There is a lot of drama surrounding Elon Musk “betrayl” of the bitcoin coin comunity, and the dream of non-government descentralized payment, denoucing bitcoin network as a major contributor to polution and causing a crash in Bitcoin value with the corresponding loss of money for hundreds of thousand.
The question is not really about if Musk is right or wrong, but whether he is just an actor in a wider play which had an ultimate goal: Government issued electronic Cash. Please put on your tinfoil hat, we are going Alex Jones on this one.
The advantage of an Electronic Cash would that it would provide ledger of all your financial transactions in one place, either by mandating that you hold only one e-Cash address or that all e-Cash address have to be tied to your Biometric ID, this opens a lot of possibilities if it is tied to your medical history, your political history (voting record and porty filiation, social media posts).
In a more pratical sense this opens a whole new world of social control, for exemple for persecuting political opens by restricting their ability to transact or exposing their purchases of fury porn. Imagine how much effective would be the Obama Campaign, the Arab Spring or Cambridge Analitica if you could have access in real time to information that could indicate people reaction to your campaign ? Are people donating, buying campaign equipment, bying food to hunker down or weapons to fight the cops ? Feed this information into a Powerfull enough Super-Computer running an advanced AI and you might get a ” Social Control Simulator ” to test your political schemes.
In a more theoretical sense the availability of the lifetime financial information of people, in minute details and in a readily available electronic, combined with non-economic data that provide proxy of emotional state that influence economic decisions (social media posts, youtube playlists), if they are tied to biometric ID in order to fight online political extremism, if plugged in a Powerfull enough Super-Computer running an advanced AI, would open the possibility of cutting the Gordian Knot of a True Planned Economies theories: The impossibility of Economic Calculation.
Even if both possible uses of e-Cash, Social Control Simulator and True Planned Economy, Governments and privates groups my still try to attain them, because it would provide them, if sucessfully, a an exponential degree of control over human civilization akin to gods.
So how does Elon Musk and bitcoin fit in ? Lets call it the Baitcoin strategy.
The purpose of Bitcoin two fold: Popularize the idea of an electronic payment sistem for the masses that is promoted by the masses, thus avoiding popular pushback against government overeach, while at the same showing its shortcomings by poor design on purpose: high energy consumptions due to hash requirements, transaction ledger in the open with no privacy, fake decentralization, and slow transaction time.
Then enter Elon Musk, transformed into the Geek Bilionaire Hero to keep the masses dreaming, to be the firm mainstream adopted of Bitcoin, by alleging that Telsa would accept bitcoins, before “changing his mind” then pointing out all the defects of bitcoin, before finally calling in for government regulation to remove to transform it into e-Cash by removing the encryption, since it is expensive in energy consumption, and having “publish hash banks” to avoid hijacking of the network.
This was writen in 19 May 2021, if I am wrong I lost nothing. If I am right, then the Baitcoin work and we lost our freedom.
Update 31 December 2022
The collapse of FTX, part of a wider crypto collapse that has yet to play-out, is raising calls for government regulation of crypto currency, thus implicitly accepting the technology in the mainstream under condition of it being under government control, and has discredited the idea of descentralized crypto-currency, thus proving the bait-coin hypothesis, especially when there is some evidence of predictive programming.
The majority of the biggest world economies are planning a Government Backed digital currency, while smaller projects based on decentralized options like São Salvador have failed so far:
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