The evils of ecurrencies are now being exposed with greater frequency.
The latest establishment bankster-friendly operation to sing praises for digital currencies is Bloomberg News. In an editorial, Bloomberg writes:
Cash had a pretty good run for 4,000 years or so. These days, though, notes and coins increasingly seem declasse: They're dirty and dangerous, unwieldy and expensive, antiquated and so very analog.Bloomberg understands how traceable ecurrencies are and so brings out the phony protection against government tracking: court order "protection."
Sensing this dissatisfaction, entrepreneurs have introduced hundreds of digital currencies in the past few years, of which bitcoin is only the most famous. Now governments want in: The People's Bank of China says it intends to issue a digital currency of its own. Central banks in Ecuador, the Philippines, the U.K. and Canada are mulling similar ideas. At least one company has sprung up to help them along.
Much depends on the details, of course. But this is a welcome trend. In theory, digital legal tender could combine the inventiveness of private virtual currencies with the stability of a government mint....
For governments and their taxpayers, potential advantages abound. Issuing digital currency would be cheaper than printing bills and minting coins. It could improve statistical indicators, such as inflation and gross domestic product. Traceable transactions could help inhibit terrorist financing, money laundering, fraud, tax evasion and corruption.
[Y]ou don't have to be paranoid to worry about Big Brother tracking your financial life.
Governments must be alert to these problems -- because the key to getting people to adopt such a system is trust. A rule that a person's transaction history could be accessed only with a court order, for instance, might alleviate privacy concerns.
The capability to track all transactions makes ecurrency advocacy perhaps the most dangerous monster economic proposal being advanced today by statist economists. It is more dangerous than Keynesianism. It is more dangerous than the Fed itself.
The justifiable hate for government produced paper money should not result in a knee jerk embrace of blockchain digital currencies. Blockchain digital currencies have the capability of providing all the evils of a government controlled paper currency with the added evil of government trackability.
The love affair with blockchain digital currencies by some free market advocates must stop now. It is a trap. It is the road to government control of life on an unprecedented scale.
Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher at EconomicPolicyJournal.com and at Target Liberty. He is also author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics
Soon to be required in order to buy and sell, the "Mark of the Beast". Sheeple will line up for it like the latest iCrap.
ReplyDeleteTPTB understand the trend is already toward utilizing electronic payment means vs. physical of which when they thought it represented a threat to control they were wary of, however as we see they are now running to embrace it.
ReplyDeleteAnother excerpt from the Bloomberg editorial board release that was interesting:
"The most far-reaching effect might be on monetary policy. For much of the past decade, central banks in the rich world have been hampered by what economists call the zero lower bound, or the inability to impose significantly negative interest rates. Persistent low demand and high unemployment may sometimes require interest rates to be pushed below zero -- but why keep money in a deposit whose value keeps shrinking when you can hold cash instead? With rates near zero, that conundrum has led policy makers to novel and unpredictable methods of stimulating the economy, such as large-scale bond-buying.
A digital legal tender could resolve this problem. Suppose the central bank charged the banks that deal with it a fee for accepting paper currency. In that way, it could set an exchange rate between electronic and paper money -- and by raising the fee, it would cause paper money to depreciate against the electronic standard. This would eliminate the incentive to hold cash rather than digital money, allowing the central bank to push the interest rate below zero and thereby boost consumption and investment. It would be a big step toward doing without cash altogether."
Been saying this since day one. Very true and it is a movement doomed tobe hijacked (if the seeds planted werent already an inside job).
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