Fiat Money

Five Years Ago Today Bitcoin was Born – Read Satoshi’s Original White Paper

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As all of my readers know, I am a huge supporter of Bitcoin for many reasons. What you may not know, is that five years ago today a still unknown individual(s) known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto released a white paper titled: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The paper announced the Bitcoin concept to the world, and described how the network would deal with the wide variety of problems that might be encountered within the context of such an ambitious project.

Here is a screen shot of the original email:

Screen Shot 2013-10-31 at 3.33.45 PM

I just read through the entirety of the white paper and it is quite fascinating to observe the creator(s) thought process. Below are some of the excerpts I found most intriguing:

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments…While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.

What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.

The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.

If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a past block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the probability of a slower attacker catching up diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added.

On Incentives…

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Picture of the Day: This is How I Would Decorate the U.S. Tombstone

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Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. – The Bhagavad Gita This is all we would need to put on the tombstone for the USA. No words, no tears, no flowers. Just a picture of George W. Bush putting the Medal of Freedom around the neck of the most destructive American in our nation’s … Read more

Obama asks Eric Schmidt if “Bitcoin is Anything He Has to Worry About”

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Here’s a story recently related to me by a guest at a White House dinner, which included Google’s Eric Schmidt: The president, whose most important job is surely to protect the integrity of the monetary system, smugly asked Schmidt if Bitcoin, one of many growing challenges to currency hegemony, was anything he had to worry about.

– From a USA Today article titled: How CEOs are Clueless About Technology

If the above is accurate (and I have no reason to suspect it isn’t), it is priceless information on so many levels. First of all, rather than ask about Bitcoin in an inquisitive manner free of prejudice as a enlightened leader surely would, Obama is merely primatively wondering if he needs to “worry about it.”

Actually Barry, if you had any sense and foresight whatsoever you would be looking at it as a great opportunity. An opportunity for the nation to lead the way in growing the Bitcoin economy and shed the archaic, feudalistic monetary system we are currently enslaved under. However, since you work directly for the oligarch money manipulators themselevs, you are clearly and disastrously unable to see things in a more productive and beneficial way.

Second, as I highlighted earlier this year, Eric Schmidt had no clue what Bitcoin was when Julian Assange first mentioned it to him in a lengthy interview in 2011. The initial exchange went as follows:

Assange: On the publishing end, the magnet links and so on are starting to come up. There’s also a very nice little paper that I’ve seen in relation to Bitcoin, that… you know about Bitcoin?

Schmidt: No.

Assange: Okay, Bitcoin is something that evolved out of the cypherpunks a couple of years ago, and it is an alternative… it is a stateless currency.

So Obama is asking Schmidt for his advice about Bitcoin, when Schmidt had no idea what it was two years after it had been created and released into the wild. One bureaucratic control-freak asking another for advice. What could possibly go wrong?

More from the USA Today article:

The president surely believes his important expertise is in matters of policy, law and political machinations. But he is, too, the chief executive of the U.S. government, with its increasing dependence on digital performance. And, in that area, he seems a near-illiterate, or at least a big boob.

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Picture of the Day: The Government Shutdown

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Another work of genius by William Banzai7. Pretty much sums it up. I repeat, the 50 states should all secede from Washington D.C. Like this post? Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G Follow me on Twitter.

Bernie Sanders Passionately Decries the American Oligarchy on the Senate Floor

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Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the longest serving Independent member of Congress in American history. While I certainly don’t agree with him on everything, I have always respected his willingness to call out the Federal Reserve for the fascist cartel that it is. He has often accurately called it “socialism for the rich.” Back in … Read more

Inside Bitcoins: Welcome to Satoshi Square

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Yesterday was an absolutely amazing, jam-packed day at the Inside Bitcoins Conference in New York City, and I want to start out by thanking MediaBistro for putting it on and for having me as a media partner. 250-300 people attended the event, and roughly 30 of them took it to the next level and paid for their ticket in bitcoin.

BitInstant
The event kicked off with keynote speaker Charlie Shrem, founder and CEO of BitInstant. For those who aren’t familiar with it, BitInstant is one of the more convenient ways to acquire bitcoins for cash. Incredibly, he is a mere 23-years old and started the company while still enrolled at Brooklyn College. He shared his experience of pitching venture capital firm after venture capital firm, and his subsequent rejection by each and every one of them. He eventually convinced his mother to seed him the $10,000 needed to start the company.

Shortly after the speech, I was able to chat with Charlie in the hallway and he couldn’t have been nicer. He immediately pointed to my “Bought with Bitcoin” shirt and told me he wanted one. The shirt’s in the mail man.

Regulatory Panel
From there, the conference proceeded with a perfect mix of both subject specific panels and individual speakers. On the panel discussing regulatory issues, a really interesting debate emerged that I had not read about previously. It revolved around whether under the recent FinCEN guidelines on virtual currencies, bitcoin “miners” are considered money transmitters and thus require registration as such. Neither side could find agreement on the issue, which highlights just how much of a wild, wild-west type environment it still is.

BitPay
CEO Tony Gallippi of BitPay was a huge highlight for me. Not only have I recently integrated BitPay on Liberty Blitzkrieg to sell my Bitcoin shirts, but it was the company’s stunning growth earlier this year that got me obsessed with the entire topic. Back in late March, BitPay had 4,000 merchants and was adding them at a mind-boggling rate of 1,000 per month. Fortunately for them, they continued on that pace and Tony reported 8,000 merchants had signed up as of yesterday. Amazing.

Mr. Gallippi also made a particularly significant point about BitPay that I hadn’t even considered, one which represents a huge positive for any merchant using them. He noted that companies can avoid potentially burdensome accounting and reporting requirements since the merchant doesn’t legally hold any bitcoins themselves unless they want to.

However, the most powerful thing Tony covered was his discussion on some of the ways that banks are already going after merchants for accepting bitcoin by shutting down their bank accounts in retribution. Even more interesting, Tony sees the biggest future concern being that payment companies like Visa and MasterCard will threaten to pull their services from merchants that also accept bitcoin. Since merchants might get 95% of their revenue via the conduit of these payment companies, they would probably quickly kick Bitcoin to the curb. I think his foresight on this issue, as well as the fact he is already rallying people to prepare for it, makes him an even more impressive CEO and leader in the space than I thought.

Adam B. Levine – YouTube is Broken
Adam has a quick and interesting mind, one that hits you like a hurricane the moment he starts speaking. I was really excited for his talk, since he was focused on what I think is one of the biggest business problems on the web today. This has to do with the inefficiencies of website monetization. As a guy that runs podcasts, his particular area of concern was youtube. He demonstrated that by placing a QR code within videos to allow bitcoin donations, he was able to earn multiples of what he could via traditional ad networks. This really impressed me, mainly because such a small percentage of the population has ever owned a bitcoin.

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Silver Circle: An Excellent New Movie

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When I originally heard about the idea of a animated movie on silver and The Federal Reserve I was highly skeptical.  While I applaud all efforts to spread the word about honest money and the corrupt practices of Central Banks, the odds of making an impactful, enjoyable film on these topics seemed quite low to … Read more

New Interview with Future Money Trends: Financial Markets Update and the Liberty Mastermind Conference

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It’s been a while my last interview with Future Money Trends, so this should be a real treat. As my regular readers know, I rarely write about the financial markets any longer.  The main reason is that I have shifted my focus into a much broader area of activism against the cancerous system we live … Read more

Some Money Launderers are “More Equal” than Others

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“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
– George Orwell’s Animal Farm

It’s been many, many years since I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the message conveyed in it will remain with me forever.  The book is many things, but more than anything else, it is a portrayal and critique of human nature and the political systems that we create. For those that need a refresher, or have not read the book, here’s the basic plot.

There’s a farm headed by a Mr. Jones, who drinks so much he becomes unable to take care of the farm and feed the animals.  Over time, the animals (in particular the pigs), decide human beings are parasites and the pigs lead a revolt and run Mr. Jones off the property.  They change the farm’s name from Manor Farm to Animal Farm and create a list of 7 commandments.  They are:

  1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
  2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
  3. No animal shall wear clothes.
  4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
  5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
  6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
  7. All animals are equal.

Rather quickly, the pigs assume leadership over the farm and one pig in particular, Napoleon, consolidates power after running his primary competitor off the property.  It goes downhill from here fast.  The pigs start to walk on two legs, drink alcohol and sleep in beds, amongst other things. Understanding that their new lifestyle in in direct contrast with their original seven commandments, they simply decide to make some adjustments.  The adjustments are:

  1. No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.
  2. No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.
  3. No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

Rather quickly, even these adjustments becoming too binding for the glutinous and power hungry pig oligarch class.  They decide to just condense everything down to one commandment:  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The above process is one for the ages, a process that has been reenacted time and time again by our species over the millennia.  It is exactly what is happening in these United States right now.

The reason I spend so much time on the Constitution and civil liberties these days is because I can see the above unfolding right before my eyes.  I also see an opportunity to stop it before it reaches its final, most destructive stage.  Whether it’s the Department of Justice turning journalism into a criminal act, the IRS going after political enemies, or our Noble Peace Prize winning President droning thousands of innocent men, women and children all over the world with flying robots, the oligarch class in this country is dismantling the Bill of Rights one amendment at a time.

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I Pledge Allegiance…

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I’m on a plane about to take off for Colorado, but figured I’d leave everyone with my updated Pledge of Allegiance applicable for modern day America.  Enjoy comrades. I pledge allegiance to the Fed of the United States of Bernakistan, and to the S&P 500 for which it stands, one ponzi, under Federal Reserve Notes, with … Read more