By Breaking (Down) The Chain of the Bitcoin-Dollar Financial System: An Investigation Post-mortem
by Mark Goodwin | Unlimited Hangout
Months of research and 82,000 words later, The Chain series has concluded – at least in its current online form. What began as a simple investigation into the stablecoin issuer Tether quickly unraveled into a decades-long web of figures, companies, investors, and technological mechanisms that conspire to build what is referred to as “The Bitcoin-Dollar” system. This financial instrument consists of two main components; the first being Bitcoin itself, a distributed digital asset boasting deflationary monetary policy and trustless settlement on a transparent ledger; while the second is privately-issued tokenized government debt that operates on public blockchains, known as dollar stablecoins.
These two elements could not be further separated in regards to the publicly-stated ethos of their champions. Bitcoin will circumnavigate the government, and separate money from the State, while stablecoins aim to strengthen the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, provide much needed demand for government-issued debt reserves, and further perpetuate the U.S. dollar as the de facto medium of exchange to the unbanked citizens of the globe. At the surface, Bitcoin and the digital dollar appear as if oil and water, unable to co-exist in the same space, and molecularly opposed.
And yet, collectively, the dollar and Bitcoin are to form the backbone for an entirely new financial system, a yin and yang construction that allows an entirely new commodity class to co-exist with a hyper-dollarized world. It was my opinion before embarking on this research vein – see 2021’s The Birth of The Bitcoin-Dollar – that the coincidence of this structure emerging at the onset of the U.S. government’s greatest-yet threat of a debt crisis was likely not an accident. Upon further investigation of the primordial Bitcoin community, and the ensuing class of stablecoin issuers – not to mention the cross-section of these parties – I must unfortunately now conclude that the emergence of this system immediately after the 2008 financial crisis, and the subsequent phase-shifting adoption of Bitcoin by the institutional authors and beneficiaries of the pandemic’s financial stimulus, was the work of a modern intelligence community that has merged with the Silicon Valley technology meridian since at least the 1980s, but unabashedly since the formation of the CIA’s venture firm In-Q-Tel just before the turn of the millennium.
While not a popular opinion in many circles, the patterns are visible of the now-merged intelligence, organized crime, bankers, venture firms, and technologists within the story of The Chain, and thus the formative incubation of Bitcoin itself. Take for example, Brock Pierce, an early pioneer of virtual assets who worked with Goldman Sachs’ Steve Bannon and modern economists to trial monetary policy experiments in online video games, and whose fellow co-founders of the Digital Entertainment Network – Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley – were both found to be sexual criminals with large stashes of underage pornography. As an early Bitcoin evangelist with his hands in the venture pie of nearly every important exchange and software company within the early blockchain space, the former Disney star Pierce reeks of a private-sector, blackmailed agent of the currency speculator stalwarts that have run the public sector in the shadows. Pierce tellingly commented that “if the government were knocking off people in this field, I would know,” upon the drowning of stablecoin developer Nikolai Mushegian just days after Mushegian stated that the CIA, the Mossad, and the “pedo elite” were going to kill him.
Operation Underworld, one of the earliest unions between organized crime and the early U.S. intelligence apparatus (dominated by Wall Street bankers and lawyers), demonstrated the need for the intelligence state to partner with mob affiliates for better data on ports of the U.S.’ east coast during the second World War, and thus this merger – as outlined eloquently and prudently at the onset of Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail – perfectly exemplifies the reasoning for the mafia and the State to work together – networks, information, and money. In the 1940s, the networks were smaller and slower, the information lossy and hard to transmit, and the money was greenbacks – paper bills that, while serialized, were quite hard to track.
Interestingly enough, it was likely the emergence of more advanced surveillance techniques by the Treasury, the IRS, and their law enforcement partners, that led to the arrest of many figureheads of the 20th century crime syndicate. But these arrests did little to stop the flow of goods from drug runners, bootleggers, and human traffickers, among the many other trades of the blackmarket. In fact, it appears that the intelligence apparatus simply stepped into the void left from the controlled take down of the mob, leading to further consolidation within the centralization of the off-shore dollar market. Off-shore markets are essential to the modern intelligence state, which fights to service the budgets of its black-book operations using clever accounting schemes to launder payments, while also investing via private-brokers into private companies built to privatize projects that were once fully-siloed within the national security state’s jurisdiction.
Take, for example, Peter Thiel’s Palantir, a CIA-cut out that developed as the private-sector iteration of DARPA’s TIA, or Total Information Awareness, which was founded after advisement from the CIA’s Alan Wade and the architect of TIA, John Poindexter. Today, Palantir feeds off of billions in government contracts to satisfy the brokering of data needs of both the public and private sectors. Their first customer was the CIA, who also provided the seed money for the founding of the firm, and they were subsequently funded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. They even accept Bitcoin. But before Palantir was officially incorporated, it began as the anti-fraud algorithm at PayPal, known as “Igor.” PayPal’s first institutional investor was the California tech incubator Idealab, whose founder Bill Gross would later go on to start Near Intelligence Holdings, the “world’s largest source of intelligence on people, places and products.” Gross’ GoTo.com/Overture holds the patent that upholds Google’s AdWords – the backbone of Google’s monetization, which remains critical to the U.S. economy. Palantir itself holds 160 patents for their global surveillance network that all reference patents held by Gross. Read Full Article >
