21–30 of 95 posts
Sooooo the issue with bitcoin+socialism would be the lack of easily centralized controls by which the party/state can manipulate the currency and that people are incapable of doing altruistic good, therefore the party/state must have those controls? Authoritarians are gross.
Sooooo the issue with bitcoin+socialism would be the lack of easily centralized controls by which the party/state can manipulate the currency and that people are incapable of doing altruistic good, therefore the party/state must have those controls? Authoritarians are gross.
There are huge swaths of the world where this isn't true. Short of making computing devices and internet connectivity human rights, these assumptions compound existing inequalities.
> Under the gold and silver standards, the public money supply was fixed – and could not be easily manipulated by the state (either the government or the, then non-existent, Fed). But that did not stop private bankers from leveraging public money out of thin air to create huge quantities of private money with which to fund the Robber Barons, i.e. the Jeff Bezoses, of the era. But didn't the creation of private money…
Lightning has nothing to do with holding and transporting Bitcoin. Holding Bitcoin is literally free. Transporting Bitcoin can also be free, depending on what you mean by transporting.
On-chain? No, that may have been true in the early days (pre 2013?) but a tx fee has to be included unless you want your money held in the mempool. You may get lucky if it has high days destroyed, but that's not really a risk you want to take unless you care about the funds and want to eventually have to resort to a CPFP tx. I did a 18 satoshi/byte tx and it took a few hours to confirm, which for my purposes was entirely fine as it was a low sum. But as we get more people onboard On-chain should only really be used for important, secure, and therefore commanding a higher fee, transactions than would/could be done as a LN tx.
And actually LN has everything to do with how bitcoin is transported, note the lower-case here, LN makes it instant and near no cost tx fees.
Holding, as you said, can be done for free. Many old schoolers never really opted for hardware wallets, as the paper-wallet method can be just as secure, despite it requiring far more planning and contingencies.
I liked Yanis when he was lambasting the Merkle/Rumpy governed EU and telling them they'd prefer to default and exit the EU and take Cyprus and the PIIGS with them. However, ever since the party he helped create (Syriza) failed to do anything different in Greece than the Trokia before it I completely tuned out to him and his tired rhetoric has lost any of its appeal.
And he is right, Bitcoin is completely agnostic to Political Ideology or its proposed factions, in fact I'd say if you understand what it really is: that is entirely the point!
I'm not going to read his article, but if that is his only contention, then he is right. Socialists need not apply, and if the Petro is any indication of what happens when Socialists create their own cryptocurrency (only to see it fail, in value or utility and then have to accept Bitcoin anyway for their services) it doesn't really matter, and proves the above.
Normally, a big problem in crypto-currency blog posts is that an ill-informed author blathers on about supposed technical features of blockchains. But this article is remarkable in that it doesn't mention any feature or property of bitcoin at all! You could replace the word 'bitcoin' in the page with any other currency, monetary system or whatever means of accounting that you like (using shells for currency, perhaps?…
It doesn't talk about technical features because it's about the macroeconomic features (unsurprisingly, as Varoufakis is an economist). He criticises it because it removes the ability of central banks to sharply increase the money supply during a crisis. Whether or not you agree with his argument, it is quite specific in that respect.
Take out the word 'bitcoin' from this, and all the points still stand. The super-rich tend to be the ones with power, and they are never motivated to change this.
(Which is kind of a truism really, because if the super-rich & powerful were willing to be generous, they wouldn't be super-rich in the first place...)
Sooooo the issue with bitcoin+socialism would be the lack of easily centralized controls by which the party/state can manipulate the currency and that people are incapable of doing altruistic good, therefore the party/state must have those controls? Authoritarians are gross.
The issue is that Bitcoin is a currency that has both a fixed supply, and is naturally controlled by the very richest people. This leads to a series of incentives and effects of monetary policy that creates conditions where the average person loses out, big time.
> Under the gold and silver standards, the public money supply was fixed – and could not be easily manipulated by the state (either the government or the, then non-existent, Fed). But that did not stop private bankers from leveraging public money out of thin air to create huge quantities of private money with which to fund the Robber Barons, i.e. the Jeff Bezoses, of the era. But didn't the creation of private money…
There are extremely powerful interest groups that want money to be creatable on demand (and not subtle ones; the public loves credit). If a sound money system is in use (Gold, Bitcoin, etc) then it may hold for a long while but sooner or later be re-defined out of the system and replaced with something that can be created. The process has nothing to do with the other underlying technical realities of the sound money, the problem being solved is the soundness of the money itself.
For me Bitcoin further exacerbates the already terrible distribution of wealth in our world. BTC is purely a play for the "rich" folks. I say "rich" because it needs not just tech access and disposable money barriers but also has the additional tech knowledge barrier to it.
What we seem to actually be getting is multiple cryptocurrencies, in addition to fiat. Under these conditions, if the world falls into depression, where money is too scarce, then an easy solution is to launch new currencies. On blockchains that support smart contracts, this would be easy to do.
If Hayek was on the right track with his advocacy of competing currencies, this could be a more stable system than we have now. Easy deployment of local currencies could also help support local businesses over large monopolies.
Normally, a big problem in crypto-currency blog posts is that an ill-informed author blathers on about supposed technical features of blockchains. But this article is remarkable in that it doesn't mention any feature or property of bitcoin at all! You could replace the word 'bitcoin' in the page with any other currency, monetary system or whatever means of accounting that you like (using shells for currency, perhaps?…
It isn't an ill-informed author, Yanis Varoufakis is a very respected and competent economist. Of course! You could replace Bitcoin with any other fixed supply currency . This is literally the point of the article! He is arguing that Bitcoin cannot work for the common man, because it has all the issues of fixed-supply currencies that lead to fiat currency. Transitioning to Bitcoin would be akin to restoring the Brett…