Right now everyone is excited about the cryptocurrencies thinking that it will be the future, and surely they are right, but what kind of future?

It is not a secret for those who want to realize that the control of the world is centralized in powerful and influential families that can control the economy of even a continent, and with capitalism, controlling the economy you can control any sector.

What if, with the globalization of cryptocurrencies, they obtained the key they need to solidify their centralized control over the world? And if in reality someone knew how to hack the blockchain?

And that we were all wrong, thinking that we are decentralizing the economy, when in reality we are contributing to the creation of what could be the perdition of our liberty.

(I used google translate since I do not fully master English )

So lets say bitcoin is eventually gonna mean the downfall of the bank
as a wallet is basically a bank. You can store money and make transactions all freely and
autonomously.

So when that happens and the banks and the government can't cooperate anymore. And the majority will be payed by bitcoin and wouldn't that
force governments to also start using bitcoin (or any other crypto currency but it wouldn't really matter to much as bitcoin is like the backbone of every coin) which would naturally mean that their own currency will lose its value by the amount that the government choses to use the bitcoins instead. And lets say one day theres not much fiat left ... how would the value of a bitcoin measured? in Eur USD Yen?

Or will it ever even come to such a scenario?

Just really wondering

Hello I would like to know the benefits of bitcoin by being deregulated.

fiat currencies have wide application in the real world. You can buy food, water, clothes, whatever with them. In short, you always know how much 1 or 1,000 dollars can buy, and this sets the reference point for the dollars worth of things. And this is the main reason why volatility of major fiat currencies is constrained. Let's take the dollar as an example here. If the dollar becomes undervalued in respect to goods which can be bought with it, people start exchanging other currencies for it, and the dollar value rises. On the other hand, if the dollar is overvalued in respect to the same basket of goods, people start selling it for other currencies, and the dollar value falls. In both of these cases, the effect is diminished volatility.

Inflation Actually Near 10% Using Older Measure

After former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was appointed in 1979, the consumer price index surged into the double digits, causing the now revered Fed Chief to double the benchmark interest rate in order to break the back of inflation. Using the methodology in place at that time puts the CPI back near those levels.

Inflation, using the reporting methodologies in place before 1980, hit an annual rate of 9.6 percent in February, according to the Shadow

Since 1980, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed the way it calculates the CPI in order to account for the substitution of products, improvements in quality (i.e. iPad 2 costing the same as original iPad) and other things. Backing out more methods implemented in 1990 by the BLS still puts inflation at a 5.5 percent rate and getting worse, according to the calculations by the newsletter’s web site, Shadowstats.com.

“Near-term circumstances generally have continued to deteriorate,” said John Williams, creator of the site, in a new note out Tuesday. “Though not yet commonly recognized, there is both an intensifying double-dip recession and a rapidly escalating inflation problem. Until such time as financial-market expectations catch up with underlying reality, reporting generally will continue to show higher-than-expected inflation and weaker-than-expected economic results in the month and months ahead.”

The pay-site and newsletter by Williams, an economic consultant for the last 30 years to companies, has gained a cult following among bloggers hungry to criticize Bernanke these days. The mission statement of the newsletter, according to the site, is to expose and analyze “flaws in current U.S. government economic data and reporting…net of financial-market and political hype.”

Investors are anxiously awaiting the release of March’s CPI reading on Friday. The consensus estimate from economists is for an annual inflation rate of 2.6 percent.

“Given ongoing inflation problems with food and the spreading impact of higher oil-related costs in the broad economy, reporting risk is to the upside of consensus expectation,” said Williams, citing a 10 percent jump in gasoline prices in March, in the note.

“While the federal government would have us believe the numbers are rather tame, our own personal gauge leads us to believe inflation is running between 5 percent to 6 percent annually,” wrote Alan Newman in his latest Crosscurrents newsletter that refers to Williams’ statistics.

Newman uses recent comments from Walmart CEO Bill Simon that inflation is going to be “serious” to back up the much higher CPI figures from him and Williams.

“Given Walmart’s sales of $422 billion, we think Mr. Simon has a good idea of what’s in the pipeline,” said Newman.

To be sure, the BLS argues that the changes it has made over the last three decades more accurately reflect a true change in the cost of living. For example, in response to its hedonic adjustments, the BLS web site states, “to measure price change accurately, the CPI must be able to distinguish the portion of price change due to this quality change.

Still, going by recent strong comments from Federal Reserve officials, even members of the central bank must believe inflation is being underreported. Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher said in a speech last week that the central bank was reaching a “tipping point” as far as changing its policy so it can react to inflation. Maybe Fisher stumbled across Shadowstats.com. The voting member did, after all, mention Volcker in the same speech.

“The need to break the back of that (budgetary debt) spiral is as dire now as was the need for Paul Volcker to break the back of inflation in the 1980s,” said Fisher on April 8th. “As a result of his steadfast determination to press on with exorcising inflation, Mr. Volcker is today among the most respected living Americans and widely considered an exemplar for public servants worldwide.”

https://www.cnbc.com/id/42551209

Here's why I think $6 trillion is completely reasonable:
1. Wall Street hasn't jumped in yet.
2. Big business still has its toes in the water.
3. There's widespread and mainstream awareness,  but very little mainstream adoption.
4. We're going to see at least one governments currency collapse soon, with that nation switching to cryptos. That will begin a widespread acceptance of cryptos as legitimate.
5. The trend in the general population is anti central authority aka. big banks, governments, big corporations. Look at brexit, Trump, the rise of nationalism against the EU, etc.  Cryptocurrencies are the embodiment of anti authority and giving the people more control over their wealth.

With so many catalysts, a 10-12x growth for this market is definitely a possibility.

What do you all think?

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@charteroakpublic
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Short sellers are in Nirvana with these creatures that had surged by hundreds or even thousands of percent in days after they announced a switch to “blockchain” in their business model or added “Blockchain” to their name. Their shares are now crashing.

I have written about a number of these outfits and their crazy share-price moves and their silly stock manipulation schemes on the way up. Now, not much later, here’s an update on how they’re doing on the way down.

UBI Blockchain International down 93% from the peak. UBIA had skyrocketed about 1,500% to $115 a share intraday by December 18, but has now – at $8.25 this morning – given up most of it.

This is a true gem. On January 9, the SEC halted trading in UBIA shares, citing two reasons: “accuracy” in UBI’s disclosures and very funny trading activity. This froze the share price at $22. The trading halt came 11 days after I’d lambasted the shenanigans by the company and its executives. On Tuesday (January 23), shares trading resumed – and have since plunged to $8.25.

Longfin down 70% from the peak. LFIN went public in the US in November, languished at first, but suddenly soared 2,700% over three days to an intraday high of $142.82 by December 18. This briefly gave it a market capitalization of over $7 billion. LFIN has since plunged 70% to $41.61 this morning.

What caused the surge was the December 15 announcement – a mix of gobbledygook, hype, and silliness, as I called it – that it had acquired a “Blockchain-empowered solutions provider,” etc. etc. What was not in the announcement was that the acquired “assets” belonged to a Singapore corporation that is 95% owned by Longfin’s CEO and chairman. This was disclosed in the SEC filings, but no one betting on this crazy stuff reads SEC filings.

DPW Holdings down 62% from the peak. DPW, a penny-stock dotcom-crash survivor that makes lowly power supplies for computers, catapulted its shares 880% from $0.56 on November 21 to an intraday high of $5.95 on December 18, by announcing that it would market its power supplies to cryptocurrency miners. Shares have since plunged 63% to $2.19 this morning.

Long Blockchain Corp down 61% from the peak. LBCC, at the time a failing beverage-maker called Long Island Iced Tea, got its shares to rocket by 360% from $2.06 on December 18 to $9.49 a few days later by announcing that it would change its name and ticker symbol.

On January 5, after having successfully manipulated up its share price, it announced that it would sell 1,603,294 shares in a secondary offering. That day, shares crashed 21%. On January 9, under withering pressure and unwelcome scrutiny, it canceled the stock offering. Shares are now at $3.72, down 61% from the peak.

On-line Blockchain down 35% from the peak. OBC, at the time named On-line Plc, a thinly traded penny stock in London, got its shares to spike 528% the morning after it announced that it plans to change its name. “Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are a new and exciting area we have been working on for some time,” it said. And this worked.

In total, OBC soared by nearly 1,000% from 14 pence to 152 pence by January 9. But in the two weeks since, they’ve given up 35% and closed at 97 pence.

Riot Blockchain down 61% from the peak. RIOT was a failing biotech outfit called Biotix with annual revenues between $100,000 and $200,000 over the past four years, generating $34 million in losses over the same period. Then on October 4, it announced that it would change its name and ticker symbol and start investing in cryptocurrency and blockchain startups.

A few days before the announcement, shares were trading at about $4.50. By December 19, they’d soared nearly 1,000% to $46.20. Since then they have crashed 61% to $17.92.

Eastman Kodak down 23% from the peak. KODK, one of the late entries into this blockchain-and-crypto stock manipulation scheme, announced on January 9 a “blockchain initiative,” including its own cryptocurrency, KodakCoin. The stock jumped 300% in two days, from $3.10 to $12.40. Amusingly, on January 8, the day before the announcement, seven independent directors awarded themselves huge stock grants. Shares have dropped 23% from the peak to $9.50.

Seven Stars Cloud Group down 40% from the peak. SSC, a Chinese video-on-demand service outfit that is traded on the Nasdaq, got its shares to spike 200% from $2.33 on December 8 to $7.00 intraday on December 26, by announcing that it took a 27% stake in The Delaware Board of Trade Holdings, a private company. Seven Starts claimed that DBOT’s Alternative Trading System is “the first and only blockchain based Alternative Trading System fully licensed by the SEC.” Shares have since plunged 40% to $4.13.

Siebert Financial Corp down 54% from the peak. The small 50-year-old New York brokerage announced on December 14 that it would expand into cryptocurrency trading. Its shares soared nearly 400%, from $4.40 to $21.64 by December 21. And that was it. Including today’s double-digit plunge, they’ve plummeted 54% from the peak, to $9.65 this morning.

There are dozens of other outfits like these out there, some of them small companies, hanging on by their fingernails, that are trying to spike their share price; others are China-based US-traded fly-by-nights; some are near-zombies going for a Hail Mary pass.

For speculators that were able to get into and out of these scams in time, it worked. A 1,000% gain obtained in a few days by hook or crook is nothing to sneeze at. But it’s ending in tears for those who got into these scams too late and whose despised fiat currency just ended up providing the exit grease for early speculators. And short sellers, the lucky ones that got the timing right, are laughing all the way to the hated legacy banks.

But not all will get the timing right. Short sellers, when they want to take profits, have to buy their shares back in order to cover their short position, and many of the stocks are thinly traded, and covering a big short position can cause shares to bounce violently. So there will be some serious snap-backs, which might take the fun out of shorting these stocks.

Are hedge funds causing the cryptocurrency rout by trying to get large sums out of an illiquid market? Read…  Crypto Collapse Crushes Hedge Funds that Touted Huge Gains for 2017

https://wolfstreet.com/2018/01/25/the-40-to-90-collapse-of-blockchain-stocks/

50 Cent has a way of pulling money out of thin air by making prescient early investments. Though he hasn’t been doing so great lately, he’s still got some tricks up his sleeve. It turns out he accepted Bitcoin payments for his 2014 album Animal Ambition and never cashed them out. Suddenly, he’s richer than he realized.

In 2004, Fiddy signed an endorsement deal with a little company called Vitamin Water that ended up netting him half a billion dollars. In the meantime, he’s had his ups and downs on the sales charts, got hurt in the 2008 recession, mismanaged his cash, and filed for bankruptcy. Animal Ambition wasn’t much of a hit and in a 2014 article titled, “9 Albums That Flopped in 2014 (Or Did They?),” Billboard reported that it only sold 124,000 copies. Well, Billboard was right to question if it was an actual failure, because fans paid him 700 bitcoin that apparently have been sitting in an account with no one paying attention. Today, that stash is worth about $7.8 million.

At the time of the album’s release, one bitcoin was worth about $660, so his haul in 2014 was still around $400,000. That’d be a lot of money to most people, but the hip-hop star apparently forgot about it. “I’m a keep it real. I forgot I did that shit,” he wrote in a now-deleted comment on Instagram. At the time of the album’s release, he did a Reddit AMA in which he said he was accepting cryptocurrency as a way to “stay with times.”

It’s a little curious why 50 Cent deleted his original Instagram post bragging about TMZ’s report on his windfall. He still has other posts that reference it, including a video captioned, “Stop talking about my money,👀look at this shit. LOL.” One reason might be that he had to explain himself in bankruptcy court after posting photos of cash on the social network. Let’s just hope he didn’t forget his private keys.

https://gizmodo.com/50-cent-forgets-he-accepted-bitcoins-for-album-finds-1822408093

So went the headline which appeared on the BBC’s website last week, detailing the newest outrages which have emerged from Britain’s crisis-beset healthcare system. This most recent revelation came as a result of an open letter sent to the prime minister by 68 senior doctors, offering details of the inhuman conditions which have become common in the National Health Service’s hospitals.

The letter, which collected statistics from NHS hospitals in England and Wales, found that in December alone over 300,000 patients were made to wait in emergency rooms for more than four hours before being seen, with thousands more suffering long waits in ambulances before even being allowed into the emergency room. The letter further noted that it had become “routine” for patients to be left on gurneys in corridors for as long as 12 hours before being offered proper beds, with many of them eventually being put into makeshift wards hastily constructed in side-rooms. In addition to this, it was revealed that around 120 patients per day are being attended to in corridors and waiting rooms, with many being made to undergo humiliating treatments in the public areas of hospitals, and some even dying prematurely as a result. One patient reported that, having gone to the emergency room with a gynecological problem which had left her in severe pain and bleeding, a lack of treatment rooms led hospital staff to examine her in a busy corridor, in full view of other patients.

While it’s tempting to believe that these extreme cases must be a rare occurrence, the fact is that such horror stories have become increasingly the norm for a socialised healthcare system that seems to be in a permanent state of crisis. Indeed, as the NHS entered the first week of 2018, over 97% of its trusts in England were reporting levels of overcrowding so severe as to be “unsafe.”

Almost as predictable as the regular emergence of new stories of this kind is the equally unwavering refusal of British commentators to consider that the state-run monopoly structure of the system itself might be to blame. Many, including the prime minister herself, have pointed to the spike in seasonal illnesses such as the flu at this time of year, to distract from the more fundamental flaws of the system. However, officials from Public Health England recently went so far as to openly dismiss this as a major cause of the current healthcare crisis, clarifying that current levels of hospital admissions due to the flu are “certainly not unprecedented.” The aging of the population, and local councils’ failure to provide more non-hospital care have also been blamed.

By far the most commonly suggested remedy, however, is simply to inject more taxpayers’ money into this failing system. Indeed, the belief that Britain’s perpetual healthcare crisis is solely the result of funding cuts by miserly Conservative politicians is so widespread that it is almost never challenged, least of all by the trusted experts within the system itself, many of whom stand to benefit from increased funding.

However, the popular caricature of the NHS as suffering from chronic underfunding is simply a myth. In fact, even when adjusting for inflation, it is clear that government funding to the NHS has been increasing at an extraordinary rate since the turn of the millennium, much more quickly than during the early years which its supporters look back on so fondly.



Indeed, under the Conservative government of 2015–16, almost 30% of Britain’s public services budget was spent on its monopoly healthcare system, compared with around 11% in the NHS’s first decade.

One commonly heard soundbite from supporters of the current system is that the Conservatives have allowed healthcare spending to slump to historically low levels; all it would take to return the NHS to the levels of success it supposedly previously enjoyed would be to increase its funding back to the same level it previously enjoyed, or so they say. However, to believe such a statement one would have to make two separate misinterpretations of the statistics, both so basic that they would strike shame into even the dullest high school math students: firstly, it is not the absolute amount of spending on the NHS which has fallen under the Conservative-led governments of 2010–18, but merely the rate at which spending is continuing to increase, even when adjusting for inflation. Second, the only reason that the rate of increase seems to have fallen is because of how disproportionately high it had been been under the infamously spendthrift Labour governments of 1997–2010.

Not only is the NHS not underfunded, but it suffers from dismally low efficiency in terms of healthcare bang per buck compared with similarly developed countries. This suggests that no matter how much its funding is increased, the current set-up is prone to chronically waste that money away.

To overcome these problems, reforms to the fundamental nature of the system itself are desperately needed, to increase the economic freedom of healthcare providers in the UK as well as the freedom of choice of consumers. In short, as long as British healthcare is organised as a taxpayer-funded state monopoly it will continue to fail, just as the other nationalised monopolies of the 1970s failed. To get to a point where the British public would even consider reforms of that kind, however, would require the breaking of a taboo that has defined the past 70 years of British politics.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-23/patients-are-dying-corridors-britains-socialised-health-system

At the center of his conclusion that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have no real value proposition is that the top Western currencies have no store-of-value problem.  

All the mainstream commentary we hear, somehow, only reflects what the elites want us to think.

According to what we now have to call mouth-pieces of the elites, somehow, people always chase bubbles, and always get hurt, because they're irrational, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.  Central-bank money creation is *never* a driving factor.  No, never.

We're living in a lie, and the earlier we wake up to it, the better.  What officials and mainstream media and academics tell us must sometimes be dismissed with: it's just politics.