Morpheus Titania
It is 2016/7/9 1:54 am Arizona Time, about 8 hours 6 minutes and 55 seconds to the Bitcoin Halving. In just a few hours the Bitcoin mining reward is going to be reduced from 25 bitcoins to 12.5 bitcoins every time the miners find a new block. This is an exciting time in history and an exciting time in crypto-currency. I have been talking about this event to all the people I do buziness with. That's not a typo. When I do business with Federal Reserve Notes (some would call them “Dollars”) its business, when you do it with Bitcoin, it's Buziness.
A great deal of people believe that a Federal Reserve Note IS a Dollar; however, nothing could be further from the truth. The Coinage Act of 1792 says:
Dollars or Units DOLLARS OR UNITS--each to be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, and to contain three hundred and seventy-one grains and four sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, or four hundred and sixteen grains of standard silver.
This law which is one of the earliest laws enacted by congress and signed by the president George Washington. It declares what a standard of measure a dollar actually IS. At the time, The Spanish Milled Dollar was one of the global standards of measurement for money. The new government though it would be best to have the united States unit of measurement to be the same as what was standard at that time. This is no different than having the inch or the pound to be the same as what was commonly used at the time. This law has never been repealed.
These Federal Reserve Notes we use as money are not Dollars they are negotiable instruments that are backed by nothing except DEBT. I laugh when I hear that that we live in a "capitalist" country, because there is zero capital. How can a debt be capital? The Government, Banks and Media have fooled most of the people. WAKE UP!
Back when the United States was first founded, it was much more important for elected officials to actually pay attention to the founding documents of the country, rather than pay lip service to them as they do today. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution stipulates exactly what the United States congress has the power to legislate:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
The first clause of section 8 are the words “general Welfare” and those words have specific meaning as far as restraining the "power" of government. However in 1936, the Supreme Court changed the definition of these words. Arch criminal sociopath Franklin D. Roosevelt had legislation enacted to "solve" the Depression problem created by the Banks and the Federal reserve in 1929. In 1936 ,United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 even though the law was struck down, the court redefined what "general Welfare" meant.
The clause confers a power separate and distinct from those later enumerated[,] is not restricted in meaning by the grant of them, and Congress consequently has a substantive power to tax and to appropriate, limited only by the requirement that it shall be exercised to provide for the general welfare of the United States. … It results that the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution.
The "Supreme Court" was able to redefine what the words “general Welfare” meant. The constitution is created to limit the power of government to SPECIFIC purposes. Instead of limiting the government to specifically what the constitution says, now the government is NOT LIMITED to providing moneys for "public purposes". By redefining “general Welfare”, the government is now free to do ANYTHING it wants as long as it is for a "public purpose" or so called "good for the country". This is a slippery slope as it is all very subjective.
This is how governments operate: if the ones who are “running it” don't like the rules, they just change the definitions. If you don't like the changes they make to “help you” then they usually say "well then vote". If you complain about voting not working, then they say “then move” or as I have heard people in the military say "embrace the suck". What does all this have to do with Bitcoin? Simple, Bitcoin is a monetary protocol run on computers; definitions, rules and how the game is played doesn't change...ever! Bitcoin operates on a consensus based model instead of a fear based model, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun", as Mao Zedong would say.
Article 1 Section 8 Clause 4 of the Constitution gives the government the power to regulate money. The founding fathers already had experience with hyperinflation and the the continental dollar's value becoming worthless.
"To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;"
Money is a unit of measurement similar in nature to an inch, a pound or a grain except that a “Dollar” is REQUIRED to be exactly 371.25 grains of pure silver, by law, this was the standard of measurement. The reason for standardization is to facilitate trade. If one person has unit of measure and the other person has a different unit of measure that is going to make trading very difficult as not only do the traders have to agree on value, quality, quantity of the goods or services they also have to agree on the value and quantity of the money.
Thus with standardization, people did business in gold and silver because they were exchanging a thing of value like a chicken, corn or textiles for something else of value like metal coins that were standardized. The asset being sold, a raw material like the chicken plus human labor to raise them, to trade for another raw material like silver plus human labor to mine, refine, weigh and stamp that gave it its value. An equilibrium was achieved and trading was performed. The person with the asset got the silver and the person with the silver got the asset. Both participants lives were improved, as trading is not a zero sum game.
The values of items were based on the immutable laws of supply and demand. For example, if I have a common paper cup, it has a value; however, there are millions of cups and they are fairly easy to make. Their value might be 1-5 pennies each. If all the machines that make paper cups were to break and I have the only paper cup in the world, the value of the cup I own is now much, much more. This is true for anything that human beings desire in the 3 dimensional world. Supply and demand determines the value of everything. Usually it is the attributes of the thing that give it value, not the thing itself. The cup is a machine, its attributes are, that is easily holds more drink than I can hold in my hands.
Bitcoin has attributes that human beings have assigned to money: scarcity, durability, authenticity, portability, divisibility and storage of value. Anything that has these attributes, is MONEY. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...it's a duck. Because Bitcoin is digital though, it creates a schism in the mind of some people. They somehow believe that money, which is a construct of the mind, has to exist in the 3 dimensional world, in order to be “real”. Many of these people say only gold and silver is real money. That is ok, they don't have to accept Bitcoin for what they think has value.
The challenge I have for these people is that right now, I use Bitcoins to buy almost anything I want. I pay my rent in Bitcoin. I buy products from overstock.com, I book hotels with expedia.com, I have register a domains with domains4bitcoins.com , I buy groceries, hardware or coffee by getting a gift card at Whole Foods, Home Depot or Starbucks through gyft.com or I buy directly from hundreds of small businesses like delicious pizza from classiccrustpizza.com How do you do that with Gold? You can't.
The only thing I can do with gold or silver is exchange it for “dollars”. No one I know of does business in precious metals. I won't deny I like having precious metals. They just aren't convenient for business. It's really hard to make change with gold and silver. With Bitcoin on the other hand, I can always make change. Back in the industrial age a negotiable instrument was invented known as a check. A person could write a check for the exact amount that was owed. The check would clear as long as you had enough money in the bank. You just never really knew until the money was in your bank, whether the check was “good” or not. These days most people have direct deposit and online banking so the popularity of these negotiable instruments has diminished.
Bitcoin has features that give it more value than legacy money. Bitcoin is counterfeit proof, it is impossible to have a fraudulent transaction or fake Bitcoins. A Bitcoin “account” cannot be frozen or censured because the banks or governments do not create or control them. They cannot regulate Bitcoins, because the government cannot control the immutable laws of math. Bitcoin transactions are between 2 parties and therefore difficult to track and therefore private. Governments HATE this. Transactions in bitcoin are validated approximately every 10 minutes so funds are available much quicker than legacy banking systems. All these attributes contribute to the bitcoin price right now of of $654.07
In the next 6 hours and 29 minutes the mining reward is going to be reduced from 3600 new bitcoins per day to 1800 new Bitcoins per day. The supply is going down, and every single day new bitcoin users are born, so demand is going up. I don't know what the price of Bitcoin is going to be in the future as I don't have a crystal ball. I do know that the price of bitcoin was $12.25 on November 28, 2012, the last time the mining reward halved from 50 to 25. One year and a day later it was $1132. Will It do that again, I don't know. I do know this: The laws of supply and demand are immutable. Although history doesn't always repeat itself, It does often rhyme.
Were Bitcoin to go up again like that it did back in 2013 after the last halving, it would probably be a good idea to have at least one. Worst case scenario you buy bitcoin and goes to zero, yea you loose $650, the other side is it goes up 92.4x like it did in 2013 and Bitcoin is $64,500. You don't want to think “if only”. Many people I know say, "I could have bought $1000 of Bitcoin when it was $.50, and I didn't." Oops!
For me I am all in. I believe the crypto-currency phenomenon is the future. My bitcoin trading pays for everything I do. Previously the jobs I had, I was always doing the same thing, making millionaires richer. For the last 2.5 years I have been doing what I want to do: by being part of the solution, changing the world and working on my own success. Now I’m semi-retired, I meet my friends all over town, we talk, have some coffee and then they give me money to convert to bitcoins. I do business only with those I want, when I want and how I want. It is MY LIFE, why would I allow anyone or any group to tell me how to live MY LIFE? Last time I checked, a just moment ago, I own MY LIFE, COMPLETELY. Just like you do! My allegiance is to Great Spirit and Great Spirit, ONLY! Not to some flag or a some hallucinated social contract a group of sociopaths created. The BORG create money that doesn’t even exist as the carrot and grant themselves a monopoly on violence to control as the stick! My buziness partners choose to do buziness with me, because they trust me and we have a solid relationship. Now That has VALUE!
With Bitcoin I have: No Government, No Banks, No Forms, No headaches, No customer service, No employees, No building, No bookkeeping, No CPA’s, No Attorneys, No permits, No insurance, No taxes; the product: one size fits all and colorless, never goes bad, always functions as promised, impervious to the elements or temperature. Instead of employees to fulfill orders, Bitcoin, a robot, was designed and maintained by someone else, fulfills the orders and I pay it pennies to do all the work. The robot never takes a break and always does exactly what I tell it to do. With all of that not enough, Bitcoin halving increases its scarcity making them more valuable in future. What could be better than that?