The Ministry of Truth
The American government last night announced the formation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” which will counter misinformation relating to Homeland Security.
I can’t imagine that this could go wrong in any way at all and I’m looking forward to their considered musings.
It does focus the mind on what the truth actually is though; often different things to different people at different times. Whatever this new and sinister cabal of cronies comes up with will almost certainly upset someone.
It’s surprising America has gone first here. The Europeans are normally the first to slaughter civil liberties in the name of “truth” and it’s disappointing to watch them take a silver medal.
It highlights the tremendous value in building systems that can produce unarguable truth, which is incredibly hard to do. That’s what decentralised networks are; pieces of software that all people agree on at all times.
As I write this, I can tell you that bitcoin has just processed block 733,910, the difficulty level is 29.8×10^12 and there are 275 transactions in the queue. Crucially, every person in the world on this network agrees with me because it is an indisputable truth. Value that, if you can.
Australian CPI
Rather an ugly chart. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the fastest rising sectors which include education and health. Draw whatever conclusion you wish from that, suffice to say, any sector where the government is involved has suffered most.
Take comfort though friends. While you starve to death, both physically and mentally, your mobile phone bill will likely be lower.
Slob
Lizard overlord Klauss Slob of the World Economic Forum has continued his attacks on bitcoin this week with a sweeping advertising campaign attacking the proof-of-work consensus mechanism.
Apparently “experts” have found a way to cut the carbon footprint of bitcoin by 99.9%. The thrust of their solution is that the bitcoin code base would replace proof-of-work with proof-of stake.
The essence of proof-of-stake is that the people with the most money get most of the reward for staking their assets and they decide the consensus. It is a fundamentally centralising mechanism over time. Think of it like the Federal Reserve.
For bitcoin, this is just another state-sponsored attack that it will have to resist. Among the discussion forums of bitcoin, there is not one iota of support for a change to the code base. In fact, it’s hardly being discussed at all because everyone knows it is just an attack vector for governments via the WEF proxy.
There are lots of options for Klauss of course, he could simply copy the bitcoin code and replace the consensus mechanism with proof-of-stake. He could do that right now at virtually zero cost. If his plan is so much better, then everybody will adopt Lizard-Coin and bitcoin will die.
Of course, he knows that won’t happen, he knows it won’t be successful and thus he needs to attack the code base of the thing he cannot stop. The thing that is eating the influence of all his friends in Davos. It’s beautiful to watch actually.
As a reminder on just how much of a furphy this energy argument is; bitcoin uses 0.05% of global energy, with 55% of that renewable. I promise you the jets that head to Davos use a lot more.
Central African Republic
Somewhat unexpectedly, the Central African Republic this week announced it had adopted bitcoin as legal tender. Before you reach for Google Maps, the clue is in the title. It’s here:
As a matter of significance to bitcoin, this wouldn’t really register. The population is small at 5 million and GDP per capita is about $1,000. Pretty much last globally. Perhaps more interesting is that local currency is the Central African Franc (CFA), a hangover of French imperialism which is still retained today. You can’t lose the imperial reins if you don’t lose the currency.
This will be interesting, adoption of bitcoin was alway going to be via countries that need it most going first. It is these initial dominoes falling that is causing so much alarm at the IMF and World Economic Forum. Today, it means nothing, but all things start somewhere.
Euro-trash
Honesty is not something one would associate with the International Monetary Fund. We got a rare dose this week from IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. At a “Debate on the Global Economy” she said:
“central banks had printed far too much money with no appreciation for the second order consequences…….. we have behaved like eight year olds chasing a football.”
Lagarde’s face contorted with a mixture of laughter and suppressed horror; it was very much not what had been scripted. Essentially, she and Powell were accused of randomly printing inordinate amounts of money every time there was ‘a crisis’. The IMF head then pointed out “there will always be another crisis”.
Some of you might remember Georgieva from her last scrape late last year. She was accused of institutional corruption by her former World Bank colleagues, specifically that she manipulated data to keep China happy about its ranking in the IMF’s Global Doing Business report. There was an investigation and the World Bank reported thus:
So rather than sack the protagonist, she kept her job at the IMF and they just stopped producing the report. After 18 years of producing it they simply decided the easiest solution was to get rid of it. It’s rather like me stealing a banana and a court deciding the appropriate measure is the removal of all bananas globally.
Perhaps these off the cuff comments put her on the path to redemption though. We will see.