China's gold back story

[Sean Lynch]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 1:31 PM, juan <juan.g71 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Apr 2016 11:30:52 -0700
> Sean Lynch <seanl at literati.org> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 2:32 PM, juan <juan.g71 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 03:47:38 +0000
> > > Zenaan Harkness <zen at freedbms.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > > There appears to be a multi country effort to (re)build gold
> > > > backed currencies, and there's every chance they will succeed,
> > > > certainly even in the face of crypto currencies - the robustness
> > > > and security levels of current computing facilities means
> > > > hoarding physical gold is likely seen by most, and certainly by
> > > > nations, as more secure and acceptable to the public psyche
> > >
> > >
> > >         It seems very very unlikely that any government will setup a
> > >         mechanism that destroys one their fundamental means to loot
> > >         their subjects : paper money and inflation.
> > >
> > >         Rather, what we are seeing is a move towards a fully
> > >         'electronic' system in which we won't be able to buy half a
> > >         potato without being taxed by the world government.
> > >
> > >
> > What Juan said (minus the Satoshi nonsense). ZeroHedge are notorious
> > gold bugs.
>
>
>         I am a gold bug too, if gold bug means understanding of the
>         fact that physical cash is a decentralized and anonymous
>         system and that gold is a particularly good form of cash.
>

I think in ZeroHedge's case their goldbuggery goes beyond your belief in
gold's superiority (which I share) and into the realm of irrationality. It
starts sounding like a long-term pump-and-dump scam, if there were such a
thing.


>
>         Being truly decentralized and anonymous are not properties
>         that any cryptocurrency has, as far as I know.
>

Indeed, though I think Bitcoin and related research have provided the
necessary building blocks. ZeroCoin/ZeroCash, for example. As far as
decentralized, it's not clear to me that Bitcoin is really worse than gold
has proven to be in practice, with governments cornering the market on
mining & minting.


>
>         On the other hand, a cryptocurrency like bitcoin is threat to
>         governments and the financial mafia, so it's reasonable to
>         assume that the mafia is going to come up with some kind of
>         countermeasure.
>

Indeed. I'm just hoping it proves to be too little, too late.


>         But yeah, it's also true that they've been 'developing' their
>         own electric monies before bitcoin arrived into the scene...
>

And I agree with you that they will probably try to coopt Bitcoin or at
least blockchain technologies. If not to build their "cashless society"
then at least to try to crowd out potential uses for anonymous transactions
by ensuring that all the "legitimate" players are playing on a controlled &
tracked blockchain.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 4243 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20160421/a8dd64cb/attachment-0002.txt>