Bitcoin & "The Position of F$ck You"
The phrase is core to the subject of the article, critical to understanding Bitcoin, and is therefore not intended to be offensive or vulgar. I will nominally refer to the phrase hereinafter as “Phuk.U”.
If you haven’t heard of “The Position of Phuk.U” then queue up the movie The Gambler, or head on down to YouTube and hear it from the master, John Goodman. I also recommend the James Collins version. I probably don't need to warn you to turn your speaker volume down a few notches.
As the character so eloquently points out towards the end of his rant, the US has lost it’s way from the great Phuk.U position, lost forever. After 70 years, this drift has provided an opportunity for wildly foreign concepts such as Bitcoin to come into existence and flourish. Although Bitcoin’s introduction is shrouded in mystery, it couldn't have taken off without crippling a monetary system who's level of Phuk.U was so strong that it earned the US the right of passage of the world’s reserve currency. Ironically, those who have acquired Bitcoin early (and prospered) have done so mainly because they have found or are finding their way to Phuk.U. Let me explain with a little Phuk.U jab to Agile:
Phuk.Use Case 1 - The Bank Check
A young man has a $2,900 reimbursement check and doesn’t want to wait a few days for it to “clear” and goes into the issuing bank to cash it (a major US bank). He does not have an account there. The teller proclaims a stiff vig of $9 to the young man, and he grins with an affirmative nod as the teller goes back and forth to the manager, asks for the young man’s fingerprint on the check, then his driver’s license. Teller goes back and forth again, then asks him to finger print the other side of the check too. Then the manager steps up and asks him if he has a second form of identification. At this point he replies “Yes, I do, but give me my check back, I’m leaving”, and leaves. Since I know this young man, I can attest that he is well on his way to ascending to Phuk.U, and it's things like this Phuk.Use case that is responsible. If you think 2 fingerprints and 2 forms of ID are acceptable for any activity, then don't bother reading any further.
Phuk.Use Case 2 - The Bank Wire
I’m at my bank to make a (domestic) wire transfer to the Bitcoin store. We go through the paper work, the process took about 30 minutes. During the process she asks “what is the purpose of the wire?”. “A purchase”, I reply. She escalates it to a supervisor, who also asks “what is the purpose of the wire?”. “A purchase”, I reply. She escalates to her manager who again asks most inquisitively with a slanted eye “what is the purpose of the wire?”. “A purchase”, I reply. After much work, I completed my transaction but with more than 3 attempts to uncover the mystery of my personal business. As recently as 2017, banks were closing customer accounts who were doing business with Bitcoin exchanges. This was one of several such transactions at different institutions, so it wasn’t an isolated incident or institution.
Phuk.Use Case 3 - Bank Withdrawals
You can’t just go into a bank with a check for $100,000 and say “I’d like to cash this please”. Good luck with that. You will likely need to schedule an appointment a week or so in advance for the bank to make arrangements to ship enough cash for that specific transaction. If you are a real estate investor with judgments and tax liens against you, distrust banks, or just want to protect your privacy, this is probably familiar territory.
Phuk.Use Case 4 - Bank Monitors
All transactions in the US are reported to taxing and justice departments when their daily aggregate exceed $10,000, or if there is any reason to suspect anything nefarious. This because they need to protect us against terrorists, money launderers, and tax evaders. Keep tucked away in the back of your mind that “terrorism” was the opportunity used to apply this overreach. Learning this is where I first got the feeling that this currency doesn’t really belong to me and that I am being herded to “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s”.
Phuk.Use Case 5 - Venezuela, India, Argentina, Turkey, Iran, Cyprus, Greece, Rome** …
These and so many “emerging markets” are knocking on the door to ruin. It doesn’t really matter if currency is driven into the dirt by debasing it, or if games are used to remove denominations from circulation or devalued for trade purposes; the result is the same, the people are hurt. But wait, the people didn’t debase their currency, did they? When we demand “free stuff” who do you think pays for it? Even in extreme poverty, large sects of Venezuelans don’t realize that they did themselves in by pushing for socialism. Unfortunately, these countries didn’t have Bitcoin to empower its people, which could have negated their country’s currency games and failed policies that resulted in massive currency debasement.
Phuk.Use Case 6 - Wealth Transfer
Inflation is used as a means to steal your savings over time without you realizing it. It is this thing that enslaves us most. For instance, a home that was purchased in the S.F. Bay Area for $25,000 in 1970 now sells for nearly $1,500,000 and has doubled over 60 times (and in certain areas even more). Have wages increased 6000% since then? For those that think that's a good thing, it isn't; that's massive currency expansion. No longer can a family survive on a single wage earner as did in my childhood, which is one of the primary reasons for the destruction of the family, and key contributing factor to why our society has declined so these past 50 years.
Phuk.Use Case 7 - Omnipotent Power
The existence of central banks allow them to print as much as they want, when they want it, and that paper is used to empower agendas which don’t have your better interests in mind. It allows for the corruption of anything, and anyone. Don’t believe it? Professor of Economics at Michigan State University, Dr. Mark Skidmore, has documented that over $21 trillion dollars has been stolen from taxpayers between the years of 1998-2015, and that is over and above the $20 trillion US debt ceiling. This evidence was taken directly from the US DoD, HUD, and the OIG budget offices. A lot of “agenda” can be bought with that much of your wealth.
The Answer
This list of Phuk.Use Cases are endless but the key to each one is stopping the printing press; just turn off the spigot. And so Bitcoin was born -- a currency that can’t be printed from nothing, that costs something to mine, that can’t be taken away from the people. It doesn't require "money changers" so there is no bank to overreach, and it can't be taken away from you by government because its everywhere, and nowhere. It roots out the problem and is backed by Phuk.U. At it's core, Phuk.U is the antithesis of debt and enslavement.
Unstoppable
Pandora’s Box has already been opened, and it can’t be put back in; it’s the Internet all over again, just bigger. Massive amounts of capital have been invested in crypto by the very same tech companies in your stock portfolio. Infrastructure and apps are being built to support it, and think tanks are working on the hooks to pull you in, and nothing having to do with Phuk.U.
THIS is the gift of ascending to the level of Phuk.U and it is ours for the taking. Not interested? ****.U
About The Author
I am a software developer architect with over 25 years in the business. I discovered Bitcoin in 2014 and mocked it, only to rediscover it on my journey to Phuk.U. If you liked this article, you might also enjoy these:
Grasping Crypto Money from Real Money
Managing a Crypto Portfolio - With Safe(r) Crypto Best Practices
Ancient Greece and Rome**
What do ancient Greece and Rome have to do with socialism and currency debasement? You don’t have to be a learned historian to understand how we are doomed to repeat. Both Greece and Rome were driven to “grow” their civic dependency and used their wealth to perpetuate war and steal resources. Both nations debased their currency by using other base metals for its money; for instance the Roman Denarius was a around 2% silver at the end of their civilization, while being about 90% silver at the height of it’s civilization. The purchasing power of the US Dollar sits below 4% today (that's a decrease of 2500% of stuff that we could buy 100 years ago, hidden by inflation). At the end of the Roman empire, it used socialism and “free stuff” to pacify its citizens (the “mob”) until nothing was left, and the empire fell. Lather, rinse, repeat present day.
If you haven't figured out where we are located on this chart in relation to our debasement, look no further then the very bottom right =[
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