by “Cash is King,” has always been my mantra. Not that long ago, I lived in an old Mercedes hippie wagon type camper van. I was making good money as a freelance photographer and all my income went into a humble Halifax building society deposit account. Whenever I needed some cash I went to a branch of Halifax and drew out enough cash to last me until the next time that I needed some. Even when I travelled abroad I only took cash or travellers cheques. I remember what fun cash was when I first started travelling the world in my twenties. All those colourful foreign currencies fascinated me with their individual designs. And doing business with illegal street money changers in places like India was one of those treats that was at the top of any self-respecting backpacker’s to do list.
Now even though I have since learnt that the cash we have in our wallets is not real money — it’s just a fiat currency, a paper IOU — I always got the feeling that these notes in my wallet were worth something, whereas the silly plastic debit and credit cards felt vacuous and of little value. Filling up a wallet with currency was essential dressing up routine for a young guy off for a night out with the lads to pull some girls. Cash was great at a flea market or boot sale too where a good deal could be done with the stallholder by waving around some currency notes to the relevant value of the amount one was prepared to pay for an item.
Then suddenly all that fun changed, and all because I bought a property to renovate in Welsh Wales.
At the time I thought that I would need a mortgage for the property purchase. Not having a bank account or a wallet bulging with credit cards to give me a credit rating that would satisfy the criteria of those whose asses I would have to kiss in order for them to be satisfied that I was a responsible enough citizen who would pay back the monthly mortgage installments with the dilligence of a saint, I opened a current account and started applying for as many credit cards as possible.
As it happened, I ended up buying the property outright with cash, so I didn’t need the credit cards or the credit rating that they gave me after all. Now, I should have cut them all up and binned them, but instead I went bat-shit crazy using them to pay for renovating my property and I soon got badly into debt, and so had to get a mortgage to pay off the debts. Vicious circle or what? Ok, it was only a small mortgage of £30,000, but soon I found that I was increasing that balance as a result of being seduced by those tempting ‘drawdown offers at the bottom of each monthly statement, and it wasn’t long before the balance had shot up to over £60,000.
Then In 2010 I started researching online about what was going on in the world and about the history of money and how a mafia cabal controlled the world money supply with a ponzi scheme and how there was going to be a massive crash of the US dollar and all paper currencies to bring in a New World Order with a single world currency.
I started rationalising that if I didn’t get my act together I would end up as the subject of one of those press stories that gets the mainstream tabloid media presstitutes salivating:
‘Photographer in Wales Barricades Himself in House to Resist High Court Sherrif’s Repo Order.’
So I went into superdrive to wack that relatively small mortgage down to under £16,000. And thank Goodness I did. Everything that was being predicted back then is coming true before my very eyes with this Coronavirus stuff in 2020.
Bitcoin and Crypto.
A few years ago, I was really interested in the new concept of crypto currency, and the blockchain technology. I physically traded quite a bit between August 2017 – June 2018. Made some, lost some.
At it’s inception in 2009 – 2010. Bitcoin was worth basically nothing. In March 2010, a user with the amusing handle – “SmokeTooMuch” – auctioned 10,000 BTC for $50 – $0.005/BTC – (cumulatively), but no buyer was found. (source Wikipedia)
On 17th March 2010, the now-defunct BitcoinMarket.com started operating as the first bitcoin exchange. The price of one bitcoin was $0.003. (source Wikipedia)
From the start price of $0.003, bitcoin went through cycles of appreciation and depreciation. bubbles and busts,
On New Year’s day 2017 it crossed the $1,000 threshold for the first time in three years. After an initial surge to almost $1,300 it crashed back again under the $1,000 mark on March 10th 2017.
After that ‘pull back’ in March, there was no stopping Bitcoin. It got the ‘bit between it’s teeth,’ fueled up it’s tanks and took off for the moon reaching a dizzy all time high of $19,891 on 17th December 2017. A return of around 2,000% on your money in just nine months!
Had someone bought those 10,000 Bitcoin, that “SmokeTooMuch” failed to auction off in 2010 for $50, and then sold at this peak in December 2017, they would have been very happy wealthy bunnies to the tune of almost $200 million! Not bad for a seven year investment of $50 eh?
A lot of people became extremely wealthy via Bitcoin and crypto including the Winklevoss twins who were the first bitcoin billionaires and used their gains to take legal action against Mark Zuckerberg who they accused of stealing their idea which eventually became facebook.
NB. The all-time high of $19,891 was on the Coinbase exchange Bitcoin Price Index. On some other exchanges it’s reported to have broken the $20,000 mark.
From it’s all-time high in December 2017, bitcoin fell out of the sky. I remember it well. After a few ‘pull backs’ on the way down it eventually hit a low of around $3,000 one year later. Today, Bitcoin is strong again and currently back up at around $10,400!
People got excited by Bitcoin and crypto because it appeared to be a decentralised and unregulated system of finance free from the control of mafia banking cartels. No longer would the people need these corporations to make transactions, or so they thought. But they weren’t ‘following the money,’ they didn’t stop to think that those with the greatest amount of wealth would still be calling the shots, and watching the crypto phenomenom from the sidelines waiting to pounce at the right moment.
Around the end of October 2017, CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) Cboe Global Markets, Inc. announced plans to launch futures and option trading for Bitcoin.
NB. Futures and options are just a way of betting on the future price of something.
In November 2017, crypto investors’ euphoria brought on by Bitcoins’ seemingly messianic launch into outer space to liberate the people from the worldwide stranglehold of banking cartels and market manipulators, blinded them to the fact that control of crypto was about to fall prey to those very same cartels that they were hoping to defeat with this new ‘decentralised currency.’
On Sunday December 10th 2017 Cboe began trading exactly as planned at 5.00 p.m CT. The opening price for bitcoin was $15,000 and 890 contracts were traded by 7:15 p.m.
From that point on, the crypto market effectively became just another currency to be traded and controlled by the big player bankster mafia of the financial markets, their casino mentality and their big money.
In just one week, the ‘Whales’ had moved in under cover, then proceeded to pump and psyche the crypto fever to it’s max as starry eyed wannabee traders and crypto newbies rushed in where angels dared to tread. Then boom! The big players pulled the plug, profit took at the top and again on ‘short’ bets as Bitcoin crashed into the abyss.
Comparisons to the crash of Tulip mania which swept Holland in the 17th century have correctly or incorrectly been made.
More important than Bitcoin and crypto is the blockchain technology. This will revolutionise the world the way that the internet revolutionised the world upon it’s arrival 20-30 years ago, and it’s already started! Check out the new video platform D.tube, it’s using blockchain technology. Check it out. https://d.tube/
Blockchain technology powers crypto currency on a distributed secure ledger system where a transaction is recorded throughout the platform on many ledgers/blocks as opposed to the old method of accounting with a single ledger showing debit/credit transactions.
So, if I owed you £50, I could carry out the transaction from my phone on the Blockchain without the need for an intermediary bank or credit card company, and I could be certain that you had received that money. However as yet (I believe that it’s still the case) I could only make a crypto transaction to you so could not as yet pay you £50 but could pay you £50 worth of crypto and you could cash that in for fiat currency, pounds or dollars etc.
The Blockchain became a great success because it provided a solution to the ‘Byzantine General’s Problem.’ ensuring guaranteed secure proof of transaction. Fascinating stuff.
Blockchain is the ledger platform for the 2,000 plus crypto currencies at the moment, but finally there will be one dominating single world crypto currency rising from the ashes of an all world currency crash. Some punters have speculated that the one world crypto currency will be called the Phoenix. This speculation arose because of the cover story ‘Get Ready for a World Currency’ in The Economist Magazine in January 1988. The cover is a picture of the mythical Phoenix bird rising from burning world fiat currencies. Hanging around the bird’s neck is a coin with the inscription Ten Phoenix 2018. There is indeed a crypto coin named PhoenixCoin PXC, and it’s worth a fraction of a cent.
Now It’s common knowledge amongst the ‘awake’ that the occultist Rothschild family own and control virtually all central banks where all ‘money’ (currency) originates. That is, it is printed out of thin air.
So whilst the Phoenix bird in this Economist cover image symbolises the rise of a new one world crypto currency from the ashes of old ones. It’s worth noting that the elite bankster cult who control world money supply are masonic occultists and that the Phoenix bird is an ancient occult symbol. Also that The Economist Newspaper Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Economist Group which masonic occultist Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild was Chairman of from 1972 to 1989. This article was published in January 1988. Connect the dots!
Whether the name of the new crypto one-world currency will be the dominant king Bitcoin, or a new Bitcoin dollar or Phoenix Bitcoin is something that only time will tell. What is certain in my opinion is that there will be a one-world currency, it will be crypto, and I won’t be happy about that at all.
One thing that I’m sure will not dissapear for a long time is precious metals. Precious metals are what Mike Maloney, host of the smash hit video series Hidden Secrets of Money, calls real money. According to Maloney, all the other so-called forms of money are mere currencies, fiat currencies.
Now, all fiat currencies, those dollar, euro, pound note currencies, those pieces of paper with pictures of dead criminals printed on them, are literally nothing more than IOUs (I owe you) and they only have value as long as people have confidence that the central bank who printed them will honour their promise to pay the bearer on demand the value printed on the note.
People accept fiat currency as ‘money’ because they have 100% confidence that when they go to a supermarket to do the weekly shopping, that supermarket will also show 100% confidence in the IOUs and will accept them in exchange for goods purchased.
In order for these pieces of paper IOUs to have a high confidence factor they need to be backed by something substantial, real money or commodity.
The world dominant reserve currency — the US dollar — was backed by gold until 1971 when US president Richard Nixon shocked the world by taking the dollar off the gold standard. He did this because there was no more gold in Fort Knox with which to back the dollar, it had all been frittered away on warfare.
The dollar desperately needed something to back it in order for it to retain it’s status as the world’s dominant reserve currency. There’s no more gold or precious metal! What’s the next best thing? — Oil. So the USA did a deal with Saudi Arabia who were the largest supplier of oil at the time. If Saudi agreed to sell oil in US dollars, then the USA would be an ally and supply Saudi with weapons and protect them from invasion. From then onwards, the dollar was backed by oil and has until now retained it’s status as the world’s dominant reserve currency. But world oil supply is dwindling and will be drying up completely in the future and therefore will be of no further use in backing the US Dollar.
The status of the world’s dominant reserve currency looks to be very much at a crossroad. Whilst fiat currencys are still the means of world trade, will the US dollar retain it’s dominant reserve currency status by finding some other commodity to back it, or will we see another currency take that prestigious position?
Whilst considering this, it’s worth bearing in mind that we are in the embryo stages of a one world crypto currency being born.
One fiat currency that many do not realise is a fiat currency are SDRs (Special Drawing Rights.) Many in the financial world are vague about SDRs calling them units of account. Financial guru Jim Rickards explains:
”I should just explain what SDR is. SDR stands for Special Drawing Rights. Sounds geeky. I know a lot of Phds who can’t give you a straight answer on what it is. It’s actually incredibly simple.
The Special Drawing Right is world money. They don’t want to call it world money cos that’s sort of spooky sounding, but that’s what it is. Now, the Federal Reserve can print dollars, the European central bank can print Euros and the IMF can print SDRs. So it’s just another form of fiat money printed by the IMF. By the way, you say who is in charge of the IMF? They have a 24 member executive committee, 24 nations and you look at that list, you got Kings, dictators, Communists, you know it’s a nice group of people. You’ve got some democratically elected leaders too it’s not all dictators, but you know it’s a nice crowd, completely unaccountable self perpetuating, unelected, they’re just there. So they run the IMF and basically they operate throught the G20, and a lot of people think that because there’s this badass kid that the SDR is backed by a basket of hard currencies, it’s not, it’s just another fiat currency.
So what’s the role of the basket? The role of the basket is just a math problem to determine the value of the SDR expressed in other currencies.
So, including the Chinese Yuan in the basket of five currencies; dollars, Euros, Yen, Sterling and now the Chinese Yuan, that’s a prestige thing, it’s important, it’s meaningful but it doesn’t change the fact that the SDR is just another printed currency. So China’s in that club, they got more votes of the IMF thanks to Paul Ryan, so they’re in that club as well.”
China has become the world’s industrial powerhouse of the last two decades, and it’s membership on 1st October 2016 to the elite ‘club’ of IMF’s basket of five reserve currencies is a significant move to consider when trying to plot the future dominant reserve currency and how it will be backed. This will determine the future economic state of the world.
China has been buying truckloads of gold, as have other nations. Could the Yuan be the the new dominant reserve currency backed by a new Chinese gold standard. Has the USA now rebuilt it’s stockpile of gold, enough to bring back the gold standard to back the US dollar again? There was talk about the SDRs becoming the new dominant reserve currency, maybe even the one world currency. Could the world’s dominant reserve currency be backed by another mineral resource, in the way that the US dollar was backed by oil. Perhaps a valuable mineral such as lithium or vanadium used for batteries as the world moves towards electrification of transport?
Me? I’ll play safe and stick to precious metals as a way to secure any spare fiat currency I might have, and keep everything, whether fiat currency or precious metals as far away from any banking or financial institution as possible. I started buying gold in 2015 and it has doubled since then. With the present crisis, gold has been rising steadily and recently hit all time highs of $2,067/oz, £1,574/oz, €1,744/oz.
The big crash is coming, there is no doubt about that. Pessimistic analytical outlooks forecast that the world crash of fiat currency will be combined with serious unrest, civil war, even, God forbid, WW3. I’m no doomsday merchant, far from it, but I’m not taking any chances. I’ve already started prepping.
Losing cash is an inevitability unless we all fight to keep it. I have signed a petition to the UK government to not phase out cash and written to my MP about it. I try to make all my purchases on the ‘High street’ with cash. Cash has been used for thousands of years in some form or other and it gives the people power and freedom and that’s why ‘they’ don’t want us to have any. But as with everything, it’s the wealthiest who run the show, and they are the ones who want a cashless society.
We could defeat this bankster mafia who control the world on this cashless society issue and many others. We outnumber these elitist scumbags millions to one. But it’s no good outnumbering them by this massive ratio if the massive ratio of people don’t even understand where money comes from. They must first stop watching TV and wake up to the illegal ponzi scheme that the supply of ‘money’ is. As Henry Ford said:
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Henry Ford. 1863 – 1947.
It’s a sobering thought that there is only about 3% of available ‘money’ for the sum of all money in the world. That means that if everyone in the world withdrew all their money from banks, at precisely the same moment, then they would only receive 3% of their wealth. It’s like that musical chairs game you played as a kid where players walk around a line of chairs – one less chair than the number of players – whilst the music is playing. As soon as the music stops participants sit down on a chair. The one player who is left standing without a chair is eliminated. Another chair is removed, the music starts up and the game continues until the winner is the single player sitting on a the last chair. The diffence with the ponzi musical money game is that there are 100 players but only three chairs!
The smartphone is an amazing piece of technology, and if we lived in a world where we had honest governments looking after our interests instead of enslaving us, everything in the garden would be rosy. But far from smartphones being something that is liberating us, they are slowly imprisoning us all in a Matrix nightmare that makes the dystopian hell evisaged by George Orwell in his novel ‘1984,’ seem like a walk in the park. We have so easily become slaves to our zombie pads.
Despite the scepticism, bitcoin and crypto are very much alive, as is the blockchain. Whether we are successful in fighting the demise of cash or not, I believe that crypto currency will be the future. And everything will be on a Blockchain ledger. Shopping, property, art, music, finance, sport, fashion, everything.
Some time ago, I bumped into a friend in a supermarket car park who I hadn’t seen for quite a while. She knew that I had been dabbling in Bitcoin and crypto, and asked me with a hint of cynicism in her voice.
“Graham, do you think that this bitcoin/crypto stuff will ever become a form of currency, I can’t get my head around money being digital, something just on some computer somewhere, you know something that you can’t touch or see?”
I paused for a few seconds, pointed to her trolley filled to the brim and said.
“Wow, what a lot of shopping you’ve been doing today, that must have cost you a fair whack, did you pay for it all with cash?”
“No, no, Graham, don’t be silly, I paid for it with my phone. This contactless payment is wonderfull, it’s so easy you just pass your phone over the terminal and the job’s done in the twinkling of an eye”
My heart sank as the awful reality of the demise of cash hit me between the eyeballs.
“There you go” I said sadly. “You are already using digital currency.”
© 2020 Graham Lawrence.
Addenda 30th October 2021: Since writing this piece Bitcoin BTC rose to and all-time high of $66,961.98 ! on 20th October 2021. Bitcoin now has a market capital of an incredible $1.2 trillion! Which makes Apple (the world’s largest company) look like the poor guy guy by comparison with a paltry $2.25 billion market capital.
Addenda 14th March 2021 Since writing this piece Bitcoin has crossed the $60,000 barrier and at 14:47 hrs UTC is at $60,154.88 that’s 3 X the previous all time high of $20,000 in December 2017!
Addenda 17th January 2021: Since writing this piece Bitcoin BTC rose to and all-time high of over $41,000 earlier this month. The current price is around $35,000. BTC is still the leading crypto currency with a market cap of $650 billion.
Addenda 7th February 2022: Since writing this piece Bitcoin BTC rose to over $67,000 in October 2021.
