When will we see investment vehicles with focus on solid mineable coins?

Thank you for being a lone reply!  I'm not sure how I come across, but certainly my thinking is more nuanced than my writing in most cases, as you can only fit so much into something people will read.

Certainly financial wealth is not worthless.  At the beginning of the state-driven financial inflation cycle, it is, objectively speaking, usually quite conducive to growth and prosperity.  It's only gradually, as time goes on, that the distortions really kick in, requiring deception to keep the system afloat, and where these efforts become destructive.

It could be a version of that 'comparative advantage' thing...  The US does a good and cheap job at 'manufacturing' money and financial assets.  The emerging markets do so with real goods.  So they take our money and we take their goods.  This is classic 'free trade' and works as long as no one thinks about how much more financial wealth exists than real wealth, at current prices.

This has been the case throughout modern history.  Plus, the modern state-bank alliance is good at dividing the world public into groups and giving each an appropriate share of the loot, to keep them quiet.  The British and American populations were big beneficiaries at the early stages of their respective empires.  (And so are Bitcoin holders today!)

But, trust me, all of this 'benefit' will come back to bite the 'beneficiaries.'  Including members of the elites themselves.  There's got to be an immutable law somewhere, that says we lose happiness, the more we live apart from reality and from fairness with each other.  Of this, I can't spell out a proof, but I have a strong feeling this is the case.

How Economic Inequality Is (Literally) Making Us Sick

Imagine there was one changeable factor that affected virtually every measure of a country’s health— including life expectancy, crime rates, addiction, obesity, infant mortality, stroke, academic achievement, happiness and even overall prosperity. Indeed, this factor actually exists.

It’s called economic inequality. A growing body of research suggests that such inequality — more so than income or absolute wealth alone — has a profound influence on a population’s health, in every socioeconomic group from rich to middle class to poor.

As the protests against increasing inequities between rich and poor spread from Wall Street, it’s clear that the issue is crucial — not least for the understanding of human health. On Wednesday in Rio, in fact, a World Health Organization conference focused on related issues is being attended by high-level health officials from at least 60 nations around the world.

Economic inequality is measured by looking at the distribution of wealth and income in a society, not the general wealth of a country. At a basic level, a country’s overall economic success does predict its people’s well-being, but the healthiest and happiest countries in the world are not the richest. Rather, they are countries where wealth is shared widely and more equally.

One obvious way in which economic equality may improve health is by reducing barriers to health care among the poor. But it turns out that the health gap exists even in countries with national health services, so the roots of the problem appear to reach deeper than that. Indeed, they may go back to the dominance hierarchies of our primate ancestors.

As studies of wild baboons in Africa have shown, there are certain key side effects of inequality — namely, stress. Baboons have a rigidly enforced social hierarchy in which fights to win alpha status are common and higher-ranking males constantly abuse and bully those below them. Not surprisingly, this results in chronically elevated levels of stress hormones in the lower ranks.

Chronically high stress hormone levels are bad news, for both humans and baboons. While these hormones can be helpful in short-term fight-or-flight situations, if they are elevated over long periods of time, they increase the risk of virtually all major mental and physical illnesses, including stroke, heart disease, diabetes, depression, infectious disease, many cancers and, of course, all types of addictions.

In humans, in fact, differences in health linked to social status — which tracks closely with economic status — have often been attributed only to addictions and to the generally bad health habits of the poor, such as eating a lousy diet. But baboons don’t have these “lifestyle factors” and yet increased mortality in the lower ranks is still seen.

Human studies bear out the association between low socioeconomic status and ill health. Sir Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology at University College London, has spent decades looking at the effects of status differences in a population very different from baboons: British civil servants working in the government bureaucracy based in Whitehall Street in London.

Marmot found large health differences across the social scale. “There are two striking findings. The first was that there was about a threefold difference between the top and bottom in mortality. That’s absolutely enormous,” he says. “The second was that it wasn’t just a difference between the top and bottom; it was what I called a social gradient. There was a stepwise relationship between your socioeconomic position and your health.”

He adds, “Your readers who are not at the bottom [may want to know] that the second from the top had worse health and higher mortality than the top and the third was worse than the second.”

The effect is much more profound than that seen in baboon societies. As Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky, who led much of the research in stress in African baboons, once told me: “When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.”

Moreover, Marmot points out, the people who were on the “bottom” in his research were not poor or unemployed. “In Whitehall, we’re not dealing with poverty. We’re dealing with people in stable white collar employment and [still we see] this graded relationship between where they are in the hierarchy and health,” he says.

When Marmot and his colleagues controlled for lifestyle factors like smoking and lack of exercise in the lower socioeconomic groups, the gradient remained. “Those things accounted for about a third of the gradient,” he says, noting that you have to look for the “causes of the causes” — the reasons that the lower classes might be driven to smoke, drink, take drugs or indulge in sweet, fatty foods. “It’s now been described the world over,” Marmot says.

Indeed, in country-to-country comparisons, researchers find that the greater the difference between the richest and the poorest in a society, the worse off everyone in that society seems to be. “It looks as if what inequality does is amplifies the effect of social status differences,” says Richard Wilkinson, an epidemiologist and co-author of the British bestseller The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.

In countries such as Japan and those in Scandinavia, which have the lowest levels of socioeconomic inequality in the developed world, the populations also enjoy overall greater life expectancy, lower infant mortality, reduced obesity, heart disease and mental illnesses, and lower rates of murder and addictions, compared with nations with high inequality like the U.K., and even more so, the U.S. Countries with wider equality also have higher levels of academic achievement and happiness.

One study in Finland found that mortality rates were twice as high in the poorest people as in the richest, a much less stark difference than that seen in Whitehall, where bottom-of-the-ladder folks had a threefold higher mortality risk than those at the top. Marmot cautions that such comparisons are hard to make accurately and that even in relatively equal countries, some status differences still exist. Still, he says, “Fairly detailed comparisons done across Europe suggest that the magnitude of the gradient is less in Nordic countries.”

So how exactly does inequality lead to so much stress? By degrading our relationships with one another. “The most important pathway is the effect of inequality on the quality of social relationships in a society,” says Wilkinson. “I think the more unequal you get, the more competitive social relationships become, because there’s more status competition.”

And because good relationships are crucial for protecting people from stress, socioeconomic inequality creates an environment in which people with the most stress can’t counter its negative health effects. This social competition degrades relationships and erodes trust across the socioeconomic spectrum — and not just among those on the bottom. (More equal societies also have higher levels of trust.)

Although researchers like Marmot haven’t been able to study the top 1%, at least one recent finding in baboons should give pause even to the very well-off.

The study found that alpha males — those at the very peak of the hierarchy — were actually just as stressed as their lowest-ranked followers. The least stressed among the baboon troops were the beta males, the No. 2’s in the hierarchy. Unlike the alphas, they could chill out and reap the perks of power without constantly having to fight off challengers.

Even when you’re at the top, then, inequality affects you and a gradient always remains for those who are successively lower down.  But it’s not inevitable: in one baboon troop Sapolsky studied, rank appeared not to affect stress and health. What happened there was that the meanest top-ranked animals had died off due to eating tainted meat, leaving the mellower ones in charge, which reduced rank-related bullying.

In the U.S., inequality has been rising since the 1980s. Between WWII and Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency, average income grew by $19,000. The bottom 90% of the country received 65% of that increase.

Between 1981 and 2008, however, average income grew by around $12,000. About 96% of that went to the top 10% richest people in the country. The ratio of pay between CEOs and average workers also became much more extreme over the same time period: in 1980, it was around 35 to 1. Today it is about 185 to 1.

If we want to be healthier and happier, we can’t ignore inequality.

Jamie Dimon may just be trying to cool the Bitcoin market a bit.  He said the same thing when Bitcoin was in the low hundreds.

The major signs I see of elite promotion of cryptos are:

- The price rise.  This speaks volumes when the elites could have killed it with laws.

- The unknown buyer of cryptos shelling out $60 million at a time, over months.  What private entity would put that kind of funds at risk?

- The BIS ('central bank of central banks') recent release of the 'new taxonomy of money' where state money is no longer solely legitimate as today's economists like to say.  Instead, a plethora of monetary forms are recognized, including precious metals and cryptos.  Most significantly, it states that state-issued cryptos won't compete with non-state cryptos by trying to be limited-supply.

- In the political sphere, the disappearance of talk about Bitcoin being a crime-enabler and the need to tighten control over it.  The appearance (in a small way) of proposals to help cryptos.

- The SEC's quick response to the need to control the proliferation of ICOs.

- Between an essay by an ex-central-banker from South Africa and the ECB's recent announcement, it's pretty clear that the Western elites are going to adopt the narrative that cryptos' rise is simply due to market demand, and that authorities won't and shouldn't interfere.  This sounds morally impeccable, but is highly misleading as a description of reality.  Of course, it will benefit cryptos.

The main concern with smartphones are them being the weakest link in a chain, from a security and attack vector perspective.

It is known that many smartphones may have backdoors built into them which allow for monitoring/data mining/state surveillance. Here is an example of this in action:


Here's another example of smartphones not being the most secure platform:


There are other potential issues with smartphones in financial transactions.

There's a push for lower smartphone encryption standards by intelligence agencies. There's the potential for cellphone signals being wirelessly intercepted and decoded to mine passwords and other personal data. As usage of cellphone based payment and monetary transactions increase, the number of viruses and malware which target cellphone platforms are also likely to propagate.

Smartphones are very convenient. Whether they can realistically be secured is another question.

Information that I saw is about one prediction or vision, I don't know how to call it. Back in 1970-s or 80-s one of the Rothschilds said that until 2020 there will be one currency in the world, global currency.

I tried to search and find who said it exactly and when, but I couldn't. I take this with reserve, but this opened many questions in my mind. Theoretically bitcoin can be global currency, it have more chances to become global currency more then any other fiat or crypto currency, or some precious metal, you name it.
Is it possible that someone started to work on bitcoin 30 years ago? In that time, or anytime Rothschild family had resources to pay for any kind of research, they financed many huge projects and many of them were secret, so is it possible that Rothschild's are behind crypto market?

I don't have clear answer on questions above, theoretically its possible, answer can be yes or no, but if its no who is behind bitcoin? Some other rich family or some agency?

Hackers may have made off with millions of credit card and debit card accounts used at Sonic Drive-In locations, according to a security blog.

In a posting Tuesday, Krebs on Security said Sonic Drive-In, a fast-food chain with 3,600 restaurants in 45 states, has acknowledged a breach affecting an unknown number of Sonic cash registers, known today as point-of-sale terminals.

About 5 million credit card numbers were recently put up for sale on a shadowy underground online network, Krebs wrote. The card has recently been used at Sonic locations.

Unknown at this point is whether the breach affected only a small portion of Sonic Drive-In sites or the entire chain.

The company's credit card processor informed Sonic last week of "unusual activity regarding credit cards used at Sonic," said Christi Woodworth, a Sonic spokeswoman.