economics well will spend much time discussing."
"What I would recommend for everyone, but most particular those like Tereza who are going to wade into public conversation about Bitcoin, is to read up on the basics. When I initially got irritated with Tereza, it was because she wanted me to hold her hand through google searches on the basics, then jumped to this message that, for anyone who has learned the basics, demonstrates that she did not bother to take that step. I suspect that her decade spent studying geo-economics was approached similar, and without any mentor guiding her, because she came up with a system that leaps over a hundred simple tests against reality that it would fail. It has the appearance of watching a person who hasn't learned how to balance an equation explain a new plan for operating a nuclear energy plant, except the risks and implications are much larger."
By your admission, you have spent zero time understanding the caret system. Yet you confidently proclaim it nonsense. You believe that I shouldn't 'wade into public conversation about Bitcoin' without doing my own research first.
On my article, I've given extensive explanations to questions readers have about my caret system, in which each commenter has been satisfied that it does address that issue. You haven't answered a single objection I've raised to Bitcoin but only answered with irritation, appeals to your authority, attempts to make me feel guilty for taking your attention away from other things, or belittling insults.
On this thread, Shane Pisani, who does know Bitcoin, has engaged in a long and respectful conversation with me comparing it to the caret. He has seen my questions as valid and worthy of analysis, whether or not we agree. Teo Jacobsen, who's read my book, invited me to join the Crypto Education Affair chat, which I understand broke off from your group. Kate Smiley also encouraged me to join and Tonika, who's also read my book. No one there has treated me or my ideas with the disrespect you do.
And Mark, to whom you're responding, has put more work into the logistics of my system than anyone, since he's found it worth his time to develop an app for it. Fadi Lama, another author of a book on geo-economics, has felt it to be a text equal to a graduate education. So your glib dismissal of me, based on no knowledge, makes me wonder why you think intimidation will work to deflect attention from your lack of answers to my objections.
In your reply to Mark you say that you suspect the Military Occult Banking Syndicate (MOBS) created Bitcoin in order to keep their Grand Theft Earth going without engaging in WWIII. I agree with you! It transfers ownership of the world's properties from the petrodollar, which is in freefall but hasn't yet splatted, to Bitcoin. As my book explains, derivative bets were at $700T in 2013, and take superpriority over deposits if a bank goes bust. There are now those derivative bets on BTC, so the MOBS will continue to own us even if BTC goes bust.
You say that BTC isn't 'liberating' and that's just hopium. What it will do is make the Grand Theft Earth transparent. Is that enough? What the caret does is take away the assets from the bankers--the houses and land--and makes sure their value can never leave the commonwealth. Why not let the dollar go belly-up if we've withdrawn our houses and mortgages from backing it? Let the bankers keep their currencies while we take back the wealth that props them up.
I don't think that pulling the 'authority card' works very well with people who are thinking for themselves, and I'm certain that includes all of my readers. Maybe yours are more easily swayed.
I just want to clarify that while privacy is something I think is incredibly important with Bitcoin there are other issues worth considering. Arguably the bigger problem is scaling because that directly impacts people's ability to self-custody. It's not useful to lecture noobs about "not your keys, not your coins" when much of the ecosystem de-facto discourages self-custody. I am skeptical the Bitcoin project is capable of adapting to future needs given how the Lightning Network has turned out in practice. If anything, it seems that due to the community's history of handling forks, where possible, custodial "solutions" will always be adopted over actually improving the base protocol; which has consequences.
It's perfectly fine for Bitcoin to continue down the digital gold niche, but I think it's a bit much to imply that it was the only original intention for the project considering the whitepaper literally defined bitcoin as "Peer to Peer Digital Cash". That's a far cry from just "influencers" pushing that opinion.
While I've focused on scaling in this comment as an example, there are likely many other potential improvements that would absolutely improve Bitcoin's ability to fit that niche, but are off the table due to how hard & soft forks have actually played out. Nobody is expecting Bitcoin to solve every problem, but there are a lot of things that could be done to greatly enhance its role in the niche it's heading towards. Not seeing those improvements makes me skeptical of its long-term success in that role.
I mean no disrespect.
I wish you both well and that you've had a good weekend.
As I understand it, caret exists alongside other currencies, such as dollar and Bitcoin. It does not replace them; it serves a different purpose. So I don't see why the military cannot exist with it; it will be paid for in dollars.
I was not clear with "liberating". I was not thinking of the privacy issue, more about the idea that it will liberate us from some of the problems of the dollar.
No, caret would not exist without the military behind its fiat, meaning supplanting one of the currency rocks, or else by tokenization on the blockchain, but a long with most other assets.
Think of caret as an outgrowth of local currencies that already exist in some places in the US. I'm familiar with one in use in St. Johnsbury, VT. It consists of wooden tokens that you buy at discount at the farmer's market there, and then use to purchase food from local growers at the market. I have a low-income friend there who uses this system. It's a way to provide support to people in the local community: both those who grow food and those who need it and would enjoy quality that they can't get at the supermarket.
I know there's a town in the Hudson Valley that has a local currency, but I forget the name of the town and don't know about how it works. I'm sure there are many others.
None of these systems requires military support. They exist alongside the dollar, in fact MUST coexist. The same is true with carets, which can be converted to and from dollars (though the exchange rate is designed to keep wealth in a community instead of sending it abroad). I'm simplifying things, but I believe the idea is the same.
Explain that, Mathew, from your knowledge of the caret system? You're throwing a lot of jargon around but not giving any actual logic to refute Mark's point. Tell me exactly why the caret wouldn't exist without the military behind it? Please include some indication that you know what the caret is and how it works. I think this is just obfuscation since Mark knows far more than you do about what the caret is. By your admission, you know nothing and have no interest in knowing anything. How does that make you qualified to jump into the conversation and make pronouncements? Surely you're not claiming that your authority exceeds mine on my own system. No, certainly you couldn't be that arrogant.
You're definitely closer to understanding this point than Tereza, and it's the fundamental point of Bitcoin.
Ultimately, all economics comes down to energy.
When comparing two systems, we need energy on both sides of the ledger. Tereza's critique goes after one side when the other side has waste and corruption sky high. The status quo uses far more energy in the system than does the Bitcoin system.
While it may seem surreal to think of energy in processing, it's equally surreal to realize that the world's military and security forces are based on the energy put in to raising children and educating them to because the army; feeding them, which involves fuel spent on transportation, and supply chain management that consumes energy; and so on.
While Bitcoin consumes 1% or so of the world's energy, that system consumes roughly half. But Tereza went out of her way to tell you I'm being callous prior to learning the basics.
Let me address what you see as a character attack first, Mathew. Everything I've said about you as a person has been how much regard and affection and respect I have for you. Three times when Gabe raised issues about the personal impact on people who are scammed or lose their savings, you said "That doesn't bother me" or that it's a small price if it ends up with something better. That perspective would certainly be seen as callous if you're the person who loses their retirement.
That's something that my system DOES care about. So yes, I'm saying that you're being callous as a verb describing your chosen position that it's a drop in the bucket. I'm not saying you ARE callous as a personality trait. There's a difference.
I look forward to your explanation of how Bitcoin will return the energy now used for the army to raising children. And I'll be happy to explain how the Caret does that. I'm glad to be engaged in this discussion, Mathew, even if you feel it's a waste of your time. If these are questions I have, it seems others have them too. So if we all don't understand the basics, it would help to explain them, I think.
"Three times when Gabe raised issues about the personal impact on people who are scammed or lose their savings, you said "That doesn't bother me" or that it's a small price if it ends up with something better. That perspective would certainly be seen as callous if you're the person who loses their retirement."
That's such a distorted characterization, on which you tack on some implication that I've suggested people invest their entire retirement savings in a new monetary technology. That actually comes off as callous, and the only people who will not roll their eyes at this mischaracterization are the people who most need the education.
I've put thousands of hours of rigorous work into learning about these systems, including a broad base in mathematics, economics, finance, and Bitcoin, each of which is either [or equivalent to] a rigorous post-graduate discipline. That's the very opposite of callousness. It's sacrifice. Not only is it sacrifice, I've run education programs to give as much of that knowledge away for free. I would probably be a billionaire had I not taken a 14-year hiatus from trading to spend 80+ hour weeks building educational programs while living an extremely frugal life.
On the other hand, when I hear you talk about economics and finance (and Bitcoin), it's clear that you haven't ever rigoursly studied a technical discipline. You measure nothing, but believe that what I would describe as "naive first hypotheses" are part of a serious conversation, not even knowing that it's one of a class of ideas that have been thought through, and rejected by, throngs of people before you who did step over it during some early phase of their education. And now we've reached the point at which I'm the mean messenger, letting you know about those long journeys, but somebody has to play that role when you start making such eggregious characterizations.
When I suggest that I'm "not concerned" (and I clearly mean "less concerned to the point that it's not a priority") about Type B scams vs. Type A scams, it's because there are many orders of magnitude between them. What I'm saying is that it's not worth my time to worry about your mosquito bite when there are packs of feral pitbulls tearing people apart. I can measure the difference, but it's also so vast that any misunderstanding of the chasm is due to a lack of serious study of the problems. I'm making a priority decision, not dismissing anyone's pain.
I put together hundreds of pages of writing, documenting scams and teaching people how to avoid them. You make no mention of this whatsoever when you casually call me "callous" with a distorted paraphrase of the conversation.
I was happy to talk with you about basic motivations for an economic system, but you have a highly distorted perception of where you are on the education curve. I've seen it so many times, and it was one of the things that motivated me to leave Wall Street in my mid-20s and take the hard road of building a new math education system. In your conversations, you spend so much time talking about topics surrounding "the caret", but it's clear to people who done the work in quantitive economics, each of whom had and later dismissed a dozen pet theories along the way, that you're dancing on the first step of a long staircase. Not having begun the process of quantitizing anything, you blissfully disregard and disrespect the effort. It has the appearance to people who put in the work of climbing back down from summiting Mt. Everest to see people doing cartwheels at the base, vlogging with a shirt that says, "I heart Everest," giving a talk on how to climb the mountain. I'll explain more of this in an article, but I'm irritated at having to take the time out to do so. Feeling the need to do so probably also means that I won't bother taking time with you in the future. It's far too much trouble.
Perhaps I could characterize it as "callous" to spend so much time dragging people into conversations about the first step when you haven't taken the journey to even illuminate to yourself that there is this enormous staircase in front that will require years of real and rigorous testing to climb. Similarly, I cringe every time I think about what damage you might have caused taking Russell Brand seriously, over a significant period, without taking steps to get close to the man in order to understand him as a predator.
In the meantime, you are miseducating your viewers in almost every paragraph, compounding their own fears of taking the educational journey. As just one example, off the top of my head, you tell them that Bitcoiners are gving their money to miners. The whole point of Bitcoin is that they give LESS to the miners than the banks absord in the process. In fact, mining is an anti-monopoly business in which the players MUST work extremely hard to seek the most efficient way to perform transaction validation. You make no effort to evaluate both sides of the ledger. You haven't learned enough to know that "crypto" isn't just a prefix for people who wear life masks, but means "cryptography", which is being applied by serious mathematicians for the purpose of taking decisions out of the hands of those who choose who gets to be banked and who doesn't, with all the perverse incentives of authoritarian market governance.
And those are just the first steps, and you would find explanations of them in many places on the internet, in books, and at Bitcoin meetups, where in an afternoon, or over lunch, you would find out that there is a mountain that you don't know before declaring the people doing the labor, to the point that after virtually giving away my time for nearly five years (plus fourteen) I'm skating on the boundary between total exhaustion and moving forward, while taking the risks to uncover and reveal seriously dangerous material, to be "callous" in any way at all.
When Gabe raised issues about people being scammed, you brushed off his concerns with 'That doesn't bother me.' You didn't counter his points but gave a response on how you felt about it.
My friend didn't invest his retirement savings, he set up the initial token transfer with an agency his research had shown to be reputable. And his account was drained, before he caught it and was able to reverse it. Any decentralized system of anonymous, secretive transfers is going to be prone to that.
Bitcoin is designed for savvy investors who have the time to educate themselves and have the money to risk. I think it's likely to be a very lucrative risk, especially with the financial blob and gov't buying in. If that's your goal, I'm not disagreeing. My purpose with the caret is different.
My biggest concern, as I've stated in previous episodes, is that we don't know how to disagree productively on ideas. Your initial comment was that my questions were wasting your time and I should do the research to convince myself why I'm wrong, saving you the trouble. Was that not an insult, Mathew?
You've told me you have no time or energy to understand my caret system or read my book. You're now saying I have no credentials to understand economics, and I'm at the baby steps of people just starting their learning curve. But that's not a character attack, right?
You are irritated and feel I'm callous to even start a conversation without the years of rigorous study in a 'technical discipline' that you've had (and somehow this is related to Russell Brand?)
The decade that I spent researching geo-economics is 'dancing on the first step of a long staircase.' It's merely a 'pet theory' that others have grown out of. And then you say, "I won't bother taking time with you in the future. It's far too much trouble." That seems as if you consider my intelligence so far beneath you that the gift of your attention is squandered. Is that not demeaning?
But let me ask a simple question: How does it work under Bitcoin when someone borrows money to buy a house? This is how 94% of dollars are created today. That's how the bankers control our lives and take 30 yrs of our labor. How does Bitcoin change this?
I will concede your point, Mathew, that it's not callous to consider someone who's been scammed to be 'a mosquito bite' if the system ends the "packs of feral pitbulls tearing people apart." However, there's no quantitative and systematic way you've shown that Bitcoin will do this. Those being torn apart are not the savvy investors with money to risk.
These seem like valid questions that Gabe raised, and that other intelligent readers on my stack also voiced. I'm always willing to doubt my own intelligence but the clear thinking and deep research of people in my comment threads blows me away. I can't dismiss them as naive, deluded, self-important or however you're characterizing me. I'm sorry you're choosing not to engage here, and hope you know that our disagreement doesn't change the high regard I have for you.
"That seems as if you consider my intelligence so far beneath you that the gift of your attention is squandered. Is that not demeaning?"
This is a case in which I am only the messenger. Part of the steep problemw with the world is that education is so sabotaged that the levels of work between people that would related to multi-disciplinary technical issues is so vast that highly technical people stand back and let the social engineers psyop everyone rather than explaining, "You haven't done the work, and until you do, everything will seem confusing, and your ideas about it will have nothing to do with what is actually taking place." This is an extremely dangerous reality, and, so far as I can tell, I'm the only person I've seen trying to address it while those efforts are sabotaged both from above and from below the baselines of power.
It's not my fault that you consider it demeaning that I consider my time to be better spent elsewhere than people who haven't done even basic research, much less a serious study of the foundations of the several topics that precede the conversation. Saying so might be the only way to jolt you or others into refocusing on the basics where progress must begin [again].
From my perspective, it is far more frightening to me that you reached this point, describing it as a decade studying geo-economics, without anyone chiming in to steer your education in a more rigorous direction. That's the mistake of many people prior to me making that judgment, a perspective that comes from tens of thousands of hours of intense labor, where I see no evidence that you learned what any of that labor looks like.
"You didn't counter his points but gave a response on how you felt about it."
I did, but you haven't done the basic reading to know that. You are mangling basic terminology, which precedes basic conceptual understanding.
Gabe's biggest mistake is a misunderstanding of Bitcoin, but understandable in the sense that it was built on hopium sold by early advocates who either themselves misunderstood it, or were simply pushing adoption based on the emotional desires of audiences. Gabe wants for Bitcoin to be private. However, that is at odds with the reality of Bitcoin and the practical reality of any digital currency. A transparent systematic ledger is the only way to achieve asymmetric information, and no digital currency was ever going to supplant the reserve currencies without that aspect just like invisible [paper] gold cannot be relied on. And no other digital currencies have relatable value to systemic currencies without the rock of a reserve currency winner.
The pseudonomity of Bitcoin provided short-term "privacy" in the new network, but true privacy would need to be achieved with a different system. Personally, I think that's just fine, and I think those panicked by the need for a different tool for privacy should focus their efforts on building that additional system, or get used to carrying silver coins [again] instead of paper dollars to the farmer's market, or to buy their drugs with. It's less of a big deal than people might imagine, though I do suspect that some privacy coin tech will succeed.
Your mistakes are different. You haven't learned the basics, which is the result of spending little time and effort.
"My friend didn't invest his retirement savings, he set up the initial token transfer with an agency his research had shown to be reputable. And his account was drained, before he caught it and was able to reverse it."
There are literally of billions of stories of people making poor decisions from which they were hurt by conmen because they stepped into arenas they did not first do the work to understand. They're all bad, and I'm not being callous by not addressing every one of them. You believe this one has something to do with the conversation about Bitcoin, and I see no reason why. In fact, I'm wondering if the story is even true, and if it is true, I'm wondering why you would think it is relevant. After all, Bitcoin is not a token, but your "caret" currency IS a token if we exclude "blockchain" as part of the definition of a token. This is where I get irritated that you chose to wade in without learning the basics.
Somewhere close to 99% of money scammed during our lifetimes has nothing to do with Bitocin. And the vast majority that relates loosely to Bitcoin, has to do with vaporware cryptocurrencies that really have nothing more to do with Bitcoin than "computers do this" and sometimes less than that. And most of that would not happen if people chose to put in the effort learning the basics. Bitcoin is a personal banking technology, which is to say that nobody needs an intermediary who can even scam them. You hold it yourself with a private key. This is why Bitcoiners repeat the addage that has become a matra, "Not your key, not your coin." Bitcoin is, by its nature, fundamentally opposed to the scam you say that your friend fell for.
"The decade that I spent researching geo-economics is 'dancing on the first step of a long staircase.'"
If you spent a decade researching geo-economics, you did so without a good mentor. I'm sad to say that you wasted so much time that it would take me years of holding your hand through unwinding it all. That you still comment on topics without first learning basic terminology suggests that you never had anyone with technical knowledge work with you to avoid building layers of nonsense without knowing how to check and test how those layers relate to reality. I don't intend for this to be mean, but I recognize that there is no way to say that you've wasted a lot of time [and are now trying to lead people in "understanding"].
"However, there's no quantitative and systematic way you've shown that Bitcoin will do this."
You want for me to have shown that Bitcoin will stop people from being scammed by following con men who exploit their lack of understanding of a process? You might as well ask me to show that a peanut butter jar will stop people from being scammed. At least Bitcoin is a personal monetary technology that doesn't require financial intermediaries that are necessary for nearly any con.
Your comment is also weird to me on the level that, so far as I can tell, I haven't seen you show the ability to have a quantitative conversation that would be meaningful in the grand scheme of things. Your caret system is a kitchen table math exercise, at best, on a quantitative level.
There are levels of elevating a testing of the concept through math that somebody with a good economics background would assume you don't have because, even before quantization occured, people would test the idea with all those principles along the way that came from the quantitative educational journey. For instance, money based on a single asset class fixes that class as the ante in an artificially created game. Make that housing, and now we have a Republic of voters whose minds focus on the prices of their houses going up due to refugees fleeing to the U.S. due to war the U.S. makes abroad. War for profit becomes a broad incentive. In fact, that's what happened when Forever Wars followed the securitization of mortgages at AAA bond levels. Your system would be an exponent of that mistake. That you haven't preempted that concern suggests that it hasn't occured to you.
I could say more, but I'm trying my best to manage my rest and energy so that I can recover.
"From my perspective, it is far more frightening to me that you reached this point, describing it as a decade studying geo-economics, without anyone chiming in to steer your education in a more rigorous direction." Appeal to authority
"... a perspective that comes from tens of thousands of hours of intense labor, where I see no evidence that you learned what any of that labor looks like." Assuming that you and I have the same hours in a day, and I've lived more days than you, this assumes that how you've chosen to spend your time is inherently more valuable than how I have. Why would that be so?
"I'm the only person I've seen trying to address it while those efforts are sabotaged both from above and from below the baselines of power." Sympathy bid
"Gabe's biggest mistake is a misunderstanding of Bitcoin, but understandable in the sense that it was built on hopium sold by early advocates who either themselves misunderstood it, or were simply pushing adoption based on the emotional desires of audiences." States wrongness as a fact and 'forgives' it based on the other being emotional and not rational.
[Two paragraphs arguing privacy] deflection to something NOT one of my objections, and not what I cited from Gabe.
"Somewhere close to 99% of money scammed during our lifetimes has nothing to do with Bitocin." Lesser of two evils argument that has nothing to do with comparing solutions.
"In fact, I'm wondering if the story is even true, and if it is true, I'm wondering why you would think it is relevant." A personal story of a friend having his account emptied by a crypto-scam isn't relevant to whether scams are a mere 'mosquito-bite'? And accusing me of lying about it? Character attack
"You want for me to have shown that Bitcoin will stop people from being scammed by following con men who exploit their lack of understanding of a process?" Straw man argument. Turns a question about a systematic protection against scams (as the caret has) into following con men.
"Your comment is also weird to me on the level that, so far as I can tell, I haven't seen you show the ability to have a quantitative conversation that would be meaningful in the grand scheme of things. Your caret system is a kitchen table math exercise, at best, on a quantitative level." On the original interview, I stated that I wanted to lure you into engaging with the math, aka quantitative side, of the caret system. You told me your health required you to conserve your energy. But now, after refusing that conversation, you say I don't have the ability. Weird.
"I could say more, but I'm trying my best to manage my rest and energy so that I can recover" Sympathy bid and guilt-mongering. By implication, I'm making you more sick because you have to respond to my attacks. Yet the closest I've come to criticizing you has been my statement that not caring about scams is callous. I don't think anyone can read what you've said about me without seeing that as an attack on my intelligence, my work ethic in rigorous research, and my honesty in lying about a friend's experience in order to make a point.
I'm sympathetic to the health ordeal you attribute to your work on the DMED data, but I don't take responsibility for making it worse by not capitulating on my points and meekly resigning myself to being too ignorant to be in the conversation.
Uncanny!! I was pondering since last night and planning to ask you about a Bit-Caret. I saw some ridiculous figures about the 'value' of b-ullshi-itcoin and wondering how rice farmers from S E Asia are supposed to 'buy in' at around $100,000 (or more).
"b-ullshi-itcoin" Very funny, Julius. And good question about the rice farmers. One of Mathew's points (although applying more to Latin America) is that remittances sent home wouldn't have the 35-40% fee, making poor nations more wealthy. But that's where I'd distinguish between money and wealth. The money that migrant workers send home to the families they've left behind will feed into another extractive system there. They give up the most precious thing they have--being in their families and communities--so their labor serves the rich in another country. That's the opposite of wealth.
The caret system enables people to live where they work and work where they live. A commonwealth can take back the resources and land within their borders, kicking out foreign corporations. If we ended economic migration, I wonder if we'd even need to guard the borders, once communities could rebuild. It's a uncommon person who wants to leave their culture permanently, although anthropology says that travel and adventure have always been beloved.
I really appreciate you summarizing some of my stronger points. I really feel the need to say that if Bitcoin was truly helpful as a resistance currency (emphasis on currency) than this discussion wouldn't be taking place at all and it would be self-evident. As I wrote in my monthly recap, I've been equal parts impressed and dismayed by the fact that there are many bright technical resistance minds caught up in the Bitcoin community. It seems "number go up" is a powerful drug, which starts to look to me like another control mechanism of imperial currencies.
(Aside)
They're called cryptocurrencies because the math they use to burn energy (or do other consensus mechanisms) is some kind of cryptographic hashing function. Account balances are also separated by encryption. So you can think of it as a short form for "cryptographic currency".
One question about the caret however, why specifically mortgages? I ask because my twin brother and I have been having back-and-forth conversations where he is saying it's worth making renting illegal. I'll admit I struggle to come up with another resource tied to geography, but it also makes me wonder about natural resources.
In either case, since really doubling-down on my research efforts after 2020, I've looked more closely at mutual credit schemes. They much more closely resemble how I think an ideal resistance currency would function. I think the current problem with any digital currency is that our digital landscape is so consolidated and rife with problems that you can't really rely on it as a solid foundation.
Which leads to the second question, do you think it would be straightforward to run the caret entirely digitally, or that it will always be best to run it mostly (or entirely) analog?
---
For what it's worth, I'm willing to concede that Mathew may be right that a powerful "battering-ram" may be required to actually take down many of the "big evils" of our day. I can only speculate how Bitcoin and other tools can fit into taking those on head on. One thing I learned from his side of the discussion is that while I've zoomed in to the small scale, the big picture still matters a great deal. Of course, whenever one operates at that scale certain trade offs and compromises are seemingly inevitable. My intuition tells me the caret or a system similar to it, would do a great deal of good regardless of if those big evils are solved or not.
What are the promising tactics and tools that can confront the "big evils" of the day?
Thank you, Gabe, and it was a pleasure to listen again to summarize your points. I was struck by how many times you went back to the foundation--and purpose is the first layer of the foundation. To think simply is also to think systematically. I suspect that's why we often agree--I'm a very systematic thinker, ploddingly so.
In a way, being naive is the opposite of being gullible. A naive person sees the obvious unobscured by convoluted arguments. A gullible person accepts someone else's authority when something doesn't make sense. You have the complex knowledge of Bitcoin that I lack, so the questions you asked were deep but unsophisticated, meaning not clouded by sophistry.
You're right that Bitcoin is neither resistance nor a currency. What is it resisting? At one point, centralized control of exchange. But on a non-local level, there is no exchange backing our purchases. It's purely extraction, a 'share' in the slave labor and resource theft enabled by our military. Bitcoin puts that extraction power into another form, keeping the imbalance of who owns it.
The caret is ONLY digital. Sorry, Mark. Since we're meeting later this month to talk about the app he's volunteered to design, I hate to break it to him how important his part is ;-) Although at this stage, it's really a simulation to show how user-friendly it can be. I see this as the decade of 'a 2020 vision' and 2030 as when we should aim for a launch.
The caret is NOT anonymous, as a physical currency would be. Every transaction leaves a digital trail. The initial distribution is in targeted dividends, that can only be used for the local goods and services you want to encourage. In my proposal for my commonwealth, I'd suggest locally produced food, wellcare, education and home improvements. The provider needs to offer these goods or services at the agreed maximum price or less in order to accept the dividends.
Once they earn them, it automatically deducts the 15% pension contribution and they can use them for their rent or mortgage or any other local good or service--which would be less expensive because the caret has a higher exchange rate than the dollar and is tax-free. And the maximum wage prevents competition from raising the price for essentials.
When used for something not produced in the commonwealth, and without a 'fair trade' agreement, the caret is taxed to convert it into dollars. And dollars not converted to carets are also taxed when used. So this discourages the egress of money.
I do understand that crypto means the algorithm that produces them, but they've also told us mortgage is because the debt is dead once it's paid off, not that it's the death grip over us that it translates to literally. I think these words are buried subliminal tricks.
And why mortgages? The mortgage is the intergenerational transfer of wealth, with the flexibility of trade. Should a person inherit the family home with no obligation to care for their parents or pass it on in a better form to the next generation? What the caret system does is take the family home and scale it up, so that a person who gets a house and infrastructure that another generation has built also has the responsibility of using their labor in ways the community values. That's why someone can't take the dividend and use it for their own rent or mortgage.
And I couldn't get into all the big picture ramifications of the caret system because it was getting too long, but I hope you'll ask about them so I can continue to show why it confronts the big evils of the day. Thanks Gabe!
About the question of whether caret should be run digitally: I'm sure Tereza will chime in here, but my understanding is that digital would be a convenience, but not necessary. I could see it being run with paper "money" and hand-written ledgers, making it collapse-proof at least in that aspect.
Haha, I appreciate, Philip, that my credere is good in your experience. I would argue, however, that in a well designed system, there should be no trust involved. 'The intent of the caret' is a critical phrase, and having verifiable ways to measure that is key, so you know if the system's working. I've thought that another goal might be intergenerational families that stay in the community and raise their kids there. What better measure of a community's success?
So I'm hoping there are people who look at how the caret's intent could be thwarted, and then how they would solve that problem. My system is just the first step in designing your system ;-)
Great questions, Afsaneh! And I would expect no less from a word person than asking about the name 'caret'.
My main reason is that it's the only unused symbol left on the keyboard. It seemed like the nose on primitive emojis wasn't enough for that fine symbol. I also liked how it corresponds with credit, which is essentially what it is. And I like the pun of 'carets not sticks,' since it's an incentive plan that encourages what you want, rather than punishing and penalizing what you don't want--which seems like the only tool gov'ts have.
Yes, the 10:1 rule is fractional reserve lending. Keeping it the same means you don't have to change how banks operate, only who Congress 'endows with the ability to issue circulating notes.' Private banks could only lend money they actually had, under my plan, not create money through FRL. Only commonwealth banks could lend money into existence, and then issue the credit monthly to repay that debt but in a distributed way that stimulates local production.
It was also eerie how well the numbers worked out. The $3T Social Security Trust Fund, which is what it was last valued at, divided by the people in the US is $9000 each so $90K in loans, as you've noted. The average home has 2.5 residents. And the average home cost in the US is $225K. So places where money circulates too fast, like Santa Cruz, would need to add to their capital while bringing the cost of housing down. Places where money moves too slow, like my Appalachian hometown, would build up their money in circulation.
I think I would agree with kitten that most things in nature grow in value over time. We pay as much in debt as we can afford to buy a house, leaving nothing to maintain or improve it for the next generation. I think that every family and community's wealth should grow in richness of the soil, beauty of common areas, nice spaces, skills and education, comfort and communication. And security, real security. That's the carets I'm looking to grow ;-)
Where I am the average for a house is also $1.5M, lot optional. When I bought my house 37 yrs ago, before I met my husband (which was helpful for keeping it in the divorce) it cost $237.5 and the interest rate was almost 20%. Every time they lowered the interest rate, the speculative price of the house went up because we bid against each other based on how much we can pay monthly. When the stock bubble burst and jobs imploded, people refinanced and pumped that money into the market, enabling housing prices to go up more. So that's how inflation is really created, not by gov't printing money--which they're not allowed to do in the US.
According to Ben Franklin, on whose colonial scrip my plan is based, no more than 20% of the money in circulation should be through debt. In the US, banks have created 94% of dollar credit through mortgages. That's especially a problem because they don't create the interest, which is half of the repayment at 5.3%. So the money put into circulation runs out halfway through, and most of it goes to the bankers as interest. That's why inflation is baked into that system but now that the prime reached almost zero, there's nowhere for them to go. That's why the Great Dispossession is happening, raising the rate so all the variable loan mortgages shake out and go back to the banks.
In my caret system, dollars can be generated to buy out any property or businesses operating within the borders. But then it becomes a loan to itself in carets. So it can generate those carets for other things it owns, like its own labor and resources. However, it can't generate dollars to buy things outside its borders. If the commonwealth needed dollars for internal exchange, we'd be stuck with the same system we have, being indebted to the bankers who are given free ownership of the property. Does that make sense?
Let me reread a few more times to get my head around it. Already, I can see that I am stomped here. "When the stock bubble burst and jobs imploded, people refinanced and pumped that money into the market, enabling housing prices to go up more. So that's how inflation is really created" ---
what are the people doing to make their own lives more expensive. What does pumping it into the market mean? What is that?
Of course it's not a pump. I'm not a finance person.
I know, I watched many people spend a certain amount of money in renovations with intention to sell. They expected and got back much more then spent on renovations. I thought to myself, this is not sane or healthy. Ultimately, the next generation is the end buyer, no matter how people buy and sell into between. We are forcing them to pay more.
Is that what you mean by pumping?
thanks.
Maybe we have to work on the ethics of people, as well?
Can any money system work, as long as the people playing remain ethical?
I would say exactly the opposite, Afsenah. On the back of my book is my only dogma, that people are inherently good and when they behave badly, systems (and stories) are to blame. I've added the second since then.
In a well designed system, there should be no trust involved. There is no way for someone to abuse it or take an unfair advantage. I encourage people to look for those holes in my system and then propose how they would fix them.
I think the purpose of our lives, on this plane of reality, is to care for the people and the places that have been entrusted to us. Renovating a home and making it more beautiful and functional is one of the greatest joys--it gives back to the world something better than how you found it. That's why my proposal for the caret distribution includes a 20% share for home improvements.
A house is a living asset and all living things require care and attention, or they bite you in the ass ;-) Being currently ticketed by the city to repair/ replace my sidewalk within 60 days, I can attest to that.
Instead of using our labor to improve our homes, we spend 30 yrs paying as much as we possibly can just to live in them. I think that's crazy that we're forced to do that.
I live in a bedroom community adjacent to Silicon Valley so the dot-com bust meant people were out of jobs. They weren't refinancing to renovate, but to live. At the time, I was predicting the housing bubble would burst, which it did in 2008. Those who had refinanced were then underwater, often forcing them to sell in a depressed market--or worse, have their houses repossessed and auctioned off to big industrial buyers. Then they manipulated the housing prices up again by lowering the interest rates once more.
So no, I definitely don't think that any money system will work. I think ours prevents people from living ethical lives. We sell our labor for as much as we can, which means making the rich richer. And there's really no way as individuals to escape that.
Oh no I didn't mean renovations didn't add value. Materials, time and effort are to be calculated in. That's a given. It adds value to the house and the community. What I saw, was something beyond this.
Thanks Tereza. I will be back. I have to figure out what I don't understand, so my questions will be worthwhile for you to review.
By the way, Amazon Publishing section of Amazon banned me for life, because of my numbers book. I'm little gun shy putting money in their pockets.
Okay... I'm not taking anyone to task. I am just trying to figure out how things work. If a tree grows in value over a course of a few years... does this mean, every year the apples from that tree are to be also more valuable, and does that translate to having to pay more for an apple from that tree, every year subsequent?
Maybe I haven't explained myself properly. It happens.
Maybe you can help me figure out what I am trying to ask?
What am I to expect?
Thanks in advance.
This is response to Kitten, however it is for Tereza ultimately.
Ah, I think you're talking about inflation, not actual value. The word itself is a trick, imo. Our money does the opposite of inflating, it becomes more and more diluted compared to the value that backs it. That's why it requires more of it to get the same value. My house, except for things I've done to it, has exactly the same value as when I bought it 37 yrs ago. But it would cost triple or quadruple the amount of debt to buy it today, even without my improvements. The use-value hasn't changed at all. Only the speculative value.
In my book, I describe inflation as a teapot that keeps pouring out tea to the bankers and leaving us with the diluted bag, up to our necks in hot water that has less and less actual substance.
What the caret system does is provide a framework that gives all communities the tools to take back the properties within their borders and the labor of their residents. How they use the tools is up to them, within the framework that makes sure everyone is included somewhere and the value is equally distributed among commonwealths and within commonwealths. The only other rules are practical, like not generating more than you collect in debt or taxes, or can back with dollars at whatever exchange rate you establish.
So your expectations need to be put into the design you'd propose for your commonwealth. In Santa Cruz, over 50% are renters, mostly students who drive the cost out of the reach of families. I would reclaim the university as commonwealth property, so that it serves the community rather than the community serving it.
I would also propose an 8 yr residence to become a commoner and share in the distribution, so it wouldn't include students. All rents and mortgages are in carets, of course, since they've become a debt to ourselves. I'd require 2 dollars for every caret as an exchange rate, but allow current homeowners and LT residents the ability to transfer a set amount of dollars monthly at a 1:1 ratio. That would give them double the advantage in renting or buying.
I would also tax any money that leaves the commonwealth at 50% so that absentee landlords and corporations would get half. This is also an incentive for them to sell to local residents during the grace period when they can receive the full amount in dollars.
However my Appalachian hometown is trying to attract more homebuyers. There I'd let new homebuyers be immediately part of the caret distribution, but I would still tax extraction at a 50% rate.
And yes, crime is a major consideration. There is no such thing as petty crime. I have other proposals to address that but I won't go into them here. My book lays the foundation for the caret system by explaining how money works and the psyops of 3000 yrs of history. The last section gets into the solution. The next book, How to Build a Commonwealth, will go into more detail on the caret system but it needs these conversations between people who already know how money works. Thanks for being interested!
I lost a mature apple tree (about 50 years old) a while back in a freak storm; I planted a new one a year ago and still have not had one apple yet. There is more fruit on an older tree and the fruit is generally better tasting, sweeter in my experience maybe due to more developed root system, nutrients.
I am worried that the new apple tree may not have fully developed fruit even after blooming due to chemicals in the chemtrails/ extensive aerosol spraying here (and in the water)I hope this is not the case but something is going on…
I did a reader survey in here and apparently I am not the only one experiencing lower yields,
A better tasting fruit may not happen every year, however, it is an example of our own taste buds recognizing a better value.
I know it seems simple, just reviewing what things are of real value.
As per chemtrails, yah they spray up here as well. My brother has many fruit trees in his backyard, either 2020 or 2021 was a good year. Since then it’s very sickly fruit, if any at all.
just adding that more mature plants will cost more due to the time (and care/work/water required during the maturation.) i think of it as the “dirty little secret” that even drought tolerant plants need lots of water for at least a year or more while their root systems establish.
here in California we are set for new draconian water restriction regulations to go into effect in 2025 so I have been trying to establish a few more fruit trees this year before we need to provide “written justification” of outdoor water use… I think very few are aware of this as it hasn’t been widely advertised.
Well, having read through the comments I recognize how little I know on Bitcoin and to a lesser extent (having read your book, so better educated) the caret system. I'll admit to certain 'fuzziness' that happens to my brain when it attempts to deal with money. Something wants to short-circuit.
I can't help but think your system is addressing a specific layer - community based wealth - and so has a built-in insular aspect to where bitcoin is addressing a global layer of exchange.
Maybe comparing them doesn't work - they are addressing different layers. Perhaps I'm wrong about that. But why wouldn't they work together as different tools used for different needs? One at the local level and the other at the global and if desired, local too? Aren't they both simply tools for value-exchange?
Carets if I understand this correctly, could not be hijacked and taken over by larger external forces. They are tied to the community and property. They are only available to people who stay long enough in the community.
I'm thinking of an interview I listened to a few years ago with Jim Rogers who said if Bitcoin really took off, governments/banks would take it over. And then recently Catherine A Fitts noted that derivatives are now in play with BTC, rendering the 21 million fixed number, moot. (This was news to me. If accurate, doesn't this un-do it's whole claim to worth?)
If you are at the top step of a long stairwell, then I'm fully hopeless, Tereza. And that's an essential point. Because value-exchange should be simple enough to grasp. (My fuzziness aside.) We all know the monetary system is part of the control matrix, and we've lost control of our labor and ability to create real wealth. It makes obvious sense that this will only happen at a small scale. Person by person, community by community. I recognize your system addresses that. I find that hopeful. Why wouldn't we be able to generate our own solutions? Why is thinking we can naive?
Assuming Jim Rogers and Catherine A Fitts are pointing to the inevitable hijacking - the global banking players are already distorting the bitcoin space - it seems sane and practical to have alternatives in place.
If something is so convoluted as to preclude most of us from understanding it - what does that mean going forward? It feels like the guts - simple human exchange - somehow has no place in the discussion. That doesn't make sense. If the people expected to use it, don't understand the implications, I don't see it as a viable human solution.
I know enough to know I don't know enough. But I do know when my neighbor needs something I have - and I offer it, then she will look to provide me with something I need down the line. Only because we care about each other. And naive or not, in my very grounded existence, the currency of care, matters the most.
I'll have to leave it to smarter people than me to explain how that fits into a monetary system.
Kathleen, it means so much to me that you go back and read all the comments. As you know, I write mini-volumes and never know if they're just a private message to someone who, in some cases, has already made up their mind. But when I get your 'like' on them, I know they have been heard.
And there is no one smarter than you. I don't even mean that as a compliment. If something is hard to understand, it could be intentionally convoluted to prevent understanding--I'd put all traditional economics in that category. Or it could be difficult because it requires letting go of all the conditioning in how we think. My intention is to explain things as simply as possible, using common sense and real world analogies. That's what I felt Gabe did in the original interview.
I would say that Bitcoin is an individual system for preserving the value of money. On a global scale, you know from my book that it means how much slave labor that buys from people for whom our labor does nothing. That's the reality we live in and none of us can change it as an individual. So using Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency or gold as a stop-gap measure for the interim makes sense. But it doesn't change the global extraction economy one iota, from what I've seen.
Under an anonymous money system, no matter how horribly you treat other people, they will cook you delicious food, make your home beautiful, wipe your ass when you get old. Or before, if you prefer. Your reputation and relationships have nothing to do with what you get back from other people. It's a one-way exchange.
All wealth is community based, even if that community is just one family. If your neighbor needs a cup of sugar, you can provide it. But what if your neighbor has lost their job or the variable rate on their mortgage went up and they're going to lose their house. Will you take them in? I'm surrounded by people who need housing. I sometimes have gotten three requests/ demands in a day to rent my garaj mahal. You and I know someone with $35K in credit card debt for medical expenses. We know people who've lost jobs, lost partners, lost businesses. Within a parasitic system that's sucking the lifeblood out of everyone, I don't think we can care for others--or very few.
Within the caret system, any person can do the labor to make the cost of housing. I'm not worried about the elderly widow getting fed or losing her house. I've seen how my neighbors, like you, want to take care of other people. But the bratty rich snob who thinks he's too good to do manual labor--the dollars in his trust fund can evaporate for all I care.
Very interesting about derivative bets on Bitcoin. You know from my book that derivatives equal 60X the global GDP and take precedence in any bank closure.
Thanks, Tereza. :-) I love and always learn from your comment section.
I was half-joking on the 'smarter than me' comment. Yes, others, like you, have definitely put the time in to understand money and wealth and how to address the issues - really the traps - that our current system creates. I'm grateful for that since it's not something I naturally wish to engage.
At the same time, those 'smarts' and what they generate won't be very valuable if intangibles like 'care' aren't part of them. That is the actual energetic currency between us. Which I know you know.
When we include care in any exchange (monetary or not) we're already on better footing. So with wealth-building, whether it's a form of the caret system or something else, if care is the basis, we'll naturally rewrite the current 'extraction economy.'
I hope we're close to a time on this planet where we can look fresh at these things. See the blatant greed and predatory nature of money and reject it in favor of something that is truly human-friendly.
2) The same asset which backs all currencies - the sentiment of those who use them.
3) The decentralised ledger which acts as security/verification
4) The decentralised agreement of users to have a store of wealth which is non- inflationary
5) The scarcity built into the concept
How might a rice farmer 'buy in'
1) Any time/resources/energy the rice farmer would like to store can now be stored in a non-inflationary, so far impossible to take by force medium. They store their wealth in increments, they do not need to store an entire bitcoin.
2) The only way to gain access to that stored wealth is via legitimate, voluntary trade for perceived value. No more stealing via inflation.
3) In such an environment, goods such as rice receive much higher margins, as all the current wastage spent on corruption and exporting inflation will instead be redirected to food and useful things.
Thanks for answering my question, Shane. It seems, though, that the energy was already spent mining it and doesn't back it as a trade value. It's not, for instance, like having a credit that entitles me to 100 gallons of gasoline, no matter what the price goes up to. That would be a real world asset that backed the credit.
I don't know if you watched the original interview with Gabe and Mathew. I thought Gabe raised some good points on why Bitcoin wasn't going to be used as a currency but rather an investment that would be sold for a currency.
In the episode I linked, Inflation Colonization, I give the example from my book of how banks create inflation by manipulating the interest rate, and fluctuating it up and down. When it goes up, it dispossesses all the people with variable rate mortgages. When it goes down, it inflates the cost of the house through competition.
So maybe you can answer this question I keep asking: under a Bitcoin system, how will a person borrow money to buy a house? That's how 94% of dollars are generated today, giving bankers control of our labor and lives. How does Bitcoin change that?
In attempting to answer, I am testing the validity of these asssertions, not commiting to them.
- Real world 'Assets' backing a credit (or a currency) are less useful than scarcity backed by the only trust mechanism which cannot be faked - energy expenditure. The energy required is the proof of work. Eg houses are considered a good collateral asset because they take a lot of energy to produce, but they lack the complete set of other properties Bitcoin can claim as a currency or store of value - eg. durable, portable, divisible, recognisable, scarce.
- Bitcoin as currency is exciting - currency which cannot be stolen easily, but this is not fundamental to the value of Bitcoin. A deflationary, decentralised store of value is still appealing. Many respected Bitcoiners such as Mark Moss agree with Gabe in the short and medium term. If Bitcoin is merely an investment sold for currency, then it still works to create an incentive structure of honesty, rather than an incentive structure that is rotten to the core - so long as it provides a store of value 1 degree removed from the central bankers.
- The appeal of Bitcoin is not that mortgages or housing markets are stable and protected. The appeal is the opposite - that risky investment remains accountable, but it is only accountable to market forces, not bank manipulation. The philosophy is we want some people to lose their homes if they overleverage. We want banks to fail and pension schemes relying on, say, the military industrial complex to have their lack of value apparent in their poor returns vs investments which create value. It seems counterintuitive, but it is worth reiterating - we want little grandma to lose her pension if she invests it in Haliburton! As Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. We desperately need to trade artificial risk reduction for accountability.
- Under a Bitcoin system, the hope is that a person buys a house by living for a few years with long term time preference - eg. save up, pay a builder, pay for materials, and you can own a house that is worth 3 years of your specialised labour valued in Bitcoin, not 30 years of your labour valued in a completely debased currency.... As it was in the past. Bitcoin changes (back) to this reality by removing the Cantillon effect, the 'WTFhappened in 1971' effects, the 94% inflation caused by fractional reserve banking as you describe.
- How does this happen - By giving people an opt out of the fractional reserve system. By valuing the house, eventually, in a deflationary measure - Bitcoin. The value of the house does not double every 10 years while the wages required to buy the house remain stagnant - as has been the case for the last century. Instead, the wages and the value of the house vary only upon the whims of the market, not on the whims of a global banking cartel which prints money and poisons their subjects with bioweapons by way of explanation.
I appreciate your attitude, Shane, that you're testing the validity of your assertions. My replies are in kind! And I'll continue comparing Bitcoin to the Caret since my position is that Bitcoin may be a good stopgap measure for the interim while we're working on an actual solution.
- Asset-backed currency or scarcity-backed? For a house, the energy expended to build it is the start of its value. For Bitcoin, the energy is expended to create an artificial scarcity, that's used up once it's done. It would be like backing the currency with houses that were built and then burnt down. But the dollar is currently created by USURPING the value of homes by claiming ownership by those who've never lifted a finger, much less a hammer, to build them. What backs the dollar, as I say in my book, is pieces of slave. It gives us access to the labor of people for whom we do nothing, which frees us to spend our labor making the rich richer. And that's what really backs Bitcoin too.
- (con't) the caret is also constrained by an arbitrary scarcity that limits its production. The capital reserves of $9K per person limits the amount of dollars that can be generated to buy back any properties or businesses within the commonwealth borders. But the repayment becomes a debt to itself. So caret generation is limited to the formula Debt + Tax + 2X Cash, so that more can't be issued than is collected or can be transferred into dollars. But since the caret is only legal tender within the commonwealth, that doesn't affect other currencies.
- For a currency to be deflationary, it needs to lower the cost of living, which is primarily housing. How does Bitcoin do this? Who lends to home buyers? Fractional reserve lending doesn't happen at the level of the Treasury or Federal Reserve, it's done by the banks that have been 'endowed by Congress' with the right to issue notes of credit that are the only currency accepted for taxes. If you bought Bitcoin early with all your income from three years of working and living with your parents, and then Bitcoin went to a value of 10X your purchase price, you could buy a house outright. Same as if you bought Facebook stock and it increased 10X. But first you'd have to earn it in dollars, buy BTC, and sell the Bitcoin back for dollars to buy the house. How would houses be priced in BTC if it was worth less than what the seller could get through a buyer w/ a 30 yr loan?
- Under the caret system, like the Bank of North Dakota (the only public bank in the country) the commonwealth bank finances up to 80% of the market price of the house. This protects the community's investment against deflation or overleveraging. The rest can be loaned by private banks but without fractional reserve lending, which is only allowed for commonwealth banks. So they can only lend money they actually have and put at risk.
- What is money? Money is a means of organizing labor in the interests of whoever issues it. Whether dollars or Bitcoin, those who issue it are the rich, so our labor serves to make the rich richer. If the community issues the money for internal trade, it can organize labor to make the community better rather than serving the 'market' which is a euphemism for the rich. Isn't that what we want?
Thanks for engaging, Shane, and helping me think through my positions.
- Bitcoin is durable, but not absolutely. The 'scarcity' energy put into the network, mining, ledger, etc. does not disappear like a burnt house. It goes into making a more secure system - which becomes harder and harder to counterfeit with each new investment of energy. It does drop to zero value if we go into full dystopia with no connectivity or communications, but so do dollars, gold, cars and most houses.
- Inflation/deflation as a 'cost of living increase/decrease' is a limited definition, yet it still applies to Bitcoin. The simple mechanism of a fixed supply is 'how Bitcoin acts deflationary'.
- As the purchasing power of the dollar continues to be diluted, Bitcoin will seem to 'increase at 10X value'. In reality, what is happening is your house was previously worth 10 BTC, now is worth 1 BTC as the purchasing power of a single unit of non-debasable currency represents a larger and larger portion of the worlds resources/productivity/value.
- The caret system, much like Gold, or the USD involves counterparty risk, and seeks to replicate the systems which were so easily corrupted with Gold or USD. BTC might be a CIA operation designed to usher in a social credit CBDC dystopia, but at least it has the possibility of diverging from what is clearly not working now.
- Robert Breedlove's 'What is Money' Show has excellent answers to the question. Of the dozens of answers he and his guests have explored, the most exciting for me is the possibility that BTC might start with the rich being able to acquire more share, but over time, even the rich can only acquire more if they are productive, and can attract BTC via voluntary exchange for perceived value. A rich person who uses their wealth to create more value in the world would indeed become richer. A rich person who currently becomes richer without voluntary exchange (eg by printing money then giving it to themselves) would become poorer and poorer as they have to spend their BTC to live, but have no mechanism of accruing more. This would dilute the wealth of the world to the rice farmers in a decentralised fashion, with less exposure to corruption than, say a 'commonwealth bank' legally allowed to counterfeit.
- 'The market' is not necessarily a euphemism for the rich. It could be a euphemism for 'almost perfectly democratic allocation of capital'. In other words, there would still be scams under a BTC standard, but they would be minimised, and the lending market would not be so distorted by the option of lenders to debase currency without exposing themselves to any downside risk.
Borrowers would still seek lenders to 'Net present Value' future earnings. Lenders would still seek out borrowers to put their spare capital to work, and this relationship could still be described as 'making the rich richer', however without market distortion, at least these exchanges would not be robbing every other person who has stored their purchasing power in BTC.
I appreciate the time you're spending on this, Shane. There is a lot I don't understand about Bitcoin so I'm glad you're explaining.
An exercise I'd thought to do with kids is to have them make things to buy from each other with tokens. In one setting, you give one kid half of the tokens to start and see what happens. In another, you give one kid ownership of all the desks that they have to pay to sit in. And in the last, you distribute the tokens evenly.
For money to be a unit of trade, you have to start with people having an equal amount. The caret system does this within the commonwealth, so trade is fair. Bitcoin is bought with other currencies, so it seems like it replicates the inequality. Is that not true?
I think this is something I'm still not understanding. The Treasury would buy Bitcoin with its reserves. Would they then be sold to pay off the national debt? Would China then redeem their Treasury bills for Bitcoin?
Would the so-called Federal Reserve still exist? Would Congress still give banks the right to issue money through fractional reserve lending?
Explain to me please what it means that the caret has counterparty risk? And why would houses lose their use-value if we had no computers or communication?
If the banks can't issue dollars (and I agree they shouldn't) 94% of all money in circulation would go away by the time that mortgages were half repaid. And then the banks would repossess the houses?
The Federal government can only issue coins. States and municipalities can't issue any form of credit. And Bitcoin, as Gabe pointed out, doesn't function as a currency.
The commonwealth bank is owned by all commoners as their shared and equal inheritance in the community. If someone has a nicer, more expensive house, their higher mortgage will contribute more to the community than they get back. If someone has a family of six in a trailer, they might get back in subsidies more than they're paying. But like you're saying about Bitcoin, if someone isn't contributing something that other people value, they can't use it to pay their rent or mortgage.
Bankers now can't issue money to pay themselves. They issue it as mortgages so the interest goes to them. It's still free money but it has to be 'bluewashed' by being backed by someone's labor before it returns to them.
Bankers have usurped the greatest power of government through the Federal Reserve. Gov't can't do anything if it doesn't control its own labor. So I don't understand the use of the term counterfeit. That's usually someone faking government-issued money. What the caret does is take government down to the size of a few thousand people and force it to be distributed equally, so that every person from the moment of birth participates in the wealth of the community. I don't see how that can be corrupted but maybe you can explain a way I haven't thought of.
- Even distribution of wealth would be great. That would require something like an asteroid strike. Since the psychopath kids currently have ownership of the desks, Bitcoin is exciting as a possible way to continue civilisation without blowing up the classroom. (Metaphors deliberately mixed)
- Bitcoin will and has replicated inequality partially. Inequality is different to equal opportunity. Equal opportunity is at least possible with a store of value which cannot be stolen via inflation, and hence is far, far more incentivised to acquire voluntarily through trade than the fiat USD.
- Counterparty risk is any process where one must trust a third party. Caret requires honest acting on the part of banks, the commonwealth, the people who set it up, etc.
- Houses lose value if there is no population to live in them, no electricity to supply to them, no transport systems to bring food to them, no social fabric to make living in them safe, etc.
- The US treasury under Trump does indeed have a plan to buy lots of Bitcoin. My understanding is that the Deep State intends world war to prelude cancelling the national debt, hence never to pay it off. The hope is that a National budget balanced around a deflationary currency dilutes this incentive before it happens. That a fixed monetary supply cuts off the inflationary supply of war, and discourages the credit supply for war.
- Yes China will try to demand payment in a more reliable form, rather than the USD which seems on course for hyperinflation real soon. Keep an eye on the Japanese Yen as a leading indicator.
- The dream is for the Fed to cease to exist, and fractional reserve lending to be seen as the confidence scam it is.
- There is no problem with divisible units to trade with in the modern world. Moving wealth out of the system in which banks over-leverage savings does not create any new problem here.
- a widely adopted Bitcoin standard would prevent any federal government issuing coins by diluting the existing circulation. That is the exact fraud Bitcoin hopes to end.
- Bitcoin is not really prescriptive about the socialist or capitalist leanings of the community which uses it. My personal hope is that yes, those who are not currently contributing what others value must lower their expecations or increase their value proposition. This is the opposite of the welfare state and the bloated inefficiencies which currently exist. Subsidies are just as responsible for information asymmetry in the market as money printing.
- Let's use a broad definition of Bankers. Bankers created a fake Pandemic. Bankers used this as a reason to 'print' 30% extra money supply. Bankers gave large parts of that money to themselves to 'spend' on pandemic measures, 'vaccines', etc. Also, some of it was bluewashed as stimulus cheques, but almost immediately the spending power returned to the billionaire class. Since those extra dollars are now competing to buy everything regular citizens wish to buy (incuding mortgages), they are indistinguishable from 'illegal' counterfeiting where some non-banker creates fake notes and circulates them. Fiat currency is therefore a counterfeiting scheme. 90% of fractional reserve lending is a related counterfeiting scheme. The USD inception and implementation was exactly as you describe the caret system. Bitcoin provides, possibly, a genuine alternative where counterfeiting is impossible.
I was led here by One asking about My thoughts on this. And humbly, I think Humanity can do far better.
First, let Me define "money" as I use it: anything tangible We use to account for the energy We input into a system. This can be trade, barter, work exchange, shells, beads, sticks notched and split, coins (metals), bills (paper), or electronic bits (or anything else used for that purpose).
"Currency" is anything that motivates Our creation in the Now. It can be money, or the social currencies - thanks, appreciation, love, reputation, lauds, adoration, fame... And plenty more.
Also, the fact that 80%+ of Us who work do so at "jobs" that merely move money around and overall upward to the moneyed psychopaths in control suggests that We do not need more than 20% of Us doing the needed work.
Add to that that We now have tech to automate any of the boring, tedious, uninteresting, noncreative needed work than very Few (if any) want to do. And so... We could set the automation to do those "jobs" and free Us to do what We WANT to do.
But money is the hindrance. As money is the accounting for Our energy added into a system, it is clear that free energy would make such accounting pointless (and, as I KNOW it exists, it is clear why the moneyed psychopaths hide and suppress the tech - They would lose Their single tool to power...).
Ergo, We could free Humanity from the psychopaths' grip, and ALL live richly - as We should, given that every One of Us born here on Our planet has an equal interest in its wealth...
The Digital Karet! Yeah, that's a perfect marriage. Suffice to say that it's a necessary merger. Because, why not, put two perfect solutions to the imperial "debt slavery" systems into their final resting places.
This is an exceptional episode, Tereza. I learned a lot more about the distinction between the Karet & Cryptocurrency! AND how they must, actually, complete each other's (the two's) directives.
Thanks Orion! Actually the caret has always been digital because it needs to verify that you, as a commoner, have a right to it. Then it tracks how the dividend is used on its first iteration. Each commonwealth or hamlet can decide for themselves but my proposal for my own is equal amounts in locally produced food, wellcare, education and home improvements. That guarantees that the caret has to circulate at least once, producing some new good or service, before it can be used for someone's rent or mortgage.
The recipient needs to be posting the service or good they supply on a neighborhood list to make them eligible to get that targeted dividend. When it goes to them, it puts 15% in the pension fund that keeps social security going. The rest is available to spend with no income or sales tax on anything local, especially housing.
So there's no way for the caret to be scammed because it leaves a digital trail everywhere it goes. And there's no need for secrecy because everyone starts with the same amount and can only make as much in carets as within certain limits.
Crypto is global, of course. It can certainly be part of a personal strategy to preserve the int'l buying power of money. And it's been helpful for my plan, because now people realize the concept of digital money. That wasn't true before.
One thing that never seems to get mentioned is that BTC and the like are all global currencies. Which is funny because there definitely are people out there who really really want everyone in the world transacting via a newfangled global currency.
I agree with all your points, Tereza. Thanks for sharing this thread.
Basically, “where your treasure is, there is also your heart.” Bitcoin is very difficult for me to get behind because of this. Do I need a computer to even use it? Are they ever going to mint or print any? Who are “they?”
I guess 4 billion of us who aren’t trans-humanists yet will need to do our “own research.”
will BTC will be the mother of all bubbles when it pops? at least with a tulip you potentially have a beautiful crop of flowers.
did “energy” to mine it go into solving the math/algorithms rather than stored somewhere to be tapped?
weird just-in-time timing of BTC to appeal to the youngsters disillusioned by seeing their parents suffer from the dot-com and then the housing busts, planned rollout?
was BTC purpose to lure investors away/siphon from real assets after the other bubbles?
or to get people comfortable with digital assets leading to wide acceptance of programmable CBDC? maybe El Salvador is the deep state’s pilot program?
even weirder coincidence that Satoshi Nakamoto just happens to translate to central intelligence?
also read how transactions on blockchain are really not private like advertised.
something doesn’t smell right.
there was an interesting article discussing how the gold “reserve” (me: if it even exists/existed) … actually gold “profits” from the Exchange Stabilization Fund… was never tapped for use until money market stabilization in the financial crisis and “COVID” financing and that adding BTC “reserves” would enrich the few mega hoarders at the expense of everyone else. (not that I trust the CATO institute either but they make some good points)
https://www.cato.org/blog/digital-gold-fallacy-or-why-bitcoin-cant-save-us-dollar-1
and does the situation where most average joes & Josephine’s hold it in an account with an intermediary sets them up for counterparty risk when everything folds house of cards style like outlined in “The Great Taking”?
this worries me that it is a setup.
kitten, you continue to amaze me. I see that soft furry face and am continually surprised by the sharp mind and deep research hidden behind those whiskers. Thanks for this knowledgable comment that picks up on my points and adds to them. And if you write about this when 'kitten is seeking answers', I'll be very interested.
"will BTC will be the mother of all bubbles when it pops? at least with a tulip you potentially have a beautiful crop of flowers."
I've been seriously concerned about this outcome. It's the reason I pointed out Bitcoin's technical flaws in the discussion. I would be much more on board with trusting the plan if it looked like the "fundamentals" were solid. As someone who was interested in how Bitcoin could change the game, I haven't actually heard any good news besides "the number is up!" since ~2016. (Which is interesting in hindsight)
"also read how transactions on blockchain are really not private like advertised."
Yes, cryptocurrency coins have effectively split between those that are private and those that are not. But even the nominally "private" coins have means in which a person and/or their transaction history can be identified. It's a very steep learning curve which is why I don't think it's practical to think of when it comes to resistance currencies.
"and does the situation where most average joes & Josephine’s hold it in an account with an intermediary sets them up for counterparty risk when everything folds house of cards style like outlined in “The Great Taking”?"
This is a non-trivial part of the equation. There's a huge difference between holding BTC in an offline (self-custody) wallet, and keeping it with an exchange or big finance money fund. All of those options have radically different considerations and I'd go as far as to say they're not even the same thing!
Mathew wrote: "If you think Bitcoin is backed by nothing, you haven't learned the basics. I recommend reading up on it. Otherwise, you're wasting both our time."
I watched that interview, and while I'm still a Bitcoin idiot, I think what Mathew is referring to is the idea that Bitcoin represents an expenditure of energy, in this case solving a math problem using ASICs.
This concept has always struck me as a bit surreal, especially after I built a house in 2012-2013 with my ex-wife. Up until that point, all the work I'd done for the previous 36 years had been simply encoded instructions for computers, which now seemd like "nothing" compared with the house. The work my wife and I did for 18 months produced something substantial that felt real, that was useful in a very real sense (shelter), and would last beyond our lifetimes. She was also a weaver, and produced useful and beautiful things that you could hold in your hands, and which would last. Compared with that, all the code I'd written felt unreal, and would likely be thrown away in a few short years.
Anyway, that's my take on your use of "nothing", which seems pretty valid when looked from the point of view of the nothingness of computer programs.
Hi, Mark. You're much more technically savvy than I am and since Mathew says you're closer to understanding this point than I am, I'll express my understanding to you. Then you can correct me if what you understand from him is different.
Mathew says that Bitcoin takes 1% of global energy to create. Every year? I assume that it will continue to be mined, especially if gov't is buying for the next five years. That's enough to support 82M people at an average energy consumption, doing things like heating their homes and getting to their jobs.
I don't think that 1% of the global population or 82M people will end up owning that Bitcoin. Maybe you can explain how it's distributed if it doesn't belong to the ASIC mining farm owners initially. The distribution will in some way go to those who have the money to buy it. Yes? So it doesn't change anything about the distribution of money or level the playing field in any way, unless there's something I'm missing.
The dollar, on the other hand, takes a few keystrokes to create when a bank issues a mortgage. The caret takes whatever your computer app requires to run ;-) Negligible, both. So the difference is in the savings when the Bitcoin is used instead of dollars.
To Mathew, this will end military expenditures at 50% of energy consumption. Can you explain how? I'd guess those Bitcoiners in the financial blob include oil and gas execs who still want to control the 'oil buried under someone else's soil.' Would they no longer control the foreign currencies like the CFA Franc? Would they let African countries have their own currencies? Why not do that now?
And Mathew says the lavish energy-consuming lifestyles of the rich will no longer be possible. Why? If Bitcoin goes to $10M, and it's being bought up by the financial blob and their gov't cronies, why would their lifestyles change--except to be more lavish? The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money for investors. That sounds like making the rich richer to me.
But I think that Mathew's 'irritation' with my questions is because the only thing backing Bitcoin is the perception you can sell it for more than you paid for it. I'm challenging that perception. If it had an intrinsic use-value, like a house, the speculative value could go up or down but your use and enjoyment of it would remain the same. Bitcoin only has a value when you sell it to buy something tangible.
But what do I know? According to Mathew, hardly anything. So explain it to me, please.
I am still pretty new at this stuff. But after the interview I spent some time looking at how difficult it would be for me, a novice, to buy and hold on to Bitcoin. I soon got overwhelmed by the sheer amount of research it would take to understand the pros and cons of managing the holdings on my own vs. letting a third party take care of it. Then if I chose the former method, I'd have to figure out exactly how I'd do that: a phone app, keys inscribed on metal tablets, etc. It became clear that Bitcoin is indeed something that, as it exists now, is inaccessible to all but the most savvy tech geeks. If it seems complicated to someone like me who uses Linux and manages their own web and mail servers, it's definitely out of reach for the vast majority of humans. Maybe this will improve over time, but I am skeptical.
Even though I conceded the 1% energy point, it still seems like a waste compared with caret. I'd prefer to see that energy be expended on making useable, tangible stuff, even if it is small compared with what Mathew calls the "status quo". Furthermore, caret doesn't require a huge technical education to be usable by ordinary people.
I'm afraid I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer your questions about military expenditures or the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
About the speculative nature of Bitcoin: Years ago, when my son-in-law was talking about what a great investment it was, my "Ponzi scheme" alert mechanism was triggered. In the interview, Mathew helped me to understand that ideally, Bitcoin is more than that, but it still bothers me that something that is supposed to be a liberating device is subject to speculative bubbles and crashes.
I know almost zero about bitcoin. BUT, I know “assets can disappear overnight, while debt is forever”. Can’t remember who said that, but it registered with me.
I have avoided unnecessary debt all my adult life. Now, my country stands on the brink of collapse, having devalued our $, whether it’s in our wallets or bank. Investments (whether Wall St or ?) are IMO a horserace, in which someone else controls every variable except how much I’m willing to lose! Once burned, twice shy comes to mind.
(Storing up treasure in heaven, where nothing can corrupt it is a far better reward.)
What I’m trying to say is, there is no earthly way for most of us to avoid the misery that seems to be around the corner, which has been & is, out of control govt corruption. I don’t see Bitcoin as apart from the overall corruption. This world will sell us as many fool-proof magic carpets & bunkers as we can afford. But in the end, we have to understand we have to do better, be better, be thankful for all the blessings we’ve had, & many we still have. God is the only One, the only Saviour. And things are going to get a lot worse before Jesus Christ returns as Judge to settle all the accountability problems. So, the important thing is to be ready to meet Him.
All the very best to you, Mark Alexander.
Oh, what a sad, sad quote, Anna Marie, and how true!
The avoidance of debt is something where the WEF Great Reset agrees, who thinks that you should own nothing and be happy. According to them, we should all be renters and carless, exist on a stipend that they determine.
And is a lack of debt the natural state of the world? I'd say that being given food, shelter, education, clothing for the first stage of our lives incurs a debt to care for your parents. If there's not an economic system that makes that debt interchangeable with other activities, we would all be living in our parents' homes and taking care of them in exchange.
When we move into a house, we instantly get the labor that went into building it (unless you build it yourself, like Mark and his ex) plus all the work that went into providing the infrastructure of the town. I think that incurs a debt to care for the previous generation who provided it and pass it on in a better form to the next generation.
But OF COURSE that's not what a debt to the bankers does, who've never lifted a finger much less a hammer to build the value of our homes. So I don't think it's debt that's the problem, but to whom we owe the debt.
And was 'treasure in heaven,' 'give unto Caesar' and 'the meek (aka compliant) shall inherit' another way of getting slave colonies--Judea for one--to not revolt against the theft of their labor and resources? I do believe there's an earthly way to avoid the misery around the corner, and I've written my book on it. THEY don't want you to believe that's possible.
"So I don't think it's debt that's the problem, but to whom we owe the debt."
That's a good point. Part of what motivated me to become debt-free was my desire to not owe a huge amount to some impersonal bank so that I could own a home in the insane Silicon Valley market.
Other reasons: my desire to save, and to reduce the risk of losing my home if I got laid off, which had nearly happened to me a couple of times. (There's really no job security in Silicon Valley. Even if you're an exemplary employee, you'll still get laid off when the latest bubble collapses.)
I think you're going to the core of the debt problem, which is social insecurity. I woke up thinking about the app you've so kindly offered to design and I think that it needs to be a user simulation for the next five years, so people can feel what it's like to live within the caret system.
It would add people to blocks of 12 houses as they joined, so that a neighborhood would emerge when 9 blocks were filled and start building the hamlet. People would get subsidies, transfer their own incomes into carets up to a certain limit, and advertise their job skills, linked to a profile on my retrometro.com site.
This doesn't need to all be done by you, but I think your app is going to be powerful. What it will show is that someone can easily and securely commit to a mortgage payment of ^500/mo per person, which is the standard I'm setting for the sim.
I'm thinking it will go through a month's transactions in a week, so it does a time-lapse of how much wealth, in skills, knowledge and relationships, can be built over time. Looking forward to working on this together!
Thanks. I hadn't heard that saying, but it's a good one. I have been debt free for a couple of decades. It wasn't easy getting there, but it was worth it.
"Even though I conceded the 1% energy point, it still seems like a waste compared with caret."
Because somehow the caret will not require the banking system, which will not require the military [and other branches of the syndicate] to protect it]?
The caret is a nonsensical system that nobody who has studied Economics well will spend much time discussing. Time is precious, most especially right now.
WRT "speculative bubbles and crashes," I do still worry that Bitcoin could be rug pulled, but less so with ANY artificially architected monetary system. However, the first 16 years of Bitcoin has *not* been speculative bubbles and crashes by the best definition. As I've mentioned, networks such as Facebook and Tencent would look similar in market capitalization ups and downs had they gone IPO on Day 1. But that "volatility" was masked by private holding. When BTC prices are lognormalized, it becomes clear that "volatility" should be measured against adoption trend, not against a line with an interest rate slope as is standard, and that the short term price is a perception game. It's human interest that is volatile, not the value of the network.
"but it still bothers me that something that is supposed to be a liberating device is subject to speculative bubbles and crashes."
Stop thinking of Bitcoin as "liberating". This is a hopium mistake that Gabe is making as well, which is most of his critique from what I can tell. This is partially due to inaccuracy of early conversation over Bitcoin, and narratives coming from some influencers. It may be liberating in some ways, but it's not going to fix all of the world's problems, and it should never have been viewed as a cure for privacy issues. And yet, that doesn't mean that Bitcoin does not solve a lot of very large problems.
Once we strip away the propaganda, criticizing Bitcoin for not fixing privacy makes no more sense than criticizing a newly marketed pickup truck for not solving the human condition. Despite what anyone says, Bitcoin is a public ledger, which is the only way to have asymmetric monitering of a monetary network system. We are in a world being spun in crazy directions because nobody outside of a small circle of people actually knows where vast amounts of money is going. If Catherine Austin-Fitts is correct, for instance, that theft in less than 20 years is equal to 10 times the current value of all Bitcoin. Even if she is not entirely correct, the levels of theft are mindboggling, and at a level of "Grand Theft Earth".
And the only way to ensure a monetary system works in the form of a public ledger is through code protected by a game theoretic mechanism that resists attack. Either that works, or the Military Occult Banking Syndicate (MOBS) is going to World War over control over the biggest poker game conceivable. I suspect that they might very well have created Bitcoin to avoid that war (even criminals understand the stupidity of destroying resources in order to control them), but I do imagine that it's possilbe that Satoshi was outside of the system, I just lean toward thinking it's a MOBS project that happens to align with the goal of making MOBS finance transparent.
What I would recommend for everyone, but most particular those like Tereza who are going to wade into public conversation about Bitcoin, is to read up on the basics. When I initially got irritated with Tereza, it was because she wanted me to hold her hand through google searches on the basics, then jumped to this message that, for anyone who has learned the basics, demonstrates that she did not bother to take that step. I suspect that her decade spent studying geo-economics was approached similar, and without any mentor guiding her, because she came up with a system that leaps over a hundred simple tests against reality that it would fail. It has the appearance of watching a person who hasn't learned how to balance an equation explain a new plan for operating a nuclear energy plant, except the risks and implications are much larger. She will think that I'm being insulting again, but I'm not sure how to say it except plainly.
I am REALLY not interested in you holding my hand, Mathew. You say that I will 'think' you're being insulting again, when you're merely stating the facts. Let's test whether that is merely my perception. You write:
"The caret is a nonsensical system that nobody who has studied Economics well will spend much time discussing."
"What I would recommend for everyone, but most particular those like Tereza who are going to wade into public conversation about Bitcoin, is to read up on the basics. When I initially got irritated with Tereza, it was because she wanted me to hold her hand through google searches on the basics, then jumped to this message that, for anyone who has learned the basics, demonstrates that she did not bother to take that step. I suspect that her decade spent studying geo-economics was approached similar, and without any mentor guiding her, because she came up with a system that leaps over a hundred simple tests against reality that it would fail. It has the appearance of watching a person who hasn't learned how to balance an equation explain a new plan for operating a nuclear energy plant, except the risks and implications are much larger."
By your admission, you have spent zero time understanding the caret system. Yet you confidently proclaim it nonsense. You believe that I shouldn't 'wade into public conversation about Bitcoin' without doing my own research first.
On my article, I've given extensive explanations to questions readers have about my caret system, in which each commenter has been satisfied that it does address that issue. You haven't answered a single objection I've raised to Bitcoin but only answered with irritation, appeals to your authority, attempts to make me feel guilty for taking your attention away from other things, or belittling insults.
On this thread, Shane Pisani, who does know Bitcoin, has engaged in a long and respectful conversation with me comparing it to the caret. He has seen my questions as valid and worthy of analysis, whether or not we agree. Teo Jacobsen, who's read my book, invited me to join the Crypto Education Affair chat, which I understand broke off from your group. Kate Smiley also encouraged me to join and Tonika, who's also read my book. No one there has treated me or my ideas with the disrespect you do.
And Mark, to whom you're responding, has put more work into the logistics of my system than anyone, since he's found it worth his time to develop an app for it. Fadi Lama, another author of a book on geo-economics, has felt it to be a text equal to a graduate education. So your glib dismissal of me, based on no knowledge, makes me wonder why you think intimidation will work to deflect attention from your lack of answers to my objections.
In your reply to Mark you say that you suspect the Military Occult Banking Syndicate (MOBS) created Bitcoin in order to keep their Grand Theft Earth going without engaging in WWIII. I agree with you! It transfers ownership of the world's properties from the petrodollar, which is in freefall but hasn't yet splatted, to Bitcoin. As my book explains, derivative bets were at $700T in 2013, and take superpriority over deposits if a bank goes bust. There are now those derivative bets on BTC, so the MOBS will continue to own us even if BTC goes bust.
You say that BTC isn't 'liberating' and that's just hopium. What it will do is make the Grand Theft Earth transparent. Is that enough? What the caret does is take away the assets from the bankers--the houses and land--and makes sure their value can never leave the commonwealth. Why not let the dollar go belly-up if we've withdrawn our houses and mortgages from backing it? Let the bankers keep their currencies while we take back the wealth that props them up.
I don't think that pulling the 'authority card' works very well with people who are thinking for themselves, and I'm certain that includes all of my readers. Maybe yours are more easily swayed.
I just want to clarify that while privacy is something I think is incredibly important with Bitcoin there are other issues worth considering. Arguably the bigger problem is scaling because that directly impacts people's ability to self-custody. It's not useful to lecture noobs about "not your keys, not your coins" when much of the ecosystem de-facto discourages self-custody. I am skeptical the Bitcoin project is capable of adapting to future needs given how the Lightning Network has turned out in practice. If anything, it seems that due to the community's history of handling forks, where possible, custodial "solutions" will always be adopted over actually improving the base protocol; which has consequences.
It's perfectly fine for Bitcoin to continue down the digital gold niche, but I think it's a bit much to imply that it was the only original intention for the project considering the whitepaper literally defined bitcoin as "Peer to Peer Digital Cash". That's a far cry from just "influencers" pushing that opinion.
While I've focused on scaling in this comment as an example, there are likely many other potential improvements that would absolutely improve Bitcoin's ability to fit that niche, but are off the table due to how hard & soft forks have actually played out. Nobody is expecting Bitcoin to solve every problem, but there are a lot of things that could be done to greatly enhance its role in the niche it's heading towards. Not seeing those improvements makes me skeptical of its long-term success in that role.
I mean no disrespect.
I wish you both well and that you've had a good weekend.
As I understand it, caret exists alongside other currencies, such as dollar and Bitcoin. It does not replace them; it serves a different purpose. So I don't see why the military cannot exist with it; it will be paid for in dollars.
I was not clear with "liberating". I was not thinking of the privacy issue, more about the idea that it will liberate us from some of the problems of the dollar.
No, caret would not exist without the military behind its fiat, meaning supplanting one of the currency rocks, or else by tokenization on the blockchain, but a long with most other assets.
Think of caret as an outgrowth of local currencies that already exist in some places in the US. I'm familiar with one in use in St. Johnsbury, VT. It consists of wooden tokens that you buy at discount at the farmer's market there, and then use to purchase food from local growers at the market. I have a low-income friend there who uses this system. It's a way to provide support to people in the local community: both those who grow food and those who need it and would enjoy quality that they can't get at the supermarket.
I know there's a town in the Hudson Valley that has a local currency, but I forget the name of the town and don't know about how it works. I'm sure there are many others.
None of these systems requires military support. They exist alongside the dollar, in fact MUST coexist. The same is true with carets, which can be converted to and from dollars (though the exchange rate is designed to keep wealth in a community instead of sending it abroad). I'm simplifying things, but I believe the idea is the same.
Explain that, Mathew, from your knowledge of the caret system? You're throwing a lot of jargon around but not giving any actual logic to refute Mark's point. Tell me exactly why the caret wouldn't exist without the military behind it? Please include some indication that you know what the caret is and how it works. I think this is just obfuscation since Mark knows far more than you do about what the caret is. By your admission, you know nothing and have no interest in knowing anything. How does that make you qualified to jump into the conversation and make pronouncements? Surely you're not claiming that your authority exceeds mine on my own system. No, certainly you couldn't be that arrogant.
You're definitely closer to understanding this point than Tereza, and it's the fundamental point of Bitcoin.
Ultimately, all economics comes down to energy.
When comparing two systems, we need energy on both sides of the ledger. Tereza's critique goes after one side when the other side has waste and corruption sky high. The status quo uses far more energy in the system than does the Bitcoin system.
While it may seem surreal to think of energy in processing, it's equally surreal to realize that the world's military and security forces are based on the energy put in to raising children and educating them to because the army; feeding them, which involves fuel spent on transportation, and supply chain management that consumes energy; and so on.
While Bitcoin consumes 1% or so of the world's energy, that system consumes roughly half. But Tereza went out of her way to tell you I'm being callous prior to learning the basics.
Let me address what you see as a character attack first, Mathew. Everything I've said about you as a person has been how much regard and affection and respect I have for you. Three times when Gabe raised issues about the personal impact on people who are scammed or lose their savings, you said "That doesn't bother me" or that it's a small price if it ends up with something better. That perspective would certainly be seen as callous if you're the person who loses their retirement.
That's something that my system DOES care about. So yes, I'm saying that you're being callous as a verb describing your chosen position that it's a drop in the bucket. I'm not saying you ARE callous as a personality trait. There's a difference.
I look forward to your explanation of how Bitcoin will return the energy now used for the army to raising children. And I'll be happy to explain how the Caret does that. I'm glad to be engaged in this discussion, Mathew, even if you feel it's a waste of your time. If these are questions I have, it seems others have them too. So if we all don't understand the basics, it would help to explain them, I think.
"Three times when Gabe raised issues about the personal impact on people who are scammed or lose their savings, you said "That doesn't bother me" or that it's a small price if it ends up with something better. That perspective would certainly be seen as callous if you're the person who loses their retirement."
That's such a distorted characterization, on which you tack on some implication that I've suggested people invest their entire retirement savings in a new monetary technology. That actually comes off as callous, and the only people who will not roll their eyes at this mischaracterization are the people who most need the education.
I've put thousands of hours of rigorous work into learning about these systems, including a broad base in mathematics, economics, finance, and Bitcoin, each of which is either [or equivalent to] a rigorous post-graduate discipline. That's the very opposite of callousness. It's sacrifice. Not only is it sacrifice, I've run education programs to give as much of that knowledge away for free. I would probably be a billionaire had I not taken a 14-year hiatus from trading to spend 80+ hour weeks building educational programs while living an extremely frugal life.
On the other hand, when I hear you talk about economics and finance (and Bitcoin), it's clear that you haven't ever rigoursly studied a technical discipline. You measure nothing, but believe that what I would describe as "naive first hypotheses" are part of a serious conversation, not even knowing that it's one of a class of ideas that have been thought through, and rejected by, throngs of people before you who did step over it during some early phase of their education. And now we've reached the point at which I'm the mean messenger, letting you know about those long journeys, but somebody has to play that role when you start making such eggregious characterizations.
When I suggest that I'm "not concerned" (and I clearly mean "less concerned to the point that it's not a priority") about Type B scams vs. Type A scams, it's because there are many orders of magnitude between them. What I'm saying is that it's not worth my time to worry about your mosquito bite when there are packs of feral pitbulls tearing people apart. I can measure the difference, but it's also so vast that any misunderstanding of the chasm is due to a lack of serious study of the problems. I'm making a priority decision, not dismissing anyone's pain.
I put together hundreds of pages of writing, documenting scams and teaching people how to avoid them. You make no mention of this whatsoever when you casually call me "callous" with a distorted paraphrase of the conversation.
https://www.campfire.wiki/doku.php?id=bitcoin:bitcoin_education_guide
https://www.campfire.wiki/doku.php?id=rounding_the_earth:the_bitcoin_wars
I was happy to talk with you about basic motivations for an economic system, but you have a highly distorted perception of where you are on the education curve. I've seen it so many times, and it was one of the things that motivated me to leave Wall Street in my mid-20s and take the hard road of building a new math education system. In your conversations, you spend so much time talking about topics surrounding "the caret", but it's clear to people who done the work in quantitive economics, each of whom had and later dismissed a dozen pet theories along the way, that you're dancing on the first step of a long staircase. Not having begun the process of quantitizing anything, you blissfully disregard and disrespect the effort. It has the appearance to people who put in the work of climbing back down from summiting Mt. Everest to see people doing cartwheels at the base, vlogging with a shirt that says, "I heart Everest," giving a talk on how to climb the mountain. I'll explain more of this in an article, but I'm irritated at having to take the time out to do so. Feeling the need to do so probably also means that I won't bother taking time with you in the future. It's far too much trouble.
Perhaps I could characterize it as "callous" to spend so much time dragging people into conversations about the first step when you haven't taken the journey to even illuminate to yourself that there is this enormous staircase in front that will require years of real and rigorous testing to climb. Similarly, I cringe every time I think about what damage you might have caused taking Russell Brand seriously, over a significant period, without taking steps to get close to the man in order to understand him as a predator.
In the meantime, you are miseducating your viewers in almost every paragraph, compounding their own fears of taking the educational journey. As just one example, off the top of my head, you tell them that Bitcoiners are gving their money to miners. The whole point of Bitcoin is that they give LESS to the miners than the banks absord in the process. In fact, mining is an anti-monopoly business in which the players MUST work extremely hard to seek the most efficient way to perform transaction validation. You make no effort to evaluate both sides of the ledger. You haven't learned enough to know that "crypto" isn't just a prefix for people who wear life masks, but means "cryptography", which is being applied by serious mathematicians for the purpose of taking decisions out of the hands of those who choose who gets to be banked and who doesn't, with all the perverse incentives of authoritarian market governance.
And those are just the first steps, and you would find explanations of them in many places on the internet, in books, and at Bitcoin meetups, where in an afternoon, or over lunch, you would find out that there is a mountain that you don't know before declaring the people doing the labor, to the point that after virtually giving away my time for nearly five years (plus fourteen) I'm skating on the boundary between total exhaustion and moving forward, while taking the risks to uncover and reveal seriously dangerous material, to be "callous" in any way at all.
When Gabe raised issues about people being scammed, you brushed off his concerns with 'That doesn't bother me.' You didn't counter his points but gave a response on how you felt about it.
My friend didn't invest his retirement savings, he set up the initial token transfer with an agency his research had shown to be reputable. And his account was drained, before he caught it and was able to reverse it. Any decentralized system of anonymous, secretive transfers is going to be prone to that.
Bitcoin is designed for savvy investors who have the time to educate themselves and have the money to risk. I think it's likely to be a very lucrative risk, especially with the financial blob and gov't buying in. If that's your goal, I'm not disagreeing. My purpose with the caret is different.
My biggest concern, as I've stated in previous episodes, is that we don't know how to disagree productively on ideas. Your initial comment was that my questions were wasting your time and I should do the research to convince myself why I'm wrong, saving you the trouble. Was that not an insult, Mathew?
You've told me you have no time or energy to understand my caret system or read my book. You're now saying I have no credentials to understand economics, and I'm at the baby steps of people just starting their learning curve. But that's not a character attack, right?
You are irritated and feel I'm callous to even start a conversation without the years of rigorous study in a 'technical discipline' that you've had (and somehow this is related to Russell Brand?)
The decade that I spent researching geo-economics is 'dancing on the first step of a long staircase.' It's merely a 'pet theory' that others have grown out of. And then you say, "I won't bother taking time with you in the future. It's far too much trouble." That seems as if you consider my intelligence so far beneath you that the gift of your attention is squandered. Is that not demeaning?
But let me ask a simple question: How does it work under Bitcoin when someone borrows money to buy a house? This is how 94% of dollars are created today. That's how the bankers control our lives and take 30 yrs of our labor. How does Bitcoin change this?
I will concede your point, Mathew, that it's not callous to consider someone who's been scammed to be 'a mosquito bite' if the system ends the "packs of feral pitbulls tearing people apart." However, there's no quantitative and systematic way you've shown that Bitcoin will do this. Those being torn apart are not the savvy investors with money to risk.
These seem like valid questions that Gabe raised, and that other intelligent readers on my stack also voiced. I'm always willing to doubt my own intelligence but the clear thinking and deep research of people in my comment threads blows me away. I can't dismiss them as naive, deluded, self-important or however you're characterizing me. I'm sorry you're choosing not to engage here, and hope you know that our disagreement doesn't change the high regard I have for you.
"That seems as if you consider my intelligence so far beneath you that the gift of your attention is squandered. Is that not demeaning?"
This is a case in which I am only the messenger. Part of the steep problemw with the world is that education is so sabotaged that the levels of work between people that would related to multi-disciplinary technical issues is so vast that highly technical people stand back and let the social engineers psyop everyone rather than explaining, "You haven't done the work, and until you do, everything will seem confusing, and your ideas about it will have nothing to do with what is actually taking place." This is an extremely dangerous reality, and, so far as I can tell, I'm the only person I've seen trying to address it while those efforts are sabotaged both from above and from below the baselines of power.
It's not my fault that you consider it demeaning that I consider my time to be better spent elsewhere than people who haven't done even basic research, much less a serious study of the foundations of the several topics that precede the conversation. Saying so might be the only way to jolt you or others into refocusing on the basics where progress must begin [again].
From my perspective, it is far more frightening to me that you reached this point, describing it as a decade studying geo-economics, without anyone chiming in to steer your education in a more rigorous direction. That's the mistake of many people prior to me making that judgment, a perspective that comes from tens of thousands of hours of intense labor, where I see no evidence that you learned what any of that labor looks like.
"You didn't counter his points but gave a response on how you felt about it."
I did, but you haven't done the basic reading to know that. You are mangling basic terminology, which precedes basic conceptual understanding.
Gabe's biggest mistake is a misunderstanding of Bitcoin, but understandable in the sense that it was built on hopium sold by early advocates who either themselves misunderstood it, or were simply pushing adoption based on the emotional desires of audiences. Gabe wants for Bitcoin to be private. However, that is at odds with the reality of Bitcoin and the practical reality of any digital currency. A transparent systematic ledger is the only way to achieve asymmetric information, and no digital currency was ever going to supplant the reserve currencies without that aspect just like invisible [paper] gold cannot be relied on. And no other digital currencies have relatable value to systemic currencies without the rock of a reserve currency winner.
The pseudonomity of Bitcoin provided short-term "privacy" in the new network, but true privacy would need to be achieved with a different system. Personally, I think that's just fine, and I think those panicked by the need for a different tool for privacy should focus their efforts on building that additional system, or get used to carrying silver coins [again] instead of paper dollars to the farmer's market, or to buy their drugs with. It's less of a big deal than people might imagine, though I do suspect that some privacy coin tech will succeed.
Your mistakes are different. You haven't learned the basics, which is the result of spending little time and effort.
"My friend didn't invest his retirement savings, he set up the initial token transfer with an agency his research had shown to be reputable. And his account was drained, before he caught it and was able to reverse it."
There are literally of billions of stories of people making poor decisions from which they were hurt by conmen because they stepped into arenas they did not first do the work to understand. They're all bad, and I'm not being callous by not addressing every one of them. You believe this one has something to do with the conversation about Bitcoin, and I see no reason why. In fact, I'm wondering if the story is even true, and if it is true, I'm wondering why you would think it is relevant. After all, Bitcoin is not a token, but your "caret" currency IS a token if we exclude "blockchain" as part of the definition of a token. This is where I get irritated that you chose to wade in without learning the basics.
Somewhere close to 99% of money scammed during our lifetimes has nothing to do with Bitocin. And the vast majority that relates loosely to Bitcoin, has to do with vaporware cryptocurrencies that really have nothing more to do with Bitcoin than "computers do this" and sometimes less than that. And most of that would not happen if people chose to put in the effort learning the basics. Bitcoin is a personal banking technology, which is to say that nobody needs an intermediary who can even scam them. You hold it yourself with a private key. This is why Bitcoiners repeat the addage that has become a matra, "Not your key, not your coin." Bitcoin is, by its nature, fundamentally opposed to the scam you say that your friend fell for.
"The decade that I spent researching geo-economics is 'dancing on the first step of a long staircase.'"
If you spent a decade researching geo-economics, you did so without a good mentor. I'm sad to say that you wasted so much time that it would take me years of holding your hand through unwinding it all. That you still comment on topics without first learning basic terminology suggests that you never had anyone with technical knowledge work with you to avoid building layers of nonsense without knowing how to check and test how those layers relate to reality. I don't intend for this to be mean, but I recognize that there is no way to say that you've wasted a lot of time [and are now trying to lead people in "understanding"].
"However, there's no quantitative and systematic way you've shown that Bitcoin will do this."
You want for me to have shown that Bitcoin will stop people from being scammed by following con men who exploit their lack of understanding of a process? You might as well ask me to show that a peanut butter jar will stop people from being scammed. At least Bitcoin is a personal monetary technology that doesn't require financial intermediaries that are necessary for nearly any con.
Your comment is also weird to me on the level that, so far as I can tell, I haven't seen you show the ability to have a quantitative conversation that would be meaningful in the grand scheme of things. Your caret system is a kitchen table math exercise, at best, on a quantitative level.
There are levels of elevating a testing of the concept through math that somebody with a good economics background would assume you don't have because, even before quantization occured, people would test the idea with all those principles along the way that came from the quantitative educational journey. For instance, money based on a single asset class fixes that class as the ante in an artificially created game. Make that housing, and now we have a Republic of voters whose minds focus on the prices of their houses going up due to refugees fleeing to the U.S. due to war the U.S. makes abroad. War for profit becomes a broad incentive. In fact, that's what happened when Forever Wars followed the securitization of mortgages at AAA bond levels. Your system would be an exponent of that mistake. That you haven't preempted that concern suggests that it hasn't occured to you.
I could say more, but I'm trying my best to manage my rest and energy so that I can recover.
Let's play 'name the rhetorical divisives (sic):
"From my perspective, it is far more frightening to me that you reached this point, describing it as a decade studying geo-economics, without anyone chiming in to steer your education in a more rigorous direction." Appeal to authority
"... a perspective that comes from tens of thousands of hours of intense labor, where I see no evidence that you learned what any of that labor looks like." Assuming that you and I have the same hours in a day, and I've lived more days than you, this assumes that how you've chosen to spend your time is inherently more valuable than how I have. Why would that be so?
"I'm the only person I've seen trying to address it while those efforts are sabotaged both from above and from below the baselines of power." Sympathy bid
"Gabe's biggest mistake is a misunderstanding of Bitcoin, but understandable in the sense that it was built on hopium sold by early advocates who either themselves misunderstood it, or were simply pushing adoption based on the emotional desires of audiences." States wrongness as a fact and 'forgives' it based on the other being emotional and not rational.
[Two paragraphs arguing privacy] deflection to something NOT one of my objections, and not what I cited from Gabe.
"Somewhere close to 99% of money scammed during our lifetimes has nothing to do with Bitocin." Lesser of two evils argument that has nothing to do with comparing solutions.
"In fact, I'm wondering if the story is even true, and if it is true, I'm wondering why you would think it is relevant." A personal story of a friend having his account emptied by a crypto-scam isn't relevant to whether scams are a mere 'mosquito-bite'? And accusing me of lying about it? Character attack
"You want for me to have shown that Bitcoin will stop people from being scammed by following con men who exploit their lack of understanding of a process?" Straw man argument. Turns a question about a systematic protection against scams (as the caret has) into following con men.
"Your comment is also weird to me on the level that, so far as I can tell, I haven't seen you show the ability to have a quantitative conversation that would be meaningful in the grand scheme of things. Your caret system is a kitchen table math exercise, at best, on a quantitative level." On the original interview, I stated that I wanted to lure you into engaging with the math, aka quantitative side, of the caret system. You told me your health required you to conserve your energy. But now, after refusing that conversation, you say I don't have the ability. Weird.
"I could say more, but I'm trying my best to manage my rest and energy so that I can recover" Sympathy bid and guilt-mongering. By implication, I'm making you more sick because you have to respond to my attacks. Yet the closest I've come to criticizing you has been my statement that not caring about scams is callous. I don't think anyone can read what you've said about me without seeing that as an attack on my intelligence, my work ethic in rigorous research, and my honesty in lying about a friend's experience in order to make a point.
I'm sympathetic to the health ordeal you attribute to your work on the DMED data, but I don't take responsibility for making it worse by not capitulating on my points and meekly resigning myself to being too ignorant to be in the conversation.
"The status quo uses far more energy in the system than does the Bitcoin system."
Fair enough. I accept that.
"Tereza went out of her way to tell you I'm being callous prior to learning the basics."
I didn't see it that way, but I'll let her explain.
Uncanny!! I was pondering since last night and planning to ask you about a Bit-Caret. I saw some ridiculous figures about the 'value' of b-ullshi-itcoin and wondering how rice farmers from S E Asia are supposed to 'buy in' at around $100,000 (or more).
"b-ullshi-itcoin" Very funny, Julius. And good question about the rice farmers. One of Mathew's points (although applying more to Latin America) is that remittances sent home wouldn't have the 35-40% fee, making poor nations more wealthy. But that's where I'd distinguish between money and wealth. The money that migrant workers send home to the families they've left behind will feed into another extractive system there. They give up the most precious thing they have--being in their families and communities--so their labor serves the rich in another country. That's the opposite of wealth.
The caret system enables people to live where they work and work where they live. A commonwealth can take back the resources and land within their borders, kicking out foreign corporations. If we ended economic migration, I wonder if we'd even need to guard the borders, once communities could rebuild. It's a uncommon person who wants to leave their culture permanently, although anthropology says that travel and adventure have always been beloved.
I really appreciate you summarizing some of my stronger points. I really feel the need to say that if Bitcoin was truly helpful as a resistance currency (emphasis on currency) than this discussion wouldn't be taking place at all and it would be self-evident. As I wrote in my monthly recap, I've been equal parts impressed and dismayed by the fact that there are many bright technical resistance minds caught up in the Bitcoin community. It seems "number go up" is a powerful drug, which starts to look to me like another control mechanism of imperial currencies.
(Aside)
They're called cryptocurrencies because the math they use to burn energy (or do other consensus mechanisms) is some kind of cryptographic hashing function. Account balances are also separated by encryption. So you can think of it as a short form for "cryptographic currency".
One question about the caret however, why specifically mortgages? I ask because my twin brother and I have been having back-and-forth conversations where he is saying it's worth making renting illegal. I'll admit I struggle to come up with another resource tied to geography, but it also makes me wonder about natural resources.
In either case, since really doubling-down on my research efforts after 2020, I've looked more closely at mutual credit schemes. They much more closely resemble how I think an ideal resistance currency would function. I think the current problem with any digital currency is that our digital landscape is so consolidated and rife with problems that you can't really rely on it as a solid foundation.
Which leads to the second question, do you think it would be straightforward to run the caret entirely digitally, or that it will always be best to run it mostly (or entirely) analog?
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For what it's worth, I'm willing to concede that Mathew may be right that a powerful "battering-ram" may be required to actually take down many of the "big evils" of our day. I can only speculate how Bitcoin and other tools can fit into taking those on head on. One thing I learned from his side of the discussion is that while I've zoomed in to the small scale, the big picture still matters a great deal. Of course, whenever one operates at that scale certain trade offs and compromises are seemingly inevitable. My intuition tells me the caret or a system similar to it, would do a great deal of good regardless of if those big evils are solved or not.
What are the promising tactics and tools that can confront the "big evils" of the day?
Thank you, Gabe, and it was a pleasure to listen again to summarize your points. I was struck by how many times you went back to the foundation--and purpose is the first layer of the foundation. To think simply is also to think systematically. I suspect that's why we often agree--I'm a very systematic thinker, ploddingly so.
In a way, being naive is the opposite of being gullible. A naive person sees the obvious unobscured by convoluted arguments. A gullible person accepts someone else's authority when something doesn't make sense. You have the complex knowledge of Bitcoin that I lack, so the questions you asked were deep but unsophisticated, meaning not clouded by sophistry.
You're right that Bitcoin is neither resistance nor a currency. What is it resisting? At one point, centralized control of exchange. But on a non-local level, there is no exchange backing our purchases. It's purely extraction, a 'share' in the slave labor and resource theft enabled by our military. Bitcoin puts that extraction power into another form, keeping the imbalance of who owns it.
The caret is ONLY digital. Sorry, Mark. Since we're meeting later this month to talk about the app he's volunteered to design, I hate to break it to him how important his part is ;-) Although at this stage, it's really a simulation to show how user-friendly it can be. I see this as the decade of 'a 2020 vision' and 2030 as when we should aim for a launch.
The caret is NOT anonymous, as a physical currency would be. Every transaction leaves a digital trail. The initial distribution is in targeted dividends, that can only be used for the local goods and services you want to encourage. In my proposal for my commonwealth, I'd suggest locally produced food, wellcare, education and home improvements. The provider needs to offer these goods or services at the agreed maximum price or less in order to accept the dividends.
Once they earn them, it automatically deducts the 15% pension contribution and they can use them for their rent or mortgage or any other local good or service--which would be less expensive because the caret has a higher exchange rate than the dollar and is tax-free. And the maximum wage prevents competition from raising the price for essentials.
When used for something not produced in the commonwealth, and without a 'fair trade' agreement, the caret is taxed to convert it into dollars. And dollars not converted to carets are also taxed when used. So this discourages the egress of money.
I do understand that crypto means the algorithm that produces them, but they've also told us mortgage is because the debt is dead once it's paid off, not that it's the death grip over us that it translates to literally. I think these words are buried subliminal tricks.
And why mortgages? The mortgage is the intergenerational transfer of wealth, with the flexibility of trade. Should a person inherit the family home with no obligation to care for their parents or pass it on in a better form to the next generation? What the caret system does is take the family home and scale it up, so that a person who gets a house and infrastructure that another generation has built also has the responsibility of using their labor in ways the community values. That's why someone can't take the dividend and use it for their own rent or mortgage.
And I couldn't get into all the big picture ramifications of the caret system because it was getting too long, but I hope you'll ask about them so I can continue to show why it confronts the big evils of the day. Thanks Gabe!
About the question of whether caret should be run digitally: I'm sure Tereza will chime in here, but my understanding is that digital would be a convenience, but not necessary. I could see it being run with paper "money" and hand-written ledgers, making it collapse-proof at least in that aspect.
I admit I don't understand BTC, and I don't fully understand your system.
However, I love the reasons for, and the intent of the caret.
Something is going to replace our current system, and I nominate yours.
I trust you. Must be a reason my last column was about rabbits.
Haha, I appreciate, Philip, that my credere is good in your experience. I would argue, however, that in a well designed system, there should be no trust involved. 'The intent of the caret' is a critical phrase, and having verifiable ways to measure that is key, so you know if the system's working. I've thought that another goal might be intergenerational families that stay in the community and raise their kids there. What better measure of a community's success?
So I'm hoping there are people who look at how the caret's intent could be thwarted, and then how they would solve that problem. My system is just the first step in designing your system ;-)
Like having hackers break into "secure" systems.
Find the flaws and then fix them.
Why is it named caret?
Isn't the 10 to 1 value the same thing as a fractional reserve system?
If so, what's the purpose for such a thing?
Is there anything in nature that grows in value over time?
Great questions, Afsaneh! And I would expect no less from a word person than asking about the name 'caret'.
My main reason is that it's the only unused symbol left on the keyboard. It seemed like the nose on primitive emojis wasn't enough for that fine symbol. I also liked how it corresponds with credit, which is essentially what it is. And I like the pun of 'carets not sticks,' since it's an incentive plan that encourages what you want, rather than punishing and penalizing what you don't want--which seems like the only tool gov'ts have.
Yes, the 10:1 rule is fractional reserve lending. Keeping it the same means you don't have to change how banks operate, only who Congress 'endows with the ability to issue circulating notes.' Private banks could only lend money they actually had, under my plan, not create money through FRL. Only commonwealth banks could lend money into existence, and then issue the credit monthly to repay that debt but in a distributed way that stimulates local production.
It was also eerie how well the numbers worked out. The $3T Social Security Trust Fund, which is what it was last valued at, divided by the people in the US is $9000 each so $90K in loans, as you've noted. The average home has 2.5 residents. And the average home cost in the US is $225K. So places where money circulates too fast, like Santa Cruz, would need to add to their capital while bringing the cost of housing down. Places where money moves too slow, like my Appalachian hometown, would build up their money in circulation.
I think I would agree with kitten that most things in nature grow in value over time. We pay as much in debt as we can afford to buy a house, leaving nothing to maintain or improve it for the next generation. I think that every family and community's wealth should grow in richness of the soil, beauty of common areas, nice spaces, skills and education, comfort and communication. And security, real security. That's the carets I'm looking to grow ;-)
Wow... 225K for a house? Nice. Here the minimum for a house with a lot is over 1.5 Million CAD.
What is the purpose of a 10-1 lending? What does it do? Is it a good thing or bad? What does it do over time?
Where I am the average for a house is also $1.5M, lot optional. When I bought my house 37 yrs ago, before I met my husband (which was helpful for keeping it in the divorce) it cost $237.5 and the interest rate was almost 20%. Every time they lowered the interest rate, the speculative price of the house went up because we bid against each other based on how much we can pay monthly. When the stock bubble burst and jobs imploded, people refinanced and pumped that money into the market, enabling housing prices to go up more. So that's how inflation is really created, not by gov't printing money--which they're not allowed to do in the US.
According to Ben Franklin, on whose colonial scrip my plan is based, no more than 20% of the money in circulation should be through debt. In the US, banks have created 94% of dollar credit through mortgages. That's especially a problem because they don't create the interest, which is half of the repayment at 5.3%. So the money put into circulation runs out halfway through, and most of it goes to the bankers as interest. That's why inflation is baked into that system but now that the prime reached almost zero, there's nowhere for them to go. That's why the Great Dispossession is happening, raising the rate so all the variable loan mortgages shake out and go back to the banks.
In my caret system, dollars can be generated to buy out any property or businesses operating within the borders. But then it becomes a loan to itself in carets. So it can generate those carets for other things it owns, like its own labor and resources. However, it can't generate dollars to buy things outside its borders. If the commonwealth needed dollars for internal exchange, we'd be stuck with the same system we have, being indebted to the bankers who are given free ownership of the property. Does that make sense?
Let me reread a few more times to get my head around it. Already, I can see that I am stomped here. "When the stock bubble burst and jobs imploded, people refinanced and pumped that money into the market, enabling housing prices to go up more. So that's how inflation is really created" ---
what are the people doing to make their own lives more expensive. What does pumping it into the market mean? What is that?
Of course it's not a pump. I'm not a finance person.
I know, I watched many people spend a certain amount of money in renovations with intention to sell. They expected and got back much more then spent on renovations. I thought to myself, this is not sane or healthy. Ultimately, the next generation is the end buyer, no matter how people buy and sell into between. We are forcing them to pay more.
Is that what you mean by pumping?
thanks.
Maybe we have to work on the ethics of people, as well?
Can any money system work, as long as the people playing remain ethical?
I would say exactly the opposite, Afsenah. On the back of my book is my only dogma, that people are inherently good and when they behave badly, systems (and stories) are to blame. I've added the second since then.
In a well designed system, there should be no trust involved. There is no way for someone to abuse it or take an unfair advantage. I encourage people to look for those holes in my system and then propose how they would fix them.
I think the purpose of our lives, on this plane of reality, is to care for the people and the places that have been entrusted to us. Renovating a home and making it more beautiful and functional is one of the greatest joys--it gives back to the world something better than how you found it. That's why my proposal for the caret distribution includes a 20% share for home improvements.
A house is a living asset and all living things require care and attention, or they bite you in the ass ;-) Being currently ticketed by the city to repair/ replace my sidewalk within 60 days, I can attest to that.
Instead of using our labor to improve our homes, we spend 30 yrs paying as much as we possibly can just to live in them. I think that's crazy that we're forced to do that.
I live in a bedroom community adjacent to Silicon Valley so the dot-com bust meant people were out of jobs. They weren't refinancing to renovate, but to live. At the time, I was predicting the housing bubble would burst, which it did in 2008. Those who had refinanced were then underwater, often forcing them to sell in a depressed market--or worse, have their houses repossessed and auctioned off to big industrial buyers. Then they manipulated the housing prices up again by lowering the interest rates once more.
So no, I definitely don't think that any money system will work. I think ours prevents people from living ethical lives. We sell our labor for as much as we can, which means making the rich richer. And there's really no way as individuals to escape that.
Oh no I didn't mean renovations didn't add value. Materials, time and effort are to be calculated in. That's a given. It adds value to the house and the community. What I saw, was something beyond this.
Thanks Tereza. I will be back. I have to figure out what I don't understand, so my questions will be worthwhile for you to review.
By the way, Amazon Publishing section of Amazon banned me for life, because of my numbers book. I'm little gun shy putting money in their pockets.
fruit trees become more productive over time
Okay... I'm not taking anyone to task. I am just trying to figure out how things work. If a tree grows in value over a course of a few years... does this mean, every year the apples from that tree are to be also more valuable, and does that translate to having to pay more for an apple from that tree, every year subsequent?
Maybe I haven't explained myself properly. It happens.
Maybe you can help me figure out what I am trying to ask?
What am I to expect?
Thanks in advance.
This is response to Kitten, however it is for Tereza ultimately.
Ah, I think you're talking about inflation, not actual value. The word itself is a trick, imo. Our money does the opposite of inflating, it becomes more and more diluted compared to the value that backs it. That's why it requires more of it to get the same value. My house, except for things I've done to it, has exactly the same value as when I bought it 37 yrs ago. But it would cost triple or quadruple the amount of debt to buy it today, even without my improvements. The use-value hasn't changed at all. Only the speculative value.
In my book, I describe inflation as a teapot that keeps pouring out tea to the bankers and leaving us with the diluted bag, up to our necks in hot water that has less and less actual substance.
Thanks. I learnt something. Inflation vs value.
Can I expect a society that doesn't expect house prices to go up?
Housing is very important. Renters are less likely to be involved in city governance.
There is major crime going on and I don't know how to stop it cause I don't even know how it's happening?
Thanks and I will check out your book.
What the caret system does is provide a framework that gives all communities the tools to take back the properties within their borders and the labor of their residents. How they use the tools is up to them, within the framework that makes sure everyone is included somewhere and the value is equally distributed among commonwealths and within commonwealths. The only other rules are practical, like not generating more than you collect in debt or taxes, or can back with dollars at whatever exchange rate you establish.
So your expectations need to be put into the design you'd propose for your commonwealth. In Santa Cruz, over 50% are renters, mostly students who drive the cost out of the reach of families. I would reclaim the university as commonwealth property, so that it serves the community rather than the community serving it.
I would also propose an 8 yr residence to become a commoner and share in the distribution, so it wouldn't include students. All rents and mortgages are in carets, of course, since they've become a debt to ourselves. I'd require 2 dollars for every caret as an exchange rate, but allow current homeowners and LT residents the ability to transfer a set amount of dollars monthly at a 1:1 ratio. That would give them double the advantage in renting or buying.
I would also tax any money that leaves the commonwealth at 50% so that absentee landlords and corporations would get half. This is also an incentive for them to sell to local residents during the grace period when they can receive the full amount in dollars.
However my Appalachian hometown is trying to attract more homebuyers. There I'd let new homebuyers be immediately part of the caret distribution, but I would still tax extraction at a 50% rate.
And yes, crime is a major consideration. There is no such thing as petty crime. I have other proposals to address that but I won't go into them here. My book lays the foundation for the caret system by explaining how money works and the psyops of 3000 yrs of history. The last section gets into the solution. The next book, How to Build a Commonwealth, will go into more detail on the caret system but it needs these conversations between people who already know how money works. Thanks for being interested!
I can't find listing for your book on your profile... did I miss it?
Here it is: https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607. And thanks for letting me know about my profile, I'll check that.
I lost a mature apple tree (about 50 years old) a while back in a freak storm; I planted a new one a year ago and still have not had one apple yet. There is more fruit on an older tree and the fruit is generally better tasting, sweeter in my experience maybe due to more developed root system, nutrients.
https://kitten.substack.com/p/tribute-to-a-fiftysomething-apple
I am worried that the new apple tree may not have fully developed fruit even after blooming due to chemicals in the chemtrails/ extensive aerosol spraying here (and in the water)I hope this is not the case but something is going on…
I did a reader survey in here and apparently I am not the only one experiencing lower yields,
https://kitten.substack.com/p/citrus-pcr
A better tasting fruit may not happen every year, however, it is an example of our own taste buds recognizing a better value.
I know it seems simple, just reviewing what things are of real value.
As per chemtrails, yah they spray up here as well. My brother has many fruit trees in his backyard, either 2020 or 2021 was a good year. Since then it’s very sickly fruit, if any at all.
just adding that more mature plants will cost more due to the time (and care/work/water required during the maturation.) i think of it as the “dirty little secret” that even drought tolerant plants need lots of water for at least a year or more while their root systems establish.
here in California we are set for new draconian water restriction regulations to go into effect in 2025 so I have been trying to establish a few more fruit trees this year before we need to provide “written justification” of outdoor water use… I think very few are aware of this as it hasn’t been widely advertised.
Oh yikes! Harder and harder to live in this state.
how about water from Mt. Baker? How come they don’t arrange something like that?
“building family and community intergenerational wealth” … this theme keeps coming up every time I look deeper into ‘National Socialism’
• A short Introduction To National Socialism – Red Pilled Radio (George) [7:08]
https://ftjmedia.com/channel/RedPilledRadio/video/.vy2w2EMPvW5pFMYpoO2H2A/a-short-introduction-to-national-socialism
Yes, they absolutely have many overlaps in purpose. And what other purpose is there?
Well, having read through the comments I recognize how little I know on Bitcoin and to a lesser extent (having read your book, so better educated) the caret system. I'll admit to certain 'fuzziness' that happens to my brain when it attempts to deal with money. Something wants to short-circuit.
I can't help but think your system is addressing a specific layer - community based wealth - and so has a built-in insular aspect to where bitcoin is addressing a global layer of exchange.
Maybe comparing them doesn't work - they are addressing different layers. Perhaps I'm wrong about that. But why wouldn't they work together as different tools used for different needs? One at the local level and the other at the global and if desired, local too? Aren't they both simply tools for value-exchange?
Carets if I understand this correctly, could not be hijacked and taken over by larger external forces. They are tied to the community and property. They are only available to people who stay long enough in the community.
I'm thinking of an interview I listened to a few years ago with Jim Rogers who said if Bitcoin really took off, governments/banks would take it over. And then recently Catherine A Fitts noted that derivatives are now in play with BTC, rendering the 21 million fixed number, moot. (This was news to me. If accurate, doesn't this un-do it's whole claim to worth?)
If you are at the top step of a long stairwell, then I'm fully hopeless, Tereza. And that's an essential point. Because value-exchange should be simple enough to grasp. (My fuzziness aside.) We all know the monetary system is part of the control matrix, and we've lost control of our labor and ability to create real wealth. It makes obvious sense that this will only happen at a small scale. Person by person, community by community. I recognize your system addresses that. I find that hopeful. Why wouldn't we be able to generate our own solutions? Why is thinking we can naive?
Assuming Jim Rogers and Catherine A Fitts are pointing to the inevitable hijacking - the global banking players are already distorting the bitcoin space - it seems sane and practical to have alternatives in place.
If something is so convoluted as to preclude most of us from understanding it - what does that mean going forward? It feels like the guts - simple human exchange - somehow has no place in the discussion. That doesn't make sense. If the people expected to use it, don't understand the implications, I don't see it as a viable human solution.
I know enough to know I don't know enough. But I do know when my neighbor needs something I have - and I offer it, then she will look to provide me with something I need down the line. Only because we care about each other. And naive or not, in my very grounded existence, the currency of care, matters the most.
I'll have to leave it to smarter people than me to explain how that fits into a monetary system.
Thanks Tereza. XOX
Kathleen, it means so much to me that you go back and read all the comments. As you know, I write mini-volumes and never know if they're just a private message to someone who, in some cases, has already made up their mind. But when I get your 'like' on them, I know they have been heard.
And there is no one smarter than you. I don't even mean that as a compliment. If something is hard to understand, it could be intentionally convoluted to prevent understanding--I'd put all traditional economics in that category. Or it could be difficult because it requires letting go of all the conditioning in how we think. My intention is to explain things as simply as possible, using common sense and real world analogies. That's what I felt Gabe did in the original interview.
I would say that Bitcoin is an individual system for preserving the value of money. On a global scale, you know from my book that it means how much slave labor that buys from people for whom our labor does nothing. That's the reality we live in and none of us can change it as an individual. So using Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency or gold as a stop-gap measure for the interim makes sense. But it doesn't change the global extraction economy one iota, from what I've seen.
Under an anonymous money system, no matter how horribly you treat other people, they will cook you delicious food, make your home beautiful, wipe your ass when you get old. Or before, if you prefer. Your reputation and relationships have nothing to do with what you get back from other people. It's a one-way exchange.
All wealth is community based, even if that community is just one family. If your neighbor needs a cup of sugar, you can provide it. But what if your neighbor has lost their job or the variable rate on their mortgage went up and they're going to lose their house. Will you take them in? I'm surrounded by people who need housing. I sometimes have gotten three requests/ demands in a day to rent my garaj mahal. You and I know someone with $35K in credit card debt for medical expenses. We know people who've lost jobs, lost partners, lost businesses. Within a parasitic system that's sucking the lifeblood out of everyone, I don't think we can care for others--or very few.
Within the caret system, any person can do the labor to make the cost of housing. I'm not worried about the elderly widow getting fed or losing her house. I've seen how my neighbors, like you, want to take care of other people. But the bratty rich snob who thinks he's too good to do manual labor--the dollars in his trust fund can evaporate for all I care.
Very interesting about derivative bets on Bitcoin. You know from my book that derivatives equal 60X the global GDP and take precedence in any bank closure.
Thanks again Kathleen!
Thanks, Tereza. :-) I love and always learn from your comment section.
I was half-joking on the 'smarter than me' comment. Yes, others, like you, have definitely put the time in to understand money and wealth and how to address the issues - really the traps - that our current system creates. I'm grateful for that since it's not something I naturally wish to engage.
At the same time, those 'smarts' and what they generate won't be very valuable if intangibles like 'care' aren't part of them. That is the actual energetic currency between us. Which I know you know.
When we include care in any exchange (monetary or not) we're already on better footing. So with wealth-building, whether it's a form of the caret system or something else, if care is the basis, we'll naturally rewrite the current 'extraction economy.'
I hope we're close to a time on this planet where we can look fresh at these things. See the blatant greed and predatory nature of money and reject it in favor of something that is truly human-friendly.
Oh you made me realize that caret contains care! How did I miss that? Thank you, Kathleen, my smarty-pants friend!
What real world 'asset' backs bitcoin:
1) The energy that went into the mining pool
2) The same asset which backs all currencies - the sentiment of those who use them.
3) The decentralised ledger which acts as security/verification
4) The decentralised agreement of users to have a store of wealth which is non- inflationary
5) The scarcity built into the concept
How might a rice farmer 'buy in'
1) Any time/resources/energy the rice farmer would like to store can now be stored in a non-inflationary, so far impossible to take by force medium. They store their wealth in increments, they do not need to store an entire bitcoin.
2) The only way to gain access to that stored wealth is via legitimate, voluntary trade for perceived value. No more stealing via inflation.
3) In such an environment, goods such as rice receive much higher margins, as all the current wastage spent on corruption and exporting inflation will instead be redirected to food and useful things.
Thanks for answering my question, Shane. It seems, though, that the energy was already spent mining it and doesn't back it as a trade value. It's not, for instance, like having a credit that entitles me to 100 gallons of gasoline, no matter what the price goes up to. That would be a real world asset that backed the credit.
I don't know if you watched the original interview with Gabe and Mathew. I thought Gabe raised some good points on why Bitcoin wasn't going to be used as a currency but rather an investment that would be sold for a currency.
In the episode I linked, Inflation Colonization, I give the example from my book of how banks create inflation by manipulating the interest rate, and fluctuating it up and down. When it goes up, it dispossesses all the people with variable rate mortgages. When it goes down, it inflates the cost of the house through competition.
So maybe you can answer this question I keep asking: under a Bitcoin system, how will a person borrow money to buy a house? That's how 94% of dollars are generated today, giving bankers control of our labor and lives. How does Bitcoin change that?
Thanks much!
Hey Tereza,
In attempting to answer, I am testing the validity of these asssertions, not commiting to them.
- Real world 'Assets' backing a credit (or a currency) are less useful than scarcity backed by the only trust mechanism which cannot be faked - energy expenditure. The energy required is the proof of work. Eg houses are considered a good collateral asset because they take a lot of energy to produce, but they lack the complete set of other properties Bitcoin can claim as a currency or store of value - eg. durable, portable, divisible, recognisable, scarce.
- Bitcoin as currency is exciting - currency which cannot be stolen easily, but this is not fundamental to the value of Bitcoin. A deflationary, decentralised store of value is still appealing. Many respected Bitcoiners such as Mark Moss agree with Gabe in the short and medium term. If Bitcoin is merely an investment sold for currency, then it still works to create an incentive structure of honesty, rather than an incentive structure that is rotten to the core - so long as it provides a store of value 1 degree removed from the central bankers.
- The appeal of Bitcoin is not that mortgages or housing markets are stable and protected. The appeal is the opposite - that risky investment remains accountable, but it is only accountable to market forces, not bank manipulation. The philosophy is we want some people to lose their homes if they overleverage. We want banks to fail and pension schemes relying on, say, the military industrial complex to have their lack of value apparent in their poor returns vs investments which create value. It seems counterintuitive, but it is worth reiterating - we want little grandma to lose her pension if she invests it in Haliburton! As Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. We desperately need to trade artificial risk reduction for accountability.
- Under a Bitcoin system, the hope is that a person buys a house by living for a few years with long term time preference - eg. save up, pay a builder, pay for materials, and you can own a house that is worth 3 years of your specialised labour valued in Bitcoin, not 30 years of your labour valued in a completely debased currency.... As it was in the past. Bitcoin changes (back) to this reality by removing the Cantillon effect, the 'WTFhappened in 1971' effects, the 94% inflation caused by fractional reserve banking as you describe.
- How does this happen - By giving people an opt out of the fractional reserve system. By valuing the house, eventually, in a deflationary measure - Bitcoin. The value of the house does not double every 10 years while the wages required to buy the house remain stagnant - as has been the case for the last century. Instead, the wages and the value of the house vary only upon the whims of the market, not on the whims of a global banking cartel which prints money and poisons their subjects with bioweapons by way of explanation.
I appreciate your attitude, Shane, that you're testing the validity of your assertions. My replies are in kind! And I'll continue comparing Bitcoin to the Caret since my position is that Bitcoin may be a good stopgap measure for the interim while we're working on an actual solution.
- Asset-backed currency or scarcity-backed? For a house, the energy expended to build it is the start of its value. For Bitcoin, the energy is expended to create an artificial scarcity, that's used up once it's done. It would be like backing the currency with houses that were built and then burnt down. But the dollar is currently created by USURPING the value of homes by claiming ownership by those who've never lifted a finger, much less a hammer, to build them. What backs the dollar, as I say in my book, is pieces of slave. It gives us access to the labor of people for whom we do nothing, which frees us to spend our labor making the rich richer. And that's what really backs Bitcoin too.
- (con't) the caret is also constrained by an arbitrary scarcity that limits its production. The capital reserves of $9K per person limits the amount of dollars that can be generated to buy back any properties or businesses within the commonwealth borders. But the repayment becomes a debt to itself. So caret generation is limited to the formula Debt + Tax + 2X Cash, so that more can't be issued than is collected or can be transferred into dollars. But since the caret is only legal tender within the commonwealth, that doesn't affect other currencies.
- For a currency to be deflationary, it needs to lower the cost of living, which is primarily housing. How does Bitcoin do this? Who lends to home buyers? Fractional reserve lending doesn't happen at the level of the Treasury or Federal Reserve, it's done by the banks that have been 'endowed by Congress' with the right to issue notes of credit that are the only currency accepted for taxes. If you bought Bitcoin early with all your income from three years of working and living with your parents, and then Bitcoin went to a value of 10X your purchase price, you could buy a house outright. Same as if you bought Facebook stock and it increased 10X. But first you'd have to earn it in dollars, buy BTC, and sell the Bitcoin back for dollars to buy the house. How would houses be priced in BTC if it was worth less than what the seller could get through a buyer w/ a 30 yr loan?
- Under the caret system, like the Bank of North Dakota (the only public bank in the country) the commonwealth bank finances up to 80% of the market price of the house. This protects the community's investment against deflation or overleveraging. The rest can be loaned by private banks but without fractional reserve lending, which is only allowed for commonwealth banks. So they can only lend money they actually have and put at risk.
- What is money? Money is a means of organizing labor in the interests of whoever issues it. Whether dollars or Bitcoin, those who issue it are the rich, so our labor serves to make the rich richer. If the community issues the money for internal trade, it can organize labor to make the community better rather than serving the 'market' which is a euphemism for the rich. Isn't that what we want?
Thanks for engaging, Shane, and helping me think through my positions.
More questions, more answers:
- Bitcoin is durable, but not absolutely. The 'scarcity' energy put into the network, mining, ledger, etc. does not disappear like a burnt house. It goes into making a more secure system - which becomes harder and harder to counterfeit with each new investment of energy. It does drop to zero value if we go into full dystopia with no connectivity or communications, but so do dollars, gold, cars and most houses.
- Inflation/deflation as a 'cost of living increase/decrease' is a limited definition, yet it still applies to Bitcoin. The simple mechanism of a fixed supply is 'how Bitcoin acts deflationary'.
- As the purchasing power of the dollar continues to be diluted, Bitcoin will seem to 'increase at 10X value'. In reality, what is happening is your house was previously worth 10 BTC, now is worth 1 BTC as the purchasing power of a single unit of non-debasable currency represents a larger and larger portion of the worlds resources/productivity/value.
- The caret system, much like Gold, or the USD involves counterparty risk, and seeks to replicate the systems which were so easily corrupted with Gold or USD. BTC might be a CIA operation designed to usher in a social credit CBDC dystopia, but at least it has the possibility of diverging from what is clearly not working now.
- Robert Breedlove's 'What is Money' Show has excellent answers to the question. Of the dozens of answers he and his guests have explored, the most exciting for me is the possibility that BTC might start with the rich being able to acquire more share, but over time, even the rich can only acquire more if they are productive, and can attract BTC via voluntary exchange for perceived value. A rich person who uses their wealth to create more value in the world would indeed become richer. A rich person who currently becomes richer without voluntary exchange (eg by printing money then giving it to themselves) would become poorer and poorer as they have to spend their BTC to live, but have no mechanism of accruing more. This would dilute the wealth of the world to the rice farmers in a decentralised fashion, with less exposure to corruption than, say a 'commonwealth bank' legally allowed to counterfeit.
- 'The market' is not necessarily a euphemism for the rich. It could be a euphemism for 'almost perfectly democratic allocation of capital'. In other words, there would still be scams under a BTC standard, but they would be minimised, and the lending market would not be so distorted by the option of lenders to debase currency without exposing themselves to any downside risk.
Borrowers would still seek lenders to 'Net present Value' future earnings. Lenders would still seek out borrowers to put their spare capital to work, and this relationship could still be described as 'making the rich richer', however without market distortion, at least these exchanges would not be robbing every other person who has stored their purchasing power in BTC.
I appreciate the time you're spending on this, Shane. There is a lot I don't understand about Bitcoin so I'm glad you're explaining.
An exercise I'd thought to do with kids is to have them make things to buy from each other with tokens. In one setting, you give one kid half of the tokens to start and see what happens. In another, you give one kid ownership of all the desks that they have to pay to sit in. And in the last, you distribute the tokens evenly.
For money to be a unit of trade, you have to start with people having an equal amount. The caret system does this within the commonwealth, so trade is fair. Bitcoin is bought with other currencies, so it seems like it replicates the inequality. Is that not true?
I think this is something I'm still not understanding. The Treasury would buy Bitcoin with its reserves. Would they then be sold to pay off the national debt? Would China then redeem their Treasury bills for Bitcoin?
Would the so-called Federal Reserve still exist? Would Congress still give banks the right to issue money through fractional reserve lending?
Explain to me please what it means that the caret has counterparty risk? And why would houses lose their use-value if we had no computers or communication?
If the banks can't issue dollars (and I agree they shouldn't) 94% of all money in circulation would go away by the time that mortgages were half repaid. And then the banks would repossess the houses?
The Federal government can only issue coins. States and municipalities can't issue any form of credit. And Bitcoin, as Gabe pointed out, doesn't function as a currency.
The commonwealth bank is owned by all commoners as their shared and equal inheritance in the community. If someone has a nicer, more expensive house, their higher mortgage will contribute more to the community than they get back. If someone has a family of six in a trailer, they might get back in subsidies more than they're paying. But like you're saying about Bitcoin, if someone isn't contributing something that other people value, they can't use it to pay their rent or mortgage.
Bankers now can't issue money to pay themselves. They issue it as mortgages so the interest goes to them. It's still free money but it has to be 'bluewashed' by being backed by someone's labor before it returns to them.
Bankers have usurped the greatest power of government through the Federal Reserve. Gov't can't do anything if it doesn't control its own labor. So I don't understand the use of the term counterfeit. That's usually someone faking government-issued money. What the caret does is take government down to the size of a few thousand people and force it to be distributed equally, so that every person from the moment of birth participates in the wealth of the community. I don't see how that can be corrupted but maybe you can explain a way I haven't thought of.
- Even distribution of wealth would be great. That would require something like an asteroid strike. Since the psychopath kids currently have ownership of the desks, Bitcoin is exciting as a possible way to continue civilisation without blowing up the classroom. (Metaphors deliberately mixed)
- Bitcoin will and has replicated inequality partially. Inequality is different to equal opportunity. Equal opportunity is at least possible with a store of value which cannot be stolen via inflation, and hence is far, far more incentivised to acquire voluntarily through trade than the fiat USD.
- Counterparty risk is any process where one must trust a third party. Caret requires honest acting on the part of banks, the commonwealth, the people who set it up, etc.
- Houses lose value if there is no population to live in them, no electricity to supply to them, no transport systems to bring food to them, no social fabric to make living in them safe, etc.
- The US treasury under Trump does indeed have a plan to buy lots of Bitcoin. My understanding is that the Deep State intends world war to prelude cancelling the national debt, hence never to pay it off. The hope is that a National budget balanced around a deflationary currency dilutes this incentive before it happens. That a fixed monetary supply cuts off the inflationary supply of war, and discourages the credit supply for war.
- Yes China will try to demand payment in a more reliable form, rather than the USD which seems on course for hyperinflation real soon. Keep an eye on the Japanese Yen as a leading indicator.
- The dream is for the Fed to cease to exist, and fractional reserve lending to be seen as the confidence scam it is.
- There is no problem with divisible units to trade with in the modern world. Moving wealth out of the system in which banks over-leverage savings does not create any new problem here.
- a widely adopted Bitcoin standard would prevent any federal government issuing coins by diluting the existing circulation. That is the exact fraud Bitcoin hopes to end.
- Bitcoin is not really prescriptive about the socialist or capitalist leanings of the community which uses it. My personal hope is that yes, those who are not currently contributing what others value must lower their expecations or increase their value proposition. This is the opposite of the welfare state and the bloated inefficiencies which currently exist. Subsidies are just as responsible for information asymmetry in the market as money printing.
- Let's use a broad definition of Bankers. Bankers created a fake Pandemic. Bankers used this as a reason to 'print' 30% extra money supply. Bankers gave large parts of that money to themselves to 'spend' on pandemic measures, 'vaccines', etc. Also, some of it was bluewashed as stimulus cheques, but almost immediately the spending power returned to the billionaire class. Since those extra dollars are now competing to buy everything regular citizens wish to buy (incuding mortgages), they are indistinguishable from 'illegal' counterfeiting where some non-banker creates fake notes and circulates them. Fiat currency is therefore a counterfeiting scheme. 90% of fractional reserve lending is a related counterfeiting scheme. The USD inception and implementation was exactly as you describe the caret system. Bitcoin provides, possibly, a genuine alternative where counterfeiting is impossible.
I was led here by One asking about My thoughts on this. And humbly, I think Humanity can do far better.
First, let Me define "money" as I use it: anything tangible We use to account for the energy We input into a system. This can be trade, barter, work exchange, shells, beads, sticks notched and split, coins (metals), bills (paper), or electronic bits (or anything else used for that purpose).
"Currency" is anything that motivates Our creation in the Now. It can be money, or the social currencies - thanks, appreciation, love, reputation, lauds, adoration, fame... And plenty more.
Social Currency (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/social-currency
Also, the fact that 80%+ of Us who work do so at "jobs" that merely move money around and overall upward to the moneyed psychopaths in control suggests that We do not need more than 20% of Us doing the needed work.
Add to that that We now have tech to automate any of the boring, tedious, uninteresting, noncreative needed work than very Few (if any) want to do. And so... We could set the automation to do those "jobs" and free Us to do what We WANT to do.
But money is the hindrance. As money is the accounting for Our energy added into a system, it is clear that free energy would make such accounting pointless (and, as I KNOW it exists, it is clear why the moneyed psychopaths hide and suppress the tech - They would lose Their single tool to power...).
Electrogravitics – My Knowledge of Free Energy (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/electrogravitics-my-knowledge-of
Ergo, We could free Humanity from the psychopaths' grip, and ALL live richly - as We should, given that every One of Us born here on Our planet has an equal interest in its wealth...
Trusts: The Big Heist Against Humanity (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/trusts-the-big-heist-against-humanity
And We can stop worrying about who "deserves" what, and all.
The End of (Social) Entropy (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/the-end-of-entropy
The Digital Karet! Yeah, that's a perfect marriage. Suffice to say that it's a necessary merger. Because, why not, put two perfect solutions to the imperial "debt slavery" systems into their final resting places.
This is an exceptional episode, Tereza. I learned a lot more about the distinction between the Karet & Cryptocurrency! AND how they must, actually, complete each other's (the two's) directives.
🔥💜🔥
OD
*Caret (oops)
Thanks Orion! Actually the caret has always been digital because it needs to verify that you, as a commoner, have a right to it. Then it tracks how the dividend is used on its first iteration. Each commonwealth or hamlet can decide for themselves but my proposal for my own is equal amounts in locally produced food, wellcare, education and home improvements. That guarantees that the caret has to circulate at least once, producing some new good or service, before it can be used for someone's rent or mortgage.
The recipient needs to be posting the service or good they supply on a neighborhood list to make them eligible to get that targeted dividend. When it goes to them, it puts 15% in the pension fund that keeps social security going. The rest is available to spend with no income or sales tax on anything local, especially housing.
So there's no way for the caret to be scammed because it leaves a digital trail everywhere it goes. And there's no need for secrecy because everyone starts with the same amount and can only make as much in carets as within certain limits.
Crypto is global, of course. It can certainly be part of a personal strategy to preserve the int'l buying power of money. And it's been helpful for my plan, because now people realize the concept of digital money. That wasn't true before.
One thing that never seems to get mentioned is that BTC and the like are all global currencies. Which is funny because there definitely are people out there who really really want everyone in the world transacting via a newfangled global currency.
I agree with all your points, Tereza. Thanks for sharing this thread.
Basically, “where your treasure is, there is also your heart.” Bitcoin is very difficult for me to get behind because of this. Do I need a computer to even use it? Are they ever going to mint or print any? Who are “they?”
I guess 4 billion of us who aren’t trans-humanists yet will need to do our “own research.”
Excellent quote, Tiger. I think that's going to be my meditation to go to sleep.
This is so painful because,
(1) You impugne my character, and
(2) Did not bother to learn the basics of Bitcoin (which led to (1)).
I'm going to answer this, but it comes at the cost of me spending my time on a much needed article about what has been going on during the pandemic.
ArmstrongEconomics.com.
www.WallStreetonParade.com
www.TradersChoice.net.
wwwTrendsJournal.com
wwwCultivateElevate.com.