The thing I think about is the possibility of rug pulls with "stablecoins." We saw it with the Melania coin. How big can a rug pull be? Can it destabilize an economy? I hope we don't have to find out.
The full faith and credit of the U.S. government is becoming a joke. We are devaluing the means by which we keep our massive debt afloat. To what end and who benefits? I think the end game may be to end all fiat currency in order to exert a decentralized control. It was Peter Thiel's dream two decades ago, I don't think that has changed.
I'm getting the distinct impression that the reason that the 'opposition' party does nothing about these crimes is that because they see them as opening future opportunities to exploit if power shifts back to them. What a mass delusion. Or mass incompetence. Can't decide which.
They tell us not to assume malice when incompetence is possible. But I'm fairly sure that sometime in the 70s, Big business, billionaires and special interests decided that only owning 1 major political party was dumb and said to themselves, "porque no los dos"?
I'm here to spread the gospel that the Democratic party, at a leadership/consultant/financing level , is the equivalent of a pro-wrestling heel or the Washington Generals (look it up kids). Ok sure, there's about 10 people in the Senate and Congress with discernable values but the rest exist only to protect their main constituency, Money.
It has always been about the very few getting it all at the expense of everyone else. That's the game, and we've allowed it to grow into the monster that it is today. We should have stood up way back in the Reagan 80's, but we didn't. Now its too late.
The entire British empire was built on scams and bribery. The American revolution was fought so that the merchant class could do their own scams and bribery.
The only thing that stops this is the constant pressure from working people to make these criminals give back to the people they’ve been stealing from.
Don’t forget the dehumanization of all the people that inconveniently lived in the lands that they and their European counterparts stole, ahem, colonized.
After all it’s not really stealing if they aren’t actually people.
I would say that the European people who founded America were settlers, not colonizers. It’s true that the government broke many treaties with the Indians but more often than not the settlers built farms and towns on land that was unoccupied, or they purchased land from the natives.
Talking about “unoccupied land” is really missing the point when talking about hunter/gatherer/nomadic people.
The colonizing/stealing was the imposition of European ideas about land ownership at the barrel of a gun on people who had done fine for thousands of years without it.
A People’s History of the United States - Howard Zinn
I question how well the native Americans did without European culture. Many Mesoamerican cultures practiced human sacrifice. Of the tribes who occupied the land currently called the United States, agriculture was rudimentary, infanticide was not uncommon, children were routinely neglected and abused, enemies were scalped and tortured and scientific knowledge was nonexistent. https://rumble.com/v69qw94-insomnia-stream-oatman-edition.html . I read Zinn back in the day but he obviously had a far left bias. Many western historians idealize American Indians but they were not angels 😇
Your statement was wrong and ahistorical. Just totally misleading. Your only source is a popular history of the United States that presented a lopsided view of European and Native American culture
It is bad. I guess the question I ask myself is whether it has always been this bad and only seems worse because there is no attempt at pretense any more. Also, was the pretense worse?
Maybe we just accept that this country was founded on the idea that if you have the right pretty words you can get on with the dirty work of exploitation and the rubes will internalize the former to the point where they find excuses for the latter.
So perhaps, for example, we don’t have to contort ourselves to rationalize the motives of slave holders banging on about liberty?
Maybe, just maybe, most of that wasnt in good faith and the sooner we flush it, the sooner we can get to something better.
Competition under American capitalism has always been ruthless. That is not changing. What is changing is that there has long been a genuine effort to build a robust, well functioning, transparent, efficient **financial system** because that actually helps capitalism function well. That system is being sold for scrap.
Fair. But if one “advantageous ”outcome of the former system was the ability to hide its monstrosity then perhaps the inability to hide is net good? How many Americans even have 401ks? Though I suppose next up is privatized SS going into the casino of financial markets.
Must things break before people are willing to accept that what we had was actually bad for most people? Is breaking it the only way to replace it? Perhaps more importantly, how many must suffer without a guarantee that what comes next is actually better?
I’m not advocating for bitcoin or any other tech bro scam. I’m saying it is a symptom, the vulgar, out loud part of capitalist systems of exploitation that have always existed, not something separate or even that much different in degree.
Btc is a ponzi scam, a negative sum game that takes a tremendous amount of work (electricity) but produces nothing useful. Capitalism for all of its drawbacks does provide society with a material goods surplus
I didn't have this on my bingo card, but everything mentioned here was touched upon in the most recent episode of South Park--not crypto by name, but the "gotta get mine" mentality.
Last week, in Belgium, I read about a dying biotech company, with stocks priced below the cent, that was receiving a cash injection from one of the major stockholders (If I remember it was a PE firm), to buy crypto commodities. The first of its kind in Belgium, it was said. I was wondering why the investors wouldn't just buy the bitcoins directly, but I figured that it was indeed meant to inflate stock prices and thereby reduce their losses a bit. What you're saying confirms my suspicions. I totally agree with what you're saying, the Grift is just becoming too large, too omnipresent. At all layers in society. And it's not just the financial stability that's at risk; People working 50hrs a week are going to be increasingly unhappy with their shitty wages when financial assets (and house prices) are skyrocketing and rich people are getting richer without contributing anything to society because of some stupid crypto bubble. That of itself is already socially destabilizing. And then people are of course going to want to try it themselves, as is now being promoted and normalized by including it in pension funds & as collateral, etc. and at some point a lot of people without any financial leeway will just get royally ducked in their bumholes, once the edifice collapses, devastating the lives of millions of people. Financial regulators should have stepped in years ago, but instead they've let it fester and grow, and now trying to reign in the monster is going to be very difficult (even if there had been a competent government in the US, but now even more so).
If I'm understanding this correctly, Trump's crypto tether to publicly traded companies only works if the stock price of the company AND the crypto value both go up? The company wants investors to buy shares, and it needs to pay off its crypto "debt". The crypto "loan" from Trump (or whoever, it sounds like this is bound to spread) being paid decreases the risk for crypto investors.
It's an unstable symbiosis in which the failure of one directly leads to the failure of the other.
Crypto has one use and one use only. It has essentially replaced money laundering. No need to commit a crime to cover another crime when you can exchange crypto legally . However, we should not underestimate the extent of international crime. It's bigger than we think and, therefore, crypto may not be the speculative bubble you think it is. When you buy crypto you are investing in crime and speculating that crime will go up. Under the current circumstances, that's not a bad bet.
The technology behind crypto actually has some interesting - and interesting to the labor movement - uses as *accounting tool*, if you ditch all the libertarian drivel surrounding it. That owes to two characteristics:
* Each unit IS its own serial number, definitionally
* A ledger using cryptographic hashes can't be forged - by the time you come up with an alternative transaction history that arrives at the same result which the math works for, the sun will long since have supernova'd.
Those are the *only* two interesting things about cryptocurrency, but they're pretty interesting. Like, if an organization - say, the Pentagon - did all of its accounting in such units, only converting to dollars where money comes in and when a human needs to be paid (say, mandating all defense contractors use those same units), not only would the Pentagon be auditable, but its books would literally BE their own audit.
It seems to me that has some utility, say, groups of employees whose employer would prefer to hide money from them.
Yes, treating it as "currency" is crap and always has been. But the tools underneath are worth co-opting.
Every person who didn't vote for Harris voted for this. They tossed their lit matches into tRump's gasoline. Their 401(k)s will burn brightly and they will be distraught and Don Donald will shrug.
When my favorite football team loses I also get great satisfaction from scolding the fans who didn't cheer loud enough, for those that had the temerity to stay at home and watch from their couch and for those who stopped watching football because the people who profit most from the game are the vilest people on the planet.
Most importantly I never criticize the team when they lose because it can only ever be the fault of the fans despite their complete lack of meaningful agency in the outcome of the game. After all those ten people in section 420 were booing so loudly every time the team did something preventably stupid. !Purists!, I yell and go on feeling smug that in reality my team is the BEST regardless of the outcome.
I believe I have come to clearly understand the moral universe of the affluent liberal over the past few years.
Where once I found myself befuddled at what seemed like well intentioned ineptitude I see now a demographic fully in thrall to and committed to the perpetuation of white supremacy.
As a brown person and immigrant I have seen what value my life has by seeing what value the lives of people that look like me have. That is to say somewhere between political inconvenience and legitimate target for extermination.
The white supremacy experiment happening in Palestine cannot exist without the political and financial systems of exploitation that underpin the western world.
The affluent liberal may acknowledge or even sneer at these systems that make their privileges possible but they will never, ever meaningfully threaten them. That’s not conjecture, just look at who they nominate, the voting doesn’t even matter.
TL;DR, I don’t have to believe what they say because I see what they do.
Crypto currency for me most of my peers is still a mystery. Nobody is all that interested in investing in it. But it being a mystery is for the most part the reason, as NH points out, it makes fertile ground for government scams, and scammers in general. As it worms its way to becoming a acceptable ingredient of our financial structure, people will treat it as another way to diversify their portfolio, provided they even have one. We already are under assault by the finance industry, with takeovers by private equity firms, monopolistc industries, and fewer and fewer watchdogs. All we can do at this point is to keep ourselves informed and spread the word.
"The heart of our nation’s economy is kind of like a healthy person deciding to pick up a syringe and inject an unknown, harmful virus into themselves"
A significant part of the problem is some people might read this and think "but that is was what vaccines were". They apply their naive skepticism to every part of vaccination tech, but not crypto. Some people chose to be too saavy.
I think that is for sure part of the plan. To siphon off any public traunches of money (think teachers retirement funds) and then when Trump's economic policies start to crash grab all the money out of crypto. We won't know though because they will not have any honest reporting mechanisms for the average consumer. Only for government higher ups and possibly foreign governments.
The thing I think about is the possibility of rug pulls with "stablecoins." We saw it with the Melania coin. How big can a rug pull be? Can it destabilize an economy? I hope we don't have to find out.
The full faith and credit of the U.S. government is becoming a joke. We are devaluing the means by which we keep our massive debt afloat. To what end and who benefits? I think the end game may be to end all fiat currency in order to exert a decentralized control. It was Peter Thiel's dream two decades ago, I don't think that has changed.
Tether has never been audited so it is on very shaky ground.
I'm getting the distinct impression that the reason that the 'opposition' party does nothing about these crimes is that because they see them as opening future opportunities to exploit if power shifts back to them. What a mass delusion. Or mass incompetence. Can't decide which.
They tell us not to assume malice when incompetence is possible. But I'm fairly sure that sometime in the 70s, Big business, billionaires and special interests decided that only owning 1 major political party was dumb and said to themselves, "porque no los dos"?
I'm here to spread the gospel that the Democratic party, at a leadership/consultant/financing level , is the equivalent of a pro-wrestling heel or the Washington Generals (look it up kids). Ok sure, there's about 10 people in the Senate and Congress with discernable values but the rest exist only to protect their main constituency, Money.
Wait, i thought gospel was supposed to be GOOD news ...
Plus cowardice, and not all of them, but, yes.
It has always been about the very few getting it all at the expense of everyone else. That's the game, and we've allowed it to grow into the monster that it is today. We should have stood up way back in the Reagan 80's, but we didn't. Now its too late.
The entire British empire was built on scams and bribery. The American revolution was fought so that the merchant class could do their own scams and bribery.
The only thing that stops this is the constant pressure from working people to make these criminals give back to the people they’ve been stealing from.
It has always been true and will always be true.
Don’t forget the dehumanization of all the people that inconveniently lived in the lands that they and their European counterparts stole, ahem, colonized.
After all it’s not really stealing if they aren’t actually people.
I would say that the European people who founded America were settlers, not colonizers. It’s true that the government broke many treaties with the Indians but more often than not the settlers built farms and towns on land that was unoccupied, or they purchased land from the natives.
Talking about “unoccupied land” is really missing the point when talking about hunter/gatherer/nomadic people.
The colonizing/stealing was the imposition of European ideas about land ownership at the barrel of a gun on people who had done fine for thousands of years without it.
A People’s History of the United States - Howard Zinn
I question how well the native Americans did without European culture. Many Mesoamerican cultures practiced human sacrifice. Of the tribes who occupied the land currently called the United States, agriculture was rudimentary, infanticide was not uncommon, children were routinely neglected and abused, enemies were scalped and tortured and scientific knowledge was nonexistent. https://rumble.com/v69qw94-insomnia-stream-oatman-edition.html . I read Zinn back in the day but he obviously had a far left bias. Many western historians idealize American Indians but they were not angels 😇
I, uh, think I’m done with this convo. But thanks for confirming my priors.
Your statement was wrong and ahistorical. Just totally misleading. Your only source is a popular history of the United States that presented a lopsided view of European and Native American culture
It is bad. I guess the question I ask myself is whether it has always been this bad and only seems worse because there is no attempt at pretense any more. Also, was the pretense worse?
Maybe we just accept that this country was founded on the idea that if you have the right pretty words you can get on with the dirty work of exploitation and the rubes will internalize the former to the point where they find excuses for the latter.
So perhaps, for example, we don’t have to contort ourselves to rationalize the motives of slave holders banging on about liberty?
Maybe, just maybe, most of that wasnt in good faith and the sooner we flush it, the sooner we can get to something better.
Competition under American capitalism has always been ruthless. That is not changing. What is changing is that there has long been a genuine effort to build a robust, well functioning, transparent, efficient **financial system** because that actually helps capitalism function well. That system is being sold for scrap.
Fair. But if one “advantageous ”outcome of the former system was the ability to hide its monstrosity then perhaps the inability to hide is net good? How many Americans even have 401ks? Though I suppose next up is privatized SS going into the casino of financial markets.
Must things break before people are willing to accept that what we had was actually bad for most people? Is breaking it the only way to replace it? Perhaps more importantly, how many must suffer without a guarantee that what comes next is actually better?
Woof, time to start drinking.
What makes you think it’ll be politically or ecologically possible to change course at that imagined point?
I’m not advocating for bitcoin or any other tech bro scam. I’m saying it is a symptom, the vulgar, out loud part of capitalist systems of exploitation that have always existed, not something separate or even that much different in degree.
Btc is a ponzi scam, a negative sum game that takes a tremendous amount of work (electricity) but produces nothing useful. Capitalism for all of its drawbacks does provide society with a material goods surplus
I didn't have this on my bingo card, but everything mentioned here was touched upon in the most recent episode of South Park--not crypto by name, but the "gotta get mine" mentality.
Last week, in Belgium, I read about a dying biotech company, with stocks priced below the cent, that was receiving a cash injection from one of the major stockholders (If I remember it was a PE firm), to buy crypto commodities. The first of its kind in Belgium, it was said. I was wondering why the investors wouldn't just buy the bitcoins directly, but I figured that it was indeed meant to inflate stock prices and thereby reduce their losses a bit. What you're saying confirms my suspicions. I totally agree with what you're saying, the Grift is just becoming too large, too omnipresent. At all layers in society. And it's not just the financial stability that's at risk; People working 50hrs a week are going to be increasingly unhappy with their shitty wages when financial assets (and house prices) are skyrocketing and rich people are getting richer without contributing anything to society because of some stupid crypto bubble. That of itself is already socially destabilizing. And then people are of course going to want to try it themselves, as is now being promoted and normalized by including it in pension funds & as collateral, etc. and at some point a lot of people without any financial leeway will just get royally ducked in their bumholes, once the edifice collapses, devastating the lives of millions of people. Financial regulators should have stepped in years ago, but instead they've let it fester and grow, and now trying to reign in the monster is going to be very difficult (even if there had been a competent government in the US, but now even more so).
If I'm understanding this correctly, Trump's crypto tether to publicly traded companies only works if the stock price of the company AND the crypto value both go up? The company wants investors to buy shares, and it needs to pay off its crypto "debt". The crypto "loan" from Trump (or whoever, it sounds like this is bound to spread) being paid decreases the risk for crypto investors.
It's an unstable symbiosis in which the failure of one directly leads to the failure of the other.
Crypto has one use and one use only. It has essentially replaced money laundering. No need to commit a crime to cover another crime when you can exchange crypto legally . However, we should not underestimate the extent of international crime. It's bigger than we think and, therefore, crypto may not be the speculative bubble you think it is. When you buy crypto you are investing in crime and speculating that crime will go up. Under the current circumstances, that's not a bad bet.
The technology behind crypto actually has some interesting - and interesting to the labor movement - uses as *accounting tool*, if you ditch all the libertarian drivel surrounding it. That owes to two characteristics:
* Each unit IS its own serial number, definitionally
* A ledger using cryptographic hashes can't be forged - by the time you come up with an alternative transaction history that arrives at the same result which the math works for, the sun will long since have supernova'd.
Those are the *only* two interesting things about cryptocurrency, but they're pretty interesting. Like, if an organization - say, the Pentagon - did all of its accounting in such units, only converting to dollars where money comes in and when a human needs to be paid (say, mandating all defense contractors use those same units), not only would the Pentagon be auditable, but its books would literally BE their own audit.
It seems to me that has some utility, say, groups of employees whose employer would prefer to hide money from them.
Yes, treating it as "currency" is crap and always has been. But the tools underneath are worth co-opting.
Good luck with that.
Every person who didn't vote for Harris voted for this. They tossed their lit matches into tRump's gasoline. Their 401(k)s will burn brightly and they will be distraught and Don Donald will shrug.
When my favorite football team loses I also get great satisfaction from scolding the fans who didn't cheer loud enough, for those that had the temerity to stay at home and watch from their couch and for those who stopped watching football because the people who profit most from the game are the vilest people on the planet.
Most importantly I never criticize the team when they lose because it can only ever be the fault of the fans despite their complete lack of meaningful agency in the outcome of the game. After all those ten people in section 420 were booing so loudly every time the team did something preventably stupid. !Purists!, I yell and go on feeling smug that in reality my team is the BEST regardless of the outcome.
Oh please. Kamala was cozying up to crypto scammer people too. She made it a central part of her campaign.
I believe I have come to clearly understand the moral universe of the affluent liberal over the past few years.
Where once I found myself befuddled at what seemed like well intentioned ineptitude I see now a demographic fully in thrall to and committed to the perpetuation of white supremacy.
As a brown person and immigrant I have seen what value my life has by seeing what value the lives of people that look like me have. That is to say somewhere between political inconvenience and legitimate target for extermination.
The white supremacy experiment happening in Palestine cannot exist without the political and financial systems of exploitation that underpin the western world.
The affluent liberal may acknowledge or even sneer at these systems that make their privileges possible but they will never, ever meaningfully threaten them. That’s not conjecture, just look at who they nominate, the voting doesn’t even matter.
TL;DR, I don’t have to believe what they say because I see what they do.
Crypto currency for me most of my peers is still a mystery. Nobody is all that interested in investing in it. But it being a mystery is for the most part the reason, as NH points out, it makes fertile ground for government scams, and scammers in general. As it worms its way to becoming a acceptable ingredient of our financial structure, people will treat it as another way to diversify their portfolio, provided they even have one. We already are under assault by the finance industry, with takeovers by private equity firms, monopolistc industries, and fewer and fewer watchdogs. All we can do at this point is to keep ourselves informed and spread the word.
It is a Ponzi scheme.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Charles Mackay. 1841.
Should be required reading.
All this is.
What is more worrisome is the damage it will do to the US economy and the World's when this fraud collapses.
The mortgage crisis took down Chrysler and others. Millions not involved lost their jobs.
I have been saying crypto will implode for years.
Now a corrupt conman is making it worse for his benefit.
Humans are soon stupid. Even so called intelligent humans.
"The heart of our nation’s economy is kind of like a healthy person deciding to pick up a syringe and inject an unknown, harmful virus into themselves"
A significant part of the problem is some people might read this and think "but that is was what vaccines were". They apply their naive skepticism to every part of vaccination tech, but not crypto. Some people chose to be too saavy.
i stand by my 2022 prediction: "Cryptocurrency Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Is Going To Destroy The World"
https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/cryptocurrency-is-a-hideous-monstrosity
Well when Social Security enters the cesspool that'll be about it for those of us that strongly rely on it to survive. Begin the countdown....
I think that is for sure part of the plan. To siphon off any public traunches of money (think teachers retirement funds) and then when Trump's economic policies start to crash grab all the money out of crypto. We won't know though because they will not have any honest reporting mechanisms for the average consumer. Only for government higher ups and possibly foreign governments.
Countdown to what, exactly? Loud comments on Substack (my specialty)?
Crippling poverty. Just stating my viewpoint Doug.
I would prefer an uprising!