(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.
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Bill C-372 seeks penalties up to $1,000,000 and two years in prison for promoting fossil fuels as anything less than an existential threat to humanity.

Just when you thought Canada couldn’t get any more Stalinist, an MP from the country’s far-left NDP party is calling for any speech that “promotes fossil fuels” – even truthful statements like comparing the relative emissions of natural gas to coal – to be banned and criminalized.

MP Charlie Angus, from Timmins, in northern Ontario (where the average temperature in February runs -7C to -21C) has introduced a private member’s Bill C-372 called “The Fossil Fuels Advertising Act” that would “prohibit the promotion of fossil fuels except in accordance with the provisions of the Act.”

Promotion defined as:

“a representation about a product or service by any means, whether directly or indirectly, including any communication of information about the product or service and its price and distribution, that is likely to influence and shape attitudes, beliefs and behaviours about the product or service.‍”

That which is not expressly permitted is forbidden…

“This enactment enacts the Fossil Fuel Advertising Act to prohibit the promotion of fossil fuels except in accordance with the provisions of the Act.“

The only public discourse that would be permitted on the matter would be literary or dramatic representations that “use or depict” fossil fuels, or “opinion or commentary” provided that in either case, the author or creator has no ties or recieves no consideration “directly or indirectly” from the fossil fuel industry.

The preamble calls climate change an “existential threat” and cites the 2023 forest fire season as a pretext.

“Whereas, in 2023, Canada experienced the worst wildfire season ever recorded as the country exceeded the largest area ever burned in a year, totaling more than 7.‍9 million hectares”

There is no mention that in multiple cases of throughout the 2023 forest fire season, such as the Lake Cavan fires in Quebec and the infamous Lake Barrington Fire in Nova Scotia, the cause was arson, (not “global boiling”).

“Claimed, without evidence…”

The phrase “claimed without evidence” has become a staple of the corporate media. It belies a baked-in partisanship reminiscent of late Soviet Era agitprop. This is especially noticeable if anybody to the right of Stalin dares question any precepts of technocratic socialism.

Yet Bill C-372 is replete with such claims…

Whereas air pollution caused by fossil fuels leads to millions of premature deaths globally, including tens of thousands of premature deaths in Canada alone, and is a major cause of cancer, respiratory illness, adverse pregnancy outcomes, children’s diseases and cardiovascular symptoms;

This is a faith-based statement (on par with Al Gore’s unhinged shrieking at Davos 2023 that “Climate change causes the equivalent of 600,000 Hiroshima class bombs per day!”). It also runs contrary to quantifiable data from multiple sources and studies showing that climate related fatalities have been in free-fall for over a century.

It is also settled science that more humans die every year from extreme cold than do heat or warming effects by a factor of 2-to-1.

Bill C-372 further asserts, without evidence (am I doing this right?), that

“fossil fuel production and consumption has resulted in a national public health crisis of substantial and pressing concern, in a way that is similar to the public health crisis caused by tobacco consumption;”

By Statistics Canada’s own measure, tobacco still kills 48,000 Canadians every year. This bill is claiming that every day, an equivalent 131 Canadians are dropping dead because of fossil fuel induced climate change. If true, why not cut the total problem of climate and tobacco related deaths in half by simply banning smoking outright?

There’s only one problem: Free Speech

“Parliament is of the opinion that fossil fuel advertising currently deploys techniques which knowingly mislead the public and fail to disclose the health and environmental harms associated with their use, impeding informed consumer decision-making, undermining public support for effective climate action”

By “impeding informed decision-making” on the part of  Canadians  he probably means any criticisms of inexorably higher carbon taxes (which get unfairly applied according to the whims of political favouritism anyway) or drawing attention to ridiculous, symbolic, non-solutions like wind turbines,  or forcing Canadians pay for expensive heat pumps in sub-zero climes.

The thing is supposed to keep you from freezing, but *you* have to keep *it* from freezing @GasPriceWizard https://t.co/0qHMXFXwVQ

— Darshan Maharaja (@TheophanesRex) February 7, 2024

(Reminder: We’re in Canada)

Further, the companies and scientists gainfully employed by Canada’s energy industry, which is responsible for 7.5% of Canada’s entire GDP (with 75% of that in Alberta), aren’t allowed to defend their industry or their livelihoods from the onslaught of junk science and ideological fanaticism, or to counter it with measured, rational, science-based counter-factuals.

While Bill C-372 asserts that “the protection of the environment is a valid use of the federal criminal law power”. It would be a stretch to apply provisions of The Environmental Protection Act to the normal course operations of the energy industry, let alone free speech. There is no mention of it in the Canadian Constitution, nor the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Section 2(a) of the latter declares as a fundamental right of all Canadians “freedom of conscience and religion” (although nobody seemed to have this right when it was time to refuse the Covid jabs).

And, of course, 2(b) “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”

Like it or not, communication includes promotion, defending oneself,  and taking a firm, defensible stance that we have a moral duty to provide abundant power to society through the practical, judicious use of cleaner fossil fuels.

That said, the Canadian government (to which the NDP are the junior partner in a governing Liberal-Socialist coalition), has no compunctions around trammelling Canadians’ constitutional rights.

A federal judge recently ruled that the Trudeau government’s invocation of The Emergencies Act, that saw Canadians’ bank accounts seized along with the violent suppression of the #FreedomConvoy protest, was both illegal and unconstitutional (the Federal government intends to appeal the ruling).

Hey @CharlieAngusNDP, if you live in Canada and are not going to freeze to death this winter, you can thank the oil and gas industry. https://t.co/2DReFMIz7e

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) September 20, 2023

Realistically, C-372  has about as much chance of passing as a Liz Warren bill, but the NDP’s do prop up Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in a slim minority ruling coalition – they could, in theory, jam it through.

After that, it would be illegal for me to observe that the people of Timmins, Ontario, Charlie Angus’ home riding, would not survive a single winter without fossil fuels (and since I hold shares of Imperial Oil and Canadian Natural Resources, it might be construed as “benefiting from the proceeds of climate extermination”, or something).

The fact that this bill was even entered into the Parliamentary register is testament to how out-of-touch the ruling Liberal-Socialist coalition is.

I leave you with this clip of Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, shrieking “climate change is real”, like a total nutcase in Canada’s House of Commons…

Steven Guilbeault is an unhinged lunatic. pic.twitter.com/uAHABHrnaD

— Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker (@Martyupnorth_2) February 6, 2024

Canadians loathe the carbon tax, and as I’ve been documenting month-after-month in the “Get Woke, Go Broke” section of The Bitcoin Capitalist, the public is done with the ESG narrative and climate hysteria. It’s over.

The later the politicians figure this out, the better – because this is the one area where I am an unabashed accelerationist. Keep at it Charlie! You go Guilbeault!

As previously announced, we’re closing The Bitcoin Capitalist to new members once the Bitcoin halving hits, you can sneak in under the wire here. You could also subscribe to the Bombthrower mailing list for free, here – and get my CBDC Survival Report when it drops.

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.

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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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“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. 

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:

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It was an honour to get #FreedomConvoy leader B. J. Dichter on the show to talk about what it was all really about (“End the mandates, get rid of ArriveCan app”). We talk cognitive dissonance, the irredeemable failure of the mainstream media, and the collapse of the COVID narrative.

Episode brought to you by: easyNostr – set up your NIP-05 address at your own domain, or use one of ours.

Show Notes:

• The HonkingForFreedom website
• Buy Honking For Freedom on Amazon
• Leave a review on Goodreads
• Contribute to BJ’s defense fund (link to follow)

Trudeau Libs gaslight Canadians on foreign interference (except when it actually happens)

“We will not let any foreign entities that seek to do harm to Canada or Canadians, erode trust in our democratic institutions, or question the legitimacy of our democracy.”
— Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety

Bombshell revelations over the weekend (although perhaps not entirely surprising) that the Chinese Communist Party actively interfered in the 2021 Federal Election in Canada to tip the scales in favour of another Trudeau minority government and the defeat of certain Conservative Party MPs who were seen as critical of the Chinese regime.

“China employed a sophisticated strategy to disrupt Canada’s democracy in the 2021 federal election campaign as Chinese diplomats and their proxies backed the re-election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals – but only to another minority government – and worked to defeat Conservative politicians considered to be unfriendly to Beijing.”

The details emerged in leaked CSIS documents which were reported by the Globe and Mail.

Ironically, the opening quote from Bill Blair was not about China interfering in a Canadian election. Blair said that almost exactly a year ago, about the Canadian #FreedomConvoy. It was among numerous claims made by the Trudeau Liberals , the NDP to vilify the truckers – and which were endlessly repeated and amplified by the corporate press. All of which were found to be false in the ensuing inquiry into Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act on Feb 14, 2022.

The #FreedomConvoy myths perpetuated included:

• MYTH: The convoy was being funded by foreign entities seeking to “destabilize our democracy” and “fund terrorism”
  
  REALITY: Upon examination it was found that nearly all funding to the convoy came from Canadian citizens (over 88%) and “a federal anti-terror agency in an internal memo said it saw no evidence millions raised by the Freedom Convoy were intended to bankroll terrorism”. That memo actually came out  three weeks before the Emergency Act was invoked.
• MYTH: The Emergency Act was enacted in response to pleas from the Ottawa Police force who feared an insurgencyREALITY: During the hearings  it emerged  that nobody in the Ottawa Police, including then-chief Peter Sloly nor his successor Steve Bell, asked Ottawa to invoke the act.
• MYTH: The convoy was an insurgency that violently occupied Ottawa, setting fire to apartment buildings, desecrating the Unknown Soldier Memorial statue, and sporting swastikas and confederate flags.REALITY: The person who desecrated the Unknown Soldier memorial was “a woman [who] was not from Western Canada and had nothing to do with the convoy” police said.

  The people who barricaded an apartment building door and were attempting to light a fire turned out to also be locals (*cough* Antifa? *cough*) with no connection to the convoy.

  That one guy with the confederate flag and the one other guy with the swastika turned out to be the only two people at the protest wearing masks (the latter seemingly accompanied by a professional photographer). They were run out of the area by the other protesters. Speculation abounds that both were agents provocateurs, and one was named by a Freedom Convoy lawyer who accused a former Toronto Star manager and Liberal Party publicist  – although there is no mention of those allegations in the final report (the person named is suing the lawyer for defamation).

The list goes on. The final report on the Emergencies Act Inquiry dropped over the weekend, and was a compendium of softballs and cherry-picked testimony. While Bill Blair is taking another victory lap, saying the report finds the government was justified in invoking the act, the nuance is that it did so “reluctantly” and because of the failures in every level of government and not because the convoy itself posed a threat to our democracy.

Yet, Canadian leaders, like Jagmeet Singh, the junior partner in Canada’s ruling Liberal/Socialist coalition, pushed all of these myths and still routinely refers to the protest as a foreign funded insurrection that sought to overthrow the government and install a fascist  dictatorship.

The convoy is occupying our nation’s capital.

Donald Trump and members of the Alt-right have endorsed them.

Foreign money is financing them.

And, a stated goal is to overthrow our democratically elected govt.

This is a clear threat to our democracy.https://t.co/z3MxvU3Kww

— Jagmeet Singh (@theJagmeetSingh) February 7, 2022

Chinese Interference should be the elephant in the room…

So given all the hysteria from our federal leaders around foreign interference in our democracy, it’s rich that Canada’s own intelligence apparatus found that the ChiComms really did interfere in the 2021 election – and they put their thumb on the scale in favour Justin Trudeau.

In the hours after the report emerged, Trudeau appeared dismissive,

“This is not a new phenomenon. This is something that countries around the world have been grappling with for a long time and Canada is no exception.”

(The PM stopped short of seizing the bank accounts of Chinese nationals with ties to Beijing. )

All we need now is for the CBC to reframe the CSIS findings as a “conspiracy theory” and we can get back to the hyper-normality that defines our age.

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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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Short answer: They can’t

(Unless they’re in a hot wallet on an exchange within Canadian jurisdiction).

Longer answer:

I’m seeing references and hearing anecdotally how the Canadian government froze or even seized crypto wallets associated with the #FreedomConvoy fundraising efforts. Including the sensational headline from Fortune magazine’s “Fed up Ottawa residents win secret suit to freeze the crypto wallets funding Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ protesters“.

…fed up residents

…secret suit

… “Freedom Convoy Protestors” in scare quotes

Oh my.

The article refers to a Mareva Injunction issued by the Ontario Superior Court against the convoy organizers (Dichter, Lich, Barber), Pat King (the convoy crasher in my book), several people who were involved in the Tallycoin fundraiser for the truckers, and then numerous John Doe’s. It orders that 134 crypto wallets be frozen, such that nobody remotely involved with them can basically move or cause to be moved any of the funds in those wallets.

Further, it orders that any wallet that receives funds from any of these wallets also be frozen. Technically that means if somebody were to move a single satoshi to Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, BitBuy, etc – then the receiving hot wallets of those exchanges are technically “frozen” as well.

This isn’t really tenable, and this issue has actually come up before within the context of Bitcoin mining and OFAC compliance. There was a time when Marathon Digital actually tried to create an initiative where they would only mine “fully AML and OFAC compliant” derived blocks. This would have essentially required the censoring Bitcoin transactions and  was widely scorned by the industry. It proved itself to be unworkable, with Marathon  scrapping the program almost immediately. (It is also worth noting here that according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which consults for numerous law enforcement and intelligence agencies, only 0.5% of all Bitcoin transactions are illicit in nature).

Trying to enforce a “taint chain” on specific crypto addresses would run into similar problems to the point where the choice would simply be to shutdown Bitcoin entirely (not possible) or give up.

The reality

The order also says

“Any other person who knows of this order and does anything which helps or permits the Defendant to breach the terms of this Order may also be held to be in contempt of court and may be fined or imprisoned. “

Let’s stress for the record that we are not advising nor condoning anyone subject to the order should violate it (but should preferably, at this stage, contest it in court).

The simple reality, which we’d argue is protected as free speech is this: no government can actually seize or freeze anything stored in any self-custody wallet, full stop. In fact, nobody can actually “help or permit” the defendants to breach the terms of the order, because only those who hold the private keys to the specified wallets are in a position to do so.

The courts can issue orders and the government can issue decrees forbidding any  entity under their jurisdiction from allowing transfers into or out of those addresses – that’s what they mean by “freezing” wallets.

But the reality is that none of these wallets are actually frozen. Not in the same sense of when a bank freezes your account. I would argue that the more accurate way to describe those wallets would be as “restricted”, not frozen.

In crypto, those wallet holders can still move those Bitcoin to any other BTC address, but probably not one that has already been created and in a FINTRAC regulated exchange. Most of the news items mention 34 or, these 134 or sometimes 200+ crypto addresses.

There are a possible

1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976

BTC addresses, enough for every individual inhabitant of Earth to have

196,385,600,286,334,710,857,791,565,804,391,698,421

addresses for their own use.

But some say “Bitcoin is not anonymous, the ledger is trackable”. Which is true (at least as long as a given asset stays on the same chain). What I usually say about this hits upon one of my favourite aspects of Bitcoin. It may be true that funds can be tracked throughout the blockchain, but there isn’t a damn thing anybody can do about it. 

Further, there is an entire universe, a “cryptoverse”, that is constructed of innumerable nodes and entities that don’t even reside within Cartesian reality, let alone the legal jurisdiction of the Ontario Superior Court. (One of the key tenets of our Crypto Capitalist Manifesto is that, in general terms, increasing amounts of wealth moving into the cryptoverse is one-way, there is no intention of it ever coming back out into fiat).

Within this cryptoverse, these nodes can take the form of:

• Non-FINTRAC regulated exchanges
• Decentralized exchanges (DEX)
• Peer-to-peer exchanges
• Alternate Layer-1 blockchains, Layer 2 protocols and wrapped assets
• Decentralized Finance (DeFi) apps, automated market makers and liquidity pools
• Bridges between any and all of these

There’s nothing anybody can do about the explosion in number and complexity of all these crypto things, and attempts to similarly “freeze”, “seize” or shutdown every address traversed of some asset you’re trying to trace through all this would mean somehow taking control over centralized exchanges (some of them very large, with legal teams) in other countries, or decentralized entities, some which don’t effectively possess legal personhood but are some sort of Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

The Mareva order does explicitly order several named entities (many of them well outside the jurisdiction of the Province of Ontario) to

otherwise prevent any removal, dissipation, alienation, transfer, assignment, encumbrance, transaction, or similar dealing with any of the assets identified in Schedule “A” to this Order.

One of which is PancakeSwap, which is one of those decentralized DAOs I was just talking about. PancakeSwap isn’t an entity that can be readily subjected to a court order, it’s a smart contract.

To be clear: I am not advocating that anyone knowingly violates a court order to which they are a subject. I’m pointing out that the government can only order wallet holders not to move funds, but that the government cannot actually, freeze let alone seize what’s in those wallets. (Technically speaking the only thing in the wallets are the private keys anyway. The cryptocurrency itself is all on the blockchain).

In a period of extreme financial turmoil such as a bank run or currency collapse where governments may be imploding while issuing all manner of orders and emergency edicts in desperation, wallet holders can be secure in the knowledge that they will still have the ability to execute capital flight even if the traditional banking sector and payment sectors are suffering extreme dislocations and breaking down.

The world is undergoing a monetary regime change. Get the Crypto Capitalist Manifesto when you join the Bombthrower mailing list for free or our premium service trial offer (fully refundable) here. 

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