Bitcoins: A Fully-Compliant Currency The Government Can Love

I’m finishing up a novel, a piece of speculative fiction in a genre you could call “economic-thriller”.

The Mark of the Beast?

In the book, the dollar crashes in a hyperinflationary fire (natch), replaced by a new currency called the american. The exchange rate at the time of the changeover is $1,000 equals ₳1. To illustrate its purchasing power, ₳1 buys you a candy bar.

However, americans don’t exist as physical currency. There are no “american bills” like there are dollar bills, and no coins either. Instead, americans are a fully digital currency: They exist in the ether. You need a card—be it a credit card, debit card, or EBT card—to spend americans. And to receive americans, either from employers, customers, government, etc., you need a “central account” which is tethered to your Social Security number.

The rationale for these measures is convenience—but the implication is, no one can earn, save or spend money without the government being aware of exactly what you are doing.

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A Calm Analysis of Bitcoins as a Currency

I got quite a bit of backlash for writing a couple of days ago about bitcoin (post here). My criticisms were fairly mild—I’m not unsympathetic to the drive behind making bitcoin work.

“Where’s bitcoin?”
Uh . . .

But even such mild criticism of the bitcoin enterprise was enough for some of the bitcoin-faithful to denounce me as a heretic, or worse, an apostate. Or worse, a shill for the banksters and their minions. Or worse still, a fucking idiot who didn’t know shit-all about bitcoins and what they represent—the future!

Okay . . .

To be clear, I am not against bitcoin, or any other of the so-called “cryptocurrencies” (cybercurrency sounds more accurate, but I’ll stick with the current convention). Neither in principle nor in practice do I object to these immaterial, manufactured, fiat currencies. Hell, I’ve had a bitcoin wallet since 2011, when I parked a few hundred bucks in it when it was at $8 a BTC.

So I’m fine with bitcoin—but I’m not a mindless cheerleader for the thing.

When talking about bitcoin, cognoscenti have to admit, and neophytes have to understand, that bitcoin does not do all that people claim it does. Far from it, bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies are severely limited.

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Bitcoins: Get Out While The Getting's Good

“It’s so pretty!
Almost like gold . . .”

Everyone hates the dollar and the euro—and with good reason. By the lights of any thoughtful observer, the two reserve currencies are being crashed by their respective central banks: The dollar by the insanity which is Quantitative Easing, the euro by the insanity which is German intransigence.

So everyone in the blogosphere is looking for a savior, a way out of this looming inflationary/deflationary collapse.

Enter bitcoin.

Bitcoin presses all the erogenous zones of nerdy tech guys everywhere, who are after all the dominant demographic of the internet, and who are not coincidentally wild about bitcoins.

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I Have A Kid

Hulkita and me.

I have a kid. She’s five-and-a-half months old, weighs about seven kilos two-hundred, measures 65.5 cm, and as of a week ago, has two lower front teeth, each about two milimeters wide.

Once a couple of days ago, she was sitting up on my lap when I got a random hiccough. It so startled her that for a moment, her expression froze as she stared into my eyes—then she burst into tears, terrified.

But no matter how bad her mood, if I raise her over my head and say, “Airplane! Airplane!” while I smile and blow kisses at her, eventually, she smiles back and starts laughing. If I rub her upper chest with the tip of my nose, she giggles. If ever I start singing Iggy Pop and The Stooges’ Search & Destroy in her presence, she begins kicking and waving her arms, revved up to rock out; it’s her favorite song, hands down—bigger than Barney in our household.

When her diaper is full, she’ll complain. She complains in two ways: One is, she babbles incomprehensibly, but with the rhythms of speech of someone dressing somebody else down (namely my wife and me). This babble often sounds vaguely like Mandarin. The other way she complains is, she lets out a low flat growl from the back of her throat, her face turning bright red as she stares fixed at us. My wife calls this her “Hulkita” growl, as she looks like a tomato-red version of a miniature Incredible Hulk.

My wife and I were walking her in her stroller a few days ago, and some asshole came tearing into a driveway immediately in front of us, his pickup truck crossing our path barely three feet from her stroller. His window was rolled down, and the driver shot me an unconcerned look. In that split second, I seriously considered killing the guy, and the guy realized it, ‘cause he apologized and backed the fuck off.

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“I Had A Dad”

“I tried hard to have a father
Instead I had a dad . . .”
—Cobain

In America, you probably grew up with this shlubby dude who wanted to be your buddy, your pal, your amigo, your confidante, your friend.

"So Dad . . ."

He didn’t want to be your father—he wanted to be your dad.

So he didn’t teach you as a father should. And you knew it, even if you couldn’t articulate it.

You wandered through elementary school, high-school, college, without a fucking clue as to what to do, how to behave, what to pay attention to and what to ignore. You didn’t even realize why you were wandering through these halls, supposedly getting this great education. So you either blew it off—to your later deep regret—or you took it at face value—again, to your later deep regret. Your dad kept sighing, giving you a shit-eating grin, and saying, “Son, you need to get good grades,” or “Son, you need to get an education,” without telling you that good grades and a good education are two vastly different things. No one ever told you what all that schooling was really for, or how to get a real education in spite of (rather than because of) the dangerous joke that is the educational system.

Women? They might as well been martians for all the help you got from dear old “Dad”. From the first boy-girl dances you went to in junior-high, to the hook-up culture of college, to twenty-something girls on their Slut-Trek through the big city, to the Biological Alarm Clockers who accost you like beggars in Calcutta now that they’re in their early-thirties, trying to trap you into marriage: The “Dads” (“Dicks”?) gave you nothing smarter than “Follow your heart”, or “Be true to your feelings”, or most despicably of all: “Tell her how you feel—but always respect her wishes.”

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Game, the Art of Archery, and the Business of Selling

Recently, I’ve been getting into the so-called “manosphere”: Blogs, sites and forums devoted to men’s interpersonal relationships, especially with women.

Game: Apply as required.

Contrary to what critics who have never bothered reading any of these sites would have you believe, the best of them (Roosh, Chateau Heartiste, Solomon II and others) aren’t misogynistic. Quite the contrary, the writers of the better sites clearly love and appreciate women.

Their sin is, they don’t idealize women.

They cast a cool eye on women, and interpret their actions not from any Romantic, quasi-Victorian ideal of “female fragility” (which if you get right down to it is how feminism implicitly regards women, even as they are loath to admit it). Instead, these sites and blogs interpret women’s actions through a combination of evolutionary biology and social Darwinism.

The underlying assumption of these sites is that women, no different from men, seek more: More status, more reproductive success, more possessions, more ease of life, more stuff, more etc.

These sites all explicitly posit that, just as men judge women on characteristics that they value—be it youth, beauty, sexual attractiveness, etc.—women judge men on characteristics that they value—such as objective social status, localized social dominance, professional success, apearance, etc.

Therefore, according to these writers, it behooves men to understand what it is that women are judging in men, in order to improve themselves so as to become more attractive to women.

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The Democrats Finally Embrace Money Printing

Quantitative Easing is no longer just a palliative Federal Reserve policy—it has just become a political issue. Which is why it will get bigger—and worse.

If you’ve been following American political theater since the start of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, you’ve probably noticed how many (but not all) Republicans line up on the side of fiscal austerity and tight-money policies so as to limit the fiscal deficit and reduce the government debt (at least when it comes to non-military spending. And non-law enforcement spending. And non-bank-saving spending.)—

Who says the Dems don’t like money?

—whereas the Democrats have insisted that the government needs to take on more debt, and spend its way back to prosperity. In the Dems’ worldview, deficits and debt don’t matter: What matters to them is how much is the government going to spend in order to “save the economy”. (“Paging Professor Krugman!”)

But last Thursday, during the testimony Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave to the Senate Banking committee, Democratic senators questioned why Bernanke was thinking of tapering off the bond purchasing programs of Quantitative Easing (QE). They wondered out loud if maybe QE should continue “until the economy further improves”.

In other words, the Democrats have finally realized that not only does QE mean they don’t have to rein in the deficit—QE also means that they can expand the deficit, confident that additional debt will be bought and paid for by the Federal Reserve. Confident that additional debt will be monetized by the Federal Reserve—because after all, that’s what QE is: Debt monetization, and everybody knows it.

(What, you really think that the Fed is gonna one day unwind its QE position? Sterilize all that money printing and rein in its balance sheet to less than $1 trillion, as per the status quo ante the Global Financial Crisis? Hue’ón, you buy that, then open your wallet, ‘cause I got a bridge to sell you.)

Which means that, with their calls for more QE, it’s clear that the Democrats have finally embraced flat-out money-printing.

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