Bitcoin Central Is Now Licensed To Operate As A Bank
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Well judging from the Bitcoin forum they will have debit cards out soon with dual EUR / BTC currency, I guess that would make it a bit more ubiquitous than local scrip, time will tell....
I agree the price chart is a bit scary but have you looked at GBP/USD, AUD/JPY, EUR/AUD etc etc they look just as scary, I really liked Swiss Francs right up until their central bank started pegging at a 1.20 EUR floor, screw that we are in a race to the bottom now....I like Schiff's gold denominated account for me that is a better play than BTC for now, but I will keep my eye on developments. If a major bank or government institution were to back it I think it could spread and I like the idea of a decentralised fiat more than most of the options out there now.
Don't get me wrong, I am gonna back the truck up on gold again after they beat it down a bit more before QE4 next week...
Yes.
Yes, you can. Easily. Just don't print any more.. or print just enough to avoid deflation.
As you can see inflation has been under control much more since we lost the gold standard. Nixon ended the gold standard in 1971.
For an even better view of the down-sides of gold backed currency watch the documentary "The Secret of Oz" by Bill Still. I really do recommend it.
Yes yes I know you will say you've read a library of books so I shouldn't even have an opinion. Well, I'm not as well read as you for sure.. but if you ever hope to convince masses of people that your views on money and anarchy are correct you'll have to do it w/out telling them to read a library unfortunately - right or wrong. You'll have to make solid points in a succinct way. I'm open to changing my mind at any time.
*sigh* I surrender.
The sad thing about people like Bill Still, is that while I do believe in their heart they mean well, the fact they don't understand economics, and subscribe to the delusion of government over the market, means they end up so far from truth.
But they are GREAT documentary filmmakers, so there will always be a fringe audience who feels like they are educated on this stuff having watched his movies.
No you're entitled to an opinion. Your opinion is only as valuable as the facts it is based on though. The same thing applies to everyone's opinion, including mine.
I didn't ask anyone to read anything except to check out Mises' regression theorem.
I am sorry, but you are probably not going to be well informed if you're watching partisan documentaries for your facts. I posted something similar about other documentaries recently. They are heavily biased and its perfect because the people watching them usually don't have familiarity with the topic, and so can't analyze the claims made, or data presented.
As far as you claiming I won't be able to win people over if I rely on reason and evidence, you're right. And so, I don't really give a shit about the masses. I only care about people interested in reason and evidence.
I'm more interested in what facts you rely on than your open mindedness.
You didn't answer my question. You avoided it.
As you can see inflation has been under control much more since we lost the gold standard. Nixon ended the gold standard in 1971.
When was gold inflated?
Also, what is "inflation under control"? Why is that a good thing? During America's most prosperous periods of growth, there was persistent deflation or relative price stability.
Also, those are government inflation numbers from the CPI. Do you understand how they are calculated?
Here are CPI numbers from Shadowstats
Alternate Inflation Charts
Look, I have work to do, and America in particular is loaded with people who are monetary cranks (see Greenbackers like Bill Still). Y'all believe whatever you want, and buy as many Bitcoins as you like.
Hit me up in 10 years and let me know how it turned out.
^^As you may or may not know, housing costs and real estate prices have conviniently been left out of the inflation index since 1983, masking the real actual inflation. The purpose obviously to hide the mass inflation since the abolishment of Bretton Woods. Yes, economic sleight of hand is a very deceptive but powerful practise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/business/02charts.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/business/02charts.html
Economics is one of the most corrupted 'sciences' today.
Ya I realized after I posted that you're coming at this from an Anarchist perspective. If you think governments are invalid then you'll think the government currency is also invalid. I understand this 100%. If I were in an anarchy I'd probably stick to gold, silver, and gems for currency.
I wouldnt say i feel educated about it. But I've seen lots of different documentaries on money/gold .. they're great to watch while eating or resting. Either way, in order to get a point across to a large group of people these days you'll at least need to make a solid point over the timespan of a documentary of 2. Although most don't even have the attention span for that.
I did watch that one vid you posted a while back where the guy basically proved that the U.S. government is not valid, not contractually obligated to protect you, nor are you contractually obligated towards it. It was interesting and I had a few comments on it but sometimes avoid them because I usually have low forum-stamina.
Agree 100%
True but aren't most of all vids biased or partisan?
Well it might be true that you wont win people over if you rely on reason alone, but that's not exactly what I said. I said you'd just need to make your point in a quick way. Throw all the reason/evidence you want in there.. it will help your cause.
The graph shows that a gold backed currency was inflated many times especially in the early 1900s. You got me on not knowing the exact specifics of how much gold is in each dollar and therefore not knowing exactly how much it was inflated (according to CPI).
Even if you look at inflation from the side of changing money supply.. gold's supply is obviously easily changed. If there is a flood of gold being mined from a new vein gold will inflate.
So how could gold not be prone to inflation/deflation?
Also, your last comments are about the definition of inflation/CPI. Agreed that CPI may not be the best indicator of inflation but either way you prob need to admit that gold can easily inflate/deflate based on gold supply, right?
I hate to side with (or speak for) guerilla, but I don't think most gold advocates want just gold to be used as currency, but rather competing currencies, of which gold could be one. If you have currencies freely competing against each other the more stable currency should be used by more people.
Completely correct...I remember when Australia changed the weighting of Petrol from the basket of goods with their explantaion being "As machines become more efficient there is less reliance on fossil fuels".
What a load of crap....its just a way to re-jig the CPI and for them to hide the massive inflation that has occured in the last 10 years. Now for anyone with an economics background will realise that the difference between the reported inflation rate and real inflation is quite massive.
Now you have to ask why? because certain groups/people are manipulating the public figures. Just like Obamas drop in unemployment rate whilst the participation rate stayed the same.
The major reason for doctoring the inflation rate is to be able to continue putting money into the fiat money reserve banking ponzi scheme.
As long as the ordinary citizen believes the official inflation rate, their wage demands are going to reflect that. Now, if on the other hand you're a banker fully aware of how the money market works, you can lend money straight from the Fed (which is essentially the taxpayer), loan that taxpayer money back to the taxpayer and then give yourself a huge bonus. A quite elaborate scheme actually.
Now, if the average joe were to travel more than they did, they would have discovered that they could buy significantly less (something like 20% less for Europeans) in popular travel destinations like Thailand.
The reason why people haven't discovered their significant wealth loss is because of the size of the ponzi scheme. All of the EU has the Euro, which means that internal trade within stays the same relative price. Then you have the Chinese pegging to the dollar even though their currency is worth significantly more. So the Euro (being inflated) and the dollar (being inflated) remains its purchasing power parity against Chinese production.
But go outside the Euro/US peg zone and you will see that you can buy significantly less than 10 years ago.
The problem with the Bill Stills thing, is the problem with minarchism (small government philosophy). First, there has never been a government which hasn't inflated fiat currency. Second, men are not angels, and no matter what rules you put on them, they won't avoid exploiting power.
I'm not criticizing Stills' politics, but he makes the same mistake with his politics he does with his money. He thinks government can be reformed into what it never was.
Not to mention, that there is no reason to have a money monopoly. Money is a good, and the market can supply it. The only reason why government money "works" is due to legal tender laws. You are forced to pay your taxes in reserve notes (btw, a note is a debt instrument, what we call money today are actually debt receipts).
I'd say everything has an angle, but there is stuff that is propaganda, and then there is stuff that has factual elements to it.
I don't know where this chart comes from. Also, the Federal Reserve came into existence in 1913.
Gold was $20 an ounce in America for decades, until FDR confiscated private gold, and revalued the USD to $35/ounce. That continued until 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window.
But I don't see evidence of gold discoveries driving inflation.
Gold is gold. An ounce of gold today will be an ounce of gold 100 years from now. What changes is purchasing power. Purchasing power fluctuates.
If you look at the USD, an ounce of gold was $20 about 100 years ago. Today I think it is around $1700. That's a huge loss of value in the dollar. Remember, an ounce of gold 100 years ago is still an ounce of gold today.
But a $1 from 100 years ago buys about $0.04 of what it buys today.
Look, if gold is scarce, people will mine more. They will shift to another currency. They will find a way to facilitate economic transactions.
The whole gold deflating/inflating thing makes no sense to me.
The reason why fiat money is an issue, is that the cost to produce a $1 is the same as to produce a $100. In fact, the cost to produce money digitally as the FED does by altering balances at banks, is near zero. So they can poof magically create money out of thin air.
You can't magically create gold or silver or palladium or copper out of thin air. Because you can't it limits the ability of the government to spend beyond it's receipts and ability to borrow.
Bitcoin is another fiat currency, but it will never be ubiquitous because it has no legal tender advantage, it's upper bound for production won't allow it to become the choice of the market, and there is no secondary demand. As soon as someone comes up with a better or more novel crypto-currency, Bitcoins will rapidly become worthless.
Whether you like gold or not, and I am not a gold bug, it does have a several thousand year run as money, all over the world. That counts for something in my book. I suspect we won't be talking much about Bitcoin in 10 years.
I think if you've got nukes being detonated at altitude over the US you've got far more important things to worry about than your bank balance. If you think gold is going to help you in such circumstances, then you're delusional. You can't eat gold or wipe your ass with it. If I have food in a post apocalyptic world and you have gold, I'm not going to trade you my food for your gold.
I came across that graph while reading some of this guys blog a long time ago:
Observations: 100 Years of Inflation Rate History (through 2011)
He's got a lot of great long term analysis on the US markets, inflation, etc.
Since there are 2 ways to look at inflation I'll talk about both of them. I know many here don't like to talk about CPI as inflation but that's what people everywhere often refer to when they speak of inflation for right or wrong. I also agree CPI can and is manipulated so it's not the best indicator.
CPI - When looking at the graph what I thought was that since you could get a certain amount of gold per dollar bill that means the purchase power of a dollar bill is tied to the purchase power of a certain amount of gold. So, the graph seemed to show purchase power (Inflation/Deflation to some) of both the dollar and gold for the same basket of goods.
But thinking about this further I assumed a lot and didn't think it out well enough. I didn't know how often they changed the amount of gold they'd give you per dollar.. or if it was continually changed. But I think I found the historical data you just looked at and I'd say they didn't change it often and the price of gold was probably 'fixed' for long periods of time like I originally assumed.
http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf
Because NOTHING is that stable man. The price of gold per dollar is like that for so many years because it was Fixed by the government. Since a certain amt of gold was fixed to the dollar for so many years it seems that their purchasing powers were also fixed.. so the chart showed CPI inflation/deflation of both gold and the dollar during the years where the gold/dollar conversion remained nearly constant.
But I'm still making some assumptions here because I don't know the full history of gold and money during this period nor the details of how the US government converted the money to gold.
Money Supply - True inflation is measured by an increase in money supply, right? I think this is the definition most Austrian economists use. Well if gold is your money you can see how this is very possible.. although deflation is much more possible. I've just heard in various places that hyper inflation and deflation can cause economic catastrophe in a country. I've also heard that warring nations used to manipulate the gold/silver supply available to another country causing massive deflation usually and crippling economies. Sorry, don't have the sources.. so discredit this if you want (Info on this might be in the Bill Still doc).
But the point is that Gold/Silver are possibly as prone to inflation/deflation as paper money.. if inflation/deflation is tied to money supply. Gold/Silver are definitely not immune to inflation/deflation.
What if gold was suddenly seen as ugly by most of the world and everyone went to sell their jewelry? The amt of gold total gold in the world would not change but the amount of circulating gold would go up drastically causing a huge change in purchasing power. This is why gold is as arbitrary of a currency as anything else. The value of the gold/money is in the eye of the beholders.. how could that not be arbitrary. Anything could be used as money, but ya some things are better than others for stability but it doesnt make them any less arbitrary.
I guess it's about what do you trust more.. man/government to keep the purchasing power of your money stable or leaving the purchasing power of your money more controllable by the market, social fads, nature, and friendly/enemy countries.
I am personally not saying paper is necessarily better than gold/silver.. just saying gold/silver is not necessarily better than properly controlled paper. I understand why you will always hate paper though because you hate the idea of the controllers.
But properly managed paper has the potential to be a more stable currency than gold/silver if stability in purchase power is something you strive for. Stability means keeping it's purchasing power nearly constant (or at least not having runaway inflation/deflation) for a basket of commonly purchased goods. Markets like stability and predictability in the value of their currency. Massive inflation or deflation can cause serious havoc in economies resulting in major job loss, etc.
I am not pro-bit coin btw.
This post was way too long. Feel free not to reply to my ramblings.
But one last question for you is this. Why are things so bad now? From what I can tell money in your world view should just be like any other commodity. We are totally free to purchase gold or any other commodity right now! You can use gold or anything else to store your wealth for the long term and convert it only temporarily when you want to spend it. There are gold ETFs that actually store the physical gold for you and you can buy/sell them at any time instantly. What does a currency really matter if you have the freedom to convert your money back and forth from another form right now? What's the worry?
Do you have an ideal currency, or should it just be a market-determined one?
I'd prob be fine with market determined currency.. I just need to know what rules (or lack of) to fucking play by and then I'll play. It's just a god damn game either way till you die.
One or 2 nukes would not destroy the US but it could destroy all electronics and therefore all electronic currencies is my point.
But ya, in a nuke holocaust I wouldn't trade food for gold either even temporarily until it was an established and reliable form of intermediate trading with stable results. Bullets would be of more value per oz than the gaudy yellow metal. Not to mention if masses and masses of people died the value per ounce of all that left-over gold in the world would go way down. Amount of gold per earths human population is something to consider.
I have no idea why I wrote except that it was 2.30 in the morning and I was at least mildly retarded at that point. Please disregard.