Counter-Currents
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Imagine going back in time to the 1500s. You can only take one technology with you: the freezer. For the purpose of this thought experiment, we will pretend you’ve also got a way to power it. Now imagine you show the freezer to some peasants in a village. At first, they will probably be most interested in its craftsmanship. They’ve never seen such perfectly smooth metal, the astoundingly high-quality hinge, and the interior of the box magically lights up when opened. But after their initial fascination, their interest would wear off. It’s just a fancy box. Maybe a wealthy nobleman would want it, but why should peasants care about it? At this point you explain to them that it can be used to freeze food, preventing rot and flies. Now the villagers can skip the whole process of salting and drying meat. They can also enjoy fruits and veggies in winter, and even freeze entire meals for eating at a later date. Suddenly the box becomes several orders of magnitude more valuable. Everybody wants one.
Bitcoin is a similar technology. The token itself is basically worthless — just an empty box. But when you store value in it, it reveals its astounding ability to preserve capital through space and time. It does this by guaranteeing something no prior money was able to: that your investment can never be diluted. Before Bitcoin was invented, all money was subject to dilution, either through inflation, or in the case of gold, via mining and mixing with other metals. There is no way to know the maximum number of dollars that will ever exist. Central banks have no stricture on how many units of their currency they can produce. Similarly, we can’t know the total amount of gold in the world today, or how much gold will exist in the future. This makes gold and fiat relatively opaque.
Contrast this with Bitcoin’s very specific 21 million coin limit, and the fact it’s impossible to melt Bitcoin down and mix it with another cryptocurrency. You’ll never see a Bitcoin-Dogecoin alloy. You can’t shave a Bitcoin’s edges. Based on these facts, it’s safe to say that Bitcoin is the world’s most precise and predictable money. It is the easiest asset to validate, assay, count, audit, etc. As such, it is the most pristine collateral imaginable. For those not familiar with finance, this means Bitcoin is uniquely positioned to become an asset worth more than $10 trillion globally, ten times what it is currently worth. And that’s a conservative estimate, because it doesn’t include the $85 trillion global M2 money supply. We are dealing with a level of scarcity that has never before existed in human history. Traditional financial institutions are just starting to catch onto this, hence the recent price increase and large purchases of BTC by MicroStrategy, Tesla, Blackrock, and others. Many other large financial institutions and corporations will likely announce they’ve purchased BTC in the coming months. We may also finally see the approval of an American Bitcoin ETF (Canada’s Bitcoin ETF already opened for trading last week).
You can buy It’s Okay to Be White: The Best of Greg Johnson here.
Back in early 2019, I wrote an article for Counter-Currents explaining the merits of buying and holding Bitcoin as an investment. At that time, it was trading for around $8,000. Today it is around $50,000. Smart readers who followed my suggestions have done very well for themselves. But I want to emphasize that if you haven’t bought Bitcoin yet, you aren’t too late. There is still a massive amount of room for growth in the next 5 to 10 years. I implore everyone to read my original article if you are just getting started. I have also written an article with some more details about how to buy your first Bitcoins, and some of the pitfalls to avoid. There is a bit of a learning curve, but if you join my Telegram channel or post your questions here I will attempt to answer them all.
I have encountered a good deal of skepticism about Bitcoin from people in the Dissident Right, and that was to be expected. Many people cite the possibility of “the power going out,” or a sudden government crackdown, or quantum computers destroying the network. Each of these questions has been asked and answered hundreds of times over the years, so I don’t want to get into the details here. I may save that for a future piece. The same skeptics will suggest we invest in physical assets like farmland or gold. I call this “Mad Max investing” because you are assuming civilization will crumble. But I could just as easily play the “what if?” game and point out that the government can easily confiscate your farm, bomb your house, and find your buried gold with a metal detector. Some initial skepticism is good, but everyone should pay attention to the fact that the skeptics have been consistently wrong about Bitcoin for over a decade now. Why do you think they’ll be right this time? Especially now that multiple publicly traded corporations are starting to buy billions of dollars’ worth of BTC, and American banks have been granted legal and regulatory approval to custody it? Betting against Bitcoin growing from here is frankly bizarre. It’s like betting against Amazon in 1999, or Apple right after Steve Jobs announced the iPod.
The traditional financial system, the very system that punishes white advocates, is currently finding itself painted into a corner. They have nobody to blame but themselves. For decades now they have used cheap credit to paper over their disastrous importation of low IQ cheap labor. The cost of living in this environment is compounding faster than young people can get their 3rd college degree. Standing out from the crowd doesn’t even matter for white men, because they are intentionally pushed aside to employ more unqualified women and nonwhites. I am hopeful that Bitcoin will force a change. Now that we have a way to save money that can’t be gamed, we can begin to make real progress in fleshing out our own economy. The transitional period between the old system and the new Bitcoin-based economy is a time of opportunity that only comes about once or twice in a lifetime. It would be a shame if we let it pass us by.
Spencer Quinn’s two-part piece on “Weaponizing Money” (Part 1 here, Part 2 here) puts into words what I’ve been thinking for a while now — the pro-white sphere must build a war chest if we are to be taken seriously in politics. I believe Bitcoin is the key part of that equation, particularly while it is still in the process of growing rapidly. But even after Bitcoin is finished filling out, we need to form investment clubs where white men can gather to discuss business ideas, educate one another on investing, help each other find jobs, assist young white families who may need small loans, etc.
Saving and investing are noble activities, and a hard money like Bitcoin helps incentivize that.
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18 comments
In late 2017 I attended a small gathering that brought together WN’s from different parts of the US, and one attendee got up and gave a speech about crypto investing. This was almost exactly the peak of BTC, and he showed us his portfolio, which was doing quite well. I hope he didn’t sell near the bottom. For a lot us, this is our shot to multiply our wealth, and it’s too risky not to buy.
I do question Bitcoin maximalism though. People who have the ability to pay attention to the crypto space and pick short-term winners for this cycle should consider buying some altcoins. I am not suggesting anyone day trade, but rather choose some projects (especially ETH) that will most likely be strong picks in the medium/long term, and have a strategy to sell between now and early 2022. Sticking only to BTC is something I would only suggest to someone who lacks either the time or motivation to learn a little about other crypto assets.
I can strongly recommend the channel ‘Cultivate Crypto’ for chart knowledge and which altcoins to buy.
Bitcoin was exiting in 2011, not anymore.
Why? It doesn’t scale.
Instead of getting technical, I will try to explain the difference between two bookkeeping systems. One is centralized, the other is decentralized, both is analogue.
The first system is centralized. A man is trusted with the books. These books holds the information of the bank accounts of everyone using the system. When someone wants to transfer money, they send a signed letter to the bookkeeper with the amount of money they want to transfer, from which account and to which account. The bookkeeper then updates the books.
The second system is decentralized. Every man keeps the same books. When someone wants to transfer money, they send a signed letter to every other user in the system, which then updates the books. If someone tries to manipulate the books, it doesn’t work, because it is audited by everyone.
The second system would obviously work for a small group of people, but as we increase the number of participants, at some point, every household turn into a large post office, and the books turn into libraries in size.
Bitcoin has these problems. At the moment the bitcoin miners consume more electricity than a mid sized European nation. The bitcoin blockchain (the transaction history of the network) is 330 GB and growing, the average cost of a single bitcoin transaction is now more than 20 dollars. These numbers are increasing rapidly.
If not addressed, bitcoin will fail.
However, the solution to something that doesn’t scale is to not scale it. On a small scale bitcoin works perfectly, and doesn’t need any improvement. Bitcoin stops working properly as the network grows too large.
As a small global network we could easily draw advantage from this as a way to to replatform ourselves on online payment services.
One of the very first replies to Satoshi when he first released the Bitcoin white paper was “it doesn’t scale”. In fact, I remember that concern was the reason I first dismissed Bitcoin when I heard about it around the $6 mark. As I type this, a single Bitcoin transaction costs around $10. Common sense would tell you that such expensive transactions would render Bitcoin worthless as people abandon it for cheaper alternatives. But just today, Square (another publicly traded company) announced they have purchased $160 million worth of Bitcoin. They didn’t announce they purchased any other altcoin. Just Bitcoin.
So you should ask yourself why this is. Why is everyone shelling out billions of dollars for this clunky, slow, inefficient digital token? I could tell you the answer, but I think it’s best to let you try to work it out yourself. If you still don’t get it, I’ll come back with an explanation.
I’m not saying it’s a bad investment. I’m saying that I can’t buy coffee with it anymore, which is true. And I can’t buy Grandma Towler’s breakfast tea either.
Correct, but any cryptocurrency won’t scale as a transactional network. That’s the nature of the beast. But Bitcoin *does* scale as a store of value, and second layer solutions are built on top of that network (Lightning, sidechains, etc). In the coming years we will see these things become more user friendly. I will help Laura set up a Lightning address to receive payments for her tea.
“It’s like betting against Amazon in 1999, or Apple right after Steve Jobs announced the iPod.”
It’s funny you should mention that. I considered buying Apple stock around 2003 and decided against it, for reasons I can no longer remember.
But a few months ago I took your advice and bought Bitcoin and it was just in time to catch a wave of tremendous growth. I also bought Ethereum based on advice from a Milleniyule 2020 guests and that’s also been doing very well.
Interesting.
But as things are, I cannot see this as a solution. Money alone is, by definition, corrupt and corrupting.
We need a society, a community, with strong nationalistic, if not national socialist, leaders, who will keep the people safe from the corrupt and hostile elite. This new community will need money as we all do, but it must be transparent and easy to understand, otherwise we will be, again, corrupted by the Usual Suspects.
I can see the possible tactical advantage, but, no, it is not enough and if the Usual Suspects are not there yet, they will be, the kind of people they are.
The point is to build a community, which can live without Bitcoin and without gold, and without corrupted currencies, like USD and euro etc. That is the answer.
But still, of course, if some of us are so high morale people that they will use their earnings to build a better society, go ahead, and good luck to You. But I would rather see streets full of people demanding Revolution. Now.
So, as I understand it, you start with $50K today. How many people can do that? But that aside, you put 50K ‘somewhere’, but then you need $25K immediately because you’ve had an auto accident, medical bills, etc. How do you ‘take out’ half your investment to pay expenses?
Well, I could go on in this vein all night, but I just can’t wrap my head around this idea. But thank you very much for trying, and I would probably put in $50K just on your well-written advice here. And one final question — how does the legal field handle this, for instance, if I die a day after ‘getting a bitcoin’, can it be put in a will? Etc. And besides, I just like the look and feel of gold. And the ease, in this day and time, of just trading stocks almost immediately. I guess you’ve heard all this before. But be patient, and keep posting until us fuzzy-minds can absorb it all.
When Bitcoin was first created, the computer scientists involved knew it needed to be useful as a global currency, so they made it extremely divisible. A single Bitcoin is comprised of 100 million units (named “satoshis”, or “sats” for short, in honor of Bitcoin’s inventor).
Bitcoin is treated as regular property in the US. Some nations treat it like currency for tax purposes. So if you have it, you can write it into your will without any problem. But I would recommend writing down all of your associated passwords and seeds on a physical piece of paper and keeping that paper in a safety deposit box. That way your family can find it and contact a computer-savvy person to help them retrieve the money. For people who may not be comfortable storing their own bitcoins, there are alternatives to holding them directly. One decent alternative is to simply call your broker and have him buy shares of MicroStrategy. The CEO of that company is a very smart guy who has been using his business’s cash reserves to accumulate billions of dollars worth of bitcoin. So the stock basically mirrors the price of bitcoin, sort of like an ETF. Soon there will be a Bitcoin ETF available in the US, so when that happens I’ll be sure to make people aware of it.
Just one thing to add.
Precisely how much does speculating with Bitcoin add to the REAL productivity? I mean if it is so great, are we then later all happier just because many of us have Bitcoins? I can see some happy punters, sure, but I cannot see it helping the nations and the people. Sure, some nouveau-rich may give some small part of their earnings to some alt-right movement, but I bet my last dime that most of them will just vanish into the life of a happy rich guy, and that is it. In fact, that is exactly what the Usual Suspects do to the best of us: they buy them. Be good in football, and hey presto, you are rich, sing a song, and you are rich. Invest in Bitcoin, and you are rich. Ad infinitum.
There are plenty of rich guys, but where is the change? Who helps the people in trouble and the nations being annihilated by the Enemy? Give me an example. A rich guy… There are not any, they are corrupt, and they are corrupt because they are rich, because they do not need anybody.
That is what Usual Suspects do. They make whores.
No, Bitcoin, gold, ok, fine. But we need more, we need leaders, we need our countries back. We do not get rich by speculating, we need to work and build, for God’s sake.
Bitcoin adds to real productivity by eliminating the Cantillon Effect, which is the method by which central banks parasitize the working class. Wealthy people don’t keep their savings in fiat currency. They own stocks, bonds, real estate, art, and so on. Poor people keep a large percentage of their net worth in fiat currency. This is just due to the nature of being poor – you live paycheck to paycheck, and you need to have cash flow in order to pay your bills as they come due. So when central banks increase the money supply, that’s effectively a tax on the poor. The purchasing power of the new money goes to the upper classes via asset price appreciation. If the working classes had access to a deflationary money, particularly during its hyperdeflationary phase, it would mean they would have to spend far less time working for Jeff Bezos. They could get out of the rat race faster. Hence the importance of getting our people to stack Bitcoin while it’s still cheap. What we are witnessing with Bitcoin is the economic equivalent to a textbook physics example: a ball rolling down a hill. Harder money ultimately pushes out inflationary money.
Ok, have to think about this. Just very, very suspicious nowadays. But will give it the benefit of the doubt.
But still, because of the situation of the so called poor people, how could they jump the bandwagon? Just in theory, why not buy collectively? But hey, I admit, I am not money man, my forte, if any, is the willingness to participate in The Revolution.
Finally, what would stop, say, a small state to decide to invest into Bitcoin? I mean heavy.
Any nation state that chooses to put a large percentage of their reserves in Bitcoin today will benefit enormously on the world stage, and they will kick off the global race by governments to accumulate as many BTC as possible. Bitcoin is like a game that everyone is playing even if they don’t yet realize they are playing. The people and institutions that buy early win, while the skeptics and naysayers lose. It’s unfair, but that’s the nature of many things in life.
My recollection, from reading about bitcoin early on, was that it was supposed to be a currency outside of government control. A way to thumb your nose at the man so to speak. How is it now going to be a part of ETFs and regulated investment? You describe it here as a finite resource. Is there truly no dilution to it’s value moving forward? Appraisal has always seemed to me as a way to help the money lenders and creditors in general. It appealed to me more when it wasn’t viewed as part of mainstream investing. Please tell me I’m wrong and I can still get in and fund my lackluster retirement savings?
The Bitcoin network is outside of government control, because no government can censor transactions or increase the total supply of Bitcoin. Just because something is traded for fiat currency doesn’t mean the traditional financial system “controls” it – if anything, Bitcoin controls them. The old system is wilting to Bitcoin’s uncompromising, brutal scarcity. We see this reflected in the plummeting value of fiat (relative to BTC). That process will continue for many more years until fiat faces a crisis of confidence and we get hyperinflation. It would happen regardless of whether Bitcoin is traded on stock exchanges or not. The fact it’s available through traditional avenues only accelerates this process by a few years.
It is all very tempting, like the tulip frenzy in Holland some centuries ago.
And I will not argue against the technical side and the “limited number” etc. But still, I just cannot see this kind of speculation, as speculation it is, because you speculate against other methods of payment. I agree it may be a worthwhile investment, but are we really in this situation?
People have no future, jobs have been outsourced, industries have been outsourced, nations live and breath debt and now the solution is to invest into new form of currency? Well, well, if it is like that, why bother doing anything, let’s just ask the brainiest alt-right guys to tell us, where to put our meagre finances and live happily ever after.
I do not think so. If this is the only (or one of the main answers) answer, well, then we are already brainwashed speculators trained by the Evil Usury Speculator, and eventually, within time, there is soon nothing to speculate, it is all dystopia.
We are in this, yes, also because of fiat money, but also because we have allowed the speculators to rule, to define the way one can earn his living: by speculating. Speculation is the strength of the hostile elite. Do we see them providing jobs? No, never. But speculation is rife and always available. Speculate yourself to riches, man!
Quite frankly, even if this would work, for sure most of the people would get nowhere. No, even if we would have to close the borders from free flow of capital, in the long term that nation would win. The free nation will have to make itself rich by employing, producing, innovating and most important, by guarding its citizens against usury and speculation. Bitcoin or any other method of payment is just a small brick in that solid house of the nation. For that nation, there is no need to lower itself to the level of useless speculators. That nation will have a currency for its citizens and no speculators are allowed to that house, ever.
Even if this may sound naive, so be it.
Everyone is a speculator, because everyone is making their best educated guess about what they should be devoting their time, energy, and money toward doing. I’m not saying we should become day traders. Far from it. Our men should be focused on developing real world skills that they can use to earn a good living no matter where they are. If you aren’t earning a decent wage, there’s no way you’ll have the excess capital necessary to invest in Bitcoin. So step one is to invest in yourself. Step two is to stack Bitcoin and hold onto it for years. Day trading and buying all these other “cryptocurrencies” is a surefire path to poverty (unless you are just lucky – in which case you could have won more money in Las Vegas). Ultimately you want to own things the parasites *can’t inflate*. Real estate and Bitcoin fit the bill, but real estate has a bunch of downsides that Bitcoin doesn’t have.
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