What do Bitcoin and Climate Change have in common?
Both are scams intended to transfer wealth from fools to the informed
The current collapse of one Bitcoin exchange after another is the inevitable outcome of the development of a payment system that creates nothing, adds no value to anything, and has no barriers to entry so that everyone and their sister can develop a “cryptocurrency” using open source “blockchain”. Think about it. I will start a company, limit the share capital to precisely 21 million shares, issue 20 million shares to random investors in my family for $1 each and tell everyone the shares are a “secure means of making transfers of money to others” with every transaction verified by random “miners” who will receive one of the 1 million unissued shares for “proving” the transfers were devoid of fraud. What, a transfer system protected from fraud? Let me be first in line. I will call the shares “Coins”, give them a fancy technoname like “staplecoin” and name my company “Blockchain Unlimited” with the slogan “Get one before they are all gone, they will be worth millions”. The share register will be digital, so no paper trail will exist, just a record of the transfers in a public ledger. Anyone ready to sign up?
But with Bitcoin (and its ilk) real people put real money into the “crypto” system and what they got back was a few bits and bytes they thought had “value” and they could trade with others through an “exchange”. Billions went into the system, and the exchanges traded the “cryptocurrencies” at higher and higher prices as the unwashed herd was driven by the fear of missing out (FOMO). Some nerds bought the original issue of Bitcoins for $1 a coin, saw the prices run as high as $60,000 per coin, and became billionaires on paper and by selling some Bitcoins, billionaires in fact. The money they made came from someone else, not from developing anything of value. Sam Bankman-Fried became a celebrity and the CEO of a popular “exchange” called FTX that kept some of the real money people paid for Bitcoins in “secure and segregated accounts”. Yep, that was all it took to separate investors from their wealth. But Sam had a problem, what to do with all that money? Why let it lie fallow?
The sad story is FTX collapsed into bankruptcy, Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO, and the receiver will have to clean up the mess. Think this was an isolated incident? Hello! It is one of long series of collapses of crypocurrency exchanges with millions lost by investors who somehow thought putting their savings into Mt. Gox or FTX was a safe play. The Globe and Mail sees the future, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s humiliation is “only the beginning”. As investors flee the space, every cryptocurrency exchange risks a “run on the bank” and the bank hasn’t enough cash to meet the demand. This con ends badly.
Why is this similar to climate change? Because the climate change theory is another “mass mania” devoid of substance, and it is at its heart a scheme to transfer money from the foolish to the informed.
The theory that CO2 will cause catastrophic “climate change” is also a mania, driven by left-wing leaders who see climate fear as a way to transfer wealth from the foolish to the informed. The promoters of the specious climate change theory make no bones about it - “we redistribute the world’s wealth by climate policy”.
Now we have world leaders meeting at COP27 to discuss reparations by wealthy countries to poor countries for the damage the wealthy countries have inflicted on poorer countries by permitting CO2 emissions. Is anyone awake?
I am all for providing aid to poorer countries, as developed nations have done for decades including through institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They didn’t need an excuse to help and certainly didn’t need a guilt trip. But there will be a reaction and it won’t help the developing world much at all.
The nonsensical climate change policies that became popular with Western democracies egged on by the United Nations and the socialist wing of politics have created a global energy shortage that is deepening daily and can only be remedied with massive investment in fossil fuels. But the fossil fools running America, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, most of Europe and Brazil are eschewing fossil fuels in deluded belief that “renewables” are the answer. Despite $3.8 trillion of worldwide investment in “renewables” oil & gas use has risen, not diminished, and fossil fuels continue to make up 80% of world energy supply.
As underdeveloped countries develop, demand for more energy will rise and the extreme shortage crippling European economies today will just get worse. Energy prices will keep rising, fueling even higher rates of inflation than we see today, and central banks will crush econmies with higher rates trying to curb inflation only to see inflation resurge as economies recover since deep recessions won’t see any increase in output of oil & gas. Eventually, democratic voters will decide not to put up with the nonsense any longer, like right after they find they can’t both heat their homes and afford to feed their families.
Climate nutters lie Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and Rishi Sunak will go down in history as fools and voters will restore sanity to the halls of power in Whitehall, Washington and Ottawa, but not before enough pain has been inflicted on citizens that they start to take the energy shortage seriously.
Both have become "religions". I have never been able to understand blind faith.
You have zero idea of what bitcoin really is . You can’t distinguish bitcoin from other coins. Your understanding of bitcoin is childish. What SBF did was fraud. The 21,000 crypto coins are more like you describe, but they are not bitcoin.