This article (admittedly from a BTC-flag-waving source) goes into a lot of the very technical details surrounding the so-called crash. Suffice it to say that is far from clear that USG was behind the crash, or yet even whether USG realizes the threat the BTC may present to USD global reserve currency status… an awful lot of auto-bathwater-ingestion no doubt goes on in the Halls of Cathedral Power.

My goggles of prognostication suggest that BTC will race past its old high ($266) and touch $300 before May 2013 is over. It may meet some resistance there. A little further out on the limb suggests that BTC will pass $1000 before year-end 2013, assuming no USG “externalities” are brought to bear on the currency and Mt. Gox continues to get its shit together.

Since Bitcoin ultimately implies depoliticization of money (i.e. exact anti-Keynesianism), I don’t find it difficult to anticipate the Cathedralist line on the topic. More generally though, one would have to maintain that the Cathedral is perfectly distinct from the Idea of the activist State

That’s a great couple of lines there. Dense. The Cathedral is, I think, more about the politicization of everything, immanentizing eschaton, than it about the activist State per se. Creating an (ever increasingly) activist State, by “popular” mandate, just happens to be one of inevitable effects (accidents) of politicizing everything. But tolerated opinions within the Cathedral vary in just how activist the State ought to be… “Rights” to abortion, to be put to death upon request, to smoke pot, to not to be killed by drones remain increasingly popular opinions on the Left. Stalin (RIP) had some good ideas but no doubt went a bit too far.

The entire concept of the politicization of money (which is, when one devotes three axons to it, a corollary to the Politicization of Everything) probably hasn’t occurred to very many in the Cathedral in at least 2 generations. Of course, gov’ts issue money… in just the right quantities for the good of all the people. What other possible arrangement could exist?

But of course very few Card-carrying Cathedral members ever contemplate the Politicization of Everything. Hell… they’re just making the world ever safer, fairer, cleaner, and right. Truth-n-goodness all the way down. Whaddaya wanna go back to the “Dark Ages”?

So the key to the strategy, so far as in is the power of the Dark Enlightenment to implement a strategy (which is to say, not much), would be to keep alternative crypto-currencies hip and cool and lefty for absolutely as long as possible.

Eventually, and it will take many years at least, BTC destroys not so much the Cathedral or the USD (I’ll still have to pay taxes in them), but rather the ability of the Cathedral to continue to pay for its breads and circuses by borrowing (one way or another) from my great-grandchildren. That would be a huge step toward sanity, even if not a final step toward The Reaction.

[Lord, give me the concision of Nick Land.]

Sometimes there are gaps and seams in the Cathedral reciprocal-bolstering alliance. And in the end, power and control wins.

It does sound like a fun scenario. So yes perhaps a Bitcoin exchange in HK might be useful to get the triads interested.

The economistically-specialised cathedralites have more to lose from Bitcoin, so they’re more explicit in their criticisms of it (Krugman, for instance).

I think the cathedral has figured out that Bitcoin is an anti-cathedral appliance of computing, but they’ve also figured out that they don’t want to get bogged down in a prohibition campaign with a marginal chance of success. Viewed in that context, Bitcoin is a negative black swan event for the cathedral (and therefore a deus ex machina for liberty).

I think this explains why other cathedralites, e.g. Felix Salmon, sound indifferent about Bitcoin – there’s no official cathedral line on Bitcoin, so the cathedralists are holding their fire for now to keep their options open. But they can see the danger and so they’re hardly likely to endorse Bitcoin.

Also, key cathedral target groups, e.g. young men, are the key Bitcoin demographic. If the cathedral attacked Bitcoin, they’d get themselves offside with a key target group. So they’re biting their tongue for now.