by James Rickards
September 5,
2017
from
DailyReckoning Website
As an economic
system, Technocracy needs an appropriate type of
currency as an accounting system, and blockchain
technology is a likely foil.
However,
Technocrats in the 1930s said that energy was the
only appropriate accounting system.
As I read this,
I would fully expect to see a global blockchain
system having some relation to, or 'peg', to either
carbon or energy itself.
Either way, the
days of the 'wild west' for Bitcoin may be in
jeopardy.
Source
Interest in Bitcoin is red hot at the moment. It's impossible to
open a website, listen to a podcast, or watch a video in the
financial space without hearing about the meteoric rise in the price
of Bitcoin.
Maybe you know a "Bitcoin millionaire" who bought five hundred
Bitcoins a few years back for $50,000 and is now sitting on a
Bitcoin fortune worth over $2,000,000.
It's true, those people
actually do exist.
Yet the crypto-hysteria is distracting you from a scary truth no one
is talking about. There is every indication that governments,
regulators, tax authorities, and the global elite are moving in for
the crypto-kill.
The future of Bitcoin may
be a dystopia in which
Big Brother controls what's called
"the
blockchain" and decides when and how you can buy or sell
anything and everything.
Furthermore, cryptocurrency technology could be the very mechanism
used
by global elites to replace the
dollar based financial system.
In 1958, Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party of
China and China's dictatorial leader was confronted with demoralized
intellectuals and artists who were alienated by Communist rule.
As a policy response, he
declared a new policy of intellectual freedom.
Mao declared,
"The policy of
letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought
contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and
the progress of science."
This declaration is
referred to as the "Hundred Flowers Campaign" (often misquoted as
the "thousand flowers campaign").
The response to Mao's
invitation was an enthusiastic outpouring of creative thought and
artistic expression.
What came next was no surprise to those familiar with the operation
of state power. Once the intellectuals and artists emerged, it was
easy for Mao's secret police to round them up, kill and torture
some, and send others to "reeducation camps" where they learned
ideological conformity.
The
Hundred Flowers Movement was a
trap for those who placed their trust in the state.
It was also a taste of
things to come in the form of the much more violent and
comprehensive Cultural Revolution of 1964-1974 in which all traces
of Chinese bourgeoisie culture and much of China's historical legacy
were eradicated.
Something similar is going on with Bitcoin and the Distributed
ledger technology (DLT)
today. Governments have been patiently watching
blockchain technology develop and
grow outside their control for the past eight years.
Libertarian supporters of blockchain celebrate this lack of
government control. Yet, their celebration is premature, and their
belief in the sustainability of powerful systems outside government
control is naïve.
Governments don't like competition especially when it comes to
money. Governments know they cannot stop blockchain, in fact they
don't want to.
What they want is to
control it using powers of regulation, taxation, and investigation
and ultimately more coercive powers including arrest and
imprisonment of individuals who refuse to obey government mandates
with regard to blockchain.
Blockchain does not exist in the ether (despite the name of one
cryptocurrency) and it does not reside on Mars.
Blockchain depends on,
...all of which are
subject to government control.
A group of major companies, all regulated by government, have
announced a joint effort to develop an open-source blockchain as a
uniform standard for all blockchain applications.
The group includes,
That's not exactly five
guys in hoodies working in a garage. That's a sign of the
corporate-state consortium taking over.
An elite U.S. legal institution called the Uniform Law Commission
(ULC),
that proposes model laws intended for adoption in all fifty states,
has released its latest proposal called the "Uniform Regulation of
Virtual Currency Businesses Act."
This new law will not only provide a regulatory scheme for state
regulators, but will also be a platform for litigation by private
plaintiffs and class action lawyers seeking recourse against real or
imagined abuses by digital coin exchanges and facilities.
Once litigation begins,
anonymity is the first casualty.
Cryptocurrencies and the Super-Elites Plan
Consider the following additional developments:
On August 1, 2017,
the SEC announced "Guidance on Regulation of Initial Coin
Offerings," the first step toward requiring fundraising through
blockchain-based tokens to register with the government.
On August 1, 2017, the World Economic Forum, host body to the
Davos conference of global super-elites, published a paper
entitled "Four reasons to question the hype around blockchain."
On August 7, 2017, China announced they will begin using
blockchain to collect taxes and issue "electronic invoices" to
citizens there.
Perhaps most
portentously, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
has weighed in. In a special report dated June 2017, the IMF had
this to say about blockchain:
"Distributed
ledger technology (DLT), in particular, could spur change in
the financial sector... DLT can be categorized as "permissionless"
or "permissioned" depending on who can participate in the
consensus-driven validation process.
Permissionless DLTs
allow anyone to read, transact on, and participate in the
validation process. These open schemes (that underlie Bitcoin,
for instance) could be very disruptive if successfully
implemented.
By contrast, in
permissioned DLTs, the validation process is controlled by a
pre-selected group of participants ("consortium") or managed by
one organization ("fully-private"), and thus serve more as a
common communications platform."
IMF releases require
expert translation because they are never written in plain English,
and the real meaning is always hidden between the lines.
But, the thrust of this
report language is clear. The IMF favors "permissioned" systems over
"open schemes." The IMF also favors control by a "pre-selected group
of participants" or "one organization," rather than allowing
"anyone" to participate.
This paper should be viewed as the first step in the IMF's plan to
migrate its existing form of world money, the special drawing right
or SDR, onto a DLT platform controlled by the IMF.
In time, all other forms
of money would be banned.
These and other developments all point toward an elite group
including,
-
the IMF
-
JPMorgan
-
the Davos crowd
-
the IRS
-
SEC,
...and other agencies
converging to shut down the existing free-wheeling blockchain
ecosphere, and replace it with a "permissioned" system under
"consortium" control.
Big Brother is coming to the blockchain...
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