Happy Friday TDVers! Grab a cold one, settle in, put up your feet, and enjoy your Friday tradition: Seeing what TDVers like you had to say about our week's content.
Wait, did you want to join in on the discourse? Of course you did. Send your questions, comments, queries, and concerns to tdv@dollarvigilante.com, comment on a post, or get on the forums.
On to the feedback…
BITCOINS AND THE FED
To whom it may concern (Jeff),
So the decline in value of USD due to the printing of money means there is no point of holding it. Other means of storing wealth for example metals like gold and silver are excellent forms of investment. But since we live in the 21st century digital currency is needed. As a Bitcoin investor I like the idea of decentralized currency and that you can support the network yourself through mining. However since the Bitcoin economy right now is nothing but a piss in the ocean compared to the USD for example. What is stopping someone like the feds from taking a trip to silicon valley and spending a couple hundred million dollars perfecting an Asic semiconductor and then kitting out a few data centers. They could easily control over 50 percent of the hashing power furthermore tampering with the block chain and potentially sabotaging the worlds next reserve currency. After all the NSA did design the sha-256 cryptography. Bitcoin needs more major exchanges all around the world. If corporate hoops need to be jumped through like the 25 million dollars required for insurance then so be it, Bitcoin needs to be connected with the real world, isolation will kill it. What are your thoughts is this or is this not a problem?
Thomas C.
Jeff's Response:
Hi Thomas,
Jesus, why don’t you just tell the Federal Reserve how to destroy Bitcoin!
I’m joking (mostly). While the Federal Reserve could definitely do a lot of things to cause problems for Bitcoin they could also do all the same things with anything else. What is stopping the Federal Reserve from buying up all the gold in the world with freshly printed FRNs?
You made a good point though and that is that Bitcoin is such a small market that it’d be much easier for the Federal Reserve or US government to destroy it. However, they’ll never be able to do it through mining. That’s because Bitcoin was designed to make it progressively harder and harder to mine and it will take more than 100 years more to produce the remaining 10 million Bitcoins. So, they can’t do it that way unless they have an incredibly long time scale. One thing they could do is try buying up every Bitcoin for freshly printed FRNs. But, again, even with a current $1 billion market cap on Bitcoin, there are many people who will not sell at almost any price… and, also, if $1 billion of buying were to come into Bitcoin in the next month I’d guesstimate that Bitcoin would quickly swell to over $1,000 from its current $100 level. Meaning, again, the more they try to buy the higher the price goes and the less they can buy each time.
I’d bet that if they ever tried that they’d likely make thousands of millionaires and billionaires who would all realize what was happening and sell, leaving the Federal Reserve with 11 million worthless Bitcoins (as there would be no market) and all those new millionaires and billionaires would start up a new Bitcoin that was less prone to being hacked or manipulated.
What is amazing to me, however, is how many people keep putting up with the Federal Reserve and the US government! Doesn’t everyone realize we can end both these criminal organizations by buying hard assets and Bitcoins and not paying taxes?
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY USED TO AVOID COMMITMENT
Gary –
Thanks for the great ideas and great writing. I just wanted to suggest an idea (between you, me, and whichever guvmint bureaucrat is reading my
e-mail). I am a psychiatrist and something occurred to me after reading your Feedback Friday about relationships:
You referenced some early childhood trauma and issues with commitment. If you have an underlying fear of commitment or an attachment problem, perhaps that is the reason you are subconsciously drawn to statist females. They are "safe" women to date, because there is no chance that you will ever
maintain a long term relationship with one. In other words, perhaps the part of your mind that is afraid to make a commitment is driving you to date women who are intellectually unavailable. It may be keeping you stuckin a loop.
If you haven't read up on Attachment Theory, you might be interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory
Just a thought. You seem to be very psychologically aware. Keep up the great writing, and wishing you best health.
-AK.
Gary's Response:
It's funny you should say that, AK. Jeff and I just met up in Boston and drove for a few hours to get to the middle of Nowhere, New Hampshire to catch the last couple of days of Porcfest. And during the drive he said much the same thing!
There is probably plenty of truth to that notion… Maybe I'm just using my moral philosophy to avoid the commitment that my childhood trauma makes me fear so much. Being at Porcfest will help me test that. I'm surrounded by beautiful and moral women who don't want to steal anyone's money, or kill innocent strangers here or on other continents, or put anyone in a cage for their personal consumption choices. It's very appealing.
I'm fully aware that in my day-to-day life, everyone I come in contact with is an outright criminal. Granted, they were born into slavery and brainwashed from birth. That may make them pitiable but no less responsible and despicable. No matter how nice a person is, how funny they may be or how charming…no matter how much they may agree with me on some important issue (prohibition, police abuses, guns, etc), I just know that they fundamentally support the central immoralities of political authority and taxation.
A lot of people at Porcfest live in New Hampshire because they came here as part of the Free State Project…something I actually signed up for myself over a decade ago. The idea behind the project was to gain some critical mass of liberty-minded voters to use the political process to roll back the size of government in one state. I've since stopped regarding politics of any sort as a legitimate means to promote freedom. (It's like getting a job as an overseer at a plantation so you can try to talk the other overseers into beating the slaves less often.) But the project did get a lot of libertarians to congregate in New Hampshire (and from the chats I had around the bonfire last night, it seems that there is a definite slide toward anarchism among the attendees). I did consider moving to the state, perhaps to the city of Manchester. But quite frankly, New Hampshire just didn't appeal to me. It was just so thinly populated. I no longer want to live in a megalopolis like the New York of my childhood and early adulthood. But New Hampshire was just too far in the other direction. That's why I settled on the Twin Cities. In terms of size and density, they are just right for me.
But after just one night at Porcfest I find myself questioning my decision. Over the past couple of years I've just grown too weary of living among criminal slaves. It's impossible for me to forget that everyone I see is harboring these horrible collectivist ideas…that they are all deeply immoral. I have to tread carefully in every conversation, avoiding current events along with other seemingly innocuous topics like "education" and real estate. It's exhausting.
It's wonderful to be at Porcfest and just know that while you are surrounded by all types of people with different backgrounds and different tastes, they all share the common believe that each person truly owns his or her own life. No excuses from any of them for taxation or regulation or the organized aggression of the state. And there are a lot of very pretty women here. Maybe at one of these Porcfests I'll figure out if it's philosophy that's really keeping me from commitment…but if things did work out, she'd have to be willing to move to Chile eventually…
THAILAND
Hey Gary and Jeff,
I couldn't help but write in and comment on the latest Feedback Friday. I especially enjoyed Jeff's comments regarding the lack of concern his wife had for politics and politicians.
I moved to Thailand about 5 1/2 years ago, met a beautiful Thai lady, and was fortunate enough to convince her to marry me. I think the wisest thing I did was not bring up politics and government until after we were married. Had I done so before I'm not totally convinced she would have stuck with me.
Now when I start a rant on governments, particularly the one in the USSA (which is where I was spawned) and she yawns, rolls her eyes, and turns up the volume on her favourite Thai soap opera. Truthfully, I have finally convinced her that all governments are corrupt (I purposely avoid any negative comments about the King) and she now agrees that, for the most part, governments only job is to steal from the people. The latest round of protests in Bangkok, which have been overshadowed by the protests in Turkey, have finally started her thinking more about how corrupt government is. However, because most Thais ignore the government anyway, she still doesn't get very excited about it all.
I did read her an article that talked about the government requiring all businesses that collect VAT will be required to report, monthly, every VAT transaction including what was sold, the amount, the purchaser, etc starting in 2014. This is an expansion from the summary reports currently required. That got her attention since she owns a business. But, in true Thai fashion, she merely agreed that the end result will be far less VAT collected, or at least reported. It will be another regulation happily ignored by the Thais.
Enjoy your missives and look forward to them.
Best regards,
Steve
Jeff’s Response:
This is exactly the kind of thing I keep trying to impress upon Gary. It's just the decaying, corrupt Western world where people are so eager to be stolen from by politicians and do as they're told by the authorities. The rest of the world is amazingly anarchist. They may not realize it because it's so normal for everyone in these countries to despise government, wish that government would just go away, and generally ignore the government in their everyday lives. For these people it's usually just not worth it to talk about how much the government sucks. May I suggest, however, that when you talk to her about the philosophical underpinnings of statelessness, you do so when her favorite soap opera isn't on?
And let me also strongly suggest that those of you still in the West just get out. Liberty enclaves like the one in New Hampshire obviously have their appeal…but ultimately they are still in the USSA and that alone subjects them to great geopolitical risk. Latin America is already mostly like what the people at Porcfest hope New Hampshire will become…with the added bonus of not being within USSA borders. That's why I started my own liberty enclave in Chile, a country that is already doing great and where things are still going to get a lot better.
If you absolutely cannot get out of the US, then try to get to someplace like New Hampshire where you'll have the support of like-minded people. And be sure to sign up for TDV Homegrown for tips and strategies on how keeping your money and freedom in tact during the collapse. If you are ready to get out, however, then Galt's Gulche, Chile is the perfect place for you. Find out more about why by clicking here.
In the meantime, there in Thailand, I'd advise you to stand for the 2 minute "national anthem' of the King they play before each movie. The Thais take that King very seriously!
