Cryptocurrencies and the economy

psionl0 said:
If you were interested in the operation of his mind, you might get a few clues by going to the original post:

http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source
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It's pretty strange comparing these sentiments with the current state of bitcoin. It's really fallen a long way from its ideological roots.

Bitcoin is increasingly entwining itself with traditional power structures. The big players, like CoinBase, are complying with state authority in order to maintain access to legitimate markets. Users are terrified of getting ripped off and increasingly lean on reputable authority figures for security. Speculation makes using bitcoin as a currency of exchange impractical and expensive, and anyone not willing to risk their wallet cashes out to fiat currency as quickly as possible.

I suppose the closest bitcoin ever came to achieving its ideological vision was the silk road days, when it was primarily used as a currency to evade state authority.
 
lomiller said:
Don't try to change the subject. We are discussing the economic value of bitcoin, and it has none. It doesn't facilitate the creation of goods or services in any way.
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Excessive bullet point quoting is the last refuge of those without an argument, so I will try to refrain from doing what you did, and consolidate my post. If bitcoin has no value, why does one BTC cost over $57,000 as of this writing? Clearly, it has made the early adopters fabulously wealthy, provided a digital store of value to the unbanked and unbankable, and facilitated the evasion of capital controls by corrupt communist governments, at the very least. I'm sure other posters can mention a number of other reasons why it's valuable.

Now THAT sounds like something a socialist would say, or perhaps more correctly a something a Communist would say. Lennon would be proud.
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I assume you mean Vladimir Lenin, not John Lennon, the late former Beatles frontman. As for what he actually said, paraphrased by John Maynard Keynes, was this:

John Maynard Keynes on Lenin said:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7290837-lenin-is-said-to-have-declared-that-the-best-way

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
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And then there is the matter of the fifth tenet of the communist manifesto:

The Communist Manifesto said:
http://www.slp.org/pdf/marx/comm_man.pdf

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national
bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
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Now, I'm not suggesting that central banks and fiat money are an exclusively communist concept, it's just that, well, it's enumerated in the manifesto. It is certainly not a capitalist concept, as capitalism is simply concerned, by definition, with the private ownership of the means of production. The corrupt money system that has resulted in the insane wealth and income gaps we see today is above capitalism and communism, and totally undermine any equitable notion of the public or private ownership of the means of production, or just property in general.

The communists and the socialists are too dumb to realize that the wealth and income gap is about the money system, not the false bogeymen of racism, or capitalism. Hence, we are where we are in 2021, with everyone at each other's throats, by design.

Would be dictators and aristocrats always claim that democracies are "autocratic". This mainly happens because democracy is a mechanism created to keep them in check.
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Democracy and pluralism in general are as much a figment of your imagination as are capitalism, and even communism. They simply do not exist.
 
lomiller said:
Ironically at it's inception bitcoin was clearly designed by people with radical left wing viewpoints. It was supposed to free people from the power of corporations and the evil banking system.
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Do you have evidence that bitcoin was conceived by radical leftists? Even if it were true, I oppose corporations and the banking system. Why is it that the leftist woke mobs, Antifa, and BLM all have the backing of the largest banks and corporations? If these people were skeptical, they might ask themselves why all the corporate virtue signaling?
 
psionl0 said:
If you were interested in the operation of his mind, you might get a few clues by going to the original post:
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Hmm. I have yet to meet one leftist ever that has expressed any concern what-so-ever about the debasement of fiat money, a policy which utterly destroys rent-paying savers and workers in favor of asset owners. Funny that.
 
Tippit said:
Hmm. I have yet to meet one leftist ever that has expressed any concern what-so-ever about the debasement of fiat money, a policy which utterly destroys rent-paying savers and workers in favor of asset owners. Funny that.
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If you made a coherent point about the issue someone might express concern. Word salad is rarely a good starting point for discussion.

Excessive bullet point quoting is the last refuge of those without an argument
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What in the blue hell are you babbling about? It's an effective way to address numerous arguments.
 
Belz... said:
Yeah the lyrics of that song sound great until you give them more than a second of thought.
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I think the saying is

Beautiful Sentiments, but Wrong Species.

Add "From Each According To His Abilities, To Each According To His Needs" to the "sounds beautiful, will never work in a million years with humans" list.
 
I admit I am not up on the history of who invented bitcoin, but if it was someone on the far left it quickly got hijacked by the Hard Line Libertarians.
 
Tippit said:
Hmm. I have yet to meet one leftist ever that has expressed any concern what-so-ever about the debasement of fiat money, a policy which utterly destroys rent-paying savers and workers in favor of asset owners. Funny that.
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God, not the Gold BUg nonsense again.

If someone uses the term Fiat Money, 90% he is peddling crackpot economic theories.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
It's pretty strange comparing these sentiments with the current state of bitcoin. It's really fallen a long way from its ideological roots.
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Yes, especially the bit about micropayments.

However, if you read the rest of that post, you will see that the code was released for users to play around with. It appears that Nakomara didn't expect the crypto to take off the way it did and it left him powerless to refine it.
 
dudalb said:
I think the saying is

Beautiful Sentiments, but Wrong Species.

Add "From Each According To His Abilities, To Each According To His Needs" to the "sounds beautiful, will never work in a million years with humans" list.
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Yes, I always say communism is a great idea... but it wasn't imagined for Homo Sapiens.
 
Belz... said:
Yes, assuming we can trust the word of a shadowy man hiding behind a pseudonym. I'm not saying that the claim is not genuine; just that there are good reasons to be wary.
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You can let your imagination run wild and come up with all the CTs you like but no alternative interpretation seems more probable than the most obvious one. This was a computer geek who solved the double spend problem and released the code over the internet so that others could play with it.
 
psionl0 said:
You can let your imagination run wild and come up with all the CTs you like
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What CTs? We don't know who this guy is, or where he is. It's not a stretch to say we should take his claims with a grain of salt.

This is the reason why I call you defensive about BTC. You just can't let anything slide that even sounds negative without stepping in.
 
Belz... said:
What CTs? We don't know who this guy is, or where he is. It's not a stretch to say we should take his claims with a grain of salt.
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Don't be a fool! I linked to the first post that was made about bitcoin. What secret code do you think that the words stand for?
 
psionl0 said:
Don't be a fool! I linked to the first post that was made about bitcoin. What secret code do you think that the words stand for?
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Who said anything about a code? Your responses are increasingly detached from the posts you quote. Focus.

How about you make a post that actually addresses what you're responding to, for a change? Do you disagree that we should not entirely trust the word of anonymous strangers making grand claims about their objectives? If so, why?
 
Belz... said:
Do you disagree that we should not entirely trust the word of anonymous strangers making grand claims about their objectives? If so, why?
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For all intents and purposes, this post seems to be about a piece of computer code that the writer claims to have authored. It included a link to a web site where you could download the code. You "distrust" that view.

You have had several opportunities to give a credible alternative view of that post and have failed miserably to do so.
 
psionl0 said:
For all intents and purposes, this post seems to be about a piece of computer code that the writer claims to have authored. It included a link to a web site where you could download the code. You "distrust" that view.
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That's a nice attempt at a bait and switch but your problem is that the part you quoted is NOT about coding, but about the problems that BTC ostensibly is meant to solve. That was in post 180. Did you forget already?

You have had several opportunities to give a credible alternative view of that post and have failed miserably to do so.
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What are you talking about? I'm saying we should take the claim with a grain of salt. That doesn't somehow imply that someone should come up with an alternative theory. So it seems I've failed at a task that you imagined for me.

What is it with some people and narratives? At least now I understand why you mentioned CTs: you can't imagine that I could doubt one story without having to come up with one of my own. That's ridiculous, but you do you.
 
In 2018, someone aptly described Bitcoin as this:

imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin
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https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1030225104234373121

With time passing, it still mostly holds up. Instead of a car idling, it's a car with the gas pedal held down with a brick. I suspect there's much less buying of heroin these days too, and more just pure speculation.
 
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