Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

#51

Post by oafitupa »

javert wrote: post #36
xacaxulu wrote: post #27

Bloated governments are grasping at straws. Look at the US with FATCA, taxing it's citizens wherever they are. I prefer to keep socking away savings in my offline bitcoin account and then exchanging it for Euros when I'm back home. Just look at all the people who had 'safe' accounts in Cyprus, or in the US underwritten by FannieMae. Bitcoin is the Libertarian's / Anarcho-Capitalist's dream; true freedom from the whim…

I agree with everything except your last sentence. Don't associate bitcoin with libertarians and anarco-capitalists. It deserves better.

Too bad that you don't like libertarianism, because Satoshi Nakamoto (you might have heard of him) expressed all kinds of libertarian and anarcho-capitalist ideas.

Re: Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

#52

Post by oafitupa »

entrop13 wrote: post #47
cromwellian wrote: post #21

Another reason deflationary currency is perceived as bad is not just because it makes life harder for debt owners, but because it can lead to its own form of boom-and-bust cycles by reducing economic activity. If you know, for example, that your cash holdings were going to grow at 10% per year, then you'd be far less willing to spend any or invest in other assets, as merely putting bitcoin under a mattress increases…

Couldn't a central bank just reimplement its monoply on money creation as a monoploy on mining, then sell those mined BTC below market value to banks to give out as loans? Adjusting the discount given based on the amount they want to increase inflation as they already do, essentially replacing the mint with miners. If the price of miners + electricity ever becomes After mining stops spitting out coins they would just…

Of course it could, but it would be stupid. Why bother with mining, if they don't want anyone else to be able to do it? The point of mining is distributed consensus. You don't need a crazy algorithm to reach consensus with yourself.

Re: Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

#53

Post by skilesare »

SocksCanClose wrote: post #44
leereeves wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the appeal of Bitcoin is the limited supply. But from a Keynesian government point of view, that's a flaw. A sovereign cryptocurrency without that limitation might be an interesting alternative to cash, but the bulk of our money couldn't be in a "hard" cryptocurrency unless we also eliminated fractional reserve banking. (Why? In short, with fractional reserve banking, the total value of everyones checking and…

hmmm... seems to me your reasoning rests on the reasoning of Keynes? what if Keynes is wrong?

If he isn't, btc is doomed in its current form. Wouldn't a better solution be on where his rightness or wrongness isn't an issue?

Re: Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

#54

Post by skilesare »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some very silly people have concluded that, since ultimately no rule or law can be enforced against the unwilling without some sort of ability to exercise power over them, making a law is logically equivalent to saying that anyone who breaks it should be shot; and, therefore, people who make laws against any but the most extreme crimes are violent thugs. And thus it naturally follows that you shouldn't have to pay ta…

AFAIK libertarians have this "principle of non-aggression" which basically defines "anything I don't like" as an attack, and thus pretty much anything that government does becomes violence. But in general, "monopoly on violence" is a legitimate concept and I think it's a requirement for a state-sized group of people to live in (a relative) harmony. You need to have some means to enforce coordination or else people ge…

They also have a tendency to put capitalism up on a pedestal even though it requires the charging of economic rent. Apparently extracting taxes is a crime but extracting economic rent is to be lauded.

Re: Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

skilesare wrote: post #54
TeMPOraL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK libertarians have this "principle of non-aggression" which basically defines "anything I don't like" as an attack, and thus pretty much anything that government does becomes violence. But in general, "monopoly on violence" is a legitimate concept and I think it's a requirement for a state-sized group of people to live in (a relative) harmony. You need to have some means to enforce coordination or else people ge…

They also have a tendency to put capitalism up on a pedestal even though it requires the charging of economic rent. Apparently extracting taxes is a crime but extracting economic rent is to be lauded.

That's why I love that 'cstross quote from [0].

"Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density"

This holds for other political and economical ideologies as well - they may have some good and important points (that's why they gain followers), but ultimately pure theoretical models rarely work well when applied to the complexities of the real world. One needs to remember that and see places where tradeoffs are needed to be made.

[0] - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-wa...

Re: Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

#57

Post by sj4nz »

megoah wrote: post #7
sj4nz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This slides in the assumption that you need a national currency. No traditional nation-state will _really adopt_ a crypto-currency unless it bakes in some ability to seize or inflate it's subject's currency. If that exists in their desired crypto-currency then, of course, no one will ever use it without the threat of violence. Catch-22 for modern nation-states.

This is the same reason that no government allows or encourages the large-scale ownership of property, land, minerals, gold, or anything else. Except that they do. All the time. Because governments are not evil machines that only want to steal your money. That's just a Dunning-Kreuger / nutjob interpretation of reality that is often repeated by a certain kind of broken individual.

Nice DH1 you've got there.

Governments are not evil machines. They're machines staffed by people and people do what people often do: follow the laws blindly because "it's their duty", exploit the existing laws to their advantage "because it's legal", and craft new laws to monkey-patch the flaws in older laws "because it's their job." When two opposing groups of people disagree with each other, they resort to theatrics and name-calling and the machine kind of idles in its current state. The machinery isn't evil and the people aren't evil. This is just how the machine works. If the people operating the machine decide it needs more of a resource, they'll try to get it by any any available means to keep the machine running. Their job, and belief in the machine depend on it. Whether or not the machine gives the world "a better place" is a coincidental side-effect of the machine that happens often, but not always.

Adopting a crypto-currency would give this machine less control over resources because it would either have too much transparency (no black budgets or quid-pro-quos) or perfect opacity (no ability to seize funds from victims or punish criminals financially).

Elections do not change the machine except in the sense of an oil-change--to optimize its continuous operation. The machine is never replaced. And people who do not believe in the machine are always attacked by the operators with a vested interest in the machine... a certain kind of broken individual.

Re: Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

#58

Post by javert »

leviself wrote: post #50
javert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything except your last sentence. Don't associate bitcoin with libertarians and anarco-capitalists. It deserves better.

I'm assuming you are ok with an association with cypherpunks / crypto-anarchy, because one certainly exists even if newcomers would rather relegate these roots to history. Hal Finney was a cypherpunk and bitcoin wouldn't be possible without his RPOW system. Wei Dai, who was cited in the original bitcoin whitepaper, was also a cypherpunk, and praised Tim May's crypto-anarchist manifesto. The list goes on...

Cypherpunk is not the same thing as libertarianism or anarchism. I'm well aware that bitcoin has cypherpunk origins.

Re: Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

#59

Post by javert »

oafitupa wrote: post #51
javert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything except your last sentence. Don't associate bitcoin with libertarians and anarco-capitalists. It deserves better.

Too bad that you don't like libertarianism, because Satoshi Nakamoto (you might have heard of him) expressed all kinds of libertarian and anarcho-capitalist ideas.

We don't know that Satoshi was a libertarian, or an anarco-capitalist. Chances are, he wasn't (isn't).

Re: Bitcoin is not for goverment. Bitcoin is digital currency of the internet

#60

Post by oafitupa »

javert wrote: post #59
oafitupa wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad that you don't like libertarianism, because Satoshi Nakamoto (you might have heard of him) expressed all kinds of libertarian and anarcho-capitalist ideas.

We don't know that Satoshi was a libertarian, or an anarco-capitalist. Chances are, he wasn't (isn't).

You don't have any evidence about that. And like I said, he expressed all kinds of libertarian ideas, so chances are he is.
Post reply on HN