Chris’ note: As regular readers know, one of the profit trends we track for you is the rise of crypto economy. And our No. 1 recommendation for playing this trend is the world’s first cryptocurrency, bitcoin.
That’s why today, we hear from Casey Report chief analyst Nick Giambruno. Nick released a new presentation about a “financial coup” in America that has profound implications for the U.S. dollar… and bitcoin. So make sure to catch up on that here.
Meanwhile, several readers have pushed back on our case for bitcoin. They say the government could shut it down and make it worthless. But as Nick reveals below, that’s impossible. At least that’s the lesson from the feds’ bizarre pursuit of cryptography hero Phil Zimmermann…
When two federal agents showed up to Washington Dulles Airport in 1994 to harass suspected arms trafficker Phil Zimmermann, he was out of his element.
Zimmermann wasn’t your usual gunrunner…
He wasn’t linked to any cartels, insurgent groups, spies, or other shady characters…
He was a computer scientist. And in 1991, he wrote a bit of computer code that the U.S. government considered a weapon.
You see, in the early 1990s, Zimmermann invented what is now the world’s most widely used email encryption system.
Called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), it ensures privacy between a sender and receiver.
And it does a good job of it.
Then Zimmermann did something that made the feds mad. He made PGP freely available to anyone over the internet.
At the time, Washington considered strong encryption to be in the same category as “munition” – guns, bombs, ballistic missiles, and so on.
And after Zimmermann posted the source code for PGP to an online message board, the feds charged him with violating the Arms Export Control Act.
The penalty… three to five years in prison and a $1 million fine.
In truth, the feds attacked Zimmermann for trying to protect something they loathe – personal privacy.
But Zimmermann was smart…
He outwitted his pursuers by printing the source code for PGP in a book so anyone could replicate it.
The publishing arm of MIT – the MIT Press – sold the book all over the world. This allowed anyone, anywhere in the world, to use Zimmermann’s source code to stay private online.
The feds could legally halt the export of munitions. But the First Amendment protects free speech. So it prevented them from legally stopping the export of a book, which is classified as speech.
PGP quickly spread across the U.S. Eventually, it also hit Europe. At this point, it was completely out of Zimmermann’s – and the feds’ – hands.
This was a bitter lesson for the U.S. government on the nature of a distributed, decentralized technology.
Zimmermann had made his code available for anyone to download… and because enthusiasts spread copies of it across dozens of countries and jurisdictions… it was impossible for any government to stop it.
All the feds could do was attack Zimmermann in a vengeful effort to deter others. But this only made his encryption code spread faster.
In the end, in 1996, the government dropped all the charges against him. The genie was out of the bottle. Zimmermann’s encryption code was too widespread for even the U.S. government rein in.
Encryption has far more applications than securing your emails. It’s also what makes online shopping and banking work.
It’s a vital part of securing any kind of digital data against hackers and other snoops. And with an ever-increasing amount of our private lives stored in the digital world, encryption is an absolute necessity.
Today, few aspects of your private life are beyond the reach of the U.S. government. But there’s an encryption-based technology that can help you discreetly grow and preserve your wealth.
It’s called Bitcoin.
You see, Bitcoin doesn’t use the traditional financial system. It has no central authority.
Instead, it runs on a cryptographically secured, decentralized, and voluntary network scattered around the world on many thousands of computers.
With Bitcoin, there’s no central location for a SWAT team to raid. There’s no “capo” to arrest. Governments can do nothing but play an endless game of whack-a-mole across the globe.
Neither the U.S. government, the Chinese government, nor any other government can shut down the Bitcoin network without shutting down the entire internet… and keeping it off.
Bitcoin’s resilience to government interference terrifies politicians. This is why it’s such a disruptive and exciting technology.
Just like Zimmermann’s PGP… Bitcoin offers regular people a safe haven.
They can easily use it to send and receive wealth from anywhere in the world. That might mean paying for goods and services when the local paper money becomes worthless, or discreetly receiving a much-needed influx from relatives who have managed to get out of crisis-ridden countries.
Bitcoin bypasses unsound banks, worthless fiat currencies, and government confiscation schemes.
When a crisis hits, a government can easily steal money from your personal bank account. It can also steal your buying power by digitally “printing” more money. But it’s next to impossible for it to steal Bitcoin or prevent people from using it.
In a crisis, Bitcoin is invaluable to the common man. Whenever there’s a crisis anywhere in the world, its price and volume spike… just like gold.
That’s why I recommend everyone own both gold and Bitcoin. These two assets are your ticket to protecting your – and your family’s – wealth from government confiscation… devaluation… or a brazen swindle.
If you think that’s farfetched… during the lockdown, America’s financial elite secretly launched the biggest attack on your wealth since 1971… when President Nixon killed the gold standard money system.
For full details on what I discovered, catch my special presentation right here.
Regards,
Nick Giambruno
Chief Analyst, The Casey Report