The way gold is trading, it seems the financial system is failing. Might be smart to hold assets in self-custody, not in brokerage accounts.

Interesting.

Another (Thoughts!): The Profound Story of Gold and Oil

The inside story on the gold for oil deal that could rock the financial centers of the world.

The Great Taking will be used to usher in CBDCs + Digital ID

The Great Taking will be used to usher in CBDCs + Digital ID

A Great Taking–style event is the perfect “problem” that justifies CBDC + global Digital ID as the “solution” to their Debt/Liquidity con...

Governments love Gold-backed stablecoins (tokenized Gold)

Governments love Gold-backed stablecoins (tokenized Gold)

They are not “the solution”; they’re a bridge: from pure fiat → programmable fiat (CBDCs) with gold theater to keep the crowd calm and insi...

One thing that was interesting about this last Bitcoin cycle was that degens were almost never allowed to significantly lever up. Once levered longs started forming, they almost instantly got drop-kicked by 5 market makers. In previous bull runs, degens levering up caused the blow off tops. This is to be expected in the post-ETF era, but I didn't expect it to be as aggressive. Pre-ETF: 20–100× perps → vertical melt-ups → liquidation cascades. Post-ETF: basis carry (long ETF/spot, short futures) + dealer options + marginable ETF → bigger notional, lower directional beta. - Upside: capped by call walls / long-gamma dealers. - Downside: cushioned by basis unwind, dealer buying, AP/NAV arb. Probably also has to do with how CZ, Brian Armstrong and the other big boys are in bed with the government. Some of the big players might have been given the green light to stop-loss hunt more aggressively.

Since we can't make fun of gold anymore:

What are the odds that Jeffrey Epstein is sitting somewhere on an island enjoying all this attention he's been getting? Probably higher than the odds of him having killed himself.

The Bitcoin or Gold psyop is silly and the debaters on both sides are usually clueless. Why wouldn't you own both Bitcoin and Gold? They are both assets outside the system and have different advantages/disadvantages. To mention some of gold's advantages (because everyone here already knows about Bitcoin's advantages): (1) Physical gold has no public ledger. - No historical chain of custody anchored in a global database. - Evidence of holdings is fragmentary: vault records, invoices, eyewitnesses, maybe customs records. - Outside that, the state has suspicion, not a cryptographic audit trail. - The "omniscient ledger" simply doesn’t exist. (2) Harder to geofence at scale from a screen. - Once it is in your physical possession, there is no equivalent "app store ban" or "node-liability" lever that instantly makes it unusable for most people. (3) Gold has no "core devs", no client politics, no mempool policy. - "Protocol" = physics, metallurgy, and a scale. - There is no equivalent of a small GitHub group with agenda-setting power. - There is no "v30" for gold. No client upgrade that suddenly increases storage risk by 1200x. - Coordination burden is basically zero at the "how it works" layer. (4) No need to defend a node/mempool ecosystem. - No nodes. - No mempool. - No UTXO set to bloat. - You don't need an army of volunteer maintainers to keep "gold full nodes" defensible. - Less coordination tax, fewer sociotechnical attack surfaces. (5) Gold expropriation requires physical enforcement, not just data + policy. There is no universal gold UTXO set or "travel rule". Expropriation requires either: - Knowing where the gold is (vault, safe deposit box, storage facility). - Or house-by-house enforcement with massive manpower/legitimacy cost. In practice, enforcement tends to focus on: - Formal channels (vaults, dealers, banks). - Border crossings. - Declarations above thresholds. @Daedalus also opened my eyes to some very significant issues regarding Bitcoin hardware wallets. TL;DR - I'd imagine the government has access to the vast majority of seed phrases. From what I've researched, getting this risk to zero is extremely hard (if not impossible). It can be minimized with multi-sig, heterogeneous devices instead of trusting any single black box. Just one of the many issues are "secure" elements in which many wallets store the seed phrase. A secure element (SE) is: - Closed-source silicon + firmware - Designed and signed off by a tiny number of entities - Certified by processes you don't control (Common Criteria, labs, NDAs) - Distributed at scale into "secure" devices (wallets, phones, SIMs, payment cards) Secure elements are perfect for creating choke points where keys & identity cluster: - Centralized design - Long lifetimes - Hard to inspect physically - Wrapped in "security" narrative So if you assume a serious state-level adversary wants that lever and can get it sometimes, the right prior is: - "Treat any closed-source Secure Element as potentially backdoored if you're defending against a nation-state" That's not the same as "we know for a fact every Secure Element is backdoored". We don't. Lacking verifiable proof is exactly what makes this such an asymmetric control point. Dice-based seeds fix RNG trust, not key exfiltration. If a device ever sees the full seed, a malicious Secure Element/firmware can leak it later. The only real structural defense is collusion forcing: - Heterogeneous multi-sig (different vendors + DIY), - Multi-source entropy (XOR’d seeds), - Passphrases kept off the compromised device, - Independent stacks for different key shares. There is no neat solution that makes you "immune to NSA". The best you can do is: - Make mass, silent theft via one corporate/vended rail impossible, - Force any serious adversary into messy, noisy, manual operations if they want you specifically. A state-level actor can plausibly: - backdoor RNG/nonces, - exfil keys via signatures, - coerce vendor into "minor tweaks", - intercept shipping, - or just use host+legal leverage. (6) Gold doesn't need electricity, internet, DNS, app stores, or routers. - You can transact in a blackout. - You can pay a smuggler without any digital evidence. - You don't care about packet filtering or "crypto port" throttling. There are many more examples of where Gold has an advantage over Bitcoin. And of course, Bitcoin has many advantages over gold (teleportability, shock convexity in a specific Great Taking scenario, programmability for complex, conditional arrangements, granularity in price discovery, verifiability, etc.). That's the point, gold vs bitcoin is a stupid debate. BTC sovereignty is mathematically elegant but socially expensive and perimeter-fragile. Gold sovereignty is technologically dumb but perimeter-resilient and legally fuzzier. Both are useful, but for different failure modes of the system. The same exercise can be repeated for Bitcoin and Monero. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

I recently had to increase my odds of a Great Taking (mass expropriation) event happening in the near future. One of the reasons is that consent has been massively deteriorating (which is mostly a good thing) and I think they'll use a Great Taking type event to usher in the CBDC + Digital ID era. More and more people understand how the game is played and you can see Central Banks becoming more and more cornered and hiring more "credible" actors. It's like when one of these scammers on the street (with the cups) gets exposed, they can't run the same scam in front of the same people anymore. If the Controllers rob everyone in an artificial financial system collapse, a massive cyber attack, or w/e mass crisis they pick, people won't have much of a choice but to accept their CBDC + Digital ID. This guy is the founder of Interactive Brokers and basically explains how most people lose everything in a Great Taking. I remember watching this clip a few years ago and I went to check the comments and I didn't find anyone who even reacted to what he said. Blows my fucking mind 😂. This is the owner of Interactive Brokers (almost a trillion USD under management). And of course, you also have the 2016 predictions for 2030 of the World Economic Forum with their 1st prediction of "In 2030, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy". You also have UN's agenda 2030 which is basically the same thing. To give you 1 more data point: Using Federal Reserve distribution data summarized by multiple outlets: - The top 1% by wealth hold roughly 40–45% of all U.S. corporate equities and mutual fund shares. - The top 10% hold something like 80–90%+ of all equities; one analysis of Fed data has top 10% at ~90%+ of stock and mutual-fund wealth, bottom 50% at ~1%. You don't have to rug very many people to actually execute the "Great Reset". It can easily be sold as: "protecting the many from the excesses of the few". Of course, the few will quietly be robbed via inflation, forced conversions, and taxes. You probably have noticed the push toward socialism especially with this Mandani actor (redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor to reduce "inequality"). By 2030, they want to equalize us. For more context on the Great Taking, watch David Rogers Webb's documentary:

Odysee

The Great Taking by David Rogers Webb

The Great Taking: https://TheGreatTaking.com

Politics is completely fake and the easiest way to figure out that someone is mentally disabled is when they say they are a republican or a democrat. The republicrats and the demopublicans are equally bad and equally fake. The people you see on TV are actors. They are not the ones making the important decisions. They are the ones who sell you decisions that have already been made. And because this is a midterm year in the US, you often hear: "Trump has to juice markets to win the midterm elections." And because politics is fake, this of course is completely incorrect. In fact, Trump wants to lose House seats. In midterm years, historically, the president's party usually loses House seats and often loses control of at least one chamber. And this is useful to the system (the bosses of these actors) for multiple reasons, but I'll give you the main one. It is a blame machine & excuse generator. If the president's party keeps a big majority: - They "own" everything. - They have no one to blame when they don't deliver what the base wants (and what they've promised). - The gap between promises vs outcomes becomes too obvious. Even the biggest dummies eventually figure out that the game is rigged. When they lose seats and often lose one chamber: They can say: - "We wanted to do X, but the other side blocked us." - "We're constrained by a divided Congress." The opposition gets partial ownership of austerity, rate hikes, and "discipline". So the regime gets: - A durable excuse for why deep structural things never change. - A way to redirect anger horizontally (left vs right) instead of vertically (people vs system). Midterm losses create narrative cover. It's all fake.

How Central Banks deliberately cause crises and inflation In this article, I've exposed the entire game of Central Banking. How they under-inject liquidity by however much they want, whenever they want, to rug-pull whoever they want and bail out whoever they want.

How Central Banks deliberately cause crises and inflation

Central Banks under-inject liquidity by however much they want, whenever they want, to rug-pull whoever they want and bail out whoever they want.

One thing that has been disappointing is watching how Bitcoiners react to endorsements from demons such as Larry Fink, Kevin Warsh, Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump, Scott Bessent, etc. When Kevin Warsh says "Bitcoin does not make me nervous", and that Bitcoin is not a replacement for the dollar, he really means: "Bitcoin is completely captured" and he is correct. Would Kevin Warsh and Scott Bessent say stuff like that if Bitcoin had stealth receive addresses (no address reuse) and sender-receiver coinjoin by default, and if small Bitcoin communities started popping up everywhere and abandoned the dollar? Privacy as a default (no special mode) lowers legal/UX risk for small commerce and defeats trivial chain surveillance that scares merchants. Privacy must be boring and automatic. We see clips of Bitcoiners begging Trump for tax exemption on small payments and the only way we're going to get a tax exemption is by strengthening privacy. Even if they allow for de-minimis tax, it will only be through their captured, full KYC custodians like Square. You probably won't see these demons endorse Monero. And to understand what I mean, you have to look at the Amish who mostly live outside the system. They sell/trade raw milk, honey, meat, fruits, vegetables without pesticides and antibiotics and federal agencies constantly fuck with them "for your safety" (especially the ones who manage to scale). The solutions won't come from the system, the only viable solution is for people to coordinate and stop playing a game they can never win. Are we going to be the retards who HODL themselves into the upcoming AI governance, digital ID, CBDC era from which there is no return for the masses? It certainly looks that way.

Listened to this David Icke interview yesterday (

Bitchute

The ENDGAME Is Unfolding NOW — The SYSTEMS Can’t Hold Much Longer | David Icke

In this wide-ranging podcast, Emilio Ortiz interviews David Icke to explore the deeper patterns shaping human perception, collective behavior, and ...

) and what he said hit hard: "When you open to consciousness beyond the program - what you tend to do is what you think is right. You don't go through this mental gymnastics of "what will people think of me, or say about me, or do about me if I say this", you say and do what you feel is right and you don't make a list of all the consequences of what you believe to be right, you just do it. If you start a list of all the consequences in this world of many things that people do that are necessary to do, you'll reach a point in the list where you'll say: "OK, I'd like to do it, I'd like to do what I know to be right but not that badly.", but if you really mean it then you just do it and whatever consequences come come, because in the end I'm out of here and I'll still be all that is, and that has been, and ever can be. I can handle that."

The system doesn't need you to love it; it needs you to need it.

Quantum computing, like most things coming out of the government, seems like a complete scam. -

Quantum computers still can

: Computer scientist Peter Gutmann tells The Reg why it's 'bollocks'

- https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf However, Covid also was a complete scam (viruses have never been isolated and don't exist - https://rumble.com/v6rh2e3-there-was-no-covid-virus-how-weve-all-been-duped-by-the-medical-establishme.html ) and it was still used throughout the entire world to further the agenda of the Controllers. As I've shown in these 2 articles, this is also going to be the case for "Quantum Computing": -

Is Quantum Computing a threat to Bitcoin (my take)

Quantum Computing will have a serious impact on Bitcoin even if large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing is impossible (is not cost-effective ...

-

A Quantum-resistance upgrade would be terrible for Bitcoin

A serious quantum-resistance upgrade for Bitcoin would be one of the most complex, politically loaded, and coordination-fragile events in its history.

"Adversarial" countries like US, China, Russia, the EU, UK, Canada are all investing massive amounts of money into quantum computing. And you'll see that most of their "scientists" who work on quantum computing previously worked on nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons don't exist as there is 0 evidence that an atom has ever been split ( ) - so they went from one scam to another. We literally live under a one world government. I'm not trying to fud. Obviously I don't know when they'll decide to pull out the quantum scam, but it's a matter of when, not if. As I cover in this article, a quantum-resistance "upgrade" would be terrible for Bitcoin (and Monero). -

A Quantum-resistance upgrade would be terrible for Bitcoin

A serious quantum-resistance upgrade for Bitcoin would be one of the most complex, politically loaded, and coordination-fragile events in its history.

I have a bad feeling that because it is a more technical topic, we might get a covid-type reaction from the community once the government-funded scientists come out with a paper how quantum computing is going to hack everything in X years. I hope I'm wrong. When I see videos like this 1 from Bitcoin core devs, I kind of lose faith. Obviously, Core is completely captured, but most people will still upgrade to whatever bullshit upgrade Core pushes on auto-pilot. "I believe that privacy is a right and encryption is not a crime. That said, I’m reticent to recommend either Zcash or Monero because they both use elliptic curve cryptography which is vulnerable to quantum computing" There is 0 evidence that Quantum can be engineered to scale cheaply and reliably enough to be broadly useful and this guy is just waiting to get told by NIST (the government) what post-quantum algorithm to migrate to and literally murder the network as MoE.

A Quantum-resistance upgrade would be terrible for Bitcoin

A Quantum-resistance upgrade would be terrible for Bitcoin

A serious quantum-resistance upgrade for Bitcoin would be one of the most complex, politically loaded, and coordination-fragile events in its history.

What are the best "Great Taking" (expropriation) hedges

What are the best "Great Taking" (expropriation) hedges

Anything inside the custody/tiering chain (bank deposits, brokerage assets, CSD-registered securities, pooled gold, mortgages, money funds) is clai...

It is crazy to think that an inflation hedge doesn't exist and cannot exist as the system is designed. By hedging inflation, I don't mean hedging CPI in the official narrative sense, but hedging something closer to: True Cost-of-Living inflation (TCLI): - Housing (owner-equivalent or rent), - Food/energy, - Health/education, - Tax drag & bracket creep, - Plus "mandatory" subscription/rail rents (connectivity, ID, cloud, payments). A universal clean hedge would be a widely available, legally favored asset that: - earns TCLI-tracked return + spread, - can't be haircut or taxed ad hoc, - is safe from FX/capital controls, - is open to the median saver. If that existed: - They couldn't use financial repression to shrink real debt. - Every crisis would require overt default, explicit austerity, or explicit wealth taxes. - Political and legitimacy cost would explode. Therefore, any candidate that approaches this holy grail will: - be taxed, - regulated, - capped in size, - or confined to insiders. That's why: - Real estate gets property tax, zoning, and mortgage dependence. - Gold gets paperization, FX/capital controls and demonization in crises. - Bitcoin gets paperization, KYC moats, surveillance, and MoE friction. Outrunning real inflation is supposed to require speculation, timing and path risk. The system's design enforces it. In other words, inflation hedge is "to what extent does this asset": - participate in inflated nominal flows, - resist being harvested by repression, - survive the policy responses, - and stay convertible into real resources? So a clean, zero-risk, everyone-can-use-it hedge is structurally impossible. As soon as something approaches that, it gets co-opted, taxed, capped, paperized, or regulated into compliance.

Once you start to research the financial system, it really humbles you. You have to start questioning everything you think you know. The official narrative story often diverges from reality. For example, the real cycle is Debt/Liquidity, not Debt/GDP. Almost every "crisis" is: not enough liquidity, at the right points in the plumbing, to roll the existing debt at a politically tolerable price. - "Too much liquidity vs debt" → bubbles. - "Too much debt vs liquidity" → refinancing crisis. In other words, they inflate the currency at will and rug-pull at will. Richard Werner did a good job of illustrating this with his book and documentary "Princes of the Yen" (

Odysee

Princes of the Yen - The Hidden Power of Central Banks_fixed 2014

View on Odysee: Princes of the Yen - The Hidden Power of Central Banks_fixed 2014

), where he documents how the banking cartel allowed Japanese, South Koreans, etc, to lever up with credit (caused inflation), then intentionally pulled liquidity and rug-pulled everyone into a depression. Think of the global system as a giant refinancing conveyor belt: - The belt carries maturing obligations (bonds, loans, repos, margin). - The operators can spray liquidity foam (reserves, facilities, swap lines, fiscal deficits, regulatory relief) to keep things rolling. - If they over-spray, everything slides too easily → bubbles. - If they under-spray, some pile of debt sticks, catches fire, and they have to choose who burns. Debt/Liquidity = how well that belt runs at any given time. Debt/GDP is the fake, official narrative story (it is stock vs flow), whereas Debt/Liquidity is about timing and plumbing. Every financial crisis is basically a roll failure (not enough liquidity to roll the existing debt at tolerable prices). They can under-inject liquidity by however much they want, whenever they want, to rug-pull whoever they want and bail out whoever they want. Each Debt/Liquidity cycle is another Hegelian loop: - Problem: refi wall + under-injection of liquidity → crisis. - Reaction: fear, political pressure. - Solution: more centralized rails (CBDCs, ID, Palantir-style governance OS, tighter collateral rules). We're basically playing a game we can't win and have been for a very long time. If you think in Debt/Liquidity terms, "macro" stops being a blur and becomes a timing overlay on top of a very stable structural direction: more debt, more crises, more patches, more rails. Michael Howell does a good job of illustrating the Debt/Liquidity relationship with this chart. - "Too much liquidity vs debt" → bubbles. - "Too much debt vs liquidity" → refinancing crisis.

At this point, everyone knows about CBDCs (programmable money) which are basically already here via stablecoins. However, not many people talk about tokenization. This video on the Great Taking by David Rogers Webb is a must watch: -

Odysee

The Great Taking by David Rogers Webb

The Great Taking: https://TheGreatTaking.com

Tokenization is very similar to CBDCs and stablecoins. You can treat tokenization as: turning everything important into machine-readable, permissioned, and programmable state. It's not about "democratizing finance". From the Controllers' perspective tokenization is: - "Put all economically and politically relevant claims into a standardized, queryable, enforceable substrate that my AI and rules engines can see and control in real time." That means: - Every claim (cash, bond, equity, fund share, real estate interest, invoice, carbon credit, benefit entitlement, even identity attribute) Has: - a unique ID - a traceable history - an attached policy envelope (who can hold it, where, when, under what rules) - and lives on a ledger that some small set of institutions can gate, pause, or rewrite under color of law. Once that's true, everything else (UX, DeFi theater, "24/7 markets") is just skin. If you wanted the option of a Great Taking (even as a tail): - You'd want everything that matters dematerialized, held by intermediaries, and expressed as tokens on systems controlled by a small institutional set. You'd want clear legal language that: - distinguishes between beneficial and legal ownership, and - puts token-holders behind secured creditors and CCPs (central counterparties). You'd want resolution / bail-in logic encoded in contracts and, over time, in token standards. Tokenization = the technical implementation layer that makes a Great Taking operationally feasible in days, not years. Even if they never push the red button, the option value is enormous from a Controller perspective. You can think of tokenization as: - State capacity up, latency down. They can see more, faster, and push changes directly through code. - Expropriation gets smoother. Instead of chaotic bank runs and court fights, you get parameter changes on tokens. - Going off-grid gets harder. You don't just opt out of banks; you opt out of the graph where ownership lives. - Plausible deniability increases. They can say "the smart contract did it" or "it's in the prospectus" instead of "we ordered a seizure". Tokenization is basically the bridge that makes a "Great Taking" technically trivial if they ever need it. Whether they press that button is a separate probability question — but the incentives to build the option are very clear. If you look into Ethereum, it is evolving into the programmable sandbox for dollar/compliance rails: - Governance testbed for next-gen money/IDs - Volatility sink for speculative energy - Prototype control rail for tokenization / programmable finance - Moral placebo ("bankless", "decentralized") for the ideologically restless Ethereum is like the R&D lab + casino + early beta for future regulated rails. They use Ethereum as a test environment and build their own prod networks separately - e.g. Canton which recently partnered with DTCC, JP Morgan, etc.