The following is not financial advice. It’s civilizational advice.
(Note Good Citizens: I was going to schedule this to go out tomorrow night but then I re-read the title).
From Censorship to Asset Seizure
It has become the obnoxious moniker of the laser-eyed crypto zealots to proclaim that bitcoin fixes everything. I have called them fervent speculators, greenhorns who know nothing about the underlying technology and are caught up in the psychological frenzy of DeFi gaming. They have their eyes on the digits in their crypto wallets and on the towering red or green candles that move their worth in wild speculative swings and care of little else. And so damn what. This is all fine. Great. Superb. It does not matter how one arrives at the correct destination so long as they get there. We have no time for crypto purity quarreling. Whether through greed, speculation, foresight or politics, it is important that the majority of people arrive here sooner than later to avoid the financial tyranny management has planned for us. The future cannot wait.
The maple leaf regime up north just leaned on a private company to seize the charitable assets of peaceful protestors assembled in Ottawa. The recent theft of the Freedom Truckers’ donations ($9 million) by Silicon Valley parasites at GoFundMe on behalf of Canadian Prime Minister Fidel Castro Jr. is just the latest in a long list of warnings that a free and fair society cannot exist upon a bed of ideologically corrupted institutions who hold all the power. This was the same company that openly and actively raised funds for hostile communists who seized public and private property in Seattle during the summer of the Saint George protests. Anyone shocked by this latest heist has not been paying attention. For all the laser-eyed zealots of crypto out there, yes, Bitcoin absolutely fixes this.
First they came for Alex Jones and people were too afraid to even use his name let alone defend him. When first they came for him, that should have been a clue that he was often right. They do not censor propagandists and liars, they promote them. They do not promote the modern sages, though sometimes outrageous or blusterous, they smear them as conspiracy theorists, then censor them. People are still afraid to use the name Alex Jones for fear of what others might think of them. We know he's been right for years about a lot of things and if people weren't so afraid of what others thought of them maybe they'd have been better prepared for the past two years. Only a coward worried about his own finances or reputation amongst functionary mid-wits of the mainstream would side with managing their impressions over promoting the truth.
After Jones they quickly came for others, and once censorship of any sort begins, it never ends. There is always a new term of service or ‘safety’ rule that can be flexed to justify the censorship of anything, and you can be sure that ‘anything’ that was censored was not what they claim but some observation or statement that was right over the target. Always pay attention to where the official corporate-state censors aim their flak. Follow the dots of black smoke in the public discourse skyline and you’ll be on the trail of truth, even if they’re smothered by chemtrails.
Censorship is always a precursor to other authoritarian methods, the canary in the free society coalmine. PayPal and large financial institutions have begun seizing and freezing finances of lawful Americans. PayPal purges are on overdrive, and their market cap is tanking. They’d rather expel good honest hard working Americans from participation in the financial system for wrong thoughts than worry about their stock price. In controlled markets with central banker bailouts the actions of a company no longer matter. The fascistic corporate-state can collude everywhere to purge enemies of its stranglehold on power. This is all unconstitutional of course but don’t expect that to matter anymore. The rule of law is as expendable as everything else in the purge of political enemies. There are no safety nets, no recourse for the law abiding citizen with the wrong views, guilty until bankrupted by legal fees.
America First dissident Nicholas Fuentes, who streams a popular political talk show that dares to put America First a la Alex Jones, was in the capitol on January 6th last year. He never breached any buildings or broke any laws and yet Bank of America froze his private accounts worth half a million dollars and he was placed by the government on a no-fly list. He couldn’t access his credit or debit cards and could not fly home. He was not the only one, just one of many with a large enough platform to call attention to this open fascism.
This is the future being engineered before our eyes. You will obey and submit and never criticize management lest you suffer the consequences of censorship, black listing, no-fly lists and asset forfeiture, no evidence of crimes needed. Your only crime? Wrong think. You will be forced to hire an expensive attorney and jump through all those legal hoops, and this is the point, to make you suffer in stress and financial loss at the very least in addition to realizing you have no liberties.
The only recourse is to opt out of everything they offer. Reject their financial structures, their banking system, their paradigms that can be controlled wherever it is possible to reject them. There is only innovation and rebellion through decisive consumer decisions that reject the servants of the corporate-state and opt for their parallels that cannot be corrupted by central authorities. These include smart phones like the encrypted freedom phone or de-googling your phone, and rejecting all offers from Silicon valley companies. This also includes diversifying assets to precious metals and crypto currencies. When they say “Bitcoin fixes this” for so many issues, they are not wrong.
First They Mock You - A Very Brief Interlude of Foresight
In 2013 I bought three USB Bitcoin miners with heat sinks and plugged them into an old laptop. Family and friends who noticed it would ask what those weird metal things were protruding from the sides of that laptop in the corner which was making a lot of noise. When I told them I was mining Bitcoin the reactions ranged from polite nods that concealed laughter and mockery, to outright laughter and mockery. The questions followed.
“What are you dealing drugs on the dark web?”
”There’s some tulips in the yard out there, why don’t you just pick those?”
”Don’t you know that was started by the CIA?”
Three years later when the price of Bitcoin shot from $800 to $19,000 my inbox began to fill up with inquires from the same people who mocked me.
“Hey man, are you still doing the bitcoin thing?”
“When’s a good time to buy?”
”Is it really going to a million bucks soon?”
This Good Citizen does not hold a grudge, not with friends. I knew that no matter what I tried to convince them of back in 2013 about decentralization, blockchain, ledgers, power structures, network theory, value, technological evolution, the history of fiat currencies, it did not matter. They were going to have to arrive at that information on their own. Value and speculation are often the first lures of the disbelievers until they buy too much at the top of the market, get burned and then run and hide for three years until the next speculative wave and they make the same mistake again.
Fiat to CBDC
In February of last year Michael Burry sent out a series of tweets warning about inflation. Burry is known for his predictions about the collapse of Mortgage Backed Securities market two years before the house of cards came down in 2008. You’ll know him well if you’ve read the book The Big Short or seen the film version of the same title. He saw it all before anyone else did. In the case of hyperinflation, we can all see it coming.
Inflation is simply theft over time. It’s a poor tax that nobody talks about. The latest CPI print shows US inflation at 7.4%, the highest since 1982. However as Peter Schiff points out the government bean counters don’t use the same CPI calculation as they did in 1982. They’ve essentially rigged it to hide inflation and justify printing endless money to transfer wealth to the top 1%. Using the 1982 calculation, inflation today is at 15% according to Schiff. That’s the single highest figure ever in US history and consumers are feeling it everywhere.
Post-WW1 Weimar Germany is a good comparison to our present situation of rising dollar inflation. It’s certainly not apples to apples or even broccoli to apples given the different socio-political and economic circumstances, including the dollar’s status as global reserve currency, but economics is economics and excessive ludicrous money printing always has devastating consequences. See Weimar Germany, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and even Ancient Rome for some examples.
“The first 90 percent of the Reichsmark's real value had already been lost before the middle of 1922.”1
“Still less clearly remembered are the years before the mark blew, with their breakneck boom, spending, profits, speculation, riches, poverty, and all manner of excess. Throughout these years the structure was quietly building itself up for the blow.”
Sound familiar?
“Germany started by not paying adequately for its war out of the sacrifices of its people—taxes—but covered its deficits with war loans and issues of new paper Reichsmarks.”
Sound familiar?
The U.S. has spent trillions over two decades of fighting terror ghosts as a pretext to funnel taxpayer money to defense contractors and the military industrial complex. Congress has authorized $5 Trillion in new spending in the past two years alone. That’s a quarter of the entire nation’s accrued debt until the year 2016. Throw in the federal reserve’s balance sheet, an increase of two trillion more and you have nearly a third of U.S. dollars ever printed throughout history done so in the past few years. And people wonder why the cost of everything is increasing. But as in Weimar Germany, it started slowly, then increased gradually, then the hyperinflation kicked in by year eight rendering the Reichsmark worthless.
Since we live in a globally interconnected economic and financial system and spending and production is a number of times more accelerated than that period of war and post-war reconstruction, it’s likely that Michael Burry will be right again, and we are not on an eight year timeline for hyperinflation to kick in (1914-1922) but maybe less than half of that. That means in the next 12-36 months we could see prices of everything sky rocket.
Management knows this yet they do not care about hyperinflation. They are corporate raiders but instead of strip mining companies they’re doing it to national treasuries, national currencies, working and middle classes and small businesses. Like many other catastrophes of our present age, they’re probably engineering this one as well. It would provide the perfect opportunity to role out their CBDCs, Central Bank Digital Currencies. This would not be verifiable by a ledger or blockchain, even if they say so it will be private blockchain which is not the same as public blockchain. With CBDCs they could print unlimited amounts and control every digital token in circulation. Imagine getting paid in digital Fed Dollars to your phone. They could control what you bought and how much you spend on certain items each month. If you run afoul of their “spending laws”, they could block your purchases and even confiscate your money. They wouldn’t even have to do it manually. The AI powered algos would simply seize your funds with no avenues of recourse on your part. Post something wrong on Facebook? The app could be connected to your digital wallet and you could pay a fine. Fall short on your taxes? They’ll seize it from your wallet. Late on a credit card payment by a day? Forget your grocery money that night, they’ll seize it for the bank. This is the future they want. Total control over your life.
Decentralized Digital Currencies
Bitcoin and other crypto currencies on public blockchain technologies cannot be controlled by governments. They are decentralized technologies that are built upon open and transparent digital ledgers that autonomously keep track of every token in circulation and every transaction that occurs on the blockchain. There are a finite amount of tokens that will ever be in circulation, so it is deflationary by design and scarce so that value increase with demand. It is the ultimate financial liberation technology for society to embrace that will be the cause of endless headaches for governments and management. It has been a great joy watching management struggle over what to do with decentralized digital currencies like Bitcoin. First they threatened to ban them until they realized they couldn’t. Then they decided to legalize and tax them. It is likely they chose that course to help the move to CBDCs. If they can get people from traditional banking systems to digital banking through cryptos like Bitcoin it will make it easier to transition the masses to CBDCs.
The only way they can successfully transition the masses is to eventually ban cryptos, except there is no easy way to do this. There are already trillions invested in cryptos, even by management’s oligarch class and new institutional investors are arriving by the day. Companies are offsetting their portfolios with Bitcoin and Ethereum. The only conceivable way to ban cryptos now would require turning all of the west into North Korea with electricity blackouts and internet outages so that no decentralized tokens can be used at all, but this would be a shot to their own faces with CBDCs that would require the same sources of network and transfer power. What they may likely do is outlaw the purchasing of cryptos with CBDCs and Fiat currencies, and it will probably be in lockstep across the west from Europe to North America to Australia. Like the plandemic policies all clocks will strike around the same time. Having seen China ban the mining and trading of cryptos, the west will likely follow.
If this does happen, at first the price of tokens will tank, but not for very long. Black market innovation will rise and underground sites will pop up that trade decentralized digital tokens for a variation of government tokens that aren’t controlled by central banks. The government enforcement agencies will be playing whack-a-mole as they usually do to try and keep up. Eventually like with prohibition of alcohol and Gold seizures, the governments of the west could be toppled by those free market forces that reject their tyrannies and embrace the decentralized and uncontrollable options, so long as there is sufficient demand.
We have two choices ahead of us. We either passively accept the future they want for us, or we actively move toward the future we want for ourselves. It starts with the little things. If we can't be bothered to do the little things now, like rejecting their products and their financial system we don't stand a chance. If the organizers of the Freedom Trucker Convoy had been paying attention the past five years, they would have first advertised their digital wallets for donations before trying GoFundMe. Preferably in Monero, an untraceable token. This would have been great for onboarding millions of people who have never purchased or used crypto before, and there would have been no way for the tiny tyrant of the north to seize or freeze their crypto assets, not without a court order, warrant and a lot of work by the police to locate them. They could have converted and washed the funds and dispersed them to cold storage before the first warrant was ever issued.
It is the year 1995 of the Internet for Crypto. What do you think the next 20 years look like?
Where to Buy Crypto?
In Europe there are several options. This Good Citizen has been using Bitstamp for the past seven years to buy crypto with fiat, though I never store or trade there. Always store crypto in a local wallet on your computer. This is local storage, but if you want to store it on USB stick to hold long term (called Cold Storage) you’ll need a hardware wallet like Trezor. For local storage Exodus has a great free wallet for mobile or desktop that can also convert between tokens and you can earn interest through holding certain tokens there.
If you live in the U.S. Coinbase is the big fish from Silicon Valley, but there’s Gemini, FTX, and others too. Anyone who knows better options in Europe, the U.S., Australia, or Latin America please provide them in the comments. If you have any questions, please ask in the comments. No questions are off limits.
Note: Avoid Kraken and Binance. The latter is a fraudulent Chinese company with no central offices to file legal actions against. They have defrauded users of tens of millions over the years and yet are somehow still popular with the laser eyed kids who will have to learn hard lessons.
Once again this is not financial or investment advice. It’s about making active consumer decisions to reject their tools of destruction to avoid the future they have planned for us.
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
- Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson would look at Bitcoin today and say of his own quote above, “Bitcoin fixes this.”
And this is why they gave Jefferson the Two Dollar bill.
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Parsson, Jens O. Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations.
Couldn't agree with you more. Get your money out of their system. I started stacking physical precious metals years ago. Own the physical stuff, not the paper derivatives. There's more claims on physical PM's then there are ounces in circulation.
And I own crypto's, while I understand many people don't have the stomach for them, either because of lack of knowledge or because of the volatility (which will dissapear when trade volume grows larger).
Don't ever trust CBDC's, our rulers will not be able to keep their paws of the minted volume. If you want an example, take a hard look at the Venezuelan Petro.
I've always found https://www.litebit.eu/en a solid company for buying cryptocurrencies in the EU. Low rates, and plenty of crypto's to choose from.
"If you don't hold it, you don't own it"
Outstanding! Thank you.