The Golden Sultanate Under-The-Mattress and Crypto Anti-Measures
The Turkish government has launched a campaign to solicit people to hand over their under-the-mattress gold and deposit it into the financial system, in a helpless effort to boost the recently distressed domestic currency, the Turkish Lira.
The “under-the-mattress” term refers to a long-held tradition in Turkey of turning to gold to safeguard wealth and storing it at home.
With this scheme, presumably part of the $250 billion-$350 billion worth of gold held by Turkish households would find its way into the domestic saving system.
Regardless, rating agency Fitch says Erdogan’s flagship savings scheme will not ‘sustainably ease’ macroeconomic and financial stability risks
Fitch downgraded Turkey’s sovereign debt and issued a scathing verdict on president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plan to tackle soaring inflation.
The international rating agency pushed the long-term debt rating deeper into junk territory, lowering it from BB- to B+ — putting G20 country on a par with Benin, Egypt, Turkmenistan, Rwanda and Kenya.
Turkey’s gold imports soared by 100 percent last year, reaching $26.6bn in 2020
But what if hypothetically Erdogan changes the approach, adjusting this from at a voluntary basis to threatening people with hefty fines for hoarding gold reserves under-the-mattresses, sequestering the gold altogether with no chance of appeal?
I mean, this is not like something out of this world considering that the Erdogan’s Sultanate has declared a new marshal law, called Article 299, might as well just declare a new Article 300:
Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code deems it illegal to “Insult the President of Turkey”. A person who is sentenced for a violation of this article can be sentenced to a prison term between one and four years and if the violation was made in public the verdict can be elevated by a sixth.
Turkish officials have opened thousands of investigations into alleged insults since Erdogan became president in 2014.The latest high-profile case involves a former Olympic swimmer who posted a comment on social media.
Nobody is safe these days: Politicians, artists, scientists, schoolchildren, housewives, street vendors or journalists.
Den of Thieves
Despite this misappropriation of gold’s sovereignty by government for its own self-seeking purposes, fiat currency is no longer anchored to gold, making it highly reproducible at near-zero cost. Indeed, fiat currency is the softest form of money in history; it can (and in virtually all cases does) suffer from counterparty risks such as censorship, deauthorization, or hyperinflation. Hard money is anchored in the reality of time to secure the time savings of its holders; fiat currency is a political tool that facilitates the institutionalized system of time-theft known as “expansionary monetary policy” perpetrated by central banks globally.
Although governments legally compel us to use fiat currencies today, these rules are only enforceable due to their vampirism — the sucking of sovereignty out of gold holdings. Ironically, this stolen power is used to monopolize violence and silence dissent. Government sovereignty, then, is derived from the agglomerated self-sovereignty of its gold hoards; which, in combination with the anticompetitive artifices it erects (legal tender laws, capital controls, capital gains taxes, etc.) in the sphere of money, explains why gold has been confiscated and its private ownership outlawed repeatedly throughout history:
There is only one reason for such confiscatory acts: governments grasping for more power; a means to usurp gold’s self-sovereignty, an embezzlement of power which itself originates in the actions of free people selecting a monetary technology in the marketplace; a tragedy at the heart of all modern economies. As the axiom says: “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.”:
How can people take measures and prepare themselves against “freedom thieves” ?
Enter Crypto
There is a distinct correlation between the surge of gold imports and purchase of cryptocurrencies.
The popularity of bitcoin has soared in countries with volatile currencies and high inflation. Turkey has the highest crypto transaction volumes in the Middle East, where volumes expanded 1,500 per cent last year compared with 2020.
This is a reoccurring pattern that happens on countries that suffer geo economic instability, financial distress imposed by authoritarian -technocratic regimes, worth mentioning just a few examples:
Lebanon, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, China etc.
Notice any similarities?!
All shit show’s of regimes, with no regard to civil liberties, human rights, individual wealth and economic freedom.
Peer-to-Peer monetary/value systems can’t co-exist for long alongside government issued currencies, analog or digital ones specially in authoritarian regimes.
What does this mean for the world as we know it, the future of money, socioeconomic systems and the simple understanding of what Bitcoin really is.
Bitcoin as much as we like it is not simply a currency, neither an asset nor the new digital gold.
Bitcoin on it’s s purest state is much more.
Bitcoin is a democratic instrument that gives everyone the means to defend themselves, be it against censorship, suit’s at big banks, politicians and even dictatorship’s.
Bitcoin is freedom
A leaderless civilization is, for the first time, possible with Bitcoin. As a means of preserving wealth through political sea-changes by perfecting our private property rights in money, Bitcoin gives the world great hope for renewing virtuosity. Perfected private property rights are prerequisite to the proper placement of freedom, growth, and responsibility in our social hierarchy of values.
Saving in honest money is the only way to restore hope for a fallen world.
Through Bitcoin, we can rediscover the value of unencumbered entrepreneurship — the idyllic principle underlying Western Civilization.
Saving in honest money takes the intellectual, political, and philosophical wind out of the sails of dishonest money, letting us right the “socioeconomic ship” once and for all. In its ascent, Bitcoin promises to decapitalize the overly complex (by design) monetary, legal, and tax authorities encumbering entrepreneurial skill-building expeditions today. By defraying frictions to free trade, Bitcoin gives the world hope for a future characterized by true freedom.
Hope is the wind which moves us forward. Fiat currency is a false tempest: a destructive windstorm tragically affecting our civilization. By saving in Bitcoin we raise our sails steadfastly as entrepreneurs racing toward sunnier skies.
Bitcoin is Hope
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