There are a lot of crappy bitcoin books. Here is my rule of thumb, if the book has a shiny gold Bitcoin pseudo-coin in the artwork, it is very likely crap. Andreas hates those dumb coins and so do I. The only positive thing that I can think of about those shiny metal Bitcoin tokens with computer circuitry designs is that maybe they might make people think of gold, but I think they just confuse the public. I was just watching the Keiser Report on RT television on DirectTV, which incidentally is illegal in Canada. Given all of the current hoopla regarding Russian meddling in the past US presidential election, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian involvement including money laundering, and conspiring to circumvent the Magnitsky Act which placed financial sanctions on Russian oligarchs. RT television was ordered to register as official Foreign Agents with Homeland Security this month. I am a little off topic here. What I wanted to say before I went off on an RT tangent is that the iconic Max Keiser Bitcoin lapel pin is totally cool and I would wear one too. Brooches and lapel pins make the best use case for those coins. Maybe Max’s pin contains an address to a Bitcoin account that has soared in value since he started talking publicly about Bitcoin in 2012. I hope so, he deserves to be rewarded. Both for supporting RT along with Larry King, and supporting cryptocurrencies in general. I saw a photo where he took a tour in a camper with the Dash logo on the side touring America promoting cryptocurrencies.
Andreas is like the godfather of Bitcoin and he gives energetic inspirational talks to large and small groups all over the world. He is somewhat angry at the financial establishment in his talks, and he pulls no punches. He is angry at Germany for example for the ‘bail-in’ demands the German banks forced upon the Greek banks which hurt his mother. I should say that Andreas was respectful and poised as he appeared before the Canadian Senate advising them on government policy for Bitcoin. He was thoroughly prepared for any question , and had well rehearsed answers. Half-way through the presentation a couple of the French Canadian Senators questions seemed to me to be motivated by them seeing the business potential of Bitcoin back home in Quebec. The Canadian Senate followed his recommendations after his appearance before their committee.
Andreas is a pilot and now and then he talks about flying in his speeches. I could see him buying himself an expensive airplane. Maybe the crypto community should crowdfund Andreas a Canadian made Bombardier Global 8000 ultra-long-range business jet. Bombardier makes Lear jets, and the seventeen-person three-cabin jet can travel 14,000 km/h at Mach 0.925 or 7,900 miles at a top speed of 700 mph. It would be a good time for an international buyer to look into buying a business jet from Bombardier. The Canadian government and Bombardier is locked in a battle with rival American jet manufacturer Boeing and the United States government, which recently imposed countervailing import duties of 220% on Bombardier jets sold in the United States. Apparently, the Americans are angrier at them for receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies and then giving themselves huge bonuses and salaries than we are. I can not envision Andreas craving to become a wealthy billionaire; and I don’t think that is what makes him tick. He is angry that the developed nations are content to do business as usual while making no attempt to include the other two-thirds of humanity. The billions of people without proper ID , with no bank accounts, loans, or credit cards. Pity all of those economically disenfranchised people, who live outside the economic prosperity zone that we all take our membership in for granted. I equate the situation to a few hundred years ago when the so-called good people took slavery for granted and saw it as something that did not need to be changed.
It was Andreas’ passionate and funny speeches posted to YouTube from cities all over the world that first brought me to Bitcoin. I have already quoted Andreas as having said if one is absolutist they are probably wrong. Vitalik Buterin made the same point when he criticized what he derisively labeled “Bitcoin Maximalists”. People who were too rigid in their crypto world view that they could envision no coin that could possibly be better than Bitcoin. They might even view the other coins as a threat and start throwing stones.
I was going to try to do a chapter in this book on the mathematics of encryption, and the way mining computers work. That is just not going to fly. Unless readers have esoteric knowledge of reverse Polish notation, little-endian format, elliptic-curve encryption, the difficulty adjustment algorithm, hexadecimal hashes, and so forth; not even getting into the electronics, or network transmission layer protocols.
This is a time of experimentation for Bitcoin and Ethereum. By necessity it is a time of errors, mistakes, misunderstandings, malicious acts, and possible intervention by unknown State actors such as North Korea. There will certainly be lost and frozen coins, and there will be thefts of large quantities of coins at a time, and breach of trust, wire fraud, and pyramid schemes. We are dealing with a lot of money and power here and it will attract a lot of evil-genius megalomaniac types. Most people are at a considerable disadvantage against these types.
I hate to say it, but I fear that a lot of these highly intelligent young crypto capitalists actually admire duplicitous game theory scenarios where the cheater wins. I base that shocking statement on the fact that no one criticized the hackers by calling them out as low-life cyber thieves that are so greedy and selfish that they would steal from fellow users and perhaps kill the project itself. No one has said that they hoped the financial authorities or law enforcement agencies would catch the thieves. There simply was no outrage at the sabotage of DDOS dedicated denial of service attacks by bots, or spam attacks of empty transactions. I heard no public condemnation of the bad actors at all, and I was looking for it. If the thefts were not expressly condemned they were implicitly condoned. That is what I said in San Francisco, and nothing has changed since then except the frequency of the increasingly larger thefts. What if it is North Korea doing this?
Many of the big names in the space argue their cases direct to the public on YouTube. They always have compelling arguments that prove that theirs is the real Bitcoin or Ethereum which most closely follows the original vision of the group at the beginning. There is a kind of a wrap yourself in the flag, or religion of computer code and mathematics summed up in the popular mantra “the code is law”. There is a lot of suspicion, and the speculative attribution of motives between parties. There is a cult of personality polarization forming where ad hominem attacks take place, and seniority as to when one bought their first Bitcoin counts more than the facts do in some people’s minds.
There are rumors and possibly fake news suggesting that Blockstream the company that hired most of the long time Bitcoin Core developers may have been quietly acquired by AXA Insurance International . Henri de Castries, 5th Count of Castries who resigned from AXA is the permanent Chairman of the shadowy Bilderberg Group. Bilderberg is an exclusive club of European blue-bloods, and wealthy bankers , primarily the Rothschilds owners of the global financial super-power bank HSBC. For a few months now I have been following anti-globalization journalists reporting on this ultra powerful ‘illuminati style’ group of nobility and blue-bloods, government officials, military leaders, finance ministers, university and think tank delegates; and corporate titans such as Nestle, a company with overt ambitions to control the world's drinking-water supply. There were several big banks who are listed as participants at the June 6, 2016 , annual Bilderberg Group meeting such as HSBC, Deutsche Bank AG, and Banco Santander. Christine Lagarde the head of the International Monetary Fund also attended. Could powerful members of this group possibly have motives to kill Bitcoin? I think that possibility is worthy of consideration. Blockstream’s insistence at unnecessarily keeping the Bitcoin block size a puny one-megabyte, which directly results in slower transaction times and higher fees. It is simply reasonable due diligence for us to ask the question, would this help protect the bank’s credit card business from the new Bitcoin technology? I am not sure as I write this, but people might want to keep an open-mind when they listen to Jeff Berwick’s warnings on the Dollar Vigilante. Jeff is an ardent Anarchist who supports Libertarianism. I sure hope that he is wrong about 9/11; but he makes a good case against the Bilderberg Group’s global hegemony. I am still not convinced of the actual risks to freedom from Globalization, or the Anarchists need to disrupt G7 meetings, or occupy Wall Street. Not to imply that Jeff did that. In fact, he went at great risk to himself to find out how the people were doing in Venezuela after their currency collapsed.
Fareed Zakaria interviewed Salman Rushdie about his newest book Golden House which is said to contain allegorical references to President Donald Trump and his family. Rushdie whom I admire greatly, said that common wisdom among writers is not to try to write in the immediate moment. I guess all of the would-be authors who are trying to chronicle the unexpected and tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump are experiencing the frustration that I am trying to keep up with daily events, and grasp their meanings and ramifications. That suggestion from Rushdie to take a slightly longer-view was very meaningful to me as I struggle to make sense of the goings-on in the cryptosphere. I think Chris Coney had the word university in mind rather than universe when he named his ‘Cryptoverse’ YouTube channel. In addition to his YouTube Patrons he is also promoting an online university concept concerning crypto currency where students receive one-on-one training. When I need up to the minute analysis I go to Chris Coney’s YouTube channel. Recently he posted a video that talked of how the Blockchain Wallet is going to introduce Bitcoin Cash. He shows an official statement from Blockchain.info that says “ market demand for Bitcoin Cash remains strong”. Many people are questioning whether or not this is a hijacking of the Bitcoin brand. The thing about Bitcoin clones is that they come ready built to a massive utilization and network effect scale. Bitcoin Cash was free money to Bitcoin holders as a result of the cloning of the chain by the fork. Bitcoin Cash is trading at $1,200 USD as I write and this is somewhat less than recent highs.