This post will revisit my original Bitcoin Kills Banking post and will provide updates and developments covering the last 18 months and how Bitcoin killing Banking is progressing, I will also be discussing the emergence of Ripple as a trojan horse and fiat gateway into Bitcoin and other altcoins creating the latest so-called crypto bubble, and I will elaborate on how these currencies can collaborate and compliment each other in different aspects of the ecosystem and why this doesn’t spell the end of Bitcoin dominance at least in the long term, and why Bitcoin is still the figureless head and leaderless honey badger needed to take the heat and blows of the inevitable regulatory crackdown on crypto-currencies from shortsighted and desperately insolvent national and international governments and banking systems… Indeed this post will return to the central theme of my original post, the success and extent of banking regulation as pertains to the industry and the currencies that will soon render it obsolete…

Bitcoin Kills Banking Revisited

To begin this post I will revisit my original post of December 2015, where I extensively described the fragile and moribund state of our Central Banking system worldwide after the credit crunch and financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 that I still maintain was the effective death of the private (high street) banking system, and the final stage of revolutionary socialism where the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan and Public Bank of China as the big five took on all “market operations”, the Too Big To Fail and Too Big To Jail consolidation combo… Instead of allowing market forces to clean out the Augean stables with debt defaults and bankruptcies of the most insolvent players in the space (pretty much all of them), Central Banks instead suspended traditional mark to market accounting to be replaced with a mark to unicorns accounting allowing financial institutions to cook their books thus magically making insolvent banks solvent again, and printed TRILLIONS in liquiditeee to arrest collapsing asset bubbles blowing the next bond, stock, real estate, manufacturing, tech and basically everything else bubble… This double whammy of accounting and financial fraud only kept the dying and dead traditional banking system alive by kicking the can, by borrowing more from the future in debt to paper the cracks and temporarily mask structural insolvency that has lasted up until now, but has only made the next credit crunch and crisis so much worse… Since the last financial crisis banks have been pumped full of credit while driving interest rates to zero which has bestowed the banks lower debt repayment costs by transferring the interest that depositors (the general public and REAL economy) used to get on their hard earned savings… The last nine years has been a slow motion wealth transfer from the private economy to the publicly bailed out national and international banking systems that has created record income inequality between rich and poor, and has given rise to the so-called populist movements in the UK, in Europe and the U.S. in the last couple of years in protesting the globalist Elites infested throughout Western governments… Indeed the world is getting more insane by the day as unlimited credit creation to stoke the much needed inflation that central bankers desperately need to devalue the debt that is choking the world has distorted every corner and aspect of life, with Weimar style degeneracy to escalate until the final meltdown of this evil system… Absolutely nothing has been solved in the past decade it has only been delayed out into the future where it will strike the world population ten times worse…

Central Banking Update – The New “Market”

If you have been following the finance space closely the last few years the one thing you should really appreciate is how involved and overpowering Central Banks have become in rigging and manipulating virtually every asset class, whether you look at the interest rate markets (LIBOR), bond markets, equity markets, gold and silver markets, crude oil, commodities, volatility (VIX) indexes, everywhere everything is rigged as systemic insolvency is masked and propped up with moar Quantitative Easing and printed money, alternating between co-ordinating and conspiring major central banks… And as this money can be created ad infinitum by the big hitters the Fed, the BOE, the BOJ, the ECB, the SNB and PBOC, then in theory this epic distortion of reality that is modern life can go on for a lot longer, contingent of course on trust and CONfidence in central banks and the purchasing power of their currencies, ironically the very purchasing power these central banks are trying to inflate away to service systemic bankruptcy… So until the black swan lands in the REAL economy (not in central bank la la land) that creates panic, defaults and unleashes the next inevitable credit crunch and crisis, here is a stark reminder of just how much central banks are propping up the post 2008 “recovery” now with over $250 BILLION in freshly printed usury per MONTH… (Bitcoin’s market cap as a reminder is $45 Billion – bubble?)

Banking System Update – The End Of Trumpflation

In my original post I discussed that while Central Banks can print money out of thin air to bailout private banks those same bailed out banks while technically and systemically insolvent were given the liquidity to rebuild their balance sheets, and lend out more money (debt) to the private economy thus kicking off a new credit and business cycle and “recovery”… I extensively discussed that by driving short term interest rates to zero (ZIRP) (and in the particularly insolvent European Union to negative interest rates (NIRP)), debt service in a debt based economy becomes more manageable both for the banks and for the debt serfs of the private economy while starving actual producers and savers of interest on deposits… However a decade of low interest rates have had their own perverse side effects which have somewhat crippled the banking sector post crisis, as interest rates are the price of money and the price of money is the price of profitability for issuers of money (banks), low profitability of money lowers the profitability and sustainability of banking itself… This highly amusing development has manifested as compressing Net Interest Margins (margin between short and long term interest rates and bonds), and the compression between the profit of borrowing short and lending long that was the traditional banking revenue model, so ZIRP and NIRP over the West is perversely weakening and slowly consuming the banking system it was intended to save, as most glaringly seen in the EU banks… While this flattening yield curve (spread between short and long term interest rates) has been a long term bearish trend for the banking system the last few years, there came short term respite at the end of 2016 with the election of Donald Trump and the Trumpflation trade and “economic growth” prospects leading to a surge in long term interest rates and for the last few months have bolstered bank confidence and net interest margins, however as we now move into the second half of 2017 a re-flattening of yield curves will again start weighing and hurting the profitability and prospects of the Western Banking System…

2s10s Yield Curve – Margin between 2 year and 10 year US Bonds

Credit Cycle Update – Nearing Recession

The credit cycle is basically the debt and interest rate cycle and it leads the business cycle as modern business cycles (and businesses) are reliant on credit… Following the prior recession (2008-09) central bank easing led to bank easing with more lending at near zero for financiers and corporations, and far higher rates for the general population (mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt, student debt)… As the credit cycle matures credit becomes more ample and is increasingly leveraged and in order to keep credit growing the financial industry needs more debtors to lend to, so the higher rates on sub-prime and high yield credit are always relaxed and revised lower over the length of the cycle so that it keeps expanding with riskier and riskier lending, and as financial institutions are divorced from their responsibility by central bank bailouts the fees keep rolling in on issuing more dodgy loans… Traditionally this increasing inflation (credit expansion) has acted as a signal for “irrational exuberance” that has led central bankers to attempt to tighten liquidity and kick up interest rates to cool a little on the debt expansion and it is always this interest rate hiking that leads to the end of the credit cycle, with a credit crunch and crisis… The Federal Reserve (as issuer of World Currency Status) has in the last 18 months raised the Federal Funds Rate 75 basis points (0.75%) that impacts short term interest rates and bleeds into longer term interest rates on credit loans, auto loans and mortgage rates and impacts upon the affordability of debt at the margins (sub-prime, high yield) while effectively hiking the barrier of entry for further expansion…

Today we have the world’s most important central bank hiking short term interest rates while long term interest rates are selling off flattening the yield curve and compressing bank net interest margin and profitability… A traditional indicator of recession in the past has been a yield curve inversion, which means short term interest rates become more expensive than long term interest rates and which has already started in China, which predicts that growth and inflation will be lower in the future than now (recession)… So after keeping short term interest rates at zero for the last eight years why has the Fed started hiking rates now? While it doesn’t take a conspiracy nut to speculate that increasing interest rates and halting credit expansion and economic “growth” in a Trump presidency (after eight years of ZIRP under Obama) will be disastrous for his approval ratings and for Making America Great Again, I think the Fed (and its puppetmasters) have decided that rates had to be hiked just for some dry powder for when the next recession does come and so central banks as interest rate manipulators are always the originators of the modern credit cycle, they crush interest rates through unleashing QE and the “growth” expands, and it is when they hike rates to rein in exuberance that the credit cycle contracts, and ends…

Alfred Owen Crozier illustration from 1912, a year before The Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Crozier understood Interest Rates!

The spike in interest rates and debt service cost in the private economy (steepening curve and increased bank profitability) in the wake of Trump’s election (“Trumpflation”) has not only raised the barrier to new debtors it has also increased the cost of debt service to those that are already indebted, which will inevitably lead to increased loan delinquencies and defaults in turn affecting collateral values and destroying bank balance sheets, in turn impairing interbank lending and eventually unleashing a credit crunch which infects the whole of the economy that is based upon the sands of debt… As business is dependent upon credit then the tightening credit conditions that the Fed has instigated will lead to a credit cycle unwind that will lead to the business cycle crash and recession with the side effects of defaults, liquidations and reductions in employment… Looking specifically at the US (as the most important credit cycle) Auto loans are exhausted which hurts manufacturing, student loans are at record highs and delinquencies, home mortgages are tightening and being defaulted upon which slaps construction, business loan tightening hits business, and revolving credit (credit card) is stagnating the hallowed “consumer economy” which is 70% of US GDP leading to the retail apocalypse laying waste to Murica’s post WWII economic model… Interest rates, the price of credit concocted by a clueless committee of communist central planners affects everything and will effect upon the whole economy going forward… The only hope of reversing this would be for the Fed to drop rates to the floor or negative (and would destroy their remaining dwindling credibility), but with a high probability of another rate hike in June, the recession higher rates will create will happen first… It looks like recession in late 2017 or early 2018 at the moment, and when the old problems printed over a decade ago will again come to the fore…

Crypto Bubble – Everyone’s Talking About “Blockchain”

I have been predicting the rise of Bitcoin for the last two years on this blog, and it seems it is here now… The price (as I predicted at the end of my halvening post) would be the main driver of public sentiment and the rocketing purchasing power (and fees) of Bitcoin is attracting attention everywhere as has the blowing up of an immense bubble in alt coins and chains that claim to challenge and render archaic Bitcoin obsolete as it stagnates in its scaling quagmire all while near all of these “rivals” have no scale, very little user base and zero network infrastructure in terms of user interfaces and zero of the network effect Bitcoin has spent the last eight years in building, so Bitcoin will never become obsolete overnight… The crypto sector is currently hovering around $100 Billion in Market Cap and Bitcoin at $45 Billion and its dominance at only half of what it was a few months ago, the meteoric rise of Ethereum, Ripple and others seemingly threatening Bitcoin’s natural monopoly and first mover advantage, and is the current schtick of the mainstream and alt media “experts” and peanut gallery who are all of a sudden experts on the technology until recently they had dismissed as being a lolbertardian joke… I will discuss this Bitcoin dominance issue later on in this post, suffice to say crypto-currencies are currently dominating mainstream and online social media social commentary in the fields of finance and governance…

“Blockchain” – Dispelling Some Myths

A consequence of the rise of Bitcoin as the first blockchain is this “blockchain” meme has spread through the banking industry as the holy grail for efficiency and streamlining in a bloated and dying industry, for the corporate system as the panacea for the just in time delivery and inventory systems eliminating duplication and waste (with most of the legacy corpotocracy jumping on the Ethereum blockchain), “blockchain” has now even spread to national governments who are apparently developing their own crypto-currencies to further swamp and drown out Bitcoin among infinite free competition and government legal tender laws… While these stories are often high on hype (good for the ad click revenue) and chronically low on any sort of detail, simply saying “blockchain” these days is enough to convince most analysts and experts that a centralized entity can oxymoronically create and manage a decentralized network, without the obvious consideration of governments historic chief distinguishing feature of turning to shit everything it touches, never mind their record in cryptography and cyber security! Will this government crypto-currency make the banking system obsolete and just take us to one cashless electronic decentralized central issuer, like magic? Can it recapitalize the now obsolete bank accounts of tens or hundreds of millions of citizens with electronic credit accounts, dispersing them to the native population and that population be up to speed on the new price discovery system of a new currency? Can this be a seamless transition from credit cycle to crypto credit cycle overnight or over a transition period of a few weeks or months? Is there a crypto-currency credit cycle, how will it be issued? The currency is central and critical to the whole economy and for debt based economic “growth”, so when governments report that they are developing their own crypto-currencies this doesn’t mean much to me, the logistics of which would be both hilarious and horrifying to watch… But until we see these “blockchains” out operating in the REAL WORLD, they will remain entertaining myths to scare the public and peddle the myth of fear and omnipotent government power…

Reality Bites – “Blockchain” Is Bitcoin

As much as “Blockchain” is entertaining and the height of fashion to comment and speculate on currently, over time it will become clearer to everyone that for all the talk of the Blockchain, there will be Bitcoin, there will be banks, and there will be governments, and an interesting power triangle from a game theoretical perspective… Now it would seem that Bitcoin’s fate lies in the hands of two adversaries and it is fighting both together, and therefore cannot have any chance whatsoever… Governments can ban Bitcoin anytime they want to goes the conventional “wisdom”! Banks can marginalize and crack down on Bitcoin exchanges stemming the flow of fiat liquidity into Bitcoin resulting in a price crash and quick destruction while banks and governments high five each other in outlawing a threat to their governance and financial monopolies… The War on Bitcoin! And like every other War governments have ever waged, it will turn out to be a miserable failure… Like alcohol prohibition or the drug war, banning Bitcoin will merely send it underground to the shadow, black and untaxed markets… A crackdown on Bitcoin exchanges for example would have the following knock on effects; Bitcoin holders would not be able to sell bitcoins through legal market exchange (banks) drying up velocity as peer to peer transactions would have to become the norm putting a floor under the price, and as simple economic theory tells us a totalitarian crackdown on Bitcoin would only increase the demand for a borderless, electronic peer to peer censorship resistant digital store of value and medium of exchange, as many in Venezuela are now finding Bitcoin and why many are willing to go to jail in Venezuela for using Bitcoin… A Bitcoin face to face market or on anonymity enhanced computer networks would also be unregulated and effectively untaxable as government surveillance ramps up then so does Bitcoin privacy development, not to mention the logistics of enforcing face to face barter transactions for tax purposes… Driving Bitcoin underground may look at first glance like the only logical move for governments who feel threatened by technological disruption, however governments are only public masks for private monopoly interests so governments sing and dance to the tune of their puppet masters behind the curtain and out of sight, governments will use their guns and goons and prisons only to enforce what the banks tell them to enforce… So meld government and banking into one entity and pit it one on one against Bitcoin, and ask what is the possible alternative to an outright and in the long term unsustainable ban?

The Faustian Bargain – Regulating Bitcoin

In my original post I set out the Faustian Bargain for National Banking systems where they had the choice if they interacted with Bitcoin or not, and there are a few reasons why banks should be attracted to Bitcoin… It is already an increasingly recognizable asset and store of value outside of government and finance, so in times of stress Bitcoin could become an invaluable digital asset and sovereign reserve for both banks and governments to own, especially with the end of the credit cycle, recession, and financial debt crisis baked into the cake sooner or later, when government taxation revenue and bank solvency will suffer another few years of contraction… Regulating Bitcoin gateways allows banks and governments to institute KYC/AML (Know Your Customer/Anti Money Laundering) regulations and to a certain degree can track and surveil the flight from fiat and help in state taxation shakedowns as opposed to banning it outright losing effective control of taxation and surveillance, as the recent IRS attempted shakedown of Coinbase users demonstrates… And let us not forget here that Bitcoin and its network effect generates millions in fees for Bitcoin exchanges, and the banks that service those exchanges… To those early banks who interacted with Bitcoin in a foggy and undefined legal and regulatory space they are now reaping the revenues, and will continue to reap revenues as Bitcoin and transactions and desperately needed fees and income increase in a world where traditional banking is becoming increasingly unprofitable…

Signing The Bargain – Building The Bridges

In my original post I explained how by their legal monopolies over fiat money and what you can do with it and where you can move it, that the banks get to decide whether they allow the bridges to be built between two distinct ecosystems, the banking ecosystem and the Bitcoin ecosystem… By allowing, building, and regulating these bridges the banks get a monopoly on charging the tolls crossing over for the gargantuan amount of wealth trapped in the banking system, and could be an increasing boon for the banking industry going forward when their traditional income revenues have dried up due to their central bank overlords driving interest rates to zilch, while also cutting banking costs and staff operations in the more efficient transfer of value that Bitcoin provides… So what are we seeing in the realm of government regulation as regards Bitcoin?

The Attitude Toward Bitcoin – East And West

When looking at how governments and therefore banks are interacting with Bitcoin currently, in my opinion you see a distinct difference in attitude between the Asian countries and the East in General, and the West and the world of Eurodollar hegemony…

In the last eighteenth months we have seen China first allow, then clampdown on Bitcoin, and just in the last few days have again decided to regulate the large Chinese Bitcoin exchanges allowing them to resume operations… In Japan in the last few months the government has recognized Bitcoin as a legal method for payment and abolished its 8% consumption tax on transacting in bitcoin and the explosion in trading and interest in Bitcoin in Japan looks like it is just beginning… Australia has removed its GST consumption tax of 10% on Bitcoin as it seeks to define and regulate its relationship further in the next few months… South Korea is also seeing an explosion in interest and trading in Bitcoin and other currencies (notably Ethereum and Ethereum Classic)… Russia after having been hardcore against Bitcoin in the early days has now it seems figured out that it is futile to fight technology and is instead seeking to work with and regulate Bitcoin in the near future while also developing its own state crypto-currency (LOL), however were Russia to release a gold backed crypto-currency as I think is likely, then this would become an interesting experiment to watch as gold starts working with “blockchain” in the mainstream, as I extensively detailed nearly two years ago in my Gold And The Blockchain post… What you are generally seeing among the big guns of the East is a willingness to utilize foreign decentralized technology, and allow it to interact with their legacy fiat ponzi schemes in perhaps benefitting their citizens and cushioning the blow and quelling social unrest when the next recession, credit contraction and financial crisis hits… This also reflects I feel the general attitude of Eastern governments (And Asian Elites) towards the plebs and average citizen, these elites at least have some conception of the future and the future of the populations they control, and while these governments are considered totalitarian and backward in the West of hallowed Democracy (and to be clear these governments are hardly angels) they are far more demographically stable (outside Japan), and financially stable (gold reserves) and their populations in general have a shared national identity and revere their leaders to some extent, so social unrest in the wake of financial crisis, bankruptcies, and mass unemployment can be muted by backing their currencies with real assets (gold) and working with digital technologies like Bitcoin…

Meanwhile in the financially and morally bankrupt West the mental disease that is Liberalism continues its march toward self cannibalism, its governments corrupt bloated and insolvent, its financial system in record debt while pawning physical gold reserves to Eastern nations in manipulating the gold and silver prices lower through its derivative ponzi constructs, its ideology polluting the minds of the young in indoctrination prisons of schools and universities in making them totally unfit for a future of work and family, indeed the anti-family, anti-child and anti-life ideology of Liberalism endlessly pumped through education media and television in combination with the debt serfdom of unhinged central bank money printing is creating a demographic timebomb and stagnating native Western populations inhibiting GDP and economic “growth”, whose Elites have decided to first bomb to dust and then import the remnants from the failed states of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe, the UK and the US as demographic replacements with no thought as to culture or history or religion or laws to somehow integrate into multicultural liberal urban cities of the West, while the conservative and homogenous rural West looks on in wonderment at the cultural enrichment these cities are currently experiencing… It is rural West that has the conservative homogeneity and social cohesion to remain somewhat stable and self sustaining during a monetary collapse, compared to the identity politics infested and hopelessly divided urban centres which I expect to more and more resemble hellholes in the near future… The leaders of the “Big Three” European Nation States, Theresa May of the UK, Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Merkel of Germany are childless, and therefore do not have a stake in any future outside of theirs in homogenous gated communities far away from the peons… The only thing I can deduce from looking at what our Western Ruling Elites are currently engineering in the US, the UK and the EU is that these insane crime families and dynasties have a blatant disregard for any type of future, so this system is doomed… An anti-life ideology can never last long and progressivism is only a century old, less than a blink of the eye in history, now dying and a financial (and funding) crisis will only weaken it further, the West is far more unstable and divided than the East that will be far more difficult for its Elites to govern and control going forward…

What is the current attitude of the financially and morally bankrupt Western EuroDollar system towards Bitcoin, and the future of money? Hostility and paranoia are two words that spring to mind, with the EUSSR currently funding surveillance and harsh regulation of Bitcoin, the UK ambivalent in general so far (although the satanic City of London will decide one way or another), and in the US, bitlicenses and IRS shakedowns of Bitcoin users on the one hand but with some encouraging signs at the states level (Nevada) on the other, in short and outside of individual banks who are dealing with Bitcoin in the West, the Western Elites do not seem at all keen on competition to their failing financial model, and I can fully understand why… For the last forty five years the unlimited printing press of the US Federal Reserve has been world reserve currency, and has been utilized by the West to empty the rest of the world of its resources, goods services and labour… The last twenty five years of the Euro has been utilized by the crazed Brussels elite to extract the resources of the European continent to fund the politically correct and communist future of the degenerate new Soviet Union… The Bank of England that operates out of the sovereign City State of London (that is a private corporation and not a part of the United Kingdom) prints its pound sterling in exchange for the resources, goods, services and labour of the over sixty million citizens that ACTUALLY FORM the United Kingdom… I can understand why all these bankrupt and criminal constructs still demand the exclusive monopoly over their pillaging apparatus and so unless something radically changes or these crazed rulers come to their senses and soon, I would expect any bans or stifling Bitcoin regulation to be in the West, and why I also predict that the Bitcoin premium that is currently in the East will shift West as using Bitcoin in the “legal” economy will become more difficult, Bitcoin therefore in the East acting more as store of value with light touch regulation benefitting fiat currencies in the short term as mediums of exchange, and in the West serving as a store of value AND medium of exchange with economic production (goods, services, barter) backing the currency and generating the price premium… This Western premium would make mining Bitcoin more economically feasible and in demonstration of the beauty of the free market, the higher the premium the more incentive to mine bitcoins in the West reduces the economic advantages and dominance of mining bitcoins in the East… This Western Bitcoin black market with more face to face barter transactions and peer to peer economy will lead to deleterious effects on government taxation revenues and blowing even wider holes in their deficits and forcing further cutbacks in places like tax administation and surveillance… As I originally said you can cut Bitcoin out of your life but you cannot kill it, it works independently of your wishes and desires so governments can either choose to benefit from Bitcoin and its regulation through fees, taxation, and by also holding reserves as a hedge against fiat destruction, while banning Bitcoin cuts off these fees, taxes and drives the economy underground, which has far more deleterious consequences for government revenues and funding… Bitcoin is a Faustian Bargain, a deal with the devil for both governments and banks, but by signing the deal you get to live longer and gives citizens a far more gradual and stable transition from Fiat into Bitcoin, by not signing the deal you just die sooner meaning the transition from Fiat to Bitcoin will be a far more bumpy ride… I see Eastern governments surviving and remaining relevant to the populations they rule far longer than despotic and suicidal Western Democracy… It seems the East has signed the deal, the West is still reading the contract…

Bitcoin And Banking – Divide And Conquer

I have described how banking and Bitcoin can work but banking is anything but monolithic and there are always factions and tensions, with competing interests in competing nations, in short there is division, and where there is division there is weakness to exploit… If you deal with Bitcoin it is both a threat to your long term future but also a short term opportunity, because Bitcoin gives you a gateway outside currency monopolies (like SWIFT), Bitcoin shatters currency monopolies by giving the banks the gateways to bypass and evade each other, and there is no honour amongst thieves… This allows banks a new level of flexibility and helps decentralize and eventually neutralize banking, it allows individual banks to work with each other directly (Bank A —> Bitcoin —> Bank B) and so allows them to evade and avoid shakedowns from having to use intermediaries and monopolies constructed by Globalist Bankers in their scheme to extract the world, and the more profitable operations and margins become for those banks… And by dividing banking Bitcoin also gets the wealth of those ALL these banks using the protocol, banking only makes Bitcoin stronger and more valuable in market cap and the price of the currency… Bitcoin is the vampire squid that will suck legacy banking dry, it all depends on how banking regulations are applied to work with it or not…

How Bitcoin Affects The Petrodollar – The Eastern Backdoor

If you have followed the geopolitical movements in the East for the last few years then you will have noticed a pronounced move from China, Russia, and Iran amongst others, for bilateral trade in national currencies (Yuan, Ruble, Rial) or by using gold, or for goods and services, and thus cutting out the Petrodollar world reserve currency and reducing its extraction of foreign resources, however if the East at anytime decided to ditch the dollar en masse there would be a near certain world war instigated by the West to protect this global instrument of pillage… For a more peaceful and gradual transition of monetary powers alternative backdoors need to be developed, as we have witnessed with the Shanghai Gold Exchange that allows Russia for example to trade and hold gold in China, and Bitcoin for Eastern trading nations could become invaluable as a backdoor and workaround for the petrodollar… For example say were China and Russia to both regulate Bitcoin, then both their banking systems and national governments could then use Bitcoin as an interbank pipeline between Russia and China directly cutting out the dollar and SWIFT starving the West of resources while also increasing the resource value of Bitcoin… If you want to utilize Bitcoin then you must hold bitcoin reserves which any bank or central bank who works with Bitcoin can do, however with only 1,800 freshly mined bitcoins per day in liquidity currently and with only a puny $45 billion in market cap in the context of hundreds of billions or even trillions in bilateral trade, the Bitcoin bubble could have a lot further up to travel and I do expect at some point for centralized legacy institutions to start using Bitcoin and holding bitcoin reserves, one more reason I question if Bitcoin is at all in a bubble?

Bitcoin Scaling Debate Update – BIP 148 UASF

It has been two months since my Bitcoin Scaling Debate post, the price of Bitcoin has more than doubled as have the costs of fees as Bitcoin’s growing popularity severely pressures scaling solutions, which in my opinion is a good thing… I have read a few “experts” declaring that the only solution to a scaling debate is a precipitous drop in market cap and price which would panic users and miners to agree before users ditched Bitcoin as a platform for good! However if you actually use your brain, it should become apparent that a rising price and rising transaction fees increases the scale and pressures and tests the scaling limits, so with interest and use of Bitcoin and it’s chronically slow and expensive fees increasing, this increasingly acute scaling problem will force some method to resolve the scaling stagnation… As I described in my last post there is currently a mexican standoff between factions of the Bitcoin community with threats of hard forks and two Bitcoins and all sorts of other myths and fear and boogiemen peddled by click bait merchants and self described experts, but strip away the noise and look at the reality and there is only one current solution to our scaling woes, and that is SegWit… And the clock on SegWit and a short and longer term scaling solution has just escalated big time!

As I explained in my last post on game theory and the governance of Bitcoin, the game theoretical endpoint and nuclear option to the scaling debate was an User Activated Soft Fork, and force Segwit upon the intransigent and stalling mining community… Well the pin on the UASF hand grenade has finally been pulled with BIP 148, a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that allows Bitcoin users (and user interfaces) to upgrade to SegWit and bypassing the need for a Miner Activated Soft Fork… As I described at length Bitcoin’s real leverage and power belongs with its users and the software they run so if users have had enough of slow and expensive fees (and who hasn’t?), they can decide to run the Segwit ready software and signal for the soft fork… This soft fork will be activated on the 1st August giving the community the next two months to digest the UASF and how to prepare for it, and I would stress not to worry about this, as confusing and complicated as this sounds UASF discussion and noise is about to become deafening in the Bitcoin space so you will know everything you need to know in the coming two months, but I am doubtful if there will be any UASF in any form… In this game of chicken between Bitcoin and its mining community this UASF is putting your foot through the accelerator and staring down hard on your opponent as they come rapidly closer into view… The miners have now been notified that SegWit will activate on August 1st, so to use a tennis analogy, the ball is solidly in their court… How do the miners return serve?

Bitcoin Miners – Conservatives To The Core

I briefly mentioned in my last post how it was perplexing how hot the mining community was on Bitcoin Unlimited and a progressive hard fork to Bitcoin’s underpinnings and how this uncertainty could ever be even considered by an intrinsically conservative mining community, some of who had made millions or even billions of dollars securing Bitcoin’s blockchain… Indeed, the thought of miners activating a hard fork is actually an absurd concept since your average miner has far more invested in Bitcoin and its price than your average user, and are therefore far more conservative in nature than users… If Bitcoin were ever to split into two then confusion and instability would abound that would dilute the value of one coin into two and would throw into chaos the whole development and in some cases industrial production of Bitcoin mining equipment and miners would be far more severely affected than the average user who only invests in the currency, so I cannot ever see a miner activated hard fork that would sever its roots and remove all backward compatibility to Bitcoin… To put some kind of figures to Bitcoin’s mining, since the halvening miners have been mining 1800 bitcoins per day that today at around $2500 means a mining revenue per day of $4.5 million, $31.5 million per week, $126 million per month, a half a billion dollars per year! Transactions currently are about 250,000 per day at a dollar or more average is another $250,000 per day, so transactions although making miners very wealthy in the short term is still only six per cent of total Bitcoin mining revenues, so what would you predict the miners would sacrifice for scaling purposes, mining or transaction fees? What they lose on transaction fees in the short run by activating SegWit and solving short term on chain scaling problems, they gain from long term mining revenues as Bitcoin off chain development scale Bitcoin as a medium exchange… If Bitcoin were to double from here to $5,000 on SegWit activation then mining revenues would double to $9 million dollars a day, a billion dollars a year, if Bitcoin reached $10,000 Bitcoin mining revenues double again… SegWit is merely the mining community losing the battle (transaction fees) and winning the war (mining revenue)…

If there is one thing that could ever be less likely than Bitcoin miners activating a hard fork, it would be miners allowing users to either hard or soft fork the Bitcoin network… While I think any contentious hard fork in any coin working at scale would be terminal for the longevity of that coin (especially for Bitcoin) for that reason while there will continue to be a lot of noise and proposed hard fork “deals” agreed going forward, the chances of an actual User Activated Hard Ford (UAHF) are zero in my opinion, but an user activated soft fork is already a certainty… So why would miners not want an UASF? If this UASF were to go swimmingly then it would set a precedent for user hegemony over the mining community and that any contentious scaling solution from now on would take the form of UASF, sidelining the mining community that in my opinion could lead to unbalance and marginalization of mining which as a reminder is actually critical to Bitcoin’s security and needs at least some semblance of balance… For that reason I cannot ever see the miners allowing this BIP 148 UASF to activate, so from a game theory perspective we have our answer to what happens next…

SegWit Activation – Before August 1st By Miner Activated Soft Fork (MASF)

Using purely game theory and analysis of incentive structures I predict that the miners will activate SegWit before August 1st and indeed BIP 148 specifically states that the UASF will be cancelled as long as SegWit is activated by MASF, which resolves the scaling debate with Bitcoin users and developers getting a conservative but substantial improvement to Bitcoin’s on chain scaling while also paving off chain scaling layers, and the miners get to stymie an UASF and save face in what has been the most fractious scaling debate in the history of Bitcoin… The more noise that the community makes in the next few weeks over this UASF and the more users we can convince to signal BIP 148 then the faster the community forces the miners to blink and capitulate, so the next few weeks will be very interesting to watch and how the BIP 148 is used as leverage by Bitcoin’s community… If the big exchanges, wallet providers and even a significant section of Bitcoin’s mining community (which is not as monolithic and far more fractious than portrayed) signal for BIP 148 activation, then the remainder of the miners will have to capitulate to avoid both an UASF and possible split of Bitcoin, none of which is in their long term interest… BIP 148 after all the myths and hysteria of a highly emotional and irrational space is at the end of it simply user leverage and hype to force the miners into a MASF, which maintains Bitcoin’s roots and tradition of Miner Activated Soft Forks while also denying the Bitcoin user and developer community an UASF precedent, which in itself is important in harmonizing leverage between rival factions as this project continues to grow…

Bitcoin Renaissance And Altcoin Blow Up

SegWit’s activation will put to bed nearly two years of development and improvement that has been stalled and blocked for one reason or another, and Bitcoin will finally scale in the short term and will get significant improvements on which to build second layer and micro payment applications, leading to a surge in Bitcoin market cap and currency value at the expense of the rest of the mostly speculative run up in altcoins as Bitcoin scaling fuelled hope and hype in scaling of coins that by definition have no scale… Having been burned in the last altcoin bubble in late 2013 and having spent over four years immersed in this space you get taught some expensive lessons while getting your head around making money and far more importantly about taking profits… While there are no doubt some amazing innovation in some of these coins the vast majority are either useless or scams that will sooner or later find their long term utility value of zero… The best will survive and will thrive dependent upon their user bases, and more importantly upon their development team and structure, and this is for the long term… While speculating with bitcoin liquidity in blowing up illiquid altcoins can be very lucrative for insiders and whales waiting for newbies with fortunes in their eyes to be the bagholders while they convert sizeable altcoin pumps back into Bitcoin leaving you to nurse your bitcoin losses after getting sucked in, this is and will be an invaluable trading lesson to those who believe in altcoin hopium because betting against Bitcoin long term in a sea of short term hype and liquidity will burn you, and the only lesson that stays with you is losing money… Rinse, no repeat…

Ripple – Trojan Horse For Bitcoin

Ripple is a very interesting protocol and contrary to recent hype in the media is not actually a competitor to Bitcoin but will turn out to be a great compliment and gateway into Bitcoin, and acts as a Trojan Horse and connector bridge of the traditional banking system to Bitcoin… I have seen a few analysts I respect thoughtfully refer to Ripple as scamcoin and bankstercoin and I find this analysis both naive and shortsighted, so I will delve a little deeper… Ripple may be a crypto-currency but it is not a blockchain and is not decentralized either and therefore cannot ever be compared or would ever compete with Bitcoin as a long term store of value, Ripple is a short term intermediary for the banking system, so I see Ripple lasting as long as the banks… Ripple pitches itself as an interbank protocol and a competitor to the established SWIFT interbank protocol that has propped up the Petrodollar monopoly this long, although who knows for how much longer…

Under the current banking system, to move liquidity and payments between banks nationally but definitely internationally, due to the fragmented and centralized nature of modern banking, you must utilize SWIFT that charges you a fortune to move money between borders (with an inbuilt surveillance apparatus to monitor money flows)… Although SWIFT claims to be non political it is essentially an US vassal construct with nations and central banks subject to censor and sanctions by leveraging SWIFT codes as blackmail to make or break trade deals and flows… Ripple disrupts SWIFT by offering competition in interbank exchange worldwide without the limitations and leverage that SWIFT enforces, which you might think also makes Ripple a dead man walking… If the banking system desired to do so it could dismantle Ripple anytime it wanted to, the protocol is apparently distributed but the development team is easily visible and recognizable so shutting it down is a pieve of cake compared to Bitcoin… So why does Ripple still exist, and why are banks (especially in Japan) starting to work with it?

As I previously explained banking is far from monolithic and uniform and so while Ripple presents a threat to SWIFT and Petrodollar hegemony it also offers opportunities to those who want to work outside SWIFT and actually divides banks and bankers, and this can only be a good thing… Exactly like Bitcoin provides a convenient backdoor or workaround for national governments or central banks, then Ripple does exactly the same for banks, severely streamlining the cost and complexity of interbank dealing and remittances, decentralizing global banking conduits… For a simple example if we had Bank A in Germany and Bank B in Japan then today the German bank would need access the SWIFT network to transfer money to Japan and for this interbank privilege SWIFT can basically charge what it wants and SWIFT is both slow and costly compared to Ripple… Ripple has its own native currency called XRP, so using Ripple Bank A in Germany need only connect to the Ripple protocol, convert its Euros to XRP with the XRP then being transferred to Japan where it can be converted into Yen, near instantaneously and negligible fees… Ripple is a significant and open source competitor (and threat) to SWIFT and the dollar while being attractive to anyone trying to evade the above… Can Western banking interests in SWIFT trump the attractiveness of Ripple to the rest of the world? Time will tell…

Ripple Currency And Value

Ripple was born with 100 Billion XRP’s in native currency and so it can and does look to many in the Bitcoin and Blockchain communities as a pre-mined scam coin with no stable rate of issue and therefore any type of scarcity value, however this kind of misses the point of what Ripple has been designed to do… Ripple is simply a short term liquidity instrument and not a long term store of value but that does not mean it cannot skyrocket in value from here, especially in light of the development team agreeing to locking up chunks of currency in smart contracts to maintain scarcity and value and allay fears of dilution and inflation… So where does the current market cap of $11.5 billion dollars and value of Ripple come from? Simply, it comes from the banks… As bank fiat currencies are converted into XRP to traverse the world for interbank settlement or remittances, XRP acts as a short term vessel for seamlessly transferring value between currencies and for this reason the market cap of Ripple in the short run may dwarf the market cap of Bitcoin, because it is working directly with banks… A hundred billion dollars worth of interbank settlement would give Ripple a market cap of a $100 billion and the more successful and popular Ripple becomes with the banks and their trillions on end in reserves, collateral and derivatives then the higher the market cap and the value of XRP… So dependent upon the emergence of Ripple in the East (mainly Japan for now) and considering the East’s general regulatory embrace of Bitcoin as I explained previously, the West can also ban Ripple but can they also ban the East from using it en masse? (Hint: No)

Ripple – A Gateway Into Bitcoin

Because of the nature of XRP as a fungible sovereign electronic currency fully backed by banking and fiat money, this also means that there now exists a frictionless, instantaneous and near zero cost method of exchanging directly into Bitcoin, and so the rise of Ripple is also the rise of Bitcoin… While I haven’t studied Ripple in serious depth and therefore do not know the surveillance capabilities of tracking where XRP go, it does provide an excellent bridge and conduit that connects the legacy banking system to the new crypto economy, while also allowing the easier laundering and general evasion of fiat money by panicked and astute players with less KYC/AML compliance and regulation on the flow of fiat into Bitcoin… Ripple in the medium term can turn the fiat flow into Bitcoin into a flood and both may grow to gargantuan size while draining the vast reserves of Eastern Fiat Money, as the fiat ecosystem deflates it inflates Ripple and Bitcoin and we are potentially talking trillions here! When the fiat system is fully drained and banking technologically obsolete, then I don’t really see a long term future for Ripple as a blockchain based monetary system has no need for banks and when Bitcoin will suck Ripple dry, but as a short and medium term transmission mechanism to seamlessly connect Banking with the Blockchain it is a phenomenal upgrade and improvement on the first generation, incompetent and disaster prone fiat to bitcoin exchanges that periodically blow up and lose user funds and cause pain and distress, so this is a trend to look out for and Ripple (and other similar protocols) obsoleting the traditional Bitcoin to fiat exchange structure…

Ethereum – Death By Hard Fork

When discussing the Bitcoin scaling debate I stated that if Bitcoin or any other blockchain at scale were ever to hard fork that would be the effective end of that blockchain, and I argue this will sooner or later apply to Ethereum in wake of last year’s decision to hard fork after the DAO debacle exposed severe weaknesses and hacked user funds held on Ethereum’s blockchain, while the DAO may have been scapegoated the hacker also exploited weakness in Ethereum… While the hack should have been allowed to proceed with users losing $50 million worth of Ether (that would be hundreds of millions of dollars today) to maintain the integrity of Ethereum in the long term, Vitalik Buterin as creator and Kaiser of the Ethereum blockchain decided and then persuaded the Ethereum community to hard fork Ethereum to reverse the vulnerabilities exploited by the DAO hacker to salvage user funds, and therefore cut the roots from which they sprang… As roots are the heart of conservatism and in my opinion why Bitcoin as the most conservative blockchain will never hard fork, chopping off your roots is the essence of progressivism, sacrificing long term survival for short term progress, and bailing out his mistakes was the contract Vitalik signed with today, not tomorrow… I say all this at a time when Ethereum has surged to an all time high market cap of near $23 billion and the value of Ether is near $250, a mind blowing rise for a project that is only two years old which in itself is quite remarkable so mETHheads will by now be laughing themselves to death at my clueless arrogance and quaint use of economic logic… To be clear Ethereum may further outperform Bitcoin from here on again but as I said in my last post this is a marathon and not a sprint… With the corporate backing of such legacy corporotocracies as J P Morgan, Microsoft, CME Group, BNY Mellon and the lengthening list of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance Ethereum may well have some longer legs than I can imagine at this time and may override the attentions of the Securities And Exchange Commission in launching securities investigations into Ethereum’s original pre-mined launch… SEC clampdown may also be triggered by the current ICO madness that is taking place on Ethereum’s blockchain (and pumping up its currency) as crowd funding tokens for white papers and hype raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (in ETH naturally) for projects that have no working product or their products are literally unworkable… If the SEC does clamp down on the ICO’s and/or Ethereum the price would surely tank becoming a self fulfilling prophecy as financial media could attack it as a ponzi or pyramid scheme that has now spectacularly imploded, and with Vitalik the life and soul and visible talisman of Ethereum the authorities would have a perfect scapegoat for a crackdown on crypto-currencies… This is why Bitcoin again is different from all others, and why the altcoin shills scoff and laugh and point at Bitcoin’s conservative and antiquated leaderless and instensely fractious development community (because how can a project that has no recognized leader or ruler possibly ever scale?), all competing altcoins have a centralized top down development team that have far bigger control over the direction their project takes… In a world of increasing totalitarianism and censorship that is certainly taking hold right now in the West, what seems Bitcoin’s biggest flaw now becomes its greatest strength, leaderless, competitive, fractious and incredibly noisy and fragmented, and powerfully anti-fragile, censorship resistant and just a bastard to kill! No other altcoin has this governance structure as altcoins are by design centralized projects of rivals and therefore inherently fragile and prone to greed, corruption and megelomania, and why they are far more easily co-opted and controllable and why in my opinion the corporate and smart money of the legacy elite families, is backing Ethereum and not Bitcoin…

So you have a clear distinction between the governance structure of Bitcoin, a blockchain in my opinion that will never hard fork because of its governance structure, and Ethereum a blockchain that hard forked at the first sign of trouble because of its governance structure… As Ethereum’s hard fork precedent has already been set, then at every scaling wall and with pressure from financial interests from now on they will hard fork to upgrade as often as required, forking off new Ethereum’s and dividing communities, which is what happens when you sever roots… The increasing market cap of Ethereum as well as pressuring scaling solutions will have more interests and money and resources attempting to exert leverage over the future of the project because this is not a game anymore, $23 billion in market cap is an enormous sum of wealth and value and investors expect moar upside, faster scaling solutions, they will want Ethereum to do this, and do that… How can you possibly satisfy everybody? You never will, so for every hard fork to satisfy one faction of the community, you alienate another faction of the community creating a trail of orphaned and disillusioned legacy chains diluting further the chains that once bound the community together, debasing values and value… If you bet on Ethereum over Bitcoin, you are betting on 23 year old Vitalik Buterin being smarter than not only Satoshi Nakamoto (who abandoned his baby to safeguard its future) but also the whole of the Bitcoin community that has since raised his baby while conserving its roots and origins, and to be clear here the total sum of brains, cryptographers, coders, programmers, computer scientists and some of the smartest people on the planet that is currently working on Bitcoin vastly dwarfs Ethereum, as does Bitcoin’s user base, the only place Ethereum has rising dominance is in hype, mania, and corporate finance… Gentlemen, place your bets…

Fables Don’t Lie – Conservatism Finishes The Race

Ethereum Classic – The True Roots Of Ethereum

In the aftermath of the debacle of the DAO Ethereum hard forked into two with Vitalik directing the bailout therefore orphaning his first born to be left for dead, and in the wake of the fork and Ethereum somehow maintaining credibility before it was assumed a success, and the old and tired, unloved and pre hard forked Ethereum was renamed Ethereum Classic, the perfect name for a bygone remnant of the past in the forward and progressive march for blockchain supremacy, Classic would not be around for long… Abandoned and alone it languished for several months as the pretender scaled new heights, but as the true heir of Ethereum ETC has survived and indeed is now starting to thrive as Ethereum’s hype starts to draw a lot of attention and ire from Bitcoiners who actually understand game theory and governance structures, and the praise of the corporate media and the crypto nouveau riche newbs that pump out endless youtube videos hyping what they don’t understand, not forgetting the praise and cash of the legacy corporations riding on deck the Titanic and probably why Ethereum will go down with the ship…

I have always thought Ethereum to be an innovative and highly promising protocol and different from Bitcoin in a few ways, and Classic is the only true heir of Vitalik’s genius, so this is the main reason to be bullish… Classic only exists because of the developer breakaway that defied Vitalik’s bailout of the DAO on philosophical grounds as it compromised the immutability of Ethereum, Classic is still a conservative project but from the snips of information I get on social media they have a solid and very smart community of developers, and as long as this developer community can take things slow and own their mistakes on what is a far less secure and easier to compromise blockchain than Bitcoin that is the trade off for its flexibility, then ETC definitely has legs… Classic has received funding from Barry Silbert who is generally well regarded in the crypto space but it is imperative that ETC’s development team resist the corporatism and the money and the temptation to promise everything to everyone and try to run before they can walk (like ETH)… Altcoins live or die by their development teams and governance…

Conclusion

The world is currently a powder keg and you can feel the madness levels grind up daily as the end game of zero interest rate unlimited credit of central banking comes closer to its inevitable end, the end stages of hyperinflationary collapse always brings degeneracy and debasement as the money we use affects our material well being and all of our lives… If the money is corrupt then all of society is corrupted as more money is printed to service debt, fund war and welfare, and wasted on the security services and indoctrination of education and media to keep us imprisoned and fearful, you only have to look around you at the censorship attempts on the internet, the crushing debt and nihilism of modern life driving suicide and pharmaceutical anti-depressants, the crumbling and empty high streets, the rising terror, this is the very utopia our communist ruling elites have funded, designed and planned for us, a synthesis of Brave New World and 1984, we are already here… So in this time of fear, madness and weapons of mass distraction and the psychological war that is waged by modern society upon the individual and voluntary institutions of life, family and community, it becomes increasingly critical for your general sanity and all round peace of mind to ignore these distractions as best as you can, and concentrate on what is really important and where change will come, and that is in Banking and Bitcoin…

We are nearing recession… At the end of my December 2015 post I stated that we wait for the central bankers to crash the system again, which would bring money and finance and competing currencies to the mainstream, well then is now… In rigged volatility, precious metals, interest rate, bond, and stock markets you will find few assets that actually tells you that everything is rigged and so it is no surprise to me that now everybody is talking about the parabolic rise of Bitcoin so it is already becoming mainstream… The next shoe to drop is the inevitable end of the global credit cycle when the REAL economy interest rate rises pushes marginal and sub-prime debtors to default on loans and debt that will crush the purveyors of debt, the banking system… Public and private debt is far more widespread and pervasive than it was a decade ago before the last credit crisis, this crisis will be magnitudes worse and destructive than last time… Each day we move closer to the day when the banks (who own the central bank who owns the government) drowning in their own insolvency will have to pivot toward some method of trying to stay alive, at least in the short term…

What we are currently seeing from the East is the movement of banks who see the endgame and have broadly embraced crypto-currencies, while the West is mostly ambivalent or hostile to crypto-currencies, I also consider the ruling Elites of the East to be far more benevolent toward their populations than those of the West which in my opinion will lead to the longevity of the Eastern financial system working with Bitcoin (and through Ripple) and its citizens holding it as a store of value while giving fiat currencies medium of exchange value, while the current attitude of short termism that has infected the West will lead to hostility and heavy regulation from Western banks toward Bitcoin, enhancing the role of Bitcoin not only as a store of value in the West but also increasingly a medium for exchange and why Bitcoin will command a premium in the West compared to the East due to shortage of arbitrage opportunities from tighter Western regulation, which in turn will stimulate the Western Bitcoin mining industry as mining becomes cheaper and more economically profitable, eliminating the advantage that Chinese electricity costs has given Eastern Bitcoin mining, so if you want more mining of Bitcoin in the West the Western banks and the governments they control look like they will give you just that… Silver linings… : )

SegWit will activate before August 1st and we will at last have a substantial scaling solution and a much needed fix for transaction malleability also removing the transaction signatures from the block that will give roughly a fourfold increase in block capacity for the network’s surging transactions while reducing fees, and will also significantly enhance off scale micropayment layers that can scale Bitcoin as a low cost medium of exchange which increases Bitcoin’s market cap and value, and mining revenues… All of the hard fork embrace of BU and the stalling of SegWit by the miners is pure bluster and exertion of leverage and milking of transaction fees of what until recently had been a lean few years for the Bitcoin mining community… As game theory predicts a Miner Activated Soft Fork the history and tradition of Bitcoin’s governance is maintained, the Miners denying the User Activated Soft Fork that would set a precedent of ignoring Bitcoin mining on future protocol upgrades, and I just cannot see the miners letting this happen… To use a poker analogy BIP148 is going all in on the hand therefore forcing the miners to either reveal their hand or fold, and folding on this hand is far more prudent for Bitcoin’s intrinsically conservative mining community than the risk of losing all your chips and the game in the event of a contentious hard fork…

As we go into the second half of 2017 and into 2018 events are now converging around what is at the centre of which direction civilization takes in the future, the money is at the root of all evil and money is at the root of all good, it just depends on who controls it and for what purpose it is directed, it can be inflationary and impoverishing and debasing and degenerating, or it can be deflationary and enriching and honest and regenerating, at the root of society whether you like it or not is money, we all exchange in money, we all save in money and we all live through money… And we have two monetary ecosystems converging currently, the terminally insolvent and intensely evil fiat currency system that is used to enrich a small cabal of crime dynasties and a retarded technocratic bureaucracy to print degeneracy in every aspect of modern life, and you have a rapidly growing intensely viruous and honest currency system that is peer to peer, borderless, immutable, resistant to censor, is chronically deflationary and rewards all holders and users equally with higher purchasing power and increased standards of material living, a life of less work and more leisure… These superior characteristics that Bitcoin holds over the competition are now making themselves apparent and I don’t think this is going to change soon, Bitcoin will continue to grow and threaten and generate drivel and ad click revenue for all sorts of nonsense and noise around “Blockchain”, so if you’re tired of hearing about Bitcoin you will really hate it in another six months… There is only Banking and Bitcoin, and so the critical question becomes how do they interact and how are they regulated, and as Bitcoin is only regulated by itself, the regulation must be constructed from the banking system… The most important trend of 2017 and 2018 is the regulation of Bitcoin in the East and West, which countries will benefit from its advantages and which countries will ban it and send it underground to the shadow and unregulated untaxed markets… This question of regulation will become more important and urgent as we head toward the next global recession and banking crisis, so it will be interesting to watch… The next twelve months are going to be very revealing…

POST SCRIPT: Further Developments In Bitcoin Regulation

EAST

Suddenly, Bitcoin to Become Legal in India (as covered by Coin Telegraph and Zero Hedge) 

Russia’s Parliament Is Discussing The Legalization of Bitcoin (Cryptocoins news)

South Korea Officially Legalizes Bitcoin, Huge Market For Traders (Coin Telegraph)

Vietnam Is Preparing To Legally Recognize Bitcoin In 2018 (Coindesk)

WEST

US Launches Quiet Crackdown On Cryptocurrencies (Zero Hedge)

Bitcoin Donations Gratefully Received:

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