I'm a long-time forum lurker, and was meaning to post something along these lines months ago. Obviously I never got to that. Feel free to delete or move this wall of text if it seems irrelevant or out of place.

I'm trying to summarize Mr. Pietila's project Kansanmarkka from the perspective of a Finnish citizen. Maybe not your Average Joe, but someone who uses google and reads forums. Please note: I have nothing personally against Mr. Pietila. He doesn't owe me a single dime. I'm not connected to him in any form, and all of this is taken from sources that are or were public (Mr. Pietila has been deleting forum posts). I've got no insider information.

Please also note that I'm not trying to portray him as being "guilty by association". Ie. I'm not accusing him of being a racist, alt-right, pro-Russia, or anything like that. He's skeptical of the government, but I consider that to be a positive.


(Re: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread - February 08, 2017)

This is an unfortunate turn of events on Mr. Pietila's part. However, as most probably realize his descriptions of the events were vastly exaggerated. Was the establishment "able to thwart" his project? Well, the project was not getting anywhere so it would have been pointless. They had maybe 90 participants for a bar event, and perhaps several thousand reading some web articles. What they accomplished was some hot air, some drink vouchers, and a shoddy website.

Mr. Janitskin runs a Finnish web magazine MV Lehti. It's considered by many to be the leading "alt-right" "fake news" publication. They'd run conspiracy theories, attack pieces, racist rants but also fairly normal news-like content. The more controversial content got Mr. Janitskin to trouble with Finnish authorities as he was sued or investigated for several crimes including defamation of character and hate speech. On this forum Mr. Pietila had repeatedly mentioned 12-13 year sentence that he said the procecution was demanding for Mr. Janitskin, but that's actually just a technicality required for the extradition process. Finnish police apparently had to inform the other country (Spain) on the maximum sentences in order to get the process going.

For contrast, 12 years is the Finnish "life sentence" for murder. There's a case where a repeat slanderer got 4 years or something, but he had spent at least double that time defaming dozens of individuals.

Because of the aforementioned Mr. Janitskin has a lot of notoriety in Finland. He's a quite well-known figure. Mr. Janitskin is seen as pro-Russia among the mainstream press and their audiences. If this assesment is fair or not I'm not sure as I've not studied Mr. Janitskin's views, but Finland has a troubled past with our huge neighbour so this kind of "accusation" tends to raise eyebrows. Mr. Janitskin has certainly been able to sell his "martyrdom" of "having to flee the country" to his supporters, but in the eyes of mainstream audience he may seem like a guy who says whatever he wishes, and runs away when he's confronted.

Mr. Pietila, on the other hand, is nowhere near as "famous" as Mr. Janitskin. There are several articles on him or that mention him, but his "fame" mostly comes from a bizarre TV documentary about silver business and superfoods. Even this is something that most Finns would not know about. His projects are discussed on some web forums, but that's it.

I don't know what happened, but I suspect these two met, possibly bonded on their anti-government views, might've felt they were in similar situation, and decided to promote Kansanmarkka via MV lehti.

Other early public endorsers of Kansanmarkka include Marco de Wit, the spokesman of the vehemently racist Suomi Ensin ("Finland First") group (or at least one of the branches/variants as these people don't seem to get along).

According to some publicly available comments Mr. Pietila would've been financially supporting Mr. Janistkin, and bought him a car. According to other commenters Mr. Pietila would've attended Finland First demonstrations. The first claim seems to be correct since Mr. Janitskin has publicly thanked Mr. Pietila, but the latter I can't verify. According to Mr. Pietila he's supported "numerous anti-government/anti-nato/anti-deep state groups since 2004 with sums of up to 7-figures". I sincerely hope that this does not include Finland First - this group basically looks like a bunch of inbred racist hillbilly drunkards who've known to get wasted in their demonstrations, and who've said to attack passers-by at random. Even other anti-immigration commenters say that Finland First makes them look like total jackasses.

Given the extremely negative public image that this publication, this group, and these figures it was not the greatest play when trying to launch something that is meant to affect the entire nation. That goal was probably quite impossible, but the first page Google hits for Kansanmarkka were about these connections. Kansanmarkka became a pet project of some alt-right activists. While their political ideas have recently gained some traction, probably more than 80% of people are either loudly against them, or utterly indifferent.

I don't think that Mr. Pietila necessarily shares the views of these other parties, but he became a pawn in their political games.


I also see other major problems with the Kansanmarkka project.

1) It was not explained very well, if at all. How does it work on theoretical level? How does it work in practice? Who will accept this currency, and when would that be? Mr. Pietila's original post to this thread is the most comprehensive post on the topic, and as you can see it's not that detailed either. The website was bafflingly vague.

2) Who's behind it? Who backs it up? Apart from the shady and/or controversial alt-right figures, there seems to be a fairly unknown bloke living in Estonia. And even that's not in the official literature, but some forum threads if you dig deep enough.

3) Even people who share some of the same political views as the early proponents saw Kansanmarkka as a scam of some sort. Mr. de Wit is quite well-known as well, but his reputation isn't good even in the "alt-right" circles.

4) The launch event felt like a complete joke. They gave what's basically a drink voucher to some random people so that they can get something from the bar.

5) The site and project was hastily coded on PHP/MySQL and some free templates. There's an amusing thread on a Finnish forum in which they login to the system with completely bogus information, notice that there's a button to create arbitrary amounts of money, and start transferring that to each other becoming billionaires in the process. And this was just days before the project launch.


Sell a silver coin, and people get the inherent value (even if it's scrap silver). Promote a crypto currency, and it's going to be much harder - but you can still explain the mathematical basis on a layman level.

Create a currency that's purely based on speculative future value, tie in an opaque entity that "prints" arbitrary number of these "coins", demand that the stocks of this entity can be bought with this speculative currency, create a convoluted multi-level structure for both the stocks and people involved, and indirectly tie the value of the currency to a literal computer game (as far as I can understand). Explain the background in secret to your chosen group, wax poetic about monetary reform in public, and promote the whole thing via sources that very few people trust or even listen to. Selling this is to a broader audience would be an impossible task. Most people would just write it off as a scam.

A forum user with a nick "LeaveEuro", who attended the launch event, summed this up in Oct 2016 (a rough translation):
"Makes no sense whatsoever. Extremely disorganized, everyone involved has a very questionable reputation, and I don't think that Pietilä nor anyone else involved have any competence to run the technical aspects of the system. As far as I know the 'central bank' has been hacked couple of times already, and participant's names were published because of this. Not even basic stuff like a reasonable level of privacy were taken in account."


In conclusion:
- I don't know if Mr. Pietila is a crypto genius, but he's obviously not a master strategist. You have to see outside of your bubble to achieve any real-world change. Couple of political activists just saw it as an opportunity to make a feeble statement.

- It's not Mr. Pietila's project that's problematic to the establishment. Mr. Janitskin's publication is a much more potent problem, but even that's might not be popular enough to pose real danger to the powers-that-be.

- It's understandable for Mr. Pietila to see many events as a conspiracy. It's easy to see why he doesn't want to stay in Finland. Given his background, projects and proclamations his decision to be a king in virtual world also makes sense - real-world revolution is near impossible to trigger.

- No matter what perspective you take it's hard to see how Kansanmarkka could've succeeded. The implementation was inept, it was secretive in the wrong parts, it was apparently meant to be controlled by one party, and in it was tied to some of the most notorious figures of recent times.

- Saying that I don't understand the genius of this project would be a fair assessment, but then again - neither did anyone else.