{"id":180997,"date":"2024-12-06T23:46:36","date_gmt":"2024-12-06T23:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/?p=180997"},"modified":"2024-12-06T23:46:36","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T23:46:36","slug":"the-chain-revealed-how-intelligence-agencies-and-tech-giants-are-shaping-the-digital-financial-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/the-chain-revealed-how-intelligence-agencies-and-tech-giants-are-shaping-the-digital-financial-age\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Chain\u201d revealed: How intelligence agencies and tech giants are shaping the digital financial age"},"content":{"rendered":"

A brief analysis of the series \u201cThe Chain\u201d, a deep dive into the creation of the Bitcoin-Dollar system, naming the names and explaining the technology that sustains the upcoming deflationary and highly monitored digital financial system<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Months of research and 82,000 words later, The Chain<\/em> series has concluded \u2013 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 \u201cThe Bitcoin-Dollar<\/em>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s reserve currency, provide much needed demand for government-issued debt reserves, and further perpetuate the U.S. dollar as the de facto<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

And yet, collectively, the dollar and Bitcoin are to form the backbone for an entirely new financial system, a complementary 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 \u2013 see 2021\u2019s The Birth of The Bitcoin-Dollar<\/em> \u2013 that the coincidence of this structure emerging at the onset of the U.S. government\u2019s greatest-yet threat of a debt crisis was likely not an accident.<\/p>\n

Upon further investigation of the primordial Bitcoin community, and the ensuing class of stablecoin issuers \u2013 not to mention the cross-section of these parties \u2013 I need to, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s venture firm In-Q-Tel just before the turn of the millennium.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, and thus the formative incubation of Bitcoin itself. Take for example, Brock Pierce, an early pioneer of virtual assets who worked with Goldman Sachs\u2019 Steve Bannon and modern economists to trial monetary policy experiments in online video games, and whose fellow co-founders of the Digital Entertainment Network \u2013 Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley \u2013 were both found to be sexual criminals with large stashes of underage pornography.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cif the government were knocking off people in this field, I would know<\/em>,\u201d upon the drowning of stablecoin developer Nikolai Mushegian just days after Mushegian stated that the CIA, the Mossad, and the \u201cpedo elite\u201d were going to kill him.<\/p>\n

Operation Underworld<\/em>, 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.\u2019 east coast during the second World War, and thus this merger \u2013 as outlined eloquently and prudently at the onset of Whitney Webb\u2019s One Nation Under Blackmail<\/em> \u2013 perfectly exemplifies the reasoning for the mafia and the State to work together \u2013 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 \u2013 paper bills that, while serialized, were quite hard to track.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

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Take, for example, Peter Thiel\u2019s Palantir, a CIA-cut out that developed as the private-sector iteration of DARPA\u2019s TIA, or Total Information Awareness, which was founded after advisement from the CIA\u2019s 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\u2019s In-Q-Tel. They even accept Bitcoin.<\/p>\n

But before Palantir was officially incorporated, it began as the anti-fraud algorithm at PayPal, known as \u201cIgor.\u201d PayPal\u2019s first institutional investor was the California tech incubator Idealab, whose founder Bill Gross would later go on to start Near Intelligence Holdings, the \u201cworld\u2019s largest source of intelligence on people, places and products<\/em>.\u201d Gross\u2019 GoTo.com\/Overture holds the patent that upholds Google\u2019s AdWords \u2013 the backbone of Google\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Even PayPal\u2019s first board member Scott Banister was a Vice President at Gross\u2019 Idealab, who lent his Palo Alto couch to PayPal\u2019s cryptographer and CTO Max Levchin the week he first met Peter Thiel. The aforementioned Brock Pierce ran the Clearstone Global Gaming Fund formed out of the Idealab facility Clearstone Ventures, which was co-founded by Bill Elkus, a trustee of Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s J. Epstein Foundation.<\/p>\n

Steve Bannon, Pierce\u2019s \u201cright hand man,\u201d filmed Epstein for 15 hours as part of a failed effort to rebrand Epstein after arrests for sex crimes, and Howard Lutnick \u2013 the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald which holds the Treasuries backing Tether\u2019s USDT stablecoin \u2013 bought the home neighboring Epstein\u2019s own (which was previously owned by Epstein) for \u201c$10 and other valuable consideration<\/em>.\u201d Lutnick, the current co-chair of Trump\u2019s transition team, also sits on the board of the Tether-funded, Earth observation satellite firm Satellogic alongside former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, which aims to provide anyone with the funds to gather human movement data and commodity surveillance from their fleet of cameras orbiting the planet.<\/p>\n

All this is to say, it can be hard to know where the lines between the mob and the intelligence state are drawn. But make no mistake, The Chain<\/em>\u2019s construction was not intended to be as transparent as the blockchains they manage. Nor was it built in a day. Ironically, it was likely our government\u2019s own want to circumnavigate their own legislation that pushed the intelligence state firmly into the private sector.<\/p>\n

When bureaucratic red tape \u2013 The Constitution<\/em> \u2013 prevents the acquisition of certain personal data of citizens from government-funded data brokers, the private sector becomes available as an enabling environment for otherwise unconstitutional surveillance. Many of the defenders of the free market, which are certainly rooted in well-read intentions, miss that the regulation and deregulation via the public sector leads to a further lack of competition in the formation of king-made networks and market monopolies, which often lead to further customer restrictions on speech, all within the framework of supposed free markets.<\/p>\n

The internet and Bitcoin\u2019s blockchain take a similar misdirection dialectic, but via a differing philosophy \u2013 decentralization. Bitcoin is less decentralized in nature than it is distributed, with its consensus mechanism standing across rungs of infrastructure that uphold our internet, and the panopticon leviathan living inside its fiber optic cables. No longer will the Federal Reserve\u2019s 12 regional Fed banks decide monetary policy or limit reserve settlement to those within their regulatory regime, but the energy generators, the chip manufacturers, and the internet service providers \u2013 at both the software and hardware level \u2013 become the new industries of consensus. The neo-banks, likely to emerge from FinTech-integrated social networks \u2013 an industry pioneered by Peter Thiel at PayPal and Facebook\u2013 are ready to embrace the oncoming regulation presumed to be imposed soon.<\/p>\n

There were millions in campaign financing waiting for a candidate to so brazenly champion the blockchain industry, and thus Trump\u2019s campaign pivot on Bitcoin should be of no surprise. It his affinity for stablecoins however \u2013 no better exemplified than his appointment of Howard Lutnick as co-chair of his transition team, whose firm Cantor Fitzgerald holds billions in government debt for Brock Pierce\u2019s Tether (not to mention hundreds of millions in Bitcoin) \u2013 that offer a quiet-part-out-loud insight into his plans to service our ballooning debt via the sale of securities to the blossoming stablecoin industry.<\/p>\n