Economic Totalitarianism

[trollercoaster]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/swedens-central-bank-cuts-main-interest-rate-further-below-zero-1455180702

[1714057188]

1714057188

[Anddos]

Do you really expect a presidential candidate to actually come with useful ideas to help the people? That's just naive.

[hdbuck]

The 8 Principles Of The Newer Normal:

Is this what we have to look forward to?

1. Ban cash
2. All-digital currency
3. No more crime
4. -10% rates
5. 70% deposit tax
6. 20% "Bail-In" Charge
7. You're broke
8. Unicorns


Because less (freedom) is more, right?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-12/8-principles-newer-normal


inb4 bitcoin

[trollercoaster]

Haha yeah, and watch everything come to a screeching halt 

[RealBitcoin]

The 8 Principles Of The Newer Normal:

Is this what we have to look forward to?

1. Ban cash
2. All-digital currency
3. No more crime
4. -10% rates
5. 70% deposit tax
6. 20% "Bail-In" Charge
7. You're broke
8. Unicorns


Because less (freedom) is more, right?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-12/8-principles-newer-normal


inb4 bitcoin

Deposit tax? Lol why?

Isnt't it supposed to be withdraw tax instead?

Banks love when you deposit money, but they hate when you withdraw (because it destabilizes their ponzi)

[trollercoaster]

http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/scihub-tears-down-academias-illegal-copyright-paywalls/

[TPTB_need_war]

Patriotism in the USA (strange to see people chanting "USA!, USA!, USA!"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ-QceqDll4

[trollercoaster]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html

[TPTB_need_war]

Of course Bitcoin is already broken, because the Chinese mining cartel controls 65% of the hashrate and they lied about the Great Firewall of China being a problem[1] because they really want to veto block size increases so they can maximize their profits via spiraling transactions fees which I predicted in 2013. And remember my point that on the next block reward halving (this year I think) then the lowest cost miners will survive and the marginal miners will lose profitability and thus China's 65% share will increase significantly. I also believe Chinese miners are operating with near 0 cost electricity with a "wink and a handshake" charging the electricity cost to the collective society.

[1]	We know they are lying because they can put a pool abroad and send only a block hash across the GFW thus bandwidth is not an issue. They are clearly lying!

[OROBTC]

...

Maybe ZIRP and NIRP deserve its (their) own thread, but individual ("guerrilla") level work-around suggestions to avoid getting NIRP-ed might be welcome.  If they escalate their "War on Cash", then other solutions for us are needed.

A unusual suggestion (for larger-scale wealth preservation in a NIRP Environment) would be collecting Rolex watches!   

[TPTB_need_war]

Until now, all crypto coins have been marketed to investors.

The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation.

Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.

Bitcoin the better gold.

Word.

This redudancy + partionning paradox is extremely hard to understand for a newbie who's native language is not even english...

It would be really appreciated if someone could rephrase this paradox summing up with easy terms what is the issue and its consequencies

I am years ago of your computer science knowledge and I may stay years ago of your knowledge in this field for the rest of my life since it isn't my study field.

Thank you in advance.  

Hopefully r0ach and others can offer their laymen's summaries.

What you need to know is that Ethereum as it is currently designed can't scale just as Bitcoin can't scale, but the level of scaling which the current Ethereum can do is much less than even Bitcoin's current limitation because verification/validation of Serpent scripts takes more resources than verification/validation of ECDSA signatures.

For both Bitcoin and Ethereum, this is not just an issue of block size limitation. The issue is that in order to scale, the mining becomes more centralized. I think you will should note that Bitcoin and all other major coins are entirely centralized already and on the precipice of failure (all of them! study my links!).

Thus Ethereum proposed Casper which is a design that attempts to use sharding (a.k.a. partitions) to improve scaling decentralized. But I explained in this thread, that can't work. To reduce electricity consumption, Ethereum also proposed PoS-like consensus-by-betting with forfeitable deposits. PoS has known failure modes that violate Nash equilibrium.

So the point of all this is that Ethereum and all the rest of the crypto coins have not yet solved the fundamental issue of decentralized consensus.

If you want to read a theoretical discussion of why, I did that too.

Okay that is enough from me. Adios.

[RealBitcoin]

...

Maybe ZIRP and NIRP deserve its (their) own thread, but individual ("guerrilla") level work-around suggestions to avoid getting NIRP-ed might be welcome.  If they escalate their "War on Cash", then other solutions for us are needed.

A unusual suggestion (for larger-scale wealth preservation in a NIRP Environment) would be collecting Rolex watches!   

Maybe a basket of top tier altcoins?

Analyze altcoins with small volatility, and build up a basket of them in relative % of allocation by their volatility.

Excluding new ones like ETH and other suspicious ones like Riple.

That should be a good idea isnt it? (even for big whales)

[TPTB_need_war]

...

Maybe ZIRP and NIRP deserve its (their) own thread, but individual ("guerrilla") level work-around suggestions to avoid getting NIRP-ed might be welcome.  If they escalate their "War on Cash", then other solutions for us are needed.

A unusual suggestion (for larger-scale wealth preservation in a NIRP Environment) would be collecting Rolex watches!   

Maybe a basket of top tier altcoins?

Analyze altcoins with small volatility, and build up a basket of them in relative % of allocation by their volatility.

Excluding new ones like ETH and other suspicious ones like Riple.

That should be a good idea isnt it? (even for big whales)

...

Pretty much every alt coin is all about the hype. What alt is actually used or useful currently?

There is no altcoin that exists which has 10,000 regular users who not also investors.

Ethereum $400 million market cap for shit that doesn't scale and has no adoption.

Of course everything is about mining the speculators, because you all just chase scams all day.

[RealBitcoin]

...

I specifically omitted ethereum, we know how that shit goes.

Most altcoins are unstable, we know that especially new hyped ones.


But there are a few ones who have became stable, or atleast established.

Look at DOGE or LTC, we know that no matter how silly or stupid they look, they will be around for a long time.

People like silly things, and I would invest in those, because they earned the reputation in these years.



As for stuff like ETH? C`mon, those guys were almost bankrupt and only ask for more funding.

[TPTB_need_war]

This really is a pointless

Only to someone who isn't paying attention to what is really going in the world that is oblivious to most (see below).

Whereas, it has helped me greatly to decide how to launch a coin wherein it will be legal every where. Which is very important compared to those coins which may run into trouble later, such as Ethereum and Zcash (assuming Zcash continues with their plan to have miners act as money transmitters to the foundation).

Note the issues I raised in this thread may not apply for those coins that never reach some level of millions of adoption, if they are no threat to the powers-that-be and haven't caused anger among investors.

You're trying to second guess what regulators will do in each country by reference to America?

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/taxes/2017-the-year-from-political-hell/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/2017-is-coming-and-the-g20-has-agreed-to-share-all-info-on-everyone/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/swiss-to-give-up-everything-everybody/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/western_europe/britain-to-ban-any-encryption-that-prevents-the-taxman-from-exposing-british-citizens/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/western_europe/uk-to-ban-whatsapp-messaging-service/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/larry-summers-calls-to-end-100-billis-here-comes-the-totalitarian-state/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/taxes/the-new-age-of-economic-totalitarianism-the-london-meeting-to-end-currency/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/nsa-blames-snowden-for-paris/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/nsa-a-tax-economics-espionage-agency/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/category/world-news/taxes/
http://www.nestmann.com/
http://www.nestmann.com/best-place-to-launder-money-surprisingly
http://www.nestmann.com/theyre-coming-for-your-cash

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-has-made-obedience-to-the-state-a-game-a6783841.html
http://theantimedia.org/china-just-launched-the-most-frightening-game-ever-and-soon-it-will-be-mandatory/

At G20 last year, all governments agreed to report everyone everywhere to their host countries for tax purposes. The hunt for taxes is destroying the world economy at a staggering rapid pace and this is far worse than even I had anticipated when we first forecast BIG BANG would hit 2015.75 back in 1985. Here is a email a non-US citizen received from his trust company in Malta.

“The reporting charges have arisen due to the implementation of new U.S legislation known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (“FATCA”) which has been introduced as part of a global initiative to create an International tax reporting regime. Together with the majority of the World’s major trading nations, the Maltese Government has entered into an agreement with the US Authorities to implement FATCA legislation in Malta. The legislation has required all Trust Companies in Malta to evaluate all structures operated on behalf of clients and categorise them according to detailed rules set out in the FATCA legislation. This categorisation process is not just limited to structures operated on behalf of US clients, or clients holding US assets but has to include all clients and structures irrespective of where clients and their structures are domiciled. We can advise you that <Name> has taken extensive legal and tax advice regarding the categorisation of clients and which information should be reported according to various trigger reporting events since our accounting and client management systems have to be tailored to supply relevant information on a per client and <Name> entity basis to the Malta Authorities who then report directly to the IRS.

Consistent with many other Trust Companies a decision has been taken to pass on some of the costs of this work to client structures for whom we act. Accordingly a December invoice will be issued for a one off fee of £250 that will be described in the invoice as a FATCA classification fee.“

You need to understand that the dollar will grow stronger as we collapse starting in earnest in 2017 and this will place the global financial leverage in the hands of the USA so it can force FATCA on the rest of the world while the rest of the world collapse they too will hunt down "tax evaders":

The dollar rally and the devaluation of the yuan is not a fluke and it most certainly is not a one-time event. The dollar declined against the yuan for 19 years during the same timing that saw gold decline from 1980 to 1999. The major low on an annual closing basis at 2013 and 2014 was an outside reversal to the upside for the dollar. The Yearly Bullish Reversal stands at 683 and technical resistance stands at 658. The dollar filled the gap that existed prior to 1994 and is yet another confirmation that the dollar rally is underway.

Yes, the world trade is contracting and will get much worse after October. Governments are destroying the world economy on their hunt for taxation. Politicians are hunting money as if it were some sport and are undoing everything that was built postwar. Numerous reports are coming in to us about people traveling on trains and having their bags searched for money in Europe. The hunt for cash is wiping out the world economy. Americans are being thrown out of banks and mutual funds everywhere. FATCA has forced Americans to repatriate dollars. The only real Americans who can operate overseas are now established multinational companies. Small companies cannot expand from the United States nor can individuals send money anywhere.

Add to FATCA the problem in Europe and we see capital still pouring into the USA from both China and Europe. The real estate cycle has/or will peak with this turning point around the world from Switzerland, Britain, Canada, to Asia right down into India and Australia. We are plagued by politicians who have absolutely no clue how to run an economy and it is now all about them retaining power virtually everywhere we look.

The dollar rally is unfolding despite the fact people do not understand why. They look only at the USA debt and assume the dollar must crash, when in fact, the problem we face is on a global scale and $18 trillion in U.S. debt is simply not the large enough for international capital to hide. The future is going to be anything but a textbook move. This is why this year’s World Economic Conference is going to be a real eye opener.

[OROBTC]

...

Gold will work, of course, as a Store of Value as long as you do not have to board the plane with it.

US resident citizens can always choose platinum if worried about the TSA upon exit or a general gold confiscation (unlikely IMO, but possible).  Silver of course would be free of that confiscation threat, but it is bulky. 

Or saffron?  (Worth more than its weight in gold I have read)

[TPTB_need_war]

...

Gold will work, of course, as a Store of Value as long as you do not have to board the plane with it.

US resident citizens can always choose platinum if worried about the TSA upon exit or a general gold confiscation (unlikely IMO, but possible).  Silver of course would be free of that confiscation threat, but it is bulky.  

Or saffron?  (Worth more than its weight in gold I have read)

Sorry I think this is ill informed advice. Any thing of value will be confiscated at transportation hubs, borders, checkpoints, routine inspections by police, etc..

And I am not convinced it will hold its value.

Either we move too far into a Dark Age, and gold loses its value relative to food. Remember Armstrong has explained why this happens throughout history of man.

Or we move to the Knowledge Age and gold loses its value relative to the crypto currency I am creating.

Or maybe both!

[TPTB_need_war]

I told you so...

Recently the European Commission (EC) announced plans to apply the EU anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing regulations (the Fourth AML Directive or 4AMLD) to digital currency exchanges and possibly wallet providers.

This move is a part of the EC’s broadening action against terrorist financing.

But while this news comes as no surprise, another EC proposal, far less publicized and somewhat overlooked, has the potential to revolutionize the current state of affairs in digital currency regulation in the EU.

The EC announced that it will consider applying the licensing and supervision rules of the Payment Services Directive (PSD; a new version of which, 2PSD, has been adopted in 2015) to digital currency exchanges in order to "promote better control and understanding of the market".

PSD is one of the cornerstones of the EU single market for payments. It sets out rules for regulated payment services and contains a catalogue of such services.

Firms which render payment services have to comply with many regulations, including licensing and supervision rules, which now the EC apparently also intends to apply to digital currency exchanges.

Such a plan seems to be sensible. It is clear that there are two legal acts in the EU that would be well-suited for regulating cryptocurrencies: PSD and another related directive, the E-Money Directive (EMD). Works on the new '3EMD' are now under way, so some changes could be introduced there as well.
Revising basic assumptions

What matters, however, is what the current PSD regulatory methodology looks like.

A crucial piece of the PSD is the definition of "funds", which so far has included only cash, bank (scriptural) money and e-money (regulated by the EMD). Cryptocurrencies do not fall into any of those categories – a fact confirmed by the European Central Bank (ECB) and others.

It follows that, for the EC, digital currency exchanges would be best covered by some provisions of the PSD, although in the current form it does not apply to digital currencies at all.

It therefore appears that regulatory change might have to be much deeper than merely adding a few provisions extending the scope of licensing and supervision regulations on digital currency exchanges.

New regulations would probably have to revise some of the basic assumptions and concepts of the PSD, including definitions of "funds", "payment transaction" or "payment institution".
How should stakeholders react?

It is difficult to evaluate the EC's plan, since at the moment it is extremely general and vague. However, very likely it will open the door for the introduction of cryptocurrencies to the EU payment services regulations.

Various proposals may emerge afterwards, from cautious and restrained ones to those proposing comprehensive and broad regulation.

Firms that may be affected by any regulatory change should monitor developments closely and be ready to react.

[trollercoaster]

http://www.coindesk.com/international-securities-regulators-commit-to-blockchain-research-effort

http://www.coindesk.com/uk-financial-regulator-blockchain-space-grow

http://time.com/money/4233007/mastercard-selfie-authentication/

[RealBitcoin]

http://www.coindesk.com/international-securities-regulators-commit-to-blockchain-research-effort

Fucking hypocrytes, they want to regulate BTC in europe very harshly, but on the other hand they fund the "blockchain" bullshit of the banks.

Any logic in this?