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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

#41

Post by drexlspivey »

nknealk wrote: post #23

Bitcoin presumes (1) everyone owns a computer (or a smartphone/similar) and (2) everyone has network connectivity all the time. Without these two things, one cannot transact. 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.

Performing an online transaction requires a credit card or a bank account which is a far stricter requirement than a smartphone which you can get for 20 bucks

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#42

Post by wmf »

nknealk wrote: post #23

Bitcoin presumes (1) everyone owns a computer (or a smartphone/similar) and (2) everyone has network connectivity all the time. Without these two things, one cannot transact. 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.

You could always issue "paper" bills that are denominated/backed by BTC. Such currency wouldn't have all the benefits of Bitcoin but it wouldn't be worse (from a coiner's perspective) than existing paper money that people are using today.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#43

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #37
sudosysgen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the whims from Human Corruption

Aside: is there a term for this style of capitalisation? I see it in 19th century texts...does it have Latin roots?

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#44

Post by einpoklum »

ColanR wrote: post #14
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.

That is a problem which crypto proponents are actively trying to overcome.

But the problem is not technical in nature - it is social. The question of who decides, and how is the decision made, to issue more currency and distribute it, or to obviate existing currency - this is a political(-economic) question.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#45

Post by colecut »

Dahoon wrote: post #17
ColanR wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a problem which crypto proponents are actively trying to overcome.

As long as it requires work by CPUs or GPUs it is for rich people.

Gold requires actual physical mining equipment and labor.

You could make the argument that gold is also for rich people, but no one seems to have a problem with it.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#46

Post by wmf »

joosters wrote: post #25
ascorbic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Moreover, this free-rider problem is made far, far worse by the fact that Bitcoin ownership is very unequally distributed, thus giving the Bitcoin-rich powerful incentives to restrain the growth of the money supply (since such restrictions would boost their private rents at the expense of the public interest). Take out the word 'bitcoin' from this, and all the points still stand. The super-rich tend to be the ones wi…

The super-rich tend to be the ones with power, and they are never motivated to change this.

And yet those social democratic countries exist.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#47

Post by einpoklum »

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…

> But didn't the creation of private money happen because gold was so expensive to hold and transport?

No.

1. There was creation of state and of private money, or money-of-sorts, in societies where money wasn't based on gold.

2. If transport and holding was the issue, private money could have been limited to the amount of available gold.

No, that's really not the reason.

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#48

Post by kerkeslager »

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 40s through the late 60s were also the era of the Holocaust, the Indonesian Genocide, and the Serbian Genocide. Did Bretton Woods cause those too? Or can we agree that maybe a lot of things that happened during the 40s through 60s weren't caused by Bretton Woods?

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#49

Post by ianmobbs »

wmf wrote: post #42
nknealk wrote: post #23

Bitcoin presumes (1) everyone owns a computer (or a smartphone/similar) and (2) everyone has network connectivity all the time. Without these two things, one cannot transact. 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.

You could always issue "paper" bills that are denominated/backed by BTC. Such currency wouldn't have all the benefits of Bitcoin but it wouldn't be worse (from a coiner's perspective) than existing paper money that people are using today.

Who is the one backing those paper bills? This brings back centralized banking, which is what most folks in favor of replacing fiat currency with Bitcoin are working away from

Re: Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally

#50

Post by udue73uru »

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…

I think it's much more likely that the desirable properties of crypto-currencies will be baked into government issued psudo-coins that retain the desirable parts of bitcoin while discarding the inconvenient parts. The only people who hate on fiat money are people who don't understand why backed currencies suck or why it would be bad if every country used the same currency. What doesn't suck though is money that essentially tracks itself and baking that self-tracking feature into an existing fiat currency via some kind of pseudo-coin would make regulatory enforcement wildly easier without the downsides of a backed currency.
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