Bitcoin: Naïve, Evil & Demented

But Some Related Hope Nevertheless Lays Down Deep Inside, Thanks To ABSOLUTE WORTH ENERGY (AWE).

Shall I start with the evil part, or the demented part? Bitcoin is not just a bit con. Bitcoin is obviously a Ponzi scheme. It’s always a pleasure to infuriate geeks and tiny crabs. “Harriet” from Oakland (a Silicon Valley suburb) contradicted me, with typical techie arrogance: “Please learn what a Ponzi scheme is. Wikipedia will help you.”

Wikipedia is to geeks what the bible is to pedophile priests. A Ponzi, or pyramid, scheme is a financial scheme where early investors make money from later investors. That’s surely the case of Bitcoin. In 2011 the value of one Bitcoin rapidly rose from about $0.30 to $32, before falling back down to $2. Those who bought $30,000 of Bitcoins at $30 soon found their so called “investment”, or “saving”, to be worth $2,000. Now in Japan, a Bitcoin bank disappeared. Real money was exchanged for sheer bamboozling.

The Truth About The Public-Private Fractional Reserve System

Geeks tend to be extremely mentally undeveloped outside, while being very smug about their small pathetic idiosyncratic view of the world (in particular all that they do not understand, they turn into a two cent joke; that’s also a characteristic of mathematicians; being one of them, I know the syndrome well).

Geeks believe that there are no empires, and they believe that, if there were some empires, they would be evil, thus irrelevant. They also believe, that they, the Geeks, are not evil, that Wikipedia (in English) is never wrong, and that links are all the truth you need.

Why to step in that mental swamp? Because Bitcoin is a delicious counterexample to the naïve concept of currency.

What’s a currency? It’s a space where an empire allows rewards and promises to be exchanged, backed-up by the empire military might. Fundamentally, a currency is the token system the empire’s soldiers are paid with. Emperor Septimus Severus pointed out to his sons, while dying in Britannia in 211 CE, that was the basis of all.

This is the hard version. This is reality.

To feed the state, the population needs to works, partly, for the state. That’s why taxation was invented. When there is not enough taxation, the state collapses. The best example of that collapse is the Late Roman empire, when there was not enough taxation of the rich to pay for defense (thus the cheap trick to use the Franks to insure defense).

Compare with the only back-up of bitcoin: not an army of soldiers, but an army of con men on Wall Street and other well organized crime. (Organized crime used Bitcoin for money laundering.)

Here is a related example: why is betting so popular in Asia? Because those who bet actually win. Why? So that they will be encouraged to bet some more, throw more money in the system. For which purpose? Because Organized Crime needs to launder money, and betting is how it does it. Losing 20% or so, is the cost of the laundering service to Organized Crime (such as Drug Trafficking).

Is a currency always created by an empire? At first sight two objections come to mind: the Thaler, and the Euro. For both it looks as if no empire was connected to them. However, that’s an illusion. (As anti-European fanatics are finding out, to their horror.)

The Thaler (or Taler or Czech Tolar… hence Dollar) was a silver coin used throughout Europe by many states for four hundred years. ( Etymologically, “Thaler” comes from German for “valley”, same as Neanderthal.) The Thaler was backed by states with serious armies: Austria, the Holy Roman German empire, Prussia, the Netherlands, etc.

A loose coalition of states can just be articulated around the army of just one state. That’s what happened with Prussia, which totally dominated the German speaking world from 1815 (partial dismemberment of Revolutionary France) until 1945 (eradication and annihilation of Prussia).

Similarly, the Euro is (mostly) backed by Franco-German might at this point. (Franco-Germania plus its immediate satellites makes a super-power, albeit one different in nature from the territory-rich USA.)

The naïve fundamental idea of Bitcoin was to create a currency without guns to back it up. Bitcoin one of the most famous Ponzi schemes in history? Some naive “techies” furiously object.

They are the same ones who firmly believe that Yahoo, Google, Facebook, are not, repeat: not, government spies agencies. (Hey, did not their chiefs “protest” to the “commander in chief”?)

If you think the usual suspects, the pirate speculators  of the Wall Street type have nothing to do with Bitcoin, please learn about Wall Street. But Wikipedia won’t help you (Wall Street guys have enough money to make sure Wikipedia says exactly what they want it to say).

On 19 November 2013, the value of Bitcoin on the Japan-based Mt.Gox exchange soared to a peak of US$900 following a United States Senate committee hearing, at which the committee was informed, by the FBI, no less, that virtual currencies were a legitimate financial service. On the same day, bitcoins traded for over RMB¥6780 (US$1100) in China.

How could the FBI be that corrupt? Some will whine. Well, what’s the FBI? An instrument of the state, just like the Dollar. It’s all about a tribe, or its leaders, exerting power.

Now visualize this: the true leaders of the USA are the plutocrats. They devised a tax code so that they don’t pay enough taxes to prevent them to become ever richer (why would they? They are in power, and the rabble does not know it!).

How did the plutocrats acquire so much power in century? Mostly by doing exactly what president Jackson was afraid the Rothschild would do to the USA (and what the Rothschilds claimed they were doing in Europe… not that their fellow big time bankers were not doing it too). In the present fractional reserve system, the state has farmed out the making of money to some private, unelected individuals, the bankers.  The Bitcoinists thought they had found a scheme to do the same. That was naïve. They drunk Ronald Reagan’s idiotic propaganda, and come to believe that We The People could do without a state.

For more than 2,000 years in the West, the government created money (with a face value often much higher than its real value), but tax collecting was farmed out to private enterprises. Now it’s the other way around: tax collecting is public, money creation, private. That’s a big mistake. We have, unsurprisingly, a system in which the money creators, the bankers, create money, that is, power, at will. That abundance of money has allowed them to buy the “democratically elected” representatives.

Thus now, as Rotschild said, the bankers control the government. Plutocracy found that money creation to be its best trick in a long time.

Can we enjoy a loftier perspective? Sure. Money is power, and power is measured by energy. Not all energy is good: blowing up the Earth won’t be good. A way to do that? One could set fire to 20 trillion tons of coal underground, and get plenty of energy, until the biosphere is destroyed. (Some plan to do that.)

So energy expenditure has to be controlled by long term ethics. This is what I call AWE (Absolute Worth Energy). With the enormous computing power we now have, it’s practical. AWE, accounting in useful energy units, is unavoidable, as it’s the only accounting system that will save civilization. AWE would make a perfect Bitcoin (AWEC: Absolute Worth Energy Coin). But of course it would need the support of the government, and that only if We The People pass laws to force it to do so.

Patrice Aymé

Note 1: A big deal  is made by Bitcoin crooks that computers are computing the scheme. In the geeks’ minds, computers are superior souls, above the fray. However, it doesn’t matter that  computers compute in the background of Bitcoin. Pyramid schemes are always about guys making computations in the background.

Note 2: Those who believe in bitcoin don’t believe in history, or sovereignty. That the wealthiest use a parallel currency with artworks, reinforces my point: only the sovereign, wealth, can create a currency durably! The wealthiest can use artwork as a currency in all impunity, precisely because they rule the world (and only the wealthiest are wealthy enough to use that currency). Average bitcoin users don’t rule the world (although governments let organized crime use bitcoin for quite a bit…)… thus their currency will not rule the world, either…

Tags: Absolute Worth Energy, AWE, Bitcoin, FBI, Fractional Reserve, Geeks, Ponzi, President Jackson, Pyramidal Scheme, Rothschild