John Cleese Explains BItCoins - LOL

Bitcoin has tipped over $200 in value on a number of exchange markets this week in the face of the recent Silk Road closure, prompting the questions: Is this a bubble, and how long will it last?

Where does money come from?

Most people say government. Actually, government steals money–they don’t create it. In it’s most basic form, money is your labor. You work, you get paid. Money is what you exchange for your labor. However, in our world, before you can cash your check the government has already extracted a tax on your labor. This legalized thief goes on everyday and yet people think government creates money! If you stop and think about (which few people do) it would clear to see: You create money with you labor! AND when the government collects a tax it is actually stealing your labor.

What can turn paper into money?

The answer is the legal authority of the government. Legal Tender Laws make us use something for money even if something else may be better. It is a very important connecting point that Legal Tender Laws are always found where Fiat Money is being used. In other words, whenever governments have DECLARED that this and only this can be used as money, they have had to back it up with penalties for those who may want to use something else.In other words, if you do not want to use this Fiat Money as money, too bad, we, the government, are going to make you anyway.

Money is just information, a way we measure what we trade, nothing of value in itself. And we can make it ourselves, to work as a complement to conventional money. It is just a matter of design. You might say money is a conspiracy. Money is where two or more ‘conspire’ (or ‘breath’ life into an idea) and agree on what their form of money will be. This only becomes an evil conspiracy when it is forced on people (like with “legal tender” laws). It is evil because it then become a false authority, a means of control, a way to enslave with debt.

Evil = False Authority

Virgil said, “Tu Ne Cede Malis,” which translates: “do not give in to evil.” One might ask, “What is evil?” And the answer can be given in two word: FALSE AUTHORITY, so Virgil was saying do not give into false authority. You are the author of your future, and if you allow someone to author you future you under their false authority by your own willingness to submit. This is what evil is, and this is why the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. In effect people who love false authority are under a form of mind control. That “mind control” greed, but how does a False Authority get your greed to serve them? That answer is fiat money, this is the basis of the Matrix or Artificial Intelligence we call the Matrix. It is the means (the mind control method) by which evil leaders (false authorities) extract their taxes, steal your labor, reduce your wealth, and control the society, and bring their own brand of order out of the chaos. Virgil also added, “…but proceed ever more boldly against it!”

The best way to do proceed boldly against evil is to create an Open Money System.

That has already been done, it is called Bitcoin.

reply to post by wasaka

A Brief History of Money

Why did kings issue gold coins with their likeness embossed on them? Some might say this was purely narcissistic. However, Professor David Graeber explains this was done for two main reasons. One reason was a practical matter, the King needed to pay his occupying armies in a foreign land and gold coin was a good way to do that. Secondly, as these coins began to circulate it allowed the King to tax his subjects and maintain control over these new occupied territories.

Ask yourself, is the money we use today so different?

Money has always been the ubiquitous control architecture for every political system. It works best when people under such false authority remain ignorant of how they are being manipulated.

This is true of every a political structure, including the religious variety. In much of monotheism, sin has always been equated with a debt to God. Under the surface of faith the real fiat currency of the church is guilt, and so the fear of hell became every priest’s stock and trade.

The priestly class of the American Empire are those mysterious families who own and operate the Federal Reserve Bank and control the Exchange Stabilization Fund. Leveraging the military might of the United States (and their own huge pools of capital), this unseen hand replaced the gold standard with a digital currency over 40 years ago.

Today every nation of the world now pays for oil in US dollars; however, times are changing. The unseen hand has used the IMF and World Bank to enslave third-world nations with debt, the same way easy-to-obtain credit cards entrap American consumers. It is written, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.”

When people begin to wake up and ask questions, the control that these political structures have over them begins to weaken. The old system of kings and kingdoms gave way to Republics and Democracies, but as long as monetarism continued so did the oligarchical control. What we are witnessing today is a massive paradigm shift taking place away from fiat currency and this could spell an end for monetarism.

While we don’t think about it, money functions as an artificial intelligence ruling almost every human enterprise, belief and behavior. Money provides control over people, and that is what political structures expect and demand. Indeed, they could not function without their ability to control and manipulate the money supply.

reply to post by wasaka


I'm a big fan of bitcoin from a idealogical standpoint but there are some aspects of it that governments can still control and possibly destroy.

One thing is that the government can track computers, we are watched all the time so at any point if government bodies really wanted to outlaw bitcoin they'd just have to track computers that are set up as miners and go after them.

Look at silk road. The government is now planning on "liquidating" the bitcoins seized.

www.forbes.com...

It's really sad because of course that will cause the price of bitcoins to drop drastically. It will be interesting to see what happens to bitcoin when that happens.

There's so many propaganda articles on silk road it makes me sick. It's so obvious what the feds are doing with this and WHY.

For something like silk road to survive there is going to have to be a market that is set up almost exactly like bitcoin, one that can never be attacked by the government or taken over. All in all I think this is a great lesson and it will be interesting to see where future programmers go with this same concept.

Is Bitcoin Money?

What makes bitcoin so different is that it is not political. If one government were to adopt bitcoin as their national currency, then you might called it political, but in such a case people could simply drop bitcoin for another crypto-currency. That is not to say they would a have a reason to do so, but the point is this: even with official endorsements, Bitcoin would not become just another means of political control.

Simply stated, money provides control over people and that is what political structures require. Therefore, non-political systems of exchange are not money, at least not money as the world has always know it. Perhaps it is more correct to say peer-to-peer systems of exchange that make property conveyance possible outside of any political system are the greatest form of money ever invented.

Dawn of Autonomous Corporations

Lets look at the big picture. Who cares if eBay accepts Bitcoin? The real value of Bitcoin lies in economies that don’t yet exist.

That’s right, autonomous corporations will be a new breed of corporations that act and behave, for all practical purposes, just like regular corporations. However, no one ‘owns’ them. Not the creator, not the customers, not the governments, no one really. Sound familiar?

Bitcoin can be thought of as the first real autonomous ‘corporation’ although you probably don’t see it that way. Think about it – it provides a payment protocol and employs miners to maintain that protocol. The employs are rewarded with ‘stock’ that is split at most into 21 million units. You don’t have to think of Bitcoin this way to get to autonomous corporations, though it will help.

btcgeek.com...

Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” This is exactly what Satoshi has done. Calling Bitcoin a “disruptive technology” is an understatement. Money unmoored from any central authority is the new model. As the old money that political structures depend on becomes obsolete so will the political structures themselves.

i have always wondered.
you buy bit coins with the currency of the nation your in or one of your choice.
when you cash them out, you get that same currency back. so basically your swapping it for a time until you get that fiat money back.

and i wonder why you never see, anyone with signs that say, will work for bit coins.

OrphanApology
reply to post by wasaka

 

Look at silk road. The government is now planning on "liquidating" the bitcoins seized.

It's really sad because of course that will cause the price of bitcoins to drop drastically. It will be interesting to see what happens to bitcoin when that happens. There's so many propaganda articles on silk road it makes me sick. It's so obvious what the feds are doing with this and WHY.

Apparently the FBI finds itself unable to confiscate the Dread Pirate's stash of bitcoins.

Bitcoin is now hitting new sustained highs. It's reputation as a safe and anonymous form of money remains intact and may even be enhanced in the wake of the Silk Road bust. So the question is, if the shutting down of a significant source of bitcoin demand isn’t bad for the currency, what would cause its demise?

The Silk Road case could set bitcoin legal precedent against self-incrimination and whether the Silk Road assets can ever be confiscated by the government. While this may be an important legal precedent, it is not the only one. The other one is being set now in the court of public opinion, and it is twofold, 1) bitcoin work and 2) they can't be hacked by the government. The FBI has a public address for 600,000 bitcoins (currently worth $80 million) but while they can see the public ledger, they can't get their hands on the coins.

Jeffrey Tucker asks:

But what’s the message here? That bitcoin is a hugely valuable property, that it is hard for the government to rob, that it is the real thing and an authentic store of wealth, that it is a viable replacement for the dollar. These are the messages that are being sent by the government’s actions. The supreme irony: the Silk Road shutdown and looting might go down in history as the greatest boost to private currency ever. We could look back and see this as the event that finally unraveled the government

The most interesting aspect of the Silk Road case will most likely be the sweeping legal precedent set for compulsory key disclosure and the Fifth Amendment. If your online wealth cannot be robbed by common bandits or government officials, then the world truly has a digital money worth paying attention to.

In other words, one of bitcoin's main attraction – that it is untraceable like cash and cannot be 'stolen' in the conventional sense by outsiders – remains in perfectly fine fettle. The FBI's inability to seize the Dread Pirate's bitcoin stash is a great PR victory for bitcoin.

www.zerohedge.com...


I'm not convinced the NSA can crack "any" codes. The NSA always uses backdoor access (or courts) to get keys. 256 encryption can't be hacked in the cryptography sense. Lavabit being just the most recent case, it's pretty clear the NSA relies on technical means to intercept communications, but legal means to compel the disclosure of encryption keys. That certainly makes their supposed code-breaking cajones look rather small. Characters for a Bitcoin private key? 32 (or, 256 bits). Enough to keep all the computers on the planet busy until long after the sun burns out. And then for a few trillion years after that as well. And that's just to spend the funds for a single Bitcoin address (and SR controlled a ton of addresses).

What we are seeing unfold is a world in which political structures of control are collapsing. With Bitcoin, pyramids of power are becoming as flat as a pancake. People are reclaiming their power from false authorities, and individuals are taking back their own sovereign birth-rights.

reply to post by wasaka


I want to be optimistic and I think bitcoins is a wonderful idea, but the fact is that governments can still shut down the internet. We have a very long way to go for true freedom.

The fact that some of the best and brightest of the world seem to be activists for open source everything is a wonderful thing in my opinion. What we need now is savvy techs to figure out how to take internet connections away from government control.

I didn't know they were having trouble confiscating the coins. If that's the case then by shutting down silk road all they might have done is cause the price of bitcoins to go up even more. Very interesting.

So many propaganda articles on the net involving silk road, it's hard to find real information.

hounddoghowlie
...i wonder why you never see, anyone with signs that say, will work for bit coins.

sphotos-h.ak.fbcdn.net...

Supposed drug kingpin Ross Ulbricht has a cache of more than 600,000 bitcoins and the remain inaccessible to the FBI. The only way to move Bitcoins out of a private wallet is to have the corresponding private key to authorize the transaction. The FBI has been unable to get through the encryption protecting Ulbricht’s wallet, leaving all those Bitcoins out of reach and amounting to roughly $80 million a few weeks ago and $121 million today.... Based on publicly available data, this is about 5% of all Bitcoins in existence right now.


www.wzzm13.com...

One FBI agent did a simple Internet search and found a post from Jan. 27, 2011, on a forum for people who use magic mushrooms called "Shroomery" (www.shroomery.org) in which a user identified as "altoid" mentioned Silk Road under the guise of seeking information. The post explained that it's a Tor-hidden service and the address could be found at silkroad420.wordpress.com. "Altoid" posted about Silk Road two days later, this time at "Bitcointalk.org," an online discussion forum.

"Altoid" posted again Oct. 11, 2011, in "Bitcoin Forum," seeking "the best and brightest IT pro in the bitcoin community" to help develop a bitcoin start-up company. This time, the FBI caught a break: "Altoid" instructed potential candidates to reply to his Gmail address, [email protected].

The FBI subpoenaed subscriber records from Google for the Gmail address, which was registered to Ulbricht and included a photo that matched a photo of Ulbricht on LinkedIn. His Google profile included YouTube videos from the Mises Institute, an Austrian economic think-tank.

In his postings on Silk Road's forum, the site operator "Dread Pirate Roberts' " signature included a link to the Mises Institute website. "Dread Pirate Roberts" often cited Austrian economic theory and the works of Ludwig von Mises as the philosophical underpinning of Silk Road.

The Google records showed every IP address used to access Ulbricht's Gmail account this year from Jan. 13 to June 20, court papers said. The IP address associated with the Gmail account led to a computer in an apartment on Hickory Street in San Francisco, where Ulbricht had moved in September 2012. The logs indicated Ulbricht accessed his Gmail account from a cafe on Laguna Street, less than 500 feet from the apartment, court papers say.

Based on these court records, it would appear that Ulbricht was making sloppy mistakes from the start. And it didn't take technical back doors to find him; it just took a lot of solid detective work, some subpoenas, and a search engine.

reply to post by wasaka


Bitcoin - Their not chocolates, lol.

RedShirt73
reply to post by wasaka

 

Bitcoin - Their not chocolates, lol.

Bitcoin: "I’m Not Dead Yet!"

OrphanApology
reply to post by wasaka

 

I want to be optimistic and I think bitcoins is a wonderful idea, but the fact is that governments can still shut down the internet. We have a very long way to go for true freedom.

On July 30, 2013 several hundred entrepreneurs gathered in midtown Manhattan for the “Inside Bitcoins” one-day conference. “This country was founded on a separation of church and state,” said Alan Safahi, founder of the bitcoin start-up ZipZap, “I think we should add separation of bank and state.” This line drew an enthusiastic round of applause. – the WSJ

In 2008 two significant events took place. A crypto-currency was described in a paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, but at the time this was a non-event. However, what no one failed to notice was the epic failure of the American Empire’s money system. The ubiquitous control architecture of the world’s last superpower was in crisis. At least, that is what we were lead to believe.

People thought the sky was falling and they freaked out.

Senators were even told in a closed section of Congress that without a “blank check” bailout there would be martial law in American. President George Bush told the world our financial structure was in such desperate shape that if Congress did not hand over $700 billion to parties unknown, immediately, the whole structure would collapse.

Looking back at this event five years after the fact, we now know that this “blank check” was actually written out for well over 10 times the amount the American people were originally told. The ubiquitous control architecture by which government maintains power over people was effectively handed over to a few banking elites. Was this the result of poor management on the part of our political leaders or was this simply the consolidation of power by true rulers of the world?

What did they do with all that money? No one seems to know, but one thing this is clear, the ubiquitous control architecture is less ubiquitous and the established money system is now facing a crisis of confidence. People are losing their faith in the system and turning to any alternatives they can find.

When we think about Earth without money it seems as alien to us as a world that knows nothing of poverty and warfare. In the Star Trek universe created by Gene Roddenberry, money stopped being a negative force in the world, poverty ended and nations stop waging war against each other. While most people dream of a peaceful world, the concept of doing away with money altogether is too much for most people to comprehend. It is dismissed as a mere entertainment.

Ironically, it is hard to see how humanity can ever rise above our warlike culture unless and until we rise above what passes for money, namely the ubiquitous control architecture of political structures. That means if we want to see world peace, then we have to be the change we want to see in the world. It must start with our money habits. Mankind must learn to vote with their money–but one that is free from political control.

reply to post by wasaka


Well "money" in the purest sense is just something that represents individuals units of human capital. In a truly free anarchist/non aggressive world, money is simply a representation of the human capital unit of a particular individual. That human capital is controlled 100% by the individual.

Ownership would still exist because one might trade say an hour of their human capital for whatever product or money that has been predetermined to represent that hourly transaction.

It's interesting to see something like bitcoin because conceptually it is the first currency I have ever heard about that is pure. Never before has a currency existed in such a pure form. It is really amazing even if you look at it from a finance/economics perspective. It's possible it can't be counterfeited, it can't be stolen by thieves(governments), it can't be inflated because a limited number will exist. It is 100% fiat which means it is not dependent on any physical location or good. It is really really amazing.

OrphanApology
reply to post by wasaka

 

It's interesting to see something like bitcoin because conceptually it is the first currency I have ever heard about that is pure. Never before has a currency existed in such a pure form. It is really amazing even if you look at it from a finance/economics perspective. It's possible it can't be counterfeited, it can't be stolen by thieves(governments), it can't be inflated because a limited number will exist. It is 100% fiat which means it is not dependent on any physical location or good. It is really really amazing.

True that.

Over four decades ago, F.A. Hayek made the same proposal but, at the time, it seemed to have little chance of becoming a reality. He argued for the denationalization of money, an abolition of the government monopoly over the money supply, and the institution of a regime of competitive private issuers of currency.

Hayek wanted to make it increasingly impossible for governments to restrict the international movement of individuals, money and capital, and thereby to safeguard the ability of dissidents to escape oppression. Another reason was stop the recurring bouts of acute inflation and deflation that result in banks foreclosing on family farms and homes. In addition to that, Hayek wanted to bring a full stop to inflation spending that robs the individual of their labor in order to finance unnecessary wars.

In 1987, James Orlin Grabbe put pen to paper and described “The End of Ordinary Money.” In that two part essay JOG quotes from Hayek and foreshadowed the coming of Bitcoin twenty years before it arrived!

How might we reinvent money so that 1) it has value like gold, and 2) would not be controlled by political structures that could use it to wage war? This two-fold question is one that few people have ever bothered to ask, much less attempted to answer. While others were still trying reform a failing system, a mysterious hacker actually came up with the answer. From Wikipedia:

Bitcoin (BTC) is a cryptocurrency first described in a 2008 paper by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who called it a peer-to-peer, electronic cash system. Bitcoin creation and transfer is based on an open source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority.

While most people don’t think about it very much, we could say money makes us slaves to the system. That may sounds rather negative, and even melodramatic, but when we re-frame the problem in terms of computer technology, solutions begin to emerge and bitcoin is one very positive answer.

The bailout of Wall Street initiated in September 2008 was premised on the dire prediction that if major counterparties in the massive edifice of derivative contracts were allowed to fall, the whole interlocking house of cards would collapse and take the economy with it. What if we faced the same banking crisis next year --- just look at the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries and you can see we are heading for troubled waters?

In such a case, would an alternative currency like Bitcoin be allowed to fill the void?

The short answer is no. As long as we keep using words like “allowed” that answer will always be no, absolutely not. The system wants to keep on living, growing and controlling. As long as we are it’s subjects, it is our master. In order to secure our freedom, we must change our minds and the words we use. The bottom line is we need to stop asking for permission.

Make no mistake about it, open source money is a revolution.

Unsolicited endorsement of Bitcoin by Ron Paul.



Yes, the time has come to demand honest government and that means we must demand honest money. Bitcoin didn’t ask for permission to exist, and in the same way we need not look to any false authority for permission to spend it. Make no mistake about it, open source money is a revolution. The only death will be the false authority of fiat money, and the rebellion is being financed by your spending.

This is an important point, so allow me to repeat it. We need government and we need money, we just don’t need one controlling the other. When money controls government then the oligarchy and corporations have undue influence. When government controls money, then the political system can control the citizens. The idea of a Republic is the idea that people control the government, but in order for this to work we need to separate money and state just like we separate church and state.

Those of you who followed the Occupy Movement will remember one predominant theme that emerged was this idea that we need to get money out of political process. This meme was one that resonated with a lot of people. It was thought that, if we could stop Wall Street from buying our politicians, they might reform themselves and become better representatives of WE THE PEOPLE.

When you think deeply about it, you begin to realize the problem is more fundamental. While it is true that K street lobbies have undue influence in our political system, that is not the root of the problem. The large pools of Capital that sit above government is the root of the problem. With the rise of Bitcoin, people like myself have begun to ask new questions and formulate new solutions. Perhaps we need government, but do we need government issued money?

Talking about removing the money from the political process is one thing, but to separate government from money altogether is something quite different–indeed, it is revolutionary. The separation of church and State is a rather new idea in human history, and most people agree it was a step forward. With the rise of financial instruments that are both autonomous and anonymous, the question must be asked: Are we now ready for the separation of money from the State?

The separation of church and State was very controversial but it brought greater pluralism for all. America had a big role to play in that evolutionary process. After the Magna Carta was signed, men of the Enlightenment were no longer content to be ruled by Kings. Today the old oligarchs that once sat behind the king’s throne are still asserting themselves by appointing bankers into political positions once held by elected officials. What we see today is neo-feudalism where the kings have been replaced by few powerful families, each with large pools of capital. They control the political process because the control the money.

What I’m describing is called “the New World Order” and those invested in this corrupt system are pushing a Globalist agenda that forces working people the world over to comply and submit to its all-powerful will without regard to their individual rights. Yes, people complain about this open conspiracy, but they are at a loss to know what can be done about it. Perhaps the answer is a simple one: stop using State issued money.

If people the world over were to adopt various forms of crypto-currency, this would seriously reduce the power of the Super-State to control them and in time it would also render the oligarchy powerless to control the state. Then, and only then, would free people have a chance to reclaim their government and restore a Constitutional Republic that is both accountable and representative of their the best interests.

Karen Hudes: "Learn to Use Payment Systems Like Bitcoin."


She mentions Bitcoin after the 21:00-mark.