Canada seems to be conducting a live fire 1984 experiment:
https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availability-on-our-platforms-in-canada/
Rishi Sunak has been taking a lot of flak (largely from Keynesian economists) for saying that #inflation is a tax that disproportionately hits the less wealthy.
But if he'd simply said "Inflation *has the effect of a tax* that unfairly targets the less well off" then his critics might not be missing the point so badly.
#Inflation is of course not a tax levied by a Revenue service and payable by law in order to fund government spending.
But it DOES have an insidious effect similar to a direct tax, as it functions as a non-optional reduction in the amount of value that you have left over for discretionary payments (whether spending, saving, or paying down debt). It IS well established that inflation disproportionally disadvantages the poorer in society who do not hold assets or investment products whose value may increase in line with or faster than the rate of inflation (like houses).
Remember - your house hasn't become more valuable. It's just that the pounds you measure it with are worth less.
Another thing that is worth less are actual government debts (to the extent that they are not inflation-linked). In this way, inflation and the associated debasement of fiat currency can reduce the real value of government borrowing, even though the nominal amount may remain the same. Unfortunately for Rishi Sunak, about a quarter of GB government debt is index linked or tied to inflation, so this effect is not as marked as it could be, but inflation does nevertheless have this second order effect, indirectly and invisibly reducing the impact of government borrowing on the government - to the detriment of the poorest in society, who pay the price out of their own pockets.
Rishi is in good company as this is not a new idea; both William Easterly of the World Bank and Stanley Fischer of the IMF came to similar conclusions in this historic paper, for example:
"This paper presents evidence that supports the view that inflation makes the poor worse off. The primary evidence comes from the answers to an international poll of 31,869 respondents in 38 countries. These show that the disadvantaged on a number of dimensions the poor, the uneducated, the unskilled (blue-collar) worker are relatively more likely to mention inflation as a top concern than the advantaged on these dimensions."
https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2023-05/fischer_inflation_poor.pdf…
"It should not be controversial to affirm that UK citizens ought to have the right to spend their own money freely from their bank accounts for any lawful purpose".
It's unacceptable that banks believe they can decide how, when and where we lawfully spend our money. It's a step down a dark path that ends in repression, censorship and totaloss of freedom. We must fight this at every step of the way.
We sent the open letter below to the City Minister in the UK this week, following actions taken by Chase Bank.
Socrates, actually - Plato reported it. Also Socrates' wife Xanthippe threw a bowl of piss on his head
Thankfully it's not as bad as the news stories make out - CW sued Cobra and Bitcoin.org with a copyright claim. Because Cobra didn't want to doc himself, the court awarded judgement to CW. The white paper is not illegal in the UK, it just can't be hosted on Bitcoin.org
Surely implementing these new rules is absolutely impossible regarding this protocol? https://twitter.com/balancealways/status/1694971642760303026?s=20
Bull and....
New guidance on crypto asset promotions from the FCA will categorise Bitcoin as a restricted mass market investment.
In preparing our latest policy document, we consulted across the industry. The prevailing view? That not only is this classification incorrect ab initio, but it is also likely to increase the risk of customer harm by driving UK customers to unregulated offshore exchanges, which are less likely to be compliant with UK rules.
Bitcoin may be described in many ways, but a ‘restricted mass market investment’ is not one of them. It is a digital bearer asset with no counterparty risk; it is a free and open-source payment protocol that has, via its Layer 2 protocols, a transaction throughput far in excess of Visa and Mastercard combined; it is a permissionless money that no government can censor, debase or dilute, and with whose monetary policy no central bank can interfere.
These new regulations, including a categorisation that the industry has consistently advised against, may inadvertently increase those very risks that the rules are intended to mitigate.
https://www.bitcoinpolicy.uk/post/bpuk-response-to-fca-guidance-consultation-gc23-1
Did you hear that scientists believe we're only ten years away from being able to build a working printer that connects to your computer every time?
Sadly I'm so old now that I have to be content with hitting PR's 'for my age'. Looking at my deadlift PR from a few years ago makes me sick....
Would Bitcoin have helped Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning?
Minor SPOILERS below....
.
.
.
In the film, Hunt and team are fighting a rogue AI that's capable of changing our digital history at will. Things get so bad that the team realize they can't rely on the truth of any digital information, anywhere, and try to go completely analogue to fight it.
If you're a Bitcoiner, by this point you're probably already thinking of one digital source of truth that cannot be changed other than by making new valid transactions. An absolutely true ledger, whose historic information literally could not be tampered with, or deleted, without redoing all the vast proof of work that has accumulated in the ledger.
An AI, faced with this impossible task in a realm that straddles the physical and the digital, would be defeated and our source of truth in the timechain would remain uncorrupted. We could include any messages we needed to preserve in transactions broadcast to the network, and the laws of physics would protect them, forever.
Bitcoin is digital, but tied to the real world through proof of work. Energy cannot be forged; and we cannot create more time. The ledger is protected by the laws of the universe, which even an all-powerful AI cannot change.
It was sad, in a way, to see the Mi7 team printing out records rather than using proof of work to defend them. Perhaps that wouldn't have been a good use of blockspace?
Maybe there's a use case for ordinals after all 😜
Gigi is of course magnificent extra reading on this. I particularly love this piece: "Every 10 minutes, Bitcoin re-asserts itself. Every 10 minutes, it cements a message in its timechain: "you shall not steal."
dergigi.com
Bitcoin Is the Rediscovery of Money | dergigi.com
Can't quite believe this is happening, and need to thrash out what I'm going to talk about, but it appears that I've been invited to speak at Bitcoin Amsterdam. Delighted to be asked and very much looking forward to it!
How to use Zapple Pay
Go to https://nwc.getalby.com and sign into your account
Select New Connection and give it a name
Set a budget so you don’t get rugged
Copy the string, and go to https://zapplepay.com
Enter your npub, and select 🤙 as the trigger emoji (only emoji available on Damus)
Paste the string and add a + after the word nostr
That’s it! You can zap on Damus again
JRR Tolkien on CBDCs: "We now live in a world where Gandalf is genuinely considering using the Ring 'just for a little bit' and 'only for good reasons'."
I listen a lot but I find I concentrate better with a hard copy book. Helps me really switch off and really get away from phone/kindle.
Excellent news. Do you have a link? The Bank of England received 50,000 responses to their consultation (hopefully all negative -BPUK's definitely was). Potentially half a million pages of negative feedback.