Today I stumbled upon a very intersting (but also lengthy) blog post discussing currencies (crypto and fiat).
Thought provoking.
I definitely recommend reading it.
If anyone has any opinions on what is being said I'd be interested to hear them.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of the article, but points out a lot of interesting things which might be very relevant now that trump was elected.
@serapath
> I'm not entirely sure what to make of the article
It's neither a technical nor a political-economic analysis. It's a religious one.
I skimmed a couple of pages, which were so full of motivated reasoning, and so smugly and unambiguously wrong on the basics, that I stopped reading.
@strypey interesting.
yes - i do notice that he is obviously very excited, but it also seems the arguments as such are valid.
could you point out a few things that were wrong? i might have missed them.
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@serapath
> could you point out a few things that were wrong?
I'm not sure this is a good use of your time or mine at this point. Because I consider the whole thing obviously wrong, based on a huge memeplex of premises and assumptions that are also obviously wrong.
The fact that you consider it mostly right means we have a *huge* amount of ground to cover. Given how long we were able to debate Nostr vs. the fediverse alone, we'd need to strap in for months to get anywhere with it.
@strypey hahaha
i mean the gist imho is:
no young person can afford houses or anything apart from food and rent and even that is difficult.
the money printing worldwide is through the roof since 2008 and inflation too. stuff is insanely expensive and it apways gets worse.
if you dont have a job that pays you high salaries you are disadvantaged.
bitcoin does not solve all problems, but it ends the capitalist class. we (the ppl) never had momey printers, but bitcoin has no more than 21 mio
@strypey thus... no more money printers for capitalists either.
musk from multimillionaire to richest multibillionaire in the world in like ... ~10 years?
mental. ...same for the others.
most of his businesses arent even break even.
how do they do it?
also - how do they fund war?
...money printing.
private (investment) banks & VCs, but also government ...the latter in the US wil now be trump.
...the ppl nenver benefit from it
no money for welfare or pensions or anything to raise living standard. homeless ppl on the street. ... but ppenty of money for the military and plenty of other corrupt projects.
just like the silicon valleys od this world print to enrich investors and the other privileged capitalist and never returns real value to the ppl that outbenefits the costs.
bitcoin ends money printing, thus ends apl of this.
if you have bitcoin and we all adopt it. it will grow forever in value
@strypey ...normal ppl anyway have to work to earn any money... but if they ever earn some, it will now grow in value over time instead of lose it.
that is the gist
that is the plausible promise based on ince tives and what is enabped IF everyone switches to bitcoin
Brics and many others who might not trust the USD anymore have incentives too.
and for 15 years bitcoin grows.
soke BRICs countries mine bitcoin with government funds. soke minor countries declared it legal tender too.
blackrock and other big companies hold significant amounts including pension funds.
in switzerland you can pay taxes with it.
..soo yeah, what do you think?
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@serapath
> soo yeah, what do you think?
I agree with Jason Hickel;
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/113647624222641778
It's well worth listening to the full podcast. But the rash of quotes I posted in that thread will give you a taste of just how differently we think about political economy.
I wasn't joking when I said a decent discussion would take months, I was being optimistic. It would probably require us to write blog length replies to each other and paste links here.
I'm up for this, after summer ; )
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I think we're tacking towards the same destination. But one of us is going east to get there, and one to the west. So figuring out where we are in relation to each other right now, is going to take some careful descriptions, and poring over of maps.
This would be a complete waste of your time if I was a statist (whether marxist or liberal). But I'm not. Although as an environmentalist I do see a limited role for territorial governance, including making tactical use of existing ones.
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Having given all that context, since you're asking what I think of BitCoin, I'll be blunt. I think the same thing I've thought about it since about a decade ago. It's not tulips, it's clearly more than a passing speculation fad, but It's not money either. It's value is a pure derivative of the value of fiat currencies, particularly the USD.
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The main reason BTC holds value, more consistently than other crypto-tokens, is that the USAmerican elite are using it to stash stolen wealth and evade taxes. When the petrodollar scam finally ends, and the US financial system goes into freefall, BTC will tank along with the USD.
But by then those US elites will have turned their holdings back into land, and gold, and other things that hold their value in an economic crash. Most of it outside the US, which will probably deepen the crash.
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Having said all that I'm less bearish on 2 strips of bandage on the "crypto" mummy.
Blockchains are a genuinely clever data structure. When the crypto wars are over and the dust settles, I'm confident they'll turn out to work really well for a particular set of use cases. Few if any of them to do with finance.
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In the shorter term, I am interested in blockchain tokens as payment systems, for the same reason I'm interested in *every* kind of digital payment system.
Efficient digital payments are an unsolved problem. As I learned in some depth when I had a contract helping Permaculture in NZ improve their website, including a payment gateway for accepting membership dues and event registration fees.
InterLedger protocol interests me more than BitCoin though.
@strypey
i follow interledger for some time now, longer than blockchains actually, but my impression was its mostly a system to allow payments on the internet ...including bitcoin.
I did not think interledger by itself works, but havent checked it for some time now.
maybe i'm missing some essentials about how it works. i found it difficult to wrap my head around it
i dont think bitcion needs or is supposed to use a lot of energy - because your tech wont save us link was kinda about that too
Once block rewards go to zero and all figure it is pointless to attack and block rewards go to zero, it makes more sense to stop mining unless to again correct and protrct the chain, thus it should get less energy intensive. right now its crypto war time and block rewards exist so it continues, but apart from that, i feel its main proposal is 21mio limit
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@serapath
> Once block rewards go to zero ... it makes more sense to stop mining unless to again correct and protrct the chain, thus it should get less energy intensive
I'll admit it's been a *long* time since I read the BitCoin white paper. However ...
My understanding is that mining blocks in a Proof of Work system isn't pointless make-work, designed merely to slow the release of new coins. But rather it's the computation work that confirms transactions, preventing double-spending.
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Which is why new tokens get harder and harder to mine as time goes on. The algorithm is trying to make sure the number of new tokens to be issued approaches but *never reaches* zero. Because if mining ever stops, the whole shamozzle comes to a shuddering halt.
So not only is mining baked in, so is its exponentially increasing computational cost, and ergo, it's energy usage. All to create a form of purely artificial scarcity that we don't really need.
It's techno-solutionist insanity.
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From what I understand, this is why Ethereum and a bunch of other blockchains have used or pivoted to Proof of Stake (Ethereum, Cardano et al).
I don't know how this affects energy use but it comes with new problems. It basically simulates capitalism (in the original Marxist sense of the term) on top of the blockchain. Whoever starts with the most tokens has a baked in advantage. Much more so than in PoW systems, where pools of holding power can be checked by pools of computation power.
@strypey agree.
that is why i am not up for any blockchain without fixed number of tokens... e.g 21mio.
because whether proof of work as in Doge coin or proof of stake as in ethereum... the rich always get the new printed moneu. the poor get dilluted.
that is the same shit we already have.
and i saw ethereum, polkadot and some more of web3 from the inside.
to me it feels like microsoft joined forces with silicon valley and wallstreet and its a hoard of employees building out the web3 based
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@serapath
> i am not up for any blockchain without fixed number of tokens
Two things;
1) When the tokens have no fixed value, this is ultimately an illusion. The number of tokens can be increased by breaking BTC into Satoshis, and then by breaking Satoshis onto micro-Satoshis.
But this is details. The more important reason the fixed number of tokens doesn't matter is ...
Bitcoin has 8 digits after the comma.
0.00000001 BTC is called one Satoshi or SAT
It cant be divided smaller than that, because digital does not have infinite digits.
The point is also more in: no new tokens for capitalist class ppl. no more money printers.
with money printers, the printing class gets more, the rest loses. in bitcoin, everyone gets more when the value of BTC goes up. that is a big improvement and in absolute terms nobody gets more.
if you spend you spend
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You seem to have missed the bit where I said;
> But this is details
But sure, let's split hairs ; )
@serapath
> 0.00000001 BTC is called one Satoshi or SAT
The point is that the original pitch had a fixed number of tokens (BTC), and that was considered to be a feature, not a bug. But that money supply limit didn't survive contact with real world use at scale. So now the number of tokens has been increased (conceptually but not technically), by defining a subtokens called a SAT.
hmmm.. but the original paper always defined 8 digits after the comma. That wasnt introduced later.
It has always been
21,000,000.000,000,00
So it did not get introduced later on is what i want to say. Bitcoin has been successfully ultrqconservative in sticking to the original vision and all kinds of changes and forks have been tried and were not successful.
The only thing that sometimes after endless discussions works is backward compatible additions a.k.a soft forks
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@serapath
> but the original paper always defined 8 digits after the comma. That wasnt introduced later
I feel like you're working really hard to avoid acknowledging the point here, so I'm just going to restate it;
> the number of tokens has been increased (conceptually but *not technically*)
... because ...
> that money supply limit didn't survive contact with real world use at scale
A flexible money supply is a *feature* of all functional monetary systems, not a bug.
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One way to get your head around this is to learn about mutual credit systems. The oldest forms of documented exchange. In which credit is issued into existence directly, by the payer, whenever a transaction happens.
The only limits on the growth of the credit supply are;
a) people's willingness to trade their goods and services for credit
b) how much credit people are willing to issue in exchange for them
c) the total goods and services produced by people willing to accept credit
Agree. Where does that exist?
This makes for essentially everyone issuing their own money.
strypey tokens and serapath tokens, and so on.
So you need to find people who are willing to take this and that until you find a circle where debt clears, like A -> B -> strypey -> serapath -> C -> D -> A
Which is tedious, so you end up with big third parties that trade with everyone to clear - it's banks all over again and now they have control over the money printer again... yay! :-)
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@serapath
> Agree. Where does that exist?
LETS, timebanks and other forms of community currencies have been practicing mutual credit all round the world since the 1980s. Digital tech initiatives include;
* Community Exchange: https://www.community-exchange.org/home/ces-upgrade/
* Open Credit Network: https://opencredit.network/2019/03/22/introducing-mutual-credit/
* Credit Commons: https://creditcommonssociety.org/about-the-credit-commons/
* my friend @utunga's Together project: https://togetherproject.nz/
From whom I learned about ...
* Token Engineering Commons: https://tecommons.org/
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One of our local groups researching and educating about this kind of stuff is Living Economies;
https://www.livingeconomies.nz/
But there's a huge community of people around the word interested in mutual credit. In fact, there has been since the early days of cooperatives. The original (pre-Marx) socialist movement grew out of the mutualism of Proudhon (the "property is theft" guy).
@strypey
Okay. fair enough.
I am german and i did explore the german landscape a lot. They have many so called "Regiogeld" initiatives and they also exist since forever, but they all have in common that they dont really work.
They are a nice gesture, a nice symbol, a nice experiment, something with a passiomate community, but most of them are less active now than in the past and the members are mostly old.
We can discuss their differences and why they did not get to the masses, but...
@strypey ... whether google pay, apple pay, VISA/Mastercard, paypal, etc... none of them scale and non of them are as convenient. Ppl in prqctice dont want to bother and have convenience.
Also, most ppl arent aware and there is a lack of trustm Is it real? is it a scam?
Most of them or basicaply all of them work because of trust in the organizers.
Blockchains are open source and digital and have the potential to get to the same convenience as the mainstream solutions i mentioned initially
@strypey
Now your links look digital and more up to date.
I havent heard of any of them, so i guess i need to read a bit first and see. Its interesting, but to me:
1. if there is a group with trust, it doesnt need money
2. if the froup grts anonymously large, then working together is much easier with some sort of accounting system and hence money helps
...but making such a system in which everyone can trust when it becomes anonymously large is difficult
Funny to me is that opencredit says it works without money, but with a credit clearing system. To me thats "hair splitting". Thats kinda what money is supposed to do as well, so i broadly summerize that under money too.
By the way, that is what "Bitcoin lighting" is
There you "open a channel" and transact back and forth based on the credit lines, but the difference is, both sides can lock some bitcoin in that channel to define the max amount initially
Who runs the servers here?
Also sounds unserious:
> What are benefits of mutual credit?
> There are multiple benefits of using mutual credit which, just to clarify, is not an alternative currency (since there is no “currency”) or a tax avoidance scheme.
And later:
> If she fills all empty tables with credit paying customers she has ‘optimised’ her business by turning spare capacity into revenue. Now she can spend the credits she received to buy supplies for the restaurant with other businesses in the network
Just like the myriad of "blockchain" projects and tokens... there are different designs and yeah, the ooen credit network is yet another design.
To me thats a currency broadly speaking (maybe not based on crypto, hence more trust is involved) ...so also unlikely it wpuld ever be globally accepted.
If a member would want to travel they would need to go through USD, EUR or BTC to get somehing thats accepted far away.
BTC has the chance of global acceptance
The CreditCommon Society describes mutual credit system
Now in the crypto world XRP (Ripple) is that.
Also Bitcoin Lightning is that
You can use blockchain frameworks to encode this "protocols" in any way
The page says there is such a protocl, sadly theg dont have a very obvious link to its details (=suspicious). Second, they say there is a group that controls the rules, but dont have an obviois link to say who they are or how they work (=suspicious)
These imho are worse practices
The togetherproject from @utunga seems to be in development status based on how the website sounds.
Token Engineering Commons is Blockchain/web3 ...more specifically Ethereum, hence we are back to blockchains.
cadCad is a project from the ethereum world and it is used for token bonding curves and it all circles back into web3.
web3 is backed by the typical investors which own it all and they cover every style, vibe and wording to get maximum adoption of web3 which they control
@Forbearance
> when are we getting money where we issue it to do good stuff and not make rich people rich?
Since all money is ultimately backed by networks of social agreements, I guess when we agree to?
@strypey @Forbearance @utunga how?
bitcoin is that?
whats the better alternative and how do we get there?
the rich arent the only ones and not all rich either. rich buying BTC strengthens BTC. the early rich suppport. the late rich dont get as much anymore and when everyone is on BTC everywhere the printers are gone.
So buying BTC is opting into ending capitalism - yeah, the rich who use the printer now will have a pretty awesome start into a BTC world, but at least this is the past time. no more printing from then on
of course, ppl who decide to stay in the old worls and keep accepting capitalist money will still be vulnerable, but probably everyone learns at some point. everyone who transitions away from capitalist money can help to educate.
i assume those who still have a lot of wealth might take a bit longer and have to lose more before they lost enough privilege to reconsider