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

Originally via @JoeyTweeets on X

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 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.

As a long time follower of the early “New Thought” authors, eventually I would run into modern day contemporaries like Ryuu Shinohara. My wife and I have been reading his books for a couple of years now and the opportunity to record a podcast with him sort of fluked into my lap last month.

Never one to argue with the universe, I leapt at the opportunity to have him on Bombthrower.TV, especially given that we’re getting ready to launch a complimentary project: Sovereign Mind.

(It also turned out he’s a Bitcoiner too, which shouldn’t surprise us).

Episode Notes & Links:

• Ryuu Shinohara: Main website & Instagram, YouTube, Twitter
• Books on Amazon
• Get on the Invite List for Sovereign Mind
• BombthrowerTV opening theme music by The Wabi Sabis from London, ON

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.

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.

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.

Follow me on Nostr, or Twitter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Follow me on Nostr, or Twitter.

A reader sent me this graphic which is circulating on social media. Whenever I see an unattributed image like this going around I want to verify it, lest it be photoshopped, a deep-fake or some derivation of  “urban legend”.

Sure enough, if you go to NatWest bank’s website, right here – you see this cash withdrawal policy spelled out for all to see:

This isn’t actually new

Here in Canada, for at least a few years – predating COVID, the big four banks have been routinely asking you why you are taking cash out whenever you withdraw anything over a couple thousand dollars. However, you can tell them pretty well anything (“because I want it”,  “none of your business”  or even “to blow it all on booze and hookers”, will all work).  I haven’t heard of a case where a withdrawal has been denied based on the reason supplied, yet.

But now that we’re starting to see it formalized in policy language of banks, we can all see where this is going.

The war on cash has been in full swing for a long time, India banned large denominations bills  in 2016 and will now start eliminating them from the monetary base. France has been signalling a prohibition on cash payments over 1,000 € since 2013 and finally, quietly, it seems, made it part of the framework this year.

It portends a wider initiative across the entire Eurozone (who is also trying to lump in crypto payments under the restrictions).

Here Come the CBDCs

This is all to lay the groundwork for the march into Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) which will seek to accomplish three objectives of Late Stage Globalism:

1. Eliminate privacy – making all transactions trackable, traceable and taxable in realtime.
2. Introduce controls on how, when and why you are spending your own money. Think China-style social credit, which in its Westernized form will almost certainly involve personal carbon footprint quotas.
   And most importantly (otherwise we wouldn’t be calling it “Late Stage Gobalism”):
3.  Extend the runway of fiat currencies – which are about to hit the wall as a long-wave debt super-cycle reaches its crescendo.

The antidote to all this, is of course, Bitcoin. The only digital asset that is scarce, truly decentralized, has frictionless portability, and is backstopped in physical reality (the “7th property”) in away gold isn’t.  It embodies all other properties of sound money:

There are still many who scoff at the idea of “magic internet money” becoming viable at all, let alone the main bulwark against the coming CBDCs.  We know cash is doomed, we know any state or central bank issued digital substitutes will simply be linear, digital extensions of fiat: backed by nothing, based on debt, but with added layers of technocratic surveillance and control.

With the mother of all economic recessions dead ahead (if not here already), and the fiat banking system more or less insolvent, the value proposition for CBDCs (a.k.a subservience-tokens) will be Universal Basic Income, with all encompassing strings attached.

Anybody relying on the State for their economic subsistence will have their lives gamified via their smartphones, their  carbon footprints metered, their energy usage subject to approval. Such will be the life of a CBDC-serf.

When those days come, the bank won’t have to ask you why you want some of your own money and how you are going to spend it.

You’re the one who will have to ask them …for permission.

My next ebook is The CBDC Survival Guide and I’m sending it free to Bombthrower subscribers when it’s done (early June). In the meantime, subscribe now and get The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto while you wait. Follow me on Nostr, or Twitter. 

The two convoys: #FreedomConvoy and Political Convoy

“I have news for everybody on the left, you’re the right-wing authoritarians who wanted to censor my video games and music in the 90s. That’s what you’ve become, you’ve become the very people you profess to be fighting against. “

I recently had a chance to sit down with B. J Dichter of Canada’s #FreedomConvoy to talk about what happened in Ottawa, what the #FreedomConvoy was all about, and his new book Honking For Freedom.

The full transcript of the show is now available, highlights include:

What the #FreedomConvoy was all about:

Markjr:

One thing that was always frustrating to me when talking about the Freedom Convoy, and we’ll get into the whole narrative and spin and media, but let’s state it for the record here. What was the goal of the Freedom Convoy?

BJ Dichter:  Oh, it was pretty simple: to end the vaccine mandates and to end the ArriveCan app.

(Dichter had outlined in an earlier podcast with Robert Breedlove how he was pulling up to the border to re-enter Canada and was holding his phone out the window to the Canada Border agent who told him not to bother, his phone had already broadcasted everything they needed to know about him when he was still approaching the border).

The mass conditioning of the public by the mainstream media:

There was nothing but deception from legacy media, there was deception from alternative media as well on all sides.

And no one was being straight with what was going on. I was doing my best to try to manage that and to leverage one media over the other, to do my best to get the story out while also trying to bait the legacy media to cover it. Because in the beginning, the legacy media wasn’t covering it. They’re trying to ignore it, which is one of the reasons I banned them from our press conferences. And I knew that would set them off. What people don’t know is not only did I ban them from our press conferences, but I also sent invites to all my contacts in the legacy media. And then when they responded, I said, “oh, sorry, you can’t come.”

Markjr: 

I think marketers call that the takeaway sale.

What infuriated me about that, when you look at headlines throughout the world, there was one guy with a confederate flag, who was hounded out of the crowd by the Convoy, and there was one guy with the swastika flag. I would pay money have that person revealed and outed because what I think, and I’m not the only one, was that he was a plant.

It was just so convenient that there was a photographer there getting professional quality photos of this person walking through the crowd. And yet, those two images were on an infinite loop all over the world. They just looped the same image over and over.

And then it’s so subtle: Suddenly the headlines, say, confederate flags and swastikas — plural. And it’s so subtle, right?

So it gets into the mind of the masses. They think that this place was overrun with Hitler Youth and Klansmen, and it was one guy of each: one swastika, one confederate flag, and they were hounded out of the area by the participants.

That was infuriating.

The other thing I’ll say about this, is when I tried to engage with people who disagreed with me about what you were trying to do, what the goal of the Convoy was, the discourse would be civil, and it would be polite, until one thing happened:

When I challenged their source of news. When I called into question the veracity of the mainstream media, the conversation turned nasty immediately. So what I found very odd about this is you can oppose people’s premises and you can attack even their beliefs. But if you attack their support structure for how they base their knowledge, they get defensive and they come out swinging.

BJ Dichter:

Yeah, it’s because you’ve triggered them into cognitive dissonance.

One of the people that benefits of all this, is that I managed to connect with some people that have large platforms, people who I admire, one of them was I messaged him back and forth just a couple of times, is Scott Adams. 

Scott Adams describes this as the seven signs of cognitive dissonance trying to do his best to get people to understand this.

Once you challenge their belief system,  they jump into one of the seven categories which are:

1. change to the topic
2. ad hominem
3. mind reading
4. word salad
5. analogy instead of reason
6. it’s too complicated to explain, or the ‘
7. so you’re saying’ straw man

Which is what you saw.

That’s what you’ve done, you’ve managed to force them, and into second guessing their belief system, because we’re no longer a science-based society, we are now a belief-based society.And we don’t challenge our own beliefs.

The role of Bitcoin in the #FreedomConvoy

Bitcoiners were trying to warn the convoy organizers that their fundraising proceeds would likely be seized, when they first approached Tamara Lich, she said reportedly said: “I don’t need video game money, I need real money.”

Eventually, they found their way to Dichter, who still encountered resistance from the other organizers who viewed it with suspicion.

Markjr: So how many people became instantly orange-pilled when bank accounts started getting frozen?

BJ Dichter:

It’s amazing. You know, it’s just like the narrative poisoning problem with messaging. Once you once you throw them the counter-narrative, either people slip into the seven signs of cognitive dissonance, or if it’s really serious, it really hits them emotionally where it’s important, like their freedom and their wealth, then they switch to “Okay, tell me more.”

Right. So we got a little bit of that. There was so much. I mean, I spent a week on the phone with lawyers trying not to get arrested. There were so many other things going on that it’s not even covered in the book, stuff I haven’t talked about yet. But what it did is it allow me to do consecutive Twitter spaces towards the end and then after the convoy and leading up to Bitcoin 2022 in Miami, that I had people saying, “Okay, tell me about Bitcoin. How did it work during the convoy? How do I buy it? Should I keep it here?”

It just really opened up the doors, where people previously they dismissed it, because in the Western world, we’re spoiled. We don’t deal with regular currency collapses. We’re not in Argentina and Brazil, right?

So what is Bitcoin here? It’s an investment. Well, once the Freedom Convoy came around that hyperbolic scenario that we all thought would never happen here. It’s always going to happen somewhere else. Well, it happened here.

And now it’s more than just an investment for a small group of people that’s growing daily. That’s why in my discord, we have a Bitcoin chat for people who are new, and still learning and don’t understand and I like the soft pill approach, the soft orange pill approach of letting people come to you and they are definitely coming because of the Chief Marketing Officer of Bitcoin: Justin Trudeau.

I love the Bitcoin community and I hate the word community. But it’s so awesome and it’s so many people in politics don’t have this advantage, the die-hard politic political people, to go into a space, where there’s a whole bunch of people have a whole bunch of different views on the world, and how the world should operate, but they agree on one thing, which is freedom, sovereignty of money, decentral decentralization, and it’s become this, this undercurrent that allows us all to talk to each other. And I’ve only ever experienced that in Bitcoin. So that’s the societal benefits and political benefits, if you will, with Bitcoin on top of the monetary value that it has, and I’m trying my best to make more and more people realize that and see that and some of them have.

Iterating for Freedom: The Dutch Farmers have a crack:

We talked about how the #FreedomConvoy set off a chain reaction around the world, it was arguably the beginning of the end of the Lockdown Era and vaccine mandates.

BJ Dichter:

Look what happened in the Netherlands. Jordan Peterson explained to me on one of our calls, he said, the people in the Netherlands who eventually connected with, they looked at what happened in the convoy.

They tried to look at the weaknesses that were exposed by the government. And they tried to hedge against that.

They had regular protests, they would break it up, they’d start again,  always kept the government guessing.

And what was the eventual result of that was the fact that they protected against all the things that we dealt with. They actually formed a party, and they got 20% of the vote. And now they have the political capital, and the votes in their parliament to block any of this nonsense, whether it’s WTF or Neo-progressive, whatever you want to call it, to block any of these restrictions on farmers, because they have 20% of the parliament.

So they won. 

Did it work in Canada?

We saw them testing messaging. And I remember saying to some of the other road captains, people are organizing and saying this is good.

They’re testing messaging, that means they have data showing that there’s overwhelming support for us. They don’t know what to do. Just wait, let’s wait it out a couple of days.

And then lo and behold, we started to see provinces. Scott Moe, in Saskatchewan, started testing messaging and saying, ‘Oh, well, maybe we’re gonna roll back. Maybe it’s time to end the pandemic and restrictions.’

And I was laughing, #nothingtodowithtruckers, right? Because they’ll never admit it.  And I found out from a number of people, there was 30+ convoys around the world, that people realized in various jurisdictions that this tactic was working.

And this also had the same ripple effect and jurisdictions outside of Canada.

So yeah, I think it did. The only one that held on were the Trudeau administration. Because extremists only know one worldview, and they’ll always double down on their strategy, they’ll never sit back and think, what’s the other guy thinking?

There is zero respect. And they eventually, how many months later, was it eight months later, they eventually removed the restrictions within Canada and the mandates. And once again, #nothingtodowithtruckers; just because you think you can hang on for additional six months? You think we don’t know it? It was the convoy. We know it did.

However B.J Dichter seems to think that the Canadian #FreedomConvoy protestors were robbed of the same victories that the later iterations, like the Dutch Farmers, were achieving. Facing the prospect of a class action suit for over $400 million, it’s hard to see the silver lining:

BJ Dichter:

We were robbed of building an equivalent grassroots movement, that wasn’t tied to any political party that we could have maneuvered and found candidates, politicians, groups of people, advocacy groups to align with, to have that sort of effect on Canadian politics, we were robbed of that, and that I will never forgive them for.

Markjr:

This brings us back to Martin Gurrie’s book [Revolt of the Public], who said that the fatal flaw in a lot of these populist movements was that they didn’t have a coherent strategy for what to do with the momentum and the inertia and the victories that they achieved, like they could overthrow a government, but then, you know, just someone worse would take its place.

So there was no coherent methodology to sort of channel it all into and what you were describing the Dutch, the Netherlands. They transcended that. They figured it out.

It’s early days here in Canada. Maybe that particular chapter went the way it did. But you guys did something immutable, something transformative, really, you set off the whole movement, and that set the entire thing in motion so that I wouldn’t sell yourself short there because it all started in Canada with you guys

BJ Dichter

I think we’re right now at the stage where people are, you know, independent journalists, YouTubers are now talking to myself and other people are understanding the nuance of what went on behind the scenes.

They’re now understanding that there are two convoys there — that what I call political convoy and freedom convoy.  And freedom convoy was much larger.

The political convoy was a small group of people trying to co-opt us for the political class, which is going to happen everywhere. We’re going to have some rough waters for a little while as we kind of purge out the political convoy and political conflict and go back to their parties.

The rest of us can refocus on unifying and building something with people we don’t necessarily agree with everything, but we agree on respect and unity and tolerating each other.

Off Camera: Liberal Faction planned to oust Trudeau

After we stopped recording we continued speaking a while, including some developments around the class action lawsuit which Dichter will announce in due course (follow the links below to stay on top of this).

However one of the bombshell revelations that came up (at least for me) was that Dichter had been contacted by a faction of MPs from within the Liberal Party of Canada who were more receptive to the grievances of the convoy and who were planning to oust Trudeau by supporting a non-confidence motion in Parliament. It never materialized as the Emergency Act was soon invoked, possibly because Trudeau was in full “seige mentality” by then. (my take, not Dichter’s).

When the convoy was happening I said that the leader of every Canadian political party was going to end up losing their job over it. The CPC dumped the “liberal-lite” Erin O’Toole almost immediately. Looks like elements within the Liberal Party wanted to do the same with Trudeau. We all know Jagmeet Singh is loathed by his own base and will probably not survive his party’s next leadership ballot given that he’s single-handedly propping up Trudeau while trying to sound like he’s fighting the system.

See also:

• The full transcript
• Episode page for  BombthrowerTV Episode #9: Honking For Freedom
• HonkingForFreedom.com
• Support the legal defense fund with Bitcoin
• B J Dichter’s Discord
• The Honking For Freedom book

The interview:

Subscribe to The Bombthrower email list and receive a free copy of the Crypto Capitalist Manifesto – or follow me on Nostr or Twitter. My Bitcoin Capitalist premium letter provides an actionable investment thesis for navigating the coming monetary apartheid between being a CBDC-serf and a Sovereign Individual with Bitcoin. 

It was a pleasure to connect with Nick Giambruno – international investor, who specializes in “off-the-beaten path” situations, currently in Argentina. He’s invested in gold, Bitcoin and among the early adaptors of the decentralized messaging protocol taking the internet by storm: Nostr.

Show Notes:

• Nick Giambruno’s Financial Underground
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This is what CBDC’s are being built for

Anybody who seriously thinks that Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs of the future won’t be full blown social credit systems need look no further than Brazil, where newly selected socialist / globalist Lula da Silva just decreed that the Bolsa Familia program will require family members to be vaccinated in order to continue receiving benefits.

“we can’t play around. It is a question of science. If there are ten covid vaccines, 50 to take, I will take as many as necessary because I like my life. I think everyone has a duty to their children’s life, take them [to vaccinate] at the right age ”.

The news comes via The Rio Times, which describes the Bolsa program as “a social welfare program for the poorest families in Brazil” and “a kind of Universal Basic Income”.

Lula says Brazilians can receive financial aid only if they have taken the vax. Bolsa Família will require vax certificates from participants & their children: We can’t play, it’s a question of science. If I have 10 covid vaccines to take, I will take all that is necessary. pic.twitter.com/hqrYq4jO6r

— Geopolitics & Empire (@Geopolitics_Emp) February 7, 2023

UBI is considered by many to be beneficent and inevitable. I personally believe the latter but not the former.

However it shouldn’t surprise anyone that if you’re dependent on The Saviour State for your sustenance (as Charles Hugh Smith calls it),  you are, in effect, their chattel.

CBDCs will be the rails for UBI programs

The emergence of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) initiatives in nearly every nation on earth clearly signals the direction this is going. Nearly every CBDC white paper or proposal I’ve come across have the following three characteristics spelled out in plain text, and I expect every CBDC to have these five capabilities baked-in, whether or not they are initially enabled (or  documented).

#1) Expiry dates / use-by dates

CBDCs will have expiry dates after which their value will evaporate or erode. What I’ve noticed is white papers coming out of central banks started framing it as a feature, not a bug, to facilitate “recovery of lost funds”.

Abstract
An important feature of physical cash payments is resilience, which is due to their indifference to power outages or network coverage. Many central banks are exploring issuing digital cash substitutes with similar online payment functionality. Such substitutes could incorporate novel features, making them more desirable than physical cash. This paper considers introducing an expiry date for online digital currency balances to automate personal loss recovery. We show that this functionality could substantially increase consumer demand for digital cash, with the time to expiration playing an important role. Having more information available to the central bank improves accuracy of loss recovery but may decrease welfare.
— Best Before Expiry? Expiring Digital Currency and Loss Recovery, Bank of Canada Staff Paper, December 24, 2021

However the real reason CBDCs will have expiry dates is to stimulate money velocity and keep recipients dependent.

#2) “Anti-hoarding” features

Saving for the future is being rebranded as “hoarding” and it is becoming officially unfashionable because personal savings reduces dependancy on the state. The easiest mechanism for achieving this will be through negative interest rates on savings accounts, as per this IMF white paper,

…which goes on to outline the challenges there would be in eliminating the “arbitrage” between digital and physical cash:

A zero lower bound can be broken through a combination of (1) adopting or strengthening an electronic money standard in which electronic money is the unit of account and (2) implementing a time-varying interest rate (or more generally, rate of return) on paper currency (cash). Then, as the interest rate on cash moves in line with the official policy rates, there is no arbitrage between cash and money in the bank. Operationally this can be done while remaining quite close to the current monetary system, but there are several legal, communication, and political challenges to a transition to such an electronic money standard (Agarwal, and Kimball 2019).

(Despite the current rise in rates, once the money printers fire back up, this is where we’re headed).

#3) Total Information Awareness

Once it’s digitized in a centralized database (central banks) as opposed to being cryptographically secured on a decentralized blockchain (Bitcoin) – everything becomes known to central authorities instantly. Taxation can be applied per-transaction, but more interestingly – prices can also be modified on the fly.

If you’re behind on your property or income taxes – or have an unpaid fine (maybe because you’re fighting it), for example, they could simply enable a rolling garnishee on your wallet until it’s paid off.

While all transaction signatures are public on Bitcoin – they are pseudonymous and more importantly, unalterable. It’s true it may be known or discoverable that A sent sats to B, but there’s nothing any third-party can do about it. With Lightning on the ascent, combined with  various privacy enhancements there – Bitcoin development is moving in the direction of more freedom and more privacy – which is the opposite direction of most CBDC initiatives.

Finally, whether CBDCs are launched with the noblest of intentions, there will at some point arise “an emergency” which will make it necessary for The People in Charge to “flip the switch” and turn them into:

#4) Social Credit Systems

Imagine if “LoonCoin” was a thing last year when the #FreedomConvoy hit Ottawa (and signalled the beginning of a worldwide revolt against Covid tyranny). Instead of emailing a list of bank accounts to be frozen that were cribbed from a (hacked) spreadsheet, they could simply direct the Bank of Canada to turn off everybody’s digital wallets who were in the vicinity of the protest, or who contributed to their crowdfund, or who retweeted the #HonkHonk hashtag.

Do you think they wouldn’t have done it?

Covid vaxports have already been weaponized in China, Brazil is doing it with their UBI program and when this is all formaized into a CBDC, they will probably not launch it without the framework for widespread social credit and control systems being part of the plumbing.

We all know from our experience with the pandemic, emergencies tend to drag on in perpetuity. The “War on Terror” is still in effect, and there are still legions of collectivist automatons tweeting #CovidIsntOver.

So when “The Long Emergency” (to use James Kunstler’s term) becomes a never ending, rolling climate crisis, the social credit systems built into CBDCs will be used to enforce:

#5) Carbon footprint tracking

Back in Carbon Rationing, CBDCs and Sound Money I wrote how this trajectory is more or less baked-in now, and that the state-run financial system is undergoing a shift from a debt-backed monetary system to one based on carbon quotas.

This is the ultimate end-game of CBDCs. There is no hidden agenda or conspiracy around this (there’s already a Mastercard that cuts off your spending when you exceed your carbon quota), and globalist elites are quite up front about it….

Notice how he pitched it as “track your own footprint” then described it as “track their”, “what they’re eating”, “where they’re travelling” https://t.co/omHLzwqJAZ

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) February 9, 2023

Why CBDCs will ultimately fail

The developments of CBDCs is something we monitor in The Bitcoin Capitalist (formerly The Crypto Capitalist). Every month we put out our coverage of CBDCs  in the “Eye On Evilcoin” section and it’s not always bad news:

There is still  some time to stop CBDCs

Despite all the jawboning about CBDCs, nobody has really deployed anything viable. It’s all still design and planning – with some test beds going on. The few projects that have launched formal, actual CBDC’s have largely stiffed: Nigeria’s Enaira, Venezuela (lol). Even China’s much vaunted Digital Yuan had an underwhelming reception at last year’s Olympics (my suspicion is that the global financial system is unraveling faster than CBDCs can be developed, so they may have to go with something already out there, like Ethereum).

Worth noting, is that Brazil plans to deploy its CBDC next year.

I should note one exception to all the proposals out there in former CFTC Commissioner Chris Giancarlo (a.k.a “CryptoDad”) and the Digital Dollar Project. So far it’s the one proposal I’ve seen bucking the trend among all CBDC specifications in that there is no talk of expiry dates, and an actual emphasis on tokenization, custody and privacy.

CBDCs will not be permanent

It amuses me that when I read these plans around social credit flavoured CBDC’s, policy makers still continue to believe that by hobbling “cash”, making it impossible to save, eliminating privacy and layering on Orwellian levels of social control, they still get something that the public will prefer to cash, crypto or Bitcoin.

Only a central banker would be worried that people are going to want to hoard a statist shitcoin. (Especially after they put expiry dates on it).

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) February 8, 2023

It’s delusional.

Incentives matter, and that’s why nobody in their right might isn’t going to hold any wealth in CBDCs and keep their transactions within it to the lowest practical level.

The overall global system of governance is in a Fourth Turning style restructuring. With institutional legitimacy in tatters and public trust plummeting, CBDCs are typical and symbolic of the last gasp of industrial era, centrally planned economies.

The transition period between where we are now (Late Stage Globalism) and where we are headed – decentralized Network States, is going to be rough, so I advise battening down the hatches and reducing one’s reliance on government entitlements as much as possible…

Pro Tip: Don’t be poor

This is where we’re headed folks, so at the risk of sounding flippant, the solution is not to need financial aid.

Anybody depending on state entitlements or financial support will be CBDCerfs, their affairs fully regulated by the state, their carbon footprints metered, and rationed, while their lives are gamified through their smartphones.

Among the affluent G20 nations where woke-ism reigns supreme and neo-Marxism is still fashionable,  a lot of them may even like it.

But for the rest of us, who would prefer not to “own nothing and be happy”, it’s imperative that you have zero reliance on government subsidies, entitlements or support payments.

If you haven’t already:

1. Start a business. (Even a kitchen table business or an online venture)
2. Start stacking sats (Bitcoin) – get off zero, today.
3. Start taking sats at your business.

If you already own or run a business, buy, start or invest in another one.

It’s going to get a lot more expensive to be free. It’s not right or fair, but that doesn’t matter.

The good news is there’s never been a better time in history to learn, create, innovate and grow and these are the dynamics and incentives that will ultimately prevail. We’re in a period of Peak Collectivism and Peak Centralization now (for the next few years). This dominating ideology is ultimately an anti-human philosophy and this too shall pass.

Be ready for it, either way.

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Berkshire Hathaway was built atop a system that Bitcoin was created to destroy

The Oracle of Omaha’s second banana has pronounced judgement on crypto. It was even more unhinged than previous attacks (“rat poison”), as Munger applauded communist China’s technocratic dictatorship as a sensible ideal we should be following here in the West.

“the communist government of China recently banned cryptocurrencies because it wisely concluded that they would provide more harm than benefit…What should the U.S. do after a ban of cryptocurrencies is in place? Well, one more action might make sense: Thank the Chinese communist leader for his splendid example of uncommon sense.”

The fact that Munger is able to aggrandize a communist police state that maintains concentration camps, engages in organ harvesting and forced labour with impunity is a testament to his insular position (not to mention the lopsidedness of our political zeitgeist).

Munger is a Cantillionaire – after Richard Cantillion who wrote one of the first economic treatise in the eighteenth century describing how proximity to the monetary inputs of a society confer special advantages at the expense of wider populus.

Munger’s crocodile tears for those who lose out in the economic game of life are ironic, given that Berkshire Hathaway’s mantra (and Westco, Munger’s sidecar conglomerate) for decades has been to buy often distressed businesses that are out of fashion but have a “durable competitive advantage ” or “moat”.

Those are euphemisms for monopolies, and both Buffet and Munger love owning them. Despite their branding as folksy, avunculars, they don’t seem to mind if their vast empire includes monopolies that draw rentier like returns from monetizing low income housing or opioid addiction.

Munger and Buffet’s dynastic wealth was built on the crest of three structural tailwinds:

If there is such thing as “structural inequality”, it has more to do with the way the monetary system is constructed to benefit people who are already super-wealthy than anything else. “Fix the money, fix the world”.

The first of these pillars below is more of a dynamic than a structure, and one that there’s nothing wrong with, actually.

But it seemed odd to hear Munger, a man who made his fortune exploiting valuation gaps in publicly traded companies, singing on the virtues of  England’s “bann[ing of] all public trading in new common stocks and kee[ping] this ban in place for about 100 years.” .

That happened back in the 1700’s when Richard Cantillon was figuring out that the monetary system was structurally rigged, even then.

So while Buffet and Munger’s investing acumen is not in dispute, these three forces acted as the lubricant, if not steroids, for their astonishing returns over the decades:

1) Value investing

…is the foundation upon which Buffet (and Munger) built Berkshire. It is buying companies or assets below their perceived intrinsic value.  The fact that other investors have lost money on it is a prerequisite, otherwise they wouldn’t be “value plays”. “All this wild and wooly capitalism”  that Munger is ruminating about in his WSJ op-ed is what created the valuation asymmetries that Berkshire Hathaway has exploited ever since the duo took it over, in 1965.

2)  Fiat currency debasement

The Cantillon Effect makes inflation acutely pernicious, widening wealth inequality as the asset values of the ultra-wealthy get higher, it drives up the cost of living for everybody else.

Buffet and Munger have been playing inflation like a fiddle for decades. They both know that all fiat currencies are headed for zero, so they gravitate toward “inflation proof” assets with “pricing power” and “moats” (…because inflation-proofing goes better with monopolies.)

Then when things run too hot, they can play the populists and urge government to raise taxes on the wealthy (suggesting tax structures which would barely impact themselves, if at all) and chide the central bank to “reign in inflation, even if it causes a recession”. Like nearly all super-wealthy elites, they love to make policy recommendations that impact everybody else, yet put them in a position capitalize on the second-order effects: Recessions cause unemployment, bankruptcies and a plethora of valuation asymmetries where they can reload on durable assets and businesses at discounted prices.

3) A 40-year decline in cost-of-capital

At the age of 52, Warren Buffet’s net worth was 0.3% of what it is today, and the correlation of Munger’s personal wealth to Buffet’s is basically 1.

That was 1982, which marked the beginning of a bond super-cycle that saw the cost of capital decline to zero by the end of it.

Real rates are still negative today, and all of this compounded with the fiat currency debasement that lifted Buffet and Munger’s boats and accentuated their returns for decades.

I’m not saying that currency debasement and secularly suppressed cost-of-capital are the sole factors for Berkshire Hathaway’s success.

But they were indisputably beneficiaries of the fiat system structure over decades. Also during periods of dislocation, like when it was weaponized against the plebes during lockdowns and the Fed started buying up Berkshire’s debt (along with every other billion and trillion dollar juggernaut) while lending rapidly devaluing dollars to small and independent businesses (that is, if they weren’t simply banned from operating).

Berkshire Hathaway was built atop a system that Bitcoin was created to destroy

Many years ago I found myself sitting in a Bay St. conference room at one of Canada’s “Big Four” banks. There was a representative there from three of those Big Four, plus an Entrepreneur-in-Residence from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) who shall remain nameless, and had organized the meeting at the behest of another BDC contact.

We were there to talk Bitcoin.

He told me a story. More of a parable. Maybe it was just the facts of life.

He said, basically this (paraphrasing),

“when a new disruptive technology comes along, you want to be out front with big investment money behind you, you want to engage with government, the banks and policy makers right away, from the start – and you develop your relationships and your platform, all the while you are engaging with policy makers and the system incumbents to develop the rules.

When the government finally moves on regulating the new space, you are already there and you are on the right side of it, because you helped shape the policies.

Then the regulatory hurdles keep getting higher, and you’re always on the right side of it, while all the later entrants are playing catch up or falling behind.

In other words (and I remember this exactly, along the with the big, smug smile he had on his face when he said it):

You get to turn around and pull the ladder up behind you!”

I left that meeting not sure what had just happened and nothing more ever came of it, at least with me.

But Bitcoin is more than a disruptive technology. It’s a decentralized counter-attack against a structurally unsustainable and predatory financial system.

Whenever I hear Buffet, Munger, Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink or any other High Priests of the Gerontocracy complaining about Bitcoin specifically, or crypto-currencies in general, I feel like that’s what I’m listening to: a bunch of super-rich Sith Lords frantically  trying to pull up the ladder behind them.

Because the last thing they want or can fathom, is to wind up back on a level playing field.

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When money is untethered from reality, you wind up in clown world.

Lately I’ve been drilling down on the difference between Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. Why does it matter?

I used to think it didn’t matter too much. My view toward the entire burgeoning asset class of crypto was “let a thousand flowers bloom”. I still think that way to some extent. If you want a proof-of-stake system for an application, a game or a project token, be my guest. It works in some circumstances.

But as a base layer for sound money, it’s an abomination. The reason why has been articulated in innumerable places, but it recent times it was George Gilder who really nailed it in The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does. The book unpacks the consequences of untethering money from solid anchors to reality:

“With no [hard] dollar anchor for long-term investment, financial horizons shrank and markets dissolved into trading over bets on bits….The collapse of productivity growth after 1972 must be deemed just another of the cascading effects of the destruction of money as a metric”.

He was talking about high time preferences, as do a lot of the Bitcoiners. What exactly the consequences of untethered money and shrinking “investment” horizons would mean when it became systemic,  saturating all avenues of traditional finance conventional economic thinking.

“[Where there are] no limits to the tempests of short-term trading and trafficking in a surf of meaningless money values.”

This expression of short term trading within meaningless monetary values found no greater expression than during the blow off top of The Everything Bubble that occurred under lockdowns, stimmies, SPACs, meme stocks, Davie Daytrader, and even crypto moonshots like LUNA and NFTs. Possibly the best phrase I’ve heard for it was Hidden Force’s Demetri Kofinas’ term, “financial nihilism”. 

That’s what you get when you untether money from any foundational anchor to the real world.

Hold that thought.

The decision (top down, non-consensus driven) to move to PoS on Ethereum’s part, to solve a largely non-existent energy consumption problem, got me thinking about this and researching it a lot more. 

Let’s start with the rationalization direct from Ethereum CEO Vitalik Buterin, 

“To summarize this in a more philosophical way, Proof-of-Work is based on the laws of physics, so you have to work with the world as it is. You have to work with electricity as it is, hardware as it is, what computers are.

Whereas because Proof-of-Stake is virtualized in this way, it’s really cool, you get to create a simulated universe that has its own laws of physics. And that just gives us protocol developers a lot more freedom to optimize the system to give us all of the security properties that we want. 

If we want the system to offer a certain security guarantee, that means we can modify the system in way that lets us achieve it.”

Buterin is making our point for us, without realizing he’s making our point for us. He is expressing the ultimate technocratic fantasy: the ability for managerial experts from on high to reorder reality according their own whims and priorities. Where models can be created on whiteboards and reality is expected to conform to these models. It never does, yet we live in a world where people who point out that the models are flawed are demonized while those who bear no consequences for being wrong, double down and are awarded Nobel Prizes.

But when whiteboard economics inevitably collides with reality – those pesky laws of physics – the models never hold up. Reality intervenes, and the modellers either double-down or create some new set of policy responses to “fix” the latest , self-induced, crisis.  

The economic and societal chaos we are in the early innings of experiencing today is a direct result of iterative cycles of “money” being detached from the laws of physics, a.k.a. reality.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

In order to regain a tether to reality, we need a monetary hard asset that can’t be arbitrarily modified by anybody, let alone a nation state, central banks, Klaus Schwab, PayPal, big tech in general, or a pyjama boy with a hard-on for virtual reality. 

It’s that anchor to reality, to the laws of physics, that make Proof-of-Work such a breakthrough innovation. At the risk of expending too much airtime on it here in the portfolio update, I will direct you to two episodes of The Investors’ Podcast network with Preston Pysh:

#1: BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery

It’s over two hours long and it takes Lowery a long time to lay the foundation for his case. Hang in there. Once he squares the circle you’ll get it. When I finished this episode it gave me absolute clarity on why this is such a fundamental issue and why Proof-of-Work is an unassailable and superior innovation vs. Proof-of-Stake in every way. At least it is when you want to create a base layer for sound money.

#2 BTC099: Michael Saylor’s Deep-Dive on Bitcoin Energy Misconceptions

Saylor extends the understanding in this interview, especially where it comes down to the difference between securities (Ethereum) and commodities (Bitcoin), and why this is such a big deal. The conversation then moves into why the anchor to physics is a feature, not a bug. 

The interview helps reconnect us to the reality that energy usage (or cost inputs) to build something useful are necessary, not evil. In Ethereum’s case, the impetus for the merge was to reduce its power consumption. Why?

In last month’s letter I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations showing that Ethereum’s total power consumption worldwide was about 2/3’s the total consumption of US electrical vehicle deployment. Why is it A Bad Thing when you use the energy to run an ostensibly distributed, universal Turing-complete super-computer under Proof-of-Work, but then it’s celebrated as a milestone when you use even more energy to run a bunch of EVs  – which end up being charged by coal and built with lithium and cobalt sourced from child labour?

95% coal, actually. Love this clip. “The elEctrIcitY cOmeS fRoM iNsIde tHe bUIldiNg!” https://t.co/hP2dgHn32e

— Mark Jeftovic, The C̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶ ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) June 8, 2022

What makes each one so? Without looking at the energy consumption and benefits or drawbacks of comparable systems (i.e. the energy consumption of maintaining the petro-dollar empire), looking at an amount of energy consumption unto itself is meaningless.

Further, once you concede that any given activity’s energy consumption is within the purview of societal moderation or judgement, you just ceded authority over all energy consumption.

People seem to be clamouring for this, we’ll see how they like it when CBDCs finally show up with Personal Carbon Allowances baked right into their wallets.

Bitcoin is the most viable base layer today for re-attaching money to reality. It does that through Proof-of-Work, not in spite of it. We already know that total Bitcoin energy usage worldwide is less than tumble dryers, and that Bitcoin mining is incentivized to use waste, renewable and stranded power sources. It’s the tie between energy input and digital output that tethers the base layer to the laws of physics, which is out here in real world, where (everybody outside of the pod), spends their everyday existence.

Without that tether, we eventually wind up in a clown world where central bankers get Nobels for blowing up the financial system, where climate alarmists want to end oil on one hand yet advocate for nuclear warfare on the other.

Today’s post was an excerpt from The Crypto Capitalist mid-month portfolio review, our premium newsletter. To get the core investment thesis free, subscribe to the Bombthrower mailing list. Follow Mark E. Jeftovic on Gettr, Twitter or join the Telegram.