Martin Armstrong Reports on a Secret Meeting in London to Ban Cash

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At this point, anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention to the central planning economic totalitarians running the fraudulent global financial system is aware of the blatant push in the media to acclimate the masses to accepting a “cashless society.”

In the mind of an economic tyrant, banning cash represents the holy grail. Forcing the plebs onto a system of digital fiat currency transactions offers total control via a seamless tracking of all transactions in the economy, and the ability to block payments if an uppity citizen dares get out of line.

While we’ve all seen the idiotic arguments for banning cash, i.e., it will allow central planners to more efficiently centrally plan economies into the ground, Martin Armstrong is reporting on a secret meeting in London with the aim of getting rid of any economic privacy that remains by ending cash.

From Armstrong Economics:

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New York Launches BitLicense Proposal – How Bad is it?

Screen Shot 2014-07-18 at 3.05.31 PMRight off the bat, I want to make it completely clear that I first became attracted to Bitcoin from an entirely ideological perspective. Having worked on Wall Street for ten years, I saw first hand the immorality, destructiveness and criminality inherent in our current monetary and financial system. In fact, I became so disillusioned and disgusted with the industry I resigned from a lucrative job in January 2010. Thus began a long journey in which I looked for answers anywhere I could, in most cases finding very few. It wasn’t until I came across Bitcoin and recognized its revolutionary force for good that I became far more optimistic about our future as a species.

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Blythe Masters’ Ex-Husband Launches Bitcoin Hedge Fund from the Island of Jersey

Screen Shot 2014-07-11 at 2.11.01 PMBlythe Masters is perhaps the most maligned human being on earth by silver investors due to suspicions of JP Morgan’s manipulation in the silver market. Well she’s back in the news, but it has nothing to do with silver. Rather, the news relates to the fact that her ex-husband and commodities traders, Daniel Masters, has just launched a Bitcoin hedge fund from the island of Jersey, a British Crown dependency.

We learn from Newsweek that:

Daniel Masters, a 50-year-old veteran commodities trader, started working for some of the largest companies in the world right out of university, trading in London, New York and Zug, Switzerland, for JPMorgan Chase and Phibro before moving on to the New York Mercantile Exchange, a short walk from Wall Street. By all appearances, it was your standard Wall Street career.

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Networks vs. Hierarchies: Which Will Win? Niall Furguson Weighs In

Networks are not planned by a single authority; they are the main source of innovation but are relatively fragile. Hierarchies exist primarily because of economies of scale and scope, beginning with the imperative of self-defense. To that end, but for other reasons too, hierarchies seek to exploit the positive externalities of networks. States need networks, for no political hierarchy, no matter how powerful, can plan all the clever things that networks spontaneously generate. But if the hierarchy comes to control the networks so much as to compromise their benign self-organizing capacities, then innovation is bound to wane.

– From Niall Furguson’s recent article Networks and Hierarchies

I’m not always a huge fan of Niall Furguson, but his latest article in The American Interest, simply titled Networks and Hierarchies is worth reading. Readers of Liberty Blitzkrieg will be well aware that I believe the most significant battle of our era is between the forces of Decentralization vs. Centralization. Mr. Furguson takes that battle and looks at it from a historical perspective, describing it as Networks vs. Hierarchies, and posits that indeed much of our collective history has been characterized by the struggle between these two forces. In fact, he starts out the article with the following question:

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The Coming Digital Anarchy

Daniel Larimer, who is working on a tool called Bitshares to apply blockchain technology to banking, insurance and company shareholding, believes that this new breed of technologies will ultimately render government entirely obsolete.

“If you think about it, what is the reason for government? It’s a way of reaching global consensus over the theory of right and wrong, global consensus over who’s guilty and who’s innocent, over who owns what.

“They’re going to be losing legitimacy as more open, transparent systems are able to provide that function without having to rely on force. That’s my mission in life.”

– From the excellent article published in The Telegraph yesterday, The Coming Digital Anarchy

Many of you may have already read this article considering it generated quite a bit of buzz yesterday when it was published. For those who haven’t, I highly recommend it.

While those of us who have been interested in Bitcoin for years may not learn anything “new,” it’s a great piece to send to friends and family members who have yet to make the plunge.

For those who haven’t been a fan of Bitcoin due to natural skepticism, confusion or any other ailment, this article presents in an easy to understand manner the inherently revolutionary characteristics embedded within Blockchain technology.

We have a chance to truly decentralize power for the first time in human history. We must not let this amazing opportunity slip away.

Here are some of my favorite excerpts. From the Telegraph:

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This is Huge – Bitcoin Apps May Finally be Coming to Apple

Screen Shot 2013-11-25 at 5.56.51 PMApple’s brand suffered earlier this year when the company decided to ban the  Blockchain Bitcoin app. In fact, it unleashed such a firestorm that diehard technologists and Bitcoin fans took to YouTube to post videos of themselves destroying their iPhones in a number of creative ways, including with a sniper rifle and a machete. In the event you haven’t seen these before, you can watch some of them here.

Moving along to the topic at hand, many people are closely scrutinizing Apple’s policies today due to the kickoff of the company’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference. For folks within the Bitcoin community, focus has been on a small recent entry within the section on “Purchasing and Currencies” within the document: App Store Review Guidelines. See below:

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My Latest Interview with Financial Survival Network – Creating a Decentralized World

Creating an ever connected, yet increasingly decentralized world is no easy task. Nevertheless, it is something I believe humanity must do in order to traverse the current challenging times and come out the other side better off than before. Yesterday, I highlighted what I believe is an extremely important article on the worker co-op movement. … Read more

What is Payment Protocol “Ripple” and How Does it Allow for Physically Backed Digital Gold Currency Exchange

I’ve known about Ripple for close to a year now. I’ve been meaning to write a post on it for several months, but since doing so is such a difficult effort I kept putting it off. The most accurate expression I’ve seen to-date describing the daunting task of explaining Ripple to someone who has never heard of it is the following line published in a recent Bitcoin Magazine article:

If you’re ever explaining Bitcoin to someone and they’re getting it, start talking about Ripple, just to confuse them again.

That was precisely how I felt when a friend of mine first introduced me to Ripple. I had only recently really gotten behind Bitcoin, and now I had to try to understand something else? Even worse, something that seemed far more complicated. While I was interested in the idea right off the bat because I have a huge degree of trust in this person’s opinion on technology, it seemed overwhelming so I put the entire thing to the side.

My perspective changed later in the year when another friend of mine asked me if I knew about Ripple. It turns out he is friends with the head of Markets and Trading at Ripple Labs, Phil Rapoport. Since Phil is based in NYC, and I was headed there, I decided to set up a meeting and develop a more informed opinion on the subject.

By the time I met with Phil, I had put a lot more thought into Ripple in order to ask good questions by the time he showed up. I was highly skeptical for many reasons.

Ripple is not particularly embraced within many areas of the Bitcoin community, and I can understand why. Going in, I had many doubts. It is first and foremost a payment protocol, and secondly a “math based currency.” Since I couldn’t grasp the payment aspect until my meeting with Phil, I had spent all of my time thinking about the currency aspect of it, and that part was not appealing to me when compared to Bitcoin.

First off, the currency is pre-mined. This means that all the units are already in existence from day one and controlled by the creators, as opposed to Bitcoin, where the currency is mined over time by computers confirming transactions and ensuring the system runs smoothly. The distinction is important since the distribution process for Ripple is entirely opaque, while the distribution process for Bitcoin is far more transparent. While you do not know who exactly receives the bitcoins as each block is created, you do know how many are being distributed and at what pace until that moment in 2140 when the very last BTC is mined. With Ripple (the native currency of the protocol is known as XRP), the only thing we know is that there are 100 billion in existence (the most there will ever be) and that the founders kept 20 billion for themselves. The remaining 80 billion have been allocated to a company called Ripple Labs, which is in charge of distributing the remaining XRP as they deem appropriate. To-date, about 9.5% of the 80 billion have been distributed and you can track the progress here.

From a business standpoint, I can understand why this would be the case. They can sell some of it into the market to pay day-to-day expenses (Ripple already has a total valuation of about $1.4 billion), they can allocate it to employees as compensation, they can give it away via charity such as their partnership with the World Community Grid, and most importantly they can gift them to strategic “Gateways” (more on those later) in order to grow the payment system into what it needs to become in order to succeed.

One of the things that I and many others in the Bitcoin community have loved about Bitcoin is the fact that some poor computer nerd could have started mining bitcoins from his home computer several years back and now be a millionaire. It is very grassroots in that way. The people who saw its potential early on had the ability to participate in what was kind of like a decentralized IPO. All you needed was a little vision and some computer chops. There is something brilliant and beautiful in that distribution process. While mining is now a very expensive affair and out of the reach of the average person, this wasn’t the case in the beginning when there was far more risk involved in the entire experiment.

With Ripple, a somewhat equitable early distribution process was never on the table. The founders have/are allocating the currency in a highly centralized and opaque manner. There’s something about this that rubs many in the crypto-currency community the wrong way. Moreover, because Bitcoin is such a grass roots creation, it is simply much more political than Ripple is or ever will be. Buying Bitcoin and supporting it is for many of us an expression of disgust with the Federal Reserve in particular, and the legacy banking system in general. While many supporters of Ripple will most definitely harbor similar sentiments, buying XRP isn’t really a statement, while buying and spending BTC very much still is.

So those are some of the “negative” aspects of Ripple. I think they represent much of the skepticism in the Bitcoin community. They certainly reflect many of my own sentiments before I learned more about the tremendous potential of the payment system.

I will now explain how I overcame my initial skepticism on Ripple and saw the enormous power and benefit of the payment protocol itself. Earlier, I described some of the main differences between Ripple and Bitcoin. I called your attention to many of the aspect of Ripple that folks within the Bitcoin community tend to dislike. I think it is also important to understand some similarities they share.

One major similarity is that they both represent new payment systems that at their core allow for transfers of value from one person to another across the world at essentially zero cost. Both run on open source code and empower merchants and economic growth generally by eliminating the middlemen currently taking anywhere from 2%-3% for merely processing payments. The tens of billions of dollars spent on such fees can be repositioned as fuel for the global economy and put to more productive uses.

They were both released to the world for free. This represents a huge revolution not just in payments, but in potentially how some startups might choose to fund themselves in the future. Within Bitcoin, the unit of exchange, BTC, is needed in order to participate in the payment protocol. In that way, bitcoins, can be seen as the equity of the network. Early adopters bought or mined bitcoin, and as they increased tremendously in value, many of them have used their wealth and knowledge to greatly advance the protocol to where it is today.

Ripple also has a currency, called XRP, which can also be seen as the “equity” of the payment system. Here is where we start to see a major difference between the two systems. Within the Bitcoin network, you will use BTC, whereas the Ripple network is currency agnostic for the most part. The system does not discriminate between one currency or the other. Using Ripple, you can send payment to someone quickly and at essentially no cost whether it is USD, gold, XRP, or bitcoins.

That said, the currency XRP does play two major roles in the system.

1) Since it is the native currency on the protocol, it is the only currency traded or exchanged on the system that does not have any counter-party risk. Anyone with a Ripple wallet can send anyone else XRP at any time with no exceptions, sort of like Bitcoin. By contrast, in order to receive any other currency or asset of value on the system you must trust certain “Gateways.”

2) There is also a certain amount of XRP that is destroyed with every transaction on the system. The amount is a negligible .00001 XRP (a extraordinarily tiny fraction of a penny), and is used to prevent spam transactions from clogging the protocol. As such, each wallet on Ripple needs to have a minuscule XRP reserve balance of 20, which is at total of $0.28 at current prices.

In a nutshell: XRP has value as the reserve currency of the payment system. It is the grease in the wheels of the whole thing.

Ok, so I probably lost a lot of you above with the whole “Gateway” and “trust” concept. Let me explain.

First of all, no other currencies or items of value are actually held within the Ripple payment system. Gold traded on Ripple will be held in a vault somewhere, and U.S. dollars (USD) traded will be held in some sort of external financial institution, a bank, credit union or whatever. This is where “Gateways” come into play. “Gateways” are essentially companies that serve as the custodians for non-XRP assets that trade on Ripple.

To make this easy to understand, I will use the USD example. If you are a U.S. citizen and want to hold USD in your Ripple wallet the best “Gateway” to use at the moment is SnapSwap. SnapSwap has a bank account at Bank of America and you “fund” your Ripple wallet with USD by sending the currency to SnapSwap’s bank account. At that point your USD enters the Ripple network and you can purchase XRP and send it to anyone, or you can send your USD to anyone on the Ripple network who also “trusts” SnapSwap. As I mentioned earlier, you don’t need “trust” to send or receive XRP, you only need “trust” to send other items of value that have counter-party risk. Since there is obviously counter-party risk associated with your USD (risk resides at both SnapSwap and Bank of America) a Ripple user must conduct due diligence to determine whether or not they “trust” SnapSwap in order to receive USD via Ripple. The choice is yours.

For more information on how SnapSwap funding works, I suggest reading this explanation.

This brings me to what I think is one of the most exciting parts of Ripple, the ability to trade physically backed, deliverable precious metals. All you need is a “Gateway” with a vault (or access to one) that is willing to allow the metals to trade instantaneously and in fractional amounts on the payment system. While my mind was already excited about this potential after I met Phil in NYC, one of the things holding me back from writing this article was the lack of a solid option for doing so. Well that option arrived in January with the launch of Ripple Singapore as a “Gateway” in late January.

In the press release describing the service they explained:

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Conan O’Brien Does Bitcoin

This is the second humorous Bitcoin related video I have posted within the past week. The last one being the very funny: Shit Bitcoin Fanatics Say. Well now the always hilarious Conan O’Brien is having a go at it. Unfortunately, the way he pokes fun at Bitcoin is actually how the majority of people out there … Read more

New York to Accept Bitcoin-Exchange Proposals

Last week, I wrote a piece titled: New York Banking Regulator Benjamin Lawsky Thinks Mt. Gox Collapse Could Help Bitcoin. In it, I speculated that Lawsky was positioning New York to emerge as a primary global Bitcoin trading hub. While certain comments from Lawsky in the past have rubbed me the wrong way, he seems to … Read more