Topic: Martin Armstrong Discussion - page 204. (Read 647176 times)

According to Jeremy Liew, the first investor in Snapchat, and Blockchain CEO and cofounder Peter Smith. In a presentation sent to Business Insider, the duo laid out their case for why it's reasonable for bitcoin to explode to $500,000 by 2030.

A very interesting article at Business Insider that worth reading: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-could-be-500000-by-2030-first-snapchat-investor-says-2017-3

@CoinCube, haven't you heard the wisdom, "no pain, no gain".  

If I can't feel it in my grubby hands, then it ain't cool enough to be real money.  

Btw, check out the math I found which unequivocally proves that Bitcoin is evil. The correspondence to the predictions in Revelation is somewhat disturbing.

In its several-thousand-year history, money has gone through an ever-accelerating evolution in its form. The first stage was commodity money — grain, oil, cattle, metal, and many other things — that functioned as media of exchange without possessing any fiduciary value. This stage lasted several millennia. The next step was coinage, which added fiduciarity to the intrinsic metallic value of silver and gold. Money consisted then of two components: a material and a symbolic.

It was quite natural that eventually the symbol would become detached from the metal, which is what happened with the advent of credit money in the Middle Ages and even before. In China, the first paper money (which was actually a kind of bank draft) was in use by the ninth century and circulated as far as Persia. (1) In the Arab world, a form of check was in wide use around that time as well. Italian traders used bills of exchange as early as the twelfth century, a practice that spread rapidly and was followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth century by fractional-reserve banking.(2) This was a major innovation, since it freed the money supply from the metal supply and allowed it to grow organically in response to economic activity. The detachment of money from metal was gradual. During the fractional-reserve banking era, which lasted several centuries, bank notes were still, at least in theory, backed by metal.

Today the era of fractional-reserve banking is over, and money has become pure credit. This is not widely recognized. Many authorities, including most economics textbooks and the Federal Reserve itself, (3) still maintain the pretense that reserves are a limiting factor in money creation, but in practice they almost never are.(4) Banks’ real constraints on money creation are their total capital and their ability to find willing, creditworthy borrowers — that is, those with either uncommitted earning potential or assets to use as collateral. In other words, social agreements govern the creation of money, primary among them the dictum, encoded in interest, that money should go to those who will make even more of it in the future. Today’s money, as I shall explain, is backed by growth; when, as is happening now, growth slows, the entire financial edifice begins to crumble.
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Some observers, seeing the disastrous consequences of today’s credit-based currencies, advocate a return to the good old days of currencies backed by something tangible, such as gold. They reason that commodity-backed currency would be noninflationary or would eliminate the compulsion for endless growth. I think some of these “hard currency” or “real money” advocates are tapping in to an atavistic desire to return to simpler days, when things were what they were. Dividing the world into two categories, the objectively real and the conventional, they believe that credit-money is an illusion, a lie, that must inevitably collapse with every bust cycle. Actually, this dichotomy is itself an illusion, a construct that reflects deeper mythologies — such as the doctrine of objectivity in physics — that are also breaking down in our time.

The difference between an unbacked and backed currency is not as great as one might suppose. On the face of it, they seem very different: a backed currency derives its value from something real, while an unbacked currency has value only because people agree it does. This is a false distinction: in either case, ultimately what gives money value is the story that surrounds it, a set of social, cultural, and legal conventions.