To begin, it’s like owning gold but the gold isn’t in your actual possession, so, when the proverbial ‘shit hits the fan’ or e.g. a solar (or nuclear) generated magnetic pulse fries your iphone, and takes down the internet along with the grid, fuel can’t even be pumped out of the underground storage to fill your car, let alone run the trucks that fill your local grocery shelves, just what the f**k do you expect you can do with your gold or Bitcoin? At this point it is merely an appendage of your memory and survival depends solely on your skills and whatever you might happen to have in your basement or garage. So, already Bitcoin doesn’t exist.
These Bitcoin essays, from an anonymous soul, posted up at Automatic Earth website, are more than an enlightening explanation of finance put forward in a commonsense language; but are a brilliant set of essays constituting an invaluable social critique. Well written, HIGHLY recommended reading:
“So money at its most austere is simply a promise. But a promise to whom for what? And that’s the problem. No matter what good you use, people place differing values on it, different time-preferences, and most especially ways to cheat, game the system, and renege. This is bad among businesses, banks – who are after all only men – especially bad among governments, but worst of all among government and banks combined. Because, should the banks lie, renege, default, abuse their privilege, who then would hold them to task?”
“Where has our present system gone wrong? The criticisms of the existing monetary system are short but glaring. First, everyone is disturbed by the constant increase in quantity. And this is more than an offhand accusation. In 2007 the Fed had $750B in assets. In 2017 they have $4.7 Trillion, a 7-fold increase. Where did that money come from? Nowhere. They printed it up, digitally”
“Even being a fellow insider is no insurance, as the NY banks cut off Lehman from funds they were owed, driving it into bankruptcy to buy the pieces in receivership. Unpopular Billionaires are treated likewise. This is a system with no justice, no order, no rules, and no predictability. Anyone within it is at grave and total risk”
“Without Internet, our just-in-time inventory halts, food and parts stop moving, banking and commerce fail. You’re talking Mad Max. TEOTWAWKI. That’s a grave problem, but not unique to Bitcoin”
“I can’t solve the next generation’s problems. We’ll be lucky to survive our own. But I can warn you that even now this generation will never accept a digital mark without which you cannot buy or sell, not voluntarily and not by force. It’s too far to reach and social trust is too compromised. But could they get us halfway there and just make it official later, when everything’s fixed again? I think absolutely.
“Once that’s in, you can finish all the plans written in the bank and government white papers: perfect, inescapable taxation. Perfect, indelible records of everyone you talked to, everything you said, everything you bought, everywhere you were, everyone you know. Not today, but in the future. And that is the purgatory or paradise they seek today. The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance. The system we have wasn’t always bad: a small cadre of bad men worked tirelessly while complacent citizens shirked their duty. So when we move to a new system softly, without real purge, real morality, real reform, what makes you think the same thing won’t happen to your new system? Only far, far more dangerous”
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Ronald Thomas West 