Interviews With Canadian Bitcoiners, Sachs Realty, Decentralize TV, CapitalCosm
On Joey Temprile’s Canadian Bitcoiners show, we talk about physical versus financial assets and my struggle to understand cryptos.
Sachs Realty’s Todd Sachs expects a real estate bust to cause a banking crisis this year. He’s probably right.
On Decentralize TV, Mike Adams, Todd Pitner, and I cover artificial intelligence, the “reverse wealth effect,” and, of course, the next financial crisis.
Danny El-Ayoubi’s CapitalCosm is gaining a lot of traction on Substack. Here, we discuss the impact of the past year’s natural disasters on an already fragile economy.
I thought your answer about cryptos/Bitcoin was a good one. Ironically, I think it actually adds to your credibility by expressing your intellectually honesty. Rather than putting you on the sideline about cryptos, it actually (should) inspire questions from crypto enthusiasts. Even something as simple as, “Like what [don’t you understand]?”, because that would invite debate that I (at least) haven’t heard or read addressed anywhere. It’s usually just fantasizing about the Bitcoin narrative, not necessarily reality.
For instance, you mentioned the “money printing” by the Fed during the Covid fiasco. A question one could ask about that is how could that have happened in a Bitcoin world? The fact that such subsidization should never have occurred not withstanding, if such a thing “needed” to happen how could it? After all, the Fed literally created currency and booked it on it’s own balance sheet, which increased it by trillions. The idea being that that “money” would be reabsorbed at some time in the future to pay itself back.
Now consider how that could happen if something like Bitcoins were the only “money.” One answer is that the Fed itself would have to own a lot of Bitcoin that it could then “lend” to those who needed it. But that would require the recipients (borrowers) to repay the Fed. But that wasn’t the deal. It was supposed to be “free” money that didn’t need to be paid back, at least not directly. Can you imagine millions of people today in debt to the Fed for several years of living expenses, or even just the few thousands that everyone received?
The fact that there is only a fixed number of BC requires something like that. The BC sent to the needy have to come from somewhere. Alternatively, instead of coming from the Fed with a big piggy bank of (off line) BC it could come from individuals, right? But then how would they get their BC back again? And if they required interest then where do the BC for that come from, never mind the mechanism for repayments? There may be other answers to this question, like outright charity (are we ready for that?), but it could also mean such “bailouts” wouldn’t occur because they couldn’t. If that’s unacceptable, then it ultimately requires a currency independent of BC (like a gold standard) which would entail the same issues that cryptos like BC claim to circumvent. Ironically, it could also lead to a “gold standard” in which BC is the currency that is backed by physical gold. That would also solve the inherent “deflationary” aspect to BC because of the steady increase in gold supply.
Just food for thought, and there are many other examples/questions. It would be nice to see debates along these lines instead of the usual ‘bitcoin is digital energy’ nonsense (besides the fact that Bitcoin can’t work as advertised.)
All that want to understand life free themselves to the intuitive. Cryptos are the way now. Invest now. Going higher and higher.