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RE: Another Billionaire Warns of Catastrophic Depths Not Seen in 5,000 Years - and Emphasizes Gold
If the internet ever crashes, crypto-currency is fucked... I think we need to get a good balance of money, crypto currency, and something with value (like gold). And maybe we'll move past any currency one day...
The internet will never crash. Isolated, centralised networks crash. Distributed networks, they don't crash. Sometimes they may fragment for a while if a major backbone goes out, but they won't go out all at once. All the undersea cables are optical. Most of the land based backbones are now optical. We aren't in the doom of the solar flare situation of the internet anymore.
Even if half the world's mains power distribution networks went out, it isn't going to affect everyone all at once, and the providers will be rolling out their backup systems within a day if not sooner.
The solar EMP scenario is less likely than ever. We are well past the most recent solar maxima and though certain politicians are talking up nuclear war nonsense, I think that with the youtube addicts out of supply the pitchforks and flaming torches would see an end to such nonsense pretty fast.
And 'move past currency'? Do you understand what a currency even is? There has never been such a globally connected currency system ever. Most banks are laying billions into moving to distributed systems because of precisely the reasons I mention. The USA is becoming a major liability for the rest of the world. Their power system, it really could go all the way out, for days, maybe even as long as a week. If Yellowstone blew up, and it could, that would be pretty serious, and there is no other place in the world where a volcano could cause so much damage, the biggest one is in the USA. The banks are sick of being held hostage by the payment processing networks in the USA, and I think the 'USA going bananas' is one of the reasons why everyone wants to stop being dependent on them.
Even if somehow, the global banking cartel centered in New York and London were to have their way, and dominate the global money market, it would not last. For all the same reasons. Brittle, centralised, top down networks are unstable. China and Russia's economies have bounced back and are mitigating their problems caused by the bureaucratic infrastructure because they are decentralising, building more horizontal connections between each other.
No, currency is never going away. And a globally connected, failure resistant, distributed crypto currency system, such as is growing now at an ever increasing rate, will connect markets better than they ever have been connected.
Markets can have big nasty burps, now and then, but the problem usually arises because of one centralised network system going down. This has always been true, going all the way back to before the Roman Empire. It's the same reason why there will not be 'Only One Cryptocurrency System'. The same horizontal connectivity issue, the same network redundancy and failure resistance. If bitcoin's code were to be broken, it could take it out for a few days. But people would have backups in other currencies.
Economic doomsday is now less likely than ever because of cryptos. Gold cannot travel around the world at the speed of light, across hundreds of parallel links, undersea cables, satellite links. Crypto networks don't use that much bandwidth. It would take such a percentage of them going down all at once for there to be more than a minor panic.
I remember MtGox. I remember Bitfinex. I don't think anyone wants these things to happen again.