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Why I’m Cryptophobic
71–80 of 455 posts
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#72so badly written wtf
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#73Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#74This is kind of a straw man, but I don't think he's wrong. The problem is that he's kind of straw manning what "libertarian" means in this context and by doing so he's landing a much weaker blow against crypto than he could. Libertarian, if words are to mean things, is roughly the view that the initiation of force should be extremely strictly limited. This includes the idea of small government since government has a…
> Force is anything that attempts to contravene the independent will of another human being. That can be done by whacking someone on the head, pointing a gun at them, or gaslighting and lying to them to the point that their judgement is deeply impaired.
I find this definition of force somewhat counter to most libertarian positions I've seen. When it comes to employer/employee relationships, what is the need to eat other than "pointing a gun at [the employee]"? Under this definition of force, how can employees ever enter into contractual agreements with employers freely? Especially at bottom of the labor ladder, where the struggle to meet basic needs is more acute.
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow the last statement. If a cryptocurrency was used for decentralized buying and selling, folks were not using it for speculation, and thus it became a stable currency would it not flourish?
The demand for a currency fluctuates according to various factors, therefore if the supply remains fixed its price will not be stable.
which is fine, since you can back another cpi/whatever automated chainlink index adjusted asset with it. Sure the efficiency will not be as good as fiat but it's robust
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#76There needs to be some basic economics here.. Money has value because of the value of the economic transactions in which its conducted. Government-backed currencies are forced to have value in the sense they force people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades. Value is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a "liquifying" of that value, to make it easier…
Your comment sort of works against BTC, because it was intentionally crippled. But there are many other coins that will do just fine for day to day transactions.
But also the premise of your argument (taxes and oil) is weak. The value of these transactions pales in comparison with the rest of the transactions. So government enforcement has little to do with the value of USD. It has value, because people believe it, they trust it will be accepted and / or easily converted to the currency of their choice.
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#77There needs to be some basic economics here.. Money has value because of the value of the economic transactions in which its conducted. Government-backed currencies are forced to have value in the sense they force people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades. Value is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a "liquifying" of that value, to make it easier…
Imagine a future where the vast majority of work is automated. Most of this is computationally expensive work, such as training large neural networks, and the average program takes a substantial amount of resources to run, comparable to paying a human worker. In this scenario, labor power has been replaced by GPU power, which can be measured in terms of electricity. Everything from ordering a meal at a restaurant to…
People being paid by the hour is just a result of simplifying work, in the very past everyone was a merchant and they sold their goods/services.
The same old behaviour should be applied to machines, it doesn't matter how much resource a machine takes to do the job, what is important is the output. The pay should not be X*Watts, but X agreed in advance for training that specific neural network, this type of market incentives evolution, where the machines that can do the same job with lower resources have the lower hand
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#78> too high maintenance to be a store of value like gold
Really? because the price/value flutuates too much? How is storing 1B dollars in gold lower maintenance than storing 1B dollars in BTC or other high-liquidity crypto?
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#79There needs to be some basic economics here.. Money has value because of the value of the economic transactions in which its conducted. Government-backed currencies are forced to have value in the sense they force people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades. Value is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a "liquifying" of that value, to make it easier…
I really don’t buy the old taxes-make-the-money-work chestnut. Far too many counterexamples.
Taxes aren't why money generally works (money emerges naturally in human societies), but taxes are what makes national currencies work.
If you don't pay your taxes, you don't get to participate in the local economy for very long. Men with guns will eventually come to your home and take your stuff and/or take your freedom.
You can't even do direct barter without cash without incurring a tax obligation in the US, https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420, so even if you live your life like this, you still need to find a way to get actual dollars to pay your taxes. This is what creates the basic and permanent demand for dollars.
The simple truth is that every government is at its core the biggest, baddest gang in the land. The old royalty were literally mob bosses, and often presented themselves as gaudily and arrogantly as the street gang bosses in the modern age. They have the monopoly on violence in their realm and then printed a bunch of tokens that they demand as tribute for the promise of letting you live your life in peace. Because they control the issuance of these tokens, they effectively control the flow of the economy and can more easily manipulate people. They can't arrest everyone, so there's still a fine balancing act required to keep the masses generally consenting of the arrangement, with just the right show of force to reinforce the system.
But other things beyond currency are still money, like gold and bitcoin, because money is just something scarce that you hoard in the hope that in the future, you can trade it for at least as much goods and services as you originally traded for the money, if not more. Anything scarce can be monetized when the currency becomes less scarce, which is part of what is driving up housing as people hoard it as a better store of value than currency. And importantly, making the thing you store this ethereal "money" in even more scarce relative other things increases the value of your own, which is part of the driving force behind NIMBYs who block new housing developments.
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#80No post body was provided.