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According to the IEA, electricity consumption from data centres, artificial intelligence (AI) and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026. Factor in the global push to EVs.

Please consider the International Energy Agency IEA Electricity Analysis Report 2024-2026.

IEA Notable Points

Global electricity demand rose moderately in 2023 but is set to grow faster through 2026
Global electricity demand is expected to rise at a faster rate over the next three years, growing by an average of 3.4% annually through 2026.
Electricity consumption from data centres, artificial intelligence (AI) and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026.
About 85% of additional electricity demand through 2026 is set to come from outside advanced economies
China provides the largest share of global electricity demand growth in terms of volume, but India posts the fastest growth rate through 2026 among major economies.
EU electricity consumption is not expected to return to 2021 levels until 2026 at the earliest. Electricity prices for energy-intensive industries in the European Union in 2023 were almost double those in the United States and China.
Despite energy prices falling from their previous record highs, EU electricity demand further declined in 2023. Lower industrial electricity demand was the most important factor, as in the previous year.
Renewables are set to provide more than one-third of total electricity generation globally by early 2025, overtaking coal. The share of renewables in electricity generation is forecast to rise from 30% in 2023 to 37% in 2026, with the growth largely supported by the expansion of ever cheaper solar PV.
By 2025, global nuclear generation is forecast to exceed its previous record set in 2021.
Global CO2 emissions from electricity generation are expected to fall by more than 2% in 2024 after increasing by 1% in 2023.

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

Ending Fiat Money Won’t Destroy the State

January 13, 2022

Ending Fiat Money Won’t Destroy the State

A certain meme has become popular among advocates of both gold and cryptocurrencies. This is the “Fix the money, fix the world” meme. This slogan is based on the idea that by switching to some commodity money—be it crypto or metal—and abandoning fiat currency, the world will improve greatly.

Taken in its moderate form, of course, this slogan is indisputably correct. State-controlled money is immoral, dangerous, and impoverishing. It paves the way for government theft of private wealth through the inflation tax, and thus allows the state to do more of what it does best: wage wars, kill, imprison, steal, and enrich the friends of the regime at the expense of everyone else. Privatizing the monetary system and imposing a “separation of money and state” would help limit these activities.

But it’s also important to not overstate the benefits of taking money out of the hands of the state. The temptation to push the “fix the world” idea to utopian levels is often seen among cryptocurrency maximalists, and among some gold promoters as well.

For example, at least one bitcoin enthusiast thinks bitcoin will bring “the end of the nation states.” And in one particularly over-the-top paragraph from another bitcoin promoter, we’re told that cryptocurrency will essentially cure every ill from poverty to corruption to environmental destruction.

The idea that changing to different money will somehow end theft, poverty, or even war is the sort of messianic thinking that would have given old-school Marxists a run for their money.

Yes, we can all agree that if we “improve the money” we also “improve the world.” But removing the state’s money monopoly won’t make states fold up their tents and slink away in the night. (And, needless to say, simply changing the money won’t make bad food or poverty disappear either.)

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

Why the West can’t ban Bitcoin the way China did

September 24, 2021

Why the West can’t ban Bitcoin the way China did

Only a complete “dictatorship of the proletariat” can kill Bitcoin

Evergrande is being called China’s “Lehman moment” and overnight the PBC closed the loop on their clampdown on crypto with a total ban on virtual currency transactions.

For those paying attention, however, China isn’t just moving against crypto, they’ve been bringing their entire technology sector to heel. They also stated that it is time to redistribute wealth from the top tier of the nations wealth holders to the rest of the peasant class.

This isn’t a return to their Communist roots as much as it is a move of self-preservation against rising internal powers. In the words of my friend Charles Hugh Smith via some correspondence we’ve been having this week “Xi has set out to crush the Network State”.

I said in my earlier Network State Primer about the coming tension between Nation States and Network States: the former will go down swinging.

The power structures of the nation states won’t go gently into the dustbin of history. They will go down swinging, over a transitional era that may span decades or longer, similar to the centuries long tensions between monarchs and the Papacy that shaped the transition from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance.

China has decided to make their last stand of the Nation State, now. Here at this moment in time. They will not bail out Evergrande, they will allow their side of the Everything Bubble to pop, and they will use the economic crash to make a final sweep of consolidation of their power. They will make sure their Big Tech knows who is in charge and that it is not them.

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

Governments to Control What You Are Allowed to Buy

July 27, 2021

Governments to Control What You Are Allowed to Buy

People are unaware that this drive of central banks to replace paper money with cryptocurrency is far more than they will ever comprehend as an end goal. Aside from the fact that governments could then impose a negative interest rate effectively confiscating money from your account in ADDITION to taxation, they are moving to do what many in the religious right see as the prophecy of the anti-Christ where you will not be able to buy or sell without his permission.

Indeed, the government can restrict what you will even be allowed to buy. They will control every aspect of your life beyond what the most demonized vision of the future might hold. These ideas will create resistance which will also be rooted in religion. Will you accept the number of the beast, or resist their commands? This is not something anyone would have dared to think that a representative form of government would have even talked about.

The Cyberattacks Are to Force the End of Paper Money

June 3, 2021

The Cyberattacks Are to Force the End of Paper Money

I find it interesting how nobody seems to distinguish between a digital currency and blockchain cryptocurrency. The former is not traceable other than that transaction. To eliminate cybercriminals, the World Economic Forum is pushing ending paper money and moving to cryptocurrencies – not digital. With blockchain, the government would be able to trace the money to the criminal. The side benefit will be to ensure everyone pays taxes on everything they ever dreamed of. This is the REAL purpose of cyberattacks that are private decisions and outside the jurisdiction of government to trace and prosecute.

This is why Klaus Schwab is warning of cyberattacks. This is to end commerce globally without government-trackable cryptocurrencies. In 1934 when Roosevelt confiscated gold if you had money on deposit in a bank, which had been in gold coin, Roosevelt seized it all. The difference between a digital currency you use today with a debt or credit card is that is not traceable beyond a single transaction. Bitcoin using blockchain allows the government to trace every person who had that Bitcoin in the flow of money. Crypto is far more than digital and they never want to talk about that either. They will tell you no more credit card theft. Everything will be 100% secure. You will no longer be able to find a $5 bill in the parking lot.

I have written before how the Romans tried to outlaw prostitution declaring you could not pay a prostitute with a coin that had the image of the emperor which they all did. So they created these tokens you would buy from a money changer, you would pay the prostitute and she accepted them because she knew she could go to the money changer and he would convert them to coin.

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

The Outage at the Federal Reserve

February 27, 2021

The Outage at the Federal Reserve

The outage of the National Settlement Service and the Fedwire Securities Service, which provides issuance, settlement, and transfer services for Treasuries and other government securities, was down and this has caused some concern and then conspiracy theories mixed in. The Fed made progress reversing the shutdown within a couple of hours, however, this has illustrated that a long-term outage of the Fed’s online services could cause intense chaos across the world financial system, preventing banks and businesses from finalizing transactions and impeding basic banking functions.

The Federal Reserve said an outage of its key financial services on Wednesday was caused by a maintenance mistake and it is taking steps to prevent a recurrence. The official statement read:

“The incident was caused by an operational error involving an automated data center maintenance process that was inadvertently triggered during business hours,” a Fed spokeswoman said. Such tasks are normally performed after-hours, she said, adding, “This was human error.”

“Our technical teams have determined that the cause is a Federal Reserve operational error,” the Fed said on Wednesday on its website. “The Federal Reserve Banks have taken steps to help ensure the resilience of the Fedwire and NSS applications, including recovery to the point of failure.”

There was no power-outage so it does appear that the Federal Reserve was honestly calling it a disruption due to an ‘operational error’. This raises the issue of concern surrounding digital currency. Indeed, solar flares and other solar–mass ejections that travel through space can overwhelm Earth’s atmosphere and generate powerful electric and magnetic fields. These magnetic storms can occasionally be intense enough to disrupt the operation of high-voltage electricity lines. A digital currency system could be brought to its knees with an EM attack.

(see report)

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

Gold and Crypto: Is This How Charts Look Before A Monetary Collapse?

October 24, 2020

Gold and Crypto: Is This How Charts Look Before A Monetary Collapse?

It is the the massive debt. It cannot be serviced. It will collapse the whole system.

The gold, silver and cryptocurrencies charts are showing signs of going parabolic. The US dollar is close to confirming a massive breakdown.

Gold, silver and cryptocurrencies all provide “crisis value” by simply being an acceptable debt-based fiat alternative. It is only later in this crisis that we will see a divergence between cryptocurrency and precious metals.

For now, they are likely to move higher together.

Gold has recently made new all-time highs, and seems ready to go higher after a decent consolidation. The importance of the 2011 all-time high can be seen on these charts:

I have marked two fractals (ABC). Both fractals start from the Dow/Gold ratio peaks (1966 and 1999). For these to continue the similarity, the level ($1920) at A and C needs to be surpassed on the current fractal.

We’ve already seen the breakout, now price has just been consolidating around that level. It is very close to blasting higher.

From a cycle analysis point of view, we are right at a point where a sustained multi-year gold rally is possible:

The top chart is gold from about 1997 to 2020 (current fractal), and the bottom chart is gold from about 1965 to 1980 (70s fractals). If the current fractal continues to follow the 70s fractal, then we could see gold continue to multiples of its current all-time high.

Currently, we are just after, or close to, a major Dow peak in the economic cycle. Again, you can see that the 2011 peak is an important indicator to confirm these fractals as relevant. It could also be considered a marker after which the chart is likely to go parabolic.

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

Predictions Of The Dollar’s Demise Are Likely Premature

July 26, 2020

Predictions Of The Dollar’s Demise Are Likely Premature

Predictions of the dollar’s demise are likely premature and overblown. This post is in response to the rising interest in both precious metals and cryptocurrencies. Several factors are driving this trend. One is the idea governments have targeted cash and wish to move us towards a “cashless” society where they control our every move. Another is rooted in the idea inflation is about to raise its ugly head as currencies are debased.

I contend that for several years currencies have been trading in a hyper-manipulated state. It should be noted that fiat money is often sheltered from the storm of volatility by both politics and because it exists in a rather closed system. Wealth is contained within this system of fiat money by laws and rules that discourage freedom of movement. It is the coordinated collusion of the major central banks that have allowed this charade to exist. The fact it has not been recognized or acknowledged does not alter or guarantee the system will continue. The failure or major repricing of any of the world’s four major reserve currencies will destroy the myth that major currencies are immune to the fate that has haunted fiat money throughout history. When the nations granting these currencies prove unable to control their budgets history shows their currency is destroyed and crushed under the weight of debt.

One thing the global economy doesn’t need with all the uncertainty that is currently floating around is unstable currency markets. When you consider just how destabilizing currency swings can be it is easy to see how a strong dollar could obliterate the global economy. It should not be a surprise in our current situation that behind the curtain central bankers could be busy manipulating currencies so they trade in a narrow range that will not rock the boat.

Fed’s Quantitative Easing Strategy Holds Long-Term Benefits for Crypto

April 2, 2020

Fed’s Quantitative Easing Strategy Holds Long-Term Benefits for Crypto

These are perilous times, and it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the United States Federal Reserve is doing its part to alleviate the suffering — which began with the coronavirus pandemic and has spread to the global economy. It’s printing more money.

“There is an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve,” Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, told Scott Pelley of CBS on March 22, adding: “We will do whatever we need to do to make sure there is enough cash in the financial system.”

The U.S. Federal Reserve itself reinforced that message on March 23, announcing that it would “continue to purchase Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities in the amounts needed to support smooth market functioning.”

The death of capitalism?

Reactions to these affirmations of quantitative easing, or QE, have been swift from sectors of the crypto community: “With these words, the last vestige of #capitalism died in the US,” wrote Caitlin Long, who established the first crypto-native bank in the United States. “[The] Fed’s monetization U.S. debt is now unlimited.”

Mati Greenspan, the CEO and co-founder of Quantum Economics told Cointelegraph: “The Fed said it is willing to buy the entire market” if necessary to stabilize markets. Meanwhile, on the fiscal side, Congress’s $2 trillion stimulus package includes handouts like “helicopter money” — i.e., a $1,200 payment to every tax-paying adult who has an annual income below $75,000. “Inflation is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point,” he stated elsewhere.

Garrick Hileman, head of research at Blockchain.com, told Cointelegraph: “The response by central banks to COVID-19 is truly unprecedented, with Fed and Bank of England officials using terms like ‘infinite,’ ‘unlimited’ and ‘radical.’” They’ve been using such extraordinary language in the hope they’ll prevent equity and credit markets from seizing up. “Only time will tell if they have gone too far.”

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

Farewell to Paper Money?

December 25, 2019

Farewell to Paper Money?

A decade or more ago, I began to discuss with associates the possibility of governments and banks colluding to eliminate physical cash. Back then, the idea struck most everyone as poppycock, that governments could never get away with it.

I didn’t write on the subject until 2015, when several countries had begun to limit the amount of money a depositor could extract from his bank account. At that point, the prospect that central banks might conceivably eliminate cash was looking less like an alarmist fantasy, and it became possible to write on the nascent issue.

In a nutshell, today, in most of the world’s most prominent countries, the people who control banking are the same people who pull the strings in government. A cashless system therefore seemed to me to be a natural, as it dramatically increased both profit and power for both banking and government – an opportunity that can’t be passed up.

The Benefit to Banking

Some banks have been delving into negative interest rates, which is a euphemism for charging you to keep your money in the bank, so that they can loan it out for their own profit. You actually lose money annually by having it on deposit.

Of course, some people accept negative interest rates in order to retain the imagined safety of having their cash in a bank vault, rather than at home. Others tolerate it because they value the convenience of using ATMs and chequing.

But anyone else may simply decide to store their money at home and save the “reverse interest” charges.

But what if cash were eliminated? No one would have a choice. They’d have to have a bank account and use it for all transactions, or they couldn’t purchase goods or pay bills.

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

China’s Central Bank to Lead Real-World Pilot of Digital Yuan: Report

December 10, 2019

China’s Central Bank to Lead Real-World Pilot of Digital Yuan: Report

China is at last planning to conduct the first real-world test of its central bank digital currency (CBDC), fresh reports claim.

According to local news outlet Caijing on Dec. 9, the initial pilot for the CBDC is set for the city of Shenzhen before the end of 2019, and may possibly include the city of Suzhou.

Banks in a digital currency “horse race”

Under the auspices of China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), four major banks and major economic participants such as China Telecom will test digital currency payments.

“One step will be to rationally select the pilot verification area, scenario and service scope, and steadily promote the introduction and application of digital form of fiat currency,” Caijing explains.The article continues:

“Compared with the previous pilot, this time the central bank’s legal digital currency pilot will go out of the central bank system and enter real service scenarios such as transportation, education, and medical treatment, reaching C-end users and generating frequent applications.”

In Shenzhen, the PBoC is encouraging what it describes as a “horse race” — each bank will manage the digital currency differently, competing against each other in order to secure its model’s wider adoption in the future.

It added that other locales could be included in the testing, but the exact details remain unspecified.

PBoC beats world competition

The debut will nonetheless make the PBoC the world’s first central bank to issue a digital currency, capitalizing on China’s efforts to embrace financial technology this year.

As Cointelegraph reported, the currency itself has been under development for several years, and was already at an advanced stage when Beijing officially endorsed the use of blockchaintechnology in October.

Criticism of the CBDC plans meanwhile continues, with analysis noting interoperability as a potential major sticking point in the plans.

Last week, Cointelegraph launched a dedicated subsidiary publication, Cointelegraph China, to cover developments in the Chinese space.

Is the Global Dollar in Jeopardy?

November 6, 2019

Is the Global Dollar in Jeopardy?

The US Federal Reserve is right to be concerned, if not worried, about the greenback’s dominance of international trade and finance. Fortunately for consumers, growing potential competitive pressure – call it the Libra effect – creates an incentive to make the existing system work better.

WASHINGTON, DC – Since the end of World War II, the United States dollar has been at the heart of international finance and trade. Over the decades, and despite the many ups and downs of the global economy, the dollar retained its role as the world’s favorite reserve asset. When times are tough or uncertainty reigns, investors flock to dollar-denominated assets, particularly US Treasury debt – ironically, even when there is a financial crisis in the US. As a result, the Federal Reserve – which sets US dollar interest rates – has enormous sway over economic conditions around the world.

For all the associated innovation evident since the launch of the decentralized blockchain-based currency Bitcoin in 2009, the arrival of modern cryptocurrencies has had essentially zero impact on the global taste for dollars. Promoters of these new forms of money still have their hopes, of course, that they can challenge the existing financial system, but the impact on global portfolios has proved minimal. The most powerful central banks (the Fed, the European Central Bank, and a few others) are still running the global money show.

Suddenly, however, there is a new, potentially serious player in town: Facebook’s Libra initiative. Facebook and a currently shifting coalition of firms are planning to launch their own private form of money that would, in some sense, be secured by holdings of major currencies.

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

Why Silver & Barter Could Become the Alternative to Cryptocurrency

January 17, 2019

Why Silver & Barter Could Become the Alternative to Cryptocurrency

QUESTION: RE: ….& Coming Barter System.
So, are you suggesting that we may see a shift to Silver by private individuals as the only way to sidestep Government stupidity, or will it be even worse, like trading whiskey for toilet paper??

TWE

ANSWER: Assuming government attempts to follow the IMF’s advice and create cryptocurrencies to replace paper money, then the only alternative will be the barter system. To make this clear, the likelihood of the USA following this route is a last resort. It will NOT be the first, but the last. We will see this in Europe before we will ever see it in the USA.

This cannot be a question that is answered based upon OPINION, for we all have one. The only rational way to approach that question is to look at history and see how people responded to similar but not identical positions. What comes to mind in Japan. Each new emperor devalued the money issued his own coins worth 10x that of the coins of the previous emperor. People resorted to bags of rice and they used the coins of China. Everyone refused to use Japanese coins. The result was that Japan LOST the right to issue coins at all for 600 years.

Moving to a cryptocurrency to stop the underground economy from using paper money will simply switch it to foreign currency (dollars in Europe) or something commodity based. In federal prisons, when they banned smoking back in 2004, packs of mackerel industry became the prison currency. Everyone operated an internal economy. They used cigarettes as their currency of choice to purchase anything from food and home-brewed prison hooch. They also used books of stamps. Prisoners could ship books of stamps out and they could resell them at a discount.

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

Deplatforming Paves the Way for Cryptocurrency

December 16, 2018

Deplatforming Paves the Way for Cryptocurrency

The recent deplatforming of Sargon of Akkad by Patreon has a lot of people very nervous. I became worried we’d get to this state the first time they went after Gab for not allowing their app in the Google or Apple stores.

It became obvious then that we would wind up here today. It starts with saying that certain things are unacceptable based on arbitrary enforcement of Terms of Service and ends with backroom pressure to cut a person off from making money.

Google began demonetizing channels which were politically unpalatable to its senior management. So, a lot of demonetized YouTubers moved to Patreon, asking subscribers to support them directly rather than deal with intrusive ads.

And now Patreon has gotten into the game. But, we always knew that they would. They went after Laura Southern last year.

Alex Jones was simultaneously thrown off every platform and then Gab was taken down over a 48-hour period with no warning over having a particular user on its platform.

Yes, that guy shot up a synagogue. That’s not Gab’s problem.

It didn’t matter that Twitter still hosts all manner of violent and disgusting content or Facebook hosting sites of terrorist groups. Political opposition to the globalist plan of universal serfdom for us and unchecked power for them was to be snuffed out with extreme prejudice.

Alternatives Rise

Alternative platforms needed to be marginalized to blunt their growth. Steemit is in trouble due to poor governance and the crushing of the cryptocurrency markets now that Wall St. can use the futures market to disrupt the actual market.

The truth, however, is that by trying to marginalize these alternative voices and raise their cost of capital for growth all that they’ve done is made them more popular than they likely would have been otherwise.

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

Central Banks Looking at Creating Their Own Cryptocurrencies

November 26, 2018

Central Banks Looking at Creating Their Own Cryptocurrencies

The IMF has recommended that all Central banks should issue their own cryptocurrencies. Indeed, they are looking at using Block Chain to keep track of taxes and to enforce negative interest rates with
cryptocurrencies which would allow them to impose negative interest rates whenever necessary. With adopting cryptocurrencies that governments would control, we will come one step closer to losing all our freedom. Central banks could enforce negative interest rates with cryptocurrencies and thus people would find their accounts just garnished. This technology is also causing those in hunt of tax revenues to lick their lips.

The issuance of digital currencies would allow central banks to remain in control of the money supply far more so than they are today. Sweden is moving forward and there we see that the use of cash is rapidly disappearing.
Cryptocurrency technology would allow also the taxman to just cometh and take whatever he desires in the midst of the economic crisis we face. The Central Banks would be able to maintain greater control over the creation of money through the process of leverage (bank lending).

While policymakers in Canada have already researched the idea. The IMF head Christine Lagarde called on central banks to focus on issuing digital currencies. All of this attention is being applied as the fear of rising interest rates in the marketplace is really beyond the control of central banks. It is true that central banks can control the short-term rates, but long-term rates are established by the free market. This is why the Federal Reserves was buying in 30-years bonds hopefully to impact the long-term rates which the Fed cannot directly control.

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