As a result of various abusive misuses by US government of the international role of the US$ fiat nations are separating themselves, and are casting around for other ways to do business with each other.
First the Brics, and now Europe has put in place with new Basel have put in place banking regulations that encourage banks to hold physical gold as an international monetary asset. Brics has abandoned plans for a blockchain based medium of exchange, and all governments everywhere are averse to the use of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
That Nato is likely to collapse in the near future is also making everyone, including members of Nato, nervous about US$ denominated assets.
Gold is already the de facto international currency again.
Which of course was a huge win for Goldbugs, and a huge loss for Bitcoin Maxis like myself. Nontheless I am still a maxi, but making even bigger returns from Bitcoin has certainly been greatly delayed, and we see the Bitcoin lettuce hands capitulating. Those who capitulated early are undoubtedly congratulating themselves. Albeit blockchain analysis indicates that most of the time most lettuce hands capitulate at the worst possible times, because the bottom of the dip happens when the most capitulation is happening.
Gold has intrinsic value, for its beauty and industrial use, but its price is primarily monetary.
Silver has intrinsic value, for its beauty and industrial use, but its price is primarily industrial, and recent changes in the price have been dictated by their advances in battery technology. If you are betting on silver, you are betting against people with inside information.
> The one strategy that almost always loses is chasing the short-term movements. (Unless, of course, you have and act on insider information, or insider access to front-run the trades, both of which are de jure illegal and de facto permitted only for favored friends of the political elite.)
A substantial rise in the value of gold due to banks using it for international transactions is entirely possible, but there is a limit on how much its value can rise, and since Gold is already the currency of bank international transactions we are likely at that limit.. It is price will of course continue rising because of the increasingly rapid decline in the value of fiat. The limit on that for Bitcoin is of course very far off.
Secondly, gold cannot be used for ordinary private transactions, because gold is not infinitely divisible.
Banking arrangements for international transactions continue to suck, resulting in increasing private use of Bitcoin for international transactions for international transactions made between entities where both of them lack the political power to get the banks to do what they want.
When people think of Gold becoming ordinary currency again, they are thinking countries going to a gold standard with a hundred percent Gold backing.
If we assume that seventy percent of all currencies world wide go to physical backing by gold, and they are all sixteen percent marginal reserve, then around US$15000-$25000 per ounce.
They are not even going back to a Gold backed standard with marginal reserve. Would not be accepted even if they did, because everyone would expect governments to steal the backing again by breaking the peg again.
While i know you are pessimistic about silver, gold (the currency of kings/elite banking houses) spikes also tend to drag up silver (the currency of gentlemen and merchants) despite it being primarily industrial. The industrial shortage looks to be severe for a long time without a big price increase…
Possibly silver is going to rise. Possibly it is going to fall. But whatever it will do, there are some very wealthy people in China who are much better informed on this question than you or I.
Battery and solar panel production is going to rise. And if the amount of silver required for a battery or a solar panel remains as it now is, silver demand would rise to impossible levels. And, knowing this, and viewing batteries as a national security requirement, particularly since Trump grabbed Venezeula, the Chinese are going to do something about it. How effective that something is going to be, they probably have a fair idea, but you and I do not.
Already under tight export controls.
Europe wants to physically block the shadow fleet — which is dangerous unless the US is doing the heavy lifting. Which it is not.
I mean export controls from China (not sure how Europes insane crusade against Russia factors in). Though Trump issued a defense production act order on critical minerals and silver was #1 on the list.
In practice, commodity shortages tend to be characterized by very rapid spikes in the price when the shortage becomes news, then a stabilization of and sometimes gradual decline in the price as supply catches up.
Remember the big run-up in GPUs a few years ago, with higher-end products selling for nearly 3x the MSRP at their peak? An RTX 5080 today from a big box retailer costs about 25% less than the RTX 4080 peak ($1200-$1400 vs. $2k+) and is generally in stock anywhere that normally stocks it. NVIDIA hasn’t changed its strategy at all; they are still chasing hyper-scalers and devoting almost all their manufacturing capacity to data centers, but they were able to increase their capacity just enough to serve both the business and consumer markets, albeit at a higher stable price than before.
We are likely seeing something similar with memory today: as big manufacturers (Micron) throw everything they have at data centers, smaller manufacturers, who previously couldn’t compete for consumer demand, are now scaling up to meet it. I doubt that this transition will happen smoothly or predictably, but it will happen, and has already started.
The industrial silver shortage is common knowledge among investors, manufacturers and mining operations. It is priced in. If demand continues to increase (which is likely), and supply cannot scale up to meet it (which I find unlikely) then yes, speculators could stand to make a lot of money. Such things are not unprecedented; they just aren’t the norm. I don’t see any clear reason why industrial silver couldn’t be scaled up; the main “constraint” on silver supply has been lack of necessity, which is to say, that so much of it is produced as a byproduct of other mining operations (especially copper and zinc), we’ve never really needed to care. Now that this “incidental” silver is insufficient, we will need actual silver mines, that’s the only difference.
Some upside? Definitely. Massive upside? Ehhh… Silver, to me, is a black-swan bet. It is a bet that something big is going to happen, in particular something big that either explodes demand way beyond that which is already priced in (what?) or, more likely, an expectation that the silver shortage, unlike the majority of shortages, is going to be prolonged and persistent, which would require some strange and unusual circumstances that none of us know about.
Gold being fully remonetized–that is, without a fractional reserve–would also be a black swan event. or I guess “gray swan” since it is actively being discussed. It is among the unlikeliest of outcomes, not significantly any more likely than governments simply confiscating all gold and silver assets from their citizens, which also has historical precedent. And if that happens, then maybe you are fine if your gold and silver is buried six feet underground or at the bottom of a lake, but if it is merely custodial gold and silver held by an ETF or vaulting company, you are going to be hosed.
This is not to say “don’t hold gold/silver” or even “don’t hold gold/silver ETFs”. As I’ve said before, investors should strive to be diversified, whatever that means to them. It is, rather, an admonition to think carefully about the probabilities of the things on which one is betting. If betting on one extremely low-probability event like “most of the world switches to literal gold coins as national currency” then one ought to also consider other extremely low-probability events like “governments confiscate the gold of all private citizens” with equal merit.
But mostly, unless one has inside information, one should either ignore such outliers, or have a minor hedge against them using only risk-capital.
Silver production is not easy to scale unless price increases a lot because now it’s mostly mined as a byproduct.
My reply already mentioned that fact and discussed it at some length.
Dedicated mining can be difficult, and relatively expensive, but it is a problem that is well-understood, and one that is definitely already priced-in.
If, during attempts to set up silver mines, the miners discovered were to discover that there are very few deposits available, or that the deposits are all very poor, then that would change the equation. As it stands today, the fact that so much silver is produced as a mining byproduct works against the prospect of silver price inflation, not in favor of it, because it implies that silver is actually very abundant, and perceived scarcity has been primarily due to low industrial demand rather than actual natural resource scarcity.
Only a surprise discovery of real resource scarcity would change this. Hence, black swan.
Of course production could be increased the problem is unless there is a huge price spike economically this will take a long time.
Also don’t assume things are priced in, when you are do that you are endorsing the efficient market hypothesis and the efficient market hypothesis is total bullshit on the level of theories like tabula rasa, the rule of law and the rational voter. Its priced in among people currently involved in the market maybe…
It’s tabula rasa if tabula rasa only applied to Anglos of 130+ IQ. EMH has been looking bad lately because the state is increasingly involved in price fixing, but otherwise it is true. Markets surface information better than any other tool we have, and in markets that are not downstream of opaque small-circle decision-making, EMH is generally true.
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis shouldn’t really be called a “hypothesis” at all. It’s simply a model, like Newtonian mechanics or r/K selection. Like most models, it is locally true–meaning, it is conditional on its premises, on its assumptions, which may be false, but if the premises are true, then the model makes correct predictions.
Efficient markets aren’t absolutely true, like Newtonian mechanics aren’t absolutely true. Efficient markets assume perfect information, when real economic behavior involves a lot of information asymmetry and general uncertainty. Efficient markets assume rational decision-making, when a lot of investing is emotional. Efficient markets do not account for positions which should be impossible or illegal, like naked shorts. And so on.
If you believe that any of these factors are present, then following an efficient-markets model is foolish. But individual markets are more efficient as information becomes more transparent, as investors become more rational, and as more time passes without any changes to the underlying economic reality. Simply tossing aside the idea that supply and demand shifts have already been priced in because “efficient markets is bullshit” is every ounce as foolish as following it blindly.
As I have repeatedly stated, if one wants to bet against the markets being efficient, or more simply, to bet against the market, then one should have some clear idea in one’s mind about where precisely the market is going wrong. People can and do make huge winning contrarian bets, but when they do, there is usually a contrarian rationale to go with it; they have access to different information, or an obviously different interpretation or weighting of information, from the larger market.
So the question is, if you do not believe the changes have been priced in, where do you believe the market has taken a wrong turn? What facts has the market misinterpreted, or what information is it failing to take into account? So far you have only stated things that are common knowledge, things that even a very inefficient market would obviously have priced in by now.
Your justification, as currently stated, appears to be that even though all the information is available, and even though precious metals are a fairly liquid and well-understood market for speculators, and even though everyone in the business knows roughly what’s involved in setting up a silver mine and what the expected capital expenses and mineral yields are, and even though nothing looks to be changing in the near future, that the market is still going to take months or years longer to react to this state of affairs…because reasons. And that makes no sense at all. If that is not what you mean, then please explain what you mean, without repeated references to easily-discoverable public information that has been public and easily discoverable for a long time.
Persistent errors are ignorance of near future technology on the one hand, people correcting for this ignorance by swallowing hype and vapour ware on the other hand, and normality bias — underestimating the likelihood of black swans.
So to benefit from inefficient markes, one has to know something others do not.
Chinese techies know what is coming up in silver, you do not.
I can believe this. Many of those allocating capital and speculating at the highest levels in commodities markets are old now, and normalcy bias reigns ever more supreme. I agree with your point nonetheless, just wanted to point out that the aging of all the major economic players introduces a massive stuffness and brittleness to the system, that has yet to be factored into most people’s mental models. In these markets today, the higher ups are boomers, the middle are worn out X-ers, and the lower are a mix of diveristy. Increasingly, talented men have been forced into smaller and smaller pools, so those legacy men in charge of the larger pools are simply old and tired and prone to “this is how it always was and will be”- type biases.
Rick Rule thinks silver is going massively higher i think he understands the market well (but he did sell most of his silver to buy mining stocks he likes). I trust his knowledge better than the garbage efficient market hypothesis.
The potential for silver to go massively higher depends on how easily industrial uses can be substituted. What is the price elasticity of industrial use?
If Rick Rule does not know anything about substitution for batteries and solar panels, he is pulling stuff out of his ass.
Where copper can be used its generally used already, it can be an alternative if silver price is so high it’s worth lowering quality. The only easy substitute to silver of comparable conductivity (and it’s not as good though its used in parts of electronics which absolutely cant corrode or tarnish) is gold… not going to be a lower cost substitute.
Of course. This is the (implied) argument of the Bitcoin Maxis, and with Bitcoin, it makes a lot more sense. Everywhere one looks at any discussion of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in the media or online, one sees a vast, nigh-impenetrable wall of ignorance about the technology’s structure and function. The proxy for the normality-bias flavor of inefficiency is [lack of] institutional ownership, and institutional dominance, which is (sort of) verifiable.
Most institutions didn’t even want to touch crypto until sometime in 2025, and when they did, they wanted to apply all their usual tricks of leverage and derivatives and such. Kind of worked, but Bitcoin doesn’t trade like a conventional equity and its price movements are increasingly decoupled from the equity markets, as they should be. So the institutions are easily spooked, and dominance is still relatively low. If one believes in the long-term potential of Bitcoin, then it is a persuasive argument to say that institutions still don’t really get it, and normies get it even less.
Not really the case with silver, which has been institutionally-dominated for quite a while. There is nowhere to point to and say “these guys just don’t get it”. Everyone seems to get it.
Personally, I don’t know or care who that is, but this does makes a degree of sense, and is a nuance that you really should pay more attention to if emulating his strategy.
Precious metals are a very strict supply and demand equation. Yes, there are futures and various other “expectations of future” supply and demand baked in, but the point is, these aren’t instruments that naturally appreciate in value on their own, they only do so in response to perceived shifts in supply and demand external to the trading market, either monetary or industrial.
The fact that he sold his silver bullion to buy mining stocks should tell you a lot. It should tell you that he believes silver demand will continue to increase but that this demand is already priced into the bullion market. Equities, on the other hand, do tend to appreciate as company revenue/profits go up, and while there is still a lot of “actual vs. expected performance” speculation that confuses the price signal, it is a pretty safe bet to be invested in successful companies producing a product that is in demand, even if little else is changing, because those companies are generally going to find ways to produce more efficiently or otherwise improve their profitability.
Whoever this guy is, he made a clear move from speculative investing to value investing which means he believes we are at or near the top of the speculator market for silver. Whether we actually are or not, I’m not trying to say and really don’t care, but his actions, which speak louder than words, are broadcasting the opposite of what you claim.
Where in the world are you getting this nonsense from? First of all, copper and silver have near-identical conductivity, and gold does not have comparable conductivity to either; gold’s conductivity is comparable to aluminum which, guess what, is actually used in electrical wiring.
But all of this is beside the point because the run-up in silver has nothing to do with its conductivity, it’s all based on silver’s use as an anode in batteries, specifically one very hyped Samsung patent for a silver (actually a silver/carbon alloy) solid state battery, and even more specifically an EV battery. So not only is all this speculation tied to industrial demand, it’s tied to EV demand in particular, and EVs are an elastic consumer market. Batteries already account for a huge chunk of the cost of an EV, and if the batteries become three times more expensive, demand for EVs is going to collapse because no one wants to pay $80,000 for an entry-level car.
Maybe these batteries will find other uses with inelastic pricing, and silver demand goes through the roof. But again, probabilities. Is that outcome more likely than battery manufacturers simply finding a new and improved formula (which they seem to do every year), or finding a way to make the current formula with less silver? Is it more likely than expensive silver SSBs being relegated to an ultra-premium product that very few people can afford or are willing to pay for? Is it more likely than demand for EVs softening in other countries, like it already has in the US? Is it more likely than silver simply becoming cheaper to mine if the miners scale up to meet demand?
Here’s another question you should be asking: what happened to the price of graphite–the anode of choice in the li-ion batteries still ubiquitous in EVs–or even the price of lithium itself, when those batteries exploded onto the market to power all the new EVs? Both are uncommon/rare minerals driven by industrial demand, and in literally the same industry, so the situation should be analogous. If you don’t want to look it up, then I’ll tell you: the price of both graphite and lithium had a big run-up until early 2023, after which point they collapsed to about half of their peak levels over the next few years.
You don’t ask, or attempt to answer, any of these questions; you just natter on about how efficient markets are BS along with an irrelevant and completely incorrect factoid about conductivity. I have been trying to be polite here, but you obviously have no idea what you are talking about and shouldn’t be here loudly telling other people how to invest their money.
If you think you know better than the market, it is not enough to say “the efficient market hypothesis is false”. You have to explain why it is false in this case, and what you know that the greatest weight of investors do not know.
The efficient market hypothesis is obviously wrong if some market participantsm have better little known or secret information, or if the information is not widely understoodl All of these conditions apply most of the time in most markets, and it this sense the efficient market hypothesis is usually false. But if you are not one of those people with special secret information, or widely available but little understood information, this does you no good, and in this sense the efficient market hypothesis is true for you.
Looking into it looks like the only area where they might be able to sub out any amount of industrial silver with copper that they aren’t using copper already is in solar panels and then they sacrifice efficiency and panel life which China being run by engineers rather than bean counters who want it to look good on their next quarterly might not be okay with anyway, they could well use lower quality panels with little to no silver or China might specify they rather eat the higher initial cost on solar panels.
Nuts.
The big price rise was in expectation of use in a particular type of battery, a battery that that last time I checked, which was immediately silver hit the news, not yet in production and not yet in use for cars, but back when I checked, battery makers were already running up big silver stockpiles. If the silver price goes up too high people are just not going to make or use that particular type of battery, and will cash in their stockpiles. Existing industrial demand, exclusive of this battery type, does not justify the silver price we have seen.
I don’t follow silver. I barely follow gold, and I knew that. You are invested in silver, and you don’t know that. You should not be investing in silver unless you have done your homework, and even less should you be giving advice on the topic.
Silver went up not on existing industrial demand, but on expected industrial demand. If it goes up too high, those expectations will change. There are lots of battery types that do not use silver.
What sent the price up was Samsung’s promise of a car battery with an energy density of 500 Wh/kg, almost double the existing power density, and a one thousand cycle, twenty year lifetime. Which takes a kilogram of silver per car. Slightly under three thousand dollars at current prices. At which price, demand for these batteries is likely to show significant price elasticity;
What probably happened is that people in the car battery industry held their fingers to the wind, and asked “At what price are customers likely to start saying that they want the shorter range, lower price, battery? OK, we will stockpile physical silver until we hit that price.”
In other words, prices in the silver market are being set by a bidder who is likely rational and better informed than you are. Hence the rational markets hypothesis is likely true.
They probably know everything there is to know about physical silver, car batteries, and car markets, but if you asked them about paper silver and monetary usage, they would look at you funny and say “Huh?”
I know about the battery thing but its more than that (and if the battery can actually store solar energy reliably and they can’t substitute non silver its worth it to the Chinese at almost any price). AI data centers and drones use silver and hypersonic missles also use silver. There is a reason silver was listed as the top priority mineral in Trump’s critical mineral defense production act order.
China builds and uses an enormous number of batteries to store solar energy, which is produced in solar farms in the desert during the day, and used in big cities during the night. But no one needs high energy density batteries for this purpose, therefore no one needs silver for this purpose.
They do need silver for solar panels, and it has long been obvious and well known that there just is not enough silver for all the solar panels that China wants to build. So Chinese manufacturers have been working on low silver and zero silver solar panels.
Silver free solar panels were already in mass production before prices skyrocketed, and every solar panel business has announced plans to fully substitute base metals for silver. Silver prices were depressed because mass production of silver free, all base metal, solar panels had started and more mass production was expected. Then they shot up on Samsung’s announcement.
The data center thing is part of the ai scam. We are going to see a substantial expansion in data centers to support ai, but not the ginormous supendous expansion promised. Missiles just are not going to use significant amounts of silver.
The sudden price rise reflects new information, and that new information is Samsung’s high energy density battery.
Jim you are very smart but I respectfully and strongly disagree with you on this topic. I think there would have been an enormous price increase even without the new Samsung battery. But lets run with the battery, battery storage of solar farm power was not really very practical with the almost unchanging previous battery technology of yesteryear either the big problem with solar power is the cost of storage of power during times when the sun was shining so it could be used the rest of the day was astronomically and impractically expensive. So China betting on solar has to be a bet on better batteries, if China likes silver because of this battery that means they think the Samsung battery can deliver.
But aside from that more and more silver is going to in many ways be required in electronics all the time. Production will eventually catch up but its likely to take a long time. Also you know markets aren’t rational or efficient if they could investors wouldn’t be able to ever earn more than economic growth in real terms. Was the Dutch Tulip market efficient?
And as far as what China’s doing they have been massively trying to source silver and they seem to favor the silver price being high in order to encourage increased production over the long term and they seem to feel they can eat the cost…
Samsung silver batteries are not better batteries for solar storage, because you don’t care about Wh/kg for stationary batteries. You only care about Wh/kg for long range electric vehicles.
No one has ever used silver for solar storage, and it is unlikely that anyone ever will.
Demand for silver for solar farms is going to drop like a stone, going to drop to zero by 2027, and demand for silver for long range electric vehicles is price sensitive. No one has to use silver for either one.
Now to be fair to the bears solar panel manufacturers have dropped silver use by 17% (not much drop in other industries) as a result of the 27 to 80ish 90ish price spike. But other industries not much at all and its questionable how much more solar manufacturers can drop it…
I don’t think AI data center construction slows down much for the next 7 years. You’re by far the smartest person who thinks AI is a bubble at all that I’m aware of… normally people who call it a bubble are leftist who have no technical background or really any technical knowledge on any subject whatsoever. I should perhaps contact my high school perfect 1600 SAT score MIT physics graduate friend to see what he thinks… I don’t think AI is going to replace programmers entirely soon either but its going to replace a lot of other office jobs. And yes missles and drones do need silver not sure how much because its not really publically available information but high quality electrical contacts… need silver.
Right now today, very large numbers of silver free solar panels are being installed in the Gobi desert. And were being installed well before the silver price started moving. If some, why not all?
I knew this. Why don’t you?
Today, the price of silver is no longer set by the clever tricks of Wall Street Financiers. It is set by the purchasing officers of solar panel companies, and the purchasing officers of Samsung. Do you want to bet those guys are wrong, ill informed, or do not understand likely future industrial demand for silver?
Obviously the wall street financiers did not understand likely future industrial demand for silver. But they are not longer in the driver’s seat.
The efficient market hypothesis was false for silver, because the bankers had their heads up each other’s asses. But, because people with their heads up each other’s asses lost money, and people who knew what they were doing gained money, prices came to be dominated by those who knew what they were doing, so the efficient market hypothesis became true, as it always does in a free market.
The efficient markets hypothesis is like the no-fifty-dollar-bills-lying-on-the-pavement hypothesis.
See, I won’t pretend to be any kind of genuine expert on precious metals either, I am just blessed with quick learning and an unusually good memory. So when I hear or read sentences like this, the red “problem” light starts blinking, and I think, “well, hmm, I remember something along those lines, but that just doesn’t sound right”, and I decide to look it up.
To my complete unsurprise, there does not appear to be any such thing as a “critical mineral defense production act”. This seems to be an amalgam of two unrelated things: the Defense Production Act, an actual piece of legislation that’s been around for 80 years, which seems to have most recently been invoked for production of herbicides (specifically, Glyphosate). But what is probably, more likely, being referenced here is a certain “Project Vault”, a large earmark to build a strategic stockpile of all currently-listed critical minerals, because we import so many of them from China.
For reference, the list of critical minerals has sixty (60) minerals on it, which does indeed include silver, though silver is not receiving any special treatment, and the many news reports covering the announcement of Project Vault never call out silver, but do call out several other strategic minerals including lithium and copper and of course the rare earths.
Or perhaps you were actually referring to H.R.3617, Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply Act, which is a House resolution with no obvious connection to Trump or the White House, and no mention of silver or any specific mineral for that matter, and hasn’t even been put to a Senate vote, and reads like your average run of the mill Congressional cloud of squid ink. I’m guessing this is not what you are referring to, but for the sake of completeness, there it is.
The one tidbit I can find about silver, which does square up with my own memory, is that silver was not always on the critical minerals list, it was added recently, meaning (apparently) in or around March of last year.
So this “top priority” hype actually amounts to a change that was made nearly a year ago, making silver one of 60 strategic priorities. Sounds a little less impressive when put in the proper context.
I am not writing this to try to embarrass you or accuse you of duplicity. To the contrary, I believe what is happening here is that you are simply getting a lot of information second- or third-hand from people whom you believe are trustworthy, and either they are not as trustworthy (or as well-informed) as you believe, or they are trustworthy and well-informed but you are hearing an alternate version of what they say that has mutated to favor a narrative you’ve become invested in, both figuratively and literally in this case.
It happens to everyone. It has happened to me. Confirmation bias is human nature. But we are here now, telling you to correct your heading, to start being a bit more skeptical of the things you are hearing and to start checking the facts with a bit more rigor. I did not have to spend a long time searching to uncover the above info, because Trump’s executive orders are all published, news reports of Project Vault are all recent and published, and the list of strategic minerals is always published.
Next time you listen to one of these silver bugs, please check their facts, instead of repeating their unverified claims here.
I was going to weigh in on the efficient markets hypothesis but most of what I was going to say has been said by others. One more point, though, about this proposition:
If markets are informationally efficient then price movements are unpredictable.
That is an “if” proposition, not an “if and only if” proposition. That is, price movements can be unpredictable even if markets are not efficient.
Suppose the Illuminati conspiracy controls the price of silver, and those whimsical little scamps decide to set the price by flipping a coin every day. Then silver’s price is not emerging from market efficiency, in the sense of having anything to do with supply and demand, but it’s not predictable either.
Less fancifully, even if most traders in a commodity are stupid – which is a weird assumption to make – that by itself does not imply predictable price movements. They’d have to be stupid and some other things would have to be true.
>gold cannot be used for ordinary private transactions, because gold is not infinitely divisible.
Using gold for small payments is not practical and that’s the exact reason why you use silver for small payments. There’s no need to invent anything new here.
Yes, and copper for even smaller payments. There are many ways to address this, including paper notes redeemable for gold.
The Goldback currency took a radically different approach by embedding small amounts of gold into paper notes. That eliminates the need for a redemption clause because the gold is inside the paper itself.
The number on a Goldback note indicates the number of 1/1000 ounces (milli-ounces) of gold it contains. So “1” means 0.001 ounces, and “100” means 0.1 ounces. There’s a “1/2” goldback which means 0.0005 ounces. (So the range of spot values now is about $2.50 for a 1/2, and $500 for a 100.)
Obviously there’s a significant premium over the gold spot price because you need to pay the people who manufacture these finely detailed notes. But the idea is that a merchant will also accept it at the premium value, not merely at spot. It looks like the premium is about 100%, because they show a current daily exchange rate of 1 goldback = $10. That would be only $5 at spot.
As Jim pointed out there would be problems with a paper gold or even silver backed paper currency now because everyone would think the government would steal the gold (and silver) and break the peg.
Good looks set to be the standard store of value and means of exchange as far as trade goes, fiat looks set to only be local short term means of exchange. Unit of account (i guess fiat because must pay taxes in it)?
Oh wait embedding PMs in the currencies themselves… might work might spawn a new form of “coining”…
Yes, it’s clever and the result is beautiful. They use a vacuum deposition process to deposit the gold onto polymer sheets, so they’re not really paper notes. I should buy some to see what they feel like.
I got the Goldbacks and they are spectacular. The notes are polymer and nicely flexible. I know some people in town who are aware of these and it will be fun to spend a few.
Bimetallism fails to work, because the relative value of silver and gold keep changing. This has always been a headache.
Worked pretty well for centuries before 1873…
Every time the relative value of gold and silver changed, bimetallism failed. A bimetallic system works if the ratio is stable, and people believe it is likely to remain stable.
If the government tries to fix the gold and silver ratio, before the 19th century the government didn’t try to do that. But you are right I thought the original sin was demonetizing silver when the original sin was trying to fix the gold and silver ratio.
And then the silver miners struck it rich in the Comstock Lode in Nevada. It started in 1859, then there was one huge bonanza after another, culminating in the Consolidated Virginia Bonanza in March 1873. All this new supply sent the silver price plummeting relative to gold, and the 15:1 peg specified in the Mint Act of 1792 could no longer hold. William Jennings Bryan was quite upset about it.
You can see the dramatic effect on the silver price here:
https://pricedingold.com/silver/
That shows the 15:1 peg holding from 1700 to 1873, and then boom the floor fell out from under it.
Note that the 15:1 peg is reflected by the price of about 2 GAU / 1 OAG over those years.
: 1 OAG / 2 GAU
= 31.1034768 GAG / 2 GAU
= 15.5517384 AG / AU
~= 15 AG / AU
Notation: O = troy ounce G = gram AU = gold AG = silver
>relative value of silver and gold keep changing.
Yes, that is called the market and is hated by statists. And in a actually free market the changes would likely be slow anyway.
>Bimetallism fails to work,
You mean, it fails when your state and your emperor “fixes” the prices. So bimetallism “managed” by government criminals doesn’t work. Shocking.
Your comments are very weird for a “Hoppe libertarian” aren’t they.
The problem is that it is inconvenient if your high value coins are not an exact multiple of your low value coins, and no matter how libertarian you are, it remains inconvenient.
Gold is not infinitely divisible, and silver and copper coins corrode. Pure silver does not corrode, but is inconveniently malleable to make coins or utensils out or;
Wouldn’t that be more slight annoyance than major problem? Especially since for everyday transactions if we hypothetically went to a monetary system of bimetallic coins (yes I know this wont happen) you’d overwhelmingly be using silver. Gold would be for major purchases, commercial transactions. Everyday use would only be the spendthrift rich (which is a minority of the rich) divorced women blowing through their money and such…
Obviously it was a big enough problem that every society has addressed it one way or another way.
They all had a problem that because the costs associated with minting, there was always a shortage of low value coins, so they would use units of account for low values, and settle up infrequently with actual coins, or with weighed silver.
“They all had a problem that because the costs associated with minting, there was always a shortage of low value coins…”
The Big problem of Small Change.
>The problem is that it is inconvenient
Indeed, freedom is “incovenient” for tyrants, statists and the like. Sure, under your anti human technocracy on the other hand, everything is automatic and “convenient”. And there of course are no humans.
Using real money also known as commodity money is “incovenient”. It’s much better to have a chip implanted in your brain and pay using molusk’s “tesla cash”, right?
>Gold is not infinitely divisible,
I didn’t directly comment on that piece of nonsense but since you repeat it…
All elements can be divided up to atoms. All compounds to molecules. By definition. And whether gold is “infinitely divisible” or not is completely irrelevant.
> Indeed, freedom is “incovenient” for tyrants, statists and the lik
No, a floating rate between gold and silver in a bimetallic monetary system is inconvenient for the wife who wants to buy a chicken.
Your “freedom” is like Rousseau’s “freedom”. You have to force people to be “free”
The trouble is that you use “liberty” the way marxists use class warfare and the EU uses “disinformation” — as a rationale for government policies that impose intolerable burdens upon individuals, as a justification for the state violence that (like a communist complaining that true communism has never been tried) you piously deplore.
A major part of your true libertarianism has been tried, and has failed catastrophically.
Look at England. It is not taxes and regulation part of liberalism that requires extraordinary state violence against the subject populace. It is the libertarian part of liberalism — open borders, gay sex, abortion, and the abolition of marriage.
These libertarian policies destroy people’s lives and leave a power vacuum, and to prevent alternative forms of large scale organised violence froem stepping into that gap and protecting the native British, the state has to become increasingly repressive.
Your purity is utterly detached from reality. The smallest practical gold coin is about three grams, which is about $500.00, and is both too small to practical, and too large to be all that useful as money
You have not the slightest interest in actually giving effect to libertarian policies, only in attacking the enemies of the EU and Keith Starmer in the name of an absurdly and impossibly pure libertarianism, much like Starmer silencing speech on the grounds that “disinformation” is a threat to free speech.
Note that “disinformation” is not lies. It is truths that are forbidden.
Using real money also known as commodity money is “incovenient”. It’s much better to have a chip implanted in your brain and pay using molusk’s “tesla cash”, right?
What a peculiar self-own. Makes it very obvious you haven’t thought this through in the slightest. What do you envision your libertarian supermarket to look like?
“I’d like to buy a pack of eggs”
– “Yes that’ll be 10 molecules of gold please”
Yes Alf. Thanks for proving that you can’t even read. My first post on this thread made the point that silver is used for “buying eggs on the supermarket”.
Then again, just like your owner, the Philosopher Emperor and jew neocon jim, you are always wrong.
Carry on.
You live in your own little universe.
Yes upon which you were explained the problems with bimetallism – that the exchange value between gold and silver fluctuates, and that silver coins erode.
The solution for this is unimetallism, but then we return to the problem of the limited divisibility of gold. To which you reacted that ‘elements can be broken down to their atoms so it’s no problem’. This was a dumb response and merited ridicule.
jaggard is repetitious. Stuff gets pointed out to him, and he just bombastically repeats his original point with insults added and double the confidence.
Insults added is not a violation of the moderation policy. Repeating ones original point as if no argument had been made against it is a violation, because it leads to boring threads that repeat forever. One has to attempt to answer the argument, or else just shut up, or better, concede the point, and proceed to make an alternative, perhaps lesser point.
When I said “bored now” the message was that he is now boring everyone and is about to go on moderation and never be seen again unless he mends his ways.
jaggard, your libertarianism is totalitarian. It achieves astonishing purity by being utterly indifferent to practical real world problems, not only coinage, but also marriage, family, public order, and national defense, and then applies this absolute purity as a bludgeon against any real world opposition to the real world totalitarian terror of Europe.
The libertarian part of liberalism, open borders, free trade, the emancipation of women, abortion, sodomy, and transexuality turns out to involve vastly more repression and state intrusion into people’s lives than the taxes and regulation party of liberalism.
The problem with liberalism is that it denies everyman a job, dates, a career, a home, a safe clean neighborhood, and a family. Which forces it to hold on to power by totalitarian terror, crushing speech, and crushing freedom of association. And you wind up justifying the destruction of family, and the open borders that have destroyed jobs, cheap housing, and safe clean neighborhoods. And then attacking anyone who opposes liberalism because, oh no, it is not very libertarian to support borders, national power, and family.
You are pure. You are totally in favor of the open borders that have destroyed everyman’s job, the abortion on demand and female emancipation that denies men and women children and and life together. You merely oppose the totalitarian terror that is regrettably an inconvenient necessity to enforce those things. Is it not odd that the most crucial and central principles of today’s libertarian party (gay sex, transexuality, abortion on demand, the dissolution of marriage, and open borders) regrettably just happen to need totalitarian terror to ensure them? So, you totally support gay sex, transsexuality, abortion on demand, the dissolution of marriage, and open borders, while totally opposing the censorship and coercion that mysteriously somehow seems to accompany, and attacking the same targets as the censors and secret police target.
And is it not even odder that you are targeting the same people as Soros, USAID, and the EU are targeting?
Why is it that to protect the gay parade, drag queen story hour, open borders, and to protect women from marriage 1.0, all these worthy libertarian goals that you are unable, in your enormous libertarian purity, to oppose, Starmer needs more vigorous restraints on freedom of speech and freedom of speech than Russia or China. And even America, most platforms have less freedom of speech than China. Willy OAM complained on his Youtube channel that he was getting a whole lot of views on a Chinese platform, and censorship on that channel was less burdensome than Youtube.
>jaggard, your libertarianism is totalitarian.
Right. Because freedom is slavery.
I could rest my case at this point, when you self-parody yourself into oblivion and show yet again that you are nothing but an Ingsoc propaganda bot…
If Starmer’s open borders, grooming gangs, and biological men masturbating in women’s bathrooms are not libertarian, why not? If they are libertarian, why do they need to be defended and upheld by more censorship and political imprisonment than in China?
Your libertarianism is totalitarian because you are using an impossible purity of liberty that no one wants or should want, that you do not actually want either, to attack actually existing liberty. You attack the liberty of Trump and Musk, in the name of the liberty of Starmer, Biden, and Obama.
>Your libertarianism
There’s no such thing as “my libertarianism” – there’s only actual libertarianism, which I can argue for and that you can’t counter.
And there’s no such thing as “Hoppe libertarianism” either. Hoppe does have some libertarian positions that again you can’t counter at all. And Hoppe has some retarded dishonest pandering to conservatives that you try to take advantage of, while of course ignoring all of Hoppe’s actual libertarian positions.
Hoppe’s “dishonest pandering” are him trying to make a libertarian polity practical. You better damn well believe it would have to be a homogeneous high trust place that kicked out malefactors. You don’t like Hoppe because he’d probably have you physically removed.
Exactly so.
Conversely, jaggard’s suicide pact purity is him trying to outholy the right, using libertarianism as a club to strike down the enemies of the EU and Keith Starmer, rather than displaying slightest interest in whether the piously pronounced ideal is practical, useful, or desirable.
You will notice, that, as always, he ignores the question, no matter in what form it is asked, the most recent form of the question being:
Of course I can explain why they are not libertarian, by reference to people’s property rights in collective goods, such as a safe and clean environment, and people’s property rights in other people, which jaggard would rightly regard as a universal all purpose out from libertarian individualism, to be applied whenever libertarian individualism leads to horrifyingly terrible results, which, of course, is exactly what it is.
The centralized state loves libertarian individualism, because it wants to atomize its subjects, thus rendering them helpless before it. And left libertarian individualism is inherently especially beloved by the totalizing managerial bureaucratic state, which is obstructed by individual and local differences, local powers, and local status. Hence the seeming paradox that the European Union and Starmer’s Britain are most savagely cruel and despotic when they are enforcing the libertarian part of liberalism, rather the taxation, regulation, and welfare part of liberalism.
Jaggard/whitebread/sockpuppet is the quintessential ankle-biter. Not just someone who generally aligns with the category, but the literal character archetype, an almost too-perfect textbook definition.
For all the sewage he excretes about freedom this and statist that, it is plainly obvious from his antisocial and self-destructive behavior that he craves the whip hand. An effeminate, perennial loser, he abhors the freedom that forces him to compete with peers for status, but channels it into resentment toward his nominal master (“The State” or sometimes “The Joos”) for neither allowing him to cheat as flagrantly as he’d like nor assigning him a more important role that could confer legitimate status.
So he tries, usually impotently, to hobble and inflict pain on anyone larger in stature. Out of spite, yes, but also in the vain hope that someone will finally notice him, pick him up by the scruff, and force him to do something useful, so that he does not have to decipher the arcane rituals necessary to socialize with the other pups.
Sadly, the eventual fate for many if not most ankle-biters is to get thrown out into the street, and at this point I’m really wishing Jim would. The thing is, you cannot argue with an ankle-biter–obviously you can, in the abstract, but it is futile, not unlike arguing with a woman. He is not here to debate, or to learn, or even because he thinks he has something to teach; he is only doing this to try to relieve tension and get noticed, and will continue doing so as long as it continues to work. And since we cannot physically put him in his place, this being the internet and all, what else is left?
Jim likes debating libertardianism and consistently gets baited, despite it being obvious to us that this is a bad faith commenter. Same thing with AF, just a different topic. Let Jim have his fun, this is his ‘house’ as it goes.
I knew this Jaggard fucker for what he was the moment he accused me of never having been a libertarian. Me? Me!
Ridiculous
Sure, and if this was just some lolbert with a need to inflict his opinions on the internet then he wouldn’t be any worse than any random Facebook or Reddit poster on their best days, and any of us on our worst.
It’s not even the unresponsiveness; it’s the attitude that distinguishes this case. It’s not enough to just say “ACK-shully you’re wrong and blah blah”. It always has to be “you’re wrong, and also you’re stupid and dishonest and evil, and I am so much better than all of you and blah blah”. He needs to inflict not only his opinions, but also his rage and misery on all of us. It’s not debating, and it doesn’t function as comedy or performance art either.
Compared to this guy, AF is a perfect gentleman. He might post baffling nonsense from an alien reality where everyone’s normal role is reversed, but at least he does it without the spittle and bug eyes, and we can occasionally enjoy it as irony or farce.
I don’t like debating libtards. But, know your enemy, know yourself.
And you learn the most from what they will not say. I keep asking him the same question over and over and over in different ways, and he keeps not answering in the same way, thereby telling me much.
The libertarian commonality with liberalism, the part of libertarianism that it has in common with liberalism has now manifested as the most horrible, evil, destructive, and aggressively intrusive part of actually existent liberalism, and libertarians suffer from a strange inability to say what this mysterious problem is. Why does “liberty” need to be state enforced by terrifying and extreme measures?
Of course what they cannot say is that all liberty needs to be enforced, state enforced, in the sense of organised violence protecting some people doing some things against other people who want to do incompatible things. We cannot all just get along except we agree on the walls between us. And some “liberties” are just plain evil and need to be crushed. The state, libertarians say, should just stop crushing liberty. But it has to crush some “liberties” so that other people can enjoy morally superior liberties.
Deport all foreigners. Poofs off roofs.
The problem with libertarianism is that some goods vital to human flourishing are inherently collective, or can only exist in the context of collective goods, so human flourishing unavoidably requires a fair bit of crushing your enemies, driving them before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women. Flourishing requires order. Order requires victory. In order that order suitable for some kinds of human existence can be established, those who would prefer a different kind of order for a different kind of human existence must be crushed. We can’t live with those people. The reason the libertarian aspects of liberalism in Starmer’s Britain are so oppressive and so monstrously evil, is that Starmer is trying to force us to live with people who have absolutely no intention of allowing us to exist at all. We can’t live with those people, and they intend to make sure we cannot.
>I don’t like debating libtards.
But Jim, you hysterically claim that you are a libtard yourself. A “hoppe libtard”, as you put it.
And there’s an even more interesting aspect to your propaganda efforts. You’ve been hanging around so called cypherpunk circles for a long time. You’ve pretended to be a cypherpunk for decades. And your pretense to be a cypherpunk is even more insane than your pretense to be any kind of libertarian.
You Jim are the ultimate musk cocksucker, and musk in turn is the ultimate tranny-humanist(he even has a tranny son). Musk is the ultimate anti-privacy, anti-human technocrat, he’s about to put chips in people’s brains, and you Jim, The King Of The Cypherpunks have nothing to say about it. Odd isn’t it?
bored now.
There are libertarians in Russia too. My friend Sasha, who speaks perfect English and loves to debate me at great length, had not heard of that word, but when I showed him the libertarian platform, he read the whole thing and said it was pure genius.
He’s also a hedonist who sees no reason to waste any of his remaining years creating new lives for others to experience. He totally does not care if Russia continues to exist after he’s gone. His wife was over 40 when they married, so no kids.
He also believes that all politicians in all countries work together in perfect unison to enslave and kill their subject populations. All disputes between them, including wars, are theater, and everything (e.g. Covid) happens exactly according to their plan. He told his employers he’d rather quit and eat only porridge than take the vax.
He has a large, sharp, triangular nose, but insists that he’s 0% Jewish. I’ll believe it when he takes a DNA test.
Let me get this straight: All state currencies are going to zero because all leaders around the world look at Argentina and Zimbabwe and say “I want that!” No state will betray this suicide pact, hold its currency at parity with gold, and invite citizens of all countries to open bank accounts with them. Like another eGold, but this time with its own army and navy.
Most fiat currencies are going to zero because post covid scam almost all states are stuck in a debt death spiral. They are most likely to payoff their debt in inflated fiatbucks and then transition to a sounder form of money only after that.
No country has ever inflated itself out of debt, and all who attempted it became fourth-world shitholes whose only export was millions of starving refugees.
It’s harder to build another Switzerland than another Venezuela, but well worth the effort.
If the US doesn’t outright ignore the constitutional black letter that says it cant repudiate its debts it must print them soon.
A state that did that would displace the global reserve currency. It’d have to be a serious nuclear power. The only real candidates are the US, China and Russia, and I don’t think any of them will get their house in order sufficiently.
Chy-na has a pseudo two currency system they are trying to prop up for international trade. Good luck to them, they prevent cartelization and actually export all their tech. We might get cheap machine tools, chips, robots, biotech equipment, lasers, etc. from them if they can avoid implosion.
It’s on open question whether they take a turn for the worse when there is no geopolitical rival to speak of, but their track record so far is good.
What’s a good way to buy some Bitcoin these days?
Told everyone the bottom ain’t in yet..
Does not matter, because time in the market beats timing the market.
If the bottom ends up being 50K, rather than 65K, and the eventual top is still 200K or 500K, then who cares? My profit was only 800% instead of 900%, big deal.
You can buy it on Bisq, but this is complicated. In the UAE you can just straight up buy it for cash.
Just buy on a cex.
If he is asking here, he does not want to buy on a cex.
Reminds me of this Far Side Cartoon
https://x.com/LibertyJen/status/1627368081680142337/photo/1
https://substack.com/@restorebritain/note/c-216896681
Feminist nationalism.
Eh
What Restore mean to say, but cannot say, is “these are our women.”
But were they to say that, this would provoke the shit test “we are not your women” — if you look at the histories of these trafficked and exploited English girls, they acquiesced, made no genuine effort to escape, and deliberately made life hard for white knight would be rescuers.
So you don’t say that until you are in a position to hit them with a stick should they say that. Women have a striking and obvious preference for black knight rescuers. I speak from direct personal experience, but if you should doubt me, check their porn.
Musk’s account on X — is it him? some PR team? No one knows! — has recently been promoting Nick Land and Yarvin. This, and the obvious wink-and-nod ‘Restore’ party, has me feeling like NRx ideas are winning over the most important players in Thermidor. Maybe not the highest level actors, whom may be old and filled with normalcy-bias, but those with the most capacity for actually taking action.
How long until these guys reach out to Jim and his illustrious followers? I cannot think of anyone else continuing to develop on top of NRx theory in any real meaningful way, Jim seems to still be the furthest tip. Jim have they tried bitmessaging you yet?
This is why I finally started commenting after years of lurking. Someone give me a job in the administration. I don’t have anything better going on
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2024944918494675416
The messaging has been rolling more and more in our direction. Soon, calls for God, King, Country, and MAGA breeding pits.
“Supreme Court strikes down tariffs” (https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs/):
A big blow to Trump? The blob striking back? A reminder that at a big part of Thermidor are such because the Left-wing holiness spiral was hurting their bottom line, and the tariffs were doing the same? A chance for Trump to finally have an Andrew Jackson moment (or will “TACO” prove to be the case again)?
Or is this irrelevant, because the time of laws and legal rulings is ending, the time of force and men with guns is coming, and thinking any of this sort of thing matters is normalcy bias?
Unfortunately Trump is increasingly unpopular because hes allowed himself to be cucked too much so now he can’t cross the Rubicon, not right now.
This is what he gets for trying to play by the three branches of government rules bullshit rather than declaring that their powers were suspended under a state of emergency day one or definitely he could have done it after the Kirk assassination.
SCOTUS and POTUS both have normalcy bias and are playing legal games that wont matter in a year. May not matter now, except in terms of tactics. Scotus limiting Trump and Trump raging against scotus is 80% performative.
Meanwhile… MAGA and Thermidor are both engaged and onboard with rebuilding American continental infrastructure for datacenters, AI, energy, and defense. These are overlapping concerns. Tariffs only one method. Increasing recognition that US enemies are using lawfare to stop the rebuilding. Establishment GOP, the third wing, mostly on the sidelines. Democrats on the sidelines.
> infrastructure for datacenters, AI, energy, and defense.
That is, infrastructure for surveillance and tyranny. It’s mildly funny to see deep state retards refering to the digital surveillance police state as “AI”.
The one thing as far as AI and tyranny that I do find massively concerning is that the surveillance state was in practice mostly toothless (less you pissed off someone powerful) because the reality is the secret police were both too undermanned and too lazy to process your information. Basically cops (at whatever level including the secret police) don’t actually want to investigate crimes thats work and they’d much rather be eating donuts unless they have some personal reason for doing so. Unless you pissed off someone really powerful personally you could in practice commit all sorts of crimes on camera and nothing was going to happen to you. Your footage would never be seen by anyone and if it did it would go at the bottom of a review pile 500 feet high that would never actually be looked through.
The scary thing about AI is they can make it do work on reviewing surveillance that lazy cops won’t. Which will of course catch a lot of real criminals but also a lot of people flexing the rules in an anarcho tyrannical system it will fufill the Scott Adams prediction that nearly all crime will be caught but that also it will reveal that everyone is a criminal. Now of course they will turn this into revenue collection because the courts don’t want to deal with these millions of new cases either there will be overwhelming pressure to accept whatever fine they think they can extort out of you in return for dropping consoldiated charges.
>The scary thing about AI is they can make it do work on reviewing surveillance that lazy cops won’t.
The mass surveillance state already did automatic surveillance of all written communications. They also did analysis of all kinds of data like location, network traffic, etc. They were also able to pick any phone conversation they wanted and listen to it. Point and click wiretapping.
Now they can listen to all phone conversations in real time. And they can watch all the video too! For instance, all the video coming from Tesla NSA.
>… nearly all crime will be caught but that also it will reveal that everyone is a criminal.
Well totalitarian shitholes like the US have tens of thousands of absurd “laws” that are selectively enforced. That’s how statism works. Mass surveillance makes things worse but it’s not a radical change in that respect.
>they will turn this into revenue collection
…But the main objective and function by far is political control.
This was parodied in Demolition Man where Sylvester Stallone’s character kept getting automated citations for things like foul language and the like.
Since Jim is always mentioning this, I thought I would leave this here.
https://x.com/EarthPigs23A/status/2025037791487291895/photo/1
Bitcoin continues to drop, while I have no doubt that should it avoid falling to zero (ie if a much better coin comes along) it will be 1M+ sometime in the future my opinion is that Basel III and the fact that bitcoin isn’t percieved as a store of value by the big boys (that was possible when line only went up but not amid such volatility) will continue to put downward pressure on it for a long time while Basel III will continue to drag gold up as most countries are in debt they can’t possibly repay without cancelling it or monetizing it. Gold being dragged up and industrial shortages (yes I know you guys quibbled) will continue to drag silver up. Gold and silver are still not nearly at their inflation adjusted prices they got to in 1980 and they should ultimately go higher in real terms because gold was not the international currency in 1980 and there wasn’t a crippling debt crisis. I suspect Andrew Tate will end up being right and bitcoin will bottom in around 25-30k.
I know I sound like I’m rubbing salt in the wound and I’m sorry I’m no stranger to taking a bath on an investment so I’m not infallible (I certainly found Biden’s market irrational and unpredictable in the extreme)…
Sadface.
Not like bitcoin isn’t known for being volatile, but still stings.
I am still not calling the Bitcoin bottom, but I expect to call the bottom some time during the next twelve months, and in eighteen months, you will be feeling somewhat better, and in two years you will be starting to feel like a financial genius again. (I assume you bought when I called the bottom at 16000-20000.)
Saw a post about 364d to bottom and then 1064d to top.
Bottom around October 2026?
I shifted to a future trend bot which opens long/short based on the short/long term moving average.
Don’t have the impulse control to hold and spot grid takes too long.
Ltc and PaxGold is my main money makers.
I’d take the profits and buy gold/ammo – direct with crypto.
Xmr or z cash I assume?
I cannot predict the bottom until it happens, and even then not exactly, but just that we are somewhere near the bottom, maybe I will call it a little bit early or a little bit late.
Maybe other people can do better, but what I see at every bottom is a whole lot of capitulation and cashing out near the bottom. Indeed, that is one the best signs that you are at the bottom, that bitcoins that were purchased during the big bull run up have moved again. When the lettuce hands capitulate, its is time to buy and hodl. And over the past three weeks there has been a lot of that. When there is a lot more of that, then it is the bottom.
That’s when I bought most of my btc. But liquidity working as it does, I’ve bought some more throughout the years, including when btc was up to 90k. All being said still ahead.
Guess that’s the kind of investment bitcoin is. Long-term, long-tail, with much rollercoaster speculation in-between.
No, you sound like you just can’t fucking let it go.
“Yes I know you guys quibbled but I’m just going to ignore all your previous objections and repeat for the 6th time my prediction that silver’s going to be totally awesome based on the same flimsy rationale as before, oh and Bitcoin being at the exact same valuation it was at 3 weeks ago is a huge red flag and totally means it’s about to drop another 50%”
Ok, buy your silver, hold your silver, whatever, just give it a rest already. Anyone who was going to be persuaded by this has already bought in.
And you sound irrational and triggered somehow. And about PM ownership I’m not hawking it here because I think it will change the price.
Buying after a huge run up and selling after a huge run down is a losing strategy. And that is the argument that you, the Cominator have been making. That silver will rise because it has been rising, and Bitcoin will fall because it has been falling.
Now if you had predicted silver before it rose, and Bitcoin before it fell, I would be a lot more impressed.
I did buy into silver around 28ish but true I didn’t announce it here but sure the easiest money on silver has been made (but I would assume that unless you get a capitulation bottom below 40k thats also true for bitcoin), I would just argue if you assume some similiarities to the 1970s PM bull market there is a lot more especially since factors are arguably even more favorable for PMs.
Buy on the rumor, sell on the news. The rumor was all those people saying that the dollar was losing reserve status. The news was Basel telling the EU banks to get with the Brics program.
Gold is now in is rightful place as the international medium of exchange for the big banks, and Bitcoin is still the up and coming challenger that is experiencing adoption by the small fry.
Gold for gold to rise substantially, it has to get into an even more favorable place. It cannot get to an even more favorable place, except nations go on the gold standard. Which they cannot, because no one would trust them.
Gold cannot actually be used to buy cans of sardines, because of inherent problems with coinage. Bitcoin could be used to buy some cans of sardines. You cannot do that now, except for some demo shops created by the Bitcoin Beach group, but you certainly can order stuff over the internet with it, and for some transactions, you pretty much have to, due to the problems with paying for stuff internationally through the banking system. And with gold, you cannot buy a can of sardines, and you certainly cannot order stuff over the internet.
The PM run in the 70s was roughly 10 years as the dollar lost purchasing power, the situation for the dollars purchasing power now is arguably a lot worse (its better in that Trump has secured a captive oil supply and we don’t need to import huge amounts from Arabs but the debt situation is far far worse), the bull run only really started about a year ago. But the AI is telling me that gold is now higher in real terms than the 1980 peak (find it hard to believe) so perhaps you’re right. I will look into this deeper. If true plan to rotate to mining stocks ASAP.
Gold purchasing power apparently higher than in 1980 (after basically only a year of running) silver not nearly as high as it was in 1980 (that was the one I was comparing and I wasn’t aware how much they diverged)…
This is something I will have to think about… historically silver does tend to catch up but it can take many many choppy years. Perhaps time to buy mining stocks early as Rick Rule has…
Calling bottom publicly now… We’re early timewise, so not saying a truly idiotic short trip to $40k isn’t possible. But having sold a bunch above $120k, and given unenumerated factors, it’s probably a good spot for people to start accumulating again, and accelerating that accumulation over this year, particularly after July 1, maxing through December. Been adding since the dive below $70k. Max drawdown so far this wave was 52.5%.
Being Coin Shills, NEVER listen to us, and never mind what coins we’re secretly adding, because everything we say will get you REKT.
Bitcoin price
BTC
$73,485.98
And climbing
Price analysis follows below commentary.
[*Deleted because your price analysis is factually wrong.
You are allowed to disagree with me about the likely future, I am not going to let you disagree with me about the recent past.*]
Bitcoin Price action from 2021 November 10 to today resembles Bitcoin price action from 2017 December 20th to 2022 November 29th
So this is not something new and unprecedented. It is very disappointing, but there have been no end of similar disappointments since the bitcoin peaked at sixty cents, and then collapsed.
https://cryptoprisoners.com/
Keonne Rodriguez
William Hill
Ian Freeman
Roman Sterlingov
Roman Storm
… and many more.
Regarding getting wrenched, spied, censored, and the ability to continue upholding the natural human expression thus right of security and privacy…
Assuming a social/corp multisig, instead of a private self-held multisig…
How does one deploy any type of multisig protection without exposing the protected account’s BTC balance to the sig keyholders?
How does one send out of a multisig without at least the M of the M:N sig keyholders knowing the BTC amount of the transaction?
How does one send into a multisig without at least the N of the M:N sig keyholders knowing the BTC amount of the transaction?
Similarly for exposing the protection account’s address, and the outbound transaction destination account’s address, to the keyholders.
Obviously, the keyholders should be a group that trusts each other. The internal workings of the collective entity should be transparent to its owners. This seems like a non problem.
> Obviously, the keyholders should be a group that trusts each other.
No. Whole point of a multisig is no trust, and no knowledge of each other. Else they’ll collude and steal your coin, etc. And no knowledge of addresses/amounts, else they’ll censor/rat/sell/wrench you.
> The internal workings of the collective entity should be transparent to its owners.
No. The account holder should not be selecting a “collective” of signatories that “internally work” together. Else they’ll collude and steal your coin, etc. Owner only cares that M of his chosen independent N signatories sign, “transparency” is undefined here, thus irrelavent.
> This seems like a non problem.
It is a massive problem, because the model implied by your reply, implies that social/corp multisig is impossible, for being impossibly antithetical to both security and privacy. And that only self-held multisig actually works.
Since no one answered the questions directly, one must follow the implication and assume the answer to all five (5) are no.
Which means that one should go with privacy coins to get a social/corp multisig that doesn’t expose these things, and thus works.
You are not making any sense, and you have not taken the shill test described in the the moderation policy.
Over the last 5 years, Bitcoin has not even outclassed the performance of the SP500 any more than simply adding some growth stocks to an SP500 portfolio would have.
Over the same 5 years, BTC has been beat by GOLD, and even steadily by $TRON going back even further, and only matched $XMR.
Even the now purely psychological 4-year cycle gains have not held over these 5 years.
All under what people think has been a multi-year string of nothing but good news for Bitcoin and crypto as a whole.
Was going to note on why this might be, and future prospects, but out of time. Be well.
Partially because 5 years ago was the run up to a peak (30k going to 60k); previously it was fluctuating between 6k-10k. But the fundamentals you are implying are because the decline of the dollar has been filled by gold. If you think gold can fill that niche indefinitely, bitcoin is a bad bet. If you think moving around gold on ships and trains is going away because of a lack of trust or drones, bitcoin is one of the better bets for a replacements.
Course all this could change in an instant if the US economy melts down- easy to be the best option if everything else implodes.
Jamie Dimon is full of shit, and a piece of shit.
https://x.com/SimplyBitcoin/status/2060432993173622829
Same for Giancarlo Devasini and Paolo Tether, he only survives because he’s gobbling up unwanted treasuries just like the banks. Stablecoins, CBDC’s, GovDC’s, CorpDC’s, FiatDC’s… all junk. Same for XRP. Uncensorable, hard, distributed, private… Crypto gonna beat their ass till they all die in a fucking bankruptcy fire.
Metcalfe is one of many metrics used to roughly assess the current “value” of a network.
Its utility decreasing when attempting to compare increasingly dissimilar networks (a network of mailboxes, vs @emails, pigeons, bicycles, hamsters, worms).
It doesn’t necessarily yield the same ranking when comparing different “values” of the network such as: financial, utility, meme
Metcalfe is not predictive of any future value.
Metcalfe is a curve fit, just like Santostasi Power.
They are point in time plausible explanatories of a past, and status estimates of the present.
Even Santostasi admits he “is… fitting models to empirical data”, and that “if Metcalfe’s would be really true we would have Bitcoin worth billion of dollars in few years, quite unrealistic”.
Bitcoin people are using both of them improperly, pounding on tables swearing they are guaranteed predictors, forever. They are not.
Metcalfe is littered with caveats explicitly warning not to use it to make predictions, some issued by Metcalfe himself…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
– “There may be diseconomies of network scale that eventually drive values down with increasing size. So, if V = An2, it could be that A (for “affinity,” value per connection) is also a function of n and heads down after some network size, overwhelming n2.”
– “Network size, and hence value, does not grow unbounded but is constrained by practical limitations such as infrastructure, access to technology, and bounded rationality such as Dunbar’s number. It is almost always the case that user growth n reaches a saturation point. With technologies, substitutes, competitors and technical obsolescence constrain growth of n.”
– Metcalfe’s law assumes that the value of each node n is of equal benefit. If this is not the case, for example because one fax machine serves 60 workers in a company, the second fax machine serves half of that, the third one third, and so on, then the relative value of an additional connection decreases.
– In social networks, if users that join later use the network less than early adopters, then the benefit of each additional user may lessen, making the overall network less efficient if costs per users are fixed.
Bitcoin-BTC has a “present value”, in many aspects.
BTC has a past value that has *so far* roughly tracked a number of “Laws”.
BTC has resistance to a smaller competitor ever doing the exact same thing as BTC (a literal clone and launch of the same code).
However, Metcalfe says absolutely nothing about BTC’s future value, or resistance. In particular regarding resistance to both old and new competitors who are not doing the same thing.
Many first instances of past “Metcalfe” networks have been superceded
– Roman aqueducts : Pipes
– Spears : AK-47’s
– Donkeys : Cargo vans
– Horse carriage : Cars
– Death : Surgery and Antibiotics
– Mailmen : Packet Switch
– Milkmen : Drones
– Govt Forced Digital Fiat : Distributed Voluntary Digital Crypto
Bitcoin-BTC has two very serious limitations that are now being talked about reasonably honestly, even on CNBC, as being concrete blockers to real adoption…
– Privacy, thus panopticon, censorship, etc
– Settled Transaction Rate capacity needed by everyone on the L1, thus fee prohibitive, central paper bitcoin, etc
If its competitors find solutions, they have the luxury of implementing them in a clean-slate L1.
BTC has L1 baggage that it must support.
BTC’s primitives may not even allow it to do a wholesale importation-and-turnstyle of whatever its competitors may or may not discover.
BTC has not reached a new “permanent” high in the effectively 5 years 3 months since first reaching the $60-70k range, meanwhile even other trad-market asset indexes and trends have handily beat it, some by many multiples. This is already not following some of the former “Laws” and certainties people swore and ascribed to it.
– Be careful when claiming something is predictive or for sure
– Be mindful of history’s tendency to supercede everything that was once thought “unbeatable”, and to its tendency to simply walk away from moot things.
I’d be willing to predict that BTC may be, perhaps even likely will be, perhaps even sooner-than-expected might be, superceded (surely to the astonishment of today’s regarded Maxis who will all turn and say they knew). But not at all yet willing to point to anything as being that thing yet.
Only time will tell.
This picture does not prove anything about the future either
https://i.redd.it/agx35jemco4h1.jpeg
People on CNBC TV now also know that the next “4-year cycle” will only have a 0.41% impact, whereas regarded Maxi’s are still swearing by it as if it were still 50 and stock-to-flow still below 1, let alone currently approaching infinite, lol.
Few.
Jim has made reference to Metcalfe’s Law about a thousand times by now. Why you think anyone here would be interested in one of your rambling, insipid and manic lectures on the topic is a mystery. As much of a mystery as why Jim continues to allow you to vomit out this spam from 47 separate accounts.
Shut. It. Down. Please, for the love of god. I know it’s a weed, and weeds keep spreading and sprouting up even after you think you’ve killed them all, but you still have to try, have to hit them hard and fast, else they completely take over your yard.
https://ecdsa.fail/
https://scirate.com/
https://proximityprize.org/
https://poseidon-initiative.info/
This is all bullshit research and a complete waste of space, the inevitable garbage generated by the publish or perish incentives.
I support Zcash and the dev/mining/funding teams user community. They have executed beyond expectation given this very difficult problem.
Zcash is already working on formal verification (as are a couple more teams in the ZK space), and on turnstiles, among other things.
Backers have stepped up to backstop funding of the roadmap. And a few of them are public, which given the privacy war, is very brave and potentially self-sacrifical.
ZK coin protocols in general, only become stronger after this news.
Monetary Cryptoprivacy, the Freedom to Save Transact and Give Privately, is a war that absolutely must be won at all costs.
You have and are nothing without privacy and cryptoprivacy, only the math of encryption can keep any system from ultimately devolving into a fully controlled recorded and abusive lockdown State, just as every country is now doing with its Fiat Central Money Systems. Fiat’s lack of privacy must and will lose, will become nothing more than a quaint 135 year failed experiment in abusive Political Power. From the original private physical Gold is spawning new private digital Money.
Disappointed with the behaviour of the Bitcoiners/Maxis toward the ZEC team, ZEC, and ZK privacy coin protocols themselves. The BTC gang once again proving themselves immature, topic twisting, XMR levels of drugged ignorance and fanboyism, even big people grossly showboating about how they’ve supposedly sold all their ZEC.
ZK protocols are more complex compared to BTC, so BTC should be praising ZK community for being able to do what they do, which is also a producing lot of research for the space.
There will always be a number of competing coin-design types, protocol hierarchies, in active development and use, especially Privacy Coins. And over the coming decades positions will shift. Formerly thought unassailable winners will become losers and vice versa. Discoveries, forks, merges, and deaths will occur. This is all normal throughout history.
You never know when you’re going to need privacy.
Waiting to find out is suicidally too late.
Keep developing and using the all privacy protocols, ZK included.
There is no alternative.
Note also, BTC is down 5% more from ATH than ZEC.
Thus seems that BTC’s lack of privacy comes with more of a negative price premium these days than even a patched exploit in a privacy coin does.
Even XMR has solidly beat BTC over the last 2+ years, and even over the last 12 years.
17+ years of crypto, investors know years of news and risks by now, don’t invest if you can’t assess the risk or handle a loss.
Oh, and how many times has BTC soft and hard forked around problems, and censored the three biggest fora.
And fixed innumerable severe bugs in early days when there was no competition around to snark at them for digs.
Bitcoin minted 184 billion coins out of thin air and had to resort to extreme measures to fix it.
Bitcoin is “building” all sorts of crazy “L2” and DeFi protocols… how many thousands of severe-critical bugs are waiting in that cesspool to be found by the AI-scanners.
Bitcoiners need to grow up, and ditch their sorry rhetoric.
Their bags are not immune to competition, and the way they’re acting proves they know it, and are afraid of being beat.
Like Tor Project, they’ve become woker and transer, “met with” the TLA’s, run some weird Bitcoin “foundations”, and refused to implement even minimal updates to the L1 to allow it to become more usable up against Fiat, kinda how Tor refuses to do anything to make passive GPA’s life harder.
Tor’s Metcalfe now has real, and deserved, competitors, both deployed and forthcoming.
Bitcoin should too.
Real competition is a good thing and should be welcomed.
ZK protocols writ large, represented in part by ZEC today, are becoming real competitors.
Disclaimer: Positions held in various coins, including ZEC, and this event has not altered the accumulation strategy, including ZEC. Not Financial Advice. Choose your own adventure.
Which worries me and makes me suspicious.
Pretty sure, none.
That is not how money works.
Zcash is developing some important, valuable, and much needed technologies. But you are kind of missing the point.
The trouble is that you have the scammer mentality. You think that that the only way you can make money is for bitcoiners to lose money. That for you to get ahead, other people must be brought low.
That is just not how this works. And if Zcash people think like this, Zcash will die like all the other scams, even though its technology is real and valuable.
There is indeed suspicious activity going on with zcash.
Zooko recently posted that there was a leak in the circuits that would allow printing more ZEC. The leak was discovered with some AI fuzz harness. All this comes across fine, normal, expected. What is strange is that this is being used as justification to push changes that will allow monitoring total counts entering and leaving the shielded pool, supposedly to identify inflation bugs.
The link is an x article, so cannot read without an account:
https://x.com/zooko/status/2062644925590900980
There is another embedded link within that writeup from Zooko that has the full details of the circuit bug, but it is a google drive pdf and therefore a bit radioactive.
Orchard_Security_Bugv2.pdf
https://x.com/DefuseSec
I don’t agree with the multisig thing (much of what a community needs can be done by creating and subscribing to a notification channel on some encrypted messaging distributed overlay network. Or if your coin has a survival messaging function builtin.)
If the protocol and code are exhaustively gamed formally verified, you don’t need humans in the loop.
You don’t want humans in the loop either, they always fuck you, or get forced to fuck you.
So you have to verify.
> Which worries me and makes me suspicious
Yes, facefaggery in the crypto world is a huge problem.
Yet, faces also force the State to expose itself in public.
And developers, many of which can still only use fiat, need to eat/laptops/rent in real life. Faces are the funding bridges there.
Funders both faced and faceless are allocating $Millions every year to privacy work, trust me, I know.
Code is law, choose whatever code you want, or make/fund your own, only time will tell which code ends up winning 100-years from now.
> Pretty sure no bugs anywhere in Bitcoin ecosystem
Baloney.
Also, if ZK isn’t considered “fixable”, and isn’t subsequently “fixed”, then everyone’s favorite rollups/snarks/recursives and Grails/Bit-VM/ZK-EVM and everything else ZK/FHE is dead in the water.
> competing… is not how money works
180 different Govt Fiat scams compete every day, it’s called Forex.
10000 cryptos compete every day, they’re called scams.
Commodities, and barter are a thing.
All competing for users, some disapper, others linger in use for a million years.
That’s how money works.
Probably no more than about 500 people and 25 crypto research projects are creating any real output across the types/classes/categories of cryptocurrency, and maybe only 10 applied projects worth following at any given time as candidates for long investment/adoption.
> lose money
Just crap man. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy/sell anything, there’s no incentive to either… nobody pays you back if they win, and they kill you if they lose. People have to do their own research.
> coin people think like this
It’s the BTC people who have gone ugly-gloating and grave-stomping over the ZEC team and ZEC. And the BTC Maxis who endlessly neg/ignore what the ZK and privacy-coin space has achieved so far. They even bash XMR. Some of these big BTC people are worse than Karen’s… sick, evil, paid, and incapable of free thought.
> must be brought low
Privacy space is the OG space, always has been, nobody real there is about that crap, the mission is all that matters.
> thermodynamics
Free markets using hard money are a closed system, therefore something must “win/lose”, but in reality both parties chose to transact at a mutually acceptable price. Everything else is Marxism.
If BTC ends up losing to a better competitor someday, then if BTC people don’t transact out of it by then, then yes they will lose. That’s their problem, no one else’s. That’s normal market function.
BTC just double-tapped $60k at 200-week.
ZEC hit 65% off and is still on fire sale, even XMR and everyone else’s faves are all on sale.
10000 scams are on sale too.
And there’s a coupon for your local steakhouse.
I’m in a select few, who cares.
DYOR.
ZEC will formally verify and give everyone time to shove their coins through an accounting turnstile. I don’t believe it was exploited and have allocated accordingly. Disclaimer, not financial advice.
Stay liquid and free.
Would not surprise me. There are quite a few uglies among us maxis. But nonetheless, I am unaware of them dumping on ZEC and the ZEC team. (Although you probably perceive me as dumping on ZEC, but only because I complain of the inevitable gap between the high objectives and the actual delivery.)
SWIFT and the major international currencies are the competition. Not other blockchains, apart from CBDCs and the many blockchain projects that are being converged into CBDCs. Not even minority international currencies such as the UAE Dirham. If you think other blockchains are the competition, then in the long run you will lose your shirt. The more people using Bitcoin, or even the UAE Dirham, the better for ZEC, and the more people using ZEC and the Dirham, the better for Bitcoin.
The more people using Ethereum, the worse for Bitcoin, but that is because Ethereum is converged towards being a CBCD. Which happened because the Ethereum founders lacked security.
> The internet is cool but physical reality is cooler. Eventually we have to manifest things in the real world, at which point you catch notice. There is no choice but to ally with a collection of states or to become a collection of states, if we want to not live in hiding and use our crypto wealth to buy nice things or invest in physical projects, and we are rather far from the organizational self-understanding and capacity to become a collection of physically sovereign states.
Balajis Network State
Voluntaryist movement among the early Bitcoiners
OG McAfee
Konklin’s Agora
Gupta’s communalism
Free NH/Keane
AnCaps, Rothbards, Misesians, Hobbesians, and more
Monarchist Minimalists
Cypherpunk… T.May et al
Prediction markets
Theory that shitcoin space was weaponization… allowed and run against those truths, by creating a dizzying hall of mirrors, noise, distraction, robbery, and disfavor.
Shitcoin space, that lost decade, now in its third phase of ongoing collapse toward zero, suffering its own demise.
This Great Filter, Reaction, stronger now, a divining process for L1’s, only the real among them shall pass through.
Those teachings will come to be voiced anew, reaching all channels on the public dial.
Those few L1’s become the tools grasped for, adopted, and used by 1000 millions to accomplish and live their Faith in those Teachings.
Tim May says this well: Enough with the ICO-Me-So-Horny-Get-Rich-Quick-Lambo Crypto
100% of the noise against Bitcoin, and ninety nine percent of the noise in favor of various competing blockchains, is scammers scamming scammers.
Zec is really introducing a real and valuable technology, but unfortunately the usual thieving scum have taken it under their wings, and when you get in bed with the usual thieving sum, you are going to wake up without your wallet, your shirt, or your pants.
That said, I am excited by the enormous potential of this tech.
At the same time, I think they have jumped the gun. That the tech that they are using is on the one hand bleeding edge, but on the other hand, not bleeding edge enough. To do what actually needs doing, you need supernova and probably verkle trees, and without them, you cannot actually accomplish in practice what this tech has to the potential to accomplish in theory.
Assuming that ZK/FHE and other tech continues to look evermore interesting and useable for people to construct things with in the coin space.
And that ZEC itself is felt to have a current Metcalfe value worth preserving (note the solid rebound and lack of death so far this weekend, even if coming in part from “bagholders shilling ZEC”)… such that a new ZK L1 privacy coin would cost too much adoption time.
Then it would seem ZEC could shepherd itself through the Ironwood update and turnstile, plus the existing short-term roadmap for this year.
Then it’s conceivable that some anon devs might fork, or somehow come to adopt the ZEC project from the non-anons over time.
But for that to succeed, the anons would have to come with a very solid research package for ZEC that everyone can get behind, plus maybe some history of anon contributions.
The non-anons would retire off to family and academic work.
If people are going to advocate that projects should be purely anon, which they should… then they must also declare that by definition Bitcoin has the exact same problem with namefags and “thieving scum” of sorts, ever since Satoshi gave the first commit-bit to a non-anon.
Hybrid model could also work…
– Lead held in the anon darkwebs by anon “priesthood” (repos, daos, keying, etc)
– Non-anons from the surfaceweb as contributors
But the opposite should be discouraged as pointless.
It’s currently somewhat hard for new L1’s and widgets done by anons to gain adoption on the surface, but it’s not entirely unheard of.
The mentality towards, demand for, and available functionality to do, fully dark anon projects, is increasing.
It is not hard to browse the potential of the darkweb…
Either Bitcoin developers are Godlike, and I have reason to believe Godlike (well, Godlike except for Lightning, which sucks) or massive money printing should have become obvious already.
Bitcoin’s deplorable traceability would quickly render money printing or unauthorized spends of other people’s bitcoins visible.
I have not got into Zec software nearly as deeply as I should have, but I have long had reason to believe far from Godlike.
Nuts. They should pay in Monero, Litecoin ltcmweb1, and coinjoin Bitcoin utxos.
If you use any other mechanism to incentivize development, your software is going to be broken and backdoored. Once your product is out, security is less critical, but while you are building the foundations, you have to have security. (And that is the problem with Lightning. The foundations were rotten, and it was never possible to fix them.)
Lightning development was broken, and Zec development is broken.
We need a blockchain that applies Zero-Knowledge Succinct Arguments of Knowledge with the developers applying that technology themselves being at least somewhat secure.
No matter how good your tech is in theory, the actual application is apt to develop into yet another government funded and quasi governmentally funded crypto scam, if your developers are insecure.
Even if Zec is theoretically capable of being a totally great and extremely secure cryptographic currency system, if you get significant namefag funding and development early in the process, addressing key design issues, it is likely to become in practice yet another ICO-Me-So-Horny-Get-Rich-Quick-Lambo Crypto.
Whenever namefags are involved in foundational protocol development, there is always going to be subtle and unobvious foundational holes in the protocol.
You are speaking from the POV of someone who thinks there is no secure way to pay or be paid in ways that enable you to pay the rent and buy a fried chicken. This is the point of view of the scammer brigade. In the non ether, non CBDC part of the crypto currency ecosystem, enormous sums are being securely and privately paid and received for real world goods and real world services.
It is working right now, and if Zec is not focused on making work easier, more accessibly, and better, Zec is turning into yet another crypto scam, the get-rich-quick ecosystem of scammers scamming scammers, no matter how great the technology potentially is.
If you are not plugging into the real usefulness, real transaction, real money crypto currency system, you are plugging into the crypto scam crypto currency system. And the center of gravity of the real system is bitcoin, despite all the obvious and grave problems with Bitcoin. If you don’t connect up to Bitcoin, you are unlikely to go anywhere. Ether is the center of gravity of all crypto scams, Bitcoin the center of gravity of all real transactions. That is just the way it is. Maybe it would be great to change that, maybe it would be wonderful for Zec to become that center of gravity, and there are loads of excellent arguments that such a change would be an enormous improvement, but if you dismiss the entire actually existent real non scam privacy transaction activity as irrelevant, you are not going to change that.
Zec is just not going anywhere until there is a non KYC pipeline between coinjoin Bitcoin utxos and shielded Zec. And namefag funders and namefag developers are likely to get in the way of such a pipeline.
If you can securely and privately buy Zec with Monero, or Litecoin ltcmweb1, or coinjoin Bitcoin utxos, it is likely to be a good investment. If you cannot, it is not.
Aware of facefag risks.
Yet just because anon, does not remove responsibility to check the code.
Anons produce crapware all the time.
Plenty of anons are feds.
Anons are unaccountable disposable nyms.
Anon only protects the anon, which is fine.
Tor’s code doesn’t protect from GPA.
There at least used to be at least some win in forcing the State to contend with you in public.
Maybe it’s past days now, but there was a pre/early-crypto time where a name-dev might shop his idea to a name-patron willing to cover his expenses/salary, if say he
1) Didn’t have a local goods/services market to spend the crypto-funding.
2) Didn’t have a local market to convert it to useable Fiat.
3) Refused to KYC themselves to an exchange/atm.
4) Didn’t have the Fiat buffer needed to wait the 10+ years it will take take for the crypto revolution to provide them with realworld options to spend the crypto-funding into food/utilities/etc.
Name-Money devs don’t even have to be the tier-1 anon-priest devs.
They could be the farmed out tiers, or documenters/ticketers/reviewers/integrators.
Or maybe all the autist-devs somehow got day jobs now to support the anon hobby.
Seems the counts of projects homed in darknets are increasing recently, so maybe a critical mass has been reached where it is now birthing its own devs instead of needing the old namefag ways.
> Zec development is broken
Anon forks turnstiles new L1’s are always a possibility that anons can take to route around things they might see in whatever namefag project.
Otherwise what people are trying to do is get the world to write off the entire validation and ZK/FHE fields of stuff listed above, as non-doable. It’s way too early to be making that call yet, lots more R&D to do.
They could simply be trying to preserve their bags against competition.
Or trying to preserve and gameify the 17yr Metcalfe’ian trend up against the State, even though their coin might be somewhat less unfit or incapable of doing so than once thought.
BTC’s price drop is deep given years of positive news, but still not absurdly out of all possibility to be considered an inexplicably bad cycle.
Perhaps driven down by all the shiny new derivative tools the feds gave the bankers to hate on and profit from Bitcoin.
Or by withdraws to chase SpaceX Anthropic etc.
Bigger meta problem is everyone knows about limitations of privacy and tps now.
Which may be why we see more banks and govs owning and memeing BTC now instead of fighting it.
Which might become a big problem… adopt and control.
Meh.
Privacy and settled tps, ftw, wherever and however you can end up getting it.
s/less//
Pipelines exist between major L1s like BTC XMR ZEC BCH ETH LTC Stables.
They’re not easy to setup, or to consistently/smoothly path through, volatility and components moving, but they can do what you want.
Rapidly improving.
> ETH
Imo, ETH lost its way and became bogged down with phangasms and bloated dependencies it has to support.
Never did like tokens anyway, just use money.
ETH has been the single most destructive influence upon real crypto.
Lost opportunity cost, kindof sad.
Many wallets like Aqua and Zodl are including swaps now.
Mostly for phones, so might want to setup wifi/emulation to send over your favorite proxy.
More and better tools are coming, give it about a year or two.
> pay the rent and buy a fried chicken
In most countries those are kyc/tax levels, or aml color filtered and locked in purgatory, or simply not connected to crypto.
Even big cities in pro-crypto countries still don’t have reliable meetup markets for size/volume in goods/services/fiat.
Freedom just isn’t that prevalent yet.
Can be lots of work and risk involved.
In all countries there are paths available for turning untraceable crypto currency into untraceable cash and vice versa — albeit with considerable effort and cost, making it non viable for small frequent conversions.
The scammer community wants a smooth path between the banking system and their scams. The real crypto currency community wants to leave the banks isolated and build a better system without them.
So you want to build a system for freedom. Or alternatively you can build a system for parting suckers from their money.
The fundamental test between scammers and the real cypherpunks, is that the scammers are building paths so that they can cash out for fiat in a slave society, while the cypherpunks intend to hodl till they have a free society.
You are arguing like a scammer who sees Bitcoin as a competing scam, not arguing like someone who thinks Bitcoin is a path to freedom, but believes Zec is another, and better, path to freedom.
If freedom is not that prevalent yet, the question then is “how then can we live free to build to the tools for freedom?”
Suppose you incentivized Zec developers with Litecoin mweb. Maybe many of them would find it inconvenient, and turn it into fiat through fully taxable KYC accounts. But no one would know that the KYC identity was the Zec developer identity, thus no one would put their balls in a vice and demand certain architectural decisions for Zec.
And, of course, should be eating your own dogfood. Pay them in Zec, and provide a path to turn Zec into Litecoin mweb.
They do. They have a council and a faux-democratic process for paying contributing teams directly from the ZEC treasury, which is funded via a block tax. The problem currently is if you get paid the equivalent of 50 thousand or more USD, they require KYC for some compliance reasons (said compliance that may or may not be political pragmatism in the growth phase they’re in). https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/c/grants/33
On the other discussion topic, fiat rails are always going to exist for the small shopkeeping payments, if a state is losing control over these transactions you are in a pirate haven, which may be what you want but it is not exactly a long term stable situation. The digital world is where the p2p electronic cash is native and will thrive, it seems to me a category error to expect that you will escape the bandits long term while living on their territory. Sure you can be clever and avoid their monitoring and taxes, you can do this without p2p private electronic cash, but only up to a certain level of wealth. If you are weirdly sitting on a bunch of capital with no explanation, then the state is going to rightly assume you didn’t pay your taxes and come after you. You avoid this in the traditional manner, by laundering your crypto into the real economy in some plausibly deniable scheme.
I don’t think that is all that pragmatic.
And I don’t think that if you are issuing a privacy currency, that is eating your own dogfood.
Suppose they did not do that. Then, chances are, the namefags would be arrested.
The moral of that is that if you are developing a privacy currency, cannot have namefags participating.
Or a very prominent namefag named Zooko would have even more problems than he already does. This is what I mean by pragmatism. They trade some minor legitimacy and active-fire stress testing for greater distribution and not getting coerced into actively destroying the network or simply being disappeared.
At some point Zooko and all the other namefags can fully step away, and the governance made anonymous and individuals redundant, but that point is not now. It’s too convenient to simply pay people out of weird Swiss-S’pore legal structures and public council votes, which is the tradeoff they’re making to be able to offer financial security to developers and investors while they flesh out the transaction technology.
I agree with you that in the long run you cannot have people with names and addresses known to the state running these networks if you want them to be any more useful than a CBDC, but we are still rather early in the evolution of all this. No need to rush over your skies when the federal agencies in charge of corrupting your project get more imbecilic by the day.
Zooko is one of the good guys, but he has been rather thoroughly doxed. Should have created a new identity to work on Zec. It is getting cheaper and easier to mint new identities.
The trouble is that every bit of harmless compliance gives the enemy levers to extort harmful compliance. There is no alternative to total resistance. If you don’t go full Jihad you wind up like Ethereum.
Oh come on. Lots of people are already in the blockchain economy that you aim to build. Join them. And while Sweden and Singapore are safer places for above ground formal organization than the US and Europe, Dubai is safer than either of them, and the whole point is not to hide in physical places such as Dubai or Singapore, but in network protocols.
The real test is: How easy is it to buy Zec without KYC using other non KYC crypto currency? If easy, they are doing it right. If hard, they are doing it wrong.
And if it is easy, they should be paying their developers without KYC,
You earlier made the argument that wanting involvement in the fiat world was a scammer red flag, and it is. However we still live in a world where the USD and fiat networks are unbelievably dominant, and a lot of people are sitting on piles of capital that require using their name and face in order to move around. This *is* joining the blockchain economy. They are normalizing the road from fiat into private p2p electronic cash. The fact of the matter is, despite the legal fig leaf applied, the organization is all on chain and paying out from a ZEC treasury. They are gradually moving in the direction we want, and I am perfectly fine with gradual. Why try and spook the state by arguing like a 100% pirate, when you can maintain plausible deniability, say you just want privacy but you are happy to comply, and invest all the slack given into furthering the technological maturity and network breadth.
ETH is compromised, and yet thanks to them we have the idea of “decentralized finance” i.e. sovereign banking and financial products, embedded firmly in the consciousness of millions more people than before. This is a gradient in our direction. Most people are cowards, and some cowards still are good developers and make tech advancement that is useful for the project *despite* how captured ETH as a whole has become.
This is a great point. It is curious why Swiss and S’pore has become the preference for these legal fig leaf organizations. I will have to pay attention and see if I can discern why, it may be as simple as first mover effects.
The internet is cool but physical reality is cooler. Eventually we have to manifest things in the real world, at which point you catch notice. There is no choice but to ally with a collection of states or to become a collection of states, if we want to not live in hiding and use our crypto wealth to buy nice things or invest in physical projects, and we are rather far from the organizational self-understanding and capacity to become a collection of physically sovereign states.
Seems to me that a whole lot of people — and probably anyone who is willing and able to do wok on blockchains, is perfectly happy to be paid in crypto currency. Fiat is the default, but if there is some practical reason why fiat is difficult (internaational transactions between normies) they are fine with crypto currency. You are not going to be able to buy a cup of coffee with crypto currency, you mostly cannot transact with a large business in crypto currency, but you can generally transact with an individual or small business in crypto currency.
We absolutely need zero knowledge blockchains.
And I am very unhappy that everyone implementing zero knowledge blockchains has the state’s dick up their ass.
They *do* pay contributors out in ZEC. The issue at hand is they all play nice with “compliance” regulators. This is because names and faces still lead zcash. The second names and faces don’t lead zcash, but the network is still observably being led by humans in some form, there is going to be a full scale war declared on the network and everyone involved with it.
Doesn’t look to me that we’re ready to take a full scale war, not yet. The state is losing competence but still has enough to find and punish actors high up enough on its list. You might disagree and believe we are ready to make an attempt at full sovereignty, but you must admit that it is still a question that could be decided by reasonable actors in the negative.
In the meantime, you can play the game they have been playing, where you argue for the right to privacy, having already given users transactional privacy, having already gotten network-level censorship resistance, and continue cutting the salami in your own favor. It may not be going fast, but zcash is winning, private p2p electronic cash is winning and gaining ground. Why rush into full governance by anons and bring in a bunch of technical risk and a bunch of state attention?
Yes, then you are bent over and the state has its dick up your ass and is buggering you hard.
Once the protocol is set it stone the way you want it, then you can afford names and faces. But if you lead with names and faces, then protocol and architecture is going to be buggered by the state.
They are going for an architecture that necessitates a small number of big powerful centralized provers. It seems likely that this, in practice, is likely to render the privacy guarantees of zero knowledge worthless as soon as zec scales up to levels that require big powerful machines.
Well, that all depends on how its done — on implementation details that are unclear, and whose consequences are unclear and unobvious. But I would be far more comfortable if they were employing technologies that favored decentralized proving at the expense of decentralized verification. They are instead deploying technologies that favor a small number of big powerful provers and a large number of small verifiers — which is not the tech we need for the ostensible objectives of zcash.
Zero Knowledge is, in principle, Zero Knowledge, and they are using zero knowledge tech. But there can be many a slip between cup and lip. Scaling is going to bite.
Does their choice of technology reflect the state’s dick up their ass? I don’t know. But the choices that they are making are consistent with the choice reflecting the state’s dick up their ass. I certainly do not have proof of guilt, but I see things that trouble me.
With Zero Knowledge tech you always face a tradeoff between the cost of proving and the cost of verifying, and if you want Zero Knowledge to remain Zero Knowledge under scaling pressure, you probably want to favor keeping the cost of proving down. I would be happier with Verkle trees and supernova.