Firstly, I do not trade Bitcoin or any cryptocurrencies and this is not a recommendation that any of you do and neither is this investment advice.
Bitcoin's price vs the U.S. dollar has been down and going sideways just above U.S.$6,000 to the U.S. dollar since June 2018, having dropped from an all time high of almost U.S.$20,000 in December 2017.
Bitcoin was originally conceived as an independent, alternative digital currency operating in a parallel universe to 'establishment' currencies such as the U.S. dollar, the Malaysian ringgit and so forth, thus enabling us to buy and sell goods and services domestically and cross-border bypassing 'establishment' financial regulations and the 'establishment' banking system.
Whilst I have no issue with the use of alternative currency and payment systems, even if it's barter trade, use of pebbles or marbles as currency, however once Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were made exchangeable with 'establishment' currencies, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have become just another 'establishment' asset class in the global finance capitalist system which are traded on exchanges by speculators and professional traders looking of opportunity to make quick money from a rise in Bitcoin's or other cryptocurrenies' rise.
I also find most of the narrative about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies do not mention blockchain - a technology initially described in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta and later developed by 'Satoshi Nakamoto' (whoever he is or they are) for use by Bitcoin for distributed, encrypted record keeping, is a technology of interest in of itself.
I suppose that with opportunity, profits and financial greed uppermost in their mind, most of those who talk about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies today either couldn't care less or don't have the brains to comprehend blockchain technologies, even at the most basic level.
Anyway, in his latest post on Bitcoin, full-time trader Crypto Kirby describes why he believes that the price of Bitcoin could likely rise in the near future but at same time it could likely also drop further.
"When Will Next Bitcoin (BTC) Bull Run Start?- Crypto Market Technical Analysis & Cryptocurrency News"
At the same time, whilst he hopes to profit from a rise in Bitcoin's price, however he does not expect it to reach astronomical heights such as US$1 million as the 'moonboys', which Kirby calls them, have predicted.
Once again, this is not speculation or investment advice but for informative purposes only.
My only interest in Crypto Kirby's videos is that they help me better understand stock price technical indicators and analysis.
For me, the exuberance, hype, hoo-hah, bullshit and ballyhoo over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is just a load of the usual IT scheiss (IT shit or IT bullshit) which has come from the mouths of Cyber-utopians all these years.
I coined the term "Cyber-utopians" to refer to techno-determinists who believe that developments in technological developments and facilities will empower and enable and empower the small, the weak, the oppressed and the underdogs to challenge and overthrow the powerful, including governments and large corporations dominating the landscape.
Let's start with the claim that the invention of the printing press increased literacy and diffusion of information and knowledge amongst the masses and enabled them to challenge the feudal order of their day.
One thing which could be said about the printing press is that it enabled the publication and diffusion of Bibles in the native languages of of various people, especially in Europe, thus undermining the hold which the Roman Catholic priesthood, who were schooled in Latin, had over the interpretation of the Bible and dissemination of its message to their flock; and the publication of Bibles in native languages of the peoples of Europe is believed to have enabled and aided the Protestant Reformation and its break with the Church of Rome.
No offence intended to Roman Catholics, Protestants or Orthodox Christians but whilst at first, the Roman Catholic church opposed the publication of Bibles in languages other than Latin, it soon after embraced this move and instead of being overwhelmed and shunted aside by the Protestant movement - with over one billion adherents worldwide, Roman Catholicism remains the overwhelmingly dominant Christian denomination by far today, dwarfing any of the estimated over 30,000 different Protestant denominations, thanks perhaps to their slightly different respective interpretations of the Bible enabled by the printing press, thus fragmentation, especially within Protestant Christianity.
Moving on, it's said that the French serfs at the time of the French Revolution were quite literate compared to their counterparts in other European countries, so the printing press could have helped enable the French Revolution and France's bourgeoisie (middle class) to overthrow the feudal ruling class - i.e. the nobility and establish the French Republic but fast forward to today, and those middle class revolutionaries have now become a monopoly capitalist class dominating France's economy and politics, with France's proletarians (working class) opposed to them fighting them for better wages, working conditions and against the austerity measures being imposed upon them by bourgeois governments.
On 8th February 1996, a time when mass availability of Internet access had begun to take off, John Perry Barlow issued a statement - "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" whilst hobnobbing with the global 'establishment's' top leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
I'm pretty sure that after reading Barlow's Cyber-utopian statement over 22 years later. many of you might be laughing at how far Barlow's idealistic vision has turned out in reality today.
Cyber-utopians during the early days of mass availability of the Internet back in the mid to late 1990s, claimed that the World Wide Web would enable small business startps in college dormitory rooms, bedrooms or garages to compete on a level playing field with and challenge to power of giant corporations but as it has turned out today, after the massive dotcom shakeout of 2000 (a.k.a. the 'dotcom bust'), in which many dotcoms fell by the wayside, a handful of dotcoms which survived have metamorphosised into giant Internet corporations dominating Cyberspace worldwide today, leaving small, cute and cuddly startups with little chance of ever successfully challenging them.
As for the printing press 'liberating' mankind from tyranny, well we now often read many complaints about how 'establishment' mainstream media giants dominate the minds of most people and how a galaxy of individuals operating small online media outlets hosted on sites such as You Tube (owned by Internet giant Google), Facebook and so forth are challenging the 'dominance' of mainstream media and these 'alternative' media content creators are no complaining about how the Internet giants upon whose sites they are hosted on for free are denying creators of content deemed 'inappropriate' from earning their share of advertising revenue (demonetisation) and worse, even kicking them off their sites altogether, as a dog shakes off fleas.
Here are some examples:-
"Gab Gets Infowars'd by the Corporate Authoritarians, to Great Applause by Thoughtslaves"
" Youtube Warns Against Article 13 While Adopting Its Own Corporate Censorship"
"Youtube Shadowbans Sargon of Akkad Video, Also now Live-Deleting Live Chats"
"Walk Away Brandon Straka BLOCKED On Facebook For Posting InfoWars Link"
"YouTube is screwing us again"
If these guys expect to enjoy unfettered free speech forever, whilst being hosted for free on a giant Internet corporation's website, they are dreaming.
So much for the IT scheiss about the Internet 'liberating' small individuals from government or corporate 'tyranny', when these guys denounce You Tube on You Tube, hoping that You Tube will listen to them, whilst risking You Tube booting them off altogether and saving on its cost of providing them with the storage space to host their content for free and the Internet infrastructure capacity to stream their videos.
I leave you with an observation I've made - i.e. Major political upheavals, revolutions and political sea changes throughout history happened before there was mass availability of Internet access, smartphones and social media. These include the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the rise of Mussolini, the successful anti-colonial struggles, the militant anti-Vietnam War marches and demonstrations, the fall of Marcos and the ending of Apartheid in South Africa.
Today, with ample Internet and social media access, the anti-war movement, especially in Imperialist heartlands such as the United States and Europe is practically lame and hardly visible.
So much for techno-determinism.
"Arab Spring", I hear someone say as being enabled by social media!!!
Look at the reality on the ground in Tunisia and Egypt today to see what has the "Arab Spring" has achieved longterm.
Let me leave you with a thought about methods of political oppression.
One method is brutality and draconian measures against political opponents, protestors, marchers and so forth. This method, often used in authoritarian third world countries is abhorrent and attracts worldwide condemnation.
Another approach used especially in the 'advance', 'democratic', 'civilised' countries is to allow opposition forces and groups to peacefully protest, picket, demonstrate, say and write whatever they want but afterwards ignore them and carry on with business as usual.
In this second method, the government or related corporations literally farts in the protestors faces, and there is nothing in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights against governments farting in the faces of the populace.
The method of oppression gives the populace the illusion of empowerment and freedom, whilst they remain oppressed.
Aldous Huxley somehow portrayed this approach in his novel Brave New World in this short video narrative:-
" Aldous Huxley and Brave New World: The Dark Side of Pleasure"
If you have the time, you may want to listed to an almost eight hour long audiobook of his book.
"Brave New World Aldous Huxley Audiobook"
Back in the 1960s, young people like myself back then were excited with the possibility that we could be travelling in outer space as we watched the Apollo 11 moon landing. However, NASA ended the Apollo moon programme in the mid-1970s and when mass Internet access came in the 1990s, people had to content themselves with travelling through Cyberspace and developed all this myths and illusions about it.
Yours truly
IT.Scheiss
http://itsheiss.blogspot.com/
