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Stuff like this is actually why I have adopted Cargo Cult Economy as a way to describe Bitcoin.
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"To understand the phenomena surrounding the illustrious Bitcoin, one has to first understand the original cargo cults that sprang up in post-WWII Melanesia and similar Pacific islands. Essentially, Japanese and Allied soldiers were stationed on the island, bringing with them all manner of supplies, from food to clothes to vehicles and more, and shared a bit of these with the native islanders, who, due to a lack of missionaries present in a warzone, weren’t informed of the reason behind this sudden flurry of wealth.
After the war ended and forces withdrew, cults developed on the islands; leaders promised their followers a return of the wealth and benefactors. People imitated the now-gone soldiers in dress and behavior, and constructed elaborate life-size replicas of things such as planes, Jeeps, air traffic control towers, runways, and more. It was believed that these items and mimicking the troops’ drills and behavior would bring back the planes and materiel, and that the various forces who were stationed on the islands were related to either deities or ancestors, and used this power to bring great wealth.
Bitcoin operates in a similar fashion. Take, for example, institutions like the NYSE, NASDAQ, IPOs, and large banks. Buttcoiners see these systems and want their toy 'currency' to function the same way, so they imitate these major economic forces in the most hilarious, ridiculous, and drama-filled ways possible. They see CEOs and CFOs and other C-level execs, and want to play businessman with their Internet money.
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They’ll imitate and mimic these things, acting like they have companies and stocks, trading imaginary shares and abbreviating Bitcoin as “BTC.” One of them, now long branded with the scarlet letter “SCAMMER,” even set up a credit rating service, imitating S&P, and handing out ratings that resembled eBay feedback more than it did actual credit ratings. Bitcoiners essentially build replica airplanes and runways, hoping desperately to have their scrip recognized by the rest of the world that already has banking, stocks, and various other financial systems.
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The Global Bitcoin Stock Exchange was allegedly the first Bitcoin “securities exchange,” where buttcoiners would trade “shares” in their “companies” with each other, making “IPOs” for their mining pools, buttcoin casinos, and various other Bitcoin disasters. This, of course, was plagued with issues, the most prevalent and destructive being the “Pirate Pass Through,” which was a Ponzi scheme stacked on top of another Ponzi scheme and ended up collapsing a great many of these fake companies.
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he repeats the right magic words: options, futures, stocks, bonds, and funds, and people inexplicably flock to his site and do “business,” passing meaningless numbers back and forth in a misguided attempt to make the numbers bigger and screw other users in the process.
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In the “business” side of things, we have the ironic mining pools, in which Bitcoiners band together to create large, centralized operations to help generate and manage financial transactions… Moving on, these are prone to failure as well, especially the ones that like to advertise themselves as having stocks, IPOs, and other Wall Street-speak in an attempt to appear legitimate. Often they all “invest” in each other, leading to a string of “debts” that never get repaid. Ultimately this is all pointless, as again they’re repeating magic words back and forth: securities, stocks, bids, investments, shares, escrow, profit. None of it actually does anything, none of it goes anywhere, they’re trading chits because that’s what they’ve seen the real investors do."
And now, the Unregulated Currency, like a retelling of why our financial systems are regulated today playing itself out in fast forward, follows in the footsteps of those before it.