Regarding a gold standard: sometimes a government has an unforeseen crisis, and they need all help addressing it. You can think of it similar to the way you might use a credit card to get by. That should rarely be resorted to, but if it’s an emergency, it’s justifiable. The problem is the US has resorted to monetary policy too often (and the reason they have gotten away with its overuse is due to the US dollar’s hegemony…) So you don’t necessarily need a hedged asset to make a currency credible; you just need a conservative fiscal policy and disincentives to hoarding it.
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Warren wants stablecoin regs. Demanding auditing by reputable disinterested parties would be a very reasonable thing to do -but alas, that would never see the light of day with Captain Bunker Boy and the Repubs! (And Biden wouldn’t have wanted stablecoins themselves to begin with, given his dollar hegemony philosophy…)
All you can do is be on record for having sought it. And exchanges (including USDC…): you better get down with a credible Good Housekeeping Seal ASAP, or the FTX debacle will look like nothing in comparison to what’s in store…
Update: Europe has a Good Housekeeping Seal program.
Tether has been a sham…
All I’m saying is that we relied on deception in order to get countries around the world to agree on making the dollar the reserve currency and to make the oil barrel trade in dollars when the original agreement had been to use a "gold backed currency. "
I understand that as long as we are the biggest empire we should be ok, but something tells me that a hollowed out US government might open us up to instability at home and might have other countries thinking they could have a different reserve currency. In the event that that were to happen I don’t really know how much paper greenbacks or ones and zeros on a computer might actually be worth. I think that backing our currency with gold and silver might help to deter runaway inflation and maybe keep us from wasting blood and treasure fighting wars over other people’s oil resources.
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Well, considering Congress and Bunker Boy have no understanding of fiscal discipline whatsoever, I’m not averse to the idea of adding a backing -other than bitcoin!
Why not bitcoin?
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Blackrock has co-opted it;
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its developers refuse to adopt a greener “proof-of-stake” approach (“proof of work” was an OK start in 2011; it’s now a relic technical approach -though I could accept work being spent on important problems; see BOINC, link…); and
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the developers refuse to add a gateway for decentralized id. Their reasoning? The same as gun nuts when there is a reasonable request to have a registration safety training program for guns: “It’s the first step to the government taking away our guns!” (yeah, sure; we saw how it has gone that way with CARS and the DMVs…) If you follow their crackpot reasoning down the rabbit hole, they will tell you it’s your right to buy and stow a nuclear warhead in your basement. Decentralized id, if done right, maintains your transaction privacy while allowing a legal representative of your choosing to answer any legal requests pertaining to abuses of power in the use of your currency.
PS Bitcoin maxis (maximalists) will tell you it’s no big deal that Blackrock holds a majority of it, since they are ostensibly agenda-neutral and only act as a proxy for buyers. I say: talk to the hand. But hey, if you believe Blackrock doesn’t ever have agendas, knock yourself out. You still have the two other issues…
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That’s them saying “Ouch!”, in response to the competition that’s heating up.
Tether seeks Big Four audit to boost transparency
About fucking time…
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The best thing that Bitcoin gave the world was the idea of a blockchain and a public ledger. The second best was probably the idea that it was a way around central banks.
I think that if this is the timeline where we somehow beat back the troglodyte cult of government via dotard dictator movement by ousting the Corrupt Corporate Dem dinosaurs and replacing them with Justice Dems or by winning seats in The House with a third party, and if we make it to the other side of that and manage to stabilize the climate crisis, we should think about making post offices local banks and backing US currency with gold, silver, and batteries maybe while letting bitcoin compete outside of that because the problem of mining it. Can we have a block chain and public ledger without the negative climate related effects of mining?
I definitely think the US government should not want to back currency with bitcoin if bitcoin can’t continue without causing environmental harm. It would necessarily not continue if we succeed in averting what scientists say we should expect if we keep up the pace of polluting.
I’m with that; I don’t need to test the definition of insanity anymore. I think Sanders thinks he might be able to shame the corporate owners of the Dem Party into allowing pro-worker/anti-pollution candidates in. They have no shame, they will never let in people advocating for those popular agendas that reduce their profits…
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Agreed; that’s why I said any digital currency should be eschewing “proof of work” at this point -unless the work is applied to a very pressing problem…
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Hey Tether; did you get your audits done yet??
Tether: “We’re goinna…”
Classic Tether; misdirection, watch the shiny object…
This was definitely my first option until Bernie and AOC started doing rallies. 2026 is critical. No third parties are moving in the same way and unless they do I’m going all in on shaming the Dem voters who vote in primaries. I dare them to try and defend another corrupt Corporate Dem loser using the words “safe” or "moderate ". Losers who couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag if they’re donors were paying them not to, but who use their power in the party to rig primaries because they can’t beat a Justice Dem in a free and fair election.
The voters. Reaching them and asking them nicely to quit voting for losers. I think that is our best shot. Taking back The House and hopefully having someone with a political bat sneak under the radar as a freshman representative on mission to convince Corrupt Corporate Dems to retire.
If a third party can’t campaign in the midterms to take seats in the House, we will never have a viable third party.
If the Republicans pass laws to take away or hinder citizens right to vote, our experiment in democracy is over. We can’t beat Republicans with Corrupt Corporate Dems, that is the insanity, to keep trying with that type of Dem. The path to keeping our republic a bit longer is definitely somewhere in between Corporate Dems and a third party and it’s gotta move masses. Bernie and AOC seem to have that and although I wish it was Dr. West and Nina Turner I’m just wanting to get to work for anyone with energy, purpose, and a better plan for the future.
Turks segment:
No derangement there!
Good point made: the Fed has done a decent job of stabilizing the US currency, in spite of a number of bad past economic decisions made by Congress. The problem that is now looming is that Trump will appoint the head of the Fed -in less than a year! Start running to your foxhole NOW!
So thanks to on-again, off-again, on-again tariffs, he is damaging the future stability of the dollar -so a stablecoin based on the US dollar will become much less meaningful.
[The tech is still valid: now you will have to link a stablecoin to a basket of relatively stable commodities. In finance, that’s called hedging.]
Also keep in mind: the utility of a stablecoin is based on how prevalent it is accepted. USDC/Circle has been out for years now, and you can pay bills with it at many sites online. It’s not enough to just say “I’m stable”; so what, if it can’t used in a number of places for payments?!
And you still need audting to make a stablecoin real. USDC has that; they honor MICAH accounting compliance (a European standard…) Wait for it with Captain Bunker Boy and the Repubs: “We’re going to do auditing SO much better than the Europeans!” Of course, they could have just joined that standards body; but what else to expect from Team Not-Invented-Here? And the last admin wasn’t interested either because they believed in dollar hegemony, so they always fought most any crypto; and look at that: they also handicapped it by not joining MICAH, etc.
Note that stablecoins do NOT address accountability issues for when they are used to abuse power. You can add decentralized id and legal representatives to do that, but everybody is much more interested in being in on speculations and grifts.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I would like to remind Turks: just because cash is abused in politics (case in point: when Trump picked up suitcases of cash from Egypt via a private flight to pay for his 2016 campaign run -link…), I don’t hear you guys going: “We simply HAVE TO stop using all cash!” The move to a cashless society can be just as dystopian in terms of loss of privacy as the one right now in crypto that has no decentralized id and legal reps to regulate abuses of financial power. China is going there and check out how tyrannical it is: if you buy a product the CCP does not like, you will just be shit-out-of-luck for years and years with a bad credit score! Crypto has up-ended the entire notion of credit scores, over which consumers had no say about their enforcement (for example: their use in getting to rent a place…)
Digital currencies are just digital cash; you need regs for both digital currencies and cash, but not the way the CCP has been doing it. You need safeguards for privacy when you are NOT abusing its use…
