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Australia Inserting Nano-Chips in $50 & $100 Bills to Track Underground Economy & Coming Barter System

January 4, 2019

Australia Inserting Nano-Chips in $50 & $100 Bills to Track Underground Economy & Coming Barter System

While the BitCoin people have hated me for not agreeing with them that a private currency could displace the currencies of all nations and BitCoin would be the new “reserve currency” killing the dollar, to me they are in serious need of help. They have ZERO comprehension of governmental power and ZERO understanding of what is going on behind the curtain. The IMF has come out and stated that each nation should issue their own cryptocurrency and these fools cheers claiming I am not with it and do not get this new age of technology. Sorry, but these people are really clueless if not perhaps undercover people with a mission to get people willing to surrender their final liberty – paper money.

While cryptobugs advocate gold is dead and BitCoin will conquer the financial world, they miss the point entirely. The IMF is by no means embracing cryptocurrencies for the same reason these people have claimed it will bypass central banks. The IMF is advocating the end of paper money to kill the underground or black economy solely to aid the hunt for taxes and to PREVENT bank runs. If there is no paper money, how can you run to the bank in a panic demanding to withdraw your money? They also argue eliminating paper money will end crime.

Now, Michael Andrew, the man appointed by the Australian Federal government to lead the ‘Black Economy Taskforce’ at the end of 2016, is arguing for an interim-step. He believes tracking the currency denomination is the best solution in stopping the underground/black economy and grabbed taxes if you found a $50 or $100 bill on the street and failed to give the government their 50%.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

FORGET THE LISTS: Selco’s Guide to What You Should REALLY Store for Trade and Barter

November 30, 2018

FORGET THE LISTS: Selco’s Guide to What You Should REALLY Store for Trade and Barter

Selco’s Guide to What You Should REALLY Store for Trade and Barter

Discussions about trade and usage of trade are great because sooner or later when SHTF, you’ll find yourself in a situation to be involved in a trade.

Now this sentence above sounds great and you may think: “OK, let’s just store a whole bunch of items for trade”.

But what items?

Then you may look for info what is going to be missing once when SHTF and you may find out that (eventually) everything going to be gone and missing once when SHTF really bad.

So it is not about what is gonna be gone when SHTF when it comes to trade. It is much more about what makes sense to have stored for trade.

But since the whole trade topic got pretty much “hijacked” from the fiction industry, there are a lot of myths there, so let’s start from some common sense ideas first.

When you should trade during SHTF?

The answer is pretty weird and paradoxical.

The answer is that you should not trade, or you should avoid trade because the process is dangerous because it involves usually unknown people during a prolonged event where there is no law and order.

In a more serious event, it is one more level up in danger. It is an event where there is no law and order and there are clear signs that law and order are not coming back any time soon.

So, again you are involved in a process where you are holding valuable resources and showing them to another group of people in a time where there is no punishment from the system for the folks who want to shoot you because of those resources.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Happens When Your Money Is Worthless? Living with a Devalued Currency

March 31, 2018

What Happens When Your Money Is Worthless? Living with a Devalued Currency

This is one of the most important and valued articles to help you prepare. I think it could be useful, based on our experience with the economic collapse and its effects on the currency. Let me tell you what life is really like when your country has a devalued currency that is nearly worthless.

How do you buy things with devalued currency?

These last few days I was asked by a fellow prepper overseas how our internal trading, with such a devalued currency, was going on. He asked if we used silver coins and bartering. I answered him that we use mostly US dollars and Euros for large transactions like vehicles, land, and housing, as far as I know. But the reason people are mostly selling is that they are desperate to get out of the country, and the wealth they have accumulated in previous years vanishes, with the bad deals they seem forced to accept.

On the other hand, for day-to-day payments, bolivars are still used, but the prices go up (always UP by the way) depending on the black market dollar price. This is, though, a perfect evidence that this black market dollar is controlled by the government: look at the evolution price, and you will find it stable just before any important election, political campaigns and such.

This is no surprise, those who benefit the most from this black market are those “companies” that aligned with the dollar river…and nowadays that stream is getting dry.

Bad news for oil industry workers

I received very bad news for those still working in the oil industry. So you can understand what is in store for the employees, I have to explain some background first.

As part of our monthly payment, we received a savings incentive: the company retained the 12.5% of our salary in their accounts until the end of the month, and provided another 12.5% (it sounds like a lot but it is not). So, by the end of the month, we had in the corporative account an additional 25%.

This was one of the main benefits for the oil state workers, and that helped to deal with the high performance demanded by the industry. This money, during better times, was kept there until the end of the year, for a new car, or starting a side business, some fancy vacations, and stuff. However I never used it for traveling overseas, but invested in land, some prepping gear and equipment, assisting my parents and my wife’s family, and short family trips from time to time to the beach, or my folks’ place and such.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Barter For Survival: Top Ten Barter Items Every Prepper Should Have

February 20, 2018

Barter For Survival: Top Ten Barter Items Every Prepper Should Have

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Barter items for survival – What would you have to trade in a survival situation?

Any conversation about prepping first starts with the “the best survival gun” followed by “bugging out vs hunkering down” and then on to “the best retreat location” and then to “what to have on hand for barter… well today, I’m going to answer that question.

The first thing to consider is what items do people need and use every day, followed by will they need these items after a long-term disaster and if so will those items be readily available when the resupply lines are cut. If not, then would those items be easy to make from other common items?

These are the questions I asked when putting away my barter items – those are included in the list below in no order.

1. Ammunition

While I don’t advocate bartering most ammo after a collapse simply because that ammo could be used against you. Stop and think about it, if a person needs to barter for ammo in the first weeks and months after a collapse then it’s evident that person has not prepped and will need other stuff, stuff they figure that you now have and there is no guarantee that they won’t use the ammo that you traded them at a later date to kill you and take your preps for their own use.

The exception that I make with ammo for barter purposes is for shotgun ammo. I’ve stocked up a large amount (500 rounds) of 12 gauge birdshot in #6 and smaller shot sizes for barter purposes. Sure birdshot can kill someone, however, it’s low penetration and short-range make it one of the least threatening ammo types that can be stocked up and used for barter purposes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Items That You Can Barter When SHTF

August 18, 2017

Items That You Can Barter When SHTF

Barter items for survival – What would you have to trade in a survival situation?

These are the questions I asked when putting away my own barter items – those are included in the list below in no order.

1. Ammunition

While I don’t advocate bartering most ammo after a collapse simply because that ammo could be used against you. Stop and think about it, if a person needs to barter for ammo in the first weeks and months after a collapse then it’s evident that that person has not prepped and will need other stuff, stuff they figure that you now have and there is no guarantee that they won’t use the ammo that you traded them at a later date to kill you and take your preps for their own use.

The exception that I make with ammo for barter purposes is for shotgun ammo. I’ve stocked up a large amount (500 rounds) of 12 gauge bird shot in #6 and smaller shot sizes for barter purposes. Sure birdshot can kill someone, however, it’s low penetration and short range make it one of the least threatening ammo types that can be stocked up and used for barter purposes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

5 Best Off-Grid Currencies That Don’t Require Electricity

August 11, 2017

5 Best Off-Grid Currencies That Don’t Require Electricity

When zombies attack or when the electric grid is taken down by an EMP or solar flare, trade must go on.

Currently, about 90% of U.S. dollars exist only digitally. Even if fiat cash remained valuable post-apocalypse, it would be pretty hard to come by.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are great, but still rely on electricity and the internet to function.

So what are the best off the grid currencies for a worst case scenario?

A currency stores the value of labor or goods that are otherwise hard to store, trade, and transport.

A Proper currency will not physically deteriorate over time. It will be widely useful, all the better if you can use it yourself, worst case scenario.

Here are the five best off the grid currencies to hoard, or have the means to create.

1. Distilled Spirits AKA Moonshine–Hard Freakin’ Alcohol!

We would never advocate that you break the law, except for right now when we encourage you to break any stupid laws against brewing your own hard liquor. Or try to navigate the legal minefield of home brewing, either way.

Whiskey was the currency of choice for Western Pennsylvanians after the Revolutionary War. Instead of hauling grain to market over hill and through dale, they converted it to whiskey. This was much easier to transport and trade since it had high value for a low volume. The scumbag Alexander Hamilton ruined that by demanding a whiskey tax paid in coin. This set off the Whiskey Rebellion which set the precedent for the terribly cronyistic and centralized government we have today.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stretching Your Resources In Uncertain Times

December 23, 2015

Stretching Your Resources In Uncertain Times

money public domain With the cost of everything going up and the future uncertain, stretching your resources and re-purposing items becomes more of a necessity. I am always looking for new ways to get the “max for the minimum.”

Some recent posts here reminded me of some of these things. My grandparents and parents were a young family when the great depression hit. What kinds of things did they do to make ends meet when things were expensive or scarce?

Unfortunately, many of them who went through this period in time are no longer with us. However, I remember a few things they did or heard of them doing, that now, looking back, were obviously brought about by the times they lived in. Even after times improved somewhat, some still stuck to certain ways of doing things. Old habits are hard to break.

Hunting and gardening were basically a given back then. Most everyone outside the city limits did one or both of this along with bartering services for goods. A little carpentry or plumbing work for a couple of chickens.

I remember my grandfather mixing his old used motor oil with a little bit of kerosene and spraying the underside and inner fender wells of his pick up truck just before winter. He claimed it helped protect the truck from incurring rust damage over the winter months. Getting more serviceable years out of the truck.

I am sure environmentalists would have a cow over this nowadays, but it was a way of taking something that didn’t appear to have any usefulness left ,and yet, finding one more use for it. The county used to spray old used oil to keep the dust down on dirt roads during the spring and summer months. Don’t see that happening anymore.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Concept Of Money And The Money Illusion

September 6, 2015

The Concept Of Money And The Money Illusion

Awareness about the concept of money is making a comeback. Gone are the decades in which the global citizenry was fooled to leave this subject to economists, governments and banks – a setup that has proven to end in disaster. The crisis in 2008 has spawned debate about what money is, where it comes from and where it should come from. These developments inspired me to write a post on the concept of money and the money illusion. (All examples in this post are simplified.) The Concept Of Money

Money is a collective human inventionFirst, let us have a look at the fundamentals of money. How did Money evolve? Thousand and thousands of years ago before any trade occurred homo sapiens use to be self-sufficient; families or small communities grew that their own crops, fished the seas, raised cattle and made their own tools.When barter emerged the necessity to be self-sufficient ceased to exist. A farmer that grew tomatoes and carrots could exchange some of his production output for bananas or oranges if he wished to do so. There was no necessity for the farmer to grow all crops he wished to consume, when there was an option to trade.Farmers participating in a barter economy were incentivized to specialize in production, because they could escalate their wealth (gain more goods) by producing fewer crops on a greater scale. Through trade increased productivity (efficiency of production) could be converted into wealth, as the more efficient commodities were produced, the higher the exchange value of the labor put in to produce them. Consequently, barter economized production among its participants.

By exchanging, human beings discovered ‘the division of labor’, the specialization of efforts and talents for mutual gain… Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution.

From Matt Ridley.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Vision of Monetary Hell …

May 23, 2015

A Vision of Monetary Hell …

… Troubles Our Sleep …

It is the vision of what the United States will be like when the authorities have obliterated almost three millennia of monetary progress and have their boots on our necks.

Here’s Peter Bofinger, a leading German Keynesian economist, in Der Spiegel magazine:

“With today’s technical possibilities, coins and notes are in fact an anachronism. They made payments incredibly difficult, with people wasting all sorts of time at the cashier as they wait for the person ahead of them to dig through their belongings to find some cash, and for the cashier to render change (rather than, for example, waiting for someone to find the right credit card, complete the transaction, and wait for approval).

[…]

But the additional time is not the largest benefit of the elimination of cash. It dries out the markets for moonlighting and drug trafficking. Almost a third of the euro cash in circulation consists of 500-euro notes. No one needs those for shopping; light-shy figures use them for their activities. [Also] it would be easier for central banks to impose their monetary policies. At this time, they cannot push interest rates appreciably below zero because the savers would hoard cash. If there is no cash, the zero bound is eliminated.”

They said they were going to make me an advisor ... Bofinger discovers they lied to him.

A Slide Back into Prehistory

Yes, dear reader, it seems to be coming – a dreadful slide back beyond the darkest ages and into the mud and slime of prehistory. Back then, modern “money” had not been invented. Using rudimentary credit and barter systems, you could only trade with people you knew – and on a limited scale.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

ENERGY-MONEY EQUILIBRIUM: THE VALUE OF MONEY IN THE AGE OF OIL

March 3, 2015

ENERGY-MONEY EQUILIBRIUM: THE VALUE OF MONEY IN THE AGE OF OIL

Trying to figure out exactly how Money achieves and holds its value is very difficult. In all but the simplest systems, which are little more than Barter, you quickly develop a level of complexity which is confounding mainly because it is always so self-referential. In this exercise I try to elucidate the process used over the centuries to not just create money, which is primary, but also to control money once created. I have some basic ideas here, but I have no idea how this post will come out in the end. It’s a very difficult problem.

Starting Point: You cannot have Money without a surplus in basic needs, but neither is surplus by itself sufficient. You also must have control over at least one basic conduit of wealth, which is in the beginning food. Why is this so?

First let us look at a pre-agricultural Hunter Gatherer (H-G) society. Said society can be in surplus, but they don’t need or use money because each member of the society can take from the surplus as much as he or she needs. You may barter things, but you do not need an intermediary of money to do that. It’s a very simple system, but it allows for virtually no savings and none are necessary so long as you always have and expect surplus. A small group of H-Gs in a large territory who are not competing with others are always in surplus. So no money develops in such a society.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Problem of Debt as We Reach Oil Limits

February 11, 2015

The Problem of Debt as We Reach Oil Limits

(This is Part 3 of my series – A New Theory of Energy and the Economy. These are links to Part 1 and Part 2.)

Many readers have asked me to explain debt. They also wonder, “Why can’t we just cancel debt and start over?” if we are reaching oil limits, and these limits threaten to destabilize the system. To answer these questions, I need to talk about the subject of promises in general, not just what we would call debt.

In some sense, debt and other promises are what hold together our networked economy. Debt and other promises allow division of labor, because each person can “pay” the others in the group for their labor with a promise of some sort, rather than with an immediate payment in goods. The existence of debt allows us to have many convenient forms of payment, such as dollar bills, credit cards, and checks. Indirectly, the many convenient forms of payment allow trade and even international trade.

Each debt, and in fact each promise of any sort, involves two parties. From the point of view of one party, the commitment is to pay a certain amount (or certain amount plus interest). From the point of view of the other party, it is a future benefit–an amount available in a bank account, or a paycheck, or a commitment from a government to pay unemployment benefits. The two parties are in a sense bound together by these commitments, in a way similar to the way atoms are bound together into molecules. We can’t get rid of debt without getting rid of the benefits that debt provides–something that is a huge problem.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Show me the real money: Three monetary myths that need busting

January 13, 2015

Show me the real money: Three monetary myths that need busting

Money pervades our everyday economic interactions. But, despite its importance, it is also pervasively misunderstood. Here are three common monetary myths – frequently perpetuated by economists – that need challenging.

Myth 1: Money emerges from barter

Economists often tell a tale about how old communities first used barter to exchange goods and services. Bartering throws up tricky situations. Take as an example a farmer trying to exchange a cow for bread from a baker, a clumsy and difficult negotiation. Thus, according the old economists like Adam Smith, money was supposedly ‘invented’ as a way to get around that inefficiency and confusion.

This narrative is ahistorical and inaccurate. Anthropologists have long had a much more convincing account: in small communities without money, exchange does not take place through on-the-spot barter. Rather it takes place through reciprocity, the process whereby I give you something now, and then you return the favour over time. In essence, communities develop elaborate systems of score-keeping – informal ‘mutual credit’ systems are created, and if I don’t eventually honour my obligations under that system, I will be shunned from the community.

It is these ‘I owe you one’ systems that are behind the origins of money. Money is an abstracted form of such credit, taken out of the interpersonal context of a small community, and formalised and legalised within a political system.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

101 Barter Items for when SHTF | Survival Life | Blog – Survival Life | Preppers | Survival Gear | Blog

December 2, 2014

When SHTF, bartering is one of the most vital skills you can have. Chances are that traditional money will be scarce or lose its value altogether, and in order to survive you will have to trade and barter to get what you need. It’s important to know the value of everything. Of course there are the obvious items like food, clothing and building materials, but the truth is that there are tons of things that will have surprising bartering value in a SHTF situation. Our friend Gaye Levy compiled a list of 101 inexpensive bartering items.

I would be preaching the choir if I told you that it is wise to gather extra supplies that you can use for bartering in a post-collapse world. The issue for many, however, is that their budget allows no room for extras. Finding funds for long term personal preps, let alone daily needs can be an ongoing challenge.

Let’s face it. We all know that the middle class is disappearing. Food and health care costs are up and even those with comfortable nest eggs are finding that their funds are rotting, earning virtually no interest and suffering the ravages of inflation. So what are we to do?

The first rule of thumb is to acquire skills that can be bartered for goods. That is the smart thing to do regardless of your financial situation. Beyond that, there are a number of low cost items that you can accumulate over time, even if you are poor.

Backdoor Survival reader Elaine K. sent me her list of “poor man’s barter items”. It gave me so many ideas that I expanded the list to include even more items. Here it is: 101 low cost items to barter if the stuff hits the fan.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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5 Best Off-Grid Currencies That Don’t Require Electricity

1. Distilled Spirits AKA Moonshine–Hard Freakin’ Alcohol!

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