#newjust now
Anonymous Coward
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Of all the forecasts in the Hidden Hand dialogue, one gets passed around more than the rest. Late in 2008 he said a new currency was coming by early 2009. Bitcoin's white paper appeared that autumn and its first block was mined that January. People who have never read the rest of the thread know this line.
It deserves a careful look, because the timing really is close. It also deserves a careful reading, because the sentence says more than people usually quote.
It comes in the first session, in answer to a sceptic who wanted something checkable:
Surely if ruling elite families exist and your a member of one then you must be controlling global events through world governments - tell us 1 major government action from any country that going to occur in the next 5 days.
ATS questioner, Hidden Hand, session 1
Hidden Hand declined to give a five-day forecast. Instead he gave a list of longer-range ones, "that you will be able to look back upon, and verify my predictions retrospectively." The currency forecast is in that list:
Unless any unforeseen disruptions delay it's announcement, there will be a new currency by the end of 2008 / early 2009, along with a new Union of nations. January has been spoken of in some circles, as the latest, though there are plans underway which could even bring this to fruition much earlier than initially hoped for. It depends upon the results of other upcoming events as to how this will play out.
Hidden Hand, session 1
The widely circulated PDF transcript puts a bracketed note at the start of this answer: "[on Sept. 10, 2008]". That date is wrong. An archived copy of the original AboveTopSecret thread (thread402958, Wayback Machine capture of February 2012) shows the thread was "started on 18-10-2008 @ 09:05 PM by Hidden-Hand". The prediction post appears as a reply "posted on 19-10-2008 @ 12:24 PM by Hidden_Hand". He was using a second account by then, because, as he wrote in the thread, his original account had not received its email validation.
So the currency line was written on 19 October 2008, not 10 September. That matters twice over. It moves the forecast closer to Bitcoin's public debut. And it changes how we read the stock market line in the same post, which is covered in the full scorecard.
These dates are well documented:
Put next to the forecast, that is a white paper twelve days after the post and a working network in the month Hidden Hand named as "the latest".
The timing is the whole case, and it is not nothing. He gave a window, end of 2008 to early 2009, and singled out January. A new form of money was published inside the window and went live in the named month. Very few forecasts in these four texts land that precisely on a calendar.
The genesis block headline adds colour. Bitcoin was launched with a bailout headline built into its first block, in the middle of the same crisis Hidden Hand was describing. Someone reading the thread in 2009 could fairly have said "he told us."
And the inventor was anonymous. For readers who already think the money system is run from behind a curtain, an untraceable author is an invitation, not an obstacle.
Read the sentence again, slowly. Four things in it do not fit Bitcoin.
It was to be announced. "Unless any unforeseen disruptions delay it's announcement". Bitcoin was not announced by anyone with authority. It was a paper posted to a cryptography mailing list under a pseudonym.
It came with a new Union of nations. The currency and the union are one forecast in one sentence. No new union of nations formed in late 2008 or early 2009, and Bitcoin has never been tied to one.
It was planned from above. Hidden Hand presents it as something "underway" in "some circles", passed down a "tree system" of need-to-know. Bitcoin was built to need no central issuer at all. If it is the currency he meant, it is the opposite of the kind of currency he described.
"New currency" talk was everywhere in October 2008. This is the strongest point against. By the time Hidden Hand posted, the idea of rebuilding the world's money system was in the headlines:
On the conspiracy side, the "Amero" theory had been running for years. It held that the Security and Prosperity Partnership between the United States, Canada and Mexico would turn into a North American Union with a single currency. Mother Jones debunked it in 2007, and the Southern Poverty Law Center described it that year as the dominant conspiracy theory in the anti-immigration movement since 2005. A new currency "along with a new Union of nations" is a close fit for the Amero story, and a poor fit for Bitcoin.
So Hidden Hand was forecasting the thing that half the internet's money forums were forecasting that month. It happened to be the month an unrelated project went public.
Ten years later Eracidni Murev Te, who presented himself as the counterpart of Hidden Hand's group, was asked about Bitcoin directly. His answers do not read like a family claiming the coin as its own:
Cryptocurrency, or digital currency, will eventually replace modern currency as the primary means of transaction as you suggest. Consider its current versions "test runs," if you will.
Eracidni Murev Te, post 145 (December 2018)
None of the current iterations of cryptocurrency will become a primary, future world currency.
Eracidni Murev Te, post 145 (December 2018)
If anything, this points back toward a top-down currency still to come, which is closer to the plain reading of the 2008 line.
In his second session, Hidden Hand warned his readers about exactly this kind of forecast:
The ones that give you precise dates and times are nearly always ones to avoid. Positive entities will not give a date and time. Negative ones will do, so they can set you up for a fall.
Hidden Hand, session 2
He was talking about channelled entities, not himself. By his own account, though, his Family's goal was a negative harvest. Readers can decide what that does to the dates he gave.
An interesting match, not proof.
The calendar fit is real: a forecast posted on 19 October 2008, a white paper on 31 October, a genesis block on 3 January 2009. But the forecast describes an announced currency, launched with a new union of nations and planned from the top. It was made in a month when presidents and prime ministers were openly calling for a new Bretton Woods. A forecaster who said "new money by early 2009" in October 2008 would have been right about something whatever happened. Bitcoin is the thing that happened, not the thing he described.
The full post, with the other forecasts he made alongside this one, is in session 1 of the transcript.
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