Some libertarians may be more pragmatic than others. For example, some may argue that so long as a government issued fiat currency is in use (as it is today), manipulations by the government should be held to a minimum. This may be the cause of the confusion.
Isn't this going to create a run on the currency? So say tomorrow some news comes out proving these btc whales are responsible for 80% of the order book and are manipulating the market, isn't it the slowest people to react who are stuck holding the bag?
Furthermore, isn't the problem with btc that we don't know if it's being manipulated or not? Manipulation or not at least I know what's going on with the dollar.
Isn't that basically the problem with bitcoin though? We can't perceive if it's being manipulated or not.
E: Actually that brings up another issue for me. Wouldn't that just be a run on the currency? So the last people to get out of manipu-coins are the ones stuck holding the bag?
No system promises that its actors will behave morally. What we're talking about is whether or not you fundamentally believe that government can and should exert force on the market. Those of us who believe they should not don't see a perfect and moral market on the other side, we just would prefer to exchange problems of force and authority with problems of interpersonal relationships.
Of course not, but government allows us to reach outside the system (in some cases) and set the rules for the system. Those rules can be used to help encourage more moral behavior and discourage less moral behavior.
>Those of us who believe they should not don't see a perfect and moral market on the other side
Okay but you can see how this language:
>If that common medium is being manipulated then the market will perceive that as damage and route around it.
does begin to imply a "perfect" market right? If something is manipulated then we just route around it. That phrasing seems to hide that the real cost in "routing around" a currency is that a lot of people lose all their money.
>we just would prefer to exchange problems of force and authority with problems of interpersonal relationships.
This wording seems to put force/authority and interpersonal relationships on opposite sides of the spectrum but that's obviously not true. Interpersonal relationships are one of the primary methods of using force and authority.
Perhaps a more accurate representation of your views is that you would like force and authority to be only transmitted person to person?
Edit to further elucidate: It isn't exactly the loan that creates money, but what happens with the money after the loan. It will almost certainly land in a bank account somewhere, adding to that bank's reserves, which allows them to lend 90% of the loan's value again. (assuming a 10% capital reserve requirement)
It's perhaps better put like this:
You store a dollar in the bank. The bank makes a loan to a business to buy cars. The car company stores that dollar in another bank. The bank makes a loan with that dollar to a farmer to buy sheep from another farmer. That farmer who sold the sheep puts that dollar in the bank.
That one dollar was used in three different transactions, thus creating more US Dollars than were actually printed.
And on and on it goes.
Edited to add:
That's why runs on banks are so dangerous, because the bank never has the full amount of money in it's safe. It's using that money to make loans.
Another shot at it with a thought experiment. Everybody goes to the bank and borrows 10k every month. The bank never asks them back for the first five years. Result? Inflation, possibly hyperinflation. Same as if they would be printing money (and they'll won't get anything back when the five years are past.)
In BTC I don't know who's creating it, what they believe about it and I have no way to affect their creation of it. Seems like the democratic governing system is more fair and transparent so where did I go wrong?
It would matter more than my (non-existent) vote in bitcoin would.
>It doesn't matter who is creating it as long as the supply is stable and predictable.
So to be clear, your problem isn't that the fed is centralized and btc is decentralized it's that btc is regular and the fed can be irregular?
You don't have to use it though.
> So to be clear, your problem isn't that the fed is centralized and btc is decentralized it's that btc is regular and the fed can be irregular?
Both aspects are problematic. It's not only the FED that is centralized, the banking system itself is. Bitcoin is Peer-to-peer without trusted third parties.
What I care about as a consumer is being able to predict the value of my currency at future times. Bitcoin doesn't allow me to do this at all.
No, you can trust them to tell you how much they're creating. Important distinction.
> I can even vote for people whose dollar creation opinions line up with mine.
The people who run the FED aren't elected, so no, you can't.
> In BTC I don't know who's creating it, what they believe about it and I have no way to affect their creation of it.
It doesn't matter, the issuance is controlled by the protocol and you can know how much Bitcoin will be created on 2105/06/25 by making a few simple calculations.
So if you don't agree with it you can bail out right now and never participate in it, no one forces you to.
A on-chain bitcoin transaction allows an arbitrary number of off-chain transactions.
The existence of war does not absolve you. If your standard of morality is "everything that's better than war is okay", you have approximately no morality.