The Dow has hit 20,000 for the first time ever, but rather than celebrating, some of the richest of the rich are building bunkers to prepare for a potential apocalypse.These "preppers" are making other investments too.They're buying houses in New Zealand, which has become a popular spot in case of calamity.Billionaire Peter Thiel just secured property and citizenship there.And they're getting elective surgery.Steve Huffman, the 33-year-old co-founder and CEO of the online community Reddit, got Lasik so that he'd be able to be more independent in case of emergency."If the world ends — and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble — getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass," the San Francisco resident tells Evan Osnos as part of The New Yorker's chronicle of the elite's end-of-the-world preparations."Without them, I'm f---ed."In addition to the eye surgery, Huffman has accumulated guns, ammunition and motorcycles so that he won't get caught in traffic jams during an evacuation.

The notion of "doomsday prepping" was popularized in the mainstream by the National Geographic channel's show by the same name.The show's website offers a quiz titled "How prepped are you?"so you can test your own likelihood of surviving an apocalypse.Former Facebook product manager Antonio García Martínez bought wooded land in the Pacific Northwest that he has stocked with generators, solar panels and ammo, The New Yorker reports."You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse," García Martínez says."I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now."In particular, the political climate has made many coastal elites anxious about the future."I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power — that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work," says Huffman.

"While I do believe they're quite resilient, and we've been through a lot, certainly we're going to go through a lot more."Doomsday prepping crosses political lines.When Barack Obama was elected to his second term, conservative preppers hunkered down, collecting canned goods and gold coins and buying products hawked by Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, The New Yorker reports.As today's preppers tend to have more resources, they are investing in tech-based currencies like Bitcoin as well as in precious metals, since they're looking to secure assets in systems not tied to the stability of government structures.More than half of Silicon Valley billionaires have outfitted themselves for a crisis, whether with a bunker, second home or vacation spot, estimates Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn.And prepping isn't a solitary pursuit.Tim Chang, the managing director at venture-capital firm Mayfield Fund, tells Osnos that survivalism has become a popular hobby, like bowling leagues for the 21st century.

"There's a bunch of us in the Valley.We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about back-up plans people are doing," he says.cay bitcoin 2017"It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and crypto-currency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens."nginx bitcoin"I kind of have this terror scenario: 'Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready,' " Chang says.armory bitcointalkAfter all, the same imagination that powers Silicon Valley can also terrify it.ice vault bitcoin"When you do [think big], it's pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias," says Roy Bahat, the head of a San Francisco-based venture-capital firm Bloomberg Beta.bitcoin faucet hack 2016

And the Valley's preppers have the resources to help soothe their troubled minds.free bitcoin instant payout"The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely," says Yishan Wong, an early Facebook employee and the CEO of Reddit from 2012 to 2014, to The New Yorker."They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this ... is a logical thing to do."Wong also underwent "eye surgery for survival purposes," reports Osnos.Read the full story in The New Yorker here: Doomsday prep for the super-richTheme camps and villages are the interactive core of Burning Man.An ideal theme camp should create a visually stimulating presence and provide a communal space or other opportunity for interaction.Creating a theme camp takes commitment.Our Theme Camp & Village Resource Guide will help you prepare and execute a camp, village, installation or performance, with the advice of veterans with practical experience.

Bitcoin just crashed 50% today, on news that the Chinese government has banned local exchanges from accepting deposits in Yuan.BtC was trading over $1000 yesterday; now it's down to $500 and still falling.I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: this is a start, but it's not sufficient.Let me give you a round-up below the cut.Like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached.Decisions we take about how to manage money, taxation, and the economy have consequences: by its consequences you may judge a finance system.Our current global system is pretty crap, but I submit that Bitcoin is worst.For starters, BtC is inherently deflationary.There is an upper limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be created ('mined', in the jargon: new bitcoins are created by carrying out mathematical operations which become progressively harder as the bitcoin space is explored—like calculating ever-larger prime numbers, they get further apart).This means the the cost of generating new Bitcoins rises over time, so that the value of Bitcoins rise relative to the available goods and services in the market.

Less money chasing stuff; less cash for everybody to spend (as the supply of stuff out-grows the supply of money).Hint: Deflation and Inflation are two very different things; in particular, deflation is not the opposite of inflation (although you can't have both deflation and inflation simultaneously—you get one disease or the other).Bitcoin is designed to be verifiable (forgery-resistant) but pretty much untraceable, and very easy to hide.Easier than a bunch of gold coins, anyway.And easier to ship to the opposite side of the planet at the push of a button.Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency".You can visualize it as some kind of scarce precious data resource, sort of a digital equivalent of gold.Nation-states don't control the supply of it, so it promises to bypass central banks.But there are a number of huge down-sides.Here's a link-farm to the high points: Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell (as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars).

This essay has some questionable numbers, but the underlying principle is sound.Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware.Bitcoin violates Gresham's law: Stolen electricity will drive out honest mining.(So the greatest benefits accrue to the most ruthless criminals.)Bitcoin's utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination (and drugs and child pornography).It's also inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society.You think our wonderful investment bankers aren't paying their fair share of taxes?Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion.Moreover, The Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia, and the "if this goes on" linear extrapolations imply that BtC will badly damage stable governance, not to mention redistributive taxation systems and social security/pension nets if its value continues to soar (as it seems designed to do due to its deflationary properties).