Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by DrEvil » Sun Mar 20, 2022 2:04 am
by drstrangelove » Sun Mar 20, 2022 5:09 am
by Gnomad » Sun Mar 20, 2022 10:52 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Mar 20, 2022 4:48 pm
drstrangelove » Sun Mar 20, 2022 4:09 am wrote:Add to this the reasoning that, to tolerate intolerance creates an intolerant world, and you get a group of people who are intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them. Terms like 'dog-whistling' or 'crypto-nazi' can be used to paint with a broad brush and avoid having to provide actual evidence of bigotry.
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Mar 20, 2022 4:58 pm
“People say we’re going to change the world, get a million dollars, and have fun while we’re doing it,” Taaki said. “No. Making money, changing the world, and having fun are separate things. You must make a decision about your priorities.”
...
I Don’t Buy The Institutional Money Narrative: that big money will come into crypto and that’s when it’ll take off.
Crypto already exists. There is a huge market where huge amounts of money are being moved around. It’s relatively small compared to traditional finance, but it exists. Most of that is grey or black money and is diametrically opposed to traditional financial markets.
Traditional finance is a giant cartel, where people own different niches of the market, and they all collude. These people use offshore havens to hide their wealth. States are putting pressure on the practice and audits are happening, but people are finding smarter ways to hide their money. They’re setting up financial infrastructure, and moving from the realm of finance into politics.
We [in crypto] have to think, not in terms of markets or money, but holistically, in terms of power. What is the nature of power? It has a physical coercive aspect. A financial aspect. An organizational aspect. A technological aspect. Even a philosophical or socio-cultural aspect.
Right now, the political consciousness within blockchain is so low, it’s unable to respond to the challenges or opportunities it faces. Yeah, ok, there are a few crypto rich with yachts and lambos. But it’s limited in its vision. The old money, the old wealth, have the entire systems to protect their wealth. We have to think at that level, how to maintain and secure power.
...
Terrorist groups are making use of bitcoin, ethereum, monero and zcash to raise donations. Any militant group across the world can send money to their hubs. No state can stop that. That’s the reality. It’s a kind of fantasy we’re living in that the crypto market will bring peace. We’re in a period of transition in global humanity that will be incredibly violent. America is losing its hegemonic status. Russia and China are working together in the arctic to lay claim. In between will be proxy wars and new frontiers. Those will be opportunities if we’re prepared. We already have the financial and technological power to leverage.
...
People don’t realize how much of a threat Libra actually was. I’ve read their technical specs, and it’s a well designed system. We almost lost the narrative. We’re actually very lucky the U.S. Congress responded with a resounding no. We have to start organizing, our communities are too passive, and think they don’t have to do anything because crypto is an inevitability.
Technologically-speaking we need to develop.
It’s like Linux, the promise of ‘an operating system made by people for the people.’ There was a time when free software as a principle, and everyone knew that Microsoft was shitty. What happened was MacOS came out of left field and took over the market. We missed the opportunity. This happens across history, were idealists have an idea, are unable to organize effectively, and some organized group comes along and takes the initiative from them.
If you look inside the ethereum community: it’s entirely captured. It’s because the Ethereum Foundation has no foresight. The project will probably fail, it’s certainly not going to live up to expectations.
by Belligerent Savant » Sun Mar 20, 2022 11:03 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Tue Mar 22, 2022 3:13 pm
The Great Reset Is Real
Alex Gutentag
...
From 2020 to 2022, we have witnessed an attempt to engineer a reversal of this historical development. Covid-19, a disease many orders of magnitude less deadly than the plague, has been deliberately exploited by ruling elites to bring about a neo-feudal order. This regression has so far been marked by diminished quality of life, sharply increased inequality, and the erosion of personal freedoms and civil liberties. Plans for digital IDs and central-bank digital currencies may further accelerate these developments, and the result will be total domination of a property-less underclass by ultra-wealthy elites and their expert class of technocratic clerics.
Much has been made of the World Economic Forum, its cartoonishly villainous chairman, Klaus Schwab, and the infiltration of various governments through its “Young Global Leaders” program. The focus on this particular group of actors is useful for illustrating how coalitions of financiers, corporations, and unaccountable nongovernmental organizations shape global policies. Schwab’s pet slogans—“the Great Reset,” “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” “You will own nothing, and you will be happy”—are now a sort of shorthand for the effort to impoverish the world population and technologically expand elites’ control.
This agenda, however, doesn’t need to be tied to one particular organization or group of leaders. Elites’ desire to subjugate the rest of the world isn’t a “conspiracy theory,” but a pattern of class conflict evident from world history. The outcome of this conflict, now raging across a tangible battlefield as well as a digital one, will determine the shape of the world to come.
As mainstream outlets signal that it is acceptable and even funny to criticize Covid policies, the question arises: Why is there no public reckoning over the astounding failure and massive harms of these measures? The answer is that these policies had little to do with the virus in the first place. Now that the Covid narrative has become a liability for elites, the pandemic is “ending,” but the “reset” agenda underlying the pandemic response remains very much in play. Unless it is met with defiance, this agenda will be a decades-long process—one that began with lockdowns and vaccine passports and will continue with the proliferation of digital ID systems and central-bank digital currencies.
We have been encouraged to view the phenomena of the past two years as the natural outcomes of a pandemic, but most were actually part of a broader scheme to undermine the middle and working classes, normalize “papers, please” societies, and end the fiat currency system as we know it.
In 2019, central bankers were determined to “rethink” the global economy, as a Financial Times story summarized at the time. Covid was blamed for a global financial crisis in 2020, but this crisis was already in motion in 2019 when a meltdown in the market for short-term loans between banks prompted the Federal Reserve to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial system to stave off a full-blown liquidity catastrophe. Lockdowns imposed in March 2020 conveniently bolstered financial assets and monopolistic giants at the expense of taxpayers and small businesses; Amazon’s profits soared, while nearly 40 percent of American small businesses went under by year’s end.
During this same period, investment firms like BlackRock have been buying entire neighborhoods of single-family homes, a move with the potential to price thousands of families out of entry-level real estate. This is significant, because home ownership, already trending downward, was once the engine of middle-class prosperity, allowing families to consolidate and pass on wealth.
In the developing world, meanwhile, literacy and poverty trends, once improving, shifted into reverse. The United Nations predicted that deaths from lockdown-induced starvation and malnutrition would exceed Covid deaths globally. To this day, 31 million students have still not returned to school in the developing world, which coincides with nearly 100 million people being pushed into poverty, and a dramatic rise in child labor and illiteracy. Through it all, the wealth of the world’s billionaires grew by $5 trillion.
It isn’t difficult to see how increasing desperation, ignorance, and instability can make the global population easier for elites to control. Along with these economic and social shifts came political transformations that subverted liberal-democratic norms. Although there is much concern about the potential development of a social-credit system in the West, many people don’t realize that a precursor to social credit has already been tested on us: the vaccine passport.
Since the Covid vaccines didn’t stop transmission (as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky conceded in August 2021), a vaccine card only served as a token to demonstrate that the bearer held the right opinions or, at least, believed the right experts. It was never a plausible mitigation measure, and its real purpose was to punish the unvaccinated for political impurity. Although binary and unsophisticated, this is similar in practice to a social-credit score that can blackball citizens. In Canada, for example, unvaccinated people weren’t permitted to travel on trains or planes—precisely one of the punishments that can befall individuals who find themselves on the Chinese Supreme Court’s list of “discredited” people.
Western ruling classes also mounted a rudimentary exercise in the seizure of financial assets. When Canadian banks froze accounts connected to the truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest, it was evidence of the financial industry’s willingness to quash dissent. This was done not only in the interest of the state, but also that of the banks, which are deeply entwined with vaccine passports, digital currencies, and digital IDs.
The International Monetary Fund is now promoting central-bank digital currencies in developed and developing nations. The Fed is currently considering issuing a digital dollar, and Apple is planning to roll out a digital driver’s license. China has launched a digital currency, and Jamaica, Zambia, Kenya, and India are likely to follow suit. The UK government has signed a contract with multinational accounting and consulting firm Deloitte to develop a new digital-ID system, and Canada is planning to roll out digital IDs at the urging of the Canadian Bankers Association. Meanwhile, Wall Street firms are strategically expanding their foothold in blockchain investments.
“Along with these economic and social shifts came political transformations that subverted liberal-democratic norms.”
The move toward digital IDs and central-bank digital currencies is part of a broader economic shift. Corporations are already subject to ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) ratings, so their behavior can be shaped to suit the priorities of financial institutions in the name of “diversity,” “sustainability,” and other abstract values. Not only can ESG scores be used to dissuade investors from decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, credit agencies have also started using ESG scores to alter credit ratings for corporations. The ruling class is thus using ESG to promote a specific agenda that can manufacture sweeping societal changes. This is effectively what “stakeholder capitalism” means: Businesses aren’t being reoriented to serve the interests of communities, customers, or workers, but to serve the ideology of elite stakeholders on whom companies are dependent to maintain their stock value.
Stakeholder capitalism is supposedly being advanced with combating climate change as a main motivation. Yet the plans of entities like the WEF involve ever-growing reliance on digital services and data storage. The data centers necessary for such plans already have carbon footprints equivalent to that of the aviation industry, and their energy usage is only expected to expand. This makes climate change more of an excuse to assert control, rather than a plausible motivation behind ESG ratings. The reason executives like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink push stakeholder capitalism is because it allows the financial industry to supersede shareholders’ immediate interests in favor of an ulterior long-term plan.
So what is this long-term plan? If a digital ID and central-bank digital currencies are used in tandem with ESG principles, banks and governments will have the ability to fully blacklist noncompliant citizens. Profitability is no longer the only goal—the goal is also to change the way economic transactions occur in the first place, so that they become closer to a form of bondage than to monetary exchange. Instead of sums of money, a bank account would come to represent tokens that could be turned on and off based on good or bad behavior. The vaccine passport and the crackdown against Covid dissent served as a test run for this model. But the inability of unvaccinated people to access a gym or a bar will pale in comparison to the types of punishments that can be meted out through such a system, not just for members of a political opposition, but for their families or anyone who dares to help them.
Data-based arguments about the efficacy of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines have in many ways served as a distraction from the larger political significance of what has transpired. A scientific or medical understanding of Covid can only go so far, because so little of the pandemic response has had any scientific validity. For much of this fiasco, we have been encouraged to disbelieve our own eyes and to discount observable evidence in favor of patently absurd propaganda. Now that this spell has been broken, many have been left wondering what will come next.
Covid policies served as temporary tools to swell the power of the ruling class, but the same ends can equally be achieved through war, climate initiatives, or other state-declared crises. As the idea of a “Great Reset” continues to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory, governments, central banks, and NGOs are becoming ever-more explicit about their plans. Any new supposed emergency can be manipulated by financial institutions to initiate systems of total control. Once fully realized, these systems may be impossible to combat. Yet as the Canadian truckers’ convoy illustrated, this move is a massive gamble for elites. The public still has the will and the ability to organize resistance through protests, labor actions, and civil disobedience. Such resistance is essential for anyone who doesn’t wish to live in a dehumanizing and nightmarish dystopia.
by Grizzly » Tue Mar 22, 2022 4:41 pm
https://www.read-read.net/nwo/theyre-just-research-labs-bioweapons-labs-video-good-overview-watch
by Belligerent Savant » Sat Mar 26, 2022 6:39 pm
by Grizzly » Sun Mar 27, 2022 12:44 am
While the WEF’s Young Global Leader program has recently become infamous, it follows the model of a much older program and think tank established with the ill-begotten gains of Cecil Rhodes.
by Grizzly » Tue Apr 05, 2022 12:00 am
by stickdog99 » Thu Apr 07, 2022 3:48 am
by Elvis » Thu Apr 07, 2022 4:56 pm
by Elvis » Thu Apr 07, 2022 5:14 pm
Grey told the congressional task force that it was limiting the full scope and potential of digital fiat currency systems by only looking at Central Bank Digital Currencies.
“Contrary to popular misconception, the Federal Reserve is not, and has never been, the only entity responsible for issuing currency or providing public payment services,” said Grey.
“Throughout American history, the [US] Mint, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, and the US Postal Service have all designed, issued, and operated various forms of public monetary technologies.
“It is thus a mistake to equate and reduce the wide spectrum of digital fiat currency architectures and arrangements to the more limited category of Central Bank Digital Currency, which refers only to those models in which central banks are the exclusive issuers and administrators,” he added.
Grey, who carries with him a host of titles including Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University, Director of the Digital Fiat Currency Institute, and Consultant to the UN International Telecommunications Union’s Focus Group on Digital Currency, warned Congress about going down the path of surveillance, censorship, and control.
In his written testimony, Grey elaborated on the potential for political censorship and oppositional persecution, which occurs whenever public and private entities attempt to self-regulate.
“It is often asserted that as long as there are adequate privacy safeguards baked into centrally administered systems, then there is little to worry about when it comes to potential for abuse,” he wrote.
“I would strongly urge members of this Task Force not to indulge in this dangerous fiction, which is typically paired with the personal sentiment that ‘as long as one is not doing anything wrong, one should have nothing to hide.’
“History reminds us time and time again that public actors, even those we tend to consider on the side of right and good, cannot always be relied upon to respect their own bright lines, or to self-regulate the worst excesses of their often well-intentioned desire to compromise individual rights and due process in the pursuit of swift and efficient administration of justice,” he added.
In both his written and spoken testimony, Grey asserted that a digital dollar should be complementary to physical, hard currency, and that the safest approach to data protection, privacy, and freedom should be one that mimics the Hippocratic Oath: “first, do no harm.”
“There are meaningful and important differences between a digital fiat currency regime committed to preserving the privacy and freedom-respecting features of physical currency, and one built exclusively instead around common ledger or account-based technologies in which all transactions are recorded and censorable by design,” he testified.
“The safest and most defensible approach is to adopt a Hippocratic-style principle of ‘first, do no harm.’ In the context of digital financial privacy, the best way to limit the risk of data abuses is to not collect it in the first place.”
Earlier this year, the People’s Bank of China began rolling out its own digital currency that would allow the Chinese Communist Party to further surveil, coerce, and control its citizens’ behavior as part of its larger social credit system.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Grey advised, “If the digital dollar is to stand for more than surveillance, data mining, and political censorship like China’s digital yuan or Facebook’s Diem [formally known as ‘Libra’], American policymakers must be willing to articulate and defend a different set of principles and commitments, even when doing so entails difficult choices.”
Should a digital dollar be abused by political interests, Grey warned, “It is not difficult to envisage a future in which political donations, even within the United States, become increasingly subject to censorship and monitoring by those in control over the technological means of payment.”
Furthermore, he added, “If we do not take active and committed steps to reverse our decline into information and surveillance capitalism, […] we will end up in a world in which token-money, and the freedoms and civil liberties that it affords, are functionally extinct.”
According to Grey, anonymous peer-to-peer financial transactions are a bedrock of political freedom in a democratic society, and he urged Congress not to fall for the “seductive narrative” that anonymity is what allows criminal enterprises to thrive.
“It is now common to hear claims today that if we allow anonymity in digital currency networks, we are effectively giving a green light to criminals, money launderers, and terrorists,” he testified.
“I strongly urge members of this Task Force not to be enticed by this crude, albeit seductive, narrative.”
Grey recommended that lawmakers treat digital fiat currency platforms like common utilities available to all citizens as a public good while expanding the notion of “net neutrality” to the concept of “currency neutrality.”
“It is not uncommon to hear policymakers claim that designing a digital dollar system to allow for anonymous, peer-to-peer transactions would be radical or extreme,” Grey told Congress, adding, “I profoundly disagree.”
“Transactional anonymity, like anonymity more broadly, is a public good and a core bedrock of political freedom in a democratic society.”
The expert witness went on to recommend:
“Above all, Congress should adopt a principle of currency neutrality similar to net neutrality whereby digital fiat currency platforms and technologies are treated as common utilities available to all as a public good.”
Virtual Hearing - Digitizing the Dollar: Investigating the Technological...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5LhZ4G4s-A
Abstract
Central banks around the world are exploring and in some cases even pi-
loting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs promise to realize
a broad range of new capabilities, including direct government disbursements
to citizens, frictionless consumer payment and money-transfer systems, and a
range of new financial instruments and monetary policy levers.
CBDCs also give rise, however, to a host of challenging technical goals and
design questions that are qualitatively and quantitatively different from those
in existing government and consumer payment systems. A well-functioning
CBDC will require an extremely resilient, secure, and performant new infras-
tructure, with the ability to onboard, authenticate, and support users on a
massive scale. It will necessitate an architecture simple enough to support
modular design and rigorous security analysis, but flexible enough to accom-
modate current and future functional requirements and use cases. A CBDC
will also in some way need to address an innate tension between privacy and
transparency, protecting user data from abuse while selectively permitting data
mining for end-user services, policymakers, and law enforcement investigations
and interventions.
In this paper, we enumerate the fundamental technical design challenges
facing CBDC designers, with a particular focus on performance, privacy, and
security. Through a survey of relevant academic and industry research and
deployed systems, we discuss the state of the art in technologies that can ad-
dress the challenges involved in successful CBDC deployment. We also present
a vision of the rich range of functionalities and use cases that a well-designed
CBDC platform could ultimately offer users.
"The appropriate degree of anonymity in a CBDC system is a political and social question, rather than a narrow technical question. As discussed above, CBDC would need to be compliant with AML regulations, which rules out truly anonymous payments."
https://bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/fi
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Jun 02, 2022 11:09 am
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests