Cross-posting this from the Economic Devastation thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg10737131#msg10737131

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: (idiot Armstrong): One-world reserve currency will cause all  nations to fail
From:    iamback
Date:    Wed, March 11, 2015 9:54 am
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
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http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/10/the-one-world-currency-not-arriving-voluntarily/

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong, do you believe there is a conspiracy to create a one world currency to which the central banks ascribe to? ANSWER: No. That is thrown around by the real conspiracy theorists who see everything as a giant planned plot form people who are actually in control of something. They cannot see that this does not need to be some giant conspiracy to end-up there with some one-world government [Typo: he meant reserve 'currency' as he has often argued the former is impractical and the latter is inevitable]...since no government will surrender sovereignty to some mysterious all powerful elite group. We are headed into a one-world currency not by design and certainly not willingly, but rather by necessity for economic reasons not political. How can anyone in their right mind argue there is a collective plot for the world to move in harmony to a one-world currency under a one-world government? This is power and politics we are talking about. This is like a two-year-old refusing to share a toy. <--- Larry Summers works for the global elite!

Armstrong, if the global elite do not benefit from a one-world reserve currency with one central bank (such as the World Bank where Larry Summers used to be their Chief Economist), then please explain to us (the 63,000 reads of my writings) why the banksters don't benefit from central bank ZIRP and QE now??

You have painted yourself into a logical corner. On the one hand you explain how the banksters are the only ones benefiting from the QE:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/10/negative-interest-rates-brain-dead-thinking-that-will-implode-the-world/

...the banks did not lend and instead they went to the Fed and demanded they be paid interest on excess reserves. The Fed complied and pays them 0.25% for excess reserves. The banks can pay ZERO and make money without risk and use the balance for trading.

This entire exercise is brain-dead and it will not end very nicely. All they are doing is wiping out pension funds and the elderly. All those years of advice save for retirement are proven to be total bullshit when banks can convince governments that people should be paying them for the privilege to trade wildly with their money. What a deal. Thank you Larry [Summers].

...moving to negative interest rate just because the former Goldman Sachs boy running the ECB is moving to negative rates thanks to Larry Summers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxOUyPKA_vg

...why do we borrow? And a subtle thing happened when we went to the floating exchange rate [in 1971]; before in the '60s if you went to the bank you had E Bonds or whatever and ... said I want to borrow against my savings in government E Bonds, they'd say, "No". It was illegal. And banks were not allowed to lend on government debt. That was correct in the sense you could say it was less inflationary to borrow than to print [i.e. difference between dropping money from banks to (government) borrowers versus Ben Bernanke's famous phrase "dropping cash from helicopters"]. But in '71 that was removed, so if you want to trade futures, you put your money in T-bills and post it as collateral. So now debt has simply become a new way of printing money that pays interest [to the banks!] and we don't understand what we've done so the national debt ... is really just money that is paying interest [to the banksters!] ... the interest payments are about 70% of the total national debt ... and that is why the system will collapse [when interest rates rise] ... in the USA if we had just printed the money [instead of borrowing it into existence from the magic wand of fractional banking], the national debt would only be 40% of what it is today; we are both creating currency and also paying interest on it...

So Armstrong has been pitching this idea that governments could just print the money they need for taxes. So the model he is proposing is where national currencies float against an international reserve currency, so governments can then mess up their own currencies if they wish. He prefer the governments just print the money from their central banks, and the relative success of nations at managing their economic and fiscal policies will determine their relative value of the national currencies relative to the inevitable one-world reserve currency.

But by Armstrong's own admission, trade only accounts for 10% of the world's capital flows and thus the vast majority of the world's wealth will choose the one-world reserve currency as its unit-of-account and thus who ever has their hands on the levers for the debasement and fractional reserves rules of the one-world reserve currency (e.g. the elite who run the World Bank, BIS, IMF, etc..) can then speculate and manipulate the national economies at-will. This will be just Goldman Sachs take over of Europe and Greece but on a global economy-of-scale level.

For analogous reasons as to why the Euro failed, the one-world reserve currency with national government debts denominated in separate currencies will also cause the nations to fail just like Greece did. The bottom line is that who ever controls the reserve currency of the world, holds the power to destroy and enslave the other nations.

Also Armstrong is contradicting himself on claiming above that the impetus for a move to a one-world reserve currency will be only for economic reasons and "not political".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxOUyPKA_vg

...we are going to go to some sort of new international reserve currency because there have been a lot of political problems with it [the dollar, i.e. one nation's debts being financed on the back of the world using that nation's currency as a reserve]...

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/10/the-one-world-currency-not-arriving-voluntarily/

I “believe” we will be forced into that one-world currency because of the collapse of the Euro and the contagion that will impact Japan. It will become the “solution” to hide the default on socialism. We are already in a declining trend since 2007 for all economies outside the USA. The USA is the only thing holding this thing up. When the global economy turns down, watch the finger-pointing.

The Sovereign Debt Crisis will cause the new currency to emerge for this is how they default. I would like to think that our proposal could be usurped and we end the borrowing, which nobody intends to repay anyway. But let’s be realistic. The collapse will be forced upon the world because of the failure of Marxism. That is the key. The very fundamental idea that government is capable of managing the economy.

The elite have planned this out a long time ago. They BIS Basel rounds have been preplanned for a long time and they slowly are increasing the Tier 1 capital requirements on banks. This will force mark-to-market and everything will collapse.

From that political problem, the world will have no choice but to accept a monetary reset, and the only way to get all the nations to agree to a reset will be for the power of the reserve currency to not be held by any one nation.

So that power will be transferred to an international entity. The elite will pretend it is a fair entity that has representation from all the nations, but as always, they will control this institution.

Armstrong wrote the following posts to try to refute what I had written as quoted below.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/11/rothschilds-fact-or-disinformation-to-protect-the-guilty/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/10/the-one-world-currency-not-arriving-voluntarily/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/10/federal-reserve-confusion/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/10/negative-interest-rates-brain-dead-thinking-that-will-implode-the-world/

...This will cause an acceleration of capital flow into the USA, driving the USA stocks to a phase transition bubble near 40,000 by 2017. The Fed will react by raising interest rates, seeing this as an opportunity to unwind their balance sheet and to pretend to be protecting the 99% against the 1% who profit on stocks. (Note Armstrong doesn't seem to understand the Fed will do this because TPTB want the masses to beg for their own demise, its all part of the master plan towards a one-world reserve currency and global Technocracy. Armstrong doesn't understand that at Bilderberg meetings a smaller group of less than a dozen meet to discuss the real plan for the world, he isn't inside the top most circle)

This rise in interest rates will cause the rest of the world (which is short the dollar due to borrowing all the QE which ended up invested outside the USA) to collapse, thus killing the USA exports from both reduced international demand and a stronger dollar.

USA should thus follow into terminal decline in 2017.

Dominoes falling...

It is very sad for me that Armstrong is in bed with the global elite, even if he doesn't realize it.

Of course the global elite don't control destiny. Human nature is in control. But the global elite are indeed playing their role as handed to them on a silver platter by human nature.

Instead of playing into the elite's goals with his Solutions Conference. Armstrong as a programmer should be helping us to create crypto-currency solutions.

Specifically the way to counter the worse effects of the one-world currency are to study my writings about the Knowledge Age which were linked from the opening post of this now 45 page forum thread.

You will probably need a week or two of studying the thread slowly.

I will be the first to admit I needed a week to fully absorb the following works of AnonyMint.

The Rise of Knowledge
Understand Everything Fundamentally

Together these are quite simply the most insightful piece of economic theory I have ever read.

If the author is right and I think he is we are all in the midst of a tragedy of epic proportions.  It is sad unstoppable and will devastate the lives of much of humanity.

The fundamental theme is summarized in my latter essay about "Thought Isn't Fungible":

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Thought_Isn%27t_Fungible

The Industrial Age relied on large economies-of-scale for manufacturing, which meant that fixed capital investments and NAV calculations sufficed for investment. The world was structured around a fixed return on capital model. This meant that large capital could find economies-of-scale for investment.

The Knowledge Age destroys all that! Big passive capital becomes dumb and impotent. Active capital (actual knowledge) is required in the Knowledge Age.

Thus those who invest in the reserve currency unit-of-account are in a dying paradigm. That one-world currency and eventual failure of the nations into a one-world government will be paradigm of death and eugenics (exactly as predicted in the Bible).

What is rising to take its place is knowledge based currencies where the unit-of-account can be pegged to the one-world reserve currency at a carrying cost by employing options to stabilize the pegged proxy unit. Since Knowledge Age workers will generate orders-of-magnitude higher ROI than fixed capital investment models (i.e. debt models) in the one-world system, the Knowledge Age workers can easily ignore this carrying cost as insignificant.

This is the mechanism by which the Knowledge Age will conquer the one-world reserve currency.

Good day. Armstrong stop being a dinosaur and give me your damn phone number so we can talk.

Combine these two:

a) https://blockchain.info/api/api_receive
b) http://www.bitcoininsanity.com/   or   https://www.bitin.co/buy

Therefor I can issue the customer a bitcoin address, which they must MANUALLY copy+paste to purchase some BTC using their credit card (paypal, etc) which is then all automated from that point forward, except the customer must MANUALLY return to the ecommerce site and their payment will be typically be confirmed within Bitcoin's 10 minutes for 1 confirmation. (note they could also pay directly from any BTC they already have, for those rarer customers that do own BTC)

The downside is the user has to copy+paste a BTC address to another website, and then manually navigate back to the ecommerce site and wait 10 - 30 minutes for confirmation.

I did email the following companies to ask if they can setup more seamless integration and am waiting any response but appears they are not responsive:

http://www.bitcoininsanity.com/

https://www.bitin.co/buy

Does any one have a way to accomplish a more seamless integration so that naive customers don't get lost? Ideally what should happen is I use the blockchain.info API to generate a new BTC address and the customer should be automatically redirected to a page where they can pay with a credit card to buy BTC which is sent to that BTC address (the address automatically set for the customer), then after the credit card transaction is initiated (and without waiting for the block chain confirmation and without waiting for the credit card processing company to do all their manual verification, e.g. without waiting for them to complete a request for scan of id or phone callback), the customer should be immediately returned automatically to the ecommerce site, so the ecommerce site knows that customer has initiated the transaction and the ecommerce site will know it is waiting for the blockchain.info API callback after the BTC has been sent and the block chain makes one confirmation.

The point of returning the customer automatically and immediately to the ecommerce site is because many virtual goods are essentially cost-free, so the ecommerce site may choose to deliver the virtual goods immediately (e.g. a online dating site membership or download software subscription) and rescind the virtual good later if confirmation fails. In other words, chargebacks are an acceptable cost in return for the advantage of giving the good customers immediate seamless, automated access.

Without this, Bitcoin will never be widely used for ecommerce!!!

I am so surprised that no one has done this yet!!!

We've got to get millions of new merchants to accept BTC. And millions of new customers to learn that their merchant does. This is how you do it!!! The ecommerce site can also accept direct BTC transfers for those who already have BTC (which is the vast minority right now), so this will drive millions of people into the ecosystem.


What is the advantage over accepting credit cards directly via Paypal or Moneybookers (skrill)? Do you have to ask?! Don't you know about unexpected holdbacks, account freezes, and other bullshit when dealing with those. And also to get paid in BTC and hold balances in BTC. And also because the above method in theory doesn't require the small merchant provide any documentation and KYC/AML charades.


I have an immediate need for such a service. If anyone can provide the service, I will use it and pay you.

[sharing a common unit-of-account across multiple currencies]

This is a discussion I started in the Skycoin thread. I am creating a separate thread to continue this discussion.

...

I formerly posted under the usernames AnonyMint, TheFascistMind, and UnunoctiumTestacles (and a couple others I don't recall). I have particularly relevant post in the On the Longest Chain Rule thread.

...

4. If I was improving Tor, I'd make it high latency and make is more secure, not less secure for higher bandwidth.

Time is of the essence. I am interested in working with highly talented authors, but unfortunately philosophical differences and differences in understanding how to succeed usually preclude such close working relationships.

I think this is too much of me spamming Skycoin's thread. They have been enormously patient with my too numerous posts in their thread. Unless the developers engage me in further discussion, I kindly ask that any further discussion directed at me be move to another thread. Simply provide a link here or in PM please. Feel free to create a discussion thread.

In our case, I have proposed a platform for competing currencies. One of the key elements of my proposal is to have the ability to purchase a unit in any currency that tracks (via options betting) any unit-of-account (e.g. USD or Bitcoin) that you desire. Thus you no longer are tied to the speculative value of the competing currencies if you don't desire to be, and thus there is no longer a need for the market to choose a "winner take all" because everyone can vote for the currency they feel is best managed while sharing a common unit-of-account across multiple currencies. This is the paradigm in money that has never been tried in the history of mankind.

What would the "common unit-of-account" be? Would it be a common coin to the platform, like Ripple or Bitshares, issued in a private offering and subsequent ICO? Or would it be distributed with some sort of proof of work? It could be a basket of assets, like shares in a hedge fund.

None of those. I had already mentioned "option bets".

My idea is decentralized option bets, with two parties taking opposing positions on the move of the currency relative to the specified unit-of-account exchange rate. Leverage relative to exchange rate movement could vary for different bets. When the currency declines in value (an asymmetry in the opposing risks), then the difference has to be taken from the margin posted to make the 3rd party holder of the unit-of-account constant in value. There needs to be auto-settlement so that if the posted margin is depleted, the unit-of-account contract is settled instantly. Afaics, there could be built automated bots which settle and recontract the unit with a new free market bet with new margins posted.

The free market of bid and ask should determine the bets. So the asymmetry will be factored in by the free market of bid and ask.

In other words, I propose an option system where there is no centralized counter party risk. The protocol makes sure settlement occurs before margin is depleted.

We could create a common trading platform for all these competing currencies, i.e. decentralized exchanges with the appropriate logic and APIs. In essense, Skycoin and some of jl777's work for NXT are mentioning some of these similar ideas about decentralized exchanges and platforms for multiple currencies, but afaics they have missed slightly the key insights of what we really need. (Btw, I am still in communication with jl777, but I am not aligned with him and these ideas do not originate from discussion with him)

I am not an expert on options, so perhaps my idea is flawed?

Afair, the BitShares BitUSD functioned differently but I don't recall all the details. (I might go look up the details and edit this post later)

Edit#1: the flaw in my idea is that no one will buy these options because someone else can offer another set of options with the same features that do not have the asymmetric loses (given to the holder of the unit-of-account when the exchange rate declines). The holder would need to pay some cost for the others to take on this asymmetric risk. The holder would have to weigh this cost against the risk (cost) of holding the unit-of-account in its normal form, e.g. USD in a bank. Note we are moving towards negative interest rates so it will actually cost money to store your fiat in a bank or sovereign bonds.


Edit#2: silly me. All I am really advocating is that users can buy puts. The standard models for options apply. The carrying cost of the put will be relative to the volatility of the exchange rate. I think the Black–Scholes model applies.

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/derivative-securities/Black-Scholes/v/implied-volatility

Edit#3: Okay I see that what we originally told Daniel Larimer (bytemaster) in this forum in 2013 was finally accepted as reality and so they adjusted their design to use a price feed:

http://docs.bitshares.org/content/price_stability.html

So the buyer of the unit-of-account is essentially buying a put (the right to sell his currency for a constant price relative to the unit-of-account) and the other party (is not a short seller!) is buying a call, i.e. is paid a carrying cost for offering to buy that currency at the strike price. A decentralized exchange would match buyers of these puts and calls, where the bid and ask would be for the carrying costs. If the current exchange price is the implied strike price, bids and asks would need to be updated as often as the exchange price changes (but this is conceptually no different than when strike prices are constant and bid and asks change constantly as the market price changes). There would be different contracts for different expirations.

So all BitAssets are is an attempt at a decentralized options market. But it is only for their currency and not a platform for competing currencies. And they are using a single price feed voted on by consensus, whereas I proposed that there be different contracts for different price feeds so that each contract can use a different price feed server (more degrees-of-freedom).

Edit#4: there is another wrinkle that can be considered. It is possible to give some of the upside to the buyer of the unit-of-account, so they have no risk to the downside, but retain some of the upside appreciation if the currency they hold  appreciates. But this will increase the carrying cost, i.e. the price the buyer needs to pay for the unit-of-account insurance. Rather the buyer could also obtain the same effect by holding some portion in the unit-of-account (without upside) and some in the uninsured holding of the currency.

Edit#5: the market for buyers of such unit-of-account contracts are people who want to diversify their (e.g. USD) holdings into crypto-currency without the volatility risk, i.e. they want the advantages of anonymity, autonomy, instant transactions, without the volatility of crypto-currency. Or for example, you want to invest in Bitcoin, but you like the anonymity and instant transactions of an altcoin, so you can get both for a carrying cost, where the carrying cost is related to the volatility of that altcoin relative to the unit-of-account chosen. Thus altcoins can compete to gain marketshare and thus less volatility.

Bottom line is competing currencies as true decentralization and more degrees-of-freedom instead of "one size fits all, one winner forced on everyone".

...

Taleb's Anti-fragility (i.e. autonomy) is why decentralized consensus is not decentralized

Thus, I want to make one more concise attempt to convince the developers that decentralized consensus is a lie, and that the only true decentralization arises from a plurality of competing choices.

In essence, all the arguments for a decentralized consensus remaining stable (resilient) against centralization are the stance that the majority (of nodes or participants) will "vote" (or "follow") for honesty over malfeasance. Even skycoin's prior post in essence makes that analogous argument in support of the robustness of the proposed Obelisk consensus algorithm in the worst case scenarios.

The problem with consensus is that it is a "winner take all" paradigm, i.e. by definition there is no way for a minority opinion to be heard. Thus the minority can not act on its wisdom and must instead follow the ("Too Big To Fail") herd. So for example, if a minority sees that the consensus is being gamed some how, and wants to break away (vote with their feet) they can not. Rather they have to try to prove to the majority what is happening and get the majority motivated to act. Doesn't that sound a lot like what we do now trying to convince our relatives of the problems with malfeasance in central banking, politics, etc and instead they either ignore us or they adopt Marxist objectives which further the concentration of wealth, e.g. "blame it all on the 1%, while we demand a government that gives us everything for free because we are poor and redistribution is justified!".

Whereas when there are competing choices, this is truly decentralization because the minority can autonomously break away to a choice that performs better, and the minority becomes more profitable ("smaller things grow faster, saplings grow to trees but trees don't grow to the moon"). For example right now you want to be discarding your Western citizenship and attaining citizenship in the small state of Singapore.

In our case, I have proposed a platform for competing currencies. One of the key elements of my proposal is to have the ability to purchase a unit in any currency that tracks (via options betting) any unit-of-account (e.g. USD or Bitcoin) that you desire. Thus you no longer are tied to the speculative value of the competing currencies if you don't desire to be, and thus there is no longer a need for the market to choose a "winner take all" because everyone can vote for the currency they feel is best managed while sharing a common unit-of-account across multiple currencies. This is the paradigm in money that has never been tried in the history of mankind.

I also proposed that fundamental building block is a secure communication network with hidden servers. Tor is broken. From this communication network, we can actually drive the demand for a cryptocurrency far beyond Bitcoin's current markets. I have vaguely alluded to the details of that and withheld perhaps some details.

For example, let's say a cryptocurrency was run by one group behind a hidden server. For as long as they publish all of the transactions and ledger then it can be verified whether they are honest, the same as Bitcoin's peers verify. If that central server is dishonest, the users can move their value out of that currency. But the users holding the pegged unit-of-account lose no value in doing so. The options traders take all that risk and will be the ones who predict in advance which currencies are well managed.  (btw, this also resolves many of the fundamental issues that plague Ethereum's designs). Even if the controllers of a centralized server tried to block all transactions and lock up the value, they could only succeed in destroying all the value in the coin and thus destroying their own power and reputation. Thus options traders would seek to verify the safeguards in place for the management of the currency.

This is very similar to the way decentralized consensus works in that if some nefarious group tries to take control of the consensus network, then the majority is expected to recognize this and fork away from that. The salient difference is that in my proposal of multiple competing currencies, it is actually very feasible for the minority to vote with their feet. It is an entirely autonomous action (i.e. it maximizes degrees-of-freedom)[1]! No amazing technical assumptions are required. They simply sell the coin that has problems. And the users who are holding pegged units-of-account don't incur any loses.

And there is nothing in my proposal that says the competing currencies can be PoW, PoS, Obelisk, consensus currencies. My proposal sits at a higher-level abstraction.

For me this is a no brainer clear direction. It beats the pants off anything else out there in the crypto world right now.

[1]

CoinJoin doesn't scale and/or it leaks anonymity (e.g. to the masternodes). It is not an autonomous block chain mixing thus it is inferior to one ring signatures. One time ring signatures can be implemented to be prune-able. ...IMO you are entirely missing the point... Degrees-of-freedom and innovation is where all prosperity originates. Inflation and deflation have nearly nothing to do with it, because innovation is: http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Knowledge_Anneals unexpected random chaotic fitness created from multitudes of random path dependencies that can only exist in the bottom-up free market And innovation far outstrips the factors you are modeling. I would like to get to the point of how to create decentralized money. I believe that is only achieved through a paradigm that enables multiple competing currencies, not through a winner take-all collective consensus (which I believe will always be a lie about decentralization). Specifically I have asserted (as well did Satoshi and Moldberg) that a widely adopted unit-of-account is the paramount factor in money (so that volatility is not a factor). Domestic businesses don't worry about the international dollar exchange rate. They can plan unfettered by that volatility. All your top-down, cathedral models won't help you. Enable the free market to experiment and innovate. Don't try to proclaim you know the perfect design for all. http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Knowledge_Anneals Knowledge Anneals Unsophisticated thinkers have an incorrect understanding of knowledge creation, idolizing a well-structured top-down sparkling academic cathedral of vastly superior theoretical minds. Rather knowledge primary spawns from accretive learning due to unexpected random chaotic fitness created from multitudes of random path dependencies that can only exist in the bottom-up free market. Top-down systems are inherently fragile because they overcommit to egregious error (link to Taleb's simplest summary of the math). Given Kurzweil's sensationalized magnum opus is the technological singularity, it is surprising that he is apparently not well studied in the field of social knowledge formation. Update: you are modeling the factors that were more paramount in the Industrial Age where fixed capital investment was a limiting factor on innovation. We are entering the Knowledge Age where all one needs is a computer and their mind.

Please note that I did not initiate this. Some others are always pinging me to do something about the state-of-affairs in the crypto world. I guess I got to the point where I just decided to do a brain dump in public of what I think is important.

we are doomed, iamback got ignored

Please.

It took him over a year to even acknowledge that he was aware of skycoin, let alone have in-depth conversations and possibly working together all of a sudden now.

I'd have brushed him off too.

You've got that backasswards. I didn't need to come here. I was asked to.

And now I am leaving. Not because Skycoin didn't say "how hi" when I said "jump" but because he is already invested in his current design. And I would be doing something different if I did an altcoin.

I think we would waste each other's time talking. I am don't want people pressuring Skycoin. That is not how working relationships are formed.

Again my best wishes to everyone. You have every right to proceed and I wish you well in your endeavors.