Martin Armstrong Discussion

[realr0ach]

IMO @sidhujag is vindicated on his characterization of @r0ach being disingenuous in discussion. I tried my best. Respectful disagreement is acceptable.

What took you so long lol. I totally agree with you on your points you are able to frame the discussion very well. I put the pest on waivers on aswell.

And another Sidhujag lie by pretending Anonymint engages in "respectful disagreement" virtually any amount of time.  I would estimate that percentage at somewhere between 25% to 50% at the most if you want to be really generous.  And that is pretty much global consensus of the entire forum with most people probably claiming 0%.  If you're going to make some kind of claim on a topic, please don't choose the absolute most hypocritical one possible.

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[CRED.me]

For our ignored tinfoil hat and his reliance on manipulated “manipulation indicators” for detecting manipulation he alleges exists:

The oldest game in town is manipulating inventories. Commodities can be stored at many places, but only selected facilities are on the reporting list. During the famous Buffet Silver scandal of 1997-1998, to justify taking silver up in price they had to make the inventories appear to decline. The easy way to do that was simple. Buffet bought the silver but in the London market – not COMEX. Thus, the silver was moved from New York to London and then everyone touted silver was in short supply as if it had been consumed like wheat.

The advice I use to provide to Japan to help reduce the trade friction was to buy gold in New York and sell it in London. The trade numbers could care less about the product actually being exported. It will reduce the trade deficit and make it appear that the US exports are rising. It is just an accounting ploy.

Institutions NEED income – and the only way to get income is to lease it [gold] out. But then the gold promoters misunderstand that and see it [the leasing in futures markets] as oppressing gold. They cannot get their mind around other people think differently and have different needs.

There is a difference between institutional and individual investment. Institutions cannot buy gold bullion for they need regular income. Those entities in the business or cannot lend money for interest based upon religion, lease gold to generate income of a fixed asset. This is not some sinister plot.

This is the same nonsense spread about “paper gold” and futures are evil. The futures market has been around since Babylonian days. A farmer has the risk of growing a crop and then not knowing what the price the market will be. He sells his crop for FUTURE delivery. Yes, technically, it does not yet exist. That does not suppress the price. It creates a viable market by eliminate the risk to grow the crop. For a miner, they will not mine even gold unless they know they can sell it yes for paper money.

Leasing gold allows someone to own it and earn money. Otherwise, gold pays no income or interest and would be a dead asset. This is why institutions cannot buy gold for they need income. Many people lease gold to own it but have to have some income from that money. This is not “paper gold” intent upon suppressing the market. Without the futures market, gold would not be traded and it would shrink from any viable international status. It would become indistinguishable from rhodium or another untradable metal.

It is NOT fractional banking that is the problem. Listen to some of these people rant and rave about fractional banking and you see how uneducated they truly are about finance. If you ended this system, the entire world economy would end. All real estate would collapse for how can there be a mortgage? You retirement fund would vanish. Nothing would exist economically. Like paper gold they usually also want to end, you would quickly see gold would lose all value if there is no market to trade. Stocks are more LIQUID than real estate BECAUSE there is a central place to trade. Eliminate “paper gold” and you eliminate the ability to trade and then gold would lose its liquidity and thus its value.

Now let’s talk reality. The Gold backwardation is simply nothing more than the collapse in interest rates as capital lost faith in banks and then the Sovereign Debt Crisis began with Greece in 2010. Much of the liquidity that came to gold in the early years was OPEC money. It had absolutely nothing to do with gold. The problem was OPEC was getting all this cash, but religiously they could not earn interest. Thus, I took clients and showed them if we bought gold and sold it forward we were earning the effective interest rate but it was called the “carrying cost”. Backwardation in this case is not indicative of any shortage whatsoever or a collapse in “trust” of the dollar. The dollar has been rising! Just look at German interest rates on short-term paper went negative by 0.6%. This has NOTHING to do with fiat and people losing faith in paper money –yada, yada, yada. If that were true, interest rates would not COLLAPSE, they would SOAR because people would not trust government bonds and they would have to pay up. The flight to quality would reverse into PRIVATE assets as it did even during the German Hyperinflation.

Gold is a tangible store of wealth to make the transition from the present to the future monetary system. It is not going to $30,000 creating false images of getting rich quick. It is not that “fiat” money always collapses – it does not. If you were waiting for the end of the dollar since 1971, that is more than half your lifetime. Asia has had nothing but fiat monetary systems where the emperor, the hand of God on earth, simply issued a bronze or iron coin and said this is valued at – w,y,z. Regardless of what money has been, it is ALWAYS a confidence game.

Buy gold because it is an INSURANCE policy against the transition. It is distinguished because it is MOVABLE, from classes such as real estate that are IMMOVABLE. The problem emerging with gold is government is out to track every ounce and tax any sale. They are trying to eradicate the underground economy.

Gold is not in permanent backwardation. You obviously never heard of carrying costs that are related to the interest rate. Nothing is EVER permanent. Stop the idiotic explanations. You cannot point to a single relationship in history that is ever permanent except stupidity. Just like the propaganda that silver is suppress and it will soar to 16:1 because that is where it use to be. Good one.

“Isn’t the Comex just a price suppression scheme as the volume is usually 50% to 100% of open interest?” That is up there with communism. We just answered that in the Swiss press that published the Socialists who claim that commodities are higher than they should be because of speculation and therefore all futures markets should be closed to eliminate speculation. This is the pinnacle of pure stupidity. Every study shows that markets reduce volatility and the price of a commodity is stabilized by creating a market. If there was no COMEX, the price of gold would be far less because you could not sell it without a market. I was a market-maker. All the stores buying gold would not have existed if they could not have sold what the bought from the public, someone refined that jewelry, and then resold it into COMEX.

Is there gold in Fort Knox? That question is completely irrelevant. Why? Will it really make a difference? The stories of no gold in the vault are just spun by people so desperate to support a gold bull market it is just crazy. I was given a tour of the NY Fed years ago and there was gold there. The US started going after the Swiss and threatening to seize their assets here in the USA for hiding Americans with assets. Without fanfare, the Swiss quietly took ALL their gold and moved it out of the USA.

[marcus_of_augustus]

hahaha ... roach getting pwnd on monetary science by anonymint!! cryptos brings out all the weirdos that's for sure ... goldbugs actually do not like free markets for money after all, they prefer the rubber glove of gubmint agents from wall st up their backsides.

[CRED.me]

Some of you were asking upthread about RaiBlocks:

RaiBlocks:

RaiBlocks is a highly flawed design that was debunked by experts (including @gmaxwell Gregory Maxwell Core Bitcoin developer) in 2015 as linked below. Heck Vitalik and AnonyMint even helped them think of the name change from Blocklattice to RaiBlocks.

[…]

Does Armstrong read this thread? See his latest blog today quoted below:

Money is an information system that enables cooperation and civilization. The quantity theory of money is wrong, wrong, wrong at many different levels of analysis.

I am most interested in your revisionist view of QTM. You debunk QTM frequently within broader topic discussions, but I’d love for you to address QTM by itself in a historical context.

You're arguing both pro-statist and anti-statist for the same point.

My analysis is like 3D chess. You’re still stuck in one dimensional (one degree-of-freedom) analysis.

It is by no means a one-dimensional economy. This is global and we are all connected.

[Wekkel]

I am confused: is Blocklattice the same as RaiBlocks?

[CRED.me]

I am confused: is Blocklattice the same as RaiBlocks?

Yes afaik it’s the same design. They changed the name based on that post I linked for you where AnonyMint had made them aware of the Rai concept that Vitalik had written about.

Afaics, they’re releasing a design that was thoroughly debunked in order to grab the money from n00b speculators.

[OROBTC]

hahaha ... roach getting pwnd on monetary science by anonymint!! cryptos brings out all the weirdos that's for sure ... goldbugs actually do not like free markets for money after all, they prefer the rubber glove of gubmint agents from wall st up their backsides.

With respect, not all physical gold advocates prefer interference from .gov nor Wall St.  I highly value some some cryptos as well as gold.

Having great respect for free markets is no way incompatible with liking BTC and/or Au.

[CRED.me]

hahaha ... roach getting pwnd on monetary science by anonymint!! cryptos brings out all the weirdos that's for sure ... goldbugs actually do not like free markets for money after all, they prefer the rubber glove of gubmint agents from wall st up their backsides.

With respect, not all physical gold advocates prefer interference from .gov nor Wall St.  I highly value some some cryptos as well as gold.

Having great respect for free markets is no way incompatible with liking BTC and/or Au.

Perhaps his implication was about my (quotes of Armstrong’s) point that all the claims about gold being long-term manipulated to suppress its true value are claims about indicators which can also be manipulated or which have free market justifications for their indications which have nothing to do with suppressing gold. There’s no firm basis to conclude that gold is manipulated long-term, i.e. free markets instead must be assumed. It’s documented (by Armstrong first-hand such as the Buffett case with silver in the late 1990s) that markets can be short-term manipulated wherein the “NY bankers” for example try to trade against their own clients, but this can be to the upside as well as downside and only short-term (as Armstrong has documented and explained).

Your valuation of gold is presumably (given prior statements in this thread) based on the belief that it has always been money and always will be money (i.e. could be handed down to the children and grandchildren as a family heirloom), but that is historically false. Better forms of money come along and render the prior forms useless as money, e.g. sheepskins, shells, slabs of iron/bronze used to all be money. Gold was more compact, transportable and more fungible than the aforementioned antiquated forms of money. Paper money was even more so, but could be created willy-nilly by various nation-state regimes. Now crypto is even more so and adds the inability for any one nation-state to corrupt it’s invariants (e.g. protocol programmed money supply). And I’m (and I presume others are) working on even further improving the decentralized invariance of ledgers. Technology doesn’t stop moving forward just to accommodate old people who still think the world is flat.

If we’re very lucky gold might go to $5000 at most (Bitcoin already raced past gold and is going to a $million by 2024 or so), and then we have to hope that governments won’t target those with large holdings of gold as terrorists (and/or blame them for the financial collapse¹) when they try to sell at that price. If you don't sell such as the peak in 1979/80, then you ride gold down for decades as interest rates peak and a new bond bubble forms. And also I think the next bear market for precious metals will take them down towards irrelevance because of the advent of decentralized ledgers.

It’s just time. Precious metals are nearly finished in human history. To all readers, we’re at the cusp of a major shift in the monetary history of the world. Get on the train or be left behind.

Afaics, all forms of fungible physical money are becoming defunct, including gold. Gold will become just like any other physical asset equivalent to real estate. It will no longer be effectively movable, because no one will be willing to buy it without paying tracked electronic money for it in exchange which of course the governments can then tax, confiscate, and restrict movement same as for real estate. Barter isn’t coming back. Gold will become trinkets for fondling and gazing, like jewelry, gaudy gold trim such as at the Trump executive suites.

1

We are bringing this model back into play because there are rising concerns among our European clients that if they hedge against the decline of the Euro and government bonds in the EU when the collapse unfolds, they will be targeted for undermining the government. The way to avoid this and be “politically correct” traders, is to once again create synthetics correlated with time. With the hostility in Europe eliminating the ability to short government bonds in a pathetic attempt to prevent the collapse of the EU bond market, it is paramount that we resurrect our synthetic models in order to be “politically correct” in trading what will no doubt turn into a witch-hunt once again.

When and if the SHTF, then if your comfy coin dealers are not able to service you, then you will depend on the innate liquidity of precious metals, meaning what the common person thinks of them. I suggest you go stand at the mall and try to give away a 1oz silver coin at $10 under spot as some guy did at numerous locations in the USA and nobody was interested to pay $10 for a 1oz silver coin. He was standing right in front of a coin dealer and even told them they could check the spot price inside. The masses do not think gold and silver are currency. Get a fucking clue.

As cited in my OP, those who have experience economic and social collapse first-hand, have stated that only food, security, medicine, and sin goods are liquid during that scenario. Also any liquid currency that people know they can very readily exchange externally to the collapsed region. Precious metals (especially silver dimes!) don't qualify. Tinfoil hat wearing goldbug idiots are thinking that people will accept their coins in barter. Never going to happen dude. Get a fucking clue about reality.

You also are closed-minded because you are wearing a tinfoil hat (as I used to do) and thus you are blindly married to the concept in which you are vested.

[…]

Edit: Selling a 10 oz Silver Bar for $10 (When It's Worth $160) - EXPERIMENT -

Selling 1 Oz Gold Coin for $25 (when it's worth over $1,500)

Buying a 99¢ Taco with 1 Ounce Gold Coin (worth over $1000) - from Taco Bell's Drive-Through

Free $5 Bill or Free Silver Dollar? It's Up To You  <--- make sure you listen at 1:30 to the guy who knows the spot price but still won't take the silver dollar!

[realr0ach]

hahaha ... roach getting pwnd on monetary science by anonymint!! cryptos brings out all the weirdos that's for sure ... goldbugs actually do not like free markets for money after all, they prefer the rubber glove of gubmint agents from wall st up their backsides.

Are you high on drugs?  Paid govt shills are currently posting telling people to dump metals and buy the DOW + cryptocurrency.

The r0ach report 36: Paid govt shills spotted telling people to dump metals and buy DOW + cryptocurrency

http://steemit.com/bitcoin/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-36-paid-govt-shills-spotted-telling-people-to-dump-metals-and-buy-dow-cryptocurrency

They have teams of people posting this stuff on multiple metals sites at the same time. Ever since it was clear that the bottom was in for metals, these "people" immediately descended upon the metals sites like locusts out of nowhere a couple months ago.

When the bottom for bitcoin was in at the $200 range, these same paid shills were all over bitcointalk.org posting the exact same stuff.

Whether they're paid by the govt or banks is semantics. The banks are the govt so it's all the same difference to me. But it's pretty damn clear, these people want you to buy their overpriced DOW and cryptocurrency and sell them your metals that are at the floor cost of production.

So without further commentary, judge for yourself:

[realr0ach]

And another red flag cryptocucks are getting fleeced soon:

[Wekkel]

Perhaps you see things that aren’t there.

[OROBTC]

...

Actually, CRED.me, your comment to a degree reinforces my near-constant nagging of those with investment assets to diversify their holdings.

You might be right about gold becoming "obsolete", although I doubt it.  True, the young do not like it.  THREE coin dealers here in my city have confirmed to me personally that "Bitcoin is sucking the oxygen out of the room" re physical gold buyers.  But, this is perhaps fashion.

"The Ten Thousand Things Rise and Fall Without Cease"
- Lao Tse (approx. 500 BC)

Gold has been valued by mankind for 6000 years.  I have no problem with keeping a fair amount of gold as "insurance against .gov malfeasance", and you have agreed with that position (note, this comment right here is more for new entrants in this conversation).  Anything that has a 6000 year track record of excellence in Store of Value ought be given the doubt when its value comes called into question.

*  *  *

With the above said, my inclination is to believe that cryptos are a new class of assets.  And it looks like they will become ever more important through time, with the inevitable ups and downs (in part due to .gov interference).

I still have yet to find anyone who can convince me that holding BOTH cryptos and precious metals is unwise.  Personal circumstances of course would influence which particulars and in what quantities should be held.

Perhaps gold's biggest problem is the inability of getting a significant quantity through the X-Ray machines at airports...  That is an issue I am still working on, how does one do that?  Perhaps you know of a famous/infamous gold guy named Peter ("Pete T") Trzaska, he claims that there is a way to get gold onto the plane undetected, but he declined to tell me how.

*  *  *

CRED.me, I have to credit you with your theory (which I have not plowed through yet, only glanced at it) of "The Knowledge Age".  Odds are that smart people, on the average, will reap outsized gains as we move forward in the future.

[realr0ach]

THREE coin dealers here in my city have confirmed to me personally that "Bitcoin is sucking the oxygen out of the room" re physical gold buyers.  But, this is perhaps fashion.

Of course it's "fashion".  The overwhelming majority of people are completely clueless when it comes to economics or investing and simply fall back on human herd mentality.  Since they know nothing, they see an asset rise and then believe, "well, there must be people who are more knowledgeable than me investing in this and I will thus defer to their opinion and buy some too since everyone else is". 

This is why pump and dump scams never cease to stop working.  Humans have a finite lifespan so there literally is a sucker born every minute.  The price of bitcoin has been controlled almost entirely by a single entity painting the tape and spoofing walls mostly operating on Bitfinex ever since the price was $200.  I'm probably the first person to talk about this, and then later even Zerohedge wrote articles about it calling him "the Bitfinex spoofer".  One scammer can create an army of zombies to follow him.

Just like all artificially rigged pump and dumps, bitcoin will fall out of fashion, the lemmings will sell their bitcoin post-collapse at the same price or lower than what they bought in, and then say "darn, I wish I bought metals before gold went up 10x and silver went up 20x. I guess i'll buy some now!".  To actually make money, you have to be somewhat of a contrarian investor and buy cold markets while immediately dumping any market full of dumb money lemmings.

[sidhujag]

...

Actually, CRED.me, your comment to a degree reinforces my near-constant nagging of those with investment assets to diversify their holdings.

You might be right about gold becoming "obsolete", although I doubt it.  True, the young do not like it.  THREE coin dealers here in my city have confirmed to me personally that "Bitcoin is sucking the oxygen out of the room" re physical gold buyers.  But, this is perhaps fashion.

"The Ten Thousand Things Rise and Fall Without Cease"
- Lao Tse (approx. 500 BC)

Gold has been valued by mankind for 6000 years.  I have no problem with keeping a fair amount of gold as "insurance against .gov malfeasance", and you have agreed with that position (note, this comment right here is more for new entrants in this conversation).  Anything that has a 6000 year track record of excellence in Store of Value ought be given the doubt when its value comes called into question.

*  *  *

With the above said, my inclination is to believe that cryptos are a new class of assets.  And it looks like they will become ever more important through time, with the inevitable ups and downs (in part due to .gov interference).

I still have yet to find anyone who can convince me that holding BOTH cryptos and precious metals is unwise.  Personal circumstances of course would influence which particulars and in what quantities should be held.

Perhaps gold's biggest problem is the inability of getting a significant quantity through the X-Ray machines at airports...  That is an issue I am still working on, how does one do that?  Perhaps you know of a famous/infamous gold guy named Peter ("Pete T") Trzaska, he claims that there is a way to get gold onto the plane undetected, but he declined to tell me how.

*  *  *

CRED.me, I have to credit you with your theory (which I have not plowed through yet, only glanced at it) of "The Knowledge Age".  Odds are that smart people, on the average, will reap outsized gains as we move forward in the future.

If gold was used as backing you bet you wouldnt be able to get gold on a plane without claim. Also all trends are made to be broken. Id rather diversify into other assets such as phosphate

[TheRealSat0shi]

...

I still have yet to find anyone who can convince me that holding BOTH cryptos and precious metals is unwise.  Personal circumstances of course would influence which particulars and in what quantities should be held.

Perhaps gold's biggest problem is the inability of getting a significant quantity through the X-Ray machines at airports...  That is an issue I am still working on, how does one do that?  Perhaps you know of a famous/infamous gold guy named Peter ("Pete T") Trzaska, he claims that there is a way to get gold onto the plane undetected, but he declined to tell me how.

*  *  *

Metals have stood the test of time as a store of value for thousands of years, I don't see them disappearing , though no longer useful as currency.
Metals have switched to a different utility now, more of a collectible asset, they will always be sought after by collectors, like artworks, antiques.
Nothing wrong with storing a portion of your wealth there, just don't expect others outside your niche group of metal collectors to value it the same way you do, nor accept it as currency.
You probably wouldn't accept a 500 year old dusty chinese vase as payment for services, but there's a niche group of collectors who would. The youth now feel the same way about metals.

[realr0ach]

Metals have stood the test of time as a store of value for thousands of years, I don't see them disappearing , though no longer useful as currency.

Who better to defeat the blasphemy of "the real satoshi" than "the real r0ach"?

The r0ach report 37: Eldritch horrors await those who put their faith in imaginary, paper assets

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-37-eldritch-horrors-await-those-who-put-their-faith-in-imaginary-paper-assets

A random user named "TheRealSat0shi" entered a discussion I was having about metals with:

"Metals have stood the test of time as a store of value for thousands of years, I don't see them disappearing , though no longer useful as currency."

He sounds like a true bitcoin shill, so with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, we will give him the benefit of the doubt that he is in fact the real Satoshi. There is only one problem, bitcoin is nothing more than a glorified paper asset in the end.

For example, if someone were to purchase a Canadian dollar, you're entering an informal contract and receiving an IOU or credit of that nation. Whether your imaginary coupon is honored or not is entirely up to the performance of that counterparty entity. With bitcoin, you're entering the exact same informal contract, except instead of signing up in an informal contract against a counterparty entity, you have signed up for a contract with...no valid counterparty at all!

These words are not to be confused with counterparty risk vs no counterparty risk. You STILL have huge counterparty risk and have done absolutely nothing to remove it, you have only deleted the counterparty of the informal legal agreement. Many aspects of monetary functions are not really economics and are just law, and in this case, you have entered an objectively worse informal legal contract.

What exactly is the draw supposed to be in entering an informal contract with 'nobody'? Supposedly the aggregate of all 'users' were supposed to be your counterparty; in other words, instead of a legal contract, a faith based religion. Even if you buy into religion, this religion only works if bitcoin wasn't designed to centralize and had a functioning Nash equilbrium, but it fails in both cases. You are then not entering into a religion, but back to an obfuscated, informal legal agreement with two or three centralized, rent seeking miners who continuously issue the currency - a powerless, stateless oligarchy instead of a real state.

These emperor with no clothes miners are actually doing the exact same function as the state: trying to take a cut out of every transaction like the normal monetary mafia that controls it. The state doesn't like fly by night pump and dumps trying to take over it's extortion function, and regulatory arbitrage is impossible when bitcoin is designed to centralize, so the state then either crushes bitcoin or co-opts it and turns it into their cashless society slavery system.

On a long enough timeline, for you to not lose all your money, you actually have to pray the state co-opts it! When all is said and done, physical commodity money like silver or gold is the only thing that is not an IOU or credit, removes counter party risk, and actually functions as a hedge against the state. Which is why:

What eldritch horrors await those who put their faith in imaginary, paper assets.

[realr0ach]

And it's time to declare war on digital currency bugmen and cucks:

The r0ach report 38: Anyone who supports digital currency over silver and gold is the enemy of humanity

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-38-anyone-who-supports-digital-currency-over-silver-and-gold-is-the-enemy-of-humanity

[Wekkel]

Such hyperbole 

[Zebra.Guy]

...

I still have yet to find anyone who can convince me that holding BOTH cryptos and precious metals is unwise.  Personal circumstances of course would influence which particulars and in what quantities should be held.

...

And you will not find such a person. I can tell you once a friend gave me a book on mathematical background of investments. I don't have the book now, and I don't remember the equations, but the bottom line of that analysis sunk very deeply: the best (EDIT: and most sure at the same time) returns one gets from maximaly divergent assets, in terms of their mutual correlation. So it seems that gold and crypto are not correlated particularly well and it would be good to have them both in your portfolio.

[sidhujag]

Yes so id hold 60% crypto 10% stocks 20% cash(jpy,chf,usd non-commodity safe havens) and 10% metals and other commodities. To me thats ideal.