I’m not Elon Musk’s biggest fan. At best, I see him as equal parts huckster and visionary.
But I won’t lie, as a long-time advocate for Bitcoin both in theory and practice, I welcomed his announcement that Tesla Corp. has a $1.5 billion position in granddaddy of cryptocurrencies.
That’s, of course, assuming that Elon isn’t the world’s biggest troll, which is a non-zero probability in my opinion.
This announcement, on the heels of Musk’s open support of the Redittor Rebellion against Wall Street via Game Stop and Dogecoin, may be the moment where we say this was the turning point.
Because Musk sits at the center of the Venn diagram of today’s cultural dynamics.
He’s an entrepreneur building electric sports cars and commercializing space flight. Tesla and SpaceX, regardless of what you think about them as companies, are aspirational ideas of the highest order.
As libertarians we’ve long decried the public space program as wasteful and inefficient. NASA has stood in the way of private space exploration for decades. And because of NASA’s typical bureaucratic defense of its fiefdom, space exploration slowed to a halt for the past two generations.
Now the race for space is everywhere, in part, due to Elon Musk.
Musk, to his credit, schmoozed not only green energy money out of the U.S. government to subsidize the growth of Tesla into the biggest meme stock of all time, he also is single-handedly legitimizing the privatization of space.
More importantly, he’s very much the hero of the Millennial generation. He’s their spirit animal. Tesla and SpaceX both speak to the broken promises of the Baby Boomers with their Utopian fantasies and Gen-X with their inability to move the Boomers out of the way.
And because of this when Musk speaks Millennials move. Who’s zooming who is a good question (see this podcast with Patrick Henningsen of 21st Century Wire). Is Musk driving or riding the bus? In the end I don’t think it matters, they are linked.
Don’t think so? Musk tweets out you can buy a Tesla with Bitcoin and Bitcoin ramps $8000 in one day. For an asset of legendary volatility, this was a nuclear bomb.
And this wasn’t some pump and dump event.
As a market analyst, I saw the timing was there to create maximum effect. It was the exact thing to blast Bitcoin through the recent high at $42,000 per coin.
Wall St. and the central banks were (what else?) heavily short Bitcoin in the futures market hoping to tame it by holding it below that level for the next few months or, if they could engineer a big enough sell off, years.
Musk knew the short position in Bitcoin was the largest it had ever been, and he saw another opportunity to build on the Millennial’s rebellion against the established order that began with Game Stop.
The generational aspect of this is important.
The old guard worked so hard to hold onto power in D.C., Brussels and London in 2020. They see the future only in terms of threats to their power. And they should. The people have had it with their feckless and cynical corruption.
The response to the COVID-19 ‘crisis’ has been completely over the top, emphasizing even more the anti-aspirational mindset of the entitled oligarch class. They have placed us under house arrest driving us crazy rather than face the consequences of their broken social program promises.
Horrific people like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen believe all they have to do is throw us a little hush money (which we will still have to pay back mind you!) and we’ll go back to being quiet, porn-besotted lay abouts straight out of Pixar’s Wall-E.
These are the same people who racked up debts so big our grandchildren won’t be able to pay them off.
Pelosi thinks appealing to them through student debt jubilee will save her from the guillotine. She believes amping up the envy between economic classes and widening the political divide will insulate them from the anger.
But she is wrong.
The main tension within our society today isn’t race or sex or any of that post-modern watered-down Marxist nonsense. It is the unwillingness of the older generation, in this case the post-World War II generation, to give up the immense power accumulated over the course of the post-Enlightenment Age.
And the Great Reset is all about ensuring none of us ever get off their tax farms, with unassailable power for them and universal serfdom for us.
In that respect, maybe the post-modern Marxists has a small point.
Which brings me back to why Musk announcing Tesla’s position in Bitcoin is so important. Because what lies at the source of that immense power of the oligarchy I call The Davos Crowd?
It is the power to issue and control the value of money.
It is only we libertarians who have been steadfast in our criticism of the monetary system and how to fix it.
It is only the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle which has adequately described the creeping malaise a society succumbs to over the decades where corrupt money circulates.
And the intense drive to crash the world economy in a compressed time frame, known as The Great Reset, is all about their pulling a bait and switch creating the ultimate control mechanism for the oligarchy, digital-0nly central bank money.
The ultimate fake money. Just like the fraudsters on Wall St. to take a good idea, a trustless, private, freely spent, incorruptible asset like Bitcoin, and turn it into a inflatable, cancellable, restricted-use fake money like the digital euro or yuan.
In 2016 I wrote a piece where I identified one of the main psychological drives of the Millennials, the drive for ‘authenticity.’ Bitcoin, by its very nature, is both aspirational, a quantum leap forward in the technology of money, and authentic, since it cannot be counterfeited.
The fight is now on. Millennials get Bitcoin. It is what they want. Boomers hate Bitcoin. It reveals all their lies. Many libertarians hate bitcoin because they feel it undermines gold and the history of sound money.
The truth is Bitcoin complements gold. I don’t care if you hate it, bullion dealers take Bitcoin (hint, hint).
Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, represent the potential for the greatest populist uprising of all time, a massive wealth transfer from the oligarch class to the middle class. Early adopters are now capitalized to build new systems to rival the old ones.
Which, finally, brings me back to Elon Musk.
Because Musk just lit a solid-rocket booster under the entire cryptocurrency market. He didn’t create this bull market, but he did just legitimize it validating the hope, dreams and work of crypto’s early adopters at a moment when the oligarchy has never been more in control of society and more vulnerable to attacks because of its illegitimacy and complexity.
He openly declared war on the hand that fed him his billions.
The central banks are losing control over hundreds of billions in saved capital. Bitcoin is disappearing onto the balance sheets of companies, funds and households all over the world.
Musk galvanized his place as the guide of a generation. I’m still not sold on Musk, he may just be riding the wave that was already building while simultaneously shoring up Tesla’s balance sheet, which badly needs it.
He may even be setting himself up to be the next generation of oligarch, certainly.
But there is no denying that this is the moment where he led the advocates for hard money and the Millennials paean for a return of normality across the Rubicon.
This piece is original for Daily Liberty News…and is reprinted with permission
Join My Patreon if you think this is liftoff
Donate via Crypto
BTC: 3GSkAe8PhENyMWQb7orjtnJK9VX8mMf7Zf
BCH: qq9pvwq26d8fjfk0f6k5mmnn09vzkmeh3sffxd6ryt
DCR: DsV2x4kJ4gWCPSpHmS4czbLz2fJNqms78oE
LTC: MWWdCHbMmn1yuyMSZX55ENJnQo8DXCFg5k
DASH: XjWQKXJuxYzaNV6WMC4zhuQ43uBw8mN4Va
XMR: 48Whbhyg8TNXiNV2LNkjeuJJU55CNt5m1XDtP3jWZK2xf5GNsbU2ZwHLDJTQ5oTU3uaJPN8oQooRpSQ2CPMJvX8pVTqthmu
“Pelosi thinks appealing to them through student debt jubilee will save her from the guillotine.”
I know someone with unserviceable student debt (partly of the person’s own making) who is coming into some decent money. Rather than let the creditors grab the money, I think the person should put the money into crypto.
In a just system, the money would be seized when attempting to jettison the debt. I also believe debtor prisons should be brought back.
I live on the other side of the planet, so when Elon tweets, I sleep. Now can we imagine the situation that I have my savings in Bitcoins and in the morning when I wake up, I discover that Elon has tweeted something and 99% of my Bitcoin money savings are gone ?
Elon is symptom of collapsing society. Like Greta Thunberg or other psychopath child world rulers meeting in Davos.
Elon throws bunch of billions here and tweets something. Mark Zuckerberg joins the game and throws also bunch of billions wherever and also tweets something. Bitcoin goes from zero to trillion and back.
Finally Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg fall into homosexual love. They join their wallets to buy all electric stations and shut them off to save the climate. This will be the end of the crypto and gold and silver and the end of western civilization.
Bitcoin is much too volatile to be a store of value, As such, it will not supplant or replace physical gold or silver.
The oligarchy will not give up its power without a fight, that is for sure. Consider the age of these front men and women for the oligarchy. Pelosi, Biden, Sanders and Trump all in there mid to late 70s. Buffet and Soros are in their 80s. This is a generation that does not want to go quietly into the night.
Silver is already not a store of value. it’s an industrial metal with some monetary character, Larry.
Bitcoin’s current volatility is a function of it becoming the very thing you say it isn’t becoming. This is what happens when one technology rapidly replaces another, there is an equally rapid repricing. It doesn’t matter the technology, money doesn’t operate under different laws than other commodities.
It’s not magic, just a zero-discount-commodity.
Boomers hate Bitcoin? Would you like to attend our Ole Fart Boomer Bitcoin Dinner next Tuesday in Ashburn, Virginia? Six of us—all born in the 1940s—heavily invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum (and LINK, MKR, AAVE, ADA, AKT, ROOK, DEC, and APY). Seriously, the Rib Eye and Cab are on us.
Awesome Ed! So happy to be wrong about some “boomers”. *big smile*
I think of Elon Musk slightly differently.
I would contend that he is one of a handful of modern-day merchant princes, whose ascendance has been managed and assured by global tyrants eager to impose Orwellian global governance. Musk, like Bezos, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Gates and Schmidt are real-life Aaron Kalloors – entrepreneurs once perhaps, but now just avid tools of the Deep State, handing over our data and laundering the intellectual and monetary innovations of their masters in exchange for cult power, wealth and the billionaire playboy lifestyles that go with them.
So when Musk lets his clown-car car company be used to launder QE dollars on their way to monetising government debt, and Zuckerberg sits through kayfabe Congressional hearings to establish the legitimacy of the Deep State’s preferred cryptocurrency (Diems will soon be the delivery mechanism for your UBI daily allowance, and you can agree to have your private crypto forked into it or see it criminalised before your eyes), and Gates talks about vaccines and the inevitable global identity surveillance tools that will be the price demanded for them, I hear the voice of Big Brother, funnelled through proxies who like Kalloor boarded the ride long ago and are now perhaps too scared to get off.
Cryptocurrency? A government initiative, designed to eliminate privacy and impose control over all buying and selling, and laundered through the private sector to acquire the bouquet and patina of liberty. A glided nightmare once back in their hands. The certainty with which its proponents believe it to be the exact opposite is evidence of the success of the Deep State’s indoctrinations – as the intelligence community said back in the 70s, they will know they have succeeded when everything we believe is a lie.
So buckle up I say – the Great Reset is about to strip away all our remaining liberties while convincing us it’s a price worth paying for the bright new future, and then once we are trapped they will “take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
That is pure speculation ID. What evidence do you have that BTC was not created in the wild? Anyhow, the globalist model only works if all nations are coerced and co-opted. I doubt it will ever happen. BTC and all value-proposition Crypto are decentralized avatars of the multipolar world. Avanti!
As a bullion dealer i’m actually thankfull for crypto. The reason for that is because many of the pumpers, scammers and fakes that were present in the bullion industry have now switched to crypto. Dogshit attracts dogshit i guess….
I think Musk simply represents the reality of the world rebalancing and resetting, in terms of the great Eurasian shift. He’s probably secretly learning Chinese and he probably now eats with chopsticks. A benign reworking of the Kurtz myth if you like.
I think the genius of BTC, and I applaud Tom for understanding this long before I and some other dullards did, is that, as I understand it, money is really just an idea. BTC started as an idea, and what an awesome idea.
The millennials deserve their revenge, if they can take it. We have screwed them, and will again unless prevented. But old age and treachery always defeats youth and enthusiasm. Be forewarned, and trust no one
But what happens if you discuss the actual tech – the ‘digital cash’, as a replacement of specie or paper?
Name a crypto-tech that can do what even a Visa does – transactions in a few seconds, with 2% fee even for a latte, and limited energy use?
I am bored of shilling, find out for yourselves, but Satoshi’s vision – whilst a revolution in money unlike anything seen since the Lydians punched gold into a means of exchange – is not being followed by most-all of the coins on offer.
And for a Libertarian to sell a tech that has had one group owning 51% hash rate (and kindly offering to not attack), as well as now having most of the mining resources in China – a nation that could either grab the power plants and initiate an attack, or just shut them down – is imo ignoring the risk of cryptocurrency with miners!
Mining is the bottleneck. It has a geographic location not easily moved. A DAG coin has nodes, but shut one down and another pops up.
Good for anyone who made money off the prototype, I personally was too caught up in the idealism of the necessity of tech to be useful (maybe still!), but the prototype is old, and the tech has promise beyond the imperfect things in the top 50.
If only people cared about the actual tech, rather than the candle chart! (said the lifelong trader tired of market irrationality!)
Visa doesn’t settle in a few seconds. All of their transactions settle in T+2 days behind the scenes. All of the modern banking system is on a T+2 or T+3 settlement layer in real terms. It only looks like it settles in seconds.
I moved DASH from one wallet to another yesterday in 1 second. I pushed the button and the money showed up in my other account by the time I switched from looking at my phone to the screen on my Trezor.
So, yes, there are options out there for ‘instant’ apparent settlement.
And, while I know that transaction won’t really settle for another hour or so, it settles, for real far faster than VISA or Mastercard.
Bitcoin, when I’m talking about it this way, is a metaphor for cryptocurrencies in general. Mining is a bottleneck. Bitcoin is alpha code that went viral. It was never meant to do what it’s doing.
I’m fully aware of all of BTC’s limitations but I’m just as frustrated as you are by shills (which I’m not) as naysayers who can’t see beyond the here and now.
The pace of innovation in crypto is far outstripping the ability of governments and toll collectors to shut it down. That’s what this moment in time is showing everyone.
Even Musk himself said that Bitcoin is dumb, but only slightly less dumb than the current system.
I do care A LOT about the actual tech but for now the world doesn’t need/want DASH it wants a place to hide value from the insanity. After the insanity settles, then cash can come into play.
So many get the order of operations wrong.
Good comment, btw, but also, as I just pointed out, short-sighted.
musk is a telsa try hard
is bullshit computerisered crap
thanks for that
and the is no point in insulting , because your probably running rings around nearly everyone