Crypto YouTuber Moves to Saipan to Escape ‘Totalitarian Tyranny’

Published at: May 21, 2020

Vin Armani, the crypto YouTuber and former star of Showtime’s Gigolos, packed up his life and family and moved to a tiny Pacific island in April to ride out the pandemic and escape the “totalitarian tyranny” he predicted was about to occur.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, the founder of CoinText said he believed there was a very good chance of him “being disappeared” if he had stayed in California as he was “an undesirable” in the eyes of unnamed forces.

Like a number of prominent members of Crypto Twitter, Armani believes the authorities are using COVID-19 as a smokescreen to impose authoritarian measures.

As things started getting weird… I started to be very public on Twitter… started making predictions. All the predictions started coming true, like one after the other.

He took his wife and two children to Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands in early April. This was shortly before COVID-19 restrictions severely limited travel options to the area. The islands are a United States Commonwealth, making it far easier for citizens to access. Only about 52,000 people live on Saipan, but Armani was able to secure housing close to the beach thanks to a friend in the crypto community.

Citing his involvement with cryptocurrency as one of the factors determining the move, Armani tweeted that his choices were between “just [being] quiet and not [saying] anything,” or escaping to a territory with “no IRS or ICE jurisdiction. No national guard. No real military presence. Very laid back police (there’s next to no crime, no violent crime). No code enforcement dept.”

Leaving the U.S. behind

The predictions that Armani referred to are scattered across a number of his tweets. On March 14, he tweeted about the government “rounding people up” and “isolating” them based on biological markers in order to “cleanse the nation of disease.”

“We did this not even 100 years ago folks. Y’all are really this blind that you’re going to walk into totalitarianism again?”

Most recently, Armani has been concerned about “Big Brother” tech in contact tracing technology as well as the government regulating the types of purchases that four million Americans are allowed to make with the stimulus prepaid debit cards. 

You thought I was bullshitting when I kept telling you, early on, that they would be “rounding people up” in America?You thought I was overreacting when I packed up my family and got on the last flight to an obscure island in the middle of the Pacific?Have fun. 🤷 https://t.co/zExijipJCL pic.twitter.com/pCBipRjkK9

— Ⓥin Ⓐrmani (@vinarmani) May 3, 2020

Advocate of cryptocurrencies since 2018

Staying active in the crypto world as a host of the Free Talk Live radio program, Armani still sees the financial crisis as “an opportunity for a parallel economy.”

“There is no financial savior,” he said, “You’re going to start to see informal economies pop up and the natural choice for them is going to be Bitcoin… you’re going to see that on a massive scale.”

Tags
Blockchain
United States
Cryptocurrencies
Coronavirus
Related Posts
What the COVID-19 pandemic means for blockchain and crypto
In March 2020, COVID-19 was declared by the World Health Organization to be a pandemic. Just over six months after that declaration, there have been almost 33 million cases of the disease worldwide and nearly 1 million deaths. While most of the stories from the pandemic involve its astronomical cost in terms of human life and suffering, the disease has also revealed a number of problems in our global economic infrastructure. A surprising number of these weaknesses might be addressed, or at least reduced, with blockchain technology. As a result of COVID-19, businesses around the globe, including in the most …
Technology / Sept. 29, 2020
Crypto Answers to the Global Crisis: Bitcoin's Do-or-Die Moment
In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former Wall Street trader turned professor, described the idea of a “black swan” event. Black swans are defined as being rare, of major consequence and impossible to predict, though he tempered their predictability with an acknowledgment that, in hindsight, they are explainable. A confluence of events has arisen in 2020 to create a black swan event unlike anything the world has witnessed since the Great Depression. It dwarfs even the 2008 financial crisis. After the global financial crisis of 2008, Taleb spoke of the importance of factoring in the possibility of black swan events …
Blockchain / April 28, 2020
OKEx Executive: Digital Currency as a Basis of Post-Crisis World Order
The global economic crisis caused by the coronavirus panic is so severe that the world’s most powerful central bank, the United States Federal Reserve, announced “QE infinity.” Bank of America Securities is estimating that the Fed could spend up to $8 trillion. While the U.S. pledged to help support stocks with infinite asset purchases, it is believed that the U.S. unemployment rate could nonetheless hit 30% for the first time since the Great Depression. The dollar’s reserve status continues to be questioned, especially as policymakers expand the money supply. The hegemony of one sovereign currency is proving to be a …
Blockchain / May 7, 2020
India’s Lift of Cryptocurrency Trading in the Context of COVID-19
In one of 2020’s biggest stories about cryptocurrencies so far, the Indian Supreme Court struck down a blanket ban on trading cryptocurrencies issued by the Reserve Bank of India earlier in the year. Then, March happened, and everything changed as COVID-19 spread around the world, inducing quarantines across the world and stoking unprecedented volatility in financial markets. India is now in a national 21-day lockdown with industries shuttered and strict enforcement doled out by the government. Following similar initiatives by other countries affected by the viral pandemic, the COVID-19 fallout changes the narrative of the Supreme Court ruling — fomenting …
Blockchain / April 21, 2020
The Need to Report Carbon Emissions Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic
JPMorgan Chase, the first American bank to create and successfully test a digital coin representing a fiat currency, also provided the most fossil fuel financing out of any bank in the world, according to a 2019 report titled “Banking on Climate Change.” The bank recently joined a chorus of other financial institutions and endowments that have declared that they will, going forward, be reluctant to provide funding to the fossil fuel industry — which energizes emerging digital technologies and companies — in order to mitigate the effects of climate change. In a hard-hitting report released to clients on the same …
Blockchain / March 30, 2020