Money

*Thank you, Satyr. I hope it fits in this context.

"At first, the heads of gods were embossed on the coins. But,
there came a point when kings replaced the gods. This change
signified the crossing of a major threshold in monetary history. The
first man to have his head imprinted on a coin was King Solomon, to
whom God had given great wisdom. Another to play an important
role in monetary history was Cyrus, King of Persia. He conquered
the Lydians and took all their gold to Persia. From there it was
managed and circulated as far as the Mediterranean. But the man
through whose hands most, if not all, of the known gold treasures of
the time passed was Alexander the Great. It is a peculiar
phenomenon that this man visited or conquered all the important
temples and holy shrines, one after the other. However, he did not
take possession of any of those consecrated sites. He sought a new
relationship with the people and their respective cultures, thus
creating the first Mediterranean cosmopolitan organization reaching
as far as India. This was the outstanding achievement of Alexander
and he was among the first to have his face on coins. "
- Ferdinand Lips, Gold Wars

The control of money, taking it away from the gods (Pantheism) seems to work together with the construction of larger social structures.


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Thanks for the quote.

Seaford [Money and the Early Greek Mind] opines, the Origin of Confidence from which coinage derives, was in sacrifice to a common god related to battle-lust...

Quote :

"The word for coinage or currency, nomisma, does not appear before the fifth century. It comes from nomisdein (to acknowledge), is the object or consequence of nomisdein. In Aristophanes’ Clouds Socrates declares that ‘the gods are not nomisma (currency/coinage) with us’, to which Strepsiades replies ‘What do you swear with? Iron (coins), as if in Byzantium?’

Here the paradox of currency, in which we have to trust but can alter at will, is brilliantly extended to deity whose image stamped on (e.g. Athenian) coins conferred acceptability. Nomisdein means to acknowledge (by belief or practice) – whether the gods (nomisdein tous theous) or coinage. The earliest surviving occurrence of nomisma is Alcaeus fr. 382 L–P: ‘truly she [Athena?] was bringing together a scattered army, inspiring them with nomisma’.Nomisma here, mysterious enough to be divinely inspired, is the collective confidence, based on custom, that can unite an army. Its next surviving occurrence is strikingly similar – of the paean that Aeschylus’ Eteocles (Sept. 269) urges the women of Thebes to shriek out – the ‘Greek nomisma of sacrificial cry, giving confidence to friends, dissolving the terror of battle’. Customary collective practice (nomisma), whether coinage or in battle, depends on and objectifies the collective confidence of the community, for whom it introduces order into potential chaos."

Anfang wrote:

One can take the sun as an example, more on that maybe later.[/left]

Bataille uses the metaphor of the sun to speak of his economy of excess and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Quote :

"Solar energy is the source of life's exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any return. The sun gives without receiving. [ . . . ] Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe. But, first, living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth. Only the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander."

Thank you.

A rare thing.


Money requires confidence. Someone once said that it's confidence men who run that show today. It's all about believing. That fits rather well with secularism and the rise in materialism - We are all believers in it - most are.
Once the sentiment is changing, a new faith has to be issued.

I'll have some serious time to think about what to write later.

Money attracts the base, the degenerate, huckster.
A mind dominated by hedonism and materialism and lacking the scruples to be noble.
There are no religious men high positions of business.

Gamblers with permission to gamble...within house rules.
The higher up you climb the more leeway you get; the more the rules do not apply to you.

I am convinced that if there are, from time to time, arrests and the law intervening it is mostly the settling of personal issues.

Masculinity is either emasculated or stripped of its nobility it is made into a state of debauchery.

The Inversion is money in ancient times was based on confidence, now our confidence is based on money.

An animated movie about money...

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Satyr wrote:

I am convinced that if there are, from time to time, arrests and the law intervening it is mostly the settling of personal issues.

Yes, I think that's the usual case.
If a group has no challenge and no threat from the outside then, over time, the focus will eventually turn inwards.


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Those 23.5% in 2007 have already been surpassed by now. In the past, there has always been some kind of currency/economical reset. There is a cycle theory for this but I've forgotten that man's name. A cycle takes about 80 years and there is an economic crisis at the end, as well as a minor one in the middle. But usually it all coincides with a breakdown in society, in general, as well. I think, in some way, history repeats itself, more or less.

It's quite funny how there is so much money (and therefore debt in our case) around to buy the world many times over. In other words, in the end everybody loses, it's just about who loses the most - in a materialistic sense. Promises on money and debt are hollow - and not only them.

Usury

Usury is the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans. Depending on the local laws or social mores, a loan may be considered usurious because of excessive or abusive interest rates. According to some jurisdictions and customs, simply charging any interest at all can be considered usury. Other terms used for usury or usurers include loan shark, as well as Shylock which is sometimes used with an antisemitic connotation.
(Wikipedia on usury)

So it's interest.
In modern times, if I loan somebody money (and I am not too big to fail) then there is a chance that the borrower can't pay me back, not in full or not at all.
Furthermore, if I am not interested in helping that other person, because he's a stranger or an enemy or wears an ugly hat, then there is little reason to do so - unless there is sufficient compensation in some form.
The impersonal, where the discrimnatory process is reduced to less and less.

In an economy which is impersonal, due to its large group size, it's about the immediate solution and the immediate growth of the economy.
To accelerate economic growth in the short term the failing of loans is minimized. - Complex financial structures which are propped up by the money issuer (central bank) to keep the game running.
When no credit fails (or only relatively small amounts) then due to interest, which is earned by someone, the money supply has to increase over time - has to.
It's a way to gather material goods and the promise of future material goods (money) in unnatural dimensions (at least as long as the game is running) by constructing a system which tries to avoid physical decay, the natural increase in entropy.

That desired acceleration in economic growth does have undesired? side-effects.
It creates a whole industry (financial sector) which is not productive but only operates administratively. (a very large part of the economy, today)
Imagine bringing your money to your bank could result in the loss of it (as in a quite high probability over the years) and borrowing money from the bank would have to be much more restrictive and costly, because of the former.
People would probably invest more locally and not only in a monetary way. In other words, it furthers the destruction of the extended family by economic means. A combination of laws (taxes, no local individual money/barter systems,...) and a bank which never fails (at least not until the game is up).
Another thing is malinvestment which is an unavoidable phenomenon, but, by postponing the effects, band-aiding, the malinvestment can grow over time just to burst later with disproportionately more devastating effects.

In my estimation, the most important effect is the destruction of small scale social structures and all the things which go along with that...

The Seaford book turned out to be really radical in explaining how pre-socratic philosophy got monetized...
In this excerpt, he compares Usury with Incest, which is how Bataille explained it as well.

Quote :

"...The tragic self-sufficiency of the Theban tyranny takes the extreme form of incest. In the Oedipus Tyrannus the tyrant suffers – along with incest and self-blinding – our three tyrannical characteristics of violent isolation from kin, perversion of (wedding) ritual, and preoccupation with money.
In Antigone his daughter Antigone identifies her kerdos (462, 464) with the quasi-incestuous loyalty to her own blood-kin that she sets above marriage (905–12). Buried alive by her own uncle Creon in a ‘bridal chamber’ (804 thalamos), she is compared to Danae confined under- ground by her own male kin in a thalamos as ‘treasurer of the gold-flowing seed of Zeus’ (948–50). The same ambiguity of thalamos as bridal chamber and store-room accompanies Oedipus’ incest.

Endogamy, in Athens and elsewhere, preserved wealth within the family. In tragedy endogamy is associated with blindness, darkness, and male imprisonment of female kin (sometimes underground). Similarly, precious metal money may be hoarded by being ‘made invisible’, frequently underground. Money and females should circulate, and are transmitted together,96 but the intro- verted household keeps, even conceals, its money and its females for itself.
Moreover, money and the female may both reproduce, with their offspring described by the same word, tokos. The mysterious new phenomenon of money is imagined in the familiar terms of nature: for instance as the sea, and sexual reproduction. Paying interest on a loan, which seems to have developed out of the practice (recommended by Hesiod) of reciprocating a gift with a better one, is greatly facilitated by the use of money.

But in contrast to gift-exchange and barter, not only is what is given (money) itself returned, but what it produces (by tokos) is also homogeneous with itself. Similarly, even money used for trading may bring to the trader a return of (homogeneous) money greater than his outlay. According to Aristotle [Pol. 1258b1–8] ‘currency came into being for exchange, but interest (tokos) makes it increase. Hence its name, for offspring are similar to their parents, and tokos is currency the child of currency (nomisma ek nomismatos). And so of the modes of acquisition this is the most unnatural’. In fact the only form of reproduction that matches Aristotle’s characterisation of interest – as ‘currency from currency’, and as unnatural – is incest. The monied tyrant Oedipus calls himself ‘of the same family (homogen ̄es) with those from whom I was born’ (1361).

This homogeneity of monetary interest is a special form of the persistent homogeneity of money (8b). In contrast to mythical cosmogony, in which our genealogically produced world – now ruled by Zeus – has superseded its genesis, the originating principle of the Milesians remains fundamental, always there, like money, to take into itself again what it has generated. This shift from myth to the impersonal occurred under the influence of monetisation (11b), which diminishes the power of genealogy." [Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind]

- - -

Quote :

"The principle of the gift, which pro- pels the movement of general activity, is at the basis of sexual activity. This is true of its simplest form: physically, the sexual act is the gift of an exuberant energy. This is true of its more complex forms, of marriage and of the laws of distribution of women among men.
Let us go back to the image of the champagne, itself animated by the movement of general exuberance and clearly symbolic of an overflowing energy. One sees Ltvi-Strauss's thesis then: the father who would marry his daughter, or the brother who would marry his sister, would be like the owner of champagne who would never invite any friends, who would drink up his stock by himself. The father must bring the wealth that is his daughter, or the brother the wealth that is his sister, into the circuit of ceremonial exchanges:
he must give her as a present, but the circuit presupposes a set of rules accepted in a given milieu as the rules of a game are.
...Thus, women are essentially pledged to communication, which is to say, they must be an object of generosity on the part of those who have them at their immediate disposal. The latter must give them away, but in a world where every generous act contributes to the circuit of
general generosity. I will receive, if I give my daughter, another woman for my son (or my nephew). What we have, in sum, throughout a limited ensemble, is generosity, organic communication. The forms of exchange are settled on in advance, as are the manifold movements of a dance or an orchestration. What is denied in the incest prohibition is only the result of an affirmation. The brother giving his sister does not so much deny the value of sexual union with his close kinswoman as he affirms the greater value of marriage that would join
this sister with another man, and himself with another woman. There is a more intense communication in exchange based on generosity than there would be in immediate gratification. More exactly, festivity assumes the introduction of movement - the negation of withdrawal into
self, hence a denial of the supreme value of avarice. The sexual relation is itself communication and movement; it has the nature of a festival. Being essentially a communication, it requires an outward movement from the beginning." [Bataille, The Accursed Share]

Anaximander:

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"In the polis (in contrast to monarchy) citizens are ruled by, and are equal with respect to, impersonal law. This equality is also expressed spatially, in the symmetrical organisation of political space around a single centre – meson, hestia koine (common hearth) – in which the citizens participate, ‘a geometrical schema of reversible relationships governed by equilibrium and reciprocity between equals’. It is, according to Vernant, this political conception that provides the model for Anaximander’s cosmology, in which the reciprocal relations between the elements are held in equilibrium by an egalitarian order, and space is symmetrically organised around a centre occupied by the earth.

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"Anaximander wrote the words ‘for they give penalty (dik ̄e) and retribution (tisis) to each other for their injustice according to the assessment/ ordainment of time’. Just as in the cosmos the yielding of one extreme to its opposite is – within a certain time – inevitable (notably in seasonal change), so at the heart of the judicial process is the inevitability – within a certain time – of compensation of victim by transgressor. Accordingly the cosmic process is imagined in terms of the judicial assessment and ordainment (by time or Time) of compensation.
just as there is no nomos (law, convention) in Homer, even in the trial scene, but rather dik ̄e (justice, judgement, com- pensation, penalty), so too in Anaximander’s projection of judicial process onto the cosmos there is no trace of law, no ‘according to law (nomos)’ but ‘giving penalty (dik ̄e) and retribution/compensation’, and ‘according to necessity (chreo ̄n, implying debt)’.

The gift in Homer, as frequently in societies where it is economically or politically significant, may retain something of the identity of its donor: the transaction expresses a personal relation. But what is surrendered in a commercial transaction is completely and permanently separated from the person who surrenders it. The receipt of x entails the simultaneous and instantaneous loss of y, with the result that y may seem to be transformed into x. Similarly, in the payment of legal compensation for injury what is paid is entirely lost to the payer (whether or not it is imagined as embodying his identity), and the injury is – and this is vital for the resolution of the conflict – annihilated by the payment defined by the polis.

The fragment of Anaximander, our first text to represent an impersonal universe, reflects this vital social pressure towards the impersonal. On the one hand the opposites reflect antagonists, under the control of the polis, ‘giving compensation to each other’. But they also reflect the impersonal transaction into which this interpersonal relationship must, if the polis is to survive, be resolved, a transaction in which the opposed items (injury and compensation, each closely associated with one of the opposed parties) are transformed and annihilated into each other.

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"...money has a dual function, as means of payment and as measure of value. As means of payment the money seems to annihilate or absorb the injury. And as measure of value it seems to reconcile the hostile parties by locating the injury on an accepted impersonal scale of values to which other injuries, as well as a whole range of goods and services, also belong.
By providing a universal measure money permits a universe of controlled peaceful transactions. It is surely this all-embracing power of money that underlies the following praise, by the fourth- century Pythagorean statesman and philosopher Archytas, of the power of calculation to create social concord.
The discovery of calculation (logismos) ended civil conflict and increased concord. For when there is calculation there is no unfair advantage, and there is equality, for it is by calculation that we come to agreement in our transactions.
By means of monetary compensation the relationship between hostile parties is assimilated to a commercial transaction, drawn into the unlimited sphere of the circulation of commodities regulated by money as means of exchange and measure of value. The assimilation is facilitated by the fact that commercial exchange, in contrast to relations of positive reciprocity expressed for instance in gift exchange, is a relation of opposition – as in traditional hostility but in a new way: each party stands opposed to the other in his attempt to get as much as possible for himself. Commercial transactions are described with the same vocabulary as is the satisfaction of justice." [Seaford]

Xenophanes:

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"Whereas the relations between the participants (human or divine) in the sacrifice, or between monarch and subject, are direct, money bestows apparent autonomy on human beings by being interposed between them, mediating but also (because seeming to be impersonal substance) natural- ising and thereby concealing the power relations between them. Whereas in the sacrifice the current and future well-being of the participants seems to depend on personal relationships with each other and with deity, it is precisely on the uniform transcendent impersonality of monetary value that individual autonomy and prosperity and collective cohesion and prosperity seem to depend.
The Xenophanean combination of personal with impersonal differs, in that the personal is embodied no longer in the relation of reciprocity but in one controlling individual. It is as if the power of money (in the hands of the individual) is now complete, with the personal relationship of autonomous reciprocity marginalised. The individual with money commands goods and services irrespective of (reciprocal) personal relations. Although money too is in fact a relation, the relation is concealed by money appearing to be a mere thing, with the result that the individual with money (and even the money itself) may seem self-sufficient – like Xenophanes’ deity. The principle of voluntary reciprocity in the exchange of goods and services has been marginalised by the permeation of exchange by money, and hostile reciprocity has been marginalised by the judicial process of the polis (partly through monetary compensation). Corresponding with the establishment of money as a universal measure of value and means of payment and exchange is the emphasis in our sources, from Plato and Aristotle onwards, on Xenophanes as a pioneer of the view that all things are one.

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Any possessor of money may sense its omnipotence. But at the personal level this omnipotence is fully realised only in the figure of the tyrant, who (unlike the premonetary king) exercises absolute personal power largely through money, thereby uniting the impersonal omnipotence of money with its personal aspect: because money is omnipotent, the only person to fully implement its power is the (omnipotent) tyrant.
It seems that in favour of monotheism Xenophanes produced the argument that since god is the most powerful being there cannot be more than one such being, for if one was less powerful than another he would not be a god. Whence this assumption that deity is pre-eminent power? Why cannot one deity have power equal to, or less than, that of another, just as we find in Homer? The principle of reciprocity implies the co-existence of autonomous powers (divine or human), such as we find to some extent in the largely pre-state, premonetary world of Homer.

The subsequent development of money tends to eliminate the co-existence of autonomous powers. To be sure, money seems to create a new, more individualistic kind of autonomy, free of the interpersonal demands of reciprocity, but in fact dependent on the possession (and general acceptability) of the single embodiment of power in general, impersonal money (14ab). And this dependence may appear – especially from a premonetary perspective – as loss of autonomy. Moreover, the unlimit of money may concentrate apparently unlimited power in a single individual, the tyrant. In the universe imagined by Anaximander the reciprocity of autonomous powers still has a place, albeit under the overall control of the apeiron. But in the world of Xenophanes co-existence of autonomous powers has in a sense been eliminated: were there two moneys, one would soon be absorbed by the other; political power, maintained and permeated by unitary money, is itself unitary – most strikingly in the figure of the tyrant. Deity is power, and so must be (at least on the model of money and political power) ‘one’. The autocracy which Xenophanes knew, at Colophon and elsewhere, was not monarchy but tyranny: his profoundly new idea of deity did not derive from a long lost political form.

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The power of the tyrant is, to the extent that it is based on money, a mysterious combination of the personal with the impersonal. The tyrant may seem, through the impersonal ubiquity of money, to control all things – without moving from the centre, without effort, without (reciprocal) personal relations. In what then does his mysteriously self-sufficient power consist? the tyrant’s invisible control over the mysterious new abstraction – itself invisible – inherent in monetary value involves a new kind of intelligence.

Xenophanes said that most things are inferior to mind (a1 DK), and, explicitly rated intelligence above physical strength. This unprecedented and mysterious combination of the invisible impersonal omnipotence of money with the invisible omnipotent intelligence of a person exhibits the same peculiar system of features as, and is a factor in, Xenophanes’ contradictory construction of deity, who

(1) is impersonal,

(2) stays in the same place,

(3) without effort shakes all things by his thought,

(4) is self-sufficient – that is, in significant contrast to the Homeric gods, he has no need of reciprocity – and

(5) in that he is almost identified with (perceiving, thinking) invisible mind (‘all of him sees, all of him thinks, all of him hears’), is a step on the way to the idea of homogeneous abstract being.

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The tyrant’s money makes him seem autonomous, independent of the demands of reciprocity. But in fact his monetary power depends on general acceptance of the socially constructed value of his money. The money that he has in his own absolute possession has (unlike the royal treasure in the Homeric store-room, e.g. at Il. 4.143–4) no value except in its ability to circulate, and yet to possess it is to withhold it from circulation. And so the autonomy (imagined or real) of the tyrant, or indeed of any individual with money, requires the imagined separation of value from circulation. Socially constructed value becomes a thing, individu- ally possessed. And so money takes on the seeming self-sufficiency of its owner.

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If the reality is that deity is one, somehow co-extensive with the universe, and non-anthropomorphic, why do mortals believe in anthropomorphic deities (mere seeming)? Because, Xenophanes says, humans construct deities in their own image (b14) – as animals would if they could (b15), and Ethiopians actually do (b16). This is the first recorded instance of deprojection or desublimation, of the subversive notion that humans unconsciously project themselves or their institutions onto the world. In this way seeming prevails over being.

However, the presocratic view that abstract unity is more real than concrete plurality may be thought to be the opposite of the truth, in that concrete things are in a sense more real than any abstraction. Whence the presocratic inversion of reality? The idea of abstract unitary reality underly- ing the appearance of multiplicity derives in part from the fundamentality of unitary abstract value to all else. But unitary abstract value is, despite its fundamentality, in a sense unreal, real by convention only. The cosmological inversion of reality reflects the paradox that monetary value is both fundamental and in a sense unreal. Xenophanes’ awareness of the mechanism of unconscious projection does not mean that he escapes doing it himself. The presocratic cosmos is, in its various forms, a projection of human institutions (especially money) onto the cosmos no less than is the Olympus of ordinary believers.

Of this unreality or artificiality of monetary value the Greeks were early aware. Midas is imagined starving amidst his gold; and the sixth-century poet Ananius (fr. 3) notes that figs are in certain circumstances preferable to gold. Money, like anthropomorphic deity (Xenophanes), is a human construction: asses prefer garbage to gold (Heraclitus b9). The artificiality of currency (nomisma), of which the Greeks of the Classical period were well aware (7d), might have contributed to the late fifth-century insistence on the mere artificiality of nomos (law, convention) as opposed to phusis (nature)." [Seaford]

Tokos, ironically, is also the term used to describe interest...as in the interests given or demanded by banks.

Seaford touches on the reason why "blue-bloods" tend to be incestuous...marrying within their group...to the point where certain genetic mutations arise.
Can you say Jews: spiritual aristocrats, spreading the illusion of genetic parity to disappear within?

But nature abhors pooling...ergo absolutes are non-existent and would require increasing energies (resources) to come about and to be preserved.
Life being such a pooling of energies.

You so generously offered us texts by Bataille in The Accursed Share, you share with us the ancient, more primal/primitive, conception of luxury, generosity, as this giving back, this returning, this exhibiting and spending....rather than the modern idea of pooling, amassing, miserly, Semitic variant of wealth, we live in today...this Capitalism.

If we are to apply to ourselves this ancient perception, then our children are not to be safeguarded, but taught, not given a solution, but trained to find one themselves...not protected from the world but allowed to make their own way in it.
How generous a parent would that be, who births and teaches and then permits the outcome to find its own fate?

Heraclitus:

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"For Heraclitus all things occur according to the logos (b1). And so, given all this, his statement ‘all things are an exchange (antamoib ̄e) for fire and fire for all things, like goods for gold and gold for goods’ (b90) has two points of comparison: fire resembles precious metal money as universal equivalent, but also as effecting universal transformation according to the logos. The compound antamoib ̄e reinforces the idea (implicit in purchase) of an exact exchange. It is this constant universal transformation that is expressed in his famous doctrine that all things flow. As the ancient Greek proverb has it, ‘when there is money (argurion), all things run and are driven’ (fr. 216).

In contrast to pre-existing kinds of transaction (sacrificial distribution, redistribution, reciprocity, barter, plunder, etc.) monetary sale seems to be regulated by a necessity that is precisely quantified (1 vase = 5 drachmas) and yet not externally imposed: it is imposed not, on the whole, by tradition (especially not during the novelty of monetisation), nor by deity nor by law nor by force.Where then does this unprecedented combination of strict necessity and total precision come from? Because money seems to become the aim of economic activity (8d) – rather than the mere means that Aristotle later will insist that it should be (12b) – it seems to drive the circulation of goods (as well as being their universal equivalent or substrate). This directive power of money, together with its embodiment of number, may make it seem to embody the invisible, impersonal necessity regulating the unified system of universal equivalence between goods and money. ‘Invisible harmony is stronger than visible’ (b54). Just as the circulation of goods (money-goods-money etc.) is driven by (insubstantial yet all- underlying) money according to a numerical abstraction (logos) that may seem embodied in the money, so cosmic circulation (fire-things-fire etc.) is driven by (insubstantial yet all-underlying) fire according to the logos, which appears to be embodied in the fire. Both money (6g) and fire have the transcendent power to transform things into their opposite.

All things happen according to the logos (b1), and the logos is common to all men (b2). ‘Listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that all things are one’ (b50). This conception of logos is influenced by the power of money to unify all goods and all men into a single abstract system. But it also includes, appropriately for such a universalist conception, the meaning of logos as verbal account. Logos, whether monetary or verbal, is a unifying abstraction that transcends individual sense data. The verbal logos (singular) does not cover all discourse, but shares with its verb legein the sense (albeit not always present) of an account that is precise and complete. ‘A logos aims at conveying something, at expounding a given subject. Its main function is to disclose it and present the matter so that it be understood.’ This aspect is common to monetary and verbal account, and explains their designation by the same word (logos, account).

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In the world inhabited by Heraclitus the power of genealogy is being replaced by the power of money. Just as the previous history of an object (in gift exchanges or as originating with a god) that mattered so much in Homer is less important than its monetary value, so the destiny of a person becomes determined less by his descent, and more by the new universal network of impersonal exchanges regulated by monetary logos. Accordingly the contradiction (notably between mortality and immortality) that in mystic doctrine is inferred from mythical genealogy is for Heraclitus inherent in universal, impersonal circulation. This systematic abstraction of contradiction, detached from myth, arises from fusion of the traditional mystic logos with the new monetary logos. The fusion is facilitated by the similarity of the two kinds of logoi, each denoted by the same word, each a precise and yet comprehensive account.

Further, the two logoi resemble each other also in content. The contradictions embodied in Orphic mystic theogony – between the many and the one, between mortality and immortality – are central also to Heraclitus’ cosmology. His cosmos is an immortal fire, which is transformed into everything else, and so is both one and many.
This transition of the same contradictions from mystic genealogy to the universal cosmology of Heraclitus is effected by the influence of the universal circulation of money.
Like Heraclitean fire and the mystic soul, monetary value is a single entity that in a sense persists (albeit transformed) through all exchanges. Just as the individual is mortal and yet contains in his soul the immortal fire that persists beyond the transformation that we call his death, so money contains the permanent value that persists beyond its transformation into goods. Heraclitus compares the universal exchangeability of fire with that of (immortal) gold, and says of the thumos (anger or spirit) that ‘what it desires it buys at the price of soul’ (psuch ̄e) (b85).

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Another factor is that money, like mystic ritual and doctrine, seems to have the transcendent power to unite opposites of various kinds (6g). The unlimited power of money to transform anything into anything may seem like a transcendent power to unite opposites. Further, one of the oppositions united by money is that between the two parties to a monetary transaction. Although monetary logos unites all things and all men, monetary purchase involves (qua monetary purchase) a historically unprecedented mutual absolute egotism: each party is seen to desire his maximum advantage to a degree beyond all other kinds of transaction (such as gift-exchange). The logos of money makes the transaction possible by uniting the opposed parties. This paradox is reflected in the following words of Heraclitus.
They do not understand how in being at variance it agrees with itself; backward- stretching harmonia as of bow and lyre.
It must be known that war is communal (xunos) and conflict is justice, and that all things happen according to conflict and necessity. (b80 (cf. a22))
Reciprocal hostility produces alternating injustice, and this (under the control of the state) is reflected in Anaximander (10b); but both hostile and friendly reciprocity tend to be replaced by the monetary transaction, which is, as in the Heraclitean paradox, itself simultaneously conflict (as mutual absolute egotism) and communal justice (being accepted by both parties and governed by the logos), as well as according to necessity.

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Heraclitus’ notion of a single all-controlling but abstract-invisible logos, present in world and in soul, is formed out of the mutual reinforcement between on the one hand the single all-controlling abstract-invisible logos of money and on the other the invisible unitary self, whose interior control over multiplicity by abstraction from sensation permits its grasp of the abstract logos out there in the world. Hence perhaps the possibility of the profound individualism of ‘I sought myself ’ (b101)." [Seaford]

Satyr wrote:

Tokos, ironically, is also the term used to describe interest...as in the interests given or demanded by banks.

I wonder if it has a more wider Indo-European root and is related to the Token, seal, oath, promise...

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You so generously offered us texts by Bataille in The Accursed Share, you share with us the ancient, more primal/primitive, conception of luxury, generosity, as this giving back, this returning, this exhibiting and spending....rather than the modern idea of pooling, amassing, miserly, Semitic variant of wealth, we live in today...this Capitalism.

Exactly, how Sloterdijk crafts his critique of the J.Xt. morality in communism, etc. - Rage-acquisition is just built up like some banking-interest in constant futuristic deferrment, never to blow-up, never let to circulate, like how Achilles explodes, and the Homeric passion erupts out, bringing a catharsis, a transformation.

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"Just like the monetary economy, the rage economy passes a critical marker once rage has advanced from local accumulation and selective explosion to the level of a systematic investment and cyclic increase. In the case of money, one calls this difference the transition from treasure hoard- ing to capital. For rage, the corresponding transformation is reached once the vengeful infliction of pain is transformed from revenge to revolution. Revolution cannot be a matter of the resentment of an isolated private person, although such affects are also instantiated in its decisive moment. Revolution rather implies the creation of a bank of rage whose investments should be considered in as precise detail as an army operation before a final battle, or actions of a multinational corporation before being taken over by a hostile competitor.
The concept of the coming "revolution," considered in light of the events of 1917, finalizes the transition from the actualism to the futurism of rage. It implies a complete dismissal of the principle of expression. Vengeful acts of expression mean nothing more than a narcissistic expenditure of energy. The professional revolutionary, who is working as an employee of a bank of rage, does not express individual tensions, he follows a plan. This presup- poses the complete subordination of revolutionary affects under the com- mercial strategy."[Sloterdijk, Rage and Time]

(p.s. I'll edit the quotes more contextually when I get the time.)

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If we are to apply to ourselves this ancient perception, then our children are not to be safeguarded, but taught, not given a solution, but trained to find one themselves...not protected from the world but allowed to make their own way in it.
How generous a parent would that be, who births and teaches and then permits the outcome to find its own fate?

Lovely words.

Parmenides:

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It was tentatively suggested almost fifty years ago by George Thomson that ‘the Parmenidean One, together with the later idea of “substance”, may be described as a reflex or projection of the substance of exchange value.’ Why so? Because the Parmenidean One is (among other things) pure abstraction, stripped of everything concrete, sensual, qualitative. Such a strange and unprecedented notion arises as the projection of abstract exchange value, to which the specificity of concrete, sensual, qualitative features is irrelevant. A (similar) connection between philosophy and the category of property called ‘invisible being’ was made independently, at about the same time, and no less tentatively, by Louis Gernet.
Thomson’s formulation, important though it is, claims too little and too much. It claims too little because in fact the Parmenidean One is not a sudden break but the culmination of a tendency (towards ab- straction of a single principle) already present in earlier Ionian cosmology (12b). Accordingly, if ‘exchange value’ was a factor in the construction of Parmenides’ One, then it may have been a factor in the construction of earlier Ionian cosmology also.
Exchange value is an abstraction that finds concrete embodiment in money. The rapid development, in the lifetime of Parmenides, of a radically new kind of money (coinage), whose only function is to embody exchange-value, is one among a series of factors (11b) in a process making for the Parmenidean representation of reality as the abstract One. On Parmenides we agree with Feyerabend that
the uniformity of the real World, or of Being, could be proved only if a corresponding uniformity had already entered the premises . . .

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According to Parmenides mortals have erroneously applied to what exists words of coming-to-be and perishing, being and not being, changing place and changing colour (b8.38–41). The goddess warns against using sight and hearing: ‘judge rather by logos the contentious refutation spoken by me’ (b7). The senses convey the error that what exists is mul- tiple and changing. Really it is one, invariant in time and space (eternal, unchanging, unmoving, homogeneous), self-sufficient, limited.
The antithesis between Heraclitus and Parmenides reflects the division between the concrete multiplicity of goods and the unitary abstract value of money. Whereas Heraclitus focuses on the relation between concrete multiplicity and the unitary abstract logos, with Parmenides withdrawal from the concrete reaches the stage of focusing (in his Way of Truth) only on what is abstracted, with radical epistemological consequences. The abstraction of monetary value is in Parmenides intensified by being imagined in a sphere of its own, abstracted even from circulation. The One is entirely abstracted from the many, identity from change, ab- stract from concrete. The transcendence inherent in monetary value, the effacement of its genesis in the circulation of commodities, is in Parmenides perfected.

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What I am suggesting is that fundamental to the process by which Parmenides arrives at the idea of a single, self-sufficient, impersonal (but with hints of personhood: 11b), unchanging, abstract sphere as all that exists is the ideology of economic self-sufficiency, reinforced and made abstract by the all-pervasive abstraction of money. A similar process is found in the Timaeus, in which the aristocratic Plato reasons thus. The creator of the universe used two fundamental principles: one is that the homogeneous is better than the unlike (33b7), the other that ‘being self-sufficient it would be better than lacking anything’ (33d).

The result is a universe that is – though personal – spherical and all there is, and so has no need of eyes and ears and organs of eating and breathing and hands and feet, with ‘all that he suffers and does occurring in and by himself ’. It is ‘one and solitary, but because of its virtue able to be (or converse) with itself, needing no other, a sufficient acquaintance and friend for itself ’.
Value separated from circulation is self-identical: the value of goods so separated is neither monetary nor as barter but inheres entirely in themselves as use-value. The economic self-sufficiency of the individual consists in the self-identity of the value of his goods. Money, on the other hand, is valuable only in payment or exchange. However, the integrative interpersonal power that is monetary value depends, we remember (10c), on disguising itself as an abstract thing independent of all interpersonal relations – self-identical and yet all-pervasive, and so easily imagined as present even in goods separated from circulation. As we noted a-propos of the unmoving self-sufficient deity of Xenophanes, money may, by dispensing with reciprocity, itself paradoxically seem self-sufficient (10d). Although valuable only in payment or exchange, it can paradoxically only be pos- sessed – together with its imagined virtues of self-sufficiency, unchangingness, and abstract fundamentality – by being withheld from payment and exchange, as ‘a mere phantom of real wealth’.91 And so idealised economic self-sufficiency may easily incorporate the imagined virtues of money." [Seaford]

Pythagoras:

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Fortunately though the next Pythagorean writings to survive are fragments from the pen of an active politician, Archytas of Tarentum (early fourth century bc).
The discovery of calculation (logismos) ended civil conflict and increased concord. For when there is calculation there is no unfair advantage, and there is equality, for it is by calculation that we come to agreement in our transactions. Because of it the poor receive from the powerful and the rich give to the needy, with both confident that through it they will have their fair share. As rod (standard) and preventer of the unjust, it stops those who know how to calculate before they commit injustice, persuading them that they will not be able to escape detection when they come up against it. Those who do not know how to calculate it prevents from committing injustice by showing them that in this (i.e. their inability to calculate) they are committing injustice.

The agreement created in private dealings by numerical calculation is extended to the citizen body as a whole, overcoming the division between rich and poor, as well as, significantly, the division between those who know how to calculate and those who do not. Mathematics, ethical self-restraint, and politics are all attributed by our sources to early Pythagoreanism. The case of Archytas shows how they may have been interrelated.
Among the very few mentions of Pythagoras himself before the mid- fifth century are the monist Heraclitus’ condemnation – of his ‘learning many things’ (polumathi ̄e) and ‘base skill’ (kakotechni ̄e) − and the plural- ist Empedocles’ admiration – of ‘a man of surpassing knowledge, capable especially of all kinds of clever actions, who obtained the utmost wealth of understanding’.
This suggests a man of diverse practical activity, and – together with all the other evidence, such as it is – allows us to say that it is in early Pythagoreanism, if anywhere, that we might expect to find sublimation of the concrete plurality inherent in commerce and practical politics, rather than of (as in Parmenides) the separation of unitary abstract value from circulation.

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For all things to be number, or made of number, it must be the same sort of thing as, and yet ontologically prior to, everything else. The doctrine focuses on the quantitative aspect of things to the exclusion of the qualitative, with the result that numbers seem concrete (also, perhaps, somehow abstract). Focusing on the quantitative aspect of things is what the trader does. The quality of a commodity concerns him only in so far as it affects the quantity of money that it will fetch. For him what matters about the vase is that he can buy or sell it for five drachmas. In barter, the vase may traditionally be exchanged for two sacks of grain. Or it may be exchangeable for different things – two sacks of grain or five fishes or three knives. But with the development of monetary value the vase seems to embody a single abstraction – five (drachmas). The association with a single number is even more likely in the case of a coin, because the value of the coin is (unlike the price of vases) unchanging, and into it enters an element of convention that separates it – up to a point – from the material value of the coin (7d). Slight damage may reduce the value of a vase, but not of a coin. Unprecedentedly in history, number seems to inhere in things." [Seaford]

Plato:

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"Money is for Plato a model of permanent invisible value: the guardians, in the Republic (416e), should – in contrast to the polluting human currency (nomisma) of the majority of the people – have divine gold and silver money (chrusion kai argurion) from the gods always presen in their souls. In Plato, no less than in Parmenides, sublimated money is homogeneous, permanent, self-sufficient, and invisible.

Traditionally gold and silver embodied aristocratic prestige and were associated with immortality (2c). But coinage puts them into general circulation. The response of Plato is to preserve their distinct status by locating them within the soul. The immortal value of precious metal is recuperated, secluded (like the guardians themselves) from circulation, by becoming invisible."[Seaford]

Protagoras:

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"Culture, the human creation of order – whether action or thought – delimits from a continuum: a vase is delimited from the continuum of earth, the ‘Athenians’ from people in general. This delimitation determines ontology, decisions on what does and does not exist. This is a truth underlying Protagoras’ statement.
Pricing involves both delimitation and measurement (peras and metron). It both delimits specific sums from the unlimited homogeneous continuum of monetary value (13b) and creates a universe of chremata differentiated by number, not unlike the universe imagined by the Pythagoreans. Aristotle states that currency (nomisma) measures all things (panta . . . metrei), and defines chr ̄emata as ‘all things of which the value is measured (metreitai) by currency’ (5b). ‘Humankind is the metron of all chr ̄emata’ means that we measure or limit all things, thereby establishing their identity and so in a sense their existence (‘of the things that are that they are . . .’). Philolaus claims that knowing involves limiting (13b) and that ‘all things that are known have number. For it is not possible that anything whatsoever be understood or known without this’ (b4).

The universality of currency as a metron constituting chr ̄emata (Aristotle) is not however enough to establish it as the factor behind Protagoras’ epistemology. Universal quantifying delimitation can be performed also by measurement of space or weight. But monetary measurement has another feature that measurement of space or weight does not. As we have seen, the tradition of deprojection (e.g. animals would project gods in their own image, and they prefer garbage to gold), which in a sense culminated in Protagoras, also produced, in his lifetime, awareness that such fundamen- tals as deity and monetary value are socially constructed.

Whereas spatial or weight measurement is human dividing up of objective reality, monetary measure is subjective. An identical vase or coin always has the same weight and spatial dimensions but may change its value. Protagoras’ emphasis, I have noted, is on humankind (anthro ̄pos). It is the combination, in the monetary metron, of universality with manifest subjectivity that produces the idea that the universe of delimited, quantified things depends on de- limiting quantification by humankind. This is not to say that Protagoras’ statement is about monetary value: metron refers rather to any kind of quantifying delimitation. My suggestion is rather that it was the merely human projection (despite its fundamentality) of universal monetary measure that was, consciously or unconsciously, an important factor in the emergence of Protagoras’ universal subjectivism.

Whereas the Parmenidean One represents the sublimation of monetary value abstracted even from circulation, with a consequent absolute distinction between being and seeming, it was the desublimation of monetary value, its restoration to human thought and practice, that contributed to Protagoras’ subjectivist challenge to the distinction between being and seeming.
Protagoras, like the presocratics generally, projects monetary value onto the universe, but his projection is dominated by the (delimiting) subjectivity of monetary value – and so in a sense also deprojects itself. This deprojection implies the possibility of individual isolation. Monetary value is created by collective assent to it, and so each of us is free to withdraw assent without incurring factual error. Accordingly Plato, who by contrast recuperates the objectivity of monetary value in the soul by giving it a divine origin (12b), infers from the subjectivism of Protagoras the disturbing conclusion that there is no way of resolving differences in what seems to each of us. But this is only one of the respects in which money may lead to an appearance of individual isolation." [Seaford]

Silenus:

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"There was an old story that Silenus was once captured by Midas, according to Herodotus in Midas’ garden where roses grew uncultivated. Forced to reveal his wisdom, Silenus spoke ‘about natural and ancient things’. He called Midas ‘ephemeral’, and revealed that for humankind the best thing is never to have been born, the second best to die as soon as possible. Dionysus, glad at the release of Silenus – or in another version Silenus himself – offered Midas the fulfilment of any wish. Midas chose the power to turn all things into gold by his touch, a choice that he subsequently regretted on finding even his food as gold. For Aristotle (Pol. 1257b16) this indicates the merely conventional power of money: a man may starve amidst his money. We may add a psychological dimension: all things are seen in terms of money; absorption in happiness in the abstract (money) is incapacity for happiness in the concrete. Midas washed his gold-making power off into the river Pactolus, thereby endowing the river with the gold from which in fact were made the first coins. This legendary Midas arose from the historical Phrygian king Midas, whose Greek wife was one of those said to have been the first to mint coins, and who impressed the Greeks by being the first foreigner to make dedications at Delphi (Hdt. 1.14).

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The myth of Midas represents the reaction of the Greek mythical imagination to the novel and startling power of precious metal as universal equivalent. But why the connection with Silenus? In his animal-like nature, in speaking of ‘natural and ancient things’, and in his wise disdain for humankind as embodied in the human for whom all nature becomes gold, Silenus belongs to the world of nature, of use-value, outside and prior to the polis, and prior to the advent of the all-pervasive power of money. Even the roses growing uncultivated may be significant as indicating primeval Utopia.

Along with this antithesis between money and nature, this contempt for humankind estranged by money from nature, there is, in Silenus’ reply, the antithesis between immortality and ‘ephemeral’ mortality. The identity and immortal happiness of the satyr or silen may be acquired through Dionysiac initiation, and so the antithesis may reflect Silenus’ disdain for the mortality of even the wealthiest uninitiated. The question ‘what is best for humankind?’ could easily be answered with ‘money’, but better with the permanent happiness promised by the makarismos uttered in the Dionysiac mysteries.

The mortality–immortality antithesis has, moreover, a special point in relation to Midas as the man of money. The interposition of money between humankind and nature has a temporal dimension. Money always embodies the deferment of the enjoyment of what it may subsequently purchase. With money used as a store of wealth, such deferment frequently extends beyond the lifetime of its owner, a process facilitated by the notion of monetary value as unchanging, permanent (12c). The accumulation of money may therefore imply forgetfulness of one’s own mortality, a bogus eternity quite unlike the eternity bestowed by mystic initiation. Nobody is more suitable to remind Midas of his mortality than Silenus, who combines immortality with immediacy of enjoyment, complete neglect of its deferral.
The opposition between Silenus and money is made explicit in a fragment of Pindar (157), in which Silenus says to the aulos-player Olympus ‘ephemeral wretch, you say foolish things to me in boasting of money’.
Silenus speaks probably as Olympus’ aulos teacher, drawing a distinction between the use-value and the exchange-value of its music. I describe elsewhere how the remains of satyric drama contain several passages based on the contrast between on the one hand the moneyless Dionysiac world of Silenus and the satyric thiasos, of immediate pleasure and the creation of culture (notably wine and musical instruments) out of nature, and on the other hand the powerful man of money, who may be their captor.

The pervasive unity of opposites in the world of Heraclitus and of Athenian tragedy, and its expression in oxymora, derive in part from mystery cult.
In Heraclitus and sometimes in tragedy the transcendent power of money to unite opposites, to efface all distinctions between things and even between people, converges with the ancient power of mystery cult to unite opposites. The opposition between intimate and enemy, typically fused by money and by the tyrannical man of money, is in tragedy expressed in
oxymora and may be fundamental to the tragic plot." [Seaford]

There will be blood wrote:

Anfang wrote:

Wealth can be destroyed, all it takes is time and the erosive forces of nature.

Wealth is subjective and does not exist as an absolute. Lets say everybody has 100000 points to distribute onto items according to their desires. No matter what happens the same amount points per capita will always exists, wealth being subjected to peoples whims. This is why marketing is so useful, and one of the main contributers to wealth inequality. There exists no such thing as intrinsic value, only estimated value.

The word wealth to me means something like infastructure, industries, houses, farms, a library, organized sustainable culture and so on. It's order. And that order does decay, it has to be maintained.

What people value is depending on their needs and needs can be manipulated, rerouted by marketing, ideologies and so on, true.

Let's say you have a community of very ineffective people, or living in an environment which they aren't adapted to - they can't sustain themselves. So their numbers will dwindle. In such an environment there is just not enough to go around. Order is on the decline, to such an extent that people just die, one after another - the disordering of their bodies. Wealth is the opposite, it's an accumulated surplus which comes in many forms.

So wealth/capita can and does dwindle at the moment. Similar to organisms, there is a phase of growth and a phase of decay -> death. Then there will be more free 'space' again for something new, eventually.

I think what you are referring to is the distribution of wealth and the social status which is connected to it. If everybody is living in a cave and I'm the only one with a simple hut with a fireplace then I am quite wealthy compared to the average.

Money is a promise on wealth. Will that promise be kept? Right now it doesn't look like it at all. It can't be kept, not by far - the goods and services aren't there, or better, they won't be there to the extent people are anticipating. That includes all forms of 'paper wealth' and promises on future services.

And about bitcoin. I don't trade but if I'd had to guess then I'd anticipate a pullback to 300$ next. After that, who knows. Back to new highs or something else.

Regarding Bitcoins I don't really care to much about short term fluctuations. It's only currently implemented in online businesses, and trouble spot areas where there's massive inflation and price controls such as Venezuela and Argentina. As more and more economies start to deteriorate, one can only hope it will catch on.

It sure ain't no insurance policy. I got other things for that. Just one hell of a bet, that might hit the jackpot. If some of these hedge fund managers who collectively handle trillions of dollars starts investing in it, they all will, and then there's no telling how high it would go.

Banks and governments being the two big losers, if it doesn't explode, I would expect some kind of global conspiracy. Somehow they have to stop it, just don't know how they could at this moment. I've never really been a conspiracy buff, always looked at things from a bottom-up perspective, but how this thing turns out will be telling. One of the most paradigm shifting technologies ever, it would take some fucking effort to stop it.

The current rally was due to the positive press on it by the Chinese state run media. I knew it would go up like crazy after that, and it did. I think more and more governments will start to promote it, as protection against the dollar implosion.

It definitely can go down considerably, the I look at it is that I want to accumulate as much as possible before it really goes up. I'm constantly buying, but only with as much as i'm willing to lose. It's a five year investment, we'll see how it goes.

I see talk about bitcoin now all over the place, also in areas which don't discuss economic matters. This means that the masses are now investing. Whenever that happens there is a peak incoming rather soon which the ones in the know use to sell their huge quantities into.

Was the same with gold 2 years ago - When everybody and their dog start talking about something then it's time to think about switching gears, at least temporarily. Similarily, when the most enthusiastic hardcore crowd starts to sound defeated then price has reached a low. (This doesn't change the nature of a secular bull market though, this has to be observed through longer periods of time)

Indeed. I‘m going to sell more than half my holdings in about two weeks. Will buy additional physical silver as I think it‘s one of the most undervalued hard assets currently.  

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All the alt-coins are only traded with bitcoins, whenever the price of a bicoin fluctuates they all follow, but within a 6-12h reactive buffer. Just abusing that knowledge you can more than double whatever bitcoin gains there are.

Obviously whatever gains some investors have made, it will have to be paid for by the losses of newly entered investors, and in that sense the ship has already set sail by my estimation.

Still it remains a very useful tool for certain activities. It makes a lot of industries completely obsolete. The amount of time and other resources that have gone into advancing specifically the bitcoin network amounts maybe to a value of a billion dollars. No other network will be able to surpass it, so it does have somewhat intrinsic value given all the functions it has and innate scarcity. It also currently has a very high cost of mining.

Currently all the energy that would be going into hard assets are instead being redirected to the virtual realm which is considerably less manipulated. There have been two attempts at starting a gold backed virtual currency, both shutdown by the government, obvious suppression, and bitcoin is helping it, thus not really a threat to the major schemes.

China is going along with it all, soon they will be the biggest holder of gold, mainly due to the manipulation, all intended on buying America time in offsetting their dollar implosion.

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Greedy bastards wanted to much, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Kind of sad how the Treaty of Versailles payments made Great Britain and the other victors largely poorer as it crushed many local industries. This time it‘s China with the productive surpluses, threatening the declining powers. Only time can tell as to what will happen next.



French president and general Charles de Gaulle was one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. Sought France to be a superpower absolutely independent of Anglo influence, a noble attempt, but ultimately unsuccessful.


Former Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamed Mahathir and Vladimir Putin are in the forerunning for greatest 21st century statesman. It‘s simply amazing what independence from the IMF and good leadership can do to a country. I‘ve been to Malaysia, and looks exactly like Singapore whilst being more than three times cheaper than Western Europe, also much less moral decay in comparison to places like the Philippines or Thailand.

Putin rid Russia of all the liberal aka Jewish oligarchs, that such people are able to get in power gives showing to the decline of their influence. Illustrates Plato‘s emphasis on the philosopher king as the means of ridding the decadent corruptors.

This one is a must watch.

TWBB wrote:

Will buy additional physical silver as I think it‘s one of the most undervalued hard assets currently.

Silver is looking quite good at the moment - it lost more than 50% of its latest peak while the fundamentals haven't changed. Could very well be that the downwards phase has run out of steam and time now.

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Obviously whatever gains some investors have made, it will have to be paid for by the losses of newly entered investors, and in that sense the ship has already set sail by my estimation.

It's a matter of confidence and convenience. If people can buy and sell, exchange for provided value, on the internets very conveniently, with little to no taxes, then bitcoin sounds quite nice. But I think most of the invested money is thinking in terms of dollar, in terms of what they can buy in the real world after they exchanged their bitcoin money back into dollars and buy stuff - after they made a fortune. Are most of them really confident, are they believers in bitcoin or is it for them just a vehicle to try and get rich by pulling out at some point?

If that's the case then a big part of the bitcoin value is derived from a ponzi-scheme, a confidence pyramid investing. A successful pyramid scheme is very profitable for those who get in early and know how to exit at the right time. Actually, they determine the end of the exponential rise.

Bitcoin started out at 5 cents, 0.05$ per bitcoin. If someone bought bitcoins for a 1000$ in 2010 then it would translate into 20 million $ if he were to sell them all at 1000$ per coin today.

That's a really strong temptation, even for the most feverish believer. I'd diversify at least a big chunk of that money and make other more conservative investments. i think at least 90% of the money in that system, now, is in there for the gamble.