asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: "the bezzle."

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: just the fact that the fake money will eventually circulate. and the consequences, etc.

asciilifeform: jurov: when the U.S. dollar price of your lunch equals today's price of a used car.

asciilifeform: jurov: yes, but that's the barometer to watch.

asciilifeform: I predict that American hyperinflation will lead to counter-intuitively slow rises in the price of gold and BTC. From the fact that large gold/BTC holders stuck in America will be selling off their stashes to buy basic necessities.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re: 1820: agrarian America, most people did not depend on a working economy as such for physical survival. no comparison.

asciilifeform: when considering the purpose of the fake money printing, I can think of two distinct goals: (1) keep the spreadsheets from failing checksum (prop up the charade of an American "economy") and (2) keep the hookers, cocaine, jets, etc. flowing to the "nobility" despite their total economic/social irrelevance.

asciilifeform: So I won't be surprised when at some point the charade ends and the tinted window fellows will be handed actual titles of nobility.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: yes, but ultimately why.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: yes, they're just hungry and stupid.

asciilifeform: what I suspect is that at some point there will be a shift to a rather different, more Latin American social order, where the nobles are simply given bank cards with $ PosInfinity balance

asciilifeform: and dispense with the elaborate spreadsheet charade.

asciilifeform: but, at the moment, there is still an effort to keep up the pretense that there is an actual economy, where physical goods are produced, bought and sold at a profit, plebes are paid salaries from a fraction of the proceeds, etc.

asciilifeform: the next step is the slow outright Sovietization

asciilifeform: the permanently-unemployed say hello to the kolkhoz, and so on

asciilifeform: jurov: inertia.

asciilifeform: with the little twist that ultimately if you eat shit instead of food long enough, you die.

asciilifeform: jurov: re: gold: eventually the physical metals market will decouple from the idiot paper-metal chump harvester. That's when the confiscation gasenwagen revvs up.

asciilifeform: and not the wimpy FDR confiscation. the Soviet one. where possession of bullion carried the same penalty as murder.

asciilifeform: "economic terrorism."

asciilifeform: see: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2011/04/financial-totalitarianism.html

asciilifeform: jurov: slowly enough. the first step will be punitive taxation of metals (see the imminent U.S. national sales tax as a base to work from.)

asciilifeform: jurov: that's when the "Bitcoin as NSA honeypot" hypothesis will be tested until red-hot.

asciilifeform: but the fun might end rather abruptly (at least in the U.S.) when the rolling blackouts begin.

asciilifeform: think: lead (and, naturally brass) "bullion" instead of gold and silver. "The lead standard."

asciilifeform: jurov: the paper economy, yes. but people will still want to live, and will try.

asciilifeform: jurov: ask MP about his gold bus.

asciilifeform: so, GPG challenge/response at the gates?