President Trump has recently declared his intention to stop minting the penny because doing so causes the federal government to incur a financial loss.  How much of a loss are we talking about here?  In 2024, penny minting cost FedGov $85 million (minting the nickel cost it about $18 million).

However, we also know that Mr Trump is keen on expanding the use of digital cryptocurrencies in the States, and particularly in FedGov’s acquiring a large reserve of them.  But the cost requirements to build out the infrastructure necessary for this new electronic currency are enormous.  We are firsthand witnesses of this here in Louisiana, as the two new data processing centers in Richland and West Feliciana Parishes will cost a combined $12 billion.

This is in addition to the natural resource costs involved:  rare minerals to make the microchips; natural gas, uranium, etc., to create electricity; water to cool the chips, etc.

Forgive the pun, but something doesn’t add up.  If concerns about costs are the reason to quit producing the penny, then how on earth can one justify the humongous costs of building and maintaining everything needed for digital currency?

The answer to that question is disquieting; Dr Joseph Farrell gives it:

‘Just this last Monday you might recall that I blogged about a story that Google, Amazon, and various countries, have signed on to a pledge to triple the power output of the world by means of nuclear power production by 2050. The question was, “why?”, and my answer was that they need all this power to run their planned AI datacenters and their new “digital” currency system and the “cashless” world, never mind the seiniorage costs of doing so, which (I also pointed out), they never mention in their proclamations of how wonderful all this will be. As I strongly intimated in that blog, I suspect the actual costs of such a system, when compared to the seiniorage costs of the current system of paper money and specie production, are ridiculous. The Bottom Line is, they need all the increased power consumption for something, and that something, I suggest, is for their Artificial Intelligence data centers, like Elon Musk’s “Colossus” center outside of Memphis, Tennessee . . .’ (‘MUSK’S COLOSSUS: HIS “NEW GOD” AT MEMPHIS’, gizadeathstar.com).

The risks involved in this new monetary system are very high for those who accept it:

‘Regardless of what the actual cost of all of this will be, the mere fact of the “gimongous” nature of the numbers themselves – gigawatts, thousands of gallons of water per minute, tens of thousands of computer chips, a building to house it all – suggest that this is a considerable amount of power of the political sort it gives its owner. And it raises again the question of why:  in a “cashless digital currency” world, he who owns such centers controls the money, and does so in a way that was only a dream for Meyer Amschel Rothschild, for that very same system will presumably be able to determine, on a case to case basis, how much an individual’s “money” is “worth” or even if it is usable based on his or her “score” against rules that the AI owner himself establishes’ (Ibid.).

The risks go beyond merely the financial:

‘Beyond this, I am reminded of the other dangers such a concentration of computer power, and hence, of political and economic and potentially even military power represents. In an editorial comment on the above article, Patrick Wood notes why Elon Musk named his computer center “Colossus”:

‘“Musk named Colossus after the 1970 science fiction horror flick, Colossus: The Forbin Project, where the US builds a military supercomputer that takes the US and the world hostage, threatening nuclear annihilation. Watch the movie. Musk is expanding Colossus with another 100 acre purchase in Memphis, TN, to scale Colossus up to 3 million state-of-the-art AI processors. Got power, Memphis?’” (Ibid.)

The ‘little people,’ who are supposed to be some of the main beneficiaries from all this snazzy, super-modern economic development, are likely the ones who will suffer most from it in the long-run:

‘Then there are other questions to be asked: what happens when there’s too little power to go around? Who takes priority? Memphis? or Musk?  And what happens when this center’s AI confronts another AI in yet another center? Who gets caught in the “crossfire”? What happens when there’s not enough water to go around? Who takes priority? Memphis? or Musk? and so on. I suspect most of us know the answers to those questions already’ (Ibid.).

We are happy with a lot of what Musk, Trump, etc., have been doing in and out of DC, but there must be limits to our trust.  We cannot be completely passive and trusting when it comes to the work going on in the halls of political/economic power.  We wish it were otherwise, but we live in a fallen world.  If someone of the stature of the Holy Apostle Paul openly warned about corrupt church leaders (Acts 20:29), how much more should we be wary of political leaders, powerful CEOs, and so on.

The plight of the serfs and peasants of the Middle Ages is often pointed to by moderns to show how wretched living conditions were for most people in those days.  But the control grid being prepared for us by Big Tech, FedGov, and other power holders, will make their living restrictions look like the most glorious freedom.  Let us be careful what technology we choose to adopt.

‘Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world’ (I John 4:1).