Martin Armstrong Discussion

[sidhujag]

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sidhujag

Sigh, I guess I was not clear.  The BTC was taken from my account even though I "owned" the keys, and I never sent them to anyone.  I did get my BTC back from blockchain.info (after some back & forth with them).  So, they made me good again (gave me BTC to make up for what disappeared), but I never got the details on what happened, why the BTC disappeared.

I still have all my communications with them in resolving the problem.  If I had given away my keys (or the 12 words), then it would have clearly been my fault, and they would not have paid me back.

Thats is impossible you need to be more clear i guess haha if you have btc and your keys and only you have your keys it defeats the premise of btc if someone else can spend

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[sidhujag]

My response to people who believe cost of production doesn't matter in bitcoin:

cost of production has very little effect on price

You're acting like bitcoin has a finite supply.  In theory it does, but not in practice since transaction fees are recycled and mining continues FOREVER.  It's the equivalent of if platinum costs $1000 an ounce to mine at some point but people are recycling old cars and getting it for $100 an ounce.  The lowest available price is the only one that matters.  It doesn't matter if the cost of production was $1 million for a coin at some point.  It's an open entropy system so if the cost of production goes to zero, people simply plug into the system and mine those recycled coins for free rather than paying you $1 million.  

If there are no recycled fees to mine, it means the system was already dead in the first place.  The act of making fees recycle is the equivalent of infinite supply when a bitcoin is an arbitrary unit in the first place, just with the store of value aspect of that supply resting on cost of production instead of scarcity.  Each halving doubles cost of production, which enables you to increase price or lower mining input.  If you run out of halvings and then lower cost of production, you should have a corresponding effect to devalue other already existing coins.  Do you see now why cost of production actually does matter?

Most people with an IQ of 70 that don't know their head from a hole in the ground call bitcoin a ponzi but have no idea how it even works, yet if you really do understand how it works, it actually does resemble somewhat of a ponzi where arbitrary dates are inserted and proclaimed that on this date, the price must rise if mining input stays the same.  If that's not a "scheme" of some type, then I don't know what is.

Cost of energy is never free and difficulty keeps rising as rewards drop.. ive alresdy covered your mistake.. your arguments are not grounded they are roach theory not economics.. anyways let the market decide and we can come back in 10 yrs and see sure? Until then how about we take a wait and see approach rather than trolling everyone that gold > xyz? Deal?

[r0ach]

anyways let the market decide

Let the market decide?  We have no market:

This market has turned full blown scam.  

Price up 1.6% from pre-ETF decision pump of $1200?  Not down....not even 5% down...but UP instead? LOL.  If there was any exchange on earth besides Bitfinex being the market leader to determine price world-wide, I might let it slide, but we're talking about the second coming of Mt Gox here - an exchange that already appeared to be naked shorting their own customers during the halving, admittedly traded on their own exchange while knowing where all margin positiosn are, probably traded with customer funds too, and then ranomly out of the blue stole something like $70 million of bitcoin from customers.  

Is this a dream?  How does Bitfinex STILL control the world-wide price of bitcoin while being completely insolvent and still owing customers something like $60 million dollars???

I used to trade on Bitfinex but wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole nowadays, yet when I ask in this thread, who the fuck is trading on this scam of an exchange?  Not a single person in this thread says they are.  So the question is, if nobody is actually trading on Bitfinex, what exactly are we looking at here?  Just the exchange owner moving the buy and sell walls around wherever he wants with no actual customers and that determines world-wide bitcoin price?

And even volume is cratering to boot from the $400-800 level.

[sidhujag]

anyways let the market decide

Let the market decide?  We have no market:

This market has turned full blown scam.  

Price up 1.6% from pre-ETF decision pump of $1200?  Not down....not even 5% down...but UP instead? LOL.  If there was any exchange on earth besides Bitfinex being the market leader to determine price world-wide, I might let it slide, but we're talking about the second coming of Mt Gox here - an exchange that already appeared to be naked shorting their own customers during the halving, admittedly traded on their own exchange while knowing where all margin positiosn are, probably traded with customer funds too, and then ranomly out of the blue stole something like $70 million of bitcoin from customers.  

Is this a dream?  How does Bitfinex STILL control the world-wide price of bitcoin while being completely insolvent and still owing customers something like $60 million dollars???

I used to trade on Bitfinex but wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole nowadays, yet when I ask in this thread, who the fuck is trading on this scam of an exchange?  Not a single person in this thread says they are.  So the question is, if nobody is actually trading on Bitfinex, what exactly are we looking at here?  Just the exchange owner moving the buy and sell walls around wherever he wants with no actual customers and that determines world-wide bitcoin price?

And even volume is cratering to boot from the $400-800 level.

Your talking nonsense again with no proof. Just like your previous fud when you held btc but sold and missed the train.

[r0ach]

Your talking nonsense again with no proof. Just like your previous fud when you held btc but sold and missed the train.

I wasn't aware sidhujag was watching over my shoulder checking to make sure when I do or don't have bitcoin ahaha.

[sidhujag]

Your talking nonsense again with no proof. Just like your previous fud when you held btc but sold and missed the train.

I wasn't aware sidhujag was watching over my shoulder checking to make sure when I do or don't have bitcoin ahaha.

It's quote obvious man.. your tone was similar to when you were pro bitshares saying get ready for an ultimate pump in bitshares because of the dpos design, to bitcoin is the answer to why isn't the invisible hand letting bitcoin rise? to bitcoin sucks gold ftw (after btc went up to about 700) You're position makes you troll for that, it is very subjective and hard to argue with someone who won't allow for logical conclusions. Next you say Szabo is wrong about the thesis of his argument without even reading his article lol I don't think you are overthrowing Szabo's arguments anytime soon.

[r0ach]

It's quote obvious man.. your tone was similar to when you were pro bitshares

At that point I said no cryptocurrency designs were actually decentralized or scalable so DPOS was probably the best compromise.  It's voting based and voting is the best of the worst solutions we already use in real life.  If the form of consensus is completely alien to what we utilize in real life, then it would just be circumvented by the voting process anyway.  The consensus would kind of have to integrate directly into what we already use to not be circumvented, otherwise it's a paper tiger.

to bitcoin sucks gold ftw

Yea, once you figure out cryptocurrency doesn't actually solve any of it's claimed problems, and there are no valid solutions to fix it, you tend to go back to the more decentralized, better store of value, more scalable, more fungible, less likely to be taken over and used by govt as a slave system - metals.

Bitcoin died and no longer accomplished any of it's goals as soon as ASICs and pools were created, but centralizing it by a Chinese cartel actually allowed them to push market cap higher..because there was incentive to do so.  The current state of bitcoin is now irrational arguments put forth by Marcus and my reply to it below:

contentious Miner Activated Hard Fork - MAHF

less than palatable User Activated Soft Fork- UASF is less dangerous

I'm honestly tired of reading this Orwellian nonsense.  Bitcoin was clearly designed with miners controlling the protocol and forks in mind.  Instead of speaking the truth, that there's supposed to be such a large amount of individually acting miners that it's not possible for them all to collude forming a nash equilibrium, and that only win-win policies would be adopted in a non-zero game game, you instead have a failure of bitcoin decentralization where everyone who controls the entire coin can fit into one car.

ASICs and pools destroyed how bitcoin is supposed to function.  It essentially died at that point and people just pretended it didn't ever since and now it's the Chinese Paypal.  This doesn't mean "full nodes" now control bitcoin just because you don't want one car full of Chinamen to control it.  That's not how it works.  Miners will always control it or it's not actually bitcoin.  The fact is, there was a breakdown in the decentralization and Nash equilibrium of bitcoin that has to be addressed.

Decentralization may even be an insoluble problem itself, making this thing a giant fugazi no matter what you do.  I tend to believe that is the case until someone can prove me wrong.  I imagine it would take something extreme like some cutting edge cryptography to let you create decentralized captchas for mining so that it takes active user input to solve blocks - human based mining.  Using energy expenditure to find convergence was never that great of an idea in the first place when energy costs are not even close to uniform across the globe.  It was designed to centralize even without ASICs.

Why do you think I like metals?  Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme created by *some guy.  Gold and silver are a Ponzi scheme created by *God.

[sidhujag]

It's quote obvious man.. your tone was similar to when you were pro bitshares

At that point I said no cryptocurrency designs were actually decentralized or scalable so DPOS was probably the best compromise.  It's voting based and voting is the best of the worst solutions we already use in real life.  If the form of consensus is completely alien to what we utilize in real life, then it would just be circumvented by the voting process anyway.  The consensus would kind of have to integrate directly into what we already use to not be circumvented, otherwise it's a paper tiger.

to bitcoin sucks gold ftw

Yea, once you figure out cryptocurrency doesn't actually solve any of it's claimed problems, and there are no valid solutions to fix it, you tend to go back to the more decentralized, better store of value, more scalable, more fungible, less likely to be taken over and used by govt as a slave system - metals.

Bitcoin died and no longer accomplished any of it's goals as soon as ASICs and pools were created, but centralizing it by a Chinese cartel actually allowed them to push market cap higher..because there was incentive to do so.  The current state of bitcoin is now irrational arguments put forth by Marcus and my reply to it below:

contentious Miner Activated Hard Fork - MAHF

less than palatable User Activated Soft Fork- UASF is less dangerous

I'm honestly tired of reading this Orwellian nonsense.  Bitcoin was clearly designed with miners controlling the protocol and forks in mind.  Instead of speaking the truth, that there's supposed to be such a large amount of individually acting miners that it's not possible for them all to collude forming a nash equilibrium, and that only win-win policies would be adopted in a non-zero game game, you instead have a failure of bitcoin decentralization where everyone who controls the entire coin can fit into one car.

ASICs and pools destroyed how bitcoin is supposed to function.  It essentially died at that point and people just pretended it didn't ever since and now it's the Chinese Paypal.  This doesn't mean "full nodes" now control bitcoin just because you don't want one car full of Chinamen to control it.  That's not how it works.  Miners will always control it or it's not actually bitcoin.  The fact is, there was a breakdown in the decentralization and Nash equilibrium of bitcoin that has to be addressed.

Decentralization may even be an insoluble problem itself, making this thing a giant fugazi no matter what you do.  I tend to believe that is the case until someone can prove me wrong.  I imagine it would take something extreme like some cutting edge cryptography to let you create decentralized captchas for mining so that it takes active user input to solve blocks - human based mining.  Using energy expenditure to find convergence was never that great of an idea in the first place when energy costs are not even close to uniform across the globe.  It was designed to centralize even without ASICs.

Why do you think I like metals?  Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme created by *some guy.  Gold and silver are a Ponzi scheme created by *God.

So why are you here wasting your time? Is there goldbugs forum where you can talk about how the sun and gold are correlated to god somehow? Ooh shiny yellow stuff must have it!
Gluck.. ill gladly bet against you.. your track record isnt the best.

I do hope that you will win one of these times.. but i bet gold wont rise until the majority of sheep sell.. in a few decades.

[r0ach]

Gluck.. ill gladly bet against you.. your track record isnt the best.

My track record in bitcoin is great.  It's not required to believe cryptocurrency solves any type of problem in order to increase your money.

Is there goldbugs forum where you can talk about how the sun and gold are correlated to god somehow?

Why not the bitcoin forum?

who made stars, included supernova?

The prime mover of the universe is non-uniform distribution of matter and gravity.  For the non-uniform distribution of matter to exist, some type of entropy source had to exist on the other side of the big bang.  *God refers to this unknown entropy source.  It's above my pay grade figuring out how you could derive free will out of the whole thing even with a random seed.  It seems like determinism and causality would persist

[iamnotback]

Goodbye Netflix and here comes the Malaysian iFlix.

The ladies prefer the iFlix because it has the Korean dramas and Netflix doesn't. Netflix costs $7 monthly here in the Philippines and iFlix is half that price.

The West is dying. Even Hollywood is being replaced.

[r0ach]

The West is dying.

If you think the west is dying, just stick around for China's demographic cliff that will be worse than the US and Japan combined.

[OROBTC]

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iamnotback, r0ach

There is little doubt that Asia is rising relative to the USA now.  The more important issue is whether it will continue.  As a rule, relatively free countries do better (economically) once they hit "Middle Income" status.  China has just about reached that status, most of SE Asia already has (like Malaysia, but Korea is First World status now).

China has been impressive over the last few decades.  But I have strong doubts that China will make the grade into a full-fledged superpower with a high GNP / capita.  And demographics do count.  Hey I could be wrong, but that's my call.

*  *  *

Armstrong has a nice thoughtful little piece today:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/money-or-government-which-is-the-problem/

Government is the problem, not the money...

[r0ach]

Armstrong has a nice thoughtful little piece today:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/money-or-government-which-is-the-problem/

Government is the problem, not the money...

LOL, Armstrong really gives himself away as a shill with posts like this.  Hugo Salinas' idea is akin to a stealth reintroduction of sound money where the govt doesn't attempt to price fix metals, then Armstrong is like "whoa holy shit that would be terrible!".  If anyone can't figure out Armstrong is a Jewish banking shill from posts like that, you are not a very smart person.  His idea is basically the same thing as free gold except free silver.

[OROBTC]

Armstrong has a nice thoughtful little piece today:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/money-or-government-which-is-the-problem/

Government is the problem, not the money...

LOL, Armstrong really gives himself away as a shill with posts like this.  Hugo Salinas' idea is akin to a stealth reintroduction of sound money where the govt doesn't attempt to price fix metals, then Armstrong is like "whoa holy shit that would be terrible!".  If anyone can't figure out Armstrong is a Jewish banking shill from posts like that, you are not a very smart person.  His idea is basically the same thing as free gold except free silver.

I think that what Armstrong is getting at is that it is the actions of government (spying, totalitarian tendencies, etc.) is the greater problem (vs. currencies people accept or even are obliged to accept).

Personally, I think any such experiments (a silver coin currency) would be interesting.  Issuing a parallel hard currency, and then watching to see if their people accept it or not.  My guess is that it would not go over that well with Mexicans that is, I doubt they would use silver as currency.  Still, whatever movement we see towards other money is a worthy experiment.

I still think that some version of FOFOA's ideas will be proven in the end.  But, you could make money taking the other side of any bets I would suggest.

[r0ach]

My guess is that it would not go over that well with Mexicans that is, I doubt they would use silver as currency. 

This is wrong.  There is almost unanimous consent to go back to silver as currency in Mexico.  Their country is one of the biggest silver producers and it's almost considered a patriotic thing there.

[OROBTC]

My guess is that it would not go over that well with Mexicans that is, I doubt they would use silver as currency.

This is wrong.  There is almost unanimous consent to go back to silver as currency in Mexico.  Their country is one of the biggest silver producers and it's almost considered a patriotic thing there.

Then they should go for it if there is enough support in their governing class (a big "if").  Mexico is now No. 1 in silver production (though Peru is close), and I do know that silver has a hallowed place in the Mexican psyche.  When I was a kid we visited Mexico, their One Peso coin was silver, kind of big too...

Like I wrote above, it would be a great experiment to see how it would go.  Bitchez!

[iamnotback]

Upvote me at StackExchange please:

Re: 22 year old inherited 30k from 529 payout; wondering best way to invest

Invest 50% in the DOW index and sell ALL when it hits 40,000 in couple of years.

Invest the rest in Bitcoin and sell half when it exceeds $2000 - $2500 within next year or so.

The big question is what to buy when you sell those because we are headed into an epic global economic disaster that will have the governments confiscating most assets. Perhaps gold.

Start reading ArmstrongEconomics.com blog if you want to know what is really going on. We have an extensive discussion on that. I am @iamnotback there.

Disclaimer: these are my unprofessional ideas. Do not hold me responsible for your investment decisions. I am supposed to tell you to consult with a professional adviser, even though I think they will lose all your money in the coming economic collapse.

[iamnotback]

No disrespect intended, but if I may be frank you two old men are stuck in your delusions while Asia accelerates out of your reach while your Western morasses collapse into the abyss. Snooze you lose.

The West is dying.

If you think the west is dying, just stick around for China's demographic cliff that will be worse than the US and Japan combined.

The white Asians don't have a demographic cliff because the brown Asians are reproducing like rabbits for them. Do a google search on beautiful filipinas, you will see so many of them are working in China now. (and using WeChat not WhatsApp, and renting iflix.com not netflix.com!)

And China won't have the problem with immigrants that we have in the West, because Asians all share the same basic understanding of family and work ethic (and the browns look up to and obey the whites and when they don't they are whipped with a cane lashing and sent home).

There is little doubt that Asia is rising relative to the USA now.  The more important issue is whether it will continue.  As a rule, relatively free countries do better (economically) once they hit "Middle Income" status.  China has just about reached that status, most of SE Asia already has (like Malaysia, but Korea is First World status now).

China has been impressive over the last few decades.  But I have strong doubts that China will make the grade into a full-fledged superpower with a high GNP / capita.  And demographics do count.

It is not only demographics. It is having a very low level of government socialism (in terms of tax rates). China didn't even have any welfare safety net until just recently. And also having very efficient government that gets things done correctly, unlike our government morasses in the West.

Asia has the demographics and both China and Japan are opening up and becoming more free market. China is busy buying off its SOEs to privatize them. Japan is now overcoming their xenophobia (the younger Japs don't have that attitude!) and importing filipina nurses at an accelerating rate.

Watch out! Asia is coming! You haven't seen anything yet.

We westerners are going to be sweeping their floors and begging them. Mark my word.

Asia will have a mild setback with a bottoming 2020. From there, it is rockets up and lights out for the West.

[iamnotback]

We need to destroy and replace StackExchange by putting the functionality on a decentralized blockchain. This will be one of the apps I'd like to see created for the OpenShare blockchain technology I am now developing.

Upvote me at StackExchange please:

Re: 22 year old inherited 30k from 529 payout; wondering best way to invest

Invest 50% in the DOW index and sell ALL when it hits 40,000 in couple of years.

Invest the rest in Bitcoin and sell half when it exceeds $2000 - $2500 within next year or so.

The big question is what to buy when you sell those because we are headed into an epic global economic disaster that will have the governments confiscating most assets. Perhaps gold.

Start reading ArmstrongEconomics.com blog if you want to know what is really going on. We have an extensive discussion on that. I am @iamnotback there.

Disclaimer: these are my unprofessional ideas. Do not hold me responsible for your investment decisions. I am supposed to tell you to consult with a professional adviser, even though I think they will lose all your money in the coming economic collapse.

StackExchange deleted my answer above and they added the following protection to the answer:

protected by Ganesh Sittampalam♦ 14 hours ago

Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).

That foolish Hitler moderator also deleted my comments. I had put the following comment below my answer after someone had downvoted it:

You'll see an enormous number of downvotes from ignorant fools who will lose all their wealth over the next few years, because they think my ideas are not sound nor conservative enough. Lol. Mark my word. Come back to my post in a few years.

I also had comments on each of the other answers, such as on the most popular answer I wrote that putting a large amount of money in a bank account long-term was one of the stupidest things one could do because the government will be coming after all assets and bail-ins are very likely especially in the EU. On the answer about maxing out retirement plan contributions, I had commented saying that the governments would nationalize the retirement plan assets and that one should be taking early withdrawals asap. On the answer about how investment advisers follow a conservative portfolio to minimize downside risk, I said the coming crash of 35+ year sovereign bond bubble would cause one to lose all their assets by being conservative.

We need to destroy and replace StackExchange...

Btw, that links to the Meta discussion area of StackExchange, but it appears they going to censor what I wrote there also:

How is StackExchange's censorship going to compete again decentralization?

StackExchange MUST and WILL die.

Observing them downvote without any discussion, I added the following comment to the bottom of the question.

Where the hell can we discuss something with you guys without incurring censorship if not in meta? So you're going to downvote and delete this also! Shoot yourselves in the foot. I am coming after you and I will destroy your centralized paradigm. We can still have moderators in a decentralized paradigm, but everyone can individually and freely choose which moderators they ignore.

And so that comment appeared to draw them into a little bit of ego chest thumping. Let the ass kicking begin by launching the actual decentralized paradigm.

I hear Stack Overflow can be rebuilt in a weekend, and we run the rest of the of the network off the same code, so I'm pretty scared. What's your proposed solution, someone who thinks we MUST and WILL die?

@AdamLear Multiple copies of a centralized paradigm is not the same economy-of-scale as a decentralized blockchain over which everyone can interopt and apply their own individualized rules for which moderation changesets to ignore, i.e. disjoint stores of data is not an optimal and winning solution to censorship. The way to mitigate the efficacy of politics is by empowering individual choice. This is why the Internet (as a complete database) is killing the corrupt mass media conglomerates. StackExchange is one of the next on the hitlist. You and your upvoters have some learning to do.

@AdamLear you see all the fighting and angst ongoing about deleted questions, answers, comments, and other forms of friction due to centralized control over the database. Just imagine how much demand for a decentralized solution you are creating. SE is the perfect marketing engine for that which will destroy its paradigm.

Calling moderators (or anybody btw) "foolish Hitler" in a rant is not an optimal and winning basis for a discussion.

@ModusTollens cry in your spilled milk. Your paradigm is going to die. All your downvotes are powerless.

Whatever. Have fun.

@ModusTollens Btw, I was the first to upvote your perfectly myopic self-criticism “Whatever. Have fun.”. ;-P Also it probably would have been more accurate to write,  “cry in your politically correct Millennials' spilled milk” not because it is more correct but because it would piss off those who it applies to.

Go ahead. Make my day. Only two more votes needed to delete this. All Hillary Clinton supporters unite! We must have order! Free speech is dead, even in Meta. Any way, I've saved the entire discussion in two places on a forum. And this will come back to haunt you., especially those who were bold enough to put their name on the censorship. Some of you are too chickenshit to put your name on your censorship.

They've tried to restrict discussion and there are already 2 votes to delete the question, but afaics SE doesn't show who makes those votes (corrupt system database isn't open):

put on hold as unclear what you're asking by gnat, Andy, Adam Lear♦ 1 hour ago

Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

As I told you all, I am not doing this just for money! It is a competition about ideas and what will make a better Internet.

[OROBTC]

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iamnotback

Bail-ins are likely here in the USA too.

Agreed that putting a large percentage of money in long-term bonds (especially if the money is kept there long-term) is a bad bet.  But, if rates stay stable or go down for a while, holding some bonds as a low percentage of a portfolio may not be a bad idea, as long as you are ready to sell when rates start back up.  Usually there is some warning.  For example now, most people should start selling bonds.

Retirement plans are indeed vulnerable to seizure (or forced conversion to, you guessed it, long-term bonds), so to be avoided.

Pensions are very vulnerable to not being paid, or being paid only in part.