Trump EO. Here he refers to Bitcoin as "Digital Gold". "Gold shall end the FED"
(www.whitehouse.gov)
Cabal is History
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I still don't get bitcoin. If it's not really backed by anything where does it get it's worth. Unless they make bitcoin backed by gold, won't it be the same thing as fiat currency? I guess I understand it's not the same as fiat because there are only so many "coins", but the true value to me is what I don't understand.
I'll have Grok explain it because I could not do it justice:
"Let’s break it down.
Bitcoin isn’t backed by a physical asset like gold or a government promise, like fiat currency (e.g., the U.S. dollar). Instead, its worth comes from a combination of scarcity, utility, and trust—kinda like how people value rare collectibles or even digital stuff in video games. Here’s how that works: Scarcity: Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million coins, baked into its code. Unlike fiat, where central banks can print more whenever they want, no one can “make” more Bitcoin beyond that limit. This mimics gold’s natural scarcity, but it’s enforced by math and cryptography, not geology.
Utility: It’s a decentralized way to send value anywhere in the world, fast and without middlemen like banks. Think of it like digital cash for the internet. People use it for payments, remittances, or even as a “store of value” (a fancy way of saying they hold it hoping it’ll be worth more later). The more people use it, the more useful it gets—network effect in action.
Trust: This is the big one. Bitcoin’s value hinges on people believing it’s worth something. That trust comes from its security (the blockchain hasn’t been hacked in 15 years), its transparency (anyone can verify it), and the fact that no single entity controls it. It’s not “backed” by a government, but it’s also not subject to their whims—like inflation from overprinting money.
Now, you mentioned fiat currency, and you’re right to compare them: both rely on trust. The dollar works because we trust the U.S. government and economy. Bitcoin works because people trust the system’s design and the community upholding it. The difference? Fiat can be inflated endlessly; Bitcoin can’t. That’s why some call it “digital gold”—it’s a hedge against fiat losing value, not a replacement for everyday cash (at least not yet).
If Bitcoin were backed by gold, it’d lose some of its decentralized mojo. You’d need a central authority to hold and guarantee that gold, which contradicts Bitcoin’s whole “trust the code, not people” vibe. Plus, tying it to gold wouldn’t necessarily make it more valuable—gold’s price fluctuates too, and Bitcoin’s scarcity already gives it a similar appeal.
Does it still feel shaky? Totally fair. Its value can swing wildly because it’s driven by speculation and adoption, not a fixed peg. But that’s also why some see it as an opportunity—it’s a bet on a future where decentralized money matters.
Thanks for the explanation. I didn't think to use Grok. My concern is with AI and the speed at which it is moving. Seems like it's something that eventually could be cracked or exploited. I'm not versed well enough in this and I did make a little money playing the bitcoin game, but it didn't feel right. It felt like a scam.
But here's Groks reply to my concern about AI
How AI Could Threaten Bitcoin Cracking Cryptography: Bitcoin relies on elliptic curve cryptography (ECDSA) to secure private keys. Right now, breaking these keys is infeasible—you’d need to guess a number in a range so huge it’d take billions of years with today’s computers.
Advanced AI, especially paired with quantum computing, could change that. If AI optimizes quantum algorithms (like Shor’s algorithm), it might crack those keys way faster. A powerful enough quantum computer could, in theory, derive your private key from your public address, letting someone steal your Bitcoin.
Catch: We’re not there yet. Current quantum tech (like Google’s or IBM’s) is nowhere near strong enough—think dozens of stable qubits when we’d need millions. AI might speed up progress, but it’s still a decade or more away, optimistically.
Mining Takeover: AI could optimize mining hardware or strategies, giving whoever controls it a huge edge. If one group (say, a tech giant or government) uses AI to dominate mining power, they could pull off a 51% attack—rewriting recent transactions or freezing the network.
Reality check: Mining’s already industrial-scale, with massive energy costs. AI might tilt the balance, but it’d still need absurd resources to outpace the current network, which is spread across thousands of miners globally.
Social Engineering and Hacks: AI’s getting scary good at phishing, deepfakes, and cracking passwords. Most Bitcoin losses come from people losing their keys to scams or bad wallet security, not the blockchain breaking. A super-smart AI could trick users or exploit weak points (like poorly coded wallets) at scale.
This isn’t really “corrupting the ledger,” though—it’s hitting the human layer, which has always been Bitcoin’s soft spot.
Network Manipulation: AI could analyze the blockchain, node behavior, and transaction patterns to find weaknesses—like targeting key nodes or predicting miner moves. A coordinated AI attack might disrupt consensus or spam the network.
Counterpoint: Bitcoin’s been hit with spam attacks before (e.g., 2017 stress tests) and survived. The network’s pretty resilient, and nodes adapt fast.
Why Bitcoin Might Hold Up Adaptation: Bitcoin’s not static. If AI or quantum tech becomes a real threat, the community could upgrade its cryptography—say, to quantum-resistant algorithms like lattice-based systems. It’d be a messy transition (everyone would need new keys), but it’s doable. Devs are already researching this.
Scale: Bitcoin’s network is huge—15,000+ nodes, insane mining power (over 600 exahashes/second as of late 2024). An AI would need to outsmart or overpower a global, decentralized system, not just one server. That’s a tall order, even for future AI.
Human Oversight: The Bitcoin community’s paranoid (in a good way). They watch for threats, audit code, and react. AI might sneak up, but it’d face a vigilant crowd ready to patch holes.
Economics: If AI breaks Bitcoin, it’d tank its value—why steal something you’re making worthless? Attackers might hesitate if the payoff doesn’t justify the cost.
The Risk Curve You’re right that as AI improves, the risk ticks up. A decade from now, if AI and quantum tech hit a breakthrough, Bitcoin could face a reckoning—especially if it doesn’t adapt fast enough. Imagine an AI quietly brute-forcing keys or simulating the network to find a crack; it’s not sci-fi, it’s just not now. Short-term, though, the bigger threats are still scams, exchange hacks, or regulatory bans—not AI breaking the ledger itself.
Quantum yeah, that's one risk.
Trump created this EO back in his first 4 years:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-13885-establishing-the-national-quantum-initiative-advisory-committee
At the end of the day bitcoin has no utility so it is essentially a digital baseball card, only worth what others want to pay for it. Average person that holds bitcoin holds 0.02 so how much does it have to go up before you make any worthwhile profit, but if u have the money and like it, buy it. More power to ya, I hope everyone gets rich on whatever they do
It's "backed" by an entirely fraudulent coin called "Tether", which is run by world-class criminals and totally protected by the highest government authorities. It's literally a "car wash token". They print Tether daily - OUT OF THIN AIR, now at a rate of literally BILLIONS per week.
It's a total joke. Back in 2017 they couldn't get a single reputable accounting form to audit their books. So they did their own, lied some more and here we are. Their original "promise" was that they held one dollar for every car wash token printed. Then in 2018, they stated in their "self-audit" that they had "invested" some of those dollars in more crypto as well as shady Chinese construction companies that have since gone bankrupt. It's a total joke.
The original "need" for Tether was that there were tons of international crypto exchanges popping up all over the world and they of course wanted American customers. But no American banks would work with them to exchange $USD back and forth between crypto coins and dollars. And it should be obvious that the American banks wouldn't work with them because they were shady operators that couldn't be vetted.
So Tether was born. For a while they even had their own website but that vanished quickly. And instead, a few US crypto exchanges like primarily "Kraken", which is based in the US and has a partnership with an American bank, was the place to join and go to buy Tether so that you could then transfer it over to these large international crypto exchanges, like "BitFinex" which was the biggest one back in the day. So big in fact, that BitFinex and Tether were basically one and the same. Both are massive scam operators that have "lost billions" with "hacks" to their exchanges. It hasn't happened just once either. More like 3 times in the past 10 years. Could it be the owners who are "hacking" their own exchange?
Anyway, enough history. Today, there are huge crypto exchanges all over the world that anybody can join in their home country. In the US, it's Coinbase or Gemini (among others). So if you wanted to buy Bitcoin (or any other coin they sell), you join Coinbase, and transfer your $USD funds into their US bank, and do your buying/selling/trading, etc. You don't need any "Tether" in the mix.
And this is true all around the world. The point of Tether was to turn your home currency into a "stable coin" so that you could then use this stable coin to buy the crypto you wanted (BTC, ETH, XRP, etc.).
So who in their right mind would want to FIRST buy "Tether" with their currency, only then to buy the crypto coin that they really want? It makes no sense. Zero sense. If you had $100 million dollars, you'd just wire it into Coinbase and buy BTC or whatever.
But that's not what's going on in the world. Every week, somebody, somehwere, SOMEHOW is buying BILLIONS of Tether car wash tokens. Nobody knows who they are. No popular figures in the crypto space buy it or use it...because they don't need it.
So who "needs" Tether exactly? Some people say drug/child traffickers are buying it and using it to try and "hide". But that's no way to "hide". There would be a record of their transactions wherever they are buying it. It's really a ridiculous idea and makes no sense. It's very, very hard to "hide" crypto purchases, even when using "crypto mixers".
So that only leaves one final possibility. Somebody is printing Tether out of thin air to pump the crypto markets. It's the only thing that makes sense.
Want to check it out? Go to CoinMarketCap and lookup Tether -> https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/
Choose "Market Cap" and then look at 7D, 1M, 1Yr, etc. You can see that somebody has bought $42 BILLION dollars worth of Tether in the past year. That's nearly $1 BILLION PER WEEK!!!!. And it's been accelerating in recent months to this level.
It's a joke. Crypto is a joke. You can tie the whole explosion of crypto in 2017 to the rise and exponential growth of the Tether carwash token. Now there are several other "stable coin" carwash tokens that are also in the mix.
Crypto is a giant scam, just like the Federal Reserve and $USD. But that being said, if it's supported and protected by the world's largest governments, intelligence agencies, media, etc. then hey, the sky is the limit as an investment I suppose. I've been wrong for nearly 7 years about it blowing up and the scam being exposed. Apparently that's not going to happen any time soon. But it will one day.
Caveat Emptor!
Exactly what I’ve been saying
You’re not supposed to understand, it’s the first crypto with every imaginable flaw. It never worked and never will
If you want a crypto coin that is actually redeemable for real gold/silver, go check out www.kinesis.money