Why Only Fools Jumped Full-On The Bitcoin Bandwagon...,

It took a minute to figure out that TOR is the antithesis of what it claims to be - and is in fact nothing other than a surveillance honeypot.  Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me....,

anonhq |  To some Bitcoin is the Free Market’s answer to crony capitalism, communism, the endless inflation of fiat currencies and all that is wrong with the world. To others, it is a worthless digital creation – numbers on a screen with no backing, a bubble with no value beyond what arbitrarily imagined number a savvy Crypto “Expert” would tell you.

In between, you have those that view Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme – but one worth cashing in on while the getting is good; those who use it as a deflationary store of wealth, akin to a prized Picasso but more liquid; and those who see the rise of other cryptos that could do what Bitcoin does – but better, and dethrone Bitcoin with a one true cryptocurrency to break the banks.

There is one last school of thought, the conspiracy theorist of conspiracy theories so to speak; What if Bitcoin is, in fact, a creation of the NSA?

It would seem that Satoshi cannot claim credit for being the first to come up with the idea; a document titled “How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash” was written in 1997 and authored by none other than Laurie Law, Susan Sabett and Jerry Solinas of the “National Security Agency Office of Information Security Research and Technology”.

Satoshi mined the genesis block of the bitcoin blockchain in January 2009, some 12 years after the paper was written. Interestingly, Tatsuaki Okamoto is cited frequently in the paper, though beyond the apparent similarity to Satoshi Nakamoto it probably doesn’t mean anything.

The paper describes signature authentication techniques, methods to prevent the counterfeiting of cryptocurrencies via transaction authentication, and mentions terminology common to current cryptocurrencies such as “tokens”, “coins”, “Secure Hashing” and “digital signatures” years before Bitcoin.

It should be noted that the paper appears to be directed towards banks, and that it does not include mining or a p2p blockchain authentication system, but given the decade between conceptualization and implementation these features may have evolved. If nothing else Satoshi must have gotten some inspiration from the paper.

The NSA also invented the hash function that Bitcoin is predicated on, SHA-256. Thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks, we also know that the NSA has inserted backdoors into its encryption standards before. With so many poring over the open-source code though, it is unknown if the NSA could really get away with a backdoor.If the NSA came up with the idea years before Satoshi did, and Bitcoin is dependent on an NSA hash, the theory goes that at the very least the NSA has some stake/ control over/ ulterior motive regarding Bitcoin. On the other hand, the US government created TOR and the Internet; if the NSA had a finger in its creation, perhaps this is another experiment that “got away” from the government…

for computer geeks, financial speculators, and drug dealers...,

Newsweek | What if people could use the Internet to create a new kind of money, one that didn’t involve governments and central banks and could be used anonymously, like cash? That is the idea behind Bitcoin, a virtual currency that has caught the attention of computer geeks, financial speculators, and drug dealers. For the first time, you can buy anything online without giving your credit-card number or bank-account information—leaving no trace at all.

Hundreds of merchants accept Bitcoins for things like books, computers, and professional services. The currency trades on a handful of Bitcoin exchanges, where the price of a Bitcoin fluctuates based on demand. Not long ago a single Bitcoin sold for less than a dollar, but in recent months the price climbed to $8, then to $20, then above $30, before falling back to $18, the current level.

What exactly are you buying? A Bitcoin is basically just a little bit of encrypted code that can be zipped over the Internet and stored in a digital wallet. The concept was proposed by a mysterious hacker named Satoshi Nakamoto (no one knows who he is, and the name is believed to be a pseudonym), who published a white paper describing a way in which computers connected over the Internet could be used to create an unregulated “cryptocurrency.”

New York Sen. Charles Schumer recently called Bitcoin “an online form of money laundering,” after learning about an online warehouse called Silk Road where sellers advertise an astounding array of illegal wares—marijuana, hashish, LSD, ecstasy, cocaine, heroin—and where the only currency accepted is the Bitcoin. (Silk Road is currently shut down, though its anonymous manager claims he intends to start back up soon.)

Right now there are about 6.5 million Bitcoins in circulation. The money supply is controlled by software algorithms and the total supply will max out at 21 million coins. You can crank out Bitcoins on a PC, but it’s an incredibly computer-intensive task, and it will keep getting harder as the number of Bitcoins in existence increases. Some people have pooled together hundreds of machines to “mine” Bitcoins. Most folks, however, just buy them on an exchange.

Some already are hoarding Bitcoins, expecting a Bitcoin bubble will drive the value up to hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars per coin. The biggest holder, whose identity is not known, is sitting on about 300,000 coins, currently worth about $6 million, says Donald Norman, who runs the London-based Bitcoin Consultancy, which advises companies that want to get in on the action.

Norman says the power of Bitcoins is that they can free people from the tyranny of middlemen: banks; credit-card companies; and money shippers like Western Union, which charge exorbitant fees for performing a rather simple task.

But for a lot of people the appeal lies in the chance to get rich quick by getting in early on the next Internet craze. Still, investing in Bitcoins is extremely risky. You don’t know who’s running the exchanges, and you can’t be sure these guys won’t just take your money and run.

Adding to the risk, authorities might take action. But even if Bitcoin goes away, others like it will spring up. “Now that we have the technology to create decentralized currencies,” Norman says, “they are definitely here to stay.”

Yvette's Fifteen Minutes Was Up The Minute She Left Irami...,

philosophyofmetrics |  The cryptocurrency craze is built upon the blockchain technology. Blockchain was created in mystery, with the assumed inventor disappearing into obscurity. Some have made the case that blockchain was in fact created by AI for the purpose of building a de-centralized AI economy. That could be the case, but regardless, the technology is here to stay, and will infiltrate and transform all aspects of human existence and interaction.

The best way I’ve found to understand blockchain is to compare it to the human brain. The brain has synapses which serve the function of allowing neurons to transfer electrical and chemical signals to other neurons. Like the neurons in the human brain, the blockchain technology has nodes which serve the same purpose of transferring information and data. Once the data exists on the blockchain, it can never be destroyed or altered. There will always be an accurate record of all transactions.

This is being likened to an artificial intelligence hive mind which will eventually connect everything in the world, including SMART appliances, SMART watches, SMART cities, and eventually SMART human beings. But I would like to take it a step further and suggest that blockchain technology, and Ethereum specifically, is more comparable to the whole human body and DNA in particular. The complex interactions and transactions which take place within the body and our DNA are being replicated on the blockchain and Ethereum platforms.

This has explosive repercussions on our understanding and acceptance of the de-centralized world which is now emerging in our midst. One of the big esoteric questions we’ve always asked ourselves regarding our individual material, spiritual, and mental fragmentation, was how do we complete a process of de-fragmentation without surrendering to a material centralization which would dominate the totality of our lives?

We can see with blockchain and Ethereum, that a massive de-centralization, or de-fragmentation, of processing and functionality, will allow each individual component to maintain individuality, while the art of de-fragmenting our human inefficiencies can proceed without corrupting into ideological disasters, such as Communism and other externalizations of human weakness.

The recent explosion in the value of Bitcoin is indicative of the growing interest in the blockchain technology. But in some regards Bitcoin is already obsolete. There are some fundamental differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum. Here is a list of just seven which have been complied by Cryptocompare.com:

1. In Ethereum the block time is set to 14 to 15 seconds compared to Bitcoins 10 minutes. This allows for faster transaction times. Ethereum does this by using the Ghost protocol.
2. Ethereum has a slightly different economic model than Bitcoin – Bitcoin block rewards halve every 4 years whilst Ethereum releases the same amount of Ether each year ad infinitum.
3. Ethereum has a different method for costing transactions depending on their computational complexity, bandwidth use and storage needs. Bitcoin transactions compete equally with each other. This is called Gas in Ethereum and is limited per block whilst in Bitcoin, it is limited by the block size.
4. Ethereum has its own Turing complete internal code… a Turing-complete code means that given enough computing power and enough time… anything can be calculated. With Bitcoin, there is not this form of flexibility.
5. Ethereum was crowd funded whilst Bitcoin was released and early miners own most of the coins that will ever be mined. With Ethereum 50% of the coins will be owned by miners in year five.
6. Ethereum discourages centralised pool mining through its Ghost protocol rewarding stale blocks. There is no advantage to being in a pool in terms of block propagation.
7. Ethereum uses a memory hard hashing algorithm called Ethash that mitigates against the use of ASICS and encourages decentralised mining by individuals using their GPU’s.

The information in that list represents the core areas in which our world is transforming. This cannot be stopped. Though Bitcoin may explode even higher, and some nations and institutions may attempt to regulate and slow the onset of the blockchain and Ethereum, the genie is now out of the lamp and nothing can put it back. Blockchain is not just for cryptocurrency and economics. It will build the foundation and framework of everything in the world of tomorrow.

Blockchain Is Not Only Crappy NSA Technology...,

medium |  Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong direction.

This December I wrote a widely-circulated article on the inapplicability of blockchain to any actual problem. People objected mostly not to the technology argument, but rather hoped that decentralization could produce integrity.

Let’s start with this: Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Yet after I wrote an article last December saying bitcoin had no use, someone responded that Venmo and Paypal are raking in consumers’ money and people should switch to bitcoin.

What a surreal contrast between blockchain’s non-usefulness/non-adoption and the conviction of its believers! It’s so entirely evident that this person didn’t become a bitcoin enthusiast because they were looking for a convenient, free way to transfer money from one person to another and discovered bitcoin. In fact, I would assert that there is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.

There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.

The number of retailers accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment is declining, and its biggest corporate boosters like IBM, NASDAQ, Fidelity, Swift and Walmart have gone long on press but short on actual rollout. Even the most prominent blockchain company, Ripple, doesn’t use blockchain in its product. You read that right: the company Ripple decided the best way to move money across international borders was to not use Ripples.

A blockchain is a literal technology, not a metaphor

Why all the enthusiasm for something so useless in practice?

People have made a number of implausible claims about the future of blockchain—like that you should use it for AI in place of the type of behavior-tracking that google and facebook do, for example. This is based on a misunderstanding of what a blockchain is. A blockchain isn’t an ethereal thing out there in the universe that you can “put” things into, it’s a specific data structure: a linear transaction log, typically replicated by computers whose owners (called miners) are rewarded for logging new transactions.

themaven |  I completely agree with much of what you wrote here. I’d like to point out a couple things:

First, in regards to “There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.” There is in fact at least one such person: me. In 2010 I was looking for a payment system which did not have any possibility for chargebacks. It turns out that bitcoin is GREAT for that, and I became a blockchain enthusiast as a result.

The ugly truth about blockchain is that it is immensely useful, but only when you are in some way trying to circumvent an authority of some sort. In my case, I wanted to take payments for digital goods without losing any to chargebacks. It’s also great for sending money to Venezuela (circumventing the authority of the government of Venezuela, which would really rather you not). It’s great for raising money for projects (ICOs are really about circumventing various regulatory authorities who make that difficult). It’s great for buying drugs, taking payment for ransomware, and any number of terrible illegal things related to human trafficking, money laundering, etc.

Frankly, the day that significant trading of derivatives (gold futures, oil futures, options, etc) starts happening on blockchain, I expect a bubble that will make previous crypto bubbles look tiny in comparison. This is not because blockchain is an easier way to trade these contracts! It is because some percentage of rich traders would like to do anonymous trading and avoid pesky laws about paying taxes on trading profits and not doing insider trading.

I sum it up like this: are you trying to do something with money that requires avoiding an authority somewhere? If not, there is a better technical solution than blockchain. That does NOT mean that what you are doing is illegal for you (it’s perfectly legal for me to send money to Venezuela). It just means that some authority somewhere doesn’t like what you are doing.

Blockchain is inherently in opposition to governmental control of the world of finance. The only reason governments aren’t more antagonistic towards blockchain is that they don’t truly understand how dangerous it is. I wrote at length about this back in 2013 in an article called “Bitcoin’s Dystopian Future”:

the all-seeing eye only wants to protect you...,

this writing has been on the wall for a while, but I reminded you of this fact two weeks ago...,

Logical outcomes from this?

1. FBI/NSA just shut down the #1 biggest hosting site and #1 most wanted person on Tor

2. Silkroad is next on their list, being the #2 most wanted (#1 was Child Porn, #2 is drugs)

3. Bitcoin and all crypto currenecies set to absolutely CRASH as a result since the feds can not completely control this currency as they please.

I don't always call the Feds agenda transparent, but when i do, I say they can be trying harder. 

Once you grok the fact that the bankster $$ system is the ultimate technology for governance and control, then you can easily understand why they're fitna loosen up their 80 year weed prohibition (cause people will transact for weed in traceable dollars and schmoking is likely to blunt a little bit of the riotous reaction to continuing economic contraction and malaise). Genuine anonymization and well-established virtual currencies are a response to the ever-tightening grip of the "top which lives off the yield of the bottom." Matter fact, they're the only pure genius games in progress at this moment in time - and constitute a genuine and growing threat to unilateral top-down governance and the system of 1% global supremacy. (psychedelics do too, but they'll be easy enough to track and monitor as they'll be an epiphenomenal component of the larger ebb and flow of legalized weed)

NYTimes | State and federal officials are starting broad investigations into shortcomings in the oversight of upstart virtual currencies like bitcoin.

The Senate’s committee on homeland security sent a letter this week to the major financial regulators and law enforcement agencies asking about the “threats and risks related to virtual currency.” These currencies, whose popularity has grown in recent years, are often used in online transactions that are not monitored by traditional financial institutions.

“This is something that is clearly not going away, and it demands a whole government response,” said a person involved in the Senate committee’s investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is continuing.

The Senate letter went out the same day that New York’s top financial regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, sent subpoenas to 22 companies that have had some involvement with bitcoin, according to a person briefed on the investigation.

Previously, there have been isolated efforts to crack down on those who took advantage of virtual currencies. But the two investigations made public this week appear to be the most wide-ranging government efforts to exert more coordinated control over what has been a largely faceless and borderless phenomenon.

Bitcoin, the most well-known digital currency, was started by anonymous Japanese computer programmers in 2009 and was intended to serve as an alternative to national currencies. Only a limited number of bitcoins can be created. And an online community has bid up the price of individual bitcoins, which are stored digitally on a decentralized network of computers. On Tuesday, a bitcoin was being sold for about $108 online.

Lawmakers are worried that bitcoin and other alternative forms of money can be used to evade taxes, defraud investors and assist trade in illegal products like drugs and pornography.

the eff punks out on bitcoin...,

themonetaryfuture | To stand up and fight to protect lawful online activity from legal threats isn’t for the faint of heart… it takes big ones.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a two decade history of taking on cases that set important precedents to protect rights in cyberspace. This is an organisation which has not been afraid to file lawsuits against the CIA, the US Department of Defence, the Department of Justice and other agencies, as well as major corporations like Apple and AT&T.

Recently, however, the EFF seems to be blowing some chilly air of its own and their source of gumption seems to have shrunk a little. They are no strangers to the pernicious effects of ‘self-censorship’; this is the ‘chilling effect’ where discussion, debate and activities are effectively destroyed before they even get started. It is the fear to speak freely or the fear to participate, because of vague legal threats or ill-defined laws. It is the uncertainty about where one’s rights begin and end, and the fear of crossing an invisible line. It is the providers closing or restricting customer accounts; not based on specific legal requests but based on some fuzzy margin even less well defined than the law itself.

Let’s see how the EFF explains its retreat from using one specific technology: Bitcoin, which is not inherently illegal and qualifies more than most as a frontier technology.

EFF and Bitcoin (June 20, 2011)

What then should we make of this statement from the EFF which reveals a primary motivator for avoiding a particular technology is legal uncertainty? At first glance this might make some sense, as ‘understanding the legal issues’ seems like a prudent first step, but you only need to step back into the EFF’s early history to see that their very birth was not just taking place in, but in a way inspired by an era of just this sort of uncertainty regarding electronic frontiers. Take this quote from ‘A Not Terribly Brief History of the EFF’.

"I realized in the course of this interview that I was seeing, in microcosm, the entire law enforcement structure of the United States.

Agent Baxter was hardly alone in his puzzlement about the legal, technical, and metaphorical nature of data crime."

This surely shows that the legal environment was not only uncertain – but positively muddy and misunderstood even by those tasked to investigate and enforce the law.

Arguably, law enforcement lags in their understanding of new technology just as much today. The ‘ambiguous nature of law in Cyberspace’ was almost a defining feature of the landscape, and back then, it didn’t stop the EFF from riding out into it; legal guns at the ready, if not blazing.

The EFF about-face regarding Bitcoin came shortly after a flurry of publicity regarding US Senators Schumer and Manchin raising their concerns about the use of bitcoins for illegal purchases on the silk road tor website. The senators mischaracterised bitcoin as “untraceable”. Senators seek crackdown on “Bitcoin” currency Fist tap Dale.

The Blockchain Has Only Ever Been A Pimper's Paradise...,

thecorrespondent  |  It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed. The Honduran land registry was going to use blockchain. That plan has been shelved. The Nasdaq was also going to do something with blockchain. Not happening. The Dutch Central Bank then? Nope. Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte.  

Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.”

I’ll list a few of the problems. Firstly: the technology is at loggerheads with European privacy legislation, specifically the right to be forgotten. Once something is in the blockchain, it cannot be removed. For instance, hundreds of links to child abuse material and revenge porn were placed in the bitcoin blockchain by malicious users.

It’s impossible to remove those.

Also, in a blockchain you aren’t anonymous, but “pseudonymous”: your identity is linked to a number, and if someone can link your name to that number, you’re screwed. Everything you got up to on that blockchain is visible to everyone.

The presumed hackers of Hillary Clinton’s email were caught, for instance, because their identity could be linked to bitcoin transactions. A number of researchers from Qatar University were able to ascertain the identities of tens of thousands of bitcoin users fairly easily through social networking sites.
Other researchers showed how you can de-anonymise many more people through trackers on shopping websites.

The fact that no one is in charge and nothing can be modified also means that mistakes cannot be corrected. A bank can reverse a payment request. This is impossible for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. So anything that has been stolen will stay stolen. There is a continuous stream of hackers targeting bitcoin exchanges and users, and fraudsters launching investment vehicles that are in fact pyramid schemes. According to estimates, nearly 15% of all bitcoin has been stolen at some point.
And it isn’t even 10 years old yet.

Google "Invests" in Bitcoin

marketslant |  Right now the BitCoin group is running into what we call "floor trader fear". The  voting members are chafing at the idea of scaling their supply by adding servers and/ or server power. This would disrupt their own little empires, not unlike the trading floor fearing Globex back in the day. And so many exchanges held out and protected the floor. And in the end they died. PHLX, AMEX, COMEX, PCOAST, CSCE, all gone or absorbed because they were late to adapt new technology and protect their liquidity pools. If Bitcoin removes power  from its voting members  control by demutualizing and uses those proceeds to increase server power they will likely excel. But Google and Amazon are now playing and they are all about unlimited  server power. Plus they have the eyeballs already. This is no unlike having the "marketmakers" already trading on a screen at Globex. The "liquidity pool" ofbuyers and sellers are already on  Amazon  and Google. Bitcoin does not have that past "early adaptors". Remember Palm?

When, not if, those behemoths are up and running they will immediately have an embedded network of both customers AND service providers  at their disposal in the form of search  eyeballs (google) and buyers (Amazon). They will be set up  to crush the opposition if they choose to create their own currency. Imagine Amazon  offering amazon money for amazon purchases. Now imagine them offering 20% discounts if you use  their money. The choices at this point boggle the mind. Tactical choices thought no longer used will come  into play again. Some examples: Freemium, Coupons, Customer Loyalty, Vertical Client Integration (P.O.S.), Travelers checks and more.

To be fair, Google has invested in Bitcoin as well. What smart trader would not hedge himself. But just like Netflix is Amazon's biggest cloud customer, but will eventually put Netflix out of business (after NetFlix kills Hollywood's distribution network); So will Google/ Amazon/ Apple attempt to obviate the need for any currency but their own. 

Blockchain is  the railroad. Amazon and Google have the oil. Like Rockefeller  before, The railroad will be made "exclusive" to their products.

The Blockchain and Us

blockchain-documentary |  What is the Blockchain?

blockchain, NOUN /ˈblɒktʃeɪn/
A digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly.
From en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/blockchain

A mysterious white paper (Nakamoto, Satoshi, 2008, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”) introduced the Bitcoin blockchain, a combination of existing technologies that ensures the integrity of data without a trusted party. It consists of a ledger that can’t be changed and a consensus algorithm—a way for groups to agree. Unlike existing databases in banks and other institutions, a network of users updates and supports the blockchain—a system somewhat similar to Wikipedia, which users around the globe maintain and double-check. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is the first use case of the blockchain, but much more seems to be possible.

The Next Generation of the Internet

The first 40 years of the Internet brought e-mail, social media, mobile applications, online shopping, Big Data, Open Data, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. Information technology is at the heart of everything today—good and bad. Despite advances in privacy, security, and inclusion, one thing is still missing from the Internet: Trust. Enter the blockchain.

The Blockchain and Us: The Project

When the Wright brothers invented the airplane in 1903, it was hard to imagine there would be over 500,000 people traveling in the air at any point in time today. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin and the blockchain. For the first time in history, his invention made it possible to send money around the globe without banks, governments or any other intermediaries. Satoshi is a mystery character, and just like the Wright brothers, he solved an unsolvable problem. The concept of the blockchain isn’t very intuitive. But still, many people believe it is a game changer. Despite its mysterious beginnings, the blockchain might be the airplane of our time.

Economist and filmmaker Manuel Stagars portrays this exciting technology in interviews with software developers, cryptologists, researchers, entrepreneurs, consultants, VCs, authors, politicians, and futurists from the United States, Canada, Switzerland, the UK, and Australia.

How can the blockchain benefit the economies of nations? How will it change society? What does this mean for each of us? The Blockchain and Us is no explainer video of the technology. It gives a view on the topic far from hype, makes it accessible and starts a conversation. For a deep dive, see all full-length interviews from the film here.

Yanis Varoufakis Takedown Of Corporatist Facism Derails Amy Goodman's Propaganda

democracynow |  Look, Amy, in slaves-owning societies or in the Middle Ages, we had production. People worked, toiled the land. Then we had distribution. The lord would send his henchmen in, his sheriff, to take his cut. So you had distribution—production, distribution. The lord’s cut would then be sold in markets. He would get money out of it, and then you would have finance. So we had production, distribution, finance.

With capitalism, we had the reversal of that. First you’d get the debt, to set up the—you know, to employ people. So you have finance, then distribution, and the last thing that happens is production. So, debt is central to capitalism. Now, that means one thing: The banker, the financier, has an exorbitant privilege. He’s like the sorcerer who has the capacity to push his hand through the time line, snatch value from the future, that has not been produced yet, and bring it in to the present to help orchestrate the production that will create the value that will be repaid in the future. But, effectively, you’re creating a class of people, the financiers, who then have complete control over society. And they can keep doing this a lot more, until the present can no longer repay the future, and there is a huge crash. And then what happens? Because they have this privileged position, they can make you and me, President Obama, whoever, Larry Summers, bail them out. So, they win if their bets succeed, and they win if their bets lose. What kind of political economy is this, when you have one class of people who win, whatever they do, and everybody else loses, whatever they do?

AMY GOODMAN: Is this what you refer to the black magic of banking?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: That’s exactly right.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what’s the cure for this?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, the cure of this is, effectively, to do that which FDR did in the 1930s.

AMY GOODMAN: President Roosevelt.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: President Roosevelt—to put the financial genie back in the bottle. Make banking boring again. Put huge constraints upon them. Nationalize the banks and turn them into institutions for public purpose. And if even—you don’t necessarily need to nationalize, as long as you really keep them under strict control. Remember Bretton Woods, which designed the golden era of capitalism. Bretton Woods was a conference in 1944, and there 120 different countries agreed on the system which saw, in the 1950s and 1960s, the longest period of steady growth, with shrinking inequality and low unemployment and low inflation. FDR had one condition slapped onto membership of that Bretton Woods Conference. Do you know what it was? No banker was allowed in the Washington—the Mount Washington Hotel. So you had a monetary and financial system that was designed in the absence of bankers. That’s what we should do again.

AMY GOODMAN: What is apolitical money?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: In this country, you have a lot of people, good people, who are fed up with politicians, who are fed up with the Fed, and who believe that—they believe in true money, in honest money, that money should be somehow independent of the political process. Remember the gold standard? They still hanker after the gold standard. They would like the quantity of dollars printed to be linked to the quantity of gold that the Fed owns, so that there would be no political influence of the quantity of money, because they fear that—they fear the government will print too much money, and there will be inflation, and the value of money will be effectively eaten away—the gold bugs, as you call them in this country. Bitcoin—Bitcoin is a digital form of the gold standard. And so, the backlash against political control—

AMY GOODMAN: The Bitcoin folks are moving into Puerto Rico right now, has been devastated by Maria.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Of course it’s been devastated. But the solution is not Bitcoin.

AMY GOODMAN: But they’re moving in fast.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Yes, but it’s—you know, it’s just a bubble. It will burst. And the reason is, however much we loathe the political process because it is controlled by oligarchs and by the same old financiers who are behind the politicians who are bailing them out whenever the finance is needed—however much we dislike that, there is no alternative to political money. Why? Because the quantity of money must be in sync with the quantity of output of goods and services. If those two go out of sync, you have deflationary bouts. You have to—that will lead to depression. So, to put it very bluntly and simply, the quantity of money must be decided democratically. At the moment, it’s not being decided democratically. It’s decided politically, but oligarchically. The solution is not to take it and tie it to some algorithm.

AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, you—in the United States, you only refer to oligarchy when you’re talking about Russia, the oligarchs. But billionaire businessmen in the United States, you do not refer to as oligarchs.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: But the United States of America is the prime oligarchy. The difference between the United States of America and Russia is that the United States is a more successful oligarchy. But it is an oligarchy nevertheless.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, think of 2008. President Obama is sworn in on a wave of expectation by the victims of the financiers. And what does he do? First thing he does is he appoints Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, the very same people who had actually unshackled the financiers in the late 1990s, allowing them to do everything that brought so much discontent to the very same people who then entrusted President Obama. President Obama, very soon after that, lost his credibility with those people, and the result is Donald Trump. That’s an oligarchy.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, why is Donald Trump so fiercely opposed to President Obama—is it just racial?—given that he laid the groundwork for the oligarchs, for people like Donald Trump, if, in fact, he does have money?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, the ruling class has a fantastic capacity, like the working class, to be divided. Donald Trump was never in the pocket of Wall Street. He used Wall Street. He used Deutsche Bank. He used all the people he dislikes, in order to keep, effectively, bankrupting his companies and profiting from it. So he’s really very good at that. But he was never very successful as a businessman, certainly not as successful as Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan. And he was always on the margins of the capitalist order of things in the United States. He understood that in order for him to gain more power, more—both discursively and politically and economically, he had to ride the wave of discontent against Obama. And he did this magnificently. And the Democrats let him. The Democrats brought their own distress and failure upon themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: So I want to talk about the rise of the right, but go back to World War II—actually, between World War I and World War II in Germany. How do you see the growth of the support for Hitler and how he took power in Germany, going back to World War I and the devastation of Germany?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: The combination—the combination of a humiliated populace. The humiliation is very important, Amy. When you humiliate a whole people in the middle of a great depression, great economic crisis, you have a political crisis. So the political center implodes, which is what happened with the Weimar Republic, and then all sorts of political monsters ride up—rise up from that. We saw this in the 1920s, the 1930s, in the midwar period in Germany. But we saw it in—we see it in Greece today, after—do you know we have a Nazi party in Greek Parliament—in the country that, along with Yugoslavia, fought tooth and nail against Nazism in the 1940s. We had a magnificent resistance movement against Nazism. In that country now, the third-largest party is a—not a neo-Nazi party, fully old-fashioned Nazi party.

AMY GOODMAN: And this came into the Parliament when?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: They came into Parliament in 2012, at the time of a humiliated public in the clasp of a great depression, just like in Germany in the 1930s.

But allow me to make a point, because there is a great misunderstanding about Germany of the midwar period. Usually people say, “Oh, it was hyperinflation. It was the fact that prices were rising exponentially that brought Hitler to power.” Not true. It is true that hyperinflation depleted the middle class, effectively destroyed the middle class’s savings and shook the system and made the Weimar Republic extremely fragile and ready for the taking. But if you look at the electoral performance of the Nazi Party in Germany, there is a direct correlation, not with inflation, but with deflation. You had Chancellor Brüning, who in 1930 decided to slam the brakes on the economy and to use large doses of austerity in order to make inflation go away—a bit like Paul Volcker when he pushed interest rates up in the early '80s, remember, to 20-something percent—and a lot more fiscal austerity, not just monetary austerity. It was at that point when prices started falling in Germany. Prices started falling, and unemployment ballooned. And that is when you have a major jump in the support for Nazis. Deflation breeds fascism. And that is something that we've got to remember. And I’m making this point because, unfortunately, the European Union’s economic policies today are producing deflationary forces that are being exported to the United States and to China. And that does not augur well for progressive international politics.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk now about the far right in Europe and also in the United States. But in Europe, you’re talking about Poland, you’re talking about Hungary. You’ve got Golden Dawn, not to mention the Nazi party, in Greece.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Oh, that’s the Golden—the Golden Dawn is a Nazi party. That’s the Nazi party I was referring to.

Be Careful Phuxxing Around With Mysterious Technology of Unknown Origin....,

NYTimes |  Worried about someone hacking the next election? Bothered by the way Facebook and Equifax coughed up your personal information?

The technology industry has an answer called the blockchain — even for the problems the industry helped to create.

The first blockchain was created in 2009 as a new kind of database for the virtual currency Bitcoin, where all transactions could be stored without any banks or governments involved.

Now, countless entrepreneurs, companies and governments are looking to use similar databases — often independent of Bitcoin — to solve some of the most intractable issues facing society.

“People feel the need to move away from something like Facebook and toward something that allows them to have ownership of their own data,” said Ryan Shea, a co-founder of Blockstack, a New York company working with blockchain technology.

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has said the blockchain could help reduce the big internet companies’ influence and return the web to his original vision. But he has also warned that it could come with some of the same problems as the web.

Blockchain allows information to be stored and exchanged by a network of computers without any central authority. In theory, this egalitarian arrangement also makes it harder for data to be altered or hacked.

Investors, for one, see potential. While the price of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies have plummeted this year, investment in other blockchain projects has remained strong. In the first three months of 2018, venture capitalists put half a billion dollars into 75 blockchain projects, more than double what they raised in the last quarter of 2017, according to data from Pitchbook.

Most of the projects have not gotten beyond pilot testing, and many are aimed at transforming mundane corporate tasks like financial trading and accounting. But some experiments promise to transform fundamental things, like the way we vote and the way we interact online. “There is just so much it can do,” said Bradley Tusk, a former campaign manager for Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, who has recently thrown his weight behind several blockchain projects. “I love the fact that you can transmit data, information and choices in a way that is really hard to hack — really hard to disrupt and that can be really efficient.”

Mr. Tusk, the founder of Tusk Strategies, is an investor in some large virtual currency companies. He has also supported efforts aimed at getting governments to move voting online to blockchain-based systems. Mr. Tusk argues that blockchains could make reliable online voting possible because the votes could be recorded in a tamper-proof way.

“Everything is moving toward people saying, ‘I want all the benefits of the internet, but I want to protect my privacy and my security,’” he said. “The only thing I know that can reconcile those things is the blockchain.”

bitcoin vs. central bankers

Video - Jon Matonis talks about BitCoin. A method of paying each other which does not rely on your currency being smashed by the devaluations and printing of central banks and politicians.

BitcoinNews | Max interviews guest Jon Matonis who introduces Bitcoin to the RT audience.

“Overall though, I do think the exchangers are the weakest link in the chain”.

“On the government level I think what this is going to actually lead to is a move and a shift away from the model of taxing income and I think you’re going to start to see governments move towards some type of consumption-based tax or headcount-type tax and the reason is because the income levels of individuals are going to become more and more difficult to ascertain”

“I believe digital cash will do to legal tender what BitTorrents did to copyrights”. Fist tap Dale.

Sum'n Jes Not Right About These Front-Running Crypto Temporary Autonomous Zones...,

technologyreview  |  Libertarian attempts to create autonomous mini-civilizations go back at least to the 1960s, but crypto is reinvigorating this old dream with a fresh infusion of cash and hype.

For an idea of what a corporate-run Bitcoin City might be like, look to a burgeoning project called Próspera, supported by the Free Private Cities Foundation in Honduras. While it’s not explicitly billed as a crypto community, a heavy emphasis on the crypto industry and the backing of heavyweight Bitcoin investors place Próspera in the same ideological milieu—a fusion of crypto evangelism and libertarian credos.

Próspera (Spanish for “prosperous”) occupies a small enclave on the Honduran island of Roatán. The developers have been handed the chance to model a society from scratch, including its own health, education, policing, and social security systems.

Honduras amended its constitution in 2013 to allow the creation of special economic zones managed by corporations and operating largely outside the country’s legal and regulatory oversight. The resulting enclaves are known in English as Zones of Economic Development and Employment (ZEDEs, pronounced “zeh-dehs”).

The decision was based on American economist Paul Romer’s proposal for charter cities—a type of special economic zone in an existing state but managed by another nation’s government. Considered one of his more outlandish ideas, they reflect his theories about how to promote foreign investment and alleviate inequality. Honduran ZEDEs are among the first tests of this concept, though Romer has held talks with some other governments.

Romer collaborated with the Honduran government at first, but they parted ways following disagreements over how his idea was being implemented. (Romer didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Próspera, which broke ground in 2020, plans to implement ultra-low taxes, outsource services typically managed by the public sector, establish an “arbitration center” in place of a court, and charge an annual fee for citizenship (either physical or e-residency) that involves signing a “social contract” the company hopes will discourage misbehavior.

When I visited the site in February, a central office was one of the few completed buildings. There was no private Próspera police force, but on the front desk was a number for Bulldog Security International, a private security company engaged by hotels on the island that consider the local police force inadequate. A pair of two-story buildings housed office workers. The rest was largely a construction site, although a residential tower block is underway.

A rendering of the future Próspera shows apartments that appear to take inspiration from the shells of the island’s indigenous conch—soft curves in pearly coral, cream, and glass. A strip of white sand separates the apartment block from the gentle lap of the Caribbean Sea.

The businesses most likely to be drawn here are those keen to escape regulation in their own countries—Próspera’s chief of staff, Trey Goff, highlights medical innovation, health tourism, and just about every facet of the cryptocurrency industry. 

“There’s an automatic degree of overlap with the crypto industry and what we’re doing,” he says. “Because they see themselves as at the forefront of financial innovation, and we want to enable that.”

 

shilling for the gubmint: do you really believe that gold is actually sitting there?

NYTimes | Keynes would, I think, have been sardonically amused to learn how little has changed in the past three generations. Public spending to fight unemployment is still anathema; miners are still spoiling the landscape to add to idle hoards of gold. (Keynes dubbed the gold standard a “barbarous relic.”) Bitcoin just adds to the joke. Gold, after all, has at least some real uses, e.g., to fill cavities; but now we’re burning up resources to create “virtual gold” that consists of nothing but strings of digits. 

I suspect, however, that Adam Smith would have been dismayed. 

Smith is often treated as a conservative patron saint, and he did indeed make the original case for free markets. It’s less often mentioned, however, that he also argued strongly for bank regulation — and that he offered a classic paean to the virtues of paper currency. Money, he understood, was a way to facilitate commerce, not a source of national prosperity — and paper money, he argued, allowed commerce to proceed without tying up much of a nation’s wealth in a “dead stock” of silver and gold. 

So why are we tearing up the highlands of Papua New Guinea to add to our dead stock of gold and, even more bizarrely, running powerful computers 24/7 to add to a dead stock of digits? 

Talk to gold bugs and they’ll tell you that paper money comes from governments, which can’t be trusted not to debase their currencies. The odd thing, however, is that for all the talk of currency debasement, such debasement is getting very hard to find. It’s not just that after years of dire warnings about runaway inflation, inflation in advanced countries is clearly too low, not too high. Even if you take a global perspective, episodes of really high inflation have become rare. Still, hyperinflation hype springs eternal. 

Bitcoin seems to derive its appeal from more or less the same sources, plus the added sense that it’s high-tech and algorithmic, so it must be the wave of the future. 

But don’t let the fancy trappings fool you: What’s really happening is a determined march to the days when money meant stuff you could jingle in your purse. In tropics and tundra alike, we are for some reason digging our way back to the 17th century.

blockchain 'smart contracts' to disrupt lawyers

afr |  Among the blockchain cognoscenti, everyone is talking about Ethereum.

A rival blockchain and virtual currency to bitcoin, Ethereum allows for the programming of "smart contracts", or computer code which facilitates or enforces a set of rules. Ethereum was first described by the programmer Vitalik Buterin in late 2013; the first full public version of the platform was released in February.

Commercial lawyers are watching the arrival of Ethereum closely given the potential for smart contracts in the future to disintermediate their highly  lucrative role in drafting and exchanging paper contracts. Smart contracts are currently being used to digitise business rules, but may soon move to codify legal agreements.

The innovation has been made possible because Ethereum provides developers with a more liberal "scripting language" than bitcoin. This is allowing companies to create their own private blockchains and build applications. Already, apps for music distribution, sports betting and a new type of financial auditing are being tested.

Some of the world's largest technology companies, from Microsoft to IBM, are lining up to work with Ethereum, while the R3 CEV banking consortium has also been trialling its technology as it tests blockchain-style applications for the banking industry including trading commercial paper. Banks are interested in blockchain because distributed ledgers can remove intermediaries and speed up transactions, thereby reducing costs. But if banks move business to blockchains in the future, financial services lawyers will need to begin re-drafting into digital form the banking contracts that underpin the capital markets.

The global director of IBM Blockchain Labs, Nitin Gaur, who was in Sydney last week, says he is a "huge fan" of Ethereum, pointing to its "rich ecosystem of developers". He predicts law to be among the industries disrupted by the technology.

American Negroes Got Massively Suckered By Celebrities Into The Crypto Dip...,

FT  |    “We do not like to get left behind when it comes to new technology,” she said. 

The promise of cryptocurrencies as a wealth builder has been supercharged by celebrity endorsements, sponsorships and advertising. Prominent black Americans including the musicians Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg, the boxer Floyd Mayweather, the actor Jamie Foxx and the film-maker Spike Lee have promoted crypto to their communities. 

Lee appeared in commercials for crypto ATM operator Coin Cloud last year, saying that “old money is not going to pick us up; it pushes us down” and “systematically oppresses”, whereas digital assets are “positive, inclusive”. Last month, Jay-Z announced a partnership with former Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey to launch a “Bitcoin Academy” literacy programme in the Brooklyn public housing complex where he grew up. 

Such celebrity endorsers have faced heavy criticism for getting paid to sell high-risk investments to people who may not have the resources to weather crypto’s volatility. “Ninety-eight per cent of these cryptocurrencies were not designed to do anything other than extract money from people’s bank accounts,” said Najah Roberts, a former financial adviser and the founder of cryptocurrency education centre Crypto Blockchain Plug. “This is not ‘get rich quick’,’’ Roberts added. “There are massive targeting ads that are targeting our community.”

Bellanton said it is not adverts but the prospect of financial freedom, a lack of the investment minimums common for mutual funds, and a feeling that the blockchain distributed ledger is more transparent than big banks that draws in first-time investors. 

“The reason that minorities at a higher rate than others are adopting crypto is precisely because if you’re not already rich, it’s way cheaper to send [USD Coin, a stablecoin asset] than to send a wire,” said Brian Brooks, chief executive of blockchain company Bitfury, at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month. “It’s just cheaper. 

The entire system is cheaper and faster. It doesn’t have all these entry barriers where you can only get it if you’re already rich.” Despite the risk of losses, many black investors are staying invested in the market. Dennis McKinley, 41, has been buying the dip against the advice of his financial adviser. He said his crypto coins now constitute roughly 30 per cent of his overall portfolio, held alongside equities. 

“Young black America is just now getting to a point where we have the amount of freedom to have the opportunity to invest in alternative strategies besides just real estate,” said McKinley, a small-business owner in Atlanta. “I think that it’s important to learn and get out there.”

The Information Industrial Complex

corbettreport |  So what is the problem with this? As Ike explained:

“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Here again the warning is of fascism. But instead of the military-industrial fascism that dominated so much of the 20th century, he was describing here a new fascistic paradigm that was but barely visible at the time that he gave his address: a scientific-technological one. Once again, the threat is that the industry that grows up around this government-sponsored activity will, just like the military-industrial complex, begin to take over and shape the actions of that same government. In this case, the warning is not one of bombs and bullets but bits and bytes, not tanks and fighter jets but hard drives and routers. Today we know this new fascism by its innocuous sounding title “Big Data,” but in keeping with the spirit of Eisenhower’s remarks, perhaps it would be more fitting to call it the “information-industrial complex.”

The concept of an information-industrial complex holds equally explanatory power for our current day and age as the military-industrial complex hypothesis held in Eisenhower’s time.

Why is a company like Google going to such lengths to capture, track and database all information on the planet?

The information-industrial complex.

Why were all major telecom providers and internet service providers mandated by federal law to hardwire in back door access to American intelligence agencies for the purpose of spying on all electronic communications?

The information-industrial complex.

Why would government after government around the world target encryption as a key threat to their national security, and why would banker after banker call for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to be banned even as they plan to set up their own, central bank-administered digital currencies?

The information-industrial complex.

The effects of this synthesis are more and more felt in our everyday lives. Every single day hundreds of millions of people around the world are interfacing with Microsoft software or Apple hardware or Amazon cloud services running on chips and processors supplied by Intel or other Silicon Valley stalwarts. Google has become so ubiquitous that its very name has become a verb meaning “to search for something on the internet.” The 21st century version of the American dream is encapsulated in the story of Mark Zuckerberg, a typical Harvard whizkid whose atypical rise to the status of multi-billionaire was enabled by a social networking tool by the name of “Facebook” that he developed.

But how many people know the flip side of this coin, the one that demonstrates the pervasive government influence in shaping and directing these companies’ rise to success, and the companies’ efforts to aid the government in collecting data on its own citizens? How many know, for instance, that Google has a publicly acknowledged relationship with the NSA? Or that a federal judge has ruled that the public does not have the right to know the details of that relationship? Or that Google Earth was originally the brainchild of Keyhole Inc., a company that was set up by the CIA’s own venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, using satellite data harvested from government “Keyhole” class reconnaissance satellites? Or that the former CEO of In-Q-Tel, Gilman Louie, sat on the board of the National Venture Capital Association with Jim Breyer, head of Accel Partners, who provided 12 million dollars of seed money for Facebook? Or that in 1999, a back door for NSA access was discovered in Microsoft’s Windows operating system source code? Or that Apple founder Steve Jobs was granted security clearance by the Department of Defense for still-undisclosed reasons while heading Pixar in 1988, as was the former head of AT&T and numerous others in the tech industry?

The connections between the IT world and the government’s military and intelligence apparatus run deep. In fact, the development of the IT industry is intimately intertwined with the US Air Force, the Department of Defense and its various branches (including, famously, DARPA), and, of course, the CIA. A cursory glance at the history of the rise of companies like Mitre Corporation, Oracle, and other household electronics and software firms should suffice to expose the extent of these relations, and the existence of what we might dub an “information-industrial complex.”

But what does this mean? What are the ramifications of such a relationship?

Ol'Stankazz Crypto-Bishes...., De-Dollarize Deeze Nutz!!!

Strategic-Culture |  It is probably too early for the common man to understand what is happening, but in fact the dollar is depreciating in relation to some more tangible assets. But gold continues to be corralled by parallel financial mechanisms and other financial instruments created for the sole purpose of manipulating the financial markets on which the common man depends in search of modest gains. As with others, the gold market suffers from the combine power of the US dollar, centralized financial institutions and market manipulation. Entities such as the FED (and their owners), criminally colluding and working with private banks, hedge funds, rating agencies and audit companies, have made immense wealth by driving the world into a debt scam that has stripped normal citizens of their future.

What is happening in the cryptocurrency markets in not only occurring in parallel with the spread of the Internet, smartphones and the increasing ability to operate in the digital world, but is also seen as a safe haven from centralized financial regulators and central banks; in other words, from the dollar and fiat currencies in general. Whether bitcoin will prove to be a wise long-term investment is yet to be seen, but the concept of cryptocurrencies is here to stay. The technology behind the idea, the blockchain, is a definitive model for decentralized economic transactions without any intermediary that can manipulate and distort the market at will. It is the antidote to the debt virus that is killing our society and spreading chaos around the world.

Washington is now left to deal with the consequences of its demented actions against its geopolitical adversaries. The decision to remove Iran from the SWIFT system, and the ongoing economic war against Russia and Venezuela, have pushed the People's Republic of China to obviate any direct attacks on its financial system by creating an alternative economic system. The goal is to warn the United States and her allies that an economic alternative exists and is already operational, ready to be opposed to the Euro-American system if necessary. Washington does not seem to want to renounce the role of manipulator and ruler of world speculative finance, and the obvious result of this is the creation of a financial system that is slowly working against the current one. Lack of anonymity and the centrality of systems seem to be the two fundamental elements of the current financial system that orbits around London and Washington. An anonymous, decentralized and technologically reliable system could be exactly what Washington's geopolitical adversaries have been looking for to end the US-Dollar hegemony.

A Crisis of Humanity

Medium |  Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

Coonery and Buffoonery Raging Amongst The Digital Hoteps...,

theroot |  Hey, man, we didn’t do an explainer last week, but I really need to talk to you about this Boyce Watkins thing that is bubbling on woke Twitter.

Sure! Earlier this week, a video of a screenshot of what seems to be an online conference call began circumnavigating the inboxes of the woke black internet. The video shows two men having a conversation about Boyce Watkins, Ph.D., and his ...

Wait, bruh. Who the hell is Boyce Watkins?

Watkins is the less charismatic Umar Johnson of black financial independence and wealth. His Black Business School is a virtual version of Umar Johnson’s Kente Cloth Hogwarts for Black Boy Magic, except, of course, that Watkins’ really exists. While Watkins’ educational products seem to be the equivalent of freshman-level community college business-theory courses with a little Creflo Dollar sprinkled in, remember, the BBS is 100 percent black. (Remember this point. It is important.)

If I were still using the term “Hotep” as a pejorative—which I am not—I would call Watkins a level 3, low-ranking Ankhologist, perfect for easing black people who are not particularly educated or experienced in Watkins’ area of kente-clothians. He is a perfect conduit conning people into becoming practitioners of entry-level dashikinomics. Plus, Watkins’ school is 100 percent black, meaning that you don’t have to worry about any Caucasian shenanigans creeping into play.

OK, now back to the video.

So the videos show Charles Wu bragging about JARVIS and the Digital Underground and how ...

Slow down! Who is Charles Wu? Is Jarvis one of the lesser-known members of the Wu-Tang Clan? And what does Shock G and Humpty have to do with any of this?

Sorry. It’s just that there’s a lot to cover.

The Digital Underground, or “the D.U.,” as it is called, is not a reference to the ’90s rap group. It is a course in Watkins’ Black Business School.

For $2,999 (or the low price of $499 per month), instead of reading Wikipedia and doing a couple of Google searches, you can have Watkins teach you everything he knows about altcoin, blockchain and bitcoin (which, coincidentally, seems to not be much. But for those who don’t know anything, it seems like a lot. After all, his name has “Dr.” right in it!) Plus, you can trust Watkins. He’s leading black people toward their “Financial Juneteenth” (his actual term). He’s a solid dude.

Oh, did I mention the school was 100 percent black?