November 30th, amid peak FUD as bitcoin unravelled attempts to fractional reserve it, the European Central Bank (ECB) was gleeful.
Bitcoin is at the “last gasp before the road to irrelevance,” Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf said on behalf of ECB.
They then proceed to make the usual arguments that bitcoin is not a suitable investment because it does not have yield, like dividents.
Ignoring the fact no one buys stocks for the dividend, bitcoin does have yield but in a decentralized manner because bitcoin itself is the product and if you want to use that product, it increases demand – and so returns.
The rest of that statement is of the same shallow analysis. On the one hand they say regulations should be applied, but on the other hand it shouldn’t be “misunderstood as approval.”
That’s still a less confused argument than the one presented more recently, now that bitcoin has recovered to double from ECB’s bottom of $15,000, by Jon Danielsson, an economist teaching at the London School of Economics.
Writing for LSE’s Business Review, he first says bitcoin will collapse “under its own internal contradictions.”
The sneaking in at the elite towers of thinking of the communist lingo that likes so much to argue others are full of internal contradictions, but not the perfect Chinese Communist Party, will hopefully not go unnoticed.
But that aside, Danielsson says “the very fact that the government is acting in such a heavy handed manner could well be what protects crypto.”
He argues crypto should be left alone instead, as that way it will disappear somehow, but if the regulatory attack continues then crypto will be made stronger, will boom, will not disappear, and it will be the government’s fault for all of that.
Interesting fellow. A bit different than “Bitcoin’s last stand,” as ECB declared it in November because it clearly turned out not to be so.
The worry now is whether fighting crypto might backfire. Our answer is obviously, but it is interesting to see so in the open statements that amount to why won’t this just go away.
The answer is what it always has been when some of the establishment doesn’t like something: it’s good for the people, and they like it, and they’re far more numerous.
So keep collapsing under your own internal contradictions of communistic thinking where one man or institution decides our money, because crypto is not going anywhere.
Except to the moon obviously as our plans to go to Mars instead have been delayed with the T-0.40 seconds testrun of the Starship rocket indicating it might take a bit more time.
No time can help those that are against competition however. Whether the US government, or Chinese, the ECB or this Danielsson guy.
Nature abhors monopoly, including over money, and that the competition for such monopoly comes from well educated, polite, math heavy coders, is and should be seen as a gift from that nature.
Because while ECB’s president Christine Lagarde talks about ‘Policy frameworks for a fragmenting world,’ some are coding those frameworks.
And it is that code that will decide many things in the digital era. China has made the strategic mistake of underestimating it when it comes to finance.
Leaders and thinkers in the west should start thinking about why they have been wrong to underestimate it for so long too, and consider that the new innovation may instead help in achieving many of the things we want.
From more dynamic markets, more competition, more vibrancy, and more empowerment, to leading the frontier and even the frontiers.
And that they have been wrong is at this point self-evident because the delusion of the ECB could not be more clear than stated in November, as now proven so.
These people also need to look at themselves in the mirror and just wonder what they have become that they are gleeful an innovation might fail.
Code money, whatever your opinion of bitcoin itself, is an achievement of man and science, and is undoubtedly a step forward.
It needs to be harnessed, should be, and it will be harnessed, as it is thankfully by largely fairly competent men that are dragging our societies to a new era of both greater capability and greater empowerment.
Where the code sets the rules, unchangeably, in a level playing field for all, and where the market is in control, not selfish or power-hungry man or men.
