Actually the statement of Paulson that crypto-currencies are limited in supply is not true. Why ? Well, as an IT professional i can tell you that the code for a "crypto-currency" is very simple. Basically it's just some code for the blockchain (which in itself is a rather simple data structure) and the "crypto", which is the encryption. There is nothing more because, as Jim Rickards said, "there is no there there". Both are standard data structures and code and can be downloaded for free from the net which means any script-kiddie can gobble together a "crypto-currency" in a few hours. There isn't even much coding necessary other than just glueing together the pieces. With server and storage capacity now being extremely cheap in the "cloud", no wonder a new "crypto currency" pops up every other day, and fundamentally they are all the same - see above. So there is no "limited supply" of crypto-currencies - you can create a new one basically for free in a few hours. The funny thing is that Bitcoin from a technical perspective is by far one of the worst "crypto-currencies" out there: transaction speeds are abysmal and the Bitcoin blockchain is one of the oldest, if not the oldest. It's basically the Betamax of Video Recoders compared to VHS - not to mention DVD's or streaming. There is absolutely no reason to hype Bitcoin over any other "crypto currency" but politics. Whatever these guys at Blackrock are up to, they picked a dud of a technology.
Another important point that no one brings up, is that even if we're true, that Bitcoin was scarce. Man made artificial scarcity, is not the same thing as nor does it equate to, real world naturally occuring scarcity.
Man made artificial scarcity is not actually truly or genuinely scarce. It is artificial.
The super high concentration of 1% owning 99% of BTC has an eerie similarity to the story below, but on a vastly larger scale of money and time, on the scale of all investor owned gold world wide. It's not zero risk of the 1% taking all from the other 99%.
From a recent post by Silver Academy:
Hailey Welch gained fame on TikTok, launched the $HAWK memecoin on the Solana blockchain in December 2024.
The $HAWK team allegedly owned 97% of the available coins and sold their share within 20 minutes of the coin going live.
This sudden crash led to a "rug pull," a type of cryptocurrency scam where developers abandon a project and run away with investors' fund.
Bitcoin and Crypto are also linked to the stock market, they seem to run in sync with each other with the highs and lows of the market. We currently have high bitcoin, high stock prices plus high real estate prices. What happens if the dow crashes unexpectedly, one would assume that crypto's will also head south if investors need capital and start to sell off stocks and crypto.
I think noone understands the real point about "crypto currencies". it's not what they are or what they are not, because of course they are "all for naught". The real point about crypto currencies is that it's impossible to remove them from the system, because then they immediately vanish. You cannot "take delivery" of your crypto and remove it from the system because then it's just a pattern of meaningless bits or a file on some storage device. It's impossible. But that's what the powers that be are most afraid of: the collateral simply being removed from the system - which, according to Gresham's law is happening in spades with real money now - so there is nothing to leverage any more. And it's possible with the shiny stuff because real money will always be money no matter what kind of "market" or "exchange" is put up to trade it or use it. It can be removed to just sit the whole thing out and start all over in the next merry-go-round. And you will always find someone to trade it and buy something real for it, all over the world - I'm speaking from experience. And that's what always makes the whole thing go down in the end - vanishing collateral. Crypto solves that problem. Yes, you can have a "hardware wallet" where you "store" your crypto, but as soon as you want to trade it for something you have to re-enter the system, which is the blockchain or some "crypto exchange", and of course then the whole thing becomes traceable - a nice addon for those who want total control. Noone will sell you something or trade something for a pattern of meaningless bits on some USB stick. It only gets a meaning inside the infrastructure that was put up for it. That's the point about crypto: it is a piece of nothing that ties you to the system forever and that is impossible to remove from it. Job done. Objective achieved. No more "bank runs". Let it all go to zero with everyone all in.
David, Yes, I can see where you are going with this and yes, they are on a political pump. I've just finished listening to Matt Piepenberg on Liberty and Finance talking about this and I thing he has it nailed re why the crypto thing is being used to but treasuries that no one else wants. He has a point and it's worth you listening to. You'll understand why he says what he does better than me. But you both seem to have the same endgame.
I think sometime people assume that something is good or safe because the majority is in it. Surely someone who knows better than me will not go in if its not safe. And all it takes is majority of people thinking this way. The reason i still does not hold bitcoin i guess because i cant see the utility other than its price going up. At least silver is nice to look at.
Silver has the highest reflectivity, thermal conduction, electrical conduction of any metal. It also will not spark when used for high voltage contacts.
Silver is more plentiful than gold but in a short squeeze anything can happen.
Remember the Volkswagen short squeeze in 2008 where the stock crept up then exploded from $200 to 1,000. Everyone knew it could not last and it did not. Ended up back at 70 in the end.
Bitcoin was created by the deep state as a pre-conditioning and pre-programming operation psy-op on the public during the 08 financial crisis; in order to shift the public "organically" to (crypto) what I call the Digital Monetary Surveillance System Economy (DMSSE).
Bitcoin was the first live time deep state best test and social engineering operation of crypto before CBDC or other forms Crypto payments.
It is a trap to herd the public or dumb money into before the slaughter.
My understanding is that if everyone removed their BTC offline from the internet it would be worth exactly $0 because there'd be no existing market left to establish its price as a result. Therefore, it can't operate properly as a currency (let alone be considered money) establishing its price as it moves from wallet to wallet in exchange for actual goods and services. I often read this is seldom practiced in reality, and even if it were, the daily transaction volume needed to establish it as a viable currency is impossible to facilitate.
So why certain large nation states are considering or proposing the development of Bitcoin reserves escapes me. Who stands to benefit, besides favored whales looking for an exit?
If we look at gold rather than silver, excluding jewellery, can't we also say that the ownership of gold is very concentrated with central banks and a few ETFs owning the bulk of it?
Secondly, we always read that the Blackrock ETF is one of the main owners of bitcoins. But ETFs are owners of nothing, they are just a legal vehicle. As you well know, owners are the thousands investors using ETFs to invest.
Thirdly rather the concentration or distribution of ownership, it would be interesting to compare the number of investors in gold and/or silver with the number of investors' addresses of bitcoin even though the latter is a 15y old asset and the former have thousands years of existence.
I am an investor in gold, silver AND Btc.
Downplaying Btc will not make gold and particularly silver shinier. Silver, for whatever reasons, has been a lousy investment, not to mention the miners. Arguments to invest in silver and silver miners are really wearing thin.
" can't we also say that the ownership of gold is very concentrated with central banks and a few ETFs owning the bulk of it" - no because near every household on earth holds gold and it has been widely distributed for millennia.
Naked crypto are a promotional fraud. It is what it is.
ETF shareholders are often just shareholders of the ETF. The ETF (Blackrock) owns the assets and most of the time, the ETF shareholder has no recourse to get hold of those assets(BTC or shares of miners etc). They can just sell their shares. This is why they have no voting rights in underlying assets, they might have a voting right in the ETF only. But when an ETF holds a hundred different assets or companies, the individual ETF shareholder effectively has zero voting rights in anything, Blackrock holds the privilege and votes as they like in the individual company votes.
There are pluses and minuses to individual ownership and ETF’s. I like ETF’s in the silver mining space due to the complexity and volatility of the individual silver dominant miners - and I forgo voting rights to receive the benefit of the group going up as a whole (one day…hopefully 🤣). Uranium for me is similar. In areas where I have a bit more experience, knowledge and understanding, I prefer individual holdings.
An ETF theoretically holds assets of which shareholders purchase a portion. When the ETF resell those assets without telling shareholders, a fraud is taking place. Buy the metal and hold it directly.
Actually the statement of Paulson that crypto-currencies are limited in supply is not true. Why ? Well, as an IT professional i can tell you that the code for a "crypto-currency" is very simple. Basically it's just some code for the blockchain (which in itself is a rather simple data structure) and the "crypto", which is the encryption. There is nothing more because, as Jim Rickards said, "there is no there there". Both are standard data structures and code and can be downloaded for free from the net which means any script-kiddie can gobble together a "crypto-currency" in a few hours. There isn't even much coding necessary other than just glueing together the pieces. With server and storage capacity now being extremely cheap in the "cloud", no wonder a new "crypto currency" pops up every other day, and fundamentally they are all the same - see above. So there is no "limited supply" of crypto-currencies - you can create a new one basically for free in a few hours. The funny thing is that Bitcoin from a technical perspective is by far one of the worst "crypto-currencies" out there: transaction speeds are abysmal and the Bitcoin blockchain is one of the oldest, if not the oldest. It's basically the Betamax of Video Recoders compared to VHS - not to mention DVD's or streaming. There is absolutely no reason to hype Bitcoin over any other "crypto currency" but politics. Whatever these guys at Blackrock are up to, they picked a dud of a technology.
Larry's organization says "you will have nothing".
Get people to buy the worst asset in an asset class that will go to zero.
It seems to fit.
"It's all just memes and scams if you really get down to it"
Caroline Ellison, of (former) FTX fame
Another important point that no one brings up, is that even if we're true, that Bitcoin was scarce. Man made artificial scarcity, is not the same thing as nor does it equate to, real world naturally occuring scarcity.
Man made artificial scarcity is not actually truly or genuinely scarce. It is artificial.
-Dillon Critique from what's THE DILL? (SUBSTACK)
The super high concentration of 1% owning 99% of BTC has an eerie similarity to the story below, but on a vastly larger scale of money and time, on the scale of all investor owned gold world wide. It's not zero risk of the 1% taking all from the other 99%.
From a recent post by Silver Academy:
Hailey Welch gained fame on TikTok, launched the $HAWK memecoin on the Solana blockchain in December 2024.
The $HAWK team allegedly owned 97% of the available coins and sold their share within 20 minutes of the coin going live.
This sudden crash led to a "rug pull," a type of cryptocurrency scam where developers abandon a project and run away with investors' fund.
I think that the financial industry has the intention of sending crypto to the moon - before it then goes to zero.
Bitcoin and Crypto are also linked to the stock market, they seem to run in sync with each other with the highs and lows of the market. We currently have high bitcoin, high stock prices plus high real estate prices. What happens if the dow crashes unexpectedly, one would assume that crypto's will also head south if investors need capital and start to sell off stocks and crypto.
I think noone understands the real point about "crypto currencies". it's not what they are or what they are not, because of course they are "all for naught". The real point about crypto currencies is that it's impossible to remove them from the system, because then they immediately vanish. You cannot "take delivery" of your crypto and remove it from the system because then it's just a pattern of meaningless bits or a file on some storage device. It's impossible. But that's what the powers that be are most afraid of: the collateral simply being removed from the system - which, according to Gresham's law is happening in spades with real money now - so there is nothing to leverage any more. And it's possible with the shiny stuff because real money will always be money no matter what kind of "market" or "exchange" is put up to trade it or use it. It can be removed to just sit the whole thing out and start all over in the next merry-go-round. And you will always find someone to trade it and buy something real for it, all over the world - I'm speaking from experience. And that's what always makes the whole thing go down in the end - vanishing collateral. Crypto solves that problem. Yes, you can have a "hardware wallet" where you "store" your crypto, but as soon as you want to trade it for something you have to re-enter the system, which is the blockchain or some "crypto exchange", and of course then the whole thing becomes traceable - a nice addon for those who want total control. Noone will sell you something or trade something for a pattern of meaningless bits on some USB stick. It only gets a meaning inside the infrastructure that was put up for it. That's the point about crypto: it is a piece of nothing that ties you to the system forever and that is impossible to remove from it. Job done. Objective achieved. No more "bank runs". Let it all go to zero with everyone all in.
David, Yes, I can see where you are going with this and yes, they are on a political pump. I've just finished listening to Matt Piepenberg on Liberty and Finance talking about this and I thing he has it nailed re why the crypto thing is being used to but treasuries that no one else wants. He has a point and it's worth you listening to. You'll understand why he says what he does better than me. But you both seem to have the same endgame.
I think sometime people assume that something is good or safe because the majority is in it. Surely someone who knows better than me will not go in if its not safe. And all it takes is majority of people thinking this way. The reason i still does not hold bitcoin i guess because i cant see the utility other than its price going up. At least silver is nice to look at.
Silver also has remarkable physical properties as well as a 4,000 year history as money.
David do you think Silver ever will be more expensive than gold one day? I dont think gold can replace silver utility right?
Silver has the highest reflectivity, thermal conduction, electrical conduction of any metal. It also will not spark when used for high voltage contacts.
Silver is more plentiful than gold but in a short squeeze anything can happen.
Remember the Volkswagen short squeeze in 2008 where the stock crept up then exploded from $200 to 1,000. Everyone knew it could not last and it did not. Ended up back at 70 in the end.
Bitcoin was created by the deep state as a pre-conditioning and pre-programming operation psy-op on the public during the 08 financial crisis; in order to shift the public "organically" to (crypto) what I call the Digital Monetary Surveillance System Economy (DMSSE).
Bitcoin was the first live time deep state best test and social engineering operation of crypto before CBDC or other forms Crypto payments.
It is a trap to herd the public or dumb money into before the slaughter.
-Dillon Critique from what's THE DILL? (SUBSTACK)
Bitcoin New Highs Explained
https://blackboxpolitics.substack.com/p/bitcoin-new-highs-explained?r=99p96
Bitcoin a Deep State Operation
https://blackboxpolitics.substack.com/p/bitcoin-a-deep-state-operation?r=99p96
Peter Schiff vs FOX Business Bitcoin Change Agents
https://blackboxpolitics.substack.com/p/peter-schiff-vs-fox-business-change?r=99p96
My understanding is that if everyone removed their BTC offline from the internet it would be worth exactly $0 because there'd be no existing market left to establish its price as a result. Therefore, it can't operate properly as a currency (let alone be considered money) establishing its price as it moves from wallet to wallet in exchange for actual goods and services. I often read this is seldom practiced in reality, and even if it were, the daily transaction volume needed to establish it as a viable currency is impossible to facilitate.
So why certain large nation states are considering or proposing the development of Bitcoin reserves escapes me. Who stands to benefit, besides favored whales looking for an exit?
Have I got this wrong somehow?
Crypto is an abstraction and when the mania dies, people are going to shake their heads as to how it could have happened.
Just another something from nothing promotion.
John Paulson says it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzUvpxqD1SA
If we look at gold rather than silver, excluding jewellery, can't we also say that the ownership of gold is very concentrated with central banks and a few ETFs owning the bulk of it?
Secondly, we always read that the Blackrock ETF is one of the main owners of bitcoins. But ETFs are owners of nothing, they are just a legal vehicle. As you well know, owners are the thousands investors using ETFs to invest.
Thirdly rather the concentration or distribution of ownership, it would be interesting to compare the number of investors in gold and/or silver with the number of investors' addresses of bitcoin even though the latter is a 15y old asset and the former have thousands years of existence.
I am an investor in gold, silver AND Btc.
Downplaying Btc will not make gold and particularly silver shinier. Silver, for whatever reasons, has been a lousy investment, not to mention the miners. Arguments to invest in silver and silver miners are really wearing thin.
" can't we also say that the ownership of gold is very concentrated with central banks and a few ETFs owning the bulk of it" - no because near every household on earth holds gold and it has been widely distributed for millennia.
Naked crypto are a promotional fraud. It is what it is.
ETF shareholders are often just shareholders of the ETF. The ETF (Blackrock) owns the assets and most of the time, the ETF shareholder has no recourse to get hold of those assets(BTC or shares of miners etc). They can just sell their shares. This is why they have no voting rights in underlying assets, they might have a voting right in the ETF only. But when an ETF holds a hundred different assets or companies, the individual ETF shareholder effectively has zero voting rights in anything, Blackrock holds the privilege and votes as they like in the individual company votes.
There are pluses and minuses to individual ownership and ETF’s. I like ETF’s in the silver mining space due to the complexity and volatility of the individual silver dominant miners - and I forgo voting rights to receive the benefit of the group going up as a whole (one day…hopefully 🤣). Uranium for me is similar. In areas where I have a bit more experience, knowledge and understanding, I prefer individual holdings.
An ETF theoretically holds assets of which shareholders purchase a portion. When the ETF resell those assets without telling shareholders, a fraud is taking place. Buy the metal and hold it directly.