CBDCs – Mark E. Jeftovic is The Bombthrower

Router Sabotage Exposed: Clear Evidence of Targeted Attacks via TR-069 on Equibit Founder’s Network

Chris — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:00:49 +0000

If you are new to the Equibit story, please read The Assassination of Equibit, originally released in 2023.

In the ongoing campaign of digital harassment and sabotage documented by Chris Horlacher, one of the most technical and intrusive episodes involves repeated compromises of his home routers in Mexico. These incidents directly affected Chris Horlacher’s ability to work, communicate securely, and access the internet—targeting only specific devices while sparing others on the same network.

This pattern aligns with advanced persistent threats, often linked to state-level or ISP-enabled capabilities.

Background: Part of a Broader Pattern

After fleeing Canada due to chronic digital intrusions and other events stemming from what he believed to be the lawsuits he just filed, Chris continued facing disruptions. VPN instability, selective device blocking, and unexplained connectivity issues prompted deeper investigation. Factory resets provided temporary relief, but problems returned rapidly—classic behavior of persistent malware or remote management exploits

The Attacks: Huawei HG8145V5V3 and ZTE F670L Routers

Key Anomalies Observed:

1981 Timestamps: Multiple log entries show dates like 1981-01-01. This is a strong indicator of Real-Time Clock (RTC) reset or deliberate log tampering/manipulation, often seen when firmware is altered or during boot-level interference. Security analysis reports explicitly flag these as “Backdated logs to 1981 (RTC reset or tampering).”
Custom Firewall Rules & Selective Blocking: Firewall settings changed to “user defined.” Specific devices (Chris’s and his wife’s) lost internet access while others worked, consistent with targeted rules or a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).
Rapid Re-infection Post-Reset: Issues returned within hours, even on a replacement router from the ISP (Telmex).

From the ZTE Log (August 2025, post-reset):

2025-08-04T16:16:01Z [Error] |dnsmasq| bind interface socket failed 99
2025-08-04T16:16:01Z [Error] !!!!!![high Alert for send msg in POWERON]...
[Warning] RunPCB process[omci] Event[0x3e81]...

High-priority OMCI/GPON messages immediately after boot, IPv6 route injections before full WAN negotiation, and MultiAPD errors point to remote provisioning activity.

From Huawei Logs (July 2025):

Numerous 1981-01-01 entries alongside PPPoE renegotiations, deprecated SSL methods, and DHCP NAKs (potential MAC spoofing or rogue activity). Frequent PPPoE sessions suggest possible DoS or disruption attempts.

Expert Security Analysis

Independent analysis by a professional (using SIEM-style detection) on both routers confirmed:

TR-069/OMCI remote provisioning activity.
Backdated logs and tampering indicators.
Potential RAT presence and DoS patterns.
Recommendations: Replace/reflash router, disable TR-069, scan devices, and isolate vulnerable hardware (e.g., older Smart TV).

Huawei Router Analysis Report (PDF)

ZTE Router Analysis Report (PDF)

TR-069 (CWMP) Vulnerabilities: This Broadband Forum protocol enables ISPs to remotely manage Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) like routers via an Auto-Configuration Server (ACS), often over port 7547. While intended for legitimate management, it is notoriously exploitable. Compromised ACS servers or weak implementations allow attackers full remote control, DNS redirection, firmware backdoors, and persistent access. It has been weaponized in botnets (e.g., Mirai variants) and enables exactly the selective targeting and re-infection seen here. Many ISPs do not allow users to fully disable it.

Video Evidence: Router Investigations

Watch Chris document the issues in real-time:

Part 1: Initial router access and strange behavior.

Part 2: Firewall changes, selective blocking, and admin interface interference.

Part 3: Factory reset, log downloads, and post-reset observations.

Part 4 (Short): Post-reset functionality vs. actual device connectivity failure.

Implications

These attacks go beyond typical criminal hacking. The precision (device-specific blocking), persistence across hardware swaps, use of ISP-managed protocols, and alignment with other documented sabotage (e.g., Microsoft OneDrive tampering, email spoofing, bank disruptions) point to sophisticated actors with significant resources—potentially leveraging intelligence or ISP cooperation.

Combined with the broader evidence in the Factum (honeypot hits from government networks, Keybase anomalies, etc.), this leaves little doubt that Chris Horlacher’s infrastructure was under targeted surveillance and disruption.

What You Can Do:

Demand transparency from ISPs on remote management (TR-069/OMCI).
Support calls for accountability in intelligence oversight.
Share this post—stories like this highlight risks to innovators and due process.

Full logs and analysis reports (Huawei and ZTE PDFs) are available for review upon request for credible researchers/journalists.

This is not paranoia. This is documented technical evidence of invasive digital warfare against a Canadian entrepreneur and litigant, across national boundaries, violating the property of a foreign ISP.

Stay tuned to equibitlawsuit.com for more updates on the Equibit lawsuits against CSIS and related actors.

Capital Controls Are Already Here and No One Seems to Care

Joey Tweeets — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:13:09 +0000

The Walls Are Going Up: Capital Controls Have Already Arrived in the First World

Originally via @JoeyTweeets on X

You’re not going to wake up one morning to a news alert that says “CAPITAL CONTROLS IMPOSED.” That’s not how it works in G20 countries. There’s no dramatic peso-style freeze, no Malaysian-style currency peg, no single event you can point to and say that’s when they locked it down.

Instead, what you get is a decade-long accumulation of regulations, reporting requirements, transaction thresholds, screening mechanisms, and surveillance infrastructure. Each one individually reasonable. Each one framed as fighting money laundering or terrorism or tax evasion. And collectively? They amount to the most comprehensive system of capital controls the developed world has ever seen.

Most people have no idea it’s happening because they’re still looking for the dramatic version.

I want to walk through what’s actually been built, what’s been legislated, and what’s already operational across the G20. Then I want to talk about why Bitcoin is the only credible response to what’s being constructed. Because the conversation about capital controls is stuck in 2015, and the reality on the ground is about five years ahead of the discourse.

The Surveillance You Didn’t Know Existed

Start with the thing nobody talks about at dinner parties: the FATF Travel Rule.

The Financial Action Task Force is an intergovernmental body with no direct legislative authority that nonetheless dictates financial policy in virtually every country on earth. Their enforcement mechanism is elegant. Countries that don’t comply get greylisted, which triggers enhanced monitoring and scares off foreign investment. Get blacklisted and you’re functionally severed from the global financial system. Soft power with a very hard edge.

In June 2025, the FATF adopted the most sweeping revision to its Recommendation 16 since the rule was created after 9/11. Here’s what it means in practice: for any cross-border payment above $1,000 USD/EUR, your name, address, date of birth, and account details must now accompany the transaction through the entire payment chain. Financial institutions are required to collect this, verify it, and transmit it. They’re also now required to implement verification tools to protect against fraud, which sounds benign until you realize it means every institution in the chain is validating your identity before your money moves.

The implementation deadline is the end of 2030, but many jurisdictions are moving faster. The EU’s Transfer of Funds Regulation already requires this information to accompany all crypto transfers between service providers. No minimum threshold. Send 50 euros worth of Bitcoin from one EU-regulated exchange to another and your full identity data goes with it.

As of early 2025, only 46% of FATF member countries had fully implemented the Travel Rule. But that number is misleading. The pressure to comply is immense and directional. Nobody’s moving away from implementation.

What this amounts to is a global transaction surveillance system. Not proposed. Operational and expanding.

They’re Coming For Cash, Too

Cash is the last truly private way to transact in the traditional system. So naturally, it’s being systematically restricted.

The EU passed Regulation 2024/1624 (the Anti-Money Laundering Package) with a vote of 482 to 47 in April 2024. Starting July 10, 2027, businesses across all 27 EU member states are prohibited from accepting or making cash payments above €10,000. This applies to single transactions or multiple payments over time that “appear to be linked.” The language is deliberately broad.

But the €10,000 cap is just the ceiling. Cash transactions above €3,000 now trigger mandatory identity verification: government-issued ID, KYC procedures, records retained for five years. Businesses must monitor payment patterns to detect structured transactions designed to circumvent the limits.

And many EU countries already go much further. France caps business cash transactions at €1,000 for residents. Greece at €500. Belgium at €3,000. The EU regulation explicitly allows member states to impose stricter limits.

Meanwhile, a new EU Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) is being stood up in Frankfurt with 400-plus staff to directly supervise anti-money-laundering controls at the 40 biggest financial institutions in the bloc. This is a brand new enforcement body with continent-wide reach.

The pushback is minimal but telling. Hungary amended its constitution in 2025 to include explicit cash protection provisions. Norway passed a law prohibiting businesses from refusing cash up to about €1,720. These are defensive moves by countries that can see where the trend is headed.

The standard rebuttal is that private transactions between individuals are still exempt. That’s true today. But the infrastructure to monitor, identify, and restrict cash transactions is being built for the commercial sphere first. History suggests it doesn’t stay there.

Your Government Now Controls Where You Invest

This is the one that should make everyone pay attention, because it’s capital controls in the most literal possible sense: governments telling citizens where they can and cannot put their own money.

For decades, countries screened inbound foreign investment. The US has had CFIUS since 1975. But starting in 2023, the paradigm flipped. Now they’re screening outbound investment. Where you, as a citizen, are allowed to deploy your own capital abroad.

The US went first. Biden’s Executive Order 14105 in August 2023 declared a national emergency and directed the Treasury Department to restrict investments by US persons into semiconductors, AI, and quantum technologies in “Countries of Concern” (currently China, including Hong Kong and Macau). The final regulations took effect January 2, 2025.

The definition of “US person” is worth reading carefully: any citizen, permanent resident, entity organized under US law including foreign branches, or any person in the United States. If you’re a Canadian visiting New York and you make an investment in a Chinese AI company from your hotel room, you’re potentially covered.

Then in February 2025, the Trump administration’s “America First Investment Policy” signaled a massive expansion, adding biotechnology, hypersonics, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, directed energy, and anything tied to China’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy to the scope. That’s not narrowing. That’s most technology-adjacent investment into China.

The EU is following the same playbook on a slightly delayed timeline. In January 2025, the European Commission published a Recommendation urging member states to review outbound investments in semiconductors, AI, and quantum, retroactively back to January 2021. By December 2025, the Council and Parliament reached a political agreement on a revamped Foreign Investment Screening Regulation as part of the EU’s new “Economic Security Doctrine.”

The UK updated its National Security and Investment Act guidance in May 2024 to clarify that it applies to outward direct investment.

This always starts with national security. Semiconductors, AI, quantum. Nobody’s going to argue those aren’t sensitive. But the scope always expands. The Trump administration’s February 2025 expansion proved that within months. And now more than 100 jurisdictions worldwide apply some form of investment screening.

When your government can review, delay, or block where you invest your money, that’s a capital control. Full stop.

The Automatic Reporting Machine

Here’s something that’s been running for years and most people either don’t know about or have normalized: your bank is already reporting your financial information to foreign governments. Automatically. Annually. Without a warrant or your consent.

Two frameworks do this.

FATCA (the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) has been in force since 2010. Every foreign financial institution on the planet must identify US persons and report their account information to the IRS. Refuse and you face a 30% withholding tax on US-source income. It’s compliance through coercion of the global banking system.

CRS (the Common Reporting Standard) was developed by the OECD at the request of the G20 and went live in 2017. Over 100 countries participate. If you hold a financial account in any participating country where you’re not a tax resident, the institution reports your information (balances, interest, payments) to local tax authorities, who share it with your home country. Automatically. No permission slip.

Unlike FATCA, which targets US persons specifically, CRS covers everyone who holds an account outside their country of tax residence. It’s broader, and it has no minimum threshold for new accounts.

And now the net is expanding to crypto. The OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) is being adopted by jurisdictions globally. The UK enacted CARF regulations effective January 1, 2026. This closes what was the last significant gap in the automated reporting regime.

Audit cycles have tightened dramatically. Large financial institutions now face reviews every 18 to 24 months, down from 3 to 5 years. Tax authorities are deploying AI to detect anomalies in the data.

Between FATCA, CRS, and CARF, if you have a bank account, investment account, or crypto account virtually anywhere in the developed world, your home government knows about it. The system runs in the background, year after year, with zero friction and zero transparency to the account holder.

CBDCs: The Infrastructure for Programmable Money

137 countries and currency unions representing 98% of global GDP are now exploring Central Bank Digital Currencies. There are 49 active pilot projects. 16 G20 nations are in development or pilot.

China’s e-CNY is the furthest along: 2.25 billion digital wallets, active retail use, and a cross-border platform (Project mBridge) connecting banks in China, Thailand, the UAE, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia. India’s e-Rupee grew 334% in a year. The ECB is deep into preparation for a digital euro. Russia is piloting the digital ruble.

Cross-border wholesale CBDC projects have more than doubled since the G7 sanctions on Russia. There are now 13. That’s not a coincidence. Countries watched Russia get partially severed from the dollar system and concluded they need alternative rails. Those rails are being built with surveillance capabilities baked in.

The US is the notable holdout on retail CBDCs. Trump’s Executive Order banned agencies from establishing or promoting one, and the House passed the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act. But the US is still participating in wholesale cross-border CBDC research through Project Agorá.

The programmability question is the one that matters most. Unlike cash or even bank deposits, CBDCs can theoretically be designed with spending restrictions, geographic limitations, expiration dates, or conditional access. Central banks insist they won’t do this. But the capability is inherent in the architecture, and the history of governments promising restraint in the use of new surveillance tools is not encouraging.

De-Banking: Financial Exclusion as Enforcement

Everything above is structural: legislation, regulation, infrastructure. De-banking is where it gets personal.

In 2022, during the Canadian Freedom Convoy, the government froze 76 bank accounts totaling $3.2 million under the Emergencies Act. A court later ruled this unconstitutional, but the precedent was set. Canada’s Banking Ombudsman opened 94 de-banking cases in 2024 and 105 in 2023, and openly admits it cannot challenge a bank’s decision or even tell the customer why their account was closed.

In the UK, the FCA found that banks were closing nearly 1,000 accounts per day. Over 343,000 in 2022, up from about 45,000 in 2017. Eight of the UK’s biggest banks closed 140,000 small business accounts in a single year.

The structural driver is the AML/BSA framework itself. Regulators have broad discretionary authority to impose massive fines on banks for inadequate “risk management,” assessed on subjective criteria. So banks de-risk aggressively. They’d rather lose a customer than face a regulatory action. And “reputational risk” became the catch-all justification for dropping anyone who might generate a headline.

There’s been some pushback. Trump signed an executive order in August 2025 ordering regulators to eliminate “reputational risk” from guidance and requiring banks to make decisions based on “individualized, objective, and risk-based analyses.” But the order doesn’t cover payment processors or credit card networks, the entities that have been among the most aggressive in ideological de-platforming. The structural incentives remain intact.

Canada: A Case Study in Real Time

Everything above describes the global system. But if you want to see how capital controls emerge in a country that considers itself free and democratic, watch Canada. Because Canada is building every layer of the stack simultaneously, and both major parties are contributing.

Start with what’s already operational. FINTRAC (Canada’s financial intelligence unit) underwent a massive expansion in 2024 and 2025. Two waves of new obligations hit reporting entities: the first in April 2025, the second in October 2025. The list of who must report to FINTRAC now includes title insurers, mortgage lenders, armoured car operators, and white-label ATM providers. Sanctions evasion was added as a reportable offence in August 2024, meaning any transaction suspected of being related to sanctions violations must be flagged. FINTRAC can now share information with the RCMP, CSIS, the CRA, the Competition Bureau, and foreign states. Penalties for non-compliance: up to $500,000 or five years imprisonment on indictment.

All of this was accelerated to align with Canada’s upcoming FATF mutual evaluation. Canada doesn’t want to get greylisted. So FINTRAC’s powers expanded faster than originally planned, and the scope of who counts as a “reporting entity” keeps growing.

Then there’s the Emergencies Act precedent. During the 2022 Freedom Convoy, the federal government froze 76 bank accounts worth $3.2 million. A Federal Court ruled the invocation unconstitutional, but the operational precedent was set: Canadian banks will freeze accounts on government instruction, instantly, without judicial review. The Banking Ombudsman later confirmed it cannot challenge these decisions or even explain them to affected customers. If you’re a Canadian who watched that happen and concluded the banking system will always be a neutral utility, you weren’t paying attention.

But the newer and more insidious developments are the soft capital controls now being proposed by both the Conservatives and the Liberals. These don’t look like capital controls. They look like tax incentives. That’s the point.

During the 2025 federal election, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre announced the “Canada First TFSA Top-Up”: an extra $5,000 in annual TFSA contribution room, but only if the money is invested in Canadian companies. The existing $7,000 limit remains unrestricted. The additional room is conditional on domestic investment. Poilievre framed it as patriotism: “rewarding patriotic Canadians who invest in Canadian businesses.”

He followed that with the “Canada First Reinvestment Tax Cut”: a full deferral of capital gains taxes on any asset sale, provided the proceeds are reinvested in Canada. Sell a property, sell stock, sell a business. No capital gains tax, as long as the money stays in Canada. Move it out of the country and the tax bill comes due immediately. The policy was proposed for a window from July 2025 through December 2026, with the promise to make it permanent if it produces “an economic boom.”

Read those two proposals carefully. The TFSA top-up creates a two-tier savings system: unrestricted room for the base amount, domestically restricted room for the bonus. The capital gains deferral creates an explicit tax penalty for moving capital out of Canada. Neither proposal prohibits foreign investment. But both use the tax code to make domestic investment cheaper and foreign investment more expensive. That is the textbook definition of a soft capital control.

And here’s the historical context that makes this more alarming: Canada has done this before. From 1971 to 2005, RRSPs were subject to a Foreign Property Rule that capped non-Canadian investments. It started at 10% of book value, rose to 20% in 1994, then 30% in 2001, and was finally abolished in 2005. For over three decades, Canadian retirement savings were legally required to be predominantly invested in Canadian assets. The rule was scrapped because economists demonstrated it hurt returns, concentrated risk in a small market (Canada represents less than 3% of global equities), and didn’t even meaningfully boost domestic investment. The mutual fund industry found derivatives workarounds, and the rule became a pointless drag on middle-class savers.

Now the political pressure is building to reimpose something similar. And this time it’s not just RRSPs.

On the Liberal side, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has been openly pressuring Canada’s “Maple Eight” pension funds (which collectively manage roughly $3 trillion in assets) to invest more domestically. Industry Minister Melanie Joly told fund managers to invest more of their assets at home as part of a broader push toward “economic nationalism.” Carney’s finance minister met with Maple Eight CEOs in Toronto in early 2025 to discuss new domestic ventures. The CPP Investment Board’s CEO publicly signaled interest in Carney’s proposed infrastructure projects: bridges, pipelines, utilities.

Currently, over 75 cents of every dollar managed by the Maple Eight is invested outside Canada. When you exclude government bonds, Canadian exposure drops to about 12 cents on the dollar. The political class sees $3 trillion in assets and wants to redirect them. Multiple senators and policy commentators have called for mandated domestic investment minimums, similar to rules in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and South Korea.

Former Bank of Canada deputy governor Paul Beaudry warned this “arm-twisting” risks descending into “crony capitalism.” McGill finance professor Sebastien Betermier called mandated domestic investment “the equivalent of imposing a tax on pensioners.” The C.D. Howe Institute published a warning in early 2025 that reimposing foreign investment limits would hurt savers without benefiting the economy, exactly as the evidence showed when the RRSP foreign content rule was in effect.

But the pressure is bipartisan. It’s not just the Liberals. Poilievre’s capital gains deferral explicitly penalizes capital that leaves Canada. His TFSA top-up restricts bonus room to domestic assets. Quebec Premier François Legault pushed the province’s Caisse de Dépôt pension fund to invest in the local economy under his “Quebec Power” program. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith pursued withdrawing the province from the federal CPP to redirect pension money toward the oil and gas sector. The impulse to control where capital goes transcends party lines.

And none of this is being described as capital controls. It’s “economic nationalism.” It’s “standing up to Trump.” It’s “investing in Canada.” It’s “rewarding patriotic Canadians.” The language is always positive, always voluntary-sounding. But the architecture is unmistakable: tax incentives that reward domestic investment, tax penalties that punish foreign investment, political pressure on pension funds to redirect capital homeward, and a financial surveillance apparatus (FINTRAC) expanding its reach and powers every year. Canada already demonstrated in 2022 that it will freeze bank accounts without judicial review. It already had a 34-year history of legally restricting where retirement savings could be invested. And now both major parties are proposing new mechanisms to steer capital back inside the border.

If you’re Canadian and you think capital controls are something that happens in Argentina, you’re not reading the policy proposals coming from your own politicians.

Stack It All Up

None of these mechanisms were designed in isolation. Together, they form what I’d call a capital control stack:

Identity layer. You cannot open an account, transact above threshold, or hold assets without full identity verification. KYC, FATCA self-certification, CRS reporting. The system knows who you are.

Surveillance layer. Every significant transaction is automatically reported. CRS, FATCA, CARF, the Travel Rule, BSA suspicious activity reports. The system knows what you’re doing with your money.

Restriction layer. Governments can screen, delay, or block investment decisions. Cash usage is capped. The system can control where your money goes.

Enforcement layer. Non-compliance means account closure, financial penalties, or exclusion. The system can punish you.

Programmable layer (emerging). CBDCs provide infrastructure for direct, real-time control over how money can be used. The system could eventually dictate how you spend.

Each layer is individually defensible. Anti-money laundering. Counter-terrorism financing. Tax transparency. National security. Consumer protection. Nobody’s going to win an argument against any single measure in isolation.

But stacked together? This is a comprehensive apparatus for monitoring and controlling the movement of capital across the developed world. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s worse: it’s a consensus. Every G20 government is building the same thing, roughly simultaneously, using the same institutional frameworks (FATF, OECD, BIS, FSB) as coordination mechanisms.

Why Bitcoin is the Exit

If you’ve read everything above and your response is “well, I have nothing to hide,” I’d ask you to reconsider the framing. The question was never about having something to hide. It was always about having something to protect.

Every layer of the capital control stack depends on a single architectural assumption: that your money lives inside institutions. Banks hold your deposits. Brokerages hold your investments. Exchanges hold your crypto. Processors move your payments. And because your money sits inside these intermediaries, it’s subject to every regulation, reporting requirement, freeze order, and screening mechanism those intermediaries must comply with. The entire control apparatus is built on the chokepoint of institutional custody.

Bitcoin breaks that assumption. Not partially. Completely.

When you hold Bitcoin in self-custody, your wealth exists as information protected by cryptography. There is no intermediary holding it on your behalf. There is no bank to receive a freeze order. There is no account to close. There is no institution sitting between you and your money that can be pressured, fined, greylisted, or threatened into cutting you off. Your keys, your coins. That’s not a slogan. It’s a description of how the protocol works at a technical level.

Go back through the stack and test each layer against self-custodied Bitcoin.

The identity layer requires KYC at every financial institution you touch. But Bitcoin doesn’t require an institution. You can receive it directly, peer to peer. You can generate a wallet with no ID, no application, no approval. The network doesn’t know your name and doesn’t need to.

The surveillance layer depends on automatic reporting from institutions. FATCA, CRS, CARF, the Travel Rule: all of these mandate that institutions collect and transmit your data. A Bitcoin transaction between two self-custody wallets touches none of these frameworks. There’s no intermediary to file a report. No server that knows your tax residence. The transaction exists on a public ledger, yes, but the ledger doesn’t know who you are unless you volunteer that information.

The restriction layer (outbound investment screening, cash caps) depends on controlling access points. Governments can tell banks to block wire transfers, tell brokerages to reject certain investments, tell businesses to refuse cash above a threshold. But they can’t tell the Bitcoin network to reject a transaction. There’s nobody to tell. No CEO, no compliance department, no headquarters in a jurisdiction. A Bitcoin transaction clears because it’s valid according to the protocol’s rules, not because a compliance officer approved it.

The enforcement layer (de-banking, asset freezing) works because your money is held by entities that answer to regulators. Take your money out of those entities and the enforcement mechanism loses its target. This is not theoretical. During the Canadian Freedom Convoy, banks froze accounts because the government told them to. Bitcoin donations to the same cause continued to flow because there was no bank in the middle to receive the order. The government was reduced to asking exchanges to freeze specific addresses they could identify, a far more limited and difficult operation than calling a bank.

The programmable layer (CBDCs) is perhaps the most important contrast. Central Bank Digital Currencies represent the logical endpoint of the control stack: money that can be programmed with conditions, limits, and restrictions at the protocol level. Money that expires. Money that can only be spent in certain categories. Money that can be turned off. Bitcoin is the exact opposite of this vision. Its supply is fixed at 21 million. Its rules are set by consensus, not by central authority. Nobody can change the emission schedule, impose spending conditions, or program restrictions into your holdings. The monetary policy is written into the code and enforced by tens of thousands of nodes run by individuals around the world. No committee meets to decide whether to inflate. No regulator can impose conditions on how you use it.

This distinction matters more than most people realize. We’re not just talking about privacy or censorship resistance in the abstract. We’re talking about the basic question of whether your economic life requires ongoing permission from institutions and governments, or whether it belongs to you by default. Every other financial asset you can name (every stock, bond, bank deposit, or piece of real estate) exists within a legal and institutional framework that governments control. They can change the rules on taxation, restrict your ability to sell, freeze your account, or dilute your purchasing power through monetary expansion. You participate in the financial system at their discretion.

Bitcoin is the first asset in human history where that’s not the case. Not because of any legal protection (governments can and do regulate on-ramps and off-ramps), but because of how the technology works. The protocol doesn’t have a “comply with government order” function. It simply validates transactions according to mathematical rules.

Now, the obvious objection: “But you still need to buy Bitcoin through an exchange, and exchanges are regulated.” True. On-ramps are the weak point, and governments know it. CARF targets crypto exchanges specifically. KYC requirements at exchanges mean your initial purchase is tracked.

But here’s the critical difference. Once you withdraw Bitcoin to self-custody, you’ve moved from the regulated world to the protocol world. You’ve taken your wealth off the institutional rails that the entire capital control stack is built on. And unlike gold (try getting $50,000 in gold bars through airport security), Bitcoin can be moved across borders with nothing but a memorized seed phrase. No customs declaration. No wire transfer. No SWIFT message. No intermediary of any kind.

There’s a deeper point here that gets lost in the “number go up” discourse. Bitcoin’s value proposition isn’t really about price appreciation. It’s about optionality. In a world where every other form of savings is increasingly surveilled, restricted, and subject to institutional permission, Bitcoin gives you the option to step outside that system. That option has a value, and it increases every time a new regulation tightens the perimeter around traditional finance.

Think about what’s happened just in the last two years. Outbound investment screening went from nonexistent to covering most technology sectors. Cash caps were legislated across Europe. The FATF rewrote the rules on cross-border transaction surveillance. CARF closed the reporting gap on crypto held at exchanges. De-banking accelerated to industrial scale in the UK. CBDCs moved from research papers to 49 active pilots.

Each of those developments independently makes the case for holding an asset outside the traditional system. Taken together, they make the case overwhelming.

This isn’t about tax evasion or breaking laws. Most Bitcoiners pay their taxes and follow the rules. It’s about having a credible exit from a system that is, as I’ve documented above, methodically closing every other door. It’s about holding an asset that doesn’t require the ongoing cooperation of the banking system to retain its value and utility. It’s about having a Plan B that actually works when Plan A (trusting institutions to respect your financial sovereignty) fails.

And Plan A is failing. We can see it in the data. 343,000 accounts closed in the UK in a single year. Unconstitutional account freezes in Canada. Outbound investment restrictions expanding months after they’re introduced. Cash caps being legislated across Europe. Every year, the perimeter tightens.

Consider this question: if you lived in a country where the government had the ability to monitor every transaction you make, control where you invest, restrict how you use cash, close your bank account without explanation, and was building infrastructure to program conditions directly into the money itself, what kind of asset would you want to hold?

You’d want one that exists outside that system. One that can’t be diluted, frozen, programmed, or confiscated without your cooperation. One that works the same way regardless of which government is in power or what emergency they’ve declared this time.

There’s only one asset that fits that description. The capital control stack is the best argument for Bitcoin ever written, and the people building it don’t realize they’re writing it.

The Timeline Objection

Whenever I lay this out, someone says “most of this is years away.” But look at the dates:

FATCA has been running since 2010. CRS since 2017. Over 100 countries apply FDI screening today. US outbound investment restrictions went live January 2025. The EU cash cap is already law (2027 is just the implementation date). De-banking is happening at industrial scale right now. 49 CBDC pilots are running worldwide. The FATF Travel Rule revisions take full effect by 2030 but jurisdictions are implementing early.

The infrastructure isn’t coming. It’s here. What’s coming is the tightening: lower thresholds, broader scope, more aggressive enforcement, less tolerance for workarounds.

If you’re waiting for the dramatic moment to start paying attention, you’ve already missed it. The dramatic moment was spread across a decade of regulatory actions, each one too boring to make the news.

That was the point.

Follow Joey Tweeets on X here, sign up for the Bombthrower mailing list here.

The Quiet Rebranding of CBDCs as “Digital-ID”

Mark E. Jeftovic — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 13:48:15 +0000

Let’s call them for what they are: Social Credit systems.

We know that “CBDC” stands for Central Bank Digital Currencies – and we have long held our hypothesis on what those entail (the TL;DR is that they will either launch as, or morph into, China-style social credit systems).

We’ve seen an Executive Order expressly ruling out CBDCs in the US, but as I keep warning readers: we’re seeing components we’d expect to see under a CBDC system appearing – only they aren’t originating at The Fed (who has never really expressed an interest in them, anyway).

Now the US Treasury Department is seeking comments on Digital ID as it relates to DeFi:

“The Department of the Treasury has filed a request for public comments to provide input on the use of “innovative or novel methods to detect and mitigate illicit finance risks involving digital assets” in accordance with the GENIUS Act, as well as in accordance with Donald Trump’s policy to support “the responsible growth and use of digital assets,” as outlined in the President’s Executive Order to strengthen US leadership in digital financial technology.”

— TheRage.co

The areas covered range from:

“the use of APIs “to help enforce strict access controls, monitor transactions and activities, and bolster security and integrity of financial institutions providing digital asset services”, the use of Artificial Intelligence to “make predictions, recommendations or decisions” to “effectively identify illicit finance patterns, risks, trends, and typologies”, and blockchain monitoring to “evaluate high-risk counterparties and activities, analyze transactions across multiple blockchains,trace or monitor transaction activities, and identify patterns that indicate potential illicit transactions.”

As well as Digital ID (which I think is the catch-phrase we’re going to see a lot of in the future, that will capture a lot of the objectives of CBDCs)

“the treasury is also seeking comments on the introduction of “portable digital identity credentials designed to support various elements of AML/CFT and sanctions compliance, maximize user privacy, and reduce compliance burden on financial institutions” to potentially be used “by decentralized finance (DeFi) services’ smart contracts to automatically check for a credential before executing a user’s transaction.”

Sounds similar to what the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) wants to do in terms of rating individual crypto wallets for AML compliance.

In a white paper titled An approach to anti-money laundering compliance for cryptoassets they propose to:

“leverag[e] the provenance and history of any particular unit or balance of a cryptoasset, including stablecoins”

In order to assign an “AML compliance score”.

That score would be based on:

‘the likelihood that a particular cryptoasset unit or balance is linked with illicit activity may be referenced at points of contact with the banking system (“off-ramps”)’

In this way, authorities could enforce a “duty of care” among “crypto market participants”.

Coverage from The Rage (again) pulls out some of the juicier tidbits from the white paper:

“An AML compliance score that references the UTXOs for bitcoins or wallets for stablecoins could use the information on the blockchain, including the full history of transactions and the wallets they have passed through”

It basically sounds like a social credit score, for crypto wallets:

None of the above should surprise anybody (unless you really believed that there would be no CBDCs in the US).

We’ve long said we expect the on-ramps and off-ramps to be heavily regulated and KYC-ed as the crypto-economy becomes a bigger component of the global financial system.

Remember the flip side of that: we also expect more capital flowing into the crypto-economy to be on a one-way trip.

Today’s post was excerpted from the Eye on Evilcoin section of this month’s Bitcoin Capitalist. Every month we cover the roll-out of social credit systems under the guise of CBDCs, “Health Passes” and Digital-ID. Bombthrower readers can get a special trial offer here.

If you’re not on the Bombthrower list, sign up here, free and get a copy of The CBDC Survival Guide when it comes out.

Trump names two CBDC blockchains as part of the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve

Mark E. Jeftovic — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 18:52:15 +0000

Maybe adding CBDCs to the BSR is an example of 4-D chess?

This may come as a shock to those suffering from what I call “Type 2 TDS” (Trump Divinity Syndrome) but the president’s declaration to add sh*tcoins to the national strategic reserve contradict his own declarations against Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)

The inciting incident: Trump comes out against CBDCs

Trump has been vocal about his opposition to CBDCs from the same moment he declared himself to be pro-Bitcoin and announcing his intention to create a US Bitcoin Strategic Reserve.

Once in office his Jan 23rd Executive Order for “Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology” specifically, section 5 called for

“taking measures to protect Americans from the risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which threaten the stability of the financial system, individual privacy, and the sovereignty of the United States, including by prohibiting the establishment, issuance, circulation, and use of a CBDC within the jurisdiction of the United States.”

We all know by now that via his recent post on TruthSocial, Trump declared that altcoins like Ethereum, Ripple (and ADA) would be added to the national strategic reserve.

Who wants to tell him?

Plot Twist: XRP is a CBDC! (and so is ETH)

In December 2020, the Gary Gensler’s SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple, alleging that XRP was an unregistered security and that the company conducted an illegal securities offering by selling XRP tokens. Gensler is gone now, those days are over, and the SEC has dropped many of its suits against cryptos – although it has not yet explicitly dropped the one against Ripple (Anthony Scaramucci recently hinted they would).

In spite of or perhaps because of these regulatory headwinds, Ripple pivoted toward positioning itself as critical infrastructure for CBDCs.

For years ripple declared CBDCs to be part of the value prop right on their home page, ….but then quietly dropped the reference sometime shortly after Donald Trump spoke in Nashville at Bitcoin 2024… suddenly it was about “stablecoins” and “cross border payments” – CBDCs shall no longer be spoken of on Ripple.com…

Ripple was also behind the now aborted #ChangeTheCode initiative, in partnership with Greenpeace, which was a smear campaign that attacked Bitcoin for its Proof-of-Work algorithm.

They also are heavy donors and lobbyists – kicking in over $60 million over the past year or so (and mostly to Democrat and left-wing entities – I wonder if TheDonald knew that before he added them to the SSR).

How tf did Ripple get included into the strategic reserve?

Wait. nm. pic.twitter.com/3D4OMLZpUA

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) March 2, 2025

Ethereum insiders have volunteered it as the blockchain base layer for CBDCs: in 2020, one of the project co-founders (Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin) undertook a pilgrimage to Davos to present a white paper to the World Economic Forum outlining exactly how Ethereum could serve as a CBDC:

“As the World Economic Forum meets in Davos for the 50th time, it does so against the backdrop of a sea change in the mechanics of money

Below we provide both an overview of CBDC and a concrete example of how a CBDC might be implemented on the Ethereum blockchain. We believe that Ethereum is the best-suited blockchain network for the kind of maximally secure, global-scale, interoperable settlement platforms that CBDCs require. But we are well aware that there are many other possibilities”

Consensys remains an active participant in numerous global CBDC initiatives (unlike Ripple, they don’t seem to have scrubbed their website of any references to the new four-letter c-word).

Some country level test beds (like Brazil’s Digital Real, whose pilot project already contained code to freeze bank accounts) have already launched, running on permissioned Ethereum as has Ripple, running pilots for Bhutan and Palau.

Synthesis: The case for rolling out CBDCs anyway

Who controls the money, controls the world. We live in an emerging hellscape of Haves and Have Nots because the middle class is being demolished. The chief delivery mechanism for this has been The Cantillon Effect – the ability to leech wealth from the wider population through the issuance of currency to insiders with proximity to the money printer.

Bitcoin stood against that – creating a new digital sound-monetary system outside the inner temple and by the time institutions and oligarchs realized it was something to be taken seriously, it was already unstoppable — they had to shift gears to getting onside with the tectonic shift, but there was still no way to retain control of society through directing the issuance of currency.

Centralized cryptos like Ethereum and Ripple promise that ability. Monetary policy can be modified and changed, pre-mines and token issuances abound, entire blockchains rolled back if something goes wrong and a “do-over” is needed – there is no sound money component around ETH, XRP, SOL or ADA.

Fiat currencies, otherwise fated to debase themselves to zero, can add a few decades onto the runway through morphing into stablecoins, fusing with tokenized assets and becoming de-facto CBDCs – whether they’re called that or not.

CBDCs (or quasi-coins) will become the rails for monetary policy, promulgating the imperatives of fiat debasement:

Providing the rails for UBI
Functional implementation for MMT
Sustaining money velocity via “expiry dates” on money
“Excess savings” disincentivized through negative interest rates.

Every CBDC initiative will either launch as, or morph into, a Chinese-style social credit system.

In the left-wing social democracies like Europe, Canada, Australia et al, these social credit systems will be centered around a purported “Climate Emergency” and the need for carbon footprint tracking and quotas.

This is important to understand:#CBDCs will not be “money”: in the sense we understand it. They will be social credit scores, capped by your personal carbon footprint quota pic.twitter.com/e6ibVwXM65

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) October 4, 2024

The US is, at least for now – disavowing the ESG narrative, while still setting the table for social credit systems by some other name than CBDCs. It will still amount to the same thing.

What would a Trump-era pivot into CBDCs look like?

We’ve just seen how a BSR (“Bitcoin Strategic Reserve”) – as declared in Nashville in July 2024, started looking like it would be more of a CSR (Crypto Strategic Reserve) once the EO on fintech dropped and now with the latest announcement it’s officially going to be a SSR as in Sh*tcoin Strategic Reserve.

Adding Ripple alone made it that, but it also will hold Ethereum (leaving Solana and ADA for another conversation)

There are a couple of ways the Trump administration could implement CBDCs, without saying “CBDC”:

Issued by the Treasury: If CBDC base layers like XRP and ETH are held in a national strategic reserve, the Treasury could issue Layer-2 tokens on them and they wouldn’t be issued by the “Central Bank” part of “CBDC” (in this case, the Fed). It would be called something else, like, maybe “FreedomCoins” that have the exact same capabilities as CBDCs.
Digital ID initiatives like REAL ID are accelerated under the rationale of eliminating illegal immigration and fentanyl mules.
The “REAL ID” initiative in the US has been underway since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

During the Biden Administration, Wyoming Senator Cindy Lummis (of Bitcoin Strategic Reserve Bill fame) co-sponsored S.884: Improving Digital Identity Act which became HR 9783: Improving Digital Identity Act of 2024.

Here’s where the picture we’ve been developing on the eventual hybridization of cryptos (as distinct from Bitcoin), CBDCs and eventually, social credit, starts to fill in.

The corporate lobbyists for S.884 are interesting, including an early Ethereum investor (Jeffery Berns) and Mastercard, who already has a climate-controlled credit card that cuts off your spending when your CO2 footprint hits your personal limit (purely voluntary of course).

Ignore what they say, watch what they do

Readers here know that I consider the battle between Bitcoin versus CBDCs to be one for the very soul of humanity. Bitcoin being the anti-CBDC in all respects, and I thought Trump – with his aligning with Bitcoin and against CBDCs understood that, at least on an intuitive level.

Now I’m not so sure, given that he’s now in favour of adding at least two CBDC layer-1 blockchains to a national strategic reserve.

After the pushback came from that announcement – from even among crypto coin holders, the new Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has attempted some damage control by walking back elements of it:

“The President definitely thinks that there’s a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Now, there will be the question of, how do we handle the other cryptocurrencies? And I think the model is going to be announced on Friday when we do that.

A Bitcoin strategic reserve is something the President’s interested in. He spoke about it all during the campaign trail, and I think you’re going to see it executed on Friday.

So Bitcoin is one thing, and then the other currencies, the other crypto tokens, I think, will be treated differently—positively, but differently.”

Perhaps behind the scenes somebody has pointed out the contradiction between eschewing CBDCs out of one side of his mouth while talking up CBDC base layers out of the other.

Maybe XRP will be dropped from the Sh*tcoin Strategic Reserve, and be replaced with DOGEcoin (I’m not even kidding), or even TRUMP and MELANIA tokens (now I am, I hope).

We expect to know more on Friday, when the inaugural Crypto Summit happens in Washington, DC and Trump is expected to make a clarifying announcement.

This post contained some excerpts from my forthcoming CBDC Survival Guide which you can get free, once it drops – as well as parts of the latest Bitcoin Capitalist Letter, which you can try out here.

Join the Bombthrower mailing list today, follow me on Twitter/X here.

A Deep Dive Into Ripple & XRP

𝙈𝙞𝙠𝙚 “Dr. Doom” 𝙃𝙤₿𝙖𝙧𝙩 — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 15:55:28 +0000

CBDCs, Ripple = XRP, GreenPeace and Bitcoin

There’s a lot a hubbub going around the interwebs (again) about XRP and their situationship with bitcoin. I hope for this write-up to serve as an aggregation of information and nexus of source material for those wishing to both gain understanding of what XRP (“Ripple”) was, is, and how the crypto token and the company have a relationship with Bitcoin.

FinCen on Ripple and XRP

Genesis

A friend of mine from Clubhouse and Twitter, who also happens to be a lawyer with explicit and long-standing experience in the crypto space, Preston Byrne, has discussed the Ripple XRP topic ad nauseam. As many have. And yet the facts and evidence continue to go unacknowledged.

Ripple Labs Inc.,” (2013) previously named “Opencoin Inc.,” (2013) which was previously named “Newcoin Inc.,” (2012).

For the last time, Ripple Labs created XRP

As noted by Preston,

“Anything done by Newcoin/Opencoin/Ripple Labs (CA) was done by a direct predecessor of the current Ripple entity that runs the business. All those names refer to the same company. For the sake of [this] analysis, therefore, each of the four names should be treated as if they refer to the same enterprise.”

The Ripple Software

The Ripple software was gifted to Newcoin/Opencoin/Ripple Labs/Ripple by Arthur Britto. With a statement that any future contributions by Britto (or others) would be done so in an open-source format.

The number of tokens in existence (referred to as “credits” in the paperwork), were agreed to be anticipated (as pointed out by Byrne, did not exist at the time of the agreement being drafted and signed) as totaling to be 100 billion in count. With an agreement to allow Britto to maintain a 2% ownership of the total supply, accounting for potential increased dilution in the future. At the time of writing the XRP token was not conceived but was later named XRP.

Preston has put together a phenomenal deepdive on the ownership and business relations of Ripple/Ripple Labs, Inc./Opencoin, Inc./Newcoin, Inc. and I do not want to risk even the slightest confusion of who has done the work. For the nittygritty on the topics such as Copyright and the like, I suggest visiting Preston’s own writing by clicking the image above or following the hyperlink here.

GitHub: Add LICENSE file. · XRPLF/rippled@0951c36 · GitHub

XRP IS Centralized

80% of the total supply of the XRP token was provided to the company for use at the company’s discretion — what is known as a premine. With 55% of the allocation getting locked up into escrow accounts that release every month.

“The escrow consists of independent on ledger escrows that release a total of one billion XRP each month over the next 55 months.” [Source]

If XRP were truly decentralized, why are over 30,000 blocks missing??

Ripple’s Use Case

According to this 2014 article published in The Banker, Mr. Larsen suggests that Ripple would be a “currency agnostic” system for transferring ‘conventional’ fiat currencies. That XRP would be the basis for an ‘internet of value.’ Unfortunately for Ripple, in 2023 the Federal Reserve announced FedNow going live.

What Larsen couldn’t have expected at the time was the development of the Lightning Network to facilitate the ‘internet of value’ and was the enabler for the development of NOSTR — which has multiple social media functions, including streaming. The Lightning Network went live in 2018, with gains in use and popularity growing between 2020 and 2021.

CBDCs — Ripple’s New Use Case

Off Ripple’s own website, published in 2021

“Moving money on the CBDC Private Ledger will be cost-effective, reliable and close to instantaneous. Transactions can also happen at volumes required by Central Banks. The CBDC Private Ledger will handle tens of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) initially with the potential to scale to hundreds of thousands TPSs over time.

Transactions on the CBDC Private Ledger are verified by the same consensus protocol used by the XRP Ledger, which is far less energy intensive, and therefore less expensive and 61,000 times more efficient than public blockchains that leverage proof-of-work.

In addition to leveraging the XRP Ledger technology, the CBDC Private Ledger is also supported by RippleNet technologies, and the Interledger suite of protocols to enable ultra-high throughput use-cases such as micro-payments.

The CBDC Private Ledger meets even the highest of security standards for Central Banks with each having complete sovereignty and ability to customize based on their own unique privacy and policy requirements. The core technology behind this new CBDC Private Ledger has been running for more than 8 years without incident and with billions of dollars of value transacted everyday.”

Then Ripple partnered with Palau to pilot their CBDC program starting in 2021, 7 months after the above posting. With Phase 2 of the Palau Project progressing in 2023.

Ripple claimed to have 10 countries onboard with its CBDC project during summer of 2024.

I have had numerous conversations with individuals on Twitter over the years that claim to be against CBDCs and the over centralization of financial power and economic surveillance YET THEY LOVE XRP AND RIPPLE. I mean are you insane, or just re[dacted]? I have provided evidence, from the horse’s mouth, that Ripple is pushing the development of CBDC’s forward. A patently anti-liberty initiative.

Political Interference

My man Pierre Rochard popped a shot at Garlinghouse and Ripple recently stating that regulation is being held up, not because of bitcoin but because of Ripple’s obfuscation of understanding via their tomfoolery with political lobbying efforts. On a similar point is Ripple’s funding of blockchain research at prominent universities to the tune of $50 million — an effective manipulation tactic made evident by revelations over actual climate and environmental data challenging activists that have been screaming for decades that we would most assuredly be burning up (or drowning) due to ‘Global Warming.’ A story that has persisted since the 70s but has not yielded any actual evidence that holds water.

Ripple Labs — Energy and Climate Experts?

Ripple has been attacking bitcoin for years in a clever, but still laughable, strategy — climate change and climate catastrophists.

“Larsen said Bitcoin’s power consumption issue could be fixed via a soft or a hard fork — both changing the network’s code to make Bitcoin less power hungry. A soft fork would preserve Bitcoin as a single blockchain. A hard fork would split Bitcoin into two separate networks, one supporting miners and the other running different code — perhaps Proof of Stake.”

Too bad Bitcoin’s energy consumption is a boon for a number of reasons: (1) the energy consumption is a strategy for securing the network, the energy cost of maintaining attacks against the network disincentivize offensive strategies; (2) the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network provides an opportunity for power producers to establish a line of revenue that is separate of societal power demands; (3) these power demands allow for bitcoin miners to act as power arbitrators, enabling them to reduce consumption in order to protect the integrity of the grid in times of need (acting as cannon fodder to take the hit so Ma & Pa can keep the lights on); (4) the energy consumption allows for oil production operations to consume the energy yield of associated natural gas rather than venting or flaring — both being negative impacts on methane emissions.

GreenPeace

GreenPeace has been trying and failing, abysmally, for years to attack bitcoin over it’s supposed negative impacts on the environment. These attempts have fallen flat on their face over the years as meme campaigns like the famous skull sculpture were reversed by the bitcoin community and truth-seekers like Daniel Batten have come out to bat for bitcoin mining.

In Conclusion

Ripple XRP is not a good faith actor in any sense of the crypto space. Not that there are many of those in the sector to start with. But Ripple and Garlinghouse are amongst the worst transgressors. Ripple XRP is not an ally to anything bitcoin or freedom related and is not in the best interests of any individual that values either, or both. They are an organization that preys upon the inexperienced and uneducated pleb that is hoping to invest in the future.

We have opportunities to invest in great projects and scrape together a little generational wealth for our loved ones, but XRP is not it. It is my position that anyone that is hoisting the flag of XRP on the social media platforms is a bad actor and their opinions over anything in the crypto space is not to be trusted, as Ripple XRP is one of the oldest projects in the space (alongside Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin) and lacking understanding of any (and all) of these stories makes them an ignorant source of information.

A Few Other Interesting Sources:

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The New Strongmen

Kane McGukin — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 14:50:26 +0000

We’ve seen this movie before. This version is the battle of digital gold over power regimes past their prime.

In the early 1900’s, specifically in the 1920s, Benjamin Strong orchestrated deals around the world to have leaders send their gold to the United States for “safe harbor” and to balance capital flows for the “safety” of the system. In hindsight, this power play put the US at the center of an emerging fiat currency-based monetary system. One was built on the backs of US industrial capitalists, financed through international political friendships, and by way of war; conflicts in capital markets, and hand-to-hand combat. This intelligent move placed the US at the helm of our global monetary system.

As the chess board tilted, tensions rose and global wars broke out.

Some countries stood in the shadows funding by proxy, while others shot from the trenches in hopes of preserving their political views of how future power structures should look. As the web of relationships untangled global capital flows, it reordered the holders of power and money strewn across the monopoly board. Countries made calls to the US to have their gold returned. To appease, Team Strong made many overseas visits and promises to ensure their gold was in safe hands. However, the US rarely returned the base capital asset, leaving others in a jam.

Upon Strong’s death, no one knew the inner workings of his plan. Nor did they have his deep global political persuasion and ties to carry it on any longer. Without Strong’s skill as a puppeteer, world financial markets and its political players found themselves in a precarious situation. Leading to the greatest ravaging experienced in some time. The Great Depression was an event unlike any other. Leaving no stone unturned as it traveled across the globe. Only to finally end in one great global war (WWII). The ending of 31 years of financial, economic, and military might, shuffled the decks and set the table for a new monetary regime guided by a Bretton Woods system of currency pegs. All money movements now hinged on gold stashed in vaults within US borders, while opposing the views and warnings of Triffin’s Dilemma.

As anger subdued and tensions came down, the fix was in. Realignment was in order so that Bretton Woods could provide all parties access to money once again. The monopoly board was set for another round of play. New leaders, deals, and tiers of countries to shape a new level of understanding as to how the game would be played. The ground rules established how a new currency system would work.

An old story this is, though it sounds all too familiar when relatinging it to our current state of international and monetary affairs. Once again, finding ourselves at a societal inflection point.

Caught Between the Throws of Money and A Few Men’s Greed.

Reflecting on our past highlights the critical importance of understanding the value of sound money assets. These assets are essential for advancing to a digital monetary system that powers our modern lives—a transition that requires time and a complete shift in thinking.

The Kings and pawns alike are seeking access to new rules and a new monetary base that will provide power and control for the next 100 years. Citizens watch over streams of media as major political players battle behind closed doors. From X (formerly Twitter), to Meta (formerly Facebook), Tiktok and Nostr, pitches are crafted for the open airwaves of the internet. Each side casts memes and propaganda across every news and social media network intending to shape the minds of the next generation of leaders. What’s the goal? Just the same as it was in the early 1900s, the intention is to corner the free market of money and power.

“A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.”
– JP Morgan

Over the span of the last 20 years our battles have become increasingly cyber in nature. As a result of these conflicts, we’ve seen Bitcoin move like gold of the past. We’ve watched Bitcoin Hashrate migrate from China to the US, where exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini, and Kraken have been constructed to power the future of money, rates, lending and barter across the bits and bytes of our internet pipes.

The Fix for the Next Round of Global World Order Is Almost In.

Big banks, technocrates, Wall Street, and political clout are all jostling for their version of how the future should be told. The difficulty adjustment continues to ratchet as the momentum of our new market places shift.

The transition from guns and army’s to a world of bots and DDOS attacks took time to run its course.

What started with credit cards and advanced technology research projects at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1958, led us to the internet, protocols, and partial means of transferring digital money by consensus. With the rise of information and consumer technology, we found ourselves in a digital ecosystem with limited access or control of our money. This new revolution in the digital age gave way to industrial ideals and promoted a shift to a more connected and intelligent world.

As foundations for a new digital financial system have been laid, global relationships were infiltrated as new players emerged. Shifting from ideals of our past monetary fathers, Benjamin Strong (US), Montagu Norman (England), Hjalmar Schacht (Germany), Emile Moreau (France) to new forms of intelligence guided by The Five Eyes (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand).

When we crossed the chasm of the 21st Century, powers shifted. E-commerce and social platforms steered the attention of business and consumers in such a way that new tools for psychological research were necessary to keep up. From this state of need, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA – 2007) was born to pick up where DARPA left off.

As populations warmed to the ideas of digital scarcity; Bitcoin has risen. Playing the role of the fastest horse for sending sound money over our internet rails. With the momentum of the race shifting, nations are back to warring again. Leading to citizenry shouts of spooks and kooks against anyone attempting to triangulate their location and affiliation.

At this juncture the board is set for players to make their move. A few critical questions should be asked. The answers will dictate the freedoms or draconian measures that follow.

What Bitcoiner is playing the role of Ben Strong?
What Bitcoin influencers are Norman, Schacht, and Moreau?
Has the Digital Bretton Woods conference taken place? If not, then when and what parties will be invited to attend?

These are the private keys that will decide our future. The future of money, power, and control.

New terms and players will dictate the price of properties, utilities, and digital rails that will be traded so we can all transact in a civilized manner. This is a new story with new faces, technologies, and tools. However, it is the same story of money that spans across human history. One that repeats in unison with the 4th Turnings that dictate our times.

Get on the Bombthrower mailing list here and receive a free copy of The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto and The CBDC Survival Guide when it drops. Subscribe to Kane McGukin’s Substack here.

Coming Soon: Your Travel Will Be Restricted By Personal Carbon Allowances

Mark E. Jeftovic — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 03:12:24 +0000

“Experts suggest” your standard of living be reduced by over 85%

A report on the future of travel and tourism, co-authored by a travel agency called Intrepid Travel and The Future Labs Institute, posits a future deeply impacted by climate change and restrictions on tourist travel to combat it.

“A Sustainable Future for Travel”, warns of “travel extinction”, where some areas suffer such radical climate change that all tourism there ceases, and “personal carbon allowances” that will restrict how often one is permitted travel.

From the report (pardon the length, emphasis added):

“Carbon Passports

A personal carbon emissions limit will become the new normal as policy and people’s values drive an era of great change.

As demonstrated by a worldwide tourism boom, the frequency at which we can fly is once again seemingly unlimited.

Conscience and budgets permitting, we feel free to hop on planes from one place to the next. But this will change. ‘On our current trajectory, we can expect a pushback against the frequency with which individuals can travel, with carbon passports set to change the tourism landscape,’ says Raymond [Martin Raymond, Future Laboratories co-founder]

Personal carbon allowances could help curb carbon emissions and lower travel’s overall footprint.

These allowances will manifest as passports that force people to ration their carbon in line with the global carbon budget, which is 750bn tonnes until 2050.

By 2040, we can expect to see limitations imposed on the amount of travel that is permitted each year.

Experts suggest that individuals should currently limit their carbon emissions to 2.3 tonnes each year – the equivalent of taking a round-trip from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. However, the average carbon footprint in the US is 16 tonnes per person per year, 15 tonnes in Australia and 11.7 tonnes in the UK. This is in stark contrast to where we may find ourselves in the future, with 2040’s travellers forced to forgo the horizon-expanding experiences so readily embraced by today’s tourists”

For all practical purposes, your carbon emissions will line up with your energy usage, give or take a relatively narrow band of efficiencies (unless we have some kind of clean energy breakthrough, and the only viable one we have, nuclear, is not considered clean energy by the climate cult).

Said differently: Your standard of living is your energy usage. Reducing a society’s energy usage is the same as reducing its living standards.

With this in mind, let’s look at the numbers cited by the Sustainable Future for Travel report:

“Experts suggest that individuals should currently limit their carbon emissions to 2.3 tonnes each year.”

The table below lays out exactly how much the standard of living for the residents of each country will have to be reduced in order to meet the recommended carbon quota set by unelected experts. This is the level of “degrowth” it will take to satisfy the objectives of climate alarmists relying on unfalsifiable premises, arbitrary computer models, and who are deliberately ignoring and suppressing countervailing data.

How serious are our leaders and policymakers about reducing the citizenry’s living standards by upwards of 85%?

Here is Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, rather blithely confirming that the government will limit natural gas usage in order to fight climate change:

Reporter: There will be limitations on how much natural gas you can use in the winter?

Guilbeault: Yes, absolutely, that’s what fighting climate change looks like.

Full clip:

Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault rather blithely answering a reporter who asked “will the government limit natural gas usage in the winter?”

(Short answer: “Of Course! That’s What fighting climate change looks like!”)

Watch: pic.twitter.com/sau9p2CMnW

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) November 25, 2023

Why are we talking about carbon passports in the section on Central Bank Digital Currencies?

(Today’s post is an excerpt from the “Eye on Evilcoin” section of this month’s Bitcoin Capitalist macro overview).

Because we think CBDCs will invariably launch as, or morph into, personal carbon footprint quotas.

Right now, what we call “the fiat money system” uses debt for money. That’s no longer sustainable, so what we’re expecting is an attempt to switch what we loosely identify as “money”, away from symbolic tokens backed by debt, to social credit scores, backed by personal carbon footprint quotas.

In the future, what we loosely identify as 'money' will switch from being symbolic tokens backed by debt, to social credit scores, backed by personal carbon footprint quotas.
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Expanding on this theme, probably, is another report from Future Labs on “Neo-Collectivism”, which may give us a hint at how the policymakers of late stage globalism will seek to preempt free markets and universal human rights with a “we’re all in this together” retread of what is essentially, communism:

“Society is facing a mass re-organisation. United by values of empathy and community, consumers are shunning individualism in favour of alliances that are decentralising industries and redistributing power at scale”

LS:N Global and Future Laboratories seem like a wannabe World Economic Forum. Lots of pronouns on the “Team” page, and leaning heavily into that euphemistic WEF-speak that makes technocratic communism sound benign and fashionable.

I ended up shelling out £265 to by the Neo-Collectivist Megatrend report (a 40 page PDF) and what I found in there was along the lines of what one might expect, but it was alarming all the same.

In the next post to this one, we’ll dive into it and find out just how the “Zalpha Generation” is poised to usher us into an era of Systemic Endemic Socialism.

My forthcoming ebook The CBDC Survival Guide will give you the tools and the knowledge to navigate coming era of Monetary Apartheid. Bombthrower subscribers will get free when it drops, sign up today.

If you’re curious about The Bitcoin Capitalist Letter I will be closing it off to new subscribers soon. I explain why to Bombthrower subscribers.

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WEF: Somebody has to be in charge of rationing freedom

Mark E. Jeftovic — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:01:22 +0000

That’s why only Central Banks can create digital currencies

The Fed recently put out a white paper, Data Privacy for Digital Asset Systems, which contends that the expectation of privacy in digital currencies (read: CBDCs) stems from misunderstanding how digital systems work.

“Concepts such as the desire for ‘cash-like anonymity’ are based on false underlying assumptions.”, is the crux of it (quick, somebody tell the Monero team, and everybody else already deploying anonymizing protocols and applications for digital assets).

The subtext is that there can be some privacy and confidentiality safeguards built into CBDCs, but at the end of the day those would still be subject to being overridden or dispensed with. The paper doesn’t come out and say that, but it does make oblique references:

“confidentiality implies that collected and stored data is protected from view in some manner, such as obfuscation or access restriction, and available only to authorized actors.”

Which of course makes you wonder who exactly will be authorized and what will their capabilities be? It truly is the trillion dollar question.

WEF: “Hold my beer”

If we keep this paper in mind while we consider the World Economic Forum’s recent article on digital currencies, privacy and freedom, which put a finer point on it, while paying lip service to the desire for privacy in those characteristic WEF-speak euphemisms:

“A digital cash replacement should not enable criminality, but there should be some freedom to transact with complete privacy.”

“Some freedom” implies that any freedom will be subject to approval, because either you have complete freedom, or you don’t.

“Some freedom” coming from the WEF especially, sounds a lot like their “Life in 2030” vision, which is mostly known for point #1: “You’ll own nothing and be happy”.

Point #4 is “You’ll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple. For the environment, and for your health”.

In other words, according to the WEF, digital currencies will afford some privacy and some freedom. Just like how in 2030 you’ll be able to eat some meat. (As long as you behave.)

Throughout the piece the impetus toward digital currencies is ascribed to consumer preferences for convenience – that nation states and NGOs (including the WEF) are relentlessly pushing us there, along with digital IDs and health passports, is never mentioned.

Through their preference for the convenience of electronic payments, we will inadvertently lose the historic freedom that only cash provides: to spend our money on what we want, with whom we choose.

It’s always amusing to watch the Davos-darlings pretend to grapple with thorny ethical issues:

As governments and central banks consider introducing retail central bank digital currencies (CBDC), they must therefore answer the following: Once the last cash payment is made, does this mean our historic right to make payments that are not observable or censorable by the state will end on the same day? Is that what we want?

The answer, of course, is a resounding “yes” if we’re to remember some of the more breathless pronouncements from their conclaves:

Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans boasts at the World Economic Forum about the development of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor what you buy, what you eat, and where/how you travel. pic.twitter.com/sisSrUngDI

— Andrew Lawton (@AndrewLawton) May 24, 2022

“We are developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint. What does that mean? That’s where are they travelling, how are they traveling? What are they eating? What are they consuming on the platform? So, individual – carbon – footprint – tracker. Stay tuned, we don’t have it operational yet, but it’s something we’re working on”.

The WEF article tackles the conundrum:

any system that allows people to make payments that cannot be traced or blocked is bound to attract criminals as well as facilitate personal liberty… A digital currency system should not mimic the “wild west”, but there should be some freedom to transact with complete privacy.

And while the article acknowledges that,

“if a CBDC doesn’t have some element of this capability, my prediction is it will fail in some major developed economies.”,

the entire framing is that Central Banks are the only game in town, and they need to get it right:

If the private sector could deliver a truly cash-like product itself, then we wouldn’t need this debate, but even a limited degree of cash-like behaviour would be incompatible with electronic payments laws. The reality is that only a central bank could deliver this type of product, thanks to the precedent set by their monopoly on the issuance of cash.

This paragraph would be the so-called “money-shot”. There is no mention of Bitcoin, or that crypto-currencies and stablecoins are already becoming ceded territory within the regulatory frameworks of nation states. There is no acknowledgement that many holders of wealth and capital will simply end-run CBDCs for the very reasons they articulate.

One of the WEF’s core tenets is that nation states are losing their position as the sole arbiters of power in this Fourth Industrial Revolution. That means they will have to coexist within a rubric of “Stakeholder Capitalism”, but what the WEF sending mixed messages:

On the one hand, governments are losing their primacy (and thus, monopoly on money issuance and supra-national initiatives like digital id’s and health passports), while on the other, only they have the authority to bless ascendent monetary systems. Which is it?

And how could you possibly publish an article like this without observing the elephant in the room: Bitcoin (and crypto-currencies, including stablecoins) have already entered the monetary landscape and have changed it in irreversible ways.

As expected when it comes to the World Economic Forum, it’s a display of truly breathtaking hubris and nescience.

Today’s post was an excerpt from the CBDC coverage section of the latest The Bitcoin Capitalist. TBC provides actionable intelligence on the macro forces shaping Late Stage Globalism and a tactical toolkit for preserving and growing your wealth as it plays out. Try it today here.

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Cash will be no refuge under CBDCs

Mark E. Jeftovic — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 18:10:19 +0000

The world is headed toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and everybody knows it, even the people who don’t want them (which at the moment looks to be most people).

But the policy-makers have deigned it be so, and CBDCs provide such a compelling opportunity for surveillance and social control that they are irresistible. That the fiat currency system is in the process of imploding makes it an imperative.

My editor and researcher JonB, (give him a follow) sent me this tweet:

Australia to be ‘functionally cashless’ by 2025. Australian people have to stop this madness and start using more cash, otherwise we will be ruled by the banks and government and rationing will affect everyone. https://t.co/ygfpzMYNcf

— Giggity (@GiggityVJ) September 24, 2023

It was to draw my attention to the timeline for Australia going cashless, and while doing so doesn’t coincide with the launch of their CBDC, the RBA is dilligently headed there (as are nearly all central banks globally).

One area of focus in The Bitcoin Capitalist is that we track all the national CBDC deployments and the myriad supranational policies and aspirations that go into them (we call it “Eye on EvilCoin”, for the Mr. Robot fans out there).

With the tweet above, I became more intrigued by the call-to-action itself, because I see this a lot: the idea that the way to resist the CBDC is to keep using cash. This is not only wrong-headed, it’s self-defeating.

The idea that the way to resist the CBDC is to keep using cash is not only wrong-headed, it’s self-defeating.
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Cash doesn’t buy you freedom under CBDCs

The error in thinking so arises from a failure to understand that cash is simply older iteration of what digital cash, and CBDCs are going to be: denominations in a currency, backed by nothing and controlled by the very state that you’re trying to protect yourself from.

It gets worse, because this is also the same state that has already weaponized the currency against you, either slowly, via targeted inflation (a.k.a “theft”) or overtly, as we saw here in Canada during the #FreedomConvoy.

The only thing I can see happening to the paper cash economy after a given country has (successfully) gone cashless, is that the paper currency will lose most of its value and everything gets far more expensive when priced in terms of cash.

It’ll be easier to destroy cash than ban it

Far easier. After all, governments and central banks have been destroying cash throughout history.

Via VisualCapitalist

In all probability, they won’t even have to ban cash or impose penalties for using it.

All they’ll have to do is crank up the money printer and hyperinflate it out of existence – all the while offering holders of cash the opportunity to switch into the CBDC at seemingly advantageous (or one-sided) terms.

At that point, banning cash will seem akin to banning the buggy whip. Kind of pointless.

The Good News

While it’s practically baked-in that CBDCs will either launch as, or morph into, CCP-style social credit systems, what is unknown at the moment is if Late Stage Globalism’s financial system will actually hold together long enough for retail CBDCs to deploy.

We see a lot of tweets and Youtube videos from people predicting a snap launch of a CBDC after a sudden banking holiday in the imminent future.

I don’t see that as possible, because there isn’t a major economy in the world that is anywhere close to being ready to launch a retail CBDC.

There are numerous interbank clearing networks that are either in test beds or already up and running. FedNow’s launch over the summer is one, and many say that is a precursor to the CBDC launch.

But at the retail level: on your phone, monitoring every transaction, metering your carbon footprint – this is still a long way off.

The US, the IMF, the BIS et al are still writing white papers about it. Many of them are chilling, to be sure, but they’re still navel gazing and not actually working on it. The UK just announced their retail CBDC roadmap and the research phase alone will start this year and go on for the next three years.

In Canada there are some tests going on but even the Bank of Canada admits there isn’t a compelling use case for CBDCs and not many Canadians really want it.

Of the four retail CBDCs already up and running (The Bahamas, Jamaica, The Eastern Caribbean Dollar, and Nigeria), they have all been plagued with technical problems or public apathy. Venezuela has launched two CBDCs over the past decade, each launch coinciding with a massive currency devaluation, and they both stiffed.

But it’s Nigeria’s eNaira which is the closest to a heavy-handed government forced CBDC. Although there is no social credit component yet -authorities there were pressing hard for a full-on cash ban to get people to use it, and that’s gone quite badly. Nigerians are opting for gold and Bitcoin instead (hold that thought).

The global financial system is coming unglued so fast that governments may find themselves forced to accelerate retail CBDC projects.

My prediction has always been that in a crisis they’ll resort to some half-baked abomination that rolls out atop a base layer that already exists: like Ethereum (which we’re already seeing in Brazil) or Ripple – who seems to want to be the base layer for CBDCs.

They’re called “Judas Goats”

Once CBDC’s hit, we will wind up in a type of Monetary Apartheid, and the important thing to understand is that clinging to cash isn’t going to save you.

Fortunately, no matter which path toward retail CBDCs governments choose, it will take long enough that you still have time to prepare.

Fortunately, no matter which path toward retail CBDCs governments choose, it will take long enough that you still have time to prepare.
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Precious metals are a favourite amongst the liberty-minded. Wisdom and history show it prudent to have some of your wealth in gold and silver (the FDR gold ban is actually instructive there because even though many people refer to it, it wasn’t overly successful in terms of public compliance).

But real sovereignty will lie in having access to a digital hard-asset that is truly decentralized and that can be frictionlessly moved around the globe, impervious to capital controls.

I am talking of course, about Bitcoin. Start a dollar cost average today, get off zero – and you will be in an entirely different economic class from 95% of the people who get blindsided when retail CBDCs do roll out.

It’s also entirely possible that Late Stage Globalism may implode before then and make it all moot. But even then, you’re still going to need some way of preserving and safeguarding your wealth, and paper cash will be especially useless in that event. You’ll also need the ability to move it, at will, and that isn’t always easy to do with gold.

The ideal toolkit contains both Bitcoin and precious metals, among other elements which are out of scope here (second passports, property and businesses in multiple jurisdictions, etc).

The main point is this: If your goal is to mitigate against a cashless society, one of the least effective ways of doing it would be with cash.

The Bitcoin Capitalist provides actionable intelligence on the macro forces shaping Late Stage Globalism and a tactical toolkit for growing your wealth as it plays out. Try it today here.

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Life in 2033: Monetary Apartheid

Mark E. Jeftovic — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:01:38 +0000

In the future, it’ll be a lot more expensive to be free.

Roger and Reggie were identical twin brothers, born in Merrickville, Ontario around 1980.

They both had normal school trajectories, even sharing an apartment through college – Roger taking computer programming and Reggie electronics engineering. The brothers seemed well positioned to enjoy reasonably affluent lives, having secured high-tech vocations in an increasingly digitized world.

They’re in their early 50’s now and it’s hard to say exactly where their lives diverged – this is not a “separated at birth” story. They were separated by something else.

Here in 2033, both of them are married – or least got married. Reggie’s wife left him in the late 20’s. She gave numerous reasons why “she couldn’t take it any more”, but statistically, financial stress overtook infidelity as the number one cause of divorce around the time of the first climate lockdowns.

Reggie ekes out a life of quiet desperation: he works as a remote drone repair / recovery technician, which has him licensed to drive a vehicle and his employer is allowed to operate seven months per year.

That leaves him on Yubey (“UBI”) for five months, usually in stretches of three and two months at a time, during which he’s confined to his fifteen minute city (a.k.a “fifdom”). By the end of it, he’s usually pretty gaunt – the caloric quota assigned to his body type, he always thought was a tad meagre. “And probably racist”, he often fumed, privately (he would never post that on a socnet, not again, anyway – he found out the hard way the first and only time he voiced his objections to his carbon allotment and feels he’s never quite earned-back those demerits, and probably never will – he laments).

He has visitation rights for his kids, but they live in a different fifteen, with their mother and a court appointed Parental 2. Even though it’s adjacent to his, he has to be careful around his travel allowance. The government finally approved OHIP coverage for MRNA syndrome, but the only practitioner he could afford was also in the adjacent zone, so he was left with either timing medical appointments with visitations or “saving up” by skipping one of his allowable excursions.

Reggie can’t afford to go to restaurants, and live entertainment in his socio-economic strata wasn’t much to write home about. Musical instruments aren’t approved for power usage in his fifdom and he was never much into acoustical scream-core. So he spends most of his time at home, a fully subsidized basement bachelor, and most of his time there in his pod, wireheaded in a semi-somnambulistic state, immersed in a combination of pornographic fantasies and electrically induced opioid-like highs.

He never talks to his brother, he couldn’t pay for the stream even if he wanted to. “Off quadrant my ass”, he thought. May as well be off planet.

Roger, (and family), live in El Salvador. In the winter, anyway. Most winters. Sometimes Costa Rica. During the Northern spring and summer he keeps a residence in Texas and his main business operates out of Bermuda, inasmuch as it is tied to any physical location. It’s really just a holding company for his multiple income streams, royalties and investments, and it could really be anywhere.

School for the kids isn’t a problem because the tutors just travel with the family. The carbon taxes on private jets are excessive, to say the least, so they make due with a fractional. Pretty well everybody does. Sometimes they have to adjust their travel times by a few days or even a week – and if they’re flying when there’s a lockdown on then it’s even more expensive to shell out for an “ETE” (Essential Travel Exemption), but for the most part they make it work.

Roger isn’t overly ostentatious with his choice of cars, private vehicle ownership being a luxury unto itself; but he and his wife like to dress well, travel well, and overall, live well. That includes (like most SovInd’s), eating meat – real meat, not the lab hatched sludge (a.k.a “carcinogen in a can”) – whenever they feel like it, which is every meal. It’s expensive, all those carbon debits, but it’s no worse than the sales and income taxes of yore.

He hasn’t heard from his brother in over a decade despite having sent emissary agents out to establish contact with him years ago, but Reggie doesn’t seem to have access to any AI or encryption at all.

What was The Great Bifurcation?

How did the two brothers’ lives go in such different directions and reach such starkly different outcomes after starting out life in exactly the same place, having almost identical upbringings, educations and opportunities?

Near as Roger could figure it, it had to have been around the fourth Bitcoin halving. Roger had been dollar-cost averaging sats since 2021 – started buying right at the top of that cycle, as luck would have it, but he remained undaunted in his conviction. Having read The Bitcoin Standard and then The Fiat Standard, when he finally picked up a copy of The Sovereign Individual, it exploded in his brain and he was never the same again.

When the Great Restructuring was declared, after a month-long banking holiday across the entire G-20 nation states, the entire world bifurcated into a type of monetary Apartheid. Everybody and anybody who’s entire net worth consisted of banking liabilities found themselves ten times “richer” at least in nominal terms – their deposits having been converted into IMFCoin at the rate of 10-to-1.

But all the wallets were the same: you had to enter your medicals, link in your shopping apps and pretty well anything capable of an e-commerce transaction – they were now all reporting each transaction via the Basel API and people started seeing tabs for “Allowance” and “Quota” showing up in their wallets.

Roger wasn’t surprised, he’d been expecting it, and he took this as his cue to pull up stakes and move himself, his family – and his wife’s mother to El Salvador. They had owned a vacation house there for some time. Bitcoin’s market cap had entirely replaced that of bonds, and gold added another half on top of that. Buying at the top of the 2021 cycle now looked like a rounding error, thank god.

He tried to talk to his brother about dollar-cost-averaging into Bitcoin during that same cycle. Reggie would have none of it. Pointing at the FTX, Tether and Binance scandals, he dismissed it all as magic internet money and put his entire savings and RRSPs into “clean tech”, ESG ETFs and government bonds, a worse combination no-one could have ever imagined. By the time the Restructuring ran it’s course, a full blown depression wiped him out. He reverse mortgaged his condo, and after real estate tanked, he was even underwater on that – his wife took the kids and left, and he was evicted.

All he had from that point on was whatever showed up on his phone each month, which he had to spend before the next stim hit (on allowable expenditures, of course). It actually didn’t matter whether his monthly top-up was from his work or from his Yubey – it was all the same. It was more of a score than money. Just a number on his phone that decremented anytime he did anything, his entire life having been gamified in a weird, Kafka-esque manner.

'It was more of a score than money. Just a number on his phone that decremented anytime he did anything, his entire life having been gamified in a weird, Kafka-esque manner.'
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Roger couldn’t understand how anybody could have been surprised by any of this. It wasn’t some big, closely held secret. Central banks, the IMF, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements had all been publishing white papers spelling everything out for years (he had been tracking it via his subscription to The Bitcoin Capitalist and its “Eye on EvilCoin” section in every edition).

Even The World Economic Forum with their cartoonish mascot, Klaus Schwab had been telegraphing all this like something out of pro wrestling: the global financial system was imploding, the debt super-cycle was ending, and generations of living beyond ones means on government granted entitlements and borrowed money was coming to an end.

Everybody was going to have to get used to ratcheting down their standard of living, and by “everybody” it meant, everybody else: those who had no independent means of wealth who relied on the government for their economic sustenance. After a decade of rolling lockdowns and what looked like a controlled demolition of the middle class, that encapsulated huge swaths of the populace.

The pathway into digital serfdom was paved with years long mass public propaganda around a climate crisis and a purely fabricated new religion called “degrowth”.

The pathway into digital serfdom was paved with years long mass public propaganda around a climate crisis and a purely fabricated new religion called 'degrowth'.
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By the time The Great Restructuring hit, it didn’t matter if the public really believed anymore. They only had to buy it long enough to become completely beholden to the system, and after that – they were locked in for perpetuity.

The exceptions were those who had preserved (and grown) their wealth, holding it in secured digital bearer instruments within the decentralized economy, and outside the legacy banking system.

This was an ascendant class of textbook Sovereign Individuals, who figuratively island hopped across various network states and crypto claves that were marbled globally throughout an otherwise collectivist, proletarian “paradise”.

Roger and his family were among this latter class. He knew the CBDC regime wouldn’t last forever, it would probably collapse in less than half the time it took for the fiat era to implode, but he also knew that the better way to navigate the Age of Collectivism was as a sovereign individual and not a serf. Whatever system arose on the other side of this, it would be far better to enter it with wealth, property, assets and mobility than with none of the above.

This is the prologue from my forthcoming book: The CBDC Survival Guide: Preserving your wealth, freedom and sanity in the coming Age of Collectivism. Due out this fall. Bombthrower list subscribers will get the CBDC Cheat Sheet Summary when it drops (and the Crypto Capitalist Manifesto while you wait). Get on the list here, and follow me on Nostr or Twitter.

You can cut straight to the The Bitcoin Capitalist and learn how to escape Crypto Communism here.