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Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

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Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#61

Post by Amincd »

olalonde wrote: post #41
hasenj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as if we live in a purely capitalistic system. In a pure capitalism, there would be no taxes. Yet here we are living in a system where the government takes money from you, specially if you're really rich. It's not as though any idea that's at odds with capitalism will require "an alternative system". There's not gonna be any change to the system that requires a new theory of economics. Suppose bitcoins are a…

I agree that we don't live in a purely capitalist system and in fact, I don't like to call it that way as it undermines its meaning. In a truly capitalist system we wouldn't have this discussion at all since there'd be no federal reserve and currencies would be free to compete against each others. In my opinion, Bitcoin (and the gold standard in some ways) is as close to capitalism as it gets.

" As someone else pointed out, in a pure capitalism, we'd have slaves, child porn, thugs for hire, assassination contracts, etc."

No you wouldn't. All of those things are the exact opposite of capitalism, since they prevent voluntary association and threaten body, liberty and property.

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#62

Post by Seth_Kriticos »

contactdick wrote: post #30
Tichy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoins are only generated every 10 minutes (on average), so it would probably not be worth it for a company to dedicate a huge cluster of computers to it. At most they could earn 50 BTC/10 minutes, no matter how much computing power they'd throw at it. It get's more interesting if a company could calculate blocks faster than all the other nodes combined. Then that company could forge the complete chain of transacti…

well the motivation to make money is a fairly strong one for a lot of people - many worse things are done every day because of it.

Yes. Though it would be hard to just out-compute the hashes without the community noticing. Just to put it into perspective: currently the network is crunching away at 16344 TeraFLOP/s ( http://bitcoinwatch.com/ ).

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#63

Post by eof »

njs12345 wrote: post #52
gritzko wrote: post #18

Technically, BitCoin is hardly scalable. As every participant needs to be aware of every transaction, that gives O(N^2) computational/storage cost, assuming N is participants and transactions~participants. May be cured by a dedicated central server storing all the transactions, but then it is not P2P anymore.

I don't think that's true. Clients just need the latest block (and a few blocks after) to verify that a transaction has gone through, only nodes (which are meant to be quite computationally powerful) need the whole block chain.

Clients need to download and verify the entire block chain; but they don't need to store the whole thing.

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#64

Post by olalonde »

barrkel wrote: post #39
jsn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free software isn't at odds with capitalism (you don't have to extract monetary profit from everything you do in capitalism). Neither is bitcoin. Government-controlled paper money, on the other hand, definitely is at odds with free market.

Nobody wants a free market. That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc. At the level of globally integrated economies, I think the gold standard has been pretty well proven to be disastrous. It especially doesn't deal well with trade imbalances that unwind suddenly. The trouble you see in the Euro area can be seen as a microcosm of what a gold standard is like; countries lik…

> Nobody wants a free market. That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc.

Those things are perfectly compatible with democracy but completely incompatible with capitalism. An inherent idea to capitalism is the protection of individual freedom which those things clearly violate in some way or another. On the other hand, those things are perfectly compatible with democracy given that 51% of the population are OK with it. In fact, what nobody believes in is democracy (that's why most democratic countries have a constitution).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMb_72hgkJk

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#65

Post by olalonde »

hasenj wrote: post #57
olalonde wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we don't live in a purely capitalist system and in fact, I don't like to call it that way as it undermines its meaning. In a truly capitalist system we wouldn't have this discussion at all since there'd be no federal reserve and currencies would be free to compete against each others. In my opinion, Bitcoin (and the gold standard in some ways) is as close to capitalism as it gets.

"as close to capitalism as it gets" is not necessarily a good thing. As someone else pointed out, in a pure capitalism, we'd have slaves, child porn, thugs for hire, assassination contracts, etc. I just got this idea right now, but I think a pure capitalism will deteriorate very quickly into a dictatorship. All it takes is for someone to accumulate enough military power so that he can take over. Assuming you can buy/…

You've got it all wrong. Those things are the antithesis of capitalism. I really don't know where to start... May I suggest you watch this documentary: http://www.freetochoose.tv/

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#66

Post by dalke »

hasenj wrote: post #55
dalke wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is your statement "you have control over your products" does not apply. Copyright law legally prevents you from including someone else's software in your work, unless you get permission. The GPL grants you that permission so long as you follow the terms of the license. In other words, it isn't "your products", it's a joint product, and the other contributor wants a say on how the joint product is delivered.…

> The GPL grants you that permission so long as you follow the terms of the license. In other words, it isn't "your products", it's a joint product, and the other contributor wants a say on how the joint product is delivered. I've already responded to this in another comment. The GPL doesn't "simply grant you this right". FSF think this right is essential and that it's unethical to not grant this right. If RMS simply…

Ahh, so you are arguing what would happen if the free software movement were able to change copyright law to what they wish. I thought you were talking about the world as it is now, and not the way the FSF would like it to be.

With that in mind I think you can see how I interpreted your comment to mean that the legal expression of free software ideology embedded in the GPL, which depends on current strong copyright law, is at odds with capitalism. If that were the case then strong copyright is at odds with capitalism.

I personally can consider a set of laws in which distributed software must be distributed as free software. I agree that such would be a limitation of the sorts of economics decisions you can make. As such, I can agree that it would be against "certain capitalistic ideas."

However, since we (as a general culture) agree that Mr. Factory Owner may not employ child labor, may not have slaves, may not dump toxic wastes in the water system, must have a safe working environment, and so on, we are already at a point where we (as a culture) agree that "certain capitalistic ideas" are either morally toxic or at least subject to trajedy of the commons oversight.

Since we (as a culture) don't have, and don't want to have, a "purely capitalistic point of view", arguments grounded in that premise are at heart faulty.

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#67

Post by weavejester »

gritzko wrote: post #18

Technically, BitCoin is hardly scalable. As every participant needs to be aware of every transaction, that gives O(N^2) computational/storage cost, assuming N is participants and transactions~participants. May be cured by a dedicated central server storing all the transactions, but then it is not P2P anymore.

> Technically, BitCoin is hardly scalable. As every participant needs to be aware of every transaction, that gives O(N^2) computational/storage cost, assuming N is participants and transactions~participants.

That's not true. The Bitcoin protocol defines a "simplified payment verification" method that does not require clients to store the full block chain.

The Bitcoin network does need a sufficient number of full clients to ensure that an attacker cannot get access to over 50% of the processing power in the network, but the number of full clients could be much lower than the number of simple clients.

If Bitcoin ever becomes a major economy, the full clients will be sitting in data centers with lots of bandwidth, and most people will use simple clients.

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#68

Post by v21 »

olalonde wrote: post #64
barrkel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants a free market. That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc. At the level of globally integrated economies, I think the gold standard has been pretty well proven to be disastrous. It especially doesn't deal well with trade imbalances that unwind suddenly. The trouble you see in the Euro area can be seen as a microcosm of what a gold standard is like; countries lik…

> Nobody wants a free market. That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc. Those things are perfectly compatible with democracy but completely incompatible with capitalism. An inherent idea to capitalism is the protection of individual freedom which those things clearly violate in some way or another. On the other hand, those things are perfectly compatible with democracy giv…

Is capitalism the same as the free market?

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#69

Post by yummyfajitas »

olalonde wrote: post #64
barrkel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants a free market. That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc. At the level of globally integrated economies, I think the gold standard has been pretty well proven to be disastrous. It especially doesn't deal well with trade imbalances that unwind suddenly. The trouble you see in the Euro area can be seen as a microcosm of what a gold standard is like; countries lik…

> Nobody wants a free market. That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc. Those things are perfectly compatible with democracy but completely incompatible with capitalism. An inherent idea to capitalism is the protection of individual freedom which those things clearly violate in some way or another. On the other hand, those things are perfectly compatible with democracy giv…

Our current quasi-free markets already do have "assassination" contracts - your supermarket pays a slaughterhouse to assassinate cows. We also have slavery - horses are forced to labor for whatever amount of money their owners give them.

I'm not making a "meat is murder" argument. I'm just pointing out that pretty much any conceivable capitalist system defines cows and horses to be property, not people. One can envision a capitalist system which does the same for slaves and assassination victims.

I.e., by tweaking the definition of "person" or "market participant", you can get all sorts of odd results.

(That said, capitalist advocates have never made such arguments, as far as I'm aware. Most early supply&demand types were abolitionists, and the phrase "the dismal science" was coined by a pro-slavery advocate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science )

Re: Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.

#70

Post by JunkDNA »

Myrth wrote: post #27

If someone still didn't get it - the whole original post was a hilariously executed troll. The author very clearly states this: "See, a bitcoin rant is almost too over-the-top for me. Asking why I think bitcoin won't work is like asking why the sky isn't red. I mean, wait, you think it is red? You actually took that seriously? Oh boy. Where do I even start?" "For the record, I'm stupid and trolling. That's why it was…

I don't think that's true at all. The original post was a cogent, if brief, explanation that about currency and the challenges for bitcoin. The last quote is most certainly meant to be sarcastic. He most certainly is trying to tweak people who are all worked up into a lather about bitcoin as a serious replacement for currencies. Just because he's provocative, doesn't make him a troll.

It appears a lot of HN readers like you took his comment too literally and killed the post. It's a shame because he makes some good points worthy of discussion. I'm not certain I agree with all of them, but there's certainly plenty of substance there. In contrast, this "rebuttal" adds little.

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