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Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

yanisvaroufakis.eu

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Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#31

Post by kyboren »

VikingCoder wrote: post #15
kerkeslager wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Holding Bitcoin is literally free. Interesting claim. How do you secure it, back it up, and bequeath it to people on your passing? Don't those things cost time and actual money?

> How do you secure it, back it up, and bequeath it to people on your passing?

Keep the private key, mnemonic, seed phrase, etc. only in your brain and perhaps your will, potentially split into pieces that are kept in the physical control of independent trusted entities.

> Don't those things cost time and actual money?

Time: yes. Actual money: perhaps, but that is not fundamentally required. For example, oral traditions are a time-honored means of transferring information to heirs.

Keep in mind we're talking about just 256 bits of information. You can scratch it on a rock and bury it in your back yard if you want.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#32

Post by chrisco255 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #10
H8crilA wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if only more people knew some history: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

This is a correlation without causation. The root cause of both fiat currency and the worker being ripped off, is globalization. Fiat currency did not cause the disconnect between productivity and wages, the same way that the disconnect between productivity and wages did not cause fiat currency. They were both caused by the shift to a complex global economy.

Why not both? Why the debate here when clearly globalization and currency debasement has an impact on society. I'll go ahead and add technology to the list. Did the information age cause a disconnect between productivity and wages? Perhaps tech + globalization ensured that we have sort of a two tiered system in the west, where information workers have largely benefitted and seen their wages and quality of life go up...but there have not been corresponding booms in the manufacturing sector to support these developments because that labor has been outsourced to developing countries?

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#33

Post by sudosysgen »

chrisco255 wrote: post #30
sudosysgen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would restoring Bretton Woods be disastrous? The late 40s through the late 60s were among the biggest economic boom years in world history and perhaps the greatest expansion of wealth and quality of living in human history.

The late 40s through the late 60s were amazing economic booms because of a small event called World War 2.

It was removed because it gave very little flexibility in monetary policy, and gravely prevented deficit spending. This led to failure to control the business cycle, as well as inflation in general, which would have been disastrous.

If we restored Bretton Woods, 2008 would have been a complete disaster, and the current recession would be orders of magnitude worse and would last much longer. As for why control over inflation and deficit spending is helpful in recession, read Krugman, or Keynes if you like the classics.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#34

Post by kerkeslager »

Of course Bitcoin is not a socialist's ally in the long run. It's fundamentally a way to get government out of money, which is exactly the opposite of socialism. Bitcoin is an anarcho-capitalist tool.

The article rightly notes that the ability to print money is relevant here, but I think they could have expressed it in simpler terms. In short: printing money is always a redistribution of wealth. If you print a million dollars and give it to a group, you've effectively taken money away from everyone else and redistributed it to that group. The pot of wealth in the country hasn't changed size, the recipients of the newly-minted money just have more of the pot.

In a socialist ideal, this is a key tool because it's one of the main ways of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. You print money and give it to the poor. This isn't creating value, obviously, it's just decreasing the value of the money held by the rich, and giving that value to the poor. A decentralized value store can't do that.

However, some socialists would argue that the ability to print money in modern western powers is primarily used to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, not the other way around. Due to this, a socialist might say it's better to use a decentralized value store now than to use a centralized value store that is used to redistribute wealth in the wrong direction.

If you're a socialist, the question on your mind with regards to bitcoin should be: Is the power to print money being used to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich? And if so, is the short term benefit of avoiding this harm worth the longer-term harm of moving value out of stores where wealth can be redistributed from the rich to the poor? These are much more complicated questions: the first might be answerable with data, but the second question involves a lot of future variables which may simply be impossible to predict.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#35

Post by vkou »

DennisP wrote: post #29

A lot of this presumes a scenario in which Bitcoin replaces fiat and become the world's sole currency. It's hard to imagine why that would happen. 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, thi…

"Money is too scarce" is not ever going to be a problem. If the monenatry supply, as a multiple of the economy is experiencing contraction, central banks can always print more.

Bitcoin, in this sense, is once again solving a problem that nobody has.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#36

Post by colecut »

VikingCoder wrote: post #15
kerkeslager wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Holding Bitcoin is literally free. Interesting claim. How do you secure it, back it up, and bequeath it to people on your passing? Don't those things cost time and actual money?

It is both secure and backed up by writing down your private key somewhere safe.

It is passed on by passing on that private key.

I don't see how that process could be made to be "less expensive"

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#37

Post by Melting_Harps »

sudosysgen wrote: post #4
ogogmad wrote: post #3

> 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…

Not really. The gold/silver standard refers to the monetary system where paper cash is backed by precious metals, for which it can be exchanged any time. It does not refer to literally buying things with gold. So yes, Bitcoin has all the same issues as a gold-backed currency (a gold standard). Private forms of money were created in order to help alleviate the extreme inelasticity of gold-backed currencies, which the…

> Private forms of money were created in order to help alleviate the extreme inelasticity of gold-backed currencies, which the US abandoned in 1971. So Bitcoin would have all the issues of the dollar from 1944 to 1971.

Which is when it began it's World Reserve Status, and was the reason why Capital Markets functioned and helped rebuild the West, and Japan, as well as led to the highest increase in Social Mobility the World had ever seen at that point and led to the emergence of the World's sole Super Power.

I'm an Anarchist and I want to do away with the notions of Nation-states entirely, but even I cannot help but take issue with your framing of what the US Treasury did by identifying those desirable qualities and attributes as 'issues.' The issues emerge when reckless abandon is applied to what was semi-sound monetary policy and you get the perversion of Modern Money and the corruption of Markets that lead to its continual inflationary based asset bubbles and crashes because of cheap/hot money.

Monetary stability is what should be desired, and for that you need a system incapable of the whims from Human Corruption.

Also, I disagree, if Bitcoin lives up to its potential it remains the only really Multi-planetary monetary system in existence. Nothing else even comes close, if you want to try this experiment just try sending money during non-business hours, on a weekend to a person not in your network.

So, BTC is hardly constrained to your confines.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#38

Post by VikingCoder »

colecut wrote: post #36
VikingCoder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Holding Bitcoin is literally free. Interesting claim. How do you secure it, back it up, and bequeath it to people on your passing? Don't those things cost time and actual money?

It is both secure and backed up by writing down your private key somewhere safe. It is passed on by passing on that private key. I don't see how that process could be made to be "less expensive"

If you choose to write it down on a sheet of paper, it's not safe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado

If you choose to write it down electronically, then you have to back up that system, and secure it. Neither of which is free.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#39

Post by thrown1917 »

yalogin wrote: post #8

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.

Socialists, at least of the libertarian sort, tend to oppose both unaccountable/centralized political and economic power.

Any unregulated and unconstrained reputation system tends to lead to Zipf-type distributions. What that means for an economy is extreme power at the high end and lots of poverty at the low end.

Thus either there would be no control at all of the economy, or that control would go to the whales by virtue of their very gravity.

The former would be bad, because the system would effectively be blind to many things that political power handles (e.g. externality). And the latter would be worse, because there's no reason to believe that these powerful entities would care about the powerless.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#40

Post by VikingCoder »

kyboren wrote: post #31
VikingCoder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Holding Bitcoin is literally free. Interesting claim. How do you secure it, back it up, and bequeath it to people on your passing? Don't those things cost time and actual money?

> How do you secure it, back it up, and bequeath it to people on your passing? Keep the private key, mnemonic, seed phrase, etc. only in your brain and perhaps your will, potentially split into pieces that are kept in the physical control of independent trusted entities. > Don't those things cost time and actual money? Time: yes. Actual money: perhaps, but that is not fundamentally required. For example, oral traditi…

Grant Imahara just died of a brain aneurysm. You can't count on whispering a password on your deathbed.

Do you think a carved rock is safe and secure?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado

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