Tag Archives: Cryptocurrencies

The evolution of credit, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on March 18, 2022 | 2 comments

The West’s fiat currencies are reaching the end of the line. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

After fifty-one years from the end of the Bretton Woods Agreement, the system of fiat currencies appears to be moving towards a crisis point for the US dollar as the international currency. The battle over global energy, commodity, and grain supplies is the continuation of an intensifying financial war between the dollar and the renminbi and rouble.

It is becoming clear that the scale of an emerging industrial revolution in Asia is in stark contrast with Western decline, a population ratio of 87 to 13. The dollar’s role as the sole reserve currency is not suited for this reality.

Commentators speculate that the current system’s failings require a global reset. They think in terms of it being organised by governments, when the governments’ global currency system is failing. Beholden to Keynesian macroeconomics, the common understanding of money and credit is lacking as well.

This article puts money, currency, and credit, and their relationships in context. It points out that the credit in an economy is far greater than officially recorded by money supply figures and it explains how relatively small amounts of gold coin can stabilise an entire credit system.

It is the only lasting solution to the growing fiat money crisis, and it is within the power of at least some central banks to implement gold coin standards by mobilising their reserves.

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On the Cusp of an Economic Singularity, by Doomberg

Posted on March 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

We’re headed towards an economic catastrophe that will render the world a completely different place. From Doomberg at doomberg.substack.com:

“One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.” – Gustave Flaubert

In 1988, Stephen Hawking published one of the best-selling science books of all time. In A Brief History of Time, Hawking made the impossibly complex topics of astronomy and modern physics accessible to a lay audience, inspiring countless young students (and at least one green chicken) to pursue a career in the sciences. It is estimated that the book has sold an incredible 25 million copies worldwide.

A Brief History of Time | photo credit: BBC

In Chapter 3 of the book, Hawking introduces the reader to the Big Bang Theory and the concept of a gravitational singularity, which Wikipedia describes as “a condition in which gravity is so intense that spacetime itself breaks down catastrophically.” Essentially, since the laws of physics are eviscerated at a singularity, what happened before it is both irrelevant and unknowable, and one could consider such an event as having reset the universe’s clock. Here’s how Hawking describes it in his book (emphasis added throughout):

“This means that even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang. Correspondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what has happened since the big bang, we could not determine what happened beforehand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang. Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.”

The simple truth of a singularity applies whether it occurred in the past or will in the future: what transpires on the other side is unknowable from here.

Given the horrific and still-unfolding events of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s collective response to it, one can’t help but wonder whether we are on the cusp of an economic singularity in which the laws and bedrock beliefs that formed the foundation of international economic order for decades break down. The consequences are similarly unknowable, but we suspect a great reset may indeed be upon us. Even if a ceasefire is announced moments after we publish this piece, shocking damage to the global economic system has undoubtedly already been done and certain genies won’t easily be put back into their bottles.

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No, Canada did NOT seize any crypto wallets connected with the #FreedomConvoy, here’s why, by Mark E. Jeftovic

Posted on March 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

Cryptocurrencies are difficult for governments and judicial processes to crack. From Mark E. Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:

Short answer: They can’t

(Unless they’re in a hot wallet on an exchange within Canadian jurisdiction).

Longer answer:

I’m seeing references and hearing anecdotally how the Canadian government froze or even seized crypto wallets associated with the #FreedomConvoy fundraising efforts. Including the sensational headline from Fortune magazine’s “Fed up Ottawa residents win secret suit to freeze the crypto wallets funding Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ protesters“.

…fed up residents

…secret suit

… “Freedom Convoy Protestors” in scare quotes

Oh my.

The article refers to a Mareva Injunction issued by the Ontario Superior Court against the convoy organizers (Dichter, Lich, Barber), Pat King (the convoy crasher in my book), several people who were involved in the Tallycoin fundraiser for the truckers, and then numerous John Doe’s. It orders that 134 crypto wallets be frozen, such that nobody remotely involved with them can basically move or cause to be moved any of the funds in those wallets.

Further, it orders that any wallet that receives funds from any of these wallets also be frozen. Technically that means if somebody were to move a single satoshi to Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, BitBuy, etc – then the receiving hot wallets of those exchanges are technically “frozen” as well.

This isn’t really tenable, and this issue has actually come up before within the context of Bitcoin mining and OFAC compliance. There was a time when Marathon Digital actually tried to create an initiative where they would only mine “fully AML and OFAC compliant” derived blocks. This would have essentially required the censoring Bitcoin transactions and  was widely scorned by the industry. It proved itself to be unworkable, with Marathon  scrapping the program almost immediately. (It is also worth noting here that according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which consults for numerous law enforcement and intelligence agencies, only 0.5% of all Bitcoin transactions are illicit in nature).

Trying to enforce a “taint chain” on specific crypto addresses would run into similar problems to the point where the choice would simply be to shutdown Bitcoin entirely (not possible) or give up.

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ECB’s Lagarde Urges Immediate Crypto Regulation To Stop Putin Evading Sanctions, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 28, 2022 | Leave a comment

They’ve been looking for a good excuse to regulate crypto. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Update: Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), has called on lawmakers to approve a regulatory framework on crypto, hinting at potentially preventing Russia from getting around economic sanctions.

In response to a question on Russia potentially using crypto to evade some of these measures, the ECB president urged action on an existing proposal for a regulatory framework on digital assets.

“Whenever there is a ban or prohibition or a mechanism in place to boycott or prohibit, there are, always criminal ways that will try to circumvent the prohibition or the ban” said Lagarde.

“It’s so critically important that MiCA is pushed through as quickly as possible so we have a regulatory framework within which crypto assets can actually be caught.”

Notably, the European Parliament has delayed a vote on the Markets in Crypto Assets Directive (MiCA) due to fears that it would be “misinterpreted as a de facto Bitcoin ban” over questions surrounding the industry’s energy demands.

*  *  *

As Daniel Roberts and Jeff John Roberts detailed for Decrypt earlier, the largest European military conflict since World War II is raging in Ukraine, and Bitcoin could shape the outcome.

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Bitcon . . .? By Eric Peters

Posted on January 25, 2022 | 8 comments

Call Eric Peters Bitcoin skeptical. From Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

One of the problems with “crypto” is just that – no one seems to know exactly what it is.

Or at least, no seems able to explain what it is.

Somehow, a digitized online representation of a “coin” has immense value, though what gives it any value is difficult to understand. It is not backed by precious metals. It is not issued by a bank.

It’s just there, on the screen.

The willingness of a sufficiency of people to accept that it has value is what gives it value. Dirt could work on this principle. To be fair, crypto is not materially different from U.S. dollars, which have value chiefly because people accept them as having it.

The pieces of paper themselves, have no more intrinsic value than the digitized representation of a “coin” online.

And that of course is the primary danger of both. They have value only because someone (speaking figuratively here) assigned it to them and because others agree to that estimation of value, which isn’t moored to anything, really.

We all pretend the “dollars” – or “coins” – themselves are things of tangible value. That works just as long as it does. Which probably won’t be for very long.

Now, the pieces of paper issued by the private cartel of banks that control their supply are “backed” by the “full faith and credit of the United States,” for whatever that’s worth. And it is probably worth something. Not much, given the value of a “federal” dollar has declined by more than 90 percent since the “federal” reserve began issuing these pieces of paper more than 100 years ago. The value of “crypto” has generally tracked in the opposite direction, a phenomenon that has made it very attractive to people trying to figure out a way to staunch the seemingly unstoppable bleeding out of the value of their money. It’s tempting to transfer “dollars” into “coins” when “coins” seem to hold rather than hemorrhage value.

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Money, funny-money and crypto, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on November 5, 2021 | 4 comments

This is a great explanation of money and how money works in an economy, a shredding of Keynesian economics, a clear warning of what’s to come, and a dashing of hopes that cryptocurrencies will be the replacement for failing fiat currencies. Alasdair Macleod is one of the few economists who understands that debt is not money, that money cannot be a liability (see also “Real Money” by Robert Gore, SLL, September 9, 2015). From Macleod at goldmoney.com:

That the post-industrial era of fiat currencies is coming to an end is becoming a real possibility. Major economies are now stalling while price inflation is just beginning to take off, following the excessive currency debasement in all major jurisdictions since the Lehman crisis and accelerated even further by covid.

The dilemma now faced by central banks is whether to raise interest rates sufficiently to tackle price inflation and lend support to their currencies, or to take one last gamble on yet more stimulus in the hope that recessions can be avoided.

Politics and neo-Keynesian economics strongly favour monetary inflation and continued interest rate suppression. But following that course leads to the destruction of currencies. So, how should ordinary people protect themselves from currency risk?

To assist them, this article draws out the distinctions between money, currency, and bank credit. It examines the claims of cryptocurrencies to be replacement money or currencies, explaining why they will be denied either role. An update is given on the uncanny resemblance between current neo-Keynesian monetary inflation and support for financial asset prices, compared with John Law’s proto-Keynesian policies which destroyed the French economy and currency in 1720.

Assuming we continue to follow Law’s playbook, an understanding why money is only physical gold and silver and nothing else will be vital to surviving what appears to be a looming crisis in financial assets and currencies.

Introduction

With the recent acceleration in the growth of money supply it is readily apparent that government spending is increasingly financed through monetary inflation. Those who hoped it would be a temporary phenomenon are being shown to have been overly optimistic. The excuse that its expansion was only a one-off event limited to supporting businesses and consumers through the covid pandemic is now being extended to seeing them through continuing logistics disruptions along with other unexpected problems. We now face an economic slowdown which will reduce government revenues and, according to policy planners, may require additional monetary stimulation to preclude.

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Hedge Fund CIO: China’s Attempt To Crush Digital Assets Has Backfired Spectacularly, by Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

Posted on October 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Chinese government’s ban of cryptocurrencies is a sign of weakness. From Eric Peters at zerohedge.com:

“Is it your intention to ban or limit the use of cryptocurrencies, like we’re seeing in China?” asked Ted Budd, Republican congressman from North Carolina. “No,” replied Fed Chairman Jay Powell. “No intention to ban them?” asked Budd again. “No intention to ban them, but stablecoins are like money market funds, they’re like bank deposits; they’re to some extent outside the regulatory perimeter, and it’s appropriate that they be regulated,” answered Powell. And as it sunk in that the world’s largest economy would not chase China to stifle private sector innovation in the field of blockchain technology, digital assets prices surged

Getting Real

The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. 59.2% of all official foreign exchange reserves are held as US dollars. 20.5% are euros. 5.8% are Japanese yen. 4.8% are British pounds sterling. 2.6% are Chinese renminbi — slightly more than the 2.2% of reserves held in Canadian dollars. 1.8% are Australian dollars. The remaining few percent are various other small currencies that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Swiss francs would be an example. Some reserves are held in gold. Someday, there will be digital asset reserves too.

For a foreign nation to hold dollars in reserve, it must first acquire them. It can either purchase those dollars in foreign exchange markets, or it can acquire the dollars by selling its goods, services, hard assets, or financial assets. There are consequences to such transactions. One of them is that the dollar’s value relative to other currencies is higher than it would be if these nations were not buying and holding dollars in reserve. Another is that by acquiring so many dollars and holding them in reserve, the US is forced to run a current account deficit.

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The No-coiners don’t get it: It’s not up to the government, by Mark Jeftovic

Posted on September 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Cryptocurrencies don’t need governments’ permission. From Mark Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:

Prometheus Donation of Fire to Mankind – Wilhelm Luksch 1925-1927

My last couple of posts, the first on why a China-style Bitcoin ban can’t happen in Westernized liberal democracies  and the second on how cryptos are a beneficial counterforce to the coming CBDCs seem to have a hit a nerve.

More people than usual made the trip all the way over here to my blog to be sure to tell me how clueless I am and there was a lot of defeatism  in the comments on Zerohedge that all converged around a theme that governments will simply not permit the use of cryptocurrencies once their existence ceases to suit them.

I’ve been involved in cryptos since 2013, and for a long time I too was strategizing out the game theory around why would governments permit cryptos to gain traction.

It wasn’t until relatively recently, that I started to fully grasp something I read a long time ago, before all this crypto business ever started. It was in a rather obscure book by one W R Clement called Quantum Jump: A survival guide for the new Renaissance and it helped me understand the key point of today’s post.

I started alluding to it in A Network State Primer that described how what we understand as “the nation state” is in the process of losing relevance to ascendent network states and crypto-claves. You can chart out the structural differences between those three different governance models based on what the architecture of the monetary layer is:

When it comes to technological leaps like the internet and then public key cryptography and decentralized, non-state, sound money; those who eschew the new paradigms generally do so because they have difficulty fitting the new model into their worldview.

People like Alvin Toffler called this “Future Shock” and he ascribed it mostly to an accelerating rate of change. He wasn’t wrong about that, but what Clement layered atop of that was the ascending level of abstraction.

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How we know that Bitcoin is a force for good, by Mark Jeftovic

Posted on September 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

Private cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are the antidote to Central Bank Digital Currencies. From Mark Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:

Cryptos are the antidote to repressive Central Bank Digital Currencies

Yesterday I wrote up why I don’t think any kind of China-style ban on Bitcoin and cryptos would be tenable in (so-called) liberal democracies here in the West. It referenced an earlier piece that described the threefold governance structure I see competing for relevance over the coming decades.

Somebody linked to those in the comments from a Tom Luongo piece (which I rather enjoyed enough to subscribe to his newsletter) but when I read through some of the other comments around Bitcoin, how it’s a globalist Trojan horse for surveillance capitalism and social credit I realized I needed to get a piece out to speak specifically to this aspect of future governance.

I cover this a lot in The Crypto Capitalist Letter, in fact it’s a pillar of our macro economic thesis (which you can download free here). It all comes down to the differences between real crypto currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Monero, et al and coming Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), like China’s Digital Yuan, like the coming FedCoin, and anything else that will be issued by central banks, directly from governments or even in conjunction with Big Tech platforms.

There are the two main types of digital money that will co-exist in the future.

Each type of digital money corresponds to a governance mode of the future. Which type of this money you make your own or your business’ financial centre of gravity will have an outsized impact on whether you live in the future as a neo-Feudal serf or as a sovereign individual.

Each one has its own fundamental architecture, and the governance and economics that result from those architectures reflect the governance models of the mode that is built on them. This is critical and builds on what I’ve been writing about for  years now, drawing on the work of relatively obscure commentators like Vincent Locascio and Steven Zarlenga. The latter who wrote in his Lost Science of Money, whoever controls the monetary system, controls society.

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Bill’s Grave Doubts About Bitcoin, by Bill Bonner

Posted on June 23, 2021 | 1 comment

If you didn’t know the price of your favorite cryptocurrency and had to assign a value to it based on the claims of it’s proponents, what value could you rationally assign? What criteria would you even use? From Bill Bonner at rogueeconomics.com:

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – Dear Reader, we are working on a shocking new insight.

It came to us yesterday as we were wondering about bitcoin, cryptos, and (a term new to us) “microcurrencies.”

The crypto sector has lost about $1.3 trillion since the beginning of May. Bitcoin itself has been cut in half.

But both colleagues and dear readers insist that the crypto class still has value.

“These are not just money substitutes,” said a colleague. “There are many microcurrencies that make business easier and less costly.”

But when we tried to pin him down on how they work, it was slow going.

“You see, they’re based on smart contracts that are registered on the blockchain and then bypass the middlemen.”

No Beer

All the foam was there; but where was the beer?

Perhaps we are just slow-witted. But the more he explained, the less we understood.

A smart contract, we discovered, is no different from a dumb contract. It can be a 200-page document… or a handshake… with as many “if X when Y, then Z” clauses as you care to put in.

If there is a dispute, it needs to be resolved. How the “smartness” part helps, we don’t know.

“You don’t understand,” an old friend added. “This is a whole new asset class. It is like the beginning of the auto industry. Most of the car manufacturers that started out failed. But those that remained were great successes.”

We still made no headway.

The auto industry produced millions of cars and trucks. It made huge profits. Its U.S. “headquarters” – Detroit… Motown – was once the richest city in America.

But crypto? What is the “asset?” Why is it an asset at all?

As far as we can tell, it is like Artificial Intelligence – one part new technology and nine parts old claptrap.

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