Image by Roy Snyder from Pixabay

Legend has it that Thomas Edison conducted more than 1,000 experiments before creating something resembling a light bulb, an object that would later become one of the things that most enslaved humanity, as the current state of affairs could not be conceived without electric lighting. Humanity once again shows its stupidity by creating a system that depends on a single thing. What's interesting about this is that Edison said, "It wasn't that I had failed 1,000 times, but that it was an invention made in 1,000 steps."

Since the beginning, Sauron, "the Horrid," "the Abhorred," "the Dark Lord of Mordor," "the Lord of the Rings," "the Great Master of Lies," "he whom we do not name," "the Lord of the Dark Land," the most powerful of Melkor's servants, and lieutenant of the evil fortress of Angband, has tried more than 1,000 times to enslave all of humanity—that is, to keep us, the Sindar elves and hobbits, permanently in debt, with no way out, depending solely on his cruelty and his designs to dominate us with one ring. One ring to rule them all.

But he would only succeed in doing so in 1971, and his perfidy would last for some four decades.

I don't want to personify Sauron in a single person, but there are some clues that point us toward some notable humans. John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) is recognized almost universally as a banker, and indeed, he was one, and one of the most successful. But in reality, he should be remembered as the chief architect of the modern financial system that subjects all of us, humble hobbits, to daily operations through the operating system known as the capitalist system. Johnny controlled the railroads, steel, electricity, and oil. His wealth was close to 25% of all American wealth. He perfected the art of concentrating power. He merged more than 3,000 companies into 300 giant corporations. He founded US Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. He controlled General Electric, AT&T, and the major railroads. He financed both sides of major conflicts. People received messages that spoke of the free market, but Johnny controlled most of the supply and demand. He was the architect of the 1907 financial panic, creating the Federal Reserve, and it seems he also had something to do with the sinking of the Titanic, because several bad guys were traveling there who opposed the creation of that monster, which today we could compare to the main fortress of Mordor, Angband. Since he controlled the money supply, he withdrew liquidity from the market and provoked massive shortages, then presented himself as a savior by buying assets for pennies. He convinced the government that it needed a central bank, an idea proposed by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto. So in 1913, the Fed was born, handing monetary control of America to a handful of private bankers. As if that weren't enough, Johnny financed both sides of the American Civil War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and its opponents as well, ensuring the creation of a system in which wars generate perpetual debt for nations—debt that his banks obviously finance and collect. Whoever wins the war, the bank will always collect interest on the debt.

The current economic model was designed by JP Morgan. Nations go into debt to exist, central banks control the issuance of money, crises mean opportunities for the accumulation and concentration of wealth in the hands of private banks, and Sindar elves and hobbits work their entire lives to pay interest on the banks' infinite debt. Humanity is a slave to debt.

JP Morgan is the most powerful bank on the planet. It influences global monetary policy, its executives work on Wall Street and in the government, and it keeps the system of financial slavery designed by its founder's vision operating sustainably.

Wall Street seems to be the temple of market freedom, where buyers and sellers converge to shape the vigorous and overwhelming capitalism that produces economic growth. All bullshit. There are many people who believe that, by buying an Apple share, that money goes to the company so it can continue innovating with the iPhone 6754, which is obviously much better than the 6753. These people have no idea that Wall Street is the Roman Colosseum where the only winners are the most powerful whales, and the money they earn is exactly what naif investors who believe in the ignominy of the free play of supply and demand lose.

All this is thanks to the famous MMT, Modern Monetary Theory.

What is MMT?

There are three types of money:

Commodity money. This is money whose value fundamentally comes from the material of which it is composed. It consists of goods or objects that have value in themselves. For example, a gold coin.

Fiat money. This is money based on the faith or trust of society; that is, it is not backed by precious metals, but by a promise of payment from the issuing entity. It is the monetary model currently used worldwide. For example, a central bank promissory note in the form of a bill.

Cryptocurrency. It is money based on computer code distributed across a computer network. New currencies are issued when certain rules are met, following an established consensus protocol that is unmodifiable, inviolable, and secured by network components incentivized to maintain the consensus. For example, Bitcoin.

The gold standard was a monetary system backed by paper money. Gold guaranteed and ensured its value. It began to be implemented in Great Britain in 1812. Currency exchange rates were fixed based on the price of gold. After the end of World War I, the gold standard began to fall out of favor. In 1930, with the Great Depression, many countries decided to abandon the gold standard, as they needed to devalue their currencies to increase their exports and thus accelerate their ailing economies. In June 1944, a Bretton Woods conference was held where it was agreed to peg currencies to the US dollar, but on the condition that the United States maintain a fixed exchange rate for the dollar against the price of gold. The Federal Reserve—who else? —would be the institution in charge of exchanging dollars for gold. From a distance, it seems like a joke. It's like giving the fox charge of the henhouse.

Richard Nixon faced a problem: there were too many dollars, and the price of gold in dollars exceeded the fixed price of gold. Vietnam and other skirmishes around the world had to be financed to bring democracy to other countries. So Nixon accepted Milton Friedman's advice, which was to eliminate the convertibility of the dollar into gold. The dollar should be worth its own value, backed by the United States government. On Sunday, August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon declared the dollar inconvertible into gold, unilaterally ending the Bretton Woods agreement. This was the birth of MMT and fiat money.

Nixon's abandonment of the gold standard had small and irrelevant consequences, but despite their small size, they have not yet been resolved. It caused serious imbalances in the International Monetary System, which transformed into a system of flexible exchange rates susceptible to manipulation by central banks. Another small problem, but a problem nonetheless, was the emergence of a phenomenon known as inflation, due to the excessive expansion of credit. And another no less negligible one: central banks have discretionary leeway to print money whenever governments and international organizations deem it appropriate. In other words, debt slavery is legal, thanks to MMT.

To understand how MMT works, wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to pay your bills? You'd have a permanent surplus, wouldn't you? Isn't this a naive fantasy? For MMT, this isn't a fantasy, but a fairly common way of operating.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is an approach to macroeconomics based on the novel and incredible idea that deficits and debt aren't necessarily harmful to a country that controls its own currency. MMT says that debt isn't a problem for a government that can pay it off by printing the necessary money.

Some economic historians trace modern monetary theory back to the economist John Maynard Keynes, who rose to fame after the Great Depression. Keynes planted the seeds of MMT almost 100 years ago by pointing out that if one person cuts spending, that person automatically cuts someone else's income. The person who cuts spending may be helping himself/herself, but he/she doesn't help the economy. Keynes argued that if everyone adopted this attitude, the economy would stagnate, a phenomenon he called "the paradox of savings."

Then the 1980s arrived, and Reagan-Thatcher launched unbridled capitalism and globalization as a great banner of prosperity for nations. Everything started moving faster, and recessions were more devastating. The junk bond crisis, the dot-com debacle, the mortgage bubble—all these biblical plagues are children of MMT.

In the beginning, humanity used seashells and stones for trade and savings. Then paper money appeared, and in this way, our predecessors, the bankers, politicians, and diplomats, found an unbeatable way to make a lot of money with other people's money and with the spurious money printed by central banks. When the internet arrived, digital money appeared. Now, money is a series of numbers in a bank account. But the essence of MMT is the same in both systems: banks create money they don't have in their vaults and that doesn't really exist, granting loans to companies and individuals who must repay it at an interest rate set by a central bank. The banks don't put up a cent and collect principal plus interest. Isn't that wonderful?

That's why banks are the most concerned about a certain Satoshi Nakamoto and his theories about decentralization. Decentralization, Bitcoin, and blockchain, along with Web 3.0, are truly the disruption that has the capacity to eliminate third parties from value exchange and savings transactions. It's a nightmare for banks and governments, who are very comfortable with MMT and wealth manipulation.

MMT considers money as an abstract unit of account for "matching" debts with credits, thus turning the famous "market" into a simple clearing house. Banks are the true issuers of money by granting credits, that is, debts. The repayment of these loans—that is, the money they created and now owed by the elves and hobbits—is used by the banks to conduct business for them, and a vampire ecosystem emerges from nowhere, looking for the most indebted preys and squeezing them until they breathe their last. The real problem that Bitcoin poses to the sinister network created by MMT is clear: it is an asset that circulates through a computer network with no other governance than the indelible and unchangeable code written by a group of cursed programmers, enemies of Mordor. Bitcoin is an asset, not a debt, as is a bill printed by a central bank. Banks and finance in general work with indebted preys. Just as the medical corporation considers a healthy individual to be a threat against the system, a bank considers a non-indebted individual to be a threat to the planet. Bitcoin is not a debt issued by a bank, a central bank, or, in short, a government. Decentralization, that is, the elimination of intermediaries, is the end of banks, finance, and MMT. No matter how hard they try, no government can control a computer network with a pre-established code. This is the famous Byzantine generals' problem.

As a basic concept of MMT, the system makes people believe that money is issued by a state's central bank, so the herd believes it is. This ensures the collective "hallucination" of the currency's acceptance as legal tender. As if that weren't enough, the state creates demand for money by collecting taxes in hallucinogenic money, with the fallacy of "redistributing" those taxes to hospitals, schools, and other goods.

MMT maintains that if savings exceed investment, the public sector must run a deficit, so it is not the public sector that displaces the private sector, but exactly the opposite. In other words, if people want to save, the state must compensate with public spending, using the note-printing machine. Otherwise, full employment cannot be achieved. It's the damned savers who make the banks print more promissory notes. If it weren't for the fact that the herd, especially the middle class, wants to save instead of spend, everyone would have a job and we would live in a world of stability and joy for all. (?!)

Conclusion

Since I first discovered Bitcoin in 2011, I have witnessed a huge and highly creative variety of Bitcoin “deaths.” I have tallied 354 Bitcoin deaths, made by the widest variety of specialists in almost every discipline, including philosophical anthropology and Egyptology. From threats to squash Bitcoin advocates like cockroaches by JD, curiously enough, the CEO of JP Morgan (which now agrees to hold Bitcoin for its clients), to Dr. Doom's predictions about the catastrophe that cryptocurrencies would bring to the very robust and growing Western economies. From predictions of death due to all Bitcoin being concentrated in the hands of the CME Group, which manages all futures markets, to the dreaded quantum computing that will definitively put an end to Bitcoin. Many Wall Street analysts, also "surprisingly," predicted the end of Bitcoin on numerous occasions, deducing geometric formulas that not even Pythagoras and his band of mathematical subversives had imagined. All of Wall Street's deductions were learned at Harvard and MIT. Who would dare dispute them? The richest man in the world, and his most conspicuous henchmen, said that Bitcoin was rat poison and that those who put money into that garbage would lose everything. Who would dare contradict the richest man in the world? Then there were those who were very scared because most Bitcoin is in the hands of a few whales. But the most scared are those who say that Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than the city of Amsterdam, forgetting to consider how much electricity the current transitional banking structure based on MMT consumes. Now, Bitcoin watchers are more focused on Bitcoin's inevitable fall to zero due to the emergence of major players in the ecosystem, the abrupt emergence of ETFs, government regulations, the IMF's claim that Bitcoin is harmful to global economies, and the most erudite graduates of MMT indoctrination temples are submitting doctoral theses showing that if you multiply the hyperbolic cosine of the angle formed by the RSI with one of the Bollinger Bands (any of them) and apply the Fibonacci retracement of two years and three months prior to the last devaluation of the yen against the drachma, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bitcoin's long-term value is zero.

In the long run, we'll all be dead, said Keynes, thinking of MMT. And in the experiment of 1,000 attempts to kill Bitcoin, most people who are familiar with the cryptocurrency ecosystem but only interested in speculating on Wall Street's modus operandi are missing the true meaning of Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that supports it.

I'm going to tell you what will happen to the price of Bitcoin in the near future: it will rise.

Is it clear what Bitcoin came to destroy?

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