Quote from: morningtime on September 21, 2014, 09:45:36 AM

When the Federal Reserve decides to up inflation from 2% to 3%, increasing the money supply by say $10bn USD, they don't actually turn on the printing presses or mint new coins. This kind of money exists only in electronic form - they don't need to go mine for gold, nor print paper money. This inflation is created "from nothing" (believe it or not).

The Fed has the power to simply add a number to a database record that resembles someones bank account.

With my colleague at eCash.io we've been scratching our heads - why don't we ever hear of a heist or hack, someone adding a few zero's to their bank accounts? Either it is kept well from the media, or it simply doesn't happen. But that's the hard part to understand. Whereas Bitcoin is cryptographically secured, and no single individual can "add some zero's" to magically change 1 BTc into 1000 BTC, central bank's electronic money systems are not cryptographically secured at all. They are literally just numbers in a database.

In principle, if you think Edward Snowden was a security risk to the USA, imagine the sysadmins working for the Fed, who have root access to alter numbers for bank accounts. Why do we hear nothing of these people? Who are they? Where do they live? Of course, if we knew where they lived, they'd be in great danger, like Satoshi Nakamoto.

* Most people can't imagine that money can be invented out of thin air, by simply altering some numbers in a cental bank's database;
* Most people don't understand that "inflation" means "to create money out of nothing" (again, changing some numbers in a database)
* When we read about "bailouts", e.g. General Motors receiving billions, this is, again, just changing numbers in a database. Nobody actually had to cough up this money, savings accounts were not involved, the money came from nothing

This is financial power in its purest form: the shareholders of the Federal Reserve, a private company, have the power to create money from nothing, simply by changing a record in a database. If the people would understand this, there would be a revolution. Many billion dollar bailouts were done through the act of changing a 0 into 12,000,000,000.

Central Banks, therefore, have an incentive to cloud this truth with smokescreens, obscure language "quantitative easing, tapering", not to mention 'no audits' for over 100 years (apparently 2014 will see one). But I can't figure out why we never hear of some Anonymous group succesfully hacking bank account records. Am I missing something here?

(i) There was a well-publicized attempt to hack the Feds last year and a British citizen was subsequently charged in court.
(ii) The National Response Team protects the Feds' ~$2.8 trillion daily transactions.
(iii) A quote by Paul Volcker, former Fed Chairman: "With the best staff in the world and all the computing power we could give them, there could never be any certainty about just the right level of the federal funds rate to keep the money supply on the right path and to regulate economic activity."