The True Meaning of Bitcoin’s ‘Success’
BY THE AU REPORT
THEDAILYCOIN.ORG
DECEMBER 3, 2017
In the year 301 AD, the Roman unit of barter was the denarius, which had originally been 95% pure silver when introduced by Augustus at the end of the first century BC but by the time of Diocletian’s rule, it had moved to 50,000 denarii to a pound of gold. Ten year later, it took 120,000 denarii to buy a pound of gold and by 337, that figure was 20,000,000. What had occurred in a mere 400 years was that a slow and agonizing erosion in the purchasing power of the Roman currency accelerated to full fiat disintegration and that complete and total disregard for the denarius was attributed as one of the underlying causes of the Fall of the Roman Empire. Nothing was more evident in the underlying rot permeating Roman society, economics and national security than the refusal by the Barbarian armies to accept anything but gold as payment for their leaving the Roman legions alone. Rejection of the currency of the Roman Empire was complete and irreversible.
One of the omens of impending inflationary spirals is the tendency of those individuals controlling large swaths of wealth to reject any form of “savings” in the form of bank deposits or interest-bearing certificates. They choose instead to jettison cash or cash-equivalent instruments because of a loss of faith in the ability of local currencies to retain purchasing power. We have seen this over the ages from Weimar Germany to Zimbabwe and now Venezuela, and where gold and land were generally the tried-and-true assets of choice for those wishing to protect their wealth from the insanity and irresponsibility of governments, today in 2017 with the advent of technology and its attendant curses and wonders, the wunderkind of today have actually created their own receptacle for frightened wealth and that is the true meaning of Bitcoin and its incredible “success.”
When the chief technology engineers sat down ten years ago after watching the global bankers vaporize the financial system and then turn right around and “save” it through a massive and globally coordinated counterfeiting racket, they determined that anywhere government has control over money (as in the banking system), there could be no certainty of anything responsible or prudent whereas there was absolute certainty that corruption would exist at a systemic level. Therein lies the reason for the invention of blockchain technologies and the best-performing “asset” of 2017, Bitcoin, which is ahead an astonishing 1,000% year-to-date spurring the creation of hundreds and hundreds of “wannabes” being trotted out as heir apparents.
Traditionally, investors moved to the old saws, gold and silver, as safe havens for decomposing currencies and as recently as this year, we have witnessed the efficacy of wealth preservation as Venezuelan citizens that moved their savings to U.S. dollars from the bolivar avoided the most hideous of outcomes as the bolivar collapsed. This is precisely what occurs when confidence sinks to zero and hoarding of staples escalates.
If they further diversified by converting bolivar to gold, the outcome was predictably preferable to holding cash in mattresses or term deposits in a Caracas banking institution. However, it was the early escalation in stock prices that became the harbinger of collapse in the bolivar’s purchasing power. “Never underestimate the replacement power of stocks within an inflationary spiral” the saying goes and no more relevant than when “inflation” metamorphoses into “hyperinflation” as seen recently in Venezuela.
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