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.

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It hasn’t worked once, so why would a politician go all-in on price controls now?

August 15th was the anniversary of the infamous “Nixon Shock”, when excessive spending and trade deficits had governments on the ropes, as prices climbed relentlessly, inflation soared into the double digits, while economic growth stalled.

In 1971 of that year, Nixon “temporarily” suspended convertibility of the US dollar for gold (still in effect), while simultaneously proclaiming a 90-day freeze on all wages and prices across the United States.

The stagflationary 70’s also saw Trudeau the 1st enact “The Anti-Inflation Act of 1975”, with his infamous “6 and 5” measures (a 6% cap on wage increases with a 5% cap on prices was supposed to put 1% back into the pocket of the peasants).

None of this worked, and as the lumpenpublic were mulched by higher prices and growing government, gold served as a barometer to it all – soaring from $35/oz at the time of the Nixon Shock to $850/oz in 1980 (that all-time high still won’t be exceeded in inflation adjusted terms until gold cracks about $2,580).

It took Paul Volcker  to get inflation under control with double-digit interest rates – (when the news came that he had been elevated from President of the New York Fed under Gerald Ford to Chairman by Jimmy Carter, Volcker’s wife burst into tears).

Today, 50 years later with a monetary regime that makes the 70’s look austere, double-digit interest rates are simply not an option – we’ve just seen a 5-sigma event nearly blow up the global monetary system from the BoJ nudging interest rates from the zero bound to 25bps.

With an unprecedented levels of monetary expansion and debt levels somewhere beyond nosebleed elevations, policy-makers and central bankers are trapped.

This is why we’re seeing a resurgence in popular rhetoric around the idea of price controls – everywhere from Jagmeet Singh here in Canada, who blames grocery store CEOs for inflation, to Dem nominee and incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris, channeling him with promises of food price controls as part of her election campaign.

Price Controls Invariably Presage Decline (& Tyranny)

The definitive chronicle of price controls throughout recorded history comes to us by way of Robert L. Schuettinger and Eammon F. Butler’s “Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls” – or “How Not to Fight Inflation“.

I could not for the life of me find my hard copy, but during the depths of the Global Financial Crisis, The Mises Institute saw the value in republishing it…

“By special arrangement with the authors, the Mises Institute is thrilled to bring back this popular guide to ridiculous economic policy from the ancient world to modern times. This outstanding history illustrates the utter futility of fighting the market process through legislation. It always uses despotic measures to yield socially catastrophic results.”

It starts as far back as Urakagina of Lagash, a King of Sumeria in around 2350BC who came to power and overturned wage and price controls held in place by an unnamed line of despotic predecessors:

“[he]began his rule by ending the burdens of excessive government regulations over the economy, including controls on wages and prices…
An historian of this period tells us that from Urakagina,

 

‘we have one of the most precious and revealing documents in the history of man and his perennial and unrelenting struggle for freedom from tyranny and oppression.’

 

This document records a sweeping reform of a whole series of prevalent abuses, most of which could be traced to a ubiquitous and obnoxious bureaucracy …it is in this document that we find the word ‘freedom’ used for the first time in man’s recorded history; the word is ‘amargi’.“

It is somewhat telling to find that the word “freedom” was seemingly coined to describe the end of price controls.

The Code of Hammurabi of ancient Babylon is often cited as one of the earliest legal codes, thought to be the first to enshrine the presumption of innocence, but it also contained detailed tables of price controls on everything from goods to services – like the hiring of a wagon (“forty qa of corn per diem”) to the wages of a field laborer (“eight gur of corn per annum”).

According to Schuettinger and Butler, historical records show that Hammurabi’s price controls dampened trade and economic activity for both Hammurabi and his successors, citing W. F Leemans, who found that:

Prominent and wealthy tamkaru (merchants) were no longer found in Hammurabi’s reign. Moreover, only a few tamkaru are known from Hammurabi’s time and afterwards . . . all . . . evidently minor tradesmen and money-lenders.

Concluding:

“it appears that the very people who were supposed to benefit from the Hammurabi wage and price restrictions were driven out of the market by those and other statutes.”

Finding that:

“There was a remarkable change in the fortunes of the people of Nippur and Isin and the other ancient towns which he ruled, which came in the middle of Rim-Sin’s reign [Hammurbi’s predecessor – whose policies he extended] . The beginning of the economic decline corresponds exactly with a series of “reforms” inaugurated by him.

For the first of many times throughout this piece, I will ask the reader to “hold that thought”.

We can fast forward to ancient Greece where Athens, a city state “perpetually short on grain” sought to control the prices at which it was sold in order to keep them “just”. At one point, under a measure that was supposed to be temporary (sound familiar?), state appointed corn buyers called “Sitonai” were mobilized to set the pricing.

Predictably, the problem got worse, and there were calls to make the measures permanent.  One politician, Lysian of Athens wanted to put grain dealers who broke the code to death.

The book is exhaustive in its examinations, covering China, India, the Medieval age, even modern times (Canada and the US in the seventies) – but ancient Rome warrants a deeper look – particularly the road to Emperor Diocletian’s Edict of 301AD.

“Under the tribune Caius Gracchus the Lex Sempronia Frumentaria was adopted which allowed every Roman citizen the right to buy a certain amount of wheat at an official price much lower than the market price.

 

In 58 B.C. this law was “improved” to allow every citizen free wheat. The result, of course, came as a surprise to the government.

 

Most of the farmers remaining in the countryside simply left to live in Rome without working.

If that wasn’t enough:

Slaves were freed by their masters so that they, as Roman citizens, could be supported by the state.

(There is a modern day analog here with open borders and the illegal immigration crisis – where we could be looking at mass migrations as being, at least partially, incentivized by governments of weakening economies trying to jettison dependents and potential rebels – offloading them to countries dumb enough to think they’re acting enlightened by taking them on and supporting them).

By 45BC, Julius Caesar found that roughly a third of the citizenry was living on “free food” from the government.

He managed to reduce this number by about half, but it soon rose again; throughout the centuries of the empire Rome was to be perpetually plagued with this problem of artificially low prices for grain, which caused economic dislocations of all sorts.

Succeeding emperors resorted to the ancient version of “Quantitative Easing” – currency debasement:

In order to attempt to deal with their increasing economic problems, the emperors gradually began to devalue the currency. Nero (A.D. 54–68) began with small devaluations and matters became worse under Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161–80) when the weights of coins were reduced. “These manipulations were the probable cause of a rise in prices,” according to Levy. The Emperor Commodus (A.D.)

By Diocletian’s time in the 4th century it reached truly hyper-inflationary levels when measured in other provincial currencies:

Egypt was the province of the Empire most affected, but her experience was reflected in lesser degrees throughout the Roman world. During the fourth century, the value of the gold solidus changed from 4,000 to 180 million Egyptian drachmai.

Diocletian’s Dilemma

Gresham’s Law states that “bad money drives out the good” – it means that rapidly devaluing or debased currencies are traded for anything other than themselves (which drives prices denominated in that currency up) – while “sound” currencies, like gold, or nowadays Bitcoin are hoarded – or at least more carefully spent.

“[I]n the years before Diocletian, emperors were issuing tin-plated copper coins which were still called by the name ‘denarius.’ Gresham’s Law, of course, became operative; silver and gold coins were naturally hoarded and were no longer found in circulation.” 

The result of iterative generations of government mismanagement and currency debasement was the hollowing out of the middle class:

“The middle class was almost obliterated and the proletariat was quickly sinking to the level of serfdom. Intellectually the world had fallen into an apathy from which nothing would rouse it.”

The same thing is happening today, but in Diocletian’s time, he saw what was happening and moved to impose some kind of order, first by issuing a new Denarious, that after centuries of declining silver content, openly contained none:

…and then, moving to a system that attempted to replace money entirely (again, hold that thought):

Since money was completely worthless, he devised a system of taxes based on payments in kind. This system had the effect, via the ascripti glebae [tenant serfs], of totally destroying the freedom of the lower classes—they became serfs and were bound to the soil to ensure that the taxes would be forthcoming. 

But he had a dilemma:

The principal reason for the official overvaluation of the currency, of course, was to provide the wherewithal to support the large army and massive bureaucracy—the equivalent of modern government.

 

Diocletian’s choices were to continue to mint the increasingly worthless denarius or to cut “government expenditures” and thereby reduce the requirement for minting them.

 

In modern terminology, he could either continue to “inflate” or he could begin the process of “deflating” the economy.

 

Diocletian decided that deflation, reducing the costs of civil and military government, was impossible. On the other hand: To inflate would be equally disastrous in the long run. 

Diocletian’s problem is the same one central banks and policy makers face today, all over the world:

The world is awash in too much debt – with debt-to-GDP more than doubling from 100% to over 256% since the Nixon Shock. With interest rates being artificially suppressed for decades – austerity is off the table, for now — I’ve been writing for years how CBDCs and #Netzero are essentially setting the table for forced austerity.

But we’re not there yet – retail CBDCs are a few years away from being ready but the global financial system is unravelling now (in the meantime, you can get on the waiting list for my CBDC Survival Guide, which is coming out this fall).

How did Diocletian navigate the quagmire?

The Solution: Inflate with Price Controls

As Schuettinger and Butler recount,

It was in this seemingly desperate circumstance that Diocletian determined to continue to inflate, but to do so in a way that would, he thought, prevent the inflation from occurring.

 

He sought to do this by simultaneously fixing the prices of goods and services and suspending the freedom of people to decide what the official currency was worth. 

Contrary to our own political leaders,  Diocletian wasn’t stupid (in fact, he may have been the most intelligent Roman Emperor after a long string of weak minded half-wits who were propped up by the military).

He knew that the incentives would be against the productive class working, selling, and entrenpreneuring at a loss and he understood that Incentives Are Everything. In his case:

“if farmers, merchants and craftsmen could not expect to receive what they considered to be a fair price for their goods they would not put them on the market at all, but would await a change in the law (or in the dynasty).”

So Diocletian had to realign people’s incentives:

“From such guilt also he too shall not be considered free, who, having goods necessary for food or usage, shall after this regulation have thought that they might be withdrawn from the market; since the penalty ought to be even heavier for him who causes need than for him who makes use of it contrary to the statutes.”

The penalty was …death.

Same for anyone who purchased goods or services at prices above the prescribed amount (no matter how hungry or desperately you needed something or how scarce that something was).

As draconian as that sounds, it almost looks like more people were killed by deprivation and mob rule than were executed for violating price controls:

There was much blood shed upon very slight and trifling accounts; and the people brought provisions no more to markets, since they could not get a reasonable price for them and this increased the dearth so much, that at last after many had died by it”

The authors go on to cite Roland Kent:

“In other words, the price limits set in the Edict were not observed by the traders, in spite of the death penalty provided in the statute for its violation; would-be purchasers, finding that the prices were above the legal limit, formed mobs and wrecked the offending traders’ establishments, incidentally killing the traders, though the goods were after all of but trifling value; hoarded their goods against the day when the restrictions should be removed, and the resulting scarcity of wares actually offered for sale caused an even greater increase in prices, so that what trading went on was at illegal prices, and therefore performed clandestinely.

Within four years, the law was set aside, and Diocletian abdicated.

Michael Rostovtzeff, another leading Roman historian, remarked:

“Diocletian shared the pernicious belief of the ancient world in the omnipotence of the state, a belief which many modern theorists continue to share with him and with it.”

Here We Are Again

Since the unprecedented monetary stimulus during Covid, we are now beginning to see exactly how trapped we are – with politicians taking victory laps for 2.9% inflation (hedonically adjusted and perpetually revised) – nobody is really remarking that the official targeted inflation rate is in the process of being hiked by half from 2% to 3% target.

The Fed is getting ready to cut interest rates, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England and the ECB are already cutting and as I told readers in the latest issue of The Bitcoin Capitalist, the Bank of Japan just showed the world that they can’t raise:

On Tuesday, August 6th, the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance held an emergency meeting, and the next day announced “no more rate hikes” until the global financial system could handle it.

 

Which will be never.

For the first 50 years of the post-Bretton Woods era, since the Nixon Shock, monetary debasement has been mostly under-the-radar and after the stagflationary 70’s, had been largely confined to asset inflation.

This was thanks to a massive bond super-cycle that saw the cost-of-capital come down for 50 years, igniting an asset bubble on the other side of the ledger:

Consumer inflation never really started hitting hard until the aftermath of Covid, and the central banks took to hiking rates to try and get it back under control (my suspicion was always that what they really wanted to do was reload as high as possible so they could cut, once again):

Again, from this month’s TBC (see end of this post for a trial deal):

We’ve been saying since the Fed originally started hiking, that they would do so until something broke.

In March of 2023, something broke – with Silicon Valley Bank and the regional banking crisis; it was quickly papered over with FDIC backstops on all deposits, while the Fed abandoned their balance sheet reductions and quickly reinflated the money supply.

 

Everything since then has been a theatrical, slow-motion pivot.

 

Now, after this Bank of Japan miscalculation, something really broke – and the world now sees how the BoJ is trapped, the rest of the central banks are paused or already cutting, right when the global liquidity cycle is starting to turn back up.

(Also – M2 is also beginning to rise again)

Price Controls Are The ‘Hail Mary’ Play of a Bankrupt System

All the usual tricks which got us this far, money printing, interest rate suppression, ballooning debt have finally run out of runway because they are now resulting in. consumer price inflation.

This is 100% the fault of bad political leadership and central bank policy but that will never be admitted (to be fair, the St. Louis Fed’s Chris Neely authored a piece in 2022 explaining “Why Price Controls Should Stay In the History Books“)

Instead, politicians will resort ad hominem attacks on the productive class, and absurd accusations that it is the fault of investors and entrepreneurs, who must navigate the risks of monetary debasement, for causing it.

Hence, we have Kamala Harris seemingly anchoring her political campaign on “ending price gouging” once she’s in office.

She seems to be channeling Canada’s own champagne socialist, Jagmeet Singh, the Rolex wearing, Versace sporting millionaire  who routinely demonizes CEOs – particularly those of grocery store chains, for causing inflation:

Corporate greed in our country has reached a breaking point after decades of Liberal and Conservative governments that have rewritten the rules to favour the ultra-rich.

Now, every bill you pay makes CEOs richer.

It’s wrong.

I’ll change the rules to help you, not CEO profits. 

(What’s ironic in both cases, is Harris is promising to do something upon being elected, although she’s the incumbent Vice President since 2020, while Jagmeet Singh is the one person in Canada, who is single-handedly propping the Trudeau government in power with a coalition government that he could end at any time).

The Lure of Technocracy For Price Controls

After one looks at the historical record – 4,000 years of endless failures, in price controls, communism and every permutation of centrally planned economies, there has to be a reason politicians are still reaching for it as a solution to problems they have caused and why a small – but vocal and influential, segment of the public cheerleads this as a net benefit for society.

The secret sauce of “it’s different this time” is technology – particularly Big Tech, big platforms, Total Information Awareness and surveillance. Central planners think it is now technically feasible to run all the calculations and tracking in real time that would enable unrestrained monetary stimulus while keeping a lid on negative externalities like inflation.

Politicians like Kamala Harris and Jagmeet Singh are just farming public sentiment created by their own policy failures, but there are very serious people – mostly unelected technocrats of a particular globalist mindset, who think we have the means, motive and opportunity to create a kind of “fully automated luxury communism”.

One of my go-to clips for illustrating the mindset is J Michael Evans at a WEF meeting talking about coming personal carbon trackers:

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

I’ll lay out the quote again here:

“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 stage is set, when politicians tell you they want to be able to control prices, believe them – but what the public must understand is that price controls means spending controls.

The politicians will tell you that it’s all about putting “greedy CEOs” in their place.

What they won’t tell you is that price controls also means is telling  you what you can or cannot eat, how you use energy – whether you’ll be permitted to travel, or make any other kind of economic decision or make any kind of value exchange that you used to take for granted.

In a world of price controls, that’s over.

Throughout history, price controls have always brought about serfdom and tyranny because that is the only way to override individual incentives. In today’s highly wired world that would mean total technocratic feudalism.

The most vivid example we have today is Venezuela – where price controls were so effective, the rabble had to break into public zoos to eat the animals.

Sign up for the Bombthrower Mailing List and get The CBDC Survival Guide when it drops this fall (you’ll also get a copy of The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto while you wait). 

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(From “Notgeld” to Hyper-Bitcoinization in Under Two Decades)

“Just because something is inevitable doesn’t make it imminent”
— Douglas Casey

For a long time, anybody paying attention knew that central banks printing fiat money out of thin air, then lending it to nation states at interest and blowing it out into the economy would inexorably, eventually lead to such wealth disparity that the society would break down.

It would get to the point where popular revolts would threaten to overwhelm the position of the elite class; those Cantillionaires who lord over this phantasmagorical system that created value ex nihilo and caused, through inflation, the vast majority of wealth to accrue to society’s “capstone class”…

One of my personal favourite quips is:

Eventually always shows up sooner than everyone expects.

It’s been over three years since I released The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto, and in it I laid out my base investment thesis that “The Great Reset” wasn’t actually anything to do with climate change or any of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – what it really was all about, is the debt:

“YOU WILL OWN NOTHING, AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY.

The messaging coming out of global elites such as the World Economic Forum, The Party at Davos, the International Monetary Fund and even places as disparate as The Vatican and Hollywood are all riffing on the same theme: You, the middle class, the lower class, the masses – are going to have to get used to a lower standard of living.

 

The real reason why isn’t because of climate change, or even COVID. It’s because of the debt. The world has finally run out of runway from kicking the can down the road all those times the global economy threatened to backslide into recession or when previous monetary bubbles imploded. All those decades of collectively living beyond our means have finally hit the wall. This is it. We’re here.

 

Governments have spent beyond their means for decades, and now the bills have come due. The only way to pay them will include inflation and austerity. It will resemble a controlled demolition of the entire middle class. The easiest way to do that will be to turn them into a completely dependent welfare class via endless rolling lockdowns, Universe Basic Income programs and mandatory health passports.

 

However “The Great Reset” is basically at its core, a monetary reboot. A way to restructure the global debt overhang and turn “money” into technocratic lube for enacting grandiose social engineering projects: most of them geared toward ratcheting down the standard of living for the masses of the developed world and suppressing the standard of living for the so-called Third World.”

(If you want a free copy of the entire manifesto, just sign up for the Bombthrower mailing list and we’ll send you the PDF).

“The Great Reset” and “Build Back Better” attempted to lay the groundwork for the eventual (and still somewhat inevitable) pivot of fiat money into Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). They will almost certainly be fused with social credit systems denominated in carbon footprint quotas – and thus a mechanism to implement forced austerity across the debt-drowning economies of the world resulting in a kind of “monetary Apartheid”.

What I Got Wrong in My Manifesto

Aside from the fact that events I assumed would play out over decades happened within 18 months, there was another fundamental flaw in my analysis:

I first discovered Bitcoin during the Cyprus banking crisis of 2013 – when people began to understand that “as safe as money in the bank” didn’t quite mean what it used to anymore.

The Cypriots got hit with a 10% “bail-in”, but more ominously – bail-in provisions started showing up all over the place (from the Manifesto, again):

As the bail-in was being planned and executed in March 2013, Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem told interviewers that Cyprus would serve as a template for future bank restructurings in the euro zone.

 

In April 2013, the idea of enshrining the framework for bail-ins surfaced in my home country of Canada, with the Conservative Harper government’s budget

 

The Canadian bail-in language was been preserved in the budget even after the Liberals under Justin Trudeau assumed office in 2015. In 2018 it officially became The Bank Recapitalization (Bail-in) Conversion Regulations. 

 

In Australia the Financial Sector Legislation Amendment (Crisis Resolution Powers and Other Measures) Bill of 2017 gave the Aussie government the power to facilitate bail-ins.

 

And in case you’re wondering, the USA was a front-runner for codifying bail-ins into legislation: the Dodd-Frank Bill that was passed in 2010, ostensibly to reform the banking sector after the Global Financial Crisis contains provisions for “Statutory Bail-Ins” to recapitalize any “systemically important” banks that gets themselves into trouble.

 

In fact, new supra-national bail-in laws took effect across the entire G-20 in 2014.

It was during the Cyprus bail-in that Bitcoin surged above $100 USD for the last time. It would never again trade at the double-digit level.

Even so,  I never thought Bitcoin would become the world reserve currency or even a component of whatever comes next after this post-post-Bretton Woods era we now live in.

My mental model for Bitcoin, right up until 2022 was as a kind of globally emergent “Notgeld” – a German term that came into being during their 1920’s Weimar Hyperinflation, and translates into English as “emergency money”.

In Germany, individual towns began printing their own scrip, during the Zimbabwe hyperinflation, people began using prepaid phone and gas cards. Every hyperinflation has its Notgeld, and until early 2022, that’s what I assumed Bitcoin was, on a global level.

Two things happened that changed my mind:

1. The US seized the foreign asset reserves of two nation states – it doesn’t matter who those states were or what they did to “deserve it”.
2. During the #FreedomConvoy, the Canadian government declared martial law and seized the bank accounts of truckers and any citizens who supported them.

The first sequence of events forever changed the calculus that nations would employ for deciding how to allocate and hold their sovereign wealth.

The second did that for individual citizens. It alone orange-pilled Robert F Kennedy Jr, who a year later would make Bitcoin a US election issue when he opened his historic keynote at Bitcoin 2023 in Miami with the words:

“I became a Bitcoiner when I saw what the Canadian Government did to the truckers” 

From that point on – Bitcoin shifted from being “Notgeld” – emergency money amid a slow-rolling, global hyper-inflationary event, and it became inevitable component of a future, successor monetary regime.

The Next President of the United States Has Been Orange-Pilled

No matter what you think of Donald Trump, whether he induces either type of “TDS” (Type 1 = “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, Type 2 = “Trump Divinity Syndrome”), or  you’re more dispassionate and objective, the fact remains that a Trump-led GOP landslide is all but baked-in come November 5th.

Like RFK Jr., Trump has firmly jumped onto the Bitcoin bandwagon. He’s been orange-pilled (props to David Bailey Bitcoin Magazine for doing so).

Trump declared that he “wants all future Bitcoin to mined in the USA”. Granted, it doesn’t quite work that way, but he went on to reiterate that, and the right to self-custody at: the Republican National Convention:

Donald Trump makes EPIC promise to US crypto holders: pic.twitter.com/LqCRtEZTbD

— Altcoin Daily (@AltcoinDailyio) July 19, 2024

The Big Announcement Will Drop on July 27th

This year Trump will be delivering the keynote address at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee. RFK Jr will also be on hand. Both candidates firmly on board with Bitcoin, albeit one destined for the Presidency more than the other (I expect RFK will land somewhere within a Tump administration come January 2025).

The inside baseball is that at that keynote address, Trump is expected to announce his intention to create a strategic reserve of Bitcoin for the US Treasury.

HUGE BREAKING: Trump to announce a USA #Bitcoin strategic reserve in Nashville – Sources

— Dennis Porter (@Dennis_Porter_) July 18, 2024

Doing so could be as simple as a stroke-of-the-pen on inauguration day, as the US is already sitting on about $5B worth of BTC:

The next President of the USA should sign an executive order to convert the $5.5 billion held by the US Government into a strategic reserve at the US Treasury then use that reserve to back the dollar with #Bitcoin. pic.twitter.com/NYjcbCWXmV

— Dennis Porter (@Dennis_Porter_) July 18, 2024

Once that happens, we’re in a whole new ballgame. The Game Theory of Bitcoin will irrevocably change globally, and nation states will be incentivized to follow suit.

Regardless of how it plays out, Bitcoin has already crossed the Rubicon. It’s here to stay, it isn’t some kind of “emergency money” to temporarily sidestep the ongoing unraveling of the global fiat standard – it’s now part of the plumbing.

Read my special report on what a Trump presidency means for Bitcoin, and which companies stand to win big right here.
Join the Bombthrower mailing list and get a free copy of the Crypto Capitalist Manifesto here (and The CBDC Survival Guide once it drops)
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For this episode of BombthrowerTV I’m reposting my own guest appearance on Robby “The Fire” Bernstein’s RYM Briefing.

We talked about sovereign computing, beating cancel-culture and coming wave of CBDCs.

This is the first episode of BombthrowerTV rockin’ the new intro music by The Wabi Sabis from London, Ontario….

Show Notes

• You can still get my Unassailable book for free here
• My article on Individual Carbon Passports
• The original Robby Bernstein full episode
• If you’re not already a Bombthrower subscriber, signing up here will get you The CBDC Survival Guide

Even if it was the NSA, the CCP
or the WEF

Rumours have abounded that Bitcoin was created by the NSA (or the CIA, or the CCP or WEFsters)  going back at least as far as 2010, or so.

They resurfaced over the past week when  Dr Mercola interviewed Catherine Austin Fitts. Since then I’ve had numerous readers forward me some choice quotes of their talk  (the transcript is here), and highlighting Fitts’ suspicion that Bitcoin was created non-altruistically by the NSA.

In it, there is a reference to Nic Carter’s theory about the NSA having created Bitcoin:

“The common understanding is that Nakamoto is the ultimate altruist and abandoned his 1 million Bitcoin for the benefit of humanity. Nic Carter is a well-known figure in the cryptocurrency community, and he doesn’t buy that story and is convinced that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is responsible for creating Bitcoin. He believes Bitcoin was written by NSA cryptographers as a monetary bioweapon.^“

Mercola references this Cointelegraph article where Nic Carter clearly lays out that his NSA-origin theory for Bitcoin is “the lab leak” scenario:

“I call it the ‘Bitcoin lab leak hypothesis.’ I think it was a shuttered internal R&D project, which one researcher thought was too good to lay fallow on the shelf and chose to secretly release.”

Very much in line with the Promethean mythos behind the Satoshi Nakamoto legend that resonates so deeply throughout the community – and if true, might explain just why, the he/she/they/them that is Satoshi – left those 1 million BTC exactly where they sit today. Nobody would want to suffer the fate of Prometheus, doomed to spend eternity chained to a rock, having his liver eaten daily by an eagle.

Yet the discussion between Fitts and Mercola, as well as many others who suspect something nefarious behind Bitcoin’s mysterious creation, seem to be deriving the wrong conclusion from Carter’s theory – or dismissing it in favour of an intentional, deliberate creation, and presumably, what that would mean (as per Fitts),

“It depends on how their rollout of complete control works … As long as they have the ability to assert complete control and shut [crypto] down or marginalize it, it’s easy for [Mr. Global] to assert control. Until then, they can continue to pull money out of precious metals and real and hard assets by encouraging retail to go into crypto.”

The assumption being: whoever created Bitcoin, controls Bitcoin.

The reality is:

Bitcoin is beyond anyone’s control

And the reason, quite simply, is because Bitcoin is open source software.
What does “open source” mean and why does it matter to Bitcoin?
Contrast with something closed source and proprietary, like Microsoft Windows – or the entire Microsoft operating system stack, open source means that the instructions that comprise the computer program itself are published to the world openly in their uncompiled source code form.

Further, anybody running the software does so by downloading the open source copy of the code, compiling it locally and then running it.

What this means is that even if the NSA, or the CCP or the WEF secretly created and released Bitcoin intending it as a Trojan horse for digital slavery (like CBDCs will be), then we would all be able to literally see it in the source code, which is right here – and nobody would run it.

• There wouldn’t any Bitcoin devs maintaining the codebase (or if there was, they’d simply remove the malware)
• Nobody would be trading energy, or cash, for Bitcoin generated from compromised code, and
• Bitcoin miners would certainly not be spending hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars in order to build out massive server farms to run NSA malware.

In other words, there would be zero market momentum behind the phenomenon known as “Bitcoin” that is sweeping the world.

Some others might concede that Bitcoin is an open source movement, with no hidden trojans or malware – but that it’s really One Big Psy-Op  to acclimatize us plebs to a cashless society using digital money.

The people who believe this might even tweet about it from their smart phone while sitting in a cafe sipping a latte that they just bought via ApplePay or tapping their chipped credit card (like that Mastercard that already cuts off your spending when your carbon footprint quota is exceeded).

You don’t need Bitcoin to brainwash people to accept a cashless society or even the coming CBDCs – huge swaths of the population are going to line up for that – and in my mind it will result in a kind of Monetary Apartheid.

Bitcoin is emergence, CBDCs are totalitarian.

The people who think Bitcoin is some kind of meat tenderizer to soften the public’s mind up for CBDCs have simply not been paying enough attention to:

1. The difference between Bitcoin and CBDCs, and
2. The difference between Bitcoin and other cryptos

It all comes down to the decentralized nature of the blockchain, the miners (Proof-of-Work) and self-custody of one’s own private keys vs centralized banking, centralized cryptos, faux-decentralized shitcoins and the like.

We even see this manifesting in legal policy in the US, as Bitcoin is the only digital asset being treated as a commodity while everything else is looking at being designated a security (even Ethereum, especially since that unforced error of switching to Proof-of-Stake).

---

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Where people mistakenly think that Bitcoin is paving the way to usher in CBDCs, Bitcoin is actually the  anti-CBDC. It is the CBDC’s Kryptonite. An emerging monetary system as a response to the over-centralization of what I liked to call Late Stage Globalism, but lately I have become enamoured with George Gilder’s term: Emergency Socialism.

I’ll re-iterate a quote from my recent review of Ferdinand Lips classic, Gold Wars, about where monetary systems actually come from:

By 1900, approximately fifty countries were on a gold standard. including all industrialized nations. The interesting fact is that the modern gold standard was not planned at an international conference, nor was it invented by some genius. It came by itself, naturally and based on experience. 

The United Kingdom went on a gold standard against the intention of its government. Only much later did laws turn an operative gold standard into an officially sanctioned gold standard.

The same thing is happening today, with Bitcoin (yes, really).

Hyper-Bitcoinization vs Notgeld

In the early days of my involvement with the space, I too, dismissed claims that the global monetary system was destined for “Hyper-Bitcoinization” – I just didn’t think it would ever happen because central bankers would simply never allow it.

Instead, I viewed Bitcoin as a kind of “Notgeld” – a German term that emerged during the Weimar Hyper-inflation that translated to “Emergency Money”. In those days towns would print their own scrip. In later hyper-inflations, other things would emerge as “notgeld” – in Zimbabwe it was prepaid phone cards and gas coupons. Every hyperinflation had one. I thought Bitcoin was an emergent, global notgeld, but I never thought it would become anything “official”.

Then, two things happened that flipped me into the Hyper-Bitcoinization camp:

The first was when the ruling Liberal/Socialist coalition government of Canada weaponized the banking system against the #FreedomConvoy protestors, probably the one single act that orange pilled the most citizens globally since the Cyprus bail-in of 2013.

The other was when the US government seized the foreign reserves of two other governments. It doesn’t matter that those governments were Russia and The Taliban, doing so probably orange-pilled more than a few nation states.

What I also realized since then, namely watching the globalists attempt – and fail – to impose a permanent technocracy under Covid, was that what ultimately happens isn’t up to the central banks, and it’s not even up to the governments. It’s up to market forces – despite all the central planning and authoritarianism marshalled against it.

That won’t prevent them from trying, however. Which is where CBDCs come in.

Money backed by debt, becomes social credit backed by carbon quotas

In the latest issue of the premium newsletter (while analyzing an Agustín Carstens speech to the BIS working group on CBDCs)  I said:

Right now, what we call “the fiat world” uses debt for money. That’s no longer sustainable, so what we think will happen in the future is an attempt to switch what we loosely identify as “money”, from something backed by debt, to social credit scores, backed by carbon emissions.

When that comes, Bitcoin will not be some sort of gateway drug to CBDCs because there are fundamental incompatibilities, and there are other cryptos out there far more suited to the task – like Ethereum and Ripple, and who actually want to the global base layer for Central Bank Digital Currencies (after all, it’s not called WEFereum for nothing…)

So where we are headed – is a global economy where the world is either going to have to adopt a non-state, decentralized digital bearer asset or international trade flows will inexorably grind to halt as trust deteriorates right along with every fiat currency going.

And a social credit system where the majority of the population (everybody who has any reliance on The State for their economic sustenance) has their lives gamified via their smart phones and their carbon footprints rationed in the name of climate justice.

Marbled throughout this world (for as long as such a system will last, because ultimately, it can’t) there will be “network states” and enclaves of those who hold their wealth and earn their income outside the social credit/CBDC system.

In my next post, I’ll tackle the inevitable arguments that “governments will never allow people to escape the coming CBDC system” and show why, at the end of the day, they have no choice. It’s already beyond their control.

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.

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.

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In case you missed it, here’s my segment about CBDC’s on Steve Bannon’s Warroom from earlier this week.

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. 

“I became a Bitcoiner when I saw what Canada did to the truckers”

Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to run for President of the United States of America, just came out as an unabashed Bitcoiner in a historic keynote delivered at the seminal #Bitcoin2023 Conference in Miami, FL.

In front of the standing-room-only crowd in the Satoshi Nakamoto hall, the presidential contender said he saw the necessity for Bitcoin last year during the #FreedomConvoy protests when the Trudeau government invoked the Emergency Act (basically declaring martial law) and began seizing the bank accounts of ordinary citizens.

RFK stated unequivocally  “The trucker demonstration was peaceful”, and that freedom of money was as paramount as freedom of speech.

“Guess what? The government always has a good excuse to take away your rights”, as he began to rattle off now familiar iterations of “the latest thing” that was supposed to be a larger, collective cause that was more important than our individual civil and human rights:

Terrorism, Covid, pandemics, climate the list goes on, “Utopia will come when the government can exercise total control over the population”. 

Funny thing is, utopia never quite arrives, and it’s always just around the corner, as soon as the govenrment takes away just a few more of your rights and whatever’s left of your privacy.

“Bitcoin is a bulwark against tyranny”

The Democrat hopeful then listed a number of policies that demonstrated far more knowledge of Bitcoin and profound understanding of crypto and the monetary policies they represent,

RFK declared “As president, your right to own Bitcoin shall be inviolable” – as will self-custody and running your own nodes. “The government has no right to be inside your wallet”.

While encouraging Bitcoin miners to continue optimizing for renewable, clean energy (something the Bitcoin industry is actually way ahead of than most of the green-washed Wall St darlings of corporate America), he also came down hard on climate alarmists saying that as an environmentalist himself, energy usage and environmental concerns should never be used a a pretext to suppress Bitcoin.

He called our present era “an Age of Turnkey Totalitarianism” and went further, saying that Bitcoiners today embody the same ethos and impulses as the original framers of the US Constitution.

It was, as noted – an historic speech.

Feels historic. pic.twitter.com/JkqOv9UZ9e

— Lawrence Lepard, “fix the money, fix the world” (@LawrenceLepard) May 19, 2023

This puts shrill hysterics like Elizabeth Warren and her “anti-crypto army” on notice that there is a real political constituency and impulse in America that transcends party lines (independent Tulsi Gabbard and Republican Patrick McHenry, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee are also here at #Bitcoin2023)

He concluded his speech with the announcement that he will be the first presidential candidate in history to accept campaign donations in Bitcoin over the Lightning network and he was given a standing ovation.

As someone who took a certain amount of heat for supporting the #FreedomConvoy last year – having a contender for the US presidency from such a prominent political lineage felt like pure vindication. #FreedomConvoy organizer B.J Dichter was on-hand to witness in person.

Standing room only while @RobertKennedyJr warms of the dangers of #Trudeau style totalitarianism and the importance of #freespeech & free assembly. #Bitcoin2023 the Canadian Trucker Convoy showed him the importance of Bitcoin & freedom money in fighting totalitarianism. pic.twitter.com/Kf8TVrgie3

— BJDichter Handy Scapegoat HonkingForFreedom.com (@BJdichter) May 19, 2023

I attended the speech with another parent from my kid’s school, who said several times throughout the speech “This guy totally gets it”, and the end he looked at me and asked “Do you think he has a chance”? To which I replied – “Did Trump?”

The public is increasingly fed up with self-appointed elites who deign to curate every aspect of our lives. What is happening now transcends the left-vs-right false dichotomy and is every bit a battle between centralization and decentralization – states vs networks, control freaks vs sovereign individuals. The good news is that the industrial age technocrats are on the losing side of a race against time. Tick-tock next block.

RFK’s speech came back-to-back with Microstrategy’s Michael Saylor – giving tremendous clarity to why a company would convert their balance sheet liabilities into rapidly appreciating digital assets, and Whitney Webb gave a sobering talk about WEFPac. Don’t know what WEFPAC is? It’s the WEF Partnership Against Cybercrime – the coming fusion of commercial banks, their regulators, and intelligence agencies. In other words, the framework for CBDCs.

Sign up for the mailing list to get my post-conference assessment as soon as I have that done.

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. 

Everyone will have to ratchet down their standard of living by over 75%

A recent piece in BBC’s “Future World” series on its surface celebrates someone who choose to live an “ultra low carbon lifestyle”. They made a conscious and individual decision to bring their own personal carbon footprint down below 2 metric tonnes per year.

Throughout the developed world, per capita carbon output ranges from 4.46 (France) to Canada being the highest at 15.43.

The article talks about the personal challenges around living an ultra-low carbon lifestyle. According to the piece, 2 tonnes/year is also about half the output of a single gas powered car in the US, so the first step for any Americans (or Canadians) wanting to do this, they would have to start by ditching their cars.

Other behaviours which move the needle would be: eating a plant based diet, buying green energy and forgoing one transatlantic round-trip per year.

In terms of what level of personal CO2 emissions gets the job done “for the climate”, estimates vary. While the 2 tonne number was somewhat arbitrary, there are other climate focused think tanks that feel the number has to be 1.4 tonnes of C02 per person by 2040 and 0.7 by 2050.

The Fallacy of per-capita output

Going back to Canada’s “excessive” carbon footprint – if we look at a metric that really means anything – total CO2 output – Canada is basically a rounding error to the world’s largest emitter, China.

At an average annual temperature at -4 to -5 celsius, Canada is also the coldest G7 nation. So perhaps we can forgive the Canucks for not wanting to freeze to death – even if it means emitting Co2 for heat. Also worth noting that far more humans are killed each year from being cold (17.7 million per year, on average) than from being too warm (2.2 million per year), roughly 8X.

Here’s the thing: everybody has to comply

While the overall timbre of the piece lauds the story’s protagonist (a communications officer at a climate non-profit) over her decision to make this lifestyle choice, sprinkled throughout are casual, back-handed references at where all this is going:

The ultra-low carbon lifestyle isn’t just for the eco-minded, it has to be for everybody. Or it isn’t going to work (“work” being defined as controlling the planet’s climate decades out).

“what do truly low-carbon lifestyles look like – and can they really be achieved by personal choice alone?“ the article laments.

Well if the answer is “no” then that means the ultra-low CO2 lifestyle has to be  for everybody. How we do that is a matter of “both individual and systems change”. By systems change is meant that

“with the right policies, infrastructure and technology in place to enable changes to our lifestyles and behaviour, we can reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions substantially by 2050…

 

In richer countries, this means moving towards a far lower carbon lifestyle for most people. But the changes to get there aren’t necessarily painful or even negative. For example, research has shown that good public services enable higher wellbeing at lower energy use.”

If you read between the lines we see the implications of this. It basically means that an ultra-low carbon lifestyle has to be brought about through systemic change, government policy and massively expanded public services – or said differently, increasing dependence on The State.

Private infrastructure – like cars – will have to become a thing of the past:

One major change would be to change how we move around. Akenji envisions a combination of public transport alongside micro-mobility systems (such as electric scooters and drones) which make it efficient and effective for people to reach it. Private cars, with their huge emissions and often empty seats, would largely be a thing of the past, he says, and car parks converted to green public spaces where people go to play, relax or do exercise.

The Climate Cult-ist ‘s Dilemma

We live in a world where many people believe many different things, but nowhere else do we find the kind of mandatory buy-in required as with the so-called climate crisis. Fortunately we’re hearing from an increasing number of scientists that there is no crisis, and whose voices are getting louder even in the face of corporate media “fact checking” and other headwinds of narrative control.

Climate crisis or not, I personally think decarbonization will happen anyway if for no other reason than that fossil fuel supplies are finite. With rational energy policies, including nuclear, natural gas and hybrid EVs (as opposed to full EV), we could significantly ratchet down CO2 emissions while still providing increased energy inputs to a world hungry for higher living standards.

Doomberg frequently quips that one’s standard of living can be measured by how much energy one can afford to waste. Somewhat glib perhaps, but he uses it to hammer home the point that energy is life (also his phrase, see this Tweet thread that goes deeper on why).

1/ Since disorder is spontaneous, the human endeavor is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy. We are a highly ordered species – a true miracle of the universe. Beating back entropy requires energy. Ergo, energy is life.

— Doomberg (@DoombergT) June 18, 2022

The reality is there is no viable path forward that makes reduced energy usage  and standard of living reductions a requirement, let alone mandatory. 

Doing so means telling the middle class to own nothing and eat bugs, while the elites parade through the city in lengthy motorcades on their way to the airport to wing it to Davos in their private jets. It means telling third-world nations to remain mired in poverty. And it means forcing the Chinese to stop building all those coal-fired plants and to keep the 600 million subjects there who are still living in extreme poverty, poor.

Good luck with that.

The simple reality is that any desired policy or collective goal that requires 100% compliance from a population (let alone the entire world) will simply not occur. Even if 100% of the world’s population believed in anthropogenic global warming, you still wouldn’t achieve consensus on the forecasts, the models or how to implement a response.

For people who believe the climate emergency narrative (and make no mistake, it is a belief, like any other), the reality of this induces a type of eco-anxiety. Climate researchers and activists are sensitive to this dilemma and have created a word for it, “solastalgia”,

“the condition of feeling lonely, insecure and powerless because of the intense changes in one’s immediate environment, which can be caused by the acute impacts (e.g., floods and wildfires) of climate change, the chronic degradation of places caused by climate change (e.g., sea level rise) (Galway, Beery, Jones-Casey, & Tasala, 2019) or by human activity (e.g. mining, deforestation) (Albrecht et al., 2007, Galway et al., 2019). Solastalgia is not nostalgia, because it is not a longing for a place from which one has moved, rather it is suffering from change and lack of control over it (Albrecht et al., 2007).”

If that weren’t bad enough, they also face cognitive dissonance over their own carbon footprints – not all, in fact not even very many of those involved in the fight for climate change, are actually living ultra-low carbon lifestyles themselves, and that causes them eco-guilt. In this widely cited paper on the topic, 17 respondents were interviewed about their coping mechanisms around ‘the emerging “psychoterratic” syndromes such as eco-anxiety, eco-guilt, and eco-grief”, the respondents were:

They reported feelings of helplessness, meaninglessness, that we’re all going to die, guilt over travel, guilt over their own carbon footprints, conflict with family over eco-awareness, the list goes on, but widely summed up as

At their core, the anxieties faced by these people are indicative of the human condition itself: we all have unique insights into the world – and if we’re introspective and genuinely curious – we become attuned to system problems that we feel need addressing. All Bitcoiners understand the “Fix the Money / Fix the World” maxim. But the approach to orange-pilling people is markedly different from eco-sermonizing.

But beneath even that, we all face impermanence, uncertainty and even mortality. Part of our psychological process of individuation is to find meaning and purpose within it all. It’s called life. Only for most of us, while seeing that our emotional support structures incorporate  community, family and purpose, we realize that at our core we are, in our earthly incarnations – here alone, as individual souls. We must face the world as it is, and we each have a personal responsibility to grow into it under our own devices.

It is  mainly the eco-anxious, the collectivists and Marxists who believe it critical, even necessary that the entire world must conform to the same worldview “in order to save humanity”. It’s textbook messiah complex and narcissism (see Deconstructing Wokethink)

Weaponizing “eco-guilt” (a.k.a “Rigging the game”)

This eco-anxiety is so acute that many think it noble and just that the structure of society itself must be altered to fit the worldview. There are academic papers on using eco-guilt to motivate eco-friendly behaviours  (“eco-shaming”). In The Bitcoin Capitalist we’ve covered the UK’s “Nudge Units” which use social media influence operations to condition behaviors.

There is even one from Ross Mittiga, a professor of Political Theory at the Catholic University of Chile, and a democratic socialist (of course) who argues for the political legitimacy of authoritarianism to the point where political candidates must “pass a climate litmus test” before being permitted to run for office, and even overturning previous democratically driven policies if they are deemed harmful to the climate:

“Governments might also justifiably limit certain democratic institutions and processes to the extent these bear on the promulgation or implementation of environmental policy. This could involve imposing a climate litmus-test on those who seek public office, disqualifying anyone who has significant (relational or financial) ties to climate-harming industries or a history of climate denialism. More strongly, governments may establish institutions capable of overturning previous democratic decisions (expressed, for example, in popu- lar referenda or plebiscites) against the implementation of carbon taxes or other necessary climate policies.”

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

This drumbeat for climate collectivism is going to get worse before it gets better. While it’s encouraging to see more reality being injected into the conversation – and eco-messiahs increasingly discrediting themselves through their lifestyles of conspicuous consumption – large swaths of the population are buying this story hook-line-and-sinker, and as Late Stage Globalism enters into its endgame, we expect policy makers to become more desperate and draconian.

CBDC’s will probably come out of the gate as personal carbon quota systems and mass adoption will be driven through UBI delivered on the rails of social credit systems and digital ID.

COVID was supposed to be a godsend for those seeking to create precedent for unlimited stimulus, quasi-UBI and prototypical social credit mechanisms through vaccine passports et al. Fortunately it was all too much, too soon and it appears as though the opposite may be happening.

Where another twenty years of operant conditioning and creeping totalitarianism may have provided the perfect setup for an enduring, technocratic authoritarianism, the widespread policy failures created a larger swath of population who is now wary and suspicious of the next “existential crisis”.

The 37 Trillion in new M2 money blowing out the currency system, the central banks forcing themselves into a corner on interest rates vs inflation, the new pandemic of “sudden and unexpected” excess mortality, and now various  Covid tyrants trying to distance themselves from their role in it all, it certainly looks as though the globalist elite of hyper-Liberalism have overplayed their hand.

That won’t preclude them from trying, however, and there are still many who think #CovidsNotOver, want to #BringBackMasks who will be all too eager to have their lives mediated and gamified via their smartphones and dramatically ratchet down their lifestyles in order to “save the climate”.

Let them.

You don’t have to go along with it, but it will become more expensive to be free. Wealth taxes, windfall taxes, heavily regulated chokepoints between the rapidly deteriorating “fiat world” and the coming “anti-fiat” economy will require being a net producer, owning hard assets across multiple jurisdictions and networks, and garnering multiple income streams. The middle class is being demolished, and with calls to reduce living standards by over 75% (cutting personal emissions from an average if 8 tonnes per capita to 1.5 and then 0.7), it looks intentional.

“In the future, there will be only one occupation: managing one’s wealth. And most people are going to be unemployed”.

As I wrote in a recent issue of the premium letter:

The CBDCs will roll out, and intended or not, become full-fledged China-style social credit systems, from which “the smart money” flees into Bitcoin and other hard assets to preserve its wealth.

 

This leads to “The Great Bifurcation” scenario I’ve written about at length.

 

It’s where Neo-serfs who rely on The State for their economic survival live lives of quiet desperation and servitude, their carbon footprints metered, their behaviours monitored, nudged and shaped; their destinies largely out of their own hands. Life is something that just happens to them, punctuated by episodes of “gaming the algo” to score additional privileges or avoid punishment.

 

Marbled throughout this world would be enclaves, and networks of sovereign individuals and micro-states for whom life is a futuristic extrapolation of hyper-capitalism and mobility. This is the Sovereign Individual thesis meeting The Network State, writ large.

Become a sovereign individual in whatever manner suits you: own gold, stack sats, have a Plan B, work for yourself, not somebody else and for God’s sake, turn off the TV and stop subjecting yourself to the corporate media. Connect with like minded individuals and form both virtual and real communities and networks.

The defining tension of Late Stage Globalism will not be between “left” and “right” but between sovereign individuals and collectivists, decentralization vs centralization. Join the Bombthrower mailing list and get a free copy of our investment thesis, or try The Bitcoin Capitalist: The monthly journal for today’s Sovereign Individual. Follow me on Nostr or Twitter.