Originally published at: THAT TEXAS GOLD-BACKED DIGITAL CURRENCY BILL IS A STEP BACKWARDS
Just a word about the blog schedule for this week; as it is the Orthodox Holy Week blogs will appear on Mon, Tues, and Wed for that reason. With that said, down to business: This very important story was spotted by one of our regular readers and article contributors, S.D., and you are going to…
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I was kind of waiting for this development in Texas (unfortunately). This is still a stronghold of Bushies, other oil men with blood on their hands (vide assassination of JFK), and sizable post war German community with allegiances to who knows where. Texans think that if they have their guns, they own the state. Another misconception in my opinion.
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Don’t think those of us in rural TX don’t know about the Connecticut Texans who support the like of Cornyn who pisses us off regularly. We are just too busy storing food and lead for the time we actually have to do anything besides enjoy good brisket barbecue.
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Freedom and wealth of Texas always attracted both sides of the aisle. Leeches and producers. At least we in CT got rid of one family of leeches. 
Texas is insofar is blessed that doesn’t have entire pond of these parasites like we do in Greenwich. But watch out for the rumors of Nasdaq moving to Dallas. 
Yeah, I get it @QVBB ! I actually designed gardens for a 60acre estate in Greenwich so I am ALL too familiar with that parasitic cesspool! I lived on and off on the estate for almost 2 years! (We transplanted full sized fruit trees to create an instant orchard. They had the “designers” of a River Runs Through It to come and completely realign a stream and build a perfect bass pond for them. “Herb garden” off the kitchen included a 60’ reflecting pool… You get the picture.)
Those of out here in sane-ville can’t do anything about the Texas swamps of Dallas and Houston. We try to scare Austin enough to stay away but it seems to be creeping closer by the California moving van. Thankfully, the Hill Country is becoming so expensive that only the vineyard owners and retired high tech guys (met one at my bank the other day and we are talking original- like MY AGE!) can afford it. It was only luck that we moved out when we did and were able to piece back together a section of an original ranch. Thank GOD for Texas agricultural tax exemptions. NY never considered saving open space with such sane exemptions so living in a wilderness area without any resources gets expensive. BTW, Tennessee DOES have great agricultural exemptions and no state income tax for those interested…
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Problem with me I can’t live without a shoreline close by, so Tennessee or inland Texas is not for me. But funny how farming may still be ingrained in my genes. Both parents came from farming families since forever but left in their 20ties for “greener” pastures in the cities, that was back during the Soviet times in Poland. Although every single summer school brake me and my brother spent on my grandparent’s farm, trying to help or rather not interrupt too much.
And now, epigenetics or bio morphogenic fields from the past are calling us back, since we decided to restore one of my grandparents farm and actually buy more land just for fun or maybe for something else. 
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@justawhoaman That California exodus has reached as far as Florida, which is about as distant as you can get. (New Yorkers have been coming here for decades, but Californians?!) I still wonder if or how that migration is going to change Texas – and whether the influence of people from other places might already be affecting politics there.
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I have lived a LOT of places and Fort Lauderdale was where I landed in the late 1970’s to help ruin what was the Gold Coast- build canals to drain the brackish water, create massive PUD’s (planned urban developments) like those in Boca Raton with absolutely every style of ticky-tacky, high-rises, golf courses, etc. primarily for Canadians and New Yorkers. I did the planting plan for Red Reef Park- one of the better projects- where we restored the dune system and create a city-owned oceanfront free park. Sadly, much of the oceanfront properties are not accessible- “privately owned”.
BTW, I too am a water person but I haven’t always been able to control that need. It was easy in the Adirondacks because the big pond b/w NY and VT had some pretty hairy sailing. My sailboat here is still on a trailer next to my house in serious need of rebuilding and with too many other commitments to funds, I will continue to hear the flap of the tarp covering it for a while. Texas has a way of blocking up ravine lined rivers and calling them lakes here. Sailing ok for little boats…
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Good evidence of the human ability to adapt and adjust to a change in their environment.
Climate change? Big deal, bring it on….
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Hope you can get that boat rebuilt and back on the water, might be able to help with that some if you need help with work for the boat.
Boats seem like a better unit of currency than cryptocurrency coins.
Did you know the base for the Icelandic Krona coin is fish? One Krona is equivalent to one fish, or at least it used to be. There is literally just an engraving of a fish on the one krona coin.
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A good choice… one can eat fish. One cannot eat gold or silver…
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Hi Dr. Farrell,
I love your work and that of Catherine as well. Both have made a huge difference in my own education, and I wanted to thank the both of you. I was a long-time subscriber of Catherine as well.
For purposes of brevity, I am going to simplify much here while trying to balance some level of detail and as much accuracy as possible.
I also live in Texas, and am a popular social media commentator in the PM space. I do education on social media, speak at conferences, etc. My background prior to writing and publishing content on macro, finance, and the precious metals was 25 years in technology including a Masters in Information Assurance (cyber sec if you will).
I am a firm libertarian. My father was a Navy medic and radio operator in WWII and landed on D-day with the 7th Naval battalion (if memory serves). BTW I am not jingoistic typically, but appreciate much of what the Constitution has provided us as opposed to the other systems. It is not perfect but the better option. Both my parents grew up during the Great Depression. My father died when I was very young and I was raised by my mother.
With that short background, here is my view.
Not all blockchain requires proof of work, especially in a closed system. Proof of work, that which requires lots of energy, is needed for distributed systems like Bitcoin in order to ‘award’ the coins or tokens to users who solve the complex math problems that create the coins. That is what costs the money. I have owned a couple of Bitcoin mining machines, managed by a third party, and yes, they are very energy intensive. Not something I want to do going forward.
Other distributed systems like Ethereum are proof of stake, which is to me an ‘elitist’ type system where if you already existing Eth, you have a larger stake. In other words, for the well-healed Ethereum investor. That system does not require heaps of energy usage.
There are other ways of running those types of decentralized blockchains (if I recall correctly) but they are not terribly popular so I won’t dive in.
Then you have Hashgraph, developed by a former military person in Austin, that uses a slightly different technology that also does not require heaps of power. But Hashgraph Hedera now has a governing council of corporations, effectively removing any sense of decentralized decision-making, development, or governance. I cannot speak for others, but I am not in favor of corporate-governed money and hence why I stopped covering Hashgraph when they made that announcement years ago.
I was never a ‘believer’ in Bitcoin, more curious how it worked under the hood and wanted to explore it as a potential investment. Lots to discuss on true origins (NSA posting on MIT board in 1990s about digital wallets and coins, etc). Likely our government was involved in Bitcoin development or contracted it through third parties, or just seeded the idea with the right people to develop it privately for eventual porting over to a centralized, closed-system CDBC issuance controlled by the Fed.
That is more than likely why the government crackdown on everything crypto now – the govt is booting up FedNow this summer which is likely the final step before a formalized ‘digital dollar’ CBDC. While they claim FedNow is not run on blockchain, I highly suspect this is their trial of it in the US without wanting anyone to know about it given every country is working on their own.
Looking at the tech section of their website, the transaction fee structure looks eerily similar to blockchain systems. How else would they have reduced their transaction fees so much while having the scalability to handle the volume it may require to run that system? I guess we will find out soon enough what is really under the hood.
Signature Bank had SigNet, and Silvergate Bank had SEN platform, both of which were private competition for the govt’s FedNow. I believe this gives new meaning to Barney Frank’s comments that Singature bank was shut down prematurely by the govt. for its crypto involvement. Frank was on the board for Signature, I believe. While they were cash poor, I believe his comments were that they were not given the chance to raise money and save the company. Interesting that both were ‘swept up’ in the banking carnage just in time. I am sure that is just a perfect coincidence.
As for the proposed legislation in TX, I believe they are a step in the right direction when managed by HONORABLE people, while also possibly introducing some additional risks of ownership that should be strongly considered. In other words, the system would work if we had all Ben Franklins and John Adams in government. But, I agree that ‘held in trust’ isn’t a great idea when you consider that both bank accounts and brokerage accounts run under the same model. Your bank money and your Schwab account are trust accounts where they ‘own’ your money, and have an obligation to provide the benefits to you of your investments.
There are serious limitations to this approach that introduces a lot of counter party risk and allows those institutions to play ‘fast and loose’ with your money. Along with Dodd-Frank, I believe this is what allows for automating compulsory ‘bail-ins’. On this subject too much to write here, but please note that the CBDC is the perfect system for bail-ins and other things. It’s all part of their final system, lots of moving parts.
That being said, I agree that a paper certificate is better for those that worry about digital payments, bail-ins, confiscation, legal entanglement, etc. than a digital token. Personally, I worry more about 1:1 backing of the digital currency. While they will likely have it audited, it still presents all sorts of counter party risk.
The TX system is not a perfect proposal, but I would take it over FedNow if those were my only two choices. We all have some time to make others before this is all implemented, but those days are drawing shorter.
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Dr. Farrell,
Everything I see in TX shows me that Abbott is making TX a UN region moving from Mexico into TX. I’m not sure how far up or over this region will go. I know that we have the infrastructure in place in both urban and rural communities for 15 min. cities. So I think it is correct to speculate that this depository may be used to enforce that concept/reality in this state.
I live in a small, West TX town. We have, as does Central TX, something called the Council of Regional Government. It is not an elected governmental body. They appoint their own members.
If you look at their websites you will see they use nearly the same words. It is UN Agenda 21 and the Regional Govt. seems to be the conduit to instituting this agenda down to the local level of the smallest communities. http://www.riocog.org/ They are renaming our roads and putting us on the equivalent of Carbine 911 (see Whitney Webb on that.) One of their satraps attends our commissioner court meetings in person or by zoom. She hates all questions and there is a real attempt to block the public from speaking taking place at this time.
Gov. Abbott was very brutal during covid-- towards our people and towards our small business (see Shelly Luther). He was Gretchen or LuAnn, but he wasn’t a good man who respects rights. I believe he is fully on board w/a globalist system of oppression.
Where I live, all the small towns were also truly brutal. The officials got orders from above and they were happy to serve. It was so extreme here that the “health” officer told me all about vaccine passports in April of 2020! So it is clear to me that this area is connected into the agenda. It is a desirable area that would serve as a good place for resources and leisure for people like Gates and Fauci who a friend said have been spotted in this area (I didn’t see them myself).
If I drive to Mexico I will see the 5g towers all the way down and into that nation. Nothing here is as it seems and the corruption is off the charts locally and state wide. So yes, I would definitely not take this move at face value. We have a number of WEF shapers in TX and those who attend Davos. Abbott attended, I believe, in 2020 as a number 4 category.
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Dr. Farrell,
I fully agree with @Ahzeld. No Texan of true mind wants any sort of CBCD, Blockchain, or other that requires a “middle man” for making purchases of any sort. In short, we Texans have been betrayed. My friends in Wyoming and other States with gold depositories are going through the same and feel as I do. Texas has quickly become Texafornia and is not the place in which the 4 generations of my family grew up.
There are organizations who, unfortunately, are trying to take the matter(s) to the other extreme, such as TEXIT; I posted their note here somewhere. We don’t want that either.
The Plan to me seems very clear, having read USMCA, which divides The U.S.A. into regions to be controlled and 15 min. cities created.
The legislation reading group I belong to has been and continues pounding the table about these Bills but, it seems to no avail. All we can do is keep pushing our sorry representatives (with a small ‘r’) and hope they back down. It does not look promising at this point.
There are certain prerequisites in order for Texas to be a freedom loving and constitution following state. Get rid of “shrub” family than real change may begin.
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I think that the people of Texas are the real problem. We have reelected those who clearly violated their oath of office and stripped people of the innate rights. What does that say about us? Why were we willing to reelect people who showed us what they do when they have power?
If the problem is one family or one party, our problems could get fixed rapidly at the local and state (also Federal) level. I feel the real problem is people are not willing to hold office holders to account by voting them out and voting in decent, intelligent people who believe in protecting the rights of the people. They will not even speak out, nor will most people consider filing suit against the corrupt practices in this state.
Texans need to be a lot more informed and much more courageous. To my mind, this is the starting point of freedom.
And what exactly have YOU done to remedy the problem?
If you’ve read my posts, you would know but, I guess you don’t read my legislation news, or, the fact that we frequently visit Reps and other lawmakers. There’s more but, I’m done explaining to adversarial posters like you. BYE!
the beaver, what do you think of what I said? I can tell you what I’ve done and am doing but that isn’t the point. My statement is that people in TX have continued to reelect people who took away our rights. People across this nation have done the same thing. We must stop doing this. We all need to act from a place of courage and being informed. Do you think this is a bad idea? If so, why?
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