The charts look interesting, but the bitcoin concept by itself looks REALLY interesting. Someone was trying to explain it to me the other day, but I wasn't really listening and it just sounded like another version of gold-money, so my mind wandered off. Still, bitcoin looks like it might be worth investigating.

The main challenge today is to escape the death grip that the banking cartel has on the global monetary system. Direct assaults (like trying to shut down Comex) are futile in my opinion, which is why I give short shrift to that camp. They are basically fighting the Fed, which is always a losing proposition. You cannot beat them at their own game - no sooner do you start to make progress than they move the goalposts. The other side to that problem is getting enough people to pay attention and actually do something effective. You are always going to be a minority - easy to single out and isolate, and TPTB will always find ways to marginalize you by focusing attention on the most extreme or ridiculous elements of any movement, thus discouraging broad participation.

What you need is something organic that by its very nature attracts people to it without having to sell it. It has to be simple, easy to use, and it has to be robust. Most important, it has to be decentralized and resistant to penetration by intermediaries and other usurpers.

Gold fails on all these counts. There isn't enough of it to transact commerce in pure specie - it has to be abstracted in some manner (which is where paper money originated) which opens the door to manipulation. The supreme irony of gold advocates fighting against central bank manipulation of the gold market is entirely lost on that crowd. The gold standard that they so earnestly seek to restore has already failed the most critical test. It is NOT immune to manipulation. Martin Armstrong is worth reading in this regard. His historic account of gold manipulation and currency debasement is fundamental to an understanding of gold as money.

Taking the idea a bit further, I see the current frenzy surrounding gold as nothing less that subterfuge and misdirection. TBTB would like us to believe that gold is the answer because when push comes to shove, they can throw a few of their own to the wolves to placate the angry mob, then resume business as usual under a new gold standard that they (of course) control. The intersection between gold advocacy and historic revivalism should be seen in this context. These beliefs are fostered as a form of nostalgia - a yearning for an imaginary better past that never really existed. In this way the central issue of our time is obscured, which in it's most basic form is a question of honest weights and measures. How do we develop and implement a system that honestly measures human effort, and can transform that effort into a medium of exchange that cannot be corrupted.

I don't claim to have the answer - even if I did I wouldn't mention it under my own name for fear of ending up like Armstrong (or worse). Nonetheless, I continue to believe that such a system is possible and will be discovered in due course. All these attempts - bitcoin, gold-money, even paypal, represent movement in that direction.

When I buy a pound of butter, I expect to get a pound as defined by some objective scientific standard, such as that meter bar the French have at le Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. Establishing such a standard for money is a more difficult task, granted, but it's not beyond our ability. Yearning for a return to some already failed standard is not the answer though. That plays right back into the hands of the money changers. What we need is a new standard that cuts them out of the game completely.

ebear