Bitcoin Will Moon If There Is War With Iran – Forbes

Protesters burn US and Israel flags as they shout slogans against the United States during a ... [+] demonstration following a US airstrike that killed top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in Iraq. Photo by Arif Ali

It behooves a speculator to speculate, and nothing gets the attention of the speculator more than the classic market catalyst of war in the Middle East. So last nights U.S. strike, killing Iranian General Soleimani, is the sort of event that gets markets moving.

As one might expect, oil jumped and so did gold. Oil is up 3% and gold jumped 2%.

In this new world there is a third safe haven asset, bitcoin (BTC). It is up 5%.

Here is a chart of that action:

Bitcoin is up on the news of the US air strike on Iran

This is a very interesting chart because it shows the global professionals reacting to the news much faster than the private traders and it might be suggested this hike is the result of Middle Eastern retail piling into BTC as a flight to safety rather than the relatively non-existent institutional money.

In any event, bitcoin has the most beta in this situation and whats more there appears to be plenty of time to get your trade on in response to the news.

This, of course, is a gift to all skilled traders, a three-hour warning to buy.

Longer term, however, it is clear to see that in instances where there is trouble in capital controlled countries like Iran and China, bitcoin will be a key asset when times get sketchy.

As such, for those speculators who think of gold and oil as the place to trade when war in the Middle East is on the rise, then bitcoin is the place to be.

For those wanting to trade what might be a U.S./Iran escalation, bitcoin is the place to do your thing because while there are trillions in gold and oil to suck up demand, there is only a smattering of bitcoin to take the sort of buying surge a country like Iran could create were the situation to spin up into a large scale conflict.

Bitcoin is the best place for flight capital and haven capital for those in Iran wishing to protect their assets, and that alone is enough to drive Bitcoin back towards its previous and all-time highs. Then there is the exaggerated Beta of Bitcoin that will draw in the global speculators and their wall of money, so that in an extended and fraught US/Iran conflict only one thing is certain about the price of Bitcoin and that is, it will be far higher than it is now.

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Clem Chambers is the CEO of private investors webssiteADVFN.com and author of 101 Ways to Pick Stock Market Winners and Trading Cryptocurrencies: A Beginners Guide.

Chambers won Journalist of the Year in the Business Market Commentary category in the State Street U.K. Institutional Press Awards in 2018.

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Bitcoin Will Moon If There Is War With Iran - Forbes

SBI, GMO to Rent Capacity at Massive Bitcoin Mine in Texas: Report – CoinDesk

Potentially the world's biggest bitcoin mine is said to have signed up two top corporate customers, SBI Holdings and GMO.

The Japanese corporate giants will be renting mining capacity at the facility in Rockdale, Texas, recently put into construction by Whinstone Inc., according to Bloomberg sources. The firms are to begin mining "within coming months," the report says, adding that the firms involved would not comment when asked.

As CoinDesk reported in November, when the facility gets up and running it will likely be the biggest bitcoin mine in the world, starting at 300 megawatts and expanding to 1 gigawatt by the end of 2020.

That puts the rival mine being built by Bitmain also in Rockdale and touted as the biggest in the world in the shade. That's planned to start at a capacity of 25-50 MW and possibly expand to 300 MW.

Internet giant GMO was also said to have been involved in setting up the Rockdale facility, as per CoinDesk's earlier report. In November, Whinstone estimated the data center will cost $150 million to build and fit out. The initial 300 MW of power was expected to come online in the first quarter, with 1 GW planned to be achieved late in the year.

Soon after Whinstone broke ground on its Texas project the company was acquired by Germany-based Northern Bitcoin, which already runs a bitcoin mine in Norway that harnesses renewable power. Similarly, Texas may have been chosen as the site for this major venture in part due to its availability of cheap wind power, according to Bloomberg.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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SBI, GMO to Rent Capacity at Massive Bitcoin Mine in Texas: Report - CoinDesk

Bitcoin and the Primacy of the Digital World – Bitcoin Magazine

As a fervent bitcoin enthusiast, I frequently come across the following objection: In contrast to physical, analog things, bitcoin and similar crypto assets are completely virtual and digital. As such, they are neither tangible nor graspable and would thus lack any real basis of value.

Because of their digital nature, many people still object to bitcoin, refuse to take it seriously or consider it altogether too scary. Some even lump the crypto asset in with other eerie and unsavory developments in tech and the ongoing digital transformation.

Among greatest digital threats seems to be the phenomenon of deepfake media. This is a term that has been in common use since 2017 for the technology used to create deceptively authentic-looking images and videos. Many politicians, actors and other celebrities have already fallen victim to this practice. Deepfake videos put words into their mouths that they never said or make them perform actions they never did. What is real and what is not?

Some technophobes fear that because the capabilities of the digital world are increasingly blurring our notions of reality and what is artifice, political as well as societal life could become ever more confused and agitated. Democracy hinging on the fact that civil discourse and public debate happen among educated and enlightened citizens is very much in danger because the fake will become indistinguishable from the truth.

Within the reactionary mistrust of all things digital, bitcoin is getting its share of blowback as well. If this sort of mistrust resonates with you, I am here to tell you some of these hazards associated with an increasingly digital world are certainly true. But Bitcoin is your ally, not your foe in this.

When looking at bitcoin, the juxtaposition of analog and digital might seem obvious at first glance dissecting it further though reveals some interesting twists. Although bitcoin is virtual and non-corporeal, as a new manifestation of money it has actually overcome many characteristics of what is typically associated with the digital realm.

Interestingly, bitcoin as an asset does experience increasing marginal costs in production, a feature that can be seen in conjunction with gold, a tangible asset of the corporeal world. The more gold is produced, the more expensive it becomes. In the case of bitcoin, the production of new units is algorithmically set to a maximum per block/time interval. In other words, no matter how hard one tries, one can never produce more bitcoin within a period of approximately 10 minutes than the amount specified by the code. It is this digital scarcity imported via the real world that makes bitcoin potentially valuable.. The potentiality of value is being actualized as more people are persuaded of its absolute digital scarcity, since any realized value is always the result of subjective value judgements by individuals.

A bearer instrument refers to an instrument that is payable to anyone possessing the instrument and is negotiable by transfer alone.

Bitcoin is not only digitally scarce but, by its very nature, is similar to a bearer instrument another feature where bitcoin contradicts the usual notion of digital goods. Because bitcoin resembles a bearer instrument, it can be held independently and apart from any third party. While holding bitcoin does not give a bitcoin holder any rights against any tangible issuer, possessing bitcoin does indeed entitle a bitcoin holder to have them spent univocaly that is, the bitcoin protocol automatically and undeniably executes a bitcoin transaction once initiated by a rightful owner. This goes to show that having bitcoin is associated with some sort of underlying right against some sort of issuer, the bitcoin protocol.

Thus the crypto asset has proved for the first time in history that bearer instruments no longer have to be printed on paper to have these characteristics. Bitcoin has solved the double-spending problem and cannot be copied. Its the perfect combination of the advantages from the analog as well as the digital world.

Many still do not appreciate the ingenuity of this combination. However, it is important to recognize that it is based on a way of thinking that is increasingly losing its validity. For more and more people, the digital has become a matter that is taken for granted. While older generations may still make excursions into digital spheres as tourists of an analog world, Gen-Z, millennials and even the slightly older Gen-Xers have long been at home in a digital world where bits dominate atoms.

Having grown up mostly as digital natives, they have cultivated a digital lifestyle from the ground up. This gives them a completely different attitude toward the digital world than people who have been socialized knowing only the analog world. One of the most impressive examples of this development is the video game Fortnite.

For so-called Google kids, Fortnite is much more than a video game it is the reality of their lives in which they socialize and spend more time than in the real world. February 2019 was the biggest moment in Fortnites young history: The American electronic music producer DJ Marshmello gave an in-game concert. His performance took place completely virtually on a stage within the computer game. Fortnite players could participate only as their virtual avatars. And thats what they did: Almost 11 million mostly young people danced as their game characters in the digital concert.

Such events may seem surreal and curious to older generations, but for these Google kids, they are completely normal. Similarly, V-Bucks, the currency within Fortnite, are valuable assets for them. From this famous in-game currency, it is only a small step to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This digital mindset also explains why some female millennials may be just as happy to receive a digital bouquet of flowers on their smartphones on Valentines Day as they are to receive roses that have grown in the soil. Similarly, the day is soon approaching when digital gold will seem more real to this generation than physical, precious metal.

As a species, we are in the process of digitizing our reality. This is probably just another iteration, not the last, of a cultivation process that humanity has been going through since time immemorial. We learn to think in gradually more abstract categories and tap into new potentials again and again. The process of cultural adaptation to fully adopt digital values has only just begun.

What makes it more difficult with bitcoin adoption, however, is the fact that it is an exponential phenomenon. Our brains, on the other hand, are designed for linear interpolation. We instinctively understand that if we take 30 one-meter steps, we can travel 30 meters in total. If we could somehow not take linear but exponential steps, the situation would be completely different. The same 30 steps, exponential in nature translating to 2^30 steps would take us around the world 26 times, a fact that we can hardly picture rationally.

Because our thinking is not one of an exponential mindset, exponential technologies have always overwhelmed us. One only needs to think of the internet or the smartphone: These technological advancements seemingly appeared all of a sudden, but shortly afterward, they had conquered the world. Bitcoin is now the next exponential technology to thrive on the back of these two (and other) exponential technologies. Just like the internet or the smartphone before it, the crypto asset is likely to produce second-round and third-round effects which will fundamentally change the world.

With each passing day, it makes less and less sense to perceive the virtual and physical worlds as separate spheres of human action. Our reality is getting evermore digital and, with it, physical atoms might be more and more dominated by digital bits. If you are intimidated by this, this is totally fine. But let me reiterate what I said in the beginning: Because bitcoin is a digital thing without the problems inherent to the digital world, it is your friend and not your foe.

This is an op ed by Pascal Hgli, author of the book Ignore at Your Own Risk: The New Decentralized World of Bitcoin and Blockchain. Views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bitcoin Magazine or BTC Inc.

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Bitcoin and the Primacy of the Digital World - Bitcoin Magazine

Nasdaq Issues Warning to Bitcoin Mining Company – Bitcoinist

According to recent reports, Nasdaq recently notified Golden Bull Limited, warning the company that it is no longer compliant with listing rules due to the lack of Form 6-K.

Golden Bull Limited, a company that operates as an online finance marketplace and a lending firm, was recently contacted by Nasdaq with a warning. According to the firms announcement, Nasdaq notified Golden Bull that it failed to provide its Form 6-K financial statements for the period of six months prior to June 30th, 2019.

The lack of the financial statement interferes with Nasdaqs listing rules, which may lead to Golden Bulls removal from Nasdaqs listing if the company fails to deliver the necessary data.

However, Nasdaq will not react immediately, and has given Golden Bull Ltd a 60-day deadline to create and deliver a plan on regaining compliance with the listing rules.

The company responded to the notification by claiming that it intends to deliver the necessary information before the end of January 2020.

As mentioned earlier, Golden Bull Limited started out as a finance marketplace and a lending firm that provided short-term loans to individuals and small businesses. The company serves customers in China, where it recently announced that it had decided to shut down its peer-to-peer lending business.

Since then, Golden Bull focused on becoming a car rental business but also a Bitcoin mining firm. The firm started this transition back in March 2018, right after cryptocurrency prices crashed after reaching its all-time high (ATH) in December 2017/January 2018.

However, this is also not the first time that the firm received a warning from Nasdaq. Previously, it was reported in late September 2019 that the company received Nasdaqs notification letter due to deficiency in the minimum bid price requirements.

According to reports from that time, Nasdaq states that the minimum bid price per share for the firms ordinary shares have been under $1 for over 30 consecutive business days. This is not in compliance with Nasdaqs listing rules, and Nasdaq sent a warning, which did not have an immediate effect either.

Instead, the company was given until March 24th, 2020 to execute a plan that would allow it to regain compliance. In other words, Golden Bull Ltd. needed to raise the closing bid price of its ordinary shares to at least $1 for 10 consecutive business days, or longer.

Now, the Bitcoin mining firm once again seems to have problems with compliance on Nasdaq, and while it will not be unlisted immediately, it will have to work for the privilege of staying on Nasdaq.

What do you think about the Golden Bulls situation? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock

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Nasdaq Issues Warning to Bitcoin Mining Company - Bitcoinist

What good is Bitcoin if the Internet fails? – Decrypt

The Internet isnt invincible. Governments the world over are restricting access to the world wide web; Russia is erecting a China-style firewall, Iran switched off the Internet during recent protests and India makes a habit of it. Intentional shutdowns have more than doubled since 2016, according to Access Now, a non-profit advocating for Internet access.

Then there are man made disasters (missile strikes) and natural onessuch as wildfires in California and Australia, or other scenarios that limit access to electricityas well as the prohibitive cost of Internet use in many parts of the world, lack of security and, of course, Internet surveillance.

The Internets vulnerability isnt great for advocates of cryptocurrency. A single day without access to the Internet can cost crypto exchanges, miners and traders millions. You cant buy, send or steal bitcoin if the Internet is down. Or can you?

Neil Woodfine, director of marketing at Bitcoin development firm Blockstream, took to Twitter on Monday to deliver a blistering riposte to those who believe Bitcoin is reliant on the Internet, based on a presentation he delivered in Zurich, Switzerland last October.

Woodfine admitted that delivering transaction data to miners requires an Internet-connected device. Therefore, any offline solution is really only Internet-minimized, but the scope is still huge.

"Bitcoin endures because the engineers that build it expect the unexpected. Money is a dangerous game, and any weaknesses, no matter how small, will be exploited, he wrote.

His first bit of advice is that people should get into the habit of going offline, and that means looking after their own private keys instead of entrusting them to an exchange or other custodian.

But the first step to really using bitcoin offline is to have your own full node. At first, it seems counter-intuitive; running a Bitcoin node requires serious bandwidthwhich requires a connection to the Internet, which is linked to an IP address, which in turn can be linked to a physical address.

Thats where Blockstream Satellite comes into play. The startup uses teleports around the world to beam bitcoin blockchain data to four geostationary satellites around the Earth. These satellites then broadcast the data to almost all populated regions in the world, said Woodfine.

Currently, Blockstreams satellites transmit only one way, for download only, so its not possible to use the network to transmit transaction datayet.

But its free, theres no bandwidth limit, and to pick up the signal you need less than $100 of equipment, said Woodfine. That consists of a standard TV satellite dish, an SDR (software defined radioavailable for $24 on Amazon), and a basic computer, such as a Raspberry Pi.

This is where things gets really interesting. Because a single node connected to a satellite can provide bitcoin blockchain data to a whole area via Wi-Fi rebroadcasts using simple, low-cost, equipment.

For sharing transactions, mesh networksa network of nodes that are not centrally-owned or controlled, connected directly to each otherare the best known option. They relay transactions data from and to other nodes in transmission range. Only one node needs to be connected to the Internet in order to relay the data to the rest of the mesh.

To hook up to a mesh network, a popular option is an inexpensive, low-powered messaging system called goTenna. It has a range of approximately four miles, which can be extended via a relay method. But mesh networks are not infallible, the technology is still nascent and its impractical in confrontational situations, say protestors.

One option thats quickly catching on is the so-called Low Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN). Widely used for IoT applications, LoRaWAN chips work in extremely low-power devices, and offer a four mile range. However, bandwidth is tiny, and transactions need to be broken up and sent slowly, said Woodfine.

Another alternative is relaying transactions via mobile text messages to Internet-connected devices. Tools to enable this include Samurai Wallets Pony Direct, txTenna, a collaboration between goTenna and Samurai Wallet, and SMSPushTX.

Using these various methods, one satnode and one Internet connected device can produce an entire network, said Woodfine.

There are other methods for getting transactions data through, he said.

Using amateur radio, users can transmit low-bandwidth transaction data around the world on very little power.

Satellite phones, such as Iridium Go, allow users to send and receive low bandwidth data anywhere in the world.

And, if all else fails, theres Opendime, a small USB stick that allows you to physically spend Bitcoin, just like a dollar bill, and pass it along multiple times.

But hang on a minute. Isnt that going back to where we all started?

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What good is Bitcoin if the Internet fails? - Decrypt

Bitcoin SV Mining Fees Just Got Even Lower: CoinGeek Follows TAAL Mining With Fee Reductions – PRNewswire

LONDON, Jan. 8, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday, the Canadian listed crypto mining giant TAAL, announced it was to lowering its mining transaction fees for the BSV network to support enterprise blockchain applications that generate high transaction volumes. In response, CoinGeek Mining has decided to follow suit and match these fee reductions:

CoinGeek will regularly review these fee rates with respect to fiat equivalents in order to maintain a fiat stable transaction fee rate; this will provide the price predictability that enterprises want for their data applications.

Recently, Bitcoin SV (BSV) application development has exploded globally, including across Europe, Australia and China, to take advantage of BSV's greater data capacity and micropayments capability. Growing usage has led BSV to show consistently more transactions and consistently bigger average block size than BTC: https://coin.dance/, and recently surpass the Ethereum network on some days.BSV is also the only project that adheres to the original design of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. In short, BSV is Bitcoin.

Calvin Ayre, owner and founder of CoinGeek Mining, commented: "We are following TAAL in reducing these transaction fees in order to support long-term growth of applications which generate high volume transactions on the BSV blockchain. We are doing this in order to generate, and highlight, the ability of BSV to accommodate a huge volume of transactions to sustain blockchain profitability for both miners and enterprise applications - in the years to come."

Additionally, CoinGeek Mining will follow TAAL's lead to increase the restrictive limit (inherited from Bitcoin Core) of unconfirmed transaction ancestors on BSV from 25 to 50. Although this change is unrelated to the reduced transaction fees, it has a similar goal to support big enterprise applications on BSV. A higher limit of 50 unconfirmed ancestors will enable business applications to create longer sets of chained transactions before they are mined in a block.

Precautions for BSV network participants

It should be noted that until a lower relay fee rate is widely adopted, it is NOT zero-confirmation safe to send transactions with a fee rate below the old default rate of 1 satoshi/byte. For transactions that involve two parties without trust, the fee rate should remain at 1 satoshi/byte until after the Genesis hard fork of the Bitcoin SV network (scheduled for February 4, 2020). Transactions that do not involve a counterparty (e.g. data transactions from applications like WeatherSV who negotiated BSV transaction fee deals directly with miners) can take advantage of the lower fee rates immediately.

For more on BSV, visit BitcoinSV.comand come to the next major BSV event the CoinGeek conference in London, February 20-21, 2020.

SOURCE CoinGeek

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Bitcoin SV Mining Fees Just Got Even Lower: CoinGeek Follows TAAL Mining With Fee Reductions - PRNewswire

Travis Kling on Bitcoin as a Safe Haven Asset – CoinDesk

The conversation about whether bitcoin is a safe haven asset continues in the wake of Iranian missile strikes, which saw the price of BTC both surge and retrace in parallel with crude and gold. To help explain whats going on, we feature comments from Ikigai Asset Managements Travis Kling.

Also in todays episode, we look at newly published priorities from the SEC around crypto including investor suitability, trading practices and compliance program effectiveness. We also discuss former Bakkt CEO and now U.S. Senator Kelly Loefflers appointment to the committee that oversees the CFTC. Is it a conflict of interest, something good for the crypto industry or both?

Bitcoin as a safe haven asset as it follows crude and gold after Iran missile strikes

SEC publishes 2020 crypto priorities

Kelly Loefller appointed to committee overseeing CFTC

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Tucker Carlson Patrick McGeehan and Rising Deep Red State Revulsion Against the Neocons – Morgan County USA

Its hard to remember now, but as recently as last week, most people didnt consider Iran an imminent threat. Iranian saboteurs were not committing acts of terror in our cities. Oh, but our leaders tell us they were about to any second and thats why we struck first.

That was Tucker Carlson last night on Fox News talking about President Trumps assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

Whats so striking is how many people appear to accept this uncritically, Carlson said. Just the other day, youll remember, our intel agencies were considered politically tainted and suspect. Certainly, on this show, they are were and will be for quite some time.

Keep in mind, these are the people who invented excuses to spy on the Trump campaign purely because they didnt like Donald Trumps foreign policy views, and theyre the ones who pretended he was a Russian agent in order to keep him from governing.

Remember that? Russia-gate? Our friends at the intel community did that.

And by the way, these are the same people who lied about Iraqs weapons of mass destruction way back in 2002, and by doing that, got us into an utterly pointless war that dramatically weakened our country. The people pushing conflict with Iran are the same people who did that.

It seems like about 20 minutes ago we were denouncing these very people as the Deep State and pledging never to trust them again without verification. But now, for some reason, we do seem to trust them implicitly and completely.

In fact, we believe whatever they tell us, no matter how outlandish. Iran did 9/11, they are telling us. Oh, okay. I didnt know that. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Sunni Saudi Arabia; none were from Shiite Iran.

But if you say so, Mr. Unnamed CIA Official, Im happy to send my kid to the Middle East a week after Christmas, on the basis of your anonymous and unverified leak to the New York Times. Youve earned my trust through years of lying to me.

That appears to be our position now. And maybe all of this will turn out fine in the end. Were certainly praying for it. We love this country. But in the meantime, pardon the skepticism.

In 2016, Donald Trump ran on a promise of fewer foreign adventures considering the ones wed embarked upon didnt work very well, Carlson said on Friday. He vowed instead to focus on our problems here at home, which are growing. Against the odds he won that election, probably because of that promise, but ever since, Washington, including some around the President, have been committed to ignoring the results of that election and its implications. Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades. Theyve been working toward it. They may have finally gotten it.

Carlson is expressing a rising strain of Republican revulsion against the neocon project of imperial war.

West Virginia House of Delegates Republican and Afghan war veteran Patrick McGeehan (R-Hancock) took to the radio waves this morning to denounce the neocon project of regime change.

John Bolton, even though hes no longer the National Security Advisor, hes definitely cheering and (Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo and all their neoconservative friends in Washington are probably cheering right now and celebrating, McGeehan told WRNRs Eastern Panhandle Talk with Rob and Dave. Its funny how these guys even have jobs anymore. Theyve been wrong about everything. This has just emboldened the hardliners in Iran. And I think its just going to result in an escalation of hostilities.

For some reason these guys have had an obsession with regime change in Tehran for decades and thats really their ultimate goal make no mistake about it. Anyone who spent any time in the intelligence arena over in the Middle East likely knew who this guy was Soleimani. He had much to do with Iranian foreign policy. He was a charismatic leader, not just a military leader but you know in many respects, a political one as well. Hes had a checkered past. He was very much involved with talking and coordinating with American diplomats in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He actually helped on a number of fronts in Afghanistan he provided Intel and advice.

Soleimani was directly responsible for giving the nod basically to the Iraqi government in 2014, to allow the United States back into Iraq to establish air bases in the country. Iran felt they needed the aid of American airpower to defeat the radical Sunni fundamentalist ISIS out in western Iraq.

The assassination was a wrongheaded move. Id like to know who actually presented the President with this option, because I think the President got bad advice. The top intelligence leaders from the various agencies who actually advise and brief the President, just filter what they want the President to hear.

Pompeo, whos supposed to be the Secretary of State, the countrys chief diplomat, but he acts more like the Secretary of War for whatever reason. I think there was an article yesterday that Pompeo has been wanting to kill Soleimani for months. Any public official who does not go into these foreign policy situations like this with a very healthy dose of skepticism, especially in the post Iraq War era, they are either just a fool or a liar.

Theyre the same people with same institutions who have routinely lied to the American public. For three years they told the American public that the President was basically some sort of Russian asset and spy who was nothing more than the Russian Presidents puppet. And they lied about the Afghanistan war over and over again you can read about that in the Afghanistan papers.

They lied about Assad in Syria gassing his own people. Theres all sorts of information out there now that says that, that never happened it was staged or maybe the rebels did it, if it did go forward. They lied about Benghazi, I mean they lied about the NSA spying on American citizens. That was done by James Clapper under oath by the way.

So now they tell us without a shred of evidence mind you that there were imminent attacks that were about to take place against Americans in the region. And they had to assassinate Soleimani because he was the evil mastermind behind them? And were going to take that at face value?

Pompeo is the guy leading this narrative about these imminent attacks. And this is the same man who stood in front of a college hall full of college students at Texas A&M I believe it was early last year, and told them that as the former director of the CIA he was an excellent liar and cheater. And his honor code that he took during his own college days there at West Point didnt matter. So, yeah, lets believe that guy, you know.

McGeehan was asked but wasnt Soleimani an evil guy?

Lets just say this the evil guy argument is dumb, McGeehan said. Thats the argument a grade schooler would make. Heres why its such a poor argument that reflects the thinking of a child. If thats the standard for the federal government to carry out hits killings and assassinations, then the federal government sure has a whole lot of work to do around the planet killing evildoers. So Im not going to be lectured to by politicians about who deserves to die because anyone that tries to imply that killing people is a simple thing is a fool or a liar. Im just gonna put it out there because hardly anything in life is really that simple.

I believe Soleimani was not a good person. He did have American blood on his hands. He was anti American between 2004 and in the surge. But the individuals within the CIA and other American covert institutions also have blood on their hands through the many proxy wars theyve carried out throughout the Middle East.

So in the end, you know, sometimes we have to sit down with our adversaries. I mean FDR sat down with Stalin for crying out loud. Kennedy sat down with Khrushchev. So to sit here and say well this guy was a bad person he was an evil person. Okay. You can make that argument but mind you this is ten years after the fact. And that was not the argument thats being made, officially from the presidents cabinet and the administration. The argument is there were imminent attacks that this guy was plotting and we need to take him out.

This Iranian obsession is just foolish and dangerous. To make matters worse, Soleimani had been on diplomatic papers. The Iraqi Government invited him in to advise them constantly. So we essentially broke the most basic diplomatic protocols, because we also killed an Iraqi official who was responsible for leading and coordinating the official militia organizations in Iraq. And because Soleimani was on diplomatic protocols its very likely thats the whole reason. They didnt expect to be openly assassinated at the public airport. So these guys werent in the shadows. They were openly managing Iraqi militias trying to make sure that ISIS in the West was indeed ended.

McGeehan has introduced legislation that would prohibit West Virginias governor from sending National Guard troops into action overseas when no federal declaration of war exists.

McGeehan says the best way to reduce high suicide rates among veterans is to not send them into unconstitutional wars in the first place.

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Tucker Carlson Patrick McGeehan and Rising Deep Red State Revulsion Against the Neocons - Morgan County USA

Libra Association Exec: World Needs Us Because Bitcoin Is ‘Not a Means of Payment’ – CoinDesk

LAS VEGAS "Bitcoin as an asset class has proven that mathematical scarcity can support an incredibly exciting asset," Dante Disparte, vice chairman of the Libra Association, said Tuesday. "It's not a means of payment. It just isn't."

Disparte spoke at the Digital Money Forum at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, making his argument to gadget fans and technology's early adopters.

"The bottom rung of the ladder of economic mobility is payment access," Disparte said. And so far, he said, crypto just isn't cutting it on payments. Disparte said that's why he became interested in what Facebook was building with Libra.

The Libra Association is a consortium of large companies that aims to eventually launch the Libra stablecoin, a federated cryptocurrency designed by Facebook for the millions of people who don't have access to banking services. Each company involved would run a node, but only those approved by existing members can join. Though it is more decentralized than existing finance, it is not permissionless, like bitcoin or ethereum.

Libra is trying to solve a complex problem. "How do you drive mass adoption?" Disparte said. "How do you remove insidious levels of friction that basically make it cost-prohibitive to give people access to payments?"

"I'm not convinced that a council of self-interested companies can do money better than a decentralized system," Akin Sawyerr, a strategy lead on the Decred project, said on the Tuesday panel. "The only way to really get there is to empower the individuals to have some base-level sovereignty."

By sovereignty, Sawyerr meant a level on which a person has uncensorable control of their money. In bitcoin terms, as long as a person controls their keys, no one can take away their bitcoin. He expressed doubt that a permissioned system run by dozens of large organizations would be very censorship-resistant. Notably, the payments companies initially involved in the Libra Association including PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and others departed en masse in October.

But Disparte countered that until permissionless crypto projects deliver a payments system that people in the developing world actually use and that shows it can scale, it's not fair to subject Libra to what he called, "a crypto purity test."

"It's not one or the other. The world is not zero sum," Disparte said.

Disclosure: CoinDesk is a media partner of the Digital Money Forum.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Bitcoin (BTC) Bull Market Has Already Started. Trading Legend Peter Brandt Explains Why – U.Today

Trading guru Peter Brandt is apparently among those who believe that a new Bitcoin bull market has already started. In his new tweet, he gives three reasons why this might be the case.

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As reported by U.Today, BTC was trapped in the six-month falling channel after reaching its 2019 high of $13,700. However, the top cryptocurrency managed to print a daily close at $8,160, thus finally breaking out of the bear channel. This "pending penetration"gives more power to the bulls that have been on fire as of recently.

Bitcoin's multi-year support also remains intact, which means that BTC could continue its parabolic uptrend that started in January 2015. Over the past few months, Bitcoin has touched this support on multiple occasions but the bears are yet to break below it.

To top that off, the trading vet also noticed that Bitcoin was inching closer to reach the head-and-shoulders (H&S) bottom on the daily chart. The narrative that BTC was about to break out of an inverse head-and-shoulders (iH&S) pattern was predominant on the Crypto Twitter as of recently.

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The cryptocurrency community looks like a ghost town after Bitcoin's explosive rally in December 2017 went south. According to BitInfoCharts, the number of Bitcoin-related tweets is currently at the 2014 level (let that sink in).

While it might seem like crypto has lost its appeal for the average Joe, this shakeout of "cryptocultists" is actually a good thing, according to Brandt. Earlier, he claimed that the bulls must be fully purged on Twitter for the BTC price to hit $50,000.

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Bitcoin (BTC) Bull Market Has Already Started. Trading Legend Peter Brandt Explains Why - U.Today