What's striking, in his description of the conference, is the total lack of any connection to real world activity. None of these people seem to be trying to get enough Bitcoin together to build a steel mill or a wafer fab or a smartphone factory or, indeed, any kind of startup that does something. Bitcoin is expected to somehow generate wealth without actually doing anything that generates revenue. All it can really do is move money from one group to another.
The world changed this week. Things just got real. Russia is taking over a big chunk of eastern Europe by force. That's what real authoritarianism looks like. Not mask mandates. Over the next few months, the tolerance for bullshit, especially in politics, will go way down.
As it turns out, moving money from one group to another† is pretty useful in modern society. It's really all that money is good for, after all.
Some of my comments from the last week and a half about what Bitcoin is good for:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30469595 when your country's central bank suspends electronic cash transfers, suspends the foreign exchange market, limits cash withdrawals, and prohibits the issuance of foreign currency from retail bank accounts; or when you want to fund a militia in a war zone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446703 in case the government of the current global hegemon imposes economic sanctions against your company or your country; right now that's the US, but probably ten years from now it will be the People's Republic of China
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408611 as an alternative to a bank when "whistleblowers" send the bank history of 30,000 "legitimate clients who had done nothing wrong" to journalists so they can comb through them looking for something to pin on the accountholders
I also wrote a bit last year about my observations of how Bitcoin gets used in practice today, outside the world of hoity-toity speculative finance the Harpers article is about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744
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† Or preventing it from being moved without its owner's consent, which is the value proposition both of safe deposit boxes and the Bitcoin guarantee of a limited money supply.
And I say that as someone who has literally spent hundreds of bitcoin at one of the ONLY points in bitcoin's history when it was primarily used as a genuine medium of exchange (silk road).
Simple example - show me a method of handling reconciliation of fraud/contract dispute for bitcoin that doesn't fall back on the legal systems of those government systems you're so happy to rail against. (hint - there is NONE).
You know what those governments absolutely won't do? Incur costs upon themselves to mediate exchanges in a foreign currency. They will either ban it (china) or add back all those things you seem to think bitcoin will solve (funds freezing, required intermediaries, identity & reporting, sanctions) that make those costs predictable and acceptable (us).
>Simple example - show me a method of handling reconciliation of fraud/contract dispute for bitcoin that doesn't fall back on the legal systems of those government systems you're so happy to rail against.
There are some people who would much rather trust the government with total control over their money, and there are some people who would much rather take responsibility for their money even if that means the government isn't there to swoop in and save them if they are foolish enough to be swindled or entrust money to someone who defrauds them. In a free society, people would be able to choose whether to incur the risks associated with the government or the risks associated with total control over their own finances. It is very telling that adherents for government control seek to eliminate this choice at the point of a gun.
Yes - this is exactly what the silk road did. A buyer would place enough coins into escrow with the silk road to prove he had the funds available to make the purchase, the seller would ship the goods, after receiving the goods, the buyer would unlock the coins from escrow and they would be given to the seller.
The problem here, is that this effectively makes the silk road (drumroll...) a traditional bank. With the monetary controls and downsides that the folks trying to speculate on bitcoin claim they don't want. (The can freeze funds, reverse transactions, run away with your coins, etc)
Further, since traditional mining is out of reach for most folks - there's no real way to avoid having to buy through an intermediary. So when you hear folks saying "Not your wallet, not your coins" ask them how they managed to get their coins in the first place, and how they avoided ever trusting an intermediary with their coins during that process (unless they literally mined them themselves, not as a pool, they're bullshitting you - they trusted an intermediary, and fraud was absolutely a possibility)
I think my real point here (admittedly long winded) is that a large reason the modern banking system functions the way it does is that they've essentially been asked to handle fraud and dispute reconciliation in a world where you're not allowed to resort to rote physical violence yourself. Unfortunately, to do that they require all sorts of monetary controls (The same controls coin enthusiasts claim to hate). But those same enthusiasts don't actually have a functional solution for handling reconciliation in instances where a dispute actually occurs, outside of falling back on the legal system of a government.
Some of them seem to have a mental fantasy of hiring assassins or threatening folks with either hacking or some other "dire" threat, but it's mostly bullshit - when fraud happens they run squealing to the government or they eat the loss. These folks are like a strange variation of the "prepper" crowd - they wish the world worked like it did thousands of years ago where blunt force solved problems.
Thinking escrow services make them a central bank means you're misunderstanding a lot of things. "Central banks" control currency printing, which silk road never did. The entire point of BTC is that being algorithmically controlled. I suspect you just mean traditional banks where people have their checking and savings accounts. But you're still mistaken. Having an arbiter for the money involved in one transaction does not mean you can have all of your funds frozen. At worst you can have a bad arbiter that awards the money from one transaction unfairly. They also absolutely can not "reverse transactions" if you are paying with a transfer on chain. I think you're mixing up "escrow" where a website requires you send them your BTC and they transfer your BTC to someone else for you by moving numbers in a SQL table with actual on chain transactions. With on chain escrow the arbiter can never get the funds, only forward them or send them back.
I bet you wish you hadn't spent those hundreds of bitcoin, don't you?
As I said in the last post I linked, Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars a year in cross-border remittances, largely to family members in Venezuela; this suggests that it's keeping several million people alive. I hear there are still darknet markets around, too. So there are current uses as a genuine medium of exchange that are very significant.
Do they amount to its primary use? I don't know. I suspect Bitcoin's primary use right now is speculation, and I wish that would settle down, because I'd really appreciate it if the money I get paid in would retain roughly the same value for weeks at a time. But perhaps the primary use of US$100 bills is cocaine trafficking; if so, what does it matter to people who are using them for other things? If the primary use of oxygen were feeding pathogenic bacteria, would you stop using oxygen?
I don't think it's a problem that Bitcoin doesn't contain its own fraud or contract dispute resolution mechanisms. Neither do gold, silver, copper, or greenbacks, and they work pretty well as currencies. Last time I had a dispute about a Bitcoin transaction, I resolved it by negotiating with the person I was disputing with to find a mutually agreeable settlement, which took about an hour; failing that, theoretically I could have resorted to talking to their friends, the Mafia, or, yes, the police, but probably I would have just swallowed my losses and not done business with them again. (In theory I could also have resorted to individual violence, too, which is probably the most common dispute resolution mechanism after simple negotiation.)
You may or may not be aware of this, but commerce is enormously older than states are, perhaps by a factor of ten, and a great deal of it has been conducted throughout history outside the aegis of any shared authority to whom disputes could plausibly be referred. It's true that a good dispute resolution mechanism reduces the risks of commerce, but commerce is often still worthwhile without it. Ask anybody who's worked under the table, been an illegal immigrant, rented a room illegally, or bought drugs on the street.
I'm not railing against government systems in this thread. They have their good points and their bad points. Fundamentally, though, I think history has proven out Lord Acton's maxim that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; and, because I have seen the devastation corrupt governments can wreak, I do not think that governments should have absolute power.
I especially do not think the US government should have absolute power over Russians, or that the Chinese government should have absolute power over Americans; the history of such arrangements is replete with avoidable famines and intentional genocides.
> I bet you wish you hadn't spent those hundreds of bitcoin, don't you?
No - not really. The point of them wasn't to hold them with an expectation that they would become unreasonably valuable (speculation). The point of them was to make an exchange for a good that was otherwise hard to acquire (in this case - weed, before legalization).
You'll notice that's not something most of you "crypto advocates" ever actually do. You know, the sole purpose of a currency - exchanging it for goods and services. Usually you treat it purely as a speculative asset, to be exchanged for another currency that actually can be traded for goods and services.
> Neither do gold, silver, copper, or greenbacks, and they work pretty well as currencies.
Of fucking course they do - the government taxes exchanges on them at unreasonably high rates (gold has a 28% long term capital gains tax, vs the normal 15-20%.) precisely because they understand that they're used as value stores (proxies for currency).
And that's precisely my point, really - the government WILL NOT protect you from fraud in the crypto space if it doesn't have a way to regulate and mediate the costs of doing so (such as tax derived income from the exchange). In which case - all of your above points become moot, because now you're right back to asking the government to enforce your contract or bill of sale. Remind me again how crypto is going to protect me from that government...?
I was there when MTGox blew up, I'm acutely aware of the risks of fraud in this space, outside of the current pump and dump fraud that's frankly rampant in the crypto world. Your finance 2.0 looks a whole lot like cooked books and bankers who run away with the cash once they have it, with an unhealthy dose of gambling tossed on top - it's not pretty.
> Of fucking course [gold, silver, copper, and greenbacks work pretty well as currencies] - the government taxes exchanges on them at unreasonably high rates (gold has a 28% long term capital gains tax, vs the normal 15-20%.)
Gold, silver, and copper have worked pretty well as currencies for 2700 years under a variety of taxation schemes, of which by far the most common was "no taxation", which I believe is the case here. Exchanges of greenbacks are not taxed at unreasonably high rates anywhere I know of. Moreover, it isn't clear how taxing the exchange of capital gains on certain commodities at an unreasonably high rate would help it function as a currency; perhaps you mean that it stabilizes their value? But the value of the metals we're talking about is primarily determined by the world market.
It is of course correct that some governments will refuse to referee disputes without imposing what you describe as "unreasonably high" taxes. Historically, though, many governments have successfully resolved disputes without imposing confiscatory taxes or demanding far-reaching extrajudicial powers against people outside their jurisdiction, and we have every reason to believe that such governments will continue to exist, even if you don't have the luck of having one yourself.
You can always emigrate, you know. But possibly not if you need your government's permission to take your savings with you.
I agree with you about the risks of fraud and the dismaying ubiquity of pump-and-dump scams, and I agree that if you do not hold your bitcoins yourself they are just as vulnerable as if you left them in a bank—a lesson missed by most current "crypto advocates," who keep their coins in their Binance accounts. I am sorry to hear about your loss to the MtGox theft.
Unless you can find a contractor who will remodel your bathroom for gold (or god help them, bitcoin), or a food vendor who will take gold instead of your local currency (at an equivalent rate) then when you actually need goods and services, you convert to a local currency, which is taxed.
In exchange for that taxation, you can write a contract that says "I will give you X gold for Y dollars" and expect the government to back that contract. It will provide legal avenues for you to use the services they have available to recoup funds in the event of fraud (up to and including physical force and imprisonment, which almost all governments keep a tight monopoly on). They tax you because providing those services incurs a cost, and they need a way to continue offering them. Historically, you could make exchanges in those assets, but there was often zero governmental protection for doing so (sometimes things considered morally harmful were punished by the government, such as theft, but they certainly wouldn't agree to do things like enforce contract disputes for free - at best you get a legal wager [see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compurgation] where you both pay up front to be heard. At other times courts were reserved to disputes above a certain value, or lower classes were prohibited from making a legally valid contract in the first place, precisely because enforcement was expensive)
If bitcoin makes that taxation impossible (or even unreasonably difficult), and it's possible to freely trade without recourse (no freezing, no transaction reversal, no monetary control at all) two options are present:
1) Stop resolving disputes for bitcoin (ex: China).
2) Add taxation, while adding back forms of control to make the costs reasonable and predictable, to match taxes.
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Long point short - Sure, 2700 years ago you could trade shiny metal for things without taxes, but it was "at your own risk", under a governmental structure that had more leeway for you enforcing it yourself (no prohibition or monopoly on violence and imprisonment). Those are not the conditions we find ourselves in today.
> Unless you can find a contractor who will remodel your bathroom for gold (or god help them, bitcoin), or a food vendor who will take gold instead of your local currency (at an equivalent rate) then when you actually need goods and services, you convert to a local currency, which is taxed.
I'm not sure if you've spent any time hanging around in the world of illegal immigrants, but in my family's circles, there _are_ contractors that are loose family friends of ours who _do_ take gold in order to perform services. Often the gold is repurposed into jewellery or otherwise sold to other immigrant-owned businesses. Eventually someone in the immigrant network can wash the gold clean. Members of our extended family fled civil war by holding jewellery on their person , and there are stories of others who melted their jewellery down and travelled with it, and used these to fund their lives in Western nations they emigrated to. Now that my family's country has politically stabilized this is a lot rarer and as such I don't know, at least in our extended network, anyone who still washes gold clean.
Sure - and this is where there is marginal use for value stores like this, but two thoughts
1. You are dealing with "family friends" who have a clear social connection (and reputation!), helping to mitigate the risk that they simply run off - not the case for sending digital coins to a person you've never met.
2. You are in a situation where you're choosing to avoid government enforcement because of legality issues (in this case, immigration status). This is also why bitcoin worked for dark markets - No one cared that the government wasn't going to enforce your bitcoin transaction, because that lack of enforcement was already a given based on the goods being traded (illegal/black market items)
In both of these cases - basically any asset can fill that role. Shiny metal, food, expensive clothing, jewelry, guns, drugs etc. Bitcoin is appealing for basically one reason alone - it weighs nothing (and as a side effect, can be digitally transferred). Since usually the limiting factor in barter is literally how much weight in goods you can drag away.
The problem, and this is genuinely where I become annoyed, is that the speculation the above poster is so happy about actually degrades the usefulness of bitcoin in this space. No one wants to hold an asset that might lose 25% of its value over night, and no one wants to spend a currency that might gain 25% of its value over night either. This run of "get rich quick" fools and "pump and dump" fan boys have been a plague on the usefulness of digital coins since people realized bitcoin shot up in price any time the media mentioned it, way back in 2012. Then they harp on and on about how digital coins are the next finance, without understanding the current system, because their incentives aren't aligned with actually using the thing as a currency, they're entirely aligned with getting more suckers on board in their speculation scam.
So yes - if you're in the (very small) minority of folks who either won't or can't use governmental recourse anyways - there was at one point in time some usefulness for bitcoin. But unless you're planning on buying drugs or guns online, my current advice is to stick with gold.
I definitely didn't think to read it as disturbing and manipulative. What do you think I'm trying to manipulate him to do? Not blow a literal fortune on smoking weed? It's too late for that, I think. He says he spent hundreds of Bitcoins buying weed; at today's prices, a hundred Bitcoins are US$3.8 million. If he'd smoked one third less weed and just kept the other third of the Bitcoins (in his own wallet, not MtGox's!) he'd be a multimillionaire. Who knows, maybe he's a multimillionaire anyway and that's why he doesn't regret it?
In that case, I'd like to manipulate everybody: Save a reasonable percentage of your earnings! Invest a modest percentage of your current consumption in a diversified portfolio of assets with a reasonable expectation of future returns! Be aware that you may become disabled or encounter other serious economic difficulties, and a little frugality today may produce enormous payoffs down the road! Be prudent and don't bet heavily on any single asset class! I'll love you if you do! Your parents would be disappointed if you failed at this!
What other manipulative stratagems can I use to get people to be wiser and more responsible?
What do you mean only point in it's history? I agree that bitcoin is mostly good for drugs but it's still being used for that as we speak. Some markets are starting to only take Monero, sure, but you can still get around with just BTC. Silk road wasn't the last dn market or even the best, not even close.
The distinction between store of value and speculation is rather fuzzy IMO.
Is putting money into gold for savings (because an actual savings bank account currently not only loses money in real but even in nominal terms) speculation as well?
Have you heard of negative interest rates? This is so real that it is real.
Also real: the wild "insanity" that is the picture painted by the writer of this Harper's piece is also exactly the same "insanity" that is present in, well, everything that involves the US dollar.
Money is so tenuous worldwide at this stage that entire central bank policy is designed so that you won't want to keep it anyway. You must spend! We really are jacked directly into the machine. It's pretty wild if you compare it to just a blip ago, historically.
It depends on where you live. In some countries it's common for monthly fees to exceed the interest you get paid. My corporate bank account ended up in the hands of a colleciton agency that way!
But can you do it without going to jail when sanctions or similar are in place against you? Technically, you can, but you face the same consequences if you were able to get a wire or SEPA transaction through. That's the point. The tech doesn't change the policy or the law. You still go to jail or your country gets shelled. Miners get chased out of countries.
Russia is reportedly exploring crypto for transfers if they get knocked off of SWIFT. That does not bode well for crypto when it becomes a weapon of a an enemy combatant state.
(obligatory xkcd about getting beaten with a wrench for your private key here)
Generally when "[economic] sanctions or similar are in place against you" it's because the people who imposed the sanctions are physically unable to jail you. Or beat you with a wrench.
The tech doesn't change the policy or the law, but it does change their consequences in the real world. Fortunately it is not yet the case that the US shells every country whose citizens do business with entities it imposes sanctions on, although the US does shell a lot of countries, and it can be challenging to identify even which country a Bitcoin transaction originates from.
What's your source for "Russia is exploring crypto for transfers if they get knocked off of SWIFT"? I assume you mean cryptocurrencies of some kind, because obviously SWIFT, СПФС, and CIPS all use cryptography, so that would be too obvious to mention. Right now I think Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with enough trading volume to handle Russia's foreign exchange needs; I don't think that's likely to happen in the next two years, though, if it ever happens at all.
If it did happen, though, it would put an end to the concerns that Bitcoin could collapse at any moment like a Ponzi scheme.
> What's your source for "Russia is exploring crypto for transfers if they get knocked off of SWIFT"? I assume you mean cryptocurrencies of some kind, because obviously SWIFT, СПФС, and CIPS all use cryptography, so that would be too obvious to mention. Right now I think Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with enough trading volume to handle Russia's foreign exchange needs.
EDIT: If you're looking for a press release from the Kremlin, no, I'm unlikely to be able to get something official from Vlad, only public news sources.
None of these substantiate the claim that "Russia is exploring crypto for transfers"; they just point out, as I did above, that people outside Russia say Russians could hypothetically use cryptocurrencies for transfers despite US sanctions. None of them even propose that the Russian government use cryptocurrencies for its own foreign trade, and none of them claim to have any Russian sources at all, whether officials or leaks or civilians. The Cointelegraph article claims that Maduro proposed doing this in the past (for Venezuela) and that Iranians raising money for flood relief have actually done so.
Russia doesn't need to resort to Bitcoin, when they can easily use their own SWIFT alternative or China's. China is conveniently friendly with Russia these days, is rapidly expanding CIPS, and would likely welcome the chance to expand it even more.
The existence of these alternatives is one reason Russia probably won't be banned from SWIFT in the first place.
It'll be interesting to see how it unfolds. Presumably for Russia to use СПФС or CIPS other countries (or banks?) have to use it too, otherwise they can only pay themselves.
Are there any downsides to making a payment through СПФС rather than SWIFT? For example, are you revealing information to the ФСБ, or exposing yourself to counterparty risk from the Russian government, or making it possible for the Russian government to cut you off from your payees if they want to level economic sanctions against you? A potential upside of Bitcoin in this sort of situation is that it's neutral: nobody can cut off your access to it, everybody can see your transactions (but without names and places), and you're only exposed to counterparty risk for the few minutes until your transaction is confirmed.
But, again, I don't think that'll happen in the next couple of years, and possibly never.
If Russia pour a trillion into crypto it would boost cryto like crazy.
Governments are buying oil and other products from Russia and need a way pay them. Russian banks will move money outside of swift. Swift just makes it easier.
But, isn't standard Bitcoin completely traceable, once you move funds out of your wallet to fiat? Can't they track you down retroactively after you make that one transaction?
Tracking you down retroactively is very different from freezing your bank account so you miss your rent payment. Also, generally, no, fiat-currency cash transactions are not completely traceable, and in practice there doesn't seem to be a Bitcoin-oriented equivalent of https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/, at any rate not yet.
GNU Taler electronic scrip[0] caught my eye awhile back.
It's supposedly anonymous to the payer, but traceable to the payee. The idea being to provide privacy for consumers, while allowing governments traceability for tax purposes. It acts like a gift card and reminds me of the Chiemgauer[1], a very interesting regional scrip that traces back to Freigeld[2].
While GNU Taler seems to be focused on anonymous consumption, the Chiemgauer is a balanced electronic medium of exchange. It doesn't have the privacy aspect of the Taler, as far as I know.
I'm curious where you get the 90% estimate? In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446703 I looked at the Chainalysis study at https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor... (use Reader Mode), in which they found that Russian "illicit and risky" businesses including money laundering accounted for 0.004% of (on-chain) Bitcoin transaction volume. (They included even coins that had been through mixers in their "risky" category, so this is presumably a vast overestimate.)
Where do you think all this money laundering is happening geographically, and why do you think there's so much of it?
Even if it were 90%, I'm not sure why the 10% of users using Bitcoin to do things like keep their savings from being frozen should care about that other 90%. Do you want them to sacrifice themselves and their families to reduce the liquidity available for money laundering by 10%? If 90% of oxygen is consumed by pathogenic bacteria, should you stop consuming oxygen?
There are actually quite a few companies doing things with bitcoin that generate revenue. Bitcoin isn't supposed to make you money; it's supposed to be money. Dollars on their own don't generate revenue, nor is gold locked in a safe. Bitcoin has qualities that make it better than fiat and better than gold, at the cost of an established history.
Perhaps the author just spoke to the wrong people, didn't get the fundamentals, or didn't ask fundamental questions.
Show me one company that "does things with bitcoin" that
1. does things which aren't already solved for cheaper using standard finance (for example, splitwise makes splitting bills easier, there are disposable credit card solutions, within crypto multi-sig accounts for the masses could be one idea)
2. is not just enabling other people to do something with crypto or building out the "doing something with crypto" capabilities (i.e., the product is used to do what real finance does - facilitate and simplify services and manufacturing of goods. Not trading, not infrastructure for trading, not derivatives, not loans...)
3. Is profitable or generates organic revenue (i.e., has customers actually using their product and paying them for it)
Alternatively, show me one company or freelancer denominating their prices in bitcoin, without tying it to the dollar indirectly.
In my experience in usa it is cheaper and easier to buy real estate with btc. Can still use closing company, if you want to pay those fees. This is just starting, and your tastes may vary. It's nice to have choice.
In USA closing companies use certified checks. BTC is cheaper and faster than literally having the closing company clerk drive certified checks to various banks.
You don't have to use it, though it works well in some situations and very well in big transactions. But you must be in a position to pay the entire purchase price and not rely on fractional reserve lenders to provide the funds to purchase the property. Since I don't need lenders, why would I use the structures that are in place to protect the lenders?
"Bitcoin is supposed to be money" isn't the only pro-crypto position out there. A lot of its current value is driven by people holding and purchasing it from a perspective including things like "this will be the new backing infrastructure for every transaction in the world" not just "this is digital gold."
Isn't the point of Bitcoin precisely that it naturally becomes more and more valuable? If people want money that doesn't make money they can use stablecoins.
I certainly hope not! That's what the article's author was hoping for, but presumably Bitcoin will reach a long-term stable price level at some point. Maybe it already has, or did two years ago when it was at US$8000, or maybe at some point it will rapidly fall to $0 as investors switch to Ether or Grin or ZCash or whatever is popular ten years from now. Its volatility unfortunately appeals to get-rich-quick speculators, but hopefully at some point they'll get burned enough to quit and leave it to serious people. Assuming it doesn't evaporate completely!
The problem with "stablecoins" is that they reintroduce the single point of failure that sunk Digicash and e-gold, which Bitcoin was specifically designed to eliminate. Holding Tether is a bet that neither Bitfinex nor the Federal Reserve will decide to make their money machine go brrr. I don't know how you feel about the Federal Reserve but I wouldn't trust Bitfinex with my lunch money, much less my savings or my country's foreign reserves.
Many people critize bitcoin for its current volatility and entirely neglect that it can totally change in the long-term.
It appears reasonable to me to expect the system dynamic along a pathway towards (possibly) wide adoption to go through various changes. Yes there are probably phases of hype and there's the influence of block reward halvings but there can also be effects in the long-term that stabilize: the more widespread and integrated in various parts of finance and the economy and actual day to day transactions or people's savings bitcoin were to become the more it would dampen volatility.
Why that? Because unlike purely speculative financial transactions, day to day transactions are very much restricted and influenced by and thus coupled to rather constant human needs, so a lot less volatile than the former.
Now don't get me wrong. I know bitcoin can't directly be used to replace cash because of settlement time and transaction fees. But that's why protocols on top like Lightning exist.
Thank you! I didn't remember that, though I must have heard of it at some point. However, its metric of "stability" is apparently US$1, so by holding Dai you are still betting that the Federal Reserve will not decide to make its money machine go brrr. Holding Bitcoin involves no such bet on politics, though it certainly has a lot of short-term volatility.
The fixed number of bitcoins doesn't help you if people decide they want ether instead. Or if either are fine. Or something else in the future. That risk is very alive and well.
(I'd argue that the spread of multiple cryptocurrencies has had a major inflationary effect overall in the world economy in the last five years. Lot of people with suddenly fat bank accounts out of nothing.)
I haven't seen any profitable cryptocurrency companies which do anything genuinely useful for non-crypto people in the real world - all the profitable ones are inward-looking, i.e. engaged in "building out the ecosystem" (or "extending the pyramid scheme" depending on your perspective), e.g. the cryptocurrency exchanges. That's a big difference between the internet and cryptocurrency - the internet can be said to have started benefitting ordinary people within a few years, but there's no sign of cryptocurrency ever doing anything useful for the proverbial "man on the Clapham omnibus" after 13 years. In that sense cryptocurrency is more like the gold rush - some people find gold, most people make money selling the shovels, but the vast majority of the world are so far removed from it all that it doesn't impact them in any way whatsoever (except perhaps for the negative effect it has on their environment).
> Over the next few months, the tolerance for bullshit, especially in politics, will go way down.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I think it's way more likely that the next few months will allow those politicians who relied on that bullshit in order to push their agenda, to instead push that agenda quietly and with little or no opposition.
For example, you don't see a lot of outrage on Twitter over Greg Abbott's persecution of trans children anymore, because Twitter is abuzz with what's going on in Ukraine. This is a thing that is just as "real" as Ukraine, but the collective attention gets focused on one thing at a time, which is why "bullshit in politics" is usually needed.
Language is somehow expected to generate wealth without actually generating any revenue. All it’s good for is moving ideas from person to another, or uttering promises…
Math is somehow expected to generate wealth without generating any revenue. Some of it is not even rational, real, or computable.
Counterpoint- this was yet another tired critique of Bitcoin. How many of these smug, superficial boomer oriented rants must we endure?
It's easy to attend conferences and mock people. Meanwhile BTC is playing a meaningful role in the realpolitik you mention, and quickly integrating into the entire banking system. You say BTC has no connection to the real world, as if the Canadian truckers didn't just get their accounts frozen, and cutting Russia off from SWIFT wasn't being discussed. How do you maintain that view in the face of such events?
How many rants from young people do we have to endure? You're not going to start the revolution you will become a boring boomer like all the generations before you.
The crux is that you are cashing out your bitcoin for £€$ to buy things in a store.
> That's what real authoritarianism looks like. Not mask mandates. Over the next few months, the tolerance for bullshit, especially in politics, will go way down.
I disagree. If you look at the Cold War period, there was all sorts of bitter politics over culture wars throughout the world. The US experienced the Free Speech Movement [1], violent leftist extremist group bombings [2] (concomitant with the rise of leftist extreme violence in the rest of the Americas with groups such as the FARC [3] in the backdrop of some pretty frightening authoritarian leaders), the Civil Rights Movement [4] and several other culturally and politically destabilizing events. All of these things happened in the background of a global conflict between capitalism and communism, when one could argue that left-wing authoritarianism was in full display in the Eastern Bloc. The US only got its act back together politically after the end of the Cold War with the rise of some awkward form of Pax Americana that lasted from roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall to September 11, 2001.
I doubt the events in Ukraine are going to _decrease_ the amount of political sectarianism in the US. If anything, it'll add an additional pressure as groups will be called out to be sympathizers of authoritarianism much as McCarthyism attacked folks for being suspected Communists.
Ukraine made some shifty and tenuous alliances with Neo-Nazi militias to expand their ranks. Obviously they're not needed anymore since the entire population is conscripting themselves, so their influence is greatly reduced. I think the deal was made to protect the eastern border but either it didn't work or the Nazis gave up quickly in defense of Ukraine.
Hah, yeah, I was going to say, if this went to court, it would feel like a slam dunk case of trademark infringement or IP of some kind, due to consumer[1] confusion.
[1] term of art in this context, not what I'd prefer they use.
Definitely felt like bait, the word Cryptonomicon does not even show up in the (long) article even once. I was waiting for the reveal that his dad was Neal (worried when he said his dad was into Ayn Rand...), or that he himself was Neal.
With all recent Metaverse stuff, it seems that Neal Stephenson is public domain now. So many things on the Internet are based on Snow Crash and Diamond Age that maybe it's time to move to different book now.
>Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace: 25 years before Oculus, John Perry Barlow described what it was like “being in nothingness.”
>[...] And they were ready to make a product. They’d made a promo video starring Timothy Leary. Gullichsen had even registered William Gibson’s term “cyberspace” as an Autodesk trademark, prompting an irritated Gibson to apply for trademark registration of the term “Eric Gullichsen.” By June, they had an implementation which, though clearly the Kitty Hawk version of the technology, endowed people with an instantaneous vision of the Concorde level. [...]
moviesCyberspace: The New Explorers: Autodesk Demo Tape on Cyberspace with Timothy Leary.
> In The Bitcoin Standard, Ammous blamed the Fed for the modern “breakdown of the family,” and for “perhaps most damagingly, the depletion of the soil of its nutrients, leading to ever-lower levels of nutrients in food.” He compared the art of the Renaissance, Classical, and Romantic periods, all financed properly with sound money, to the decadent culture of the twenty-first century, with its “animalistic noises’’ and “immediate sensory pleasures.’’ “It was hard money that financed Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos,” he wrote, “while easy money financed Miley Cyrus’s twerks.” It was, moreover, “no coincidence that the era of central bank-controlled money was inaugurated with the first world war in human history.” Here was a theory of everything, a moral case for Bitcoin that encompassed art and war and even the nutrients in our soil. (Ammous disdains what he calls “fiat food,” claiming his diet consists of “approximately 95% red meat, 5% other meats, and approximately zero plant matter.”)
I un-ironically believe all of this, but when put in this way, it sounds crazy. But I believe it.
Is it not curious that true fiat currency is a relatively recent phenomena, perhaps 100 years old in reality and 50 years officially, yet amazing discoveries, inventions, buildings, factories, art, etc. were all made before fiat currency? Fiat isn't a requirement nor an inevitability - it is a human invention, and one I personally see as a mistake.
I think the phenomenon you're observing is that the quote observes a true correlation, coincidence, or relation, but "sounds crazy" because the implication it draws is _very_ strong relative to what can probably be evidenced.
In other words, it _is_ the case that Renaissance works were financed with harder money than works today. That's a historical matter of fact. It _is_ the case that families are breaking down or that nutrient levels in produce (per unit size) have decreased. It's also the case that those events were coincident with a change of greater adoption of fiat currency vs hard currency (and I'd put it on a spectrum because of fractional reserve banking and other items which made the Gold standard dollars not _really_ redeemable in Gold and etc).
With all that said, the "sounds crazy" comes in because it's totally unsubstantiated in the quote (and probably otherwise) that just because these things occurred together the change in the status of money is the primary driver behind the other changes.
Edit: For example, if the change in money is the primary driver, then it is the case that the massive technology shifts we've seen aren't the primary driver. Nitrogen based fertilizers aren't the primary driver. Various civil rights movements aren't the primary driver. The presence of global travel, the formation of a global village, the new ability to communicate, none of these are the primary drivers.
And the more you lean on fiat money being the explainer, the less you allow all these other things to contribute to the explanation. That case becomes harder and harder to support, I think.
The conversion of US society from an agricultural one to an industrial one to an information/services one probably the larger trend driving results here, especially if the quality of produce/soil is something you're thinking about. The role fiat currency played in that is debatable I'll grant.
RE: terrible art, the rise of that is the rise of art for lower classes in terms of more of it being produced and seen, which is a good thing I'd argue, as well as comparing art made in a 10 year period say with all of the best art western civilization has produced in the past 500 years.
Yup, classic fascist rhetoric. It's not surprising they point to a woman being independent and expressing her sexuality as the example of "degenerate culture". The "other" (people of colour, women, queers) are producing art that represents our own experiences, which is a threat to their desired white hetero-patriarchal order.
Never mind that Mozart wrote a ton of filthy shit. People have been obsessed with sex forever
I think the comment about the music is ridiculous, but the broader point about free money causing the gradual degradation of food, housing, standard of living, etc. is not without merit.
> free money causing the gradual degradation of food, housing, standard of living, etc. is not without merit.
First, you have to establish that degradation has taken place. Considering that for most of civilizational history, the vast majority of people were wearing rags and eating grain porridge without spice or much salt and living in hovels, that doesn't seem obvious to me. Second, even if you do establish that, you have to specifically tie it to "fiat" currency and not some other factor. Those both seem like a tall order.
The factors leading to the dust bowl in the 1930s happened under the gold standard.
The government is prioritizing the wrong things, which is leading to today's degradation of food, but lack of government intervention also results in the degradation of food.
Housing quality and standard of living are at their best ever - if free money is causing that, thats not a terrible outcome
Well we are approaching half of americans having a chronic disease and a large part of that is from what we eat along with lack of exercise. it does seem like we have a degradation of the nutrients in our food supply as well.
Surely this is a problem of supply and not demand.
If I go to Safeway and don't find something healthy, I will nevertheless buy something for the simple reason that I am hungry. Want healthier food in a society? Sell healthier food in a society.
It's not the job of consumers, nor is there any reasonable communication channel, to dictate what is put on shelves. They can only provide feedback based on what is already there. If they have a limited selection, you will receive a censored signal, and you cannot judge the outcome based on counterfactuals of what they would have bought if something else was in the pool of offered products.
Above describes the folly of "demand-based" economic thinking. If there was truly an infinite supply and infinite variety of products, it makes sense to consider demand-based perspectives as actually expressing consumer desires. But it doesn't do that -- it only expresses preferences among the finite selection available, and you can very quickly sink into a feedback loop that encourages unhealthy diets by conflating the two perspectives.
' It's not the job of consumers, nor is there any reasonable communication channel, to dictate what is put on shelves. '
In a free market the job of consumers is to use communication channel of purchases to signal what they want to have stocked on the shelves. Safeway stocks junk food because that is what people buy.
Where is the answer to the problem? Signals are carried in codes, and codes can be more or less efficient at conveying information. How does a sample from a biased population provide any information about the true mean? How would offering only Cheez-its and Gatorade tell you about consumer desires for eggplant?
Many accuse their fellow humans of degeneracy but that narrative only serves to obfuscate the primary role of corporations, for which we can make much stronger accusations of degeneracy.
Dear reader, observe the classically crypto-fascist rhetoric with its complete lack of self-reflection and deflection via essentially empty-headed, debate-bro tactics.
There has never been a time in human history where a smaller percentage of the population faced starvation. Actual wars were fought over access to spices I can buy for three dollars at the supermarket.
Small changes in per-unit micronutrient quantities are not the cause of modern obesity. If you do want to make some claim that worldwide nutrition was better at some point in the past, that point was definitely not when Bach was alive.
What's really being said here is "people need to make better nutrition choices." Or can you support a claim that highly processed super-tasty engineered and mass-produced food is purely a function of ag subsidies? And that there would be no market pressure to create such a thing in your world.
It doesn't matter. Facts don't matter if you have spent significant amount of your life savings into magic internet money. Any news is contructed into 'this is good for bitcoin'. Even history itself is malleable, everything can be blamed on fiat (even though Bitcoin itself is fiat).
To those of us who are far-right, Christian, and have noticed the lack of distinction that seems to be applied between say, David Duke, and Chris Rufo, this is not the takedown-by-association you seem to think it is.
You are inside a cult, complaining that people outside have not differentiated levels of extremes inside the cult, and therefore you do not view being similar to the cult as a bad thing. This is not a defense of the cult you seem to think it is.
It was not intended as a take down. Thanks for clarifying.
It's becoming clearer that Bitcoin is the "currency" of the far right. For those of us who consider this ideology abhorrent and counter to the ideals of a free and democratic society it's good to have that out on the table and on full display.
> It's becoming clearer that Bitcoin is the "currency" of the far right.
Does this extend to all cryptocurrencies or is it just Bitcoin?
A Ukrainian organization called 'Come back Alive' who have just been de-platformed by Patreon [0] are now turning to Bitcoin donations [1]. Does that make them far right?
Or maybe the starving Afghans who are under sanctions due to the Taliban are trying to survive by using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies managed and accepted by NGOs helping them survive [2]. Perhaps they are all far-right too?
Maybe if you have been chasing or watching imaginary nazis in computer games, movies and on the 'news' in the last four years perhaps?
If a claim is without any evidence and has no substance, it can be easily dismissed and ignored.
Not every silly, baseless conspiracy theory has an immediate association with the 'far-right' or with 'Christian, white supremacists' and especially not this one.
As long as they have zero evidence and they are unable to substantiate it, who cares? We already know bitcoin has failed being a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and it is still useless as a currency.
> He compared the art of the Renaissance, Classical, and Romantic periods, all financed properly with sound money, to the decadent culture of the twenty-first century, with its “animalistic noises’’ and “immediate sensory pleasures.’’
The 50-100 years the has been an explosion of new discoveries. The model T was still being produced 100 years ago. To claim anyone has a worse life then 100 years(or whenever fiat was started) ago is a bit of a stretch.
If our crops don't have any nutrients, how exactly would our animal products have nutrients in them? I doubt he is eating wild caught animals for a majority of his nutrition - presumably just eating factory raised pigs and cows which are fed the same crops that he believes has no nutrients.
I'll also bet that Ammous ends up with diverticulitis within 10 years if his description of his diet is correct.
Does the guy in OPs statement only eat grass-fed animals? Isn't the source of the grass important? If it is grown in a wild field, maybe it will have all its natural nutrients. But if it is grown as a crop, or on a field under repeated heavy grazing, isn't that just as bad as what is happening to the human crops?
Also, if the guy is going out of his way to only eat the best, most expensive beef, because corn-fed beef is actually bad, why doesn't he do the same thing for fruits and vegetables? You can get "wild grown" vegetables just like you can get wild grazed beef. It just costs more.
This exhibits many of the classic signs you are in a cult - believing "crazy" things that non-cult-members would not believe, suspending rational thought processes and deferring to charismatic leader(s), and blaming objects of persecution for an unfeasibly wide range of issues (e.g. blaming the Fed for everything from the "breakdown of the family" to "the depletion of the soil of its nutrients").
The rest of the article exhibits many more classic indicators of cult membership - extreme obsessiveness with leader(s), any criticism or questioning characterized as persecution, special persecution of former members (Musk in the original article), denying it is a cult, etc.
There are just…I can’t even start with the sheer inanity of that quote.
First off, the First World War happened on the gold standard. Most currencies, notably the British Pound, didn’t become decoupled from gold until after WW1.
And those World Wars were enabled by technology, not fiat currency. Mass production of weaponry, rapid advancements in said weaponry, trains, fertilizer to grow more food to supply those front line…technology was far more of a driver than fractional reserve banking.
And decadence? Decadence! The Sun King would like to have a word with you about “decadence”.
Anyone who is very serious about strong lines between "fancy" art and "low-class" art can be safely dismissed as an idiot. It takes only the tiniest bit of historical knowledge to understand that these things frequently, and frequently-rapidly evolve, usually from "low-class" to "fancy." See e.g. theatre, jazz, etc.
It's over 1000 years old and it evolved from nothing to what we have.
It's very weird that you ignore history like this.
You should read up on Spain, silver, gold, china and tons of other history regarding tender.
What we have with fiat is your very well working monolith fine tuned over centuries while everyone who wants to make money of of you tells you why their Nanoservice with security holes and no features is so much better.
What's striking, in his description of the conference, is the total lack of any connection to real world activity. None of these people seem to be trying to get enough Bitcoin together to build a steel mill or a wafer fab or a smartphone factory or, indeed, any kind of startup that does something. Bitcoin is expected to somehow generate wealth without actually doing anything that generates revenue. All it can really do is move money from one group to another.
The world changed this week. Things just got real. Russia is taking over a big chunk of eastern Europe by force. That's what real authoritarianism looks like. Not mask mandates. Over the next few months, the tolerance for bullshit, especially in politics, will go way down.