I have been an accredited investor in the past, and during my due diligence and research, I came across Equedia Investment Research. Sometimes startling, sometimes wrong, but always written for laymen in lucid and clear English, I continue to receive the free newsletter, despite no longer investing.
Since understanding events tends to almost always involve 'following the money', I find investment research useful in understanding, well, everything.
After a good storm, I have been inundated (not punny!) with work. During one lunch break I was hit up for no less than 5 roofing jobs by folks that suddenly discovered leaks they wanted fixed. Also, Steemit was wonky, and I was practically unable to post, vote, or comment for weeks. For all these reasons, I haven't posted much of late.
After reading this Equedia Newsletter, I am returning to the fray. And, also, I find Steemit has settled down in the last couple days, so I hope I'll be able to actually get this published!
Anywho, I have also watched as BTC and it's ilk have remained largely left to grow and be benignly neglected by governments, and thus not crushed in infancy - as one would expect of a technology that challenged the utter tyrannical stranglehold fractional reserve banking has on our wealth.
This is NOT a brief discussion, so it'll take several minutes to read through. However, I find the views of the author, Ivan Lo, to be similar to my own regarding BTC and cryptos, and benign government neglect, and perhaps you will find some very valuable tidbit in here.
Importantly, he and I both feel that cryptos are being fed a LOT of rope, and there is presently a LOT of upside left before the IMF, FED, and etc., try anything funny.
Enjoy!
From what I understand both the Fed (internal) and the IMF(external) are creatures of US (non governmental) financial institutions that set monetary policy. Particularly in the case of the Fed, its policies determine the supply of money within the economy; and through its prolonged use of quantitative easing, the value of the US dollar has continued to erode. To further exacerbate the situation, sine the US dollar, thanks to President Richard Nixon, is no longer backed by any tangible underlying assets, some have warned that it could soon lose its reserve currency status. If the dollar collapses, the Fed and IMF lose power and influence. Barring the hasty introduction of a new compulsory currency (likely crypto based), what could the Fed or IMF do to stem the continued rise of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies?
Just as you say. The situation isn't that the IMF is gonna act alone to implement it's control, but rather that these institutions are part of oligarchic systemic control, and each do their part.
Actual and particular actions to control BTC are left to other institutions and actors, such as the SEC, IRS, etc., and it is clear that these forces have left BTC alone so that it will prosper, at least for now.
There are various mechanisms that could be employed to disable cryptos. Exchanges are the obvious weakness, and not long ago the exchanges that list Steem were enlisted in the successful forcing of SBD into parity with the USD.
Who actually made this move is unclear to me, but the likeliest suspects are Stinc, and that is a quite revealing picture of the degree of power that is necessary to employ exchanges to impose control of cryptocurrency.
Steem is also a tiny player in the crypto markets, and that such fine-grained control is being exercised is indicative of the finesse and subtlety with which the game is being played, globally.
Very astute observations. Your arguments about the SEC and the IRS make a very strong case. One possible silver lining in all of this is that there are a number of projects that are developing decentralized exchanges that aim to offer absolute privacy among traders. When combined with cryptocurrencies such as ZCoin, Monero, and CloakCoin, all that purportedly offer iron-clad anonymity, authorities will be hard pressed to maintain control over markets as they have in the past. By the way, if I hadn't mentioned it before, excellent post.
Freedom and security only depend on privacy in a world featuring oligarchical force. While I'll lament it's passing as much as anyone, privacy is largely already nonexistent, and will simply no longer exist shortly.
I suspect that what is going to be necessary to counter the total invasion of our privacy is noise. Rather than any single currency being able to withstand regulatory pressure, an infinite supply of currencies will.
We already see over 1000 cryptocurrencies, and the cat is out of the bag. I have written a (fiction) post in which single use and one off currencies are used to preclude centralized control of finance. Lemme know if you wanna read it.
Thanks for your kind words =)
Yes, I would be interested in giving it a read. Thanks for the suggestion.
Welp, here's a link to that post.
Enjoy!