First
we have Juraj Bednár, a bubbly Slovak anarchist speaker. His topic:
free markets, e-money and cryptocurrency. He rightly recognizes that
our current socioeconomic system is not capitalist. Money in itself
is not wealth, because we don't become richer simply by printing
money. Printing money (counterfeiting) is fraud. Bednár points out
the moral superiority of voluntary exchanges in lieu of government
violence. The current model (statism) erects major barriers to entry
for small private business and thus favours larger corporations, who
in many cases have lobbied successfully for more regulations that
they can afford to comply with but which force smaller competitors
out of the market. Free markets are not just about reducing taxes but
reducing regulatory burdens generally. Then there's one more
reassertion of the sanctity of the non-aggression principle.
Next
up we have Frank Braun, IT security consultant and self-described
“privacy extremist”, wearing a fully-fledged face mask, not to
protect himself from swine flu (haha) but state surveillance (CCTV).
Why is Bitcoin an important step towards a free society? A free
society needs a free market and a free market needs sound money.
Bitcoin is such money.
“No
state, no banks, no OTC”: in the Bitcoin community we should not
focus on interoperability with
the old state/bank/over-the-counter trifecta. Braun's firm
anarcho-voluntarist-revolutionary roots are clearly displayed in his
use of such colloquialisms as banksters and
sheeple.
A key point is that Braun
believes Bitcoin will fail if it remains too dependent on exchange
with the legacy banking system. The Bitcoin economy needs to flourish
in its own right, perhaps with underground face-to-face exchanges to
physical monies, bypassing the state-monitored banking system. He's
making the entire world feel like the former East Germany! I had the
audacity to pose this notion as a question and he replied that in
some ways he thinks today's surveillance state is worse than
the apparatus of the former east German régime! This is a
seriously sobering thought.
The sound-money theme
continues with a talk by Charles Vollum comparing bitcoins with real
gold. Gold is precious but bitcoins share similar properties as sound
money. Both are limited-supply, unforgeable, durable, divisible,
free-market currencies. However, bitcoins are much more versatile as
means of payment; Vollum points out you could wire bitcoins to Mars
in a quarter of an hour!
One weakness of Bitcoin
is its poor liquidity, resulting from a small economy at present and
no easy instant means to exchange large volumes of legacy monies into
bitcoins. Vollum does, however, believe that Bitcoin offers huge
potential to develop into a store of value possibly superior to
physical gold. The future of Bitcoin is obviously still uncertain
(but it is that very uncertainty that opens up opportunities).
Vollum produces a few
graphs quoting price changes in gold grams as well as US$, showing
how the bankers have robbed everybody blind via inflation, debasement
of the paper currency. Yale tuition, for example, priced on a gold
basis, has experienced a few peaks and troughs, but today is almost
exactly the same price as in 1900! In dollar terms it costs over $55k
annually today compared with $700 in 1900. “Free your mind from
fiat currencies” - Vollum.
A brief interlude brings
on the BFL auction, the main highlight of which is their current FPGA
rig, with a retail price of US$15000 or so. Josh is auctioning off
one such system (with a faulty display!) and it finally sells for BTC
1070.
4pm sharp, and finally!
It's the famous/notorious (delete as appropriate) Max Keiser! Yes,
the guy on RT! He's a huge supporter of, and believer in, the bitcoin
currency and is representing himself at this conference for no pay.
Keiser opens by pointing
out that barter is once again all the rage in this new age, as the
fiat banking system breaks down. Communities trade with detergent or
even chewing gum. Think what Bitcoin could achieve. As Keiser points
out, finance has become more abstract and elastic since the globally
dominant US$ detached from the theoretical gold standard in 1971. The
fiat system is no longer fractional reserve but fictional (zero)
reserve. Keiser has repeated all this well-known fact on his RT show
many times already.
In under an hour's
talking time, Keiser's given us a showdown of a lot of the
malfeasance the global banking élite constantly get up to. They're
robbing the lot of us blind, and sooner rather than later the house
of cards known as fiat money and the global banking system is bound
to come tumbling down. This sounds catastrophic but it will open up a
big opportunity and finally relieve the world of the bankers' fraud.
Max Keiser never pulls a punch, he calls a spade a spade and so he
also calls fraud what it is: fraud. He claims London, as a major
banking centre, is the fraud capital of the universe. He tells us a
little story of a Chinese woman sentenced to death for bilking about
$57 million in assets from her investors. “Now that's a
deterrent!” he says almost gleefully.
Max Keiser's lecture has
brought the conference to a timely end, and I “sneakily” film a
few snippets of him and his now fiancée, Stacy Herbert, together
answering a few questions in the hotel lobby. Skip forward a few
hours after I had a nice dinner on Tottenham Court Road with my
uncle, and I find myself here in the dingy environs of the Star of
Kings pub in north London, a few blocks north of Kings Cross rail
station. It is a slightly odd anticlimax to a slightly hectic
weekend. I've enjoyed myself reasonably well on what has been, after
all, a semi-serious business trip. Maybe I deserve a day or two to
mess around London seeing a few sights, but there'll always be a
chance for that in future.
From the conference's
end, it's over and out. Amir certainly did a good job on the
organizational side of things. Me, I shall try to keep blogging on
Bitcoin-related material. Don't take this as online panhandling, but
extra money flowing toward my “donations” address (q.v.) will
certainly help in keeping the blog taps flowing! However, money or
no, I will make my best effort to post something of note here
periodically, especially at future Bitcoin-related events.
Satoshi!
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