128 Comments

  1. The productivity drain caused by employee resource groups, or ERGs, is very real. It’s hard to see how the trend can continue long-term, and I speculate a reversal is in the near future.

  2. Dear Catherine, another great insight, many thanks. The reduced productivity might also have affected so many who worked from home. The office ethos has been destroyed. Also, your admiration for India brought a tear of gratitude from me. I am an Indian, my motherland has a special place in the journey of human civilization. The western press is always disparaging of India. They don’t get her. You do, John did. That meant a lot to me personally. Awaken India Movement have left no stone unturned in raising awareness. I am aware of local volunteers going on foot in small towns to spread the message of informed consent. To your point about raising one child at a time – the middle class in India sets records on this front. I have seen daily wage labourers giving it all to send their children to school, have seen people making sacrifices to keep a small roadside temple going, teachers and doctors raising the bar with what they have done during the pandemic. We believe our Gods walk amidst us. There can be no period when HE keeps putting a comma each time. The door never closes with the Lord. Have a wonderful week. With gratitude.

    1. Rekha:

      I was hoping to return to India in this period. I have not been there since 1971. I am with you. The Indian people are a great people and have done so much to stop the tyranny – at great cost and with great personal courage.

      Catherine

  3. Hello everyone,

    Though I am technically a new member, I have followed Catherine’s work on and off for over a decade. (I have learned about her and her work through Mike Ruppert and his work.)

    The reason I am writing is that I would like to know what Catherine, John, and members of this community think about the monero cryptocurrency. I tried searching on solari.com but found no information on this.

    I think most of the cryptocurrency hype today is mostly just that, a hype. Since the market cap is small, it is volatile, and since it is largely unregulated, it welcomes corrupt games and theft through various defi schemes. So I am not at all interested in cryptocurrency as an investment at all.

    But I am very interested in their potential as use in transactions, i.e., (digital) cash. In that sense, any cash-alternative must be fungible, private, decentralized, and not prone to manipulations, and with cryptocurrencies, the network must be secure, i.e., trustworthy. The monero community is humble and, as far as I can tell, the technology is sound. (I am a software engineer and a scientist, though not with a background in cryptography.) I think monero largely fits this bill and a technologically mature solution already today. What is, of course, missing (but growing) is adoption, i.e., trust.

    I think an interesting testament to the fact that monero works in practice is the move of most dark markets from bitcoin to monero: https://www.monerotalk.live/dr-rolf-van-wegberg-on-monero-replacing-bitcoin-on-dark-markets.

    Another interesting fact, which I think underlines that monero as a technology could work as digital cash, is its unique privacy characteristics, superior to all other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin: the IRS is ready to fund anyone who can crack the privacy of monero: https://modernconsensus.com/regulation/irs-bets-1m-monero-transactions-are-traceable. In a nutshell: in monero by default, the sender, the receiver, as well as the amount of a transaction are all private, yet, through view keys, auditing is possible. None of this is true for bitcoin.

    With a huge respect towards Catherine’s and John’s knowledge in monetary systems and banking in general, I would love to hear what they think, from that perspective and background, about monero.

    PS: I use cash not only on every Friday but every day. But cash is cumbersome online and across large distances.

    Respectfully,
    Jozsef

    1. Jozef:

      On my list to look at Monero. I have numerous allies who are fans.

      Catherine

    2. Thanks for the comment on Monero. I agree that many private transactions take place, some from bitcoin into monero and then back to bitcoin.
      We know that bitcoin is traceable at a State level, and possibly one day monero will also be traceable. Bear in mind this is an all or nothing event.

      1. Hi Richard,

        Can you please elaborate on what you mean by “all or nothing event”?

        Thanks,
        Jozsef

        1. Hi Jozsef, if a State has the ability to solve the Monero encryption, and perhaps other features of it blockchain implementation, then all the hidden data becomes available. That is the “all”. Today, that is not possible and “nothing” can be read.

          1. That is not how breaking monero would work, because the technology behind involves several components and breaking each of them only allows answering questions that are statistical (i.e., non-deterministic, let alone binary) in nature. In other words, it is misleading to think of breaking monero as a binary (black box) operation.

            Even if a single component, say, the one responsible for obfuscating sender identities in a transaction, gets broken, all the attacker can hope for is a significantly less-than-certain probability that some address was involved in a given transaction. What does that mean in court?

            Bitcoin is a very different matter altogether, where all transactions and their histories are public, because the bitcoin ledger stores its information public. Bitcoin is equivalent to have a bulletin board outside of the bank that displays all past transactions of all clients of a bank. That single “transparency feature” of bitcoin ensures that bitcoin can never seriously be considered as an equivalent of cash. It is more of a proof-of-concept in my mind. But don’t get me wrong: I consider bitcoin revolutionary in the ideas it introduced and how it combined several existing technologies, but it did not get a crucial component of solid money right: privacy. In my mind it is version 1, while monero is bitcoin version 2.

            There is also a significantly different policy the monero community takes with respect to code changes (or forks) compared to bitcoin. While in bitcoin, forks are considered a problem, in monero updates to better protocols are usual operating procedure. In other words, monero admits that future improvements are necessary.

            There are many ways monero importantly differs from bitcoin (and its derivatives), and another big one is that the mining algorithm that keeps the network secure, performs best on commodity hardware. This is intentional and extremely important. It was invented with that purpose and can also be further improved if necessary. As a result, no single specific centralized authority can control the majority of the computing power (as is already done in bitcoin) and the monero network is therefore a lot more decentralized and thus more secure.

            In general, as I see it, there is a lot of high-quality work and research go into monero and how it continues to evolve with the single goal of sound money and nothing else. For example, no scripting as in bitcoin or in ethereum.

            But no one should believe me of course. The real test of the pudding is how it works in practice. Based on the two links I posted above, I think we might have something here.

            If you only have an hour to spend on this subject, I recommend watching this video: https://tube.bakosi.org/w/hMUFP2gGw7ruCkXyzmGX2S

    1. Whatever you do, please do not assume that anything Cliff High says about Solari is accurate or relevant. Yes, the Greek or Latin derivation is related to the word for sun – note that our logo is a solar armillary.

      1. Cliff is kind of out there.
        He did say he didn’t know if his interpretation of Solari, as it relates to your meaning, was accurate.

        Yes, I’m not sure what he says is true or not about many things,
        especially the current covid narrative.
        I was curious to know your two cents. Thanks, Steven

Comments are closed.