https://monoskop.org/images/3/36/Graeber_David_Toward_an_Ant...
let me fix that for you: "Money is an emergent phenomenon of markets, markets are a fundamental feature of libertarianism, therefore money has everything to do with libertarianism."
So, did banks invent gold? Or did gold give rise to banks?
How can banks even exist in the first place unless we already have a common medium of exchange (gold), which can deposited into said banks?
The problem arises when depositors can’t redeem their medium of exchange for the commodities they originally deposited, or something of equivalent value.
By the way, I’m convinced Bitcoin will not function without credit instruments, just like was the case with gold. I’d argue there’s a huge difference between redeemable and irredeemable credit instruments, though. The latter being an artifact of government regulation.
Sort of; at that time it the boundaries were less clearly defined between what was governmental and what was private. The basic economic structure was for a large temple to store the various goods people produced, and to give the goods out to people as necessary. For example, a farmer would deposit grain, and the grain would be redistributed throughout the city-state; the farmer would receive other things from the temple, like clothes and tools. The record-keeping served two purposes: to keep track of what was available for distribution, and to keep track of who was contributing what. This was the "palace economy:"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_economy
The bible makes reference to such a system in the story of Joseph (which is ancient enough that palace economies still existed when the story was first written), who was the administrator of such a system in Egypt:
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0141.htm#47
"I assume people voluntarily deposited commodities in exchange for a common medium of exchange."
Not originally and not universally. It was more like a system of 100% taxation in some of the early palace economies, where everyone deposited everything they produced with the temple, and then received things as they were needed. You were basically not allowed to live in the city without contributing something (he who does not work shall not eat), though a person could always work for the temple itself e.g. as a sacred prostitute. Of course the specific laws and economic organization varied from city to city, and plenty of people lived far outside the cities and had their own ways to manage goods; the specific details varied with different places and periods of time.
What you received for your deposit was often just an update to the temple's ledgers clearing a debt you owed the temple (i.e. indicating you paid your taxes; often referred to as "offerings" in the biblical legal code) and possibly offset future taxes. If you were unable to make good on that obligation, your land could be seized and you could become a slave until the king declared a general amnesty (not uncommon in the ancient world; the biblical legal code requires slaves to be given amnesty after 7 years of service, and a similar amnesty provision is in the code of Hammurabi). The story of Joseph also indicates that this exact scenario had played out under Joseph's administration in Egypt: the farmers were forced to turn their lands over to the government during a famine (I am not suggesting that the bible is historical; rather, in ancient Israel at the time that story was written, people were familiar with the situation).
As the economies became better developed and the scale increased, money (i.e. a single unit of account that serves as a common medium of exchange) and markets (i.e. trade between inhabitants of the same city) began to replace the temple economy system, at which point private banking enterprises became more clearly defined. For example:
You can use this "nonsense" money right now. And nothing that any economist says about it can stop you.
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-states-m...
PS. Every standard sized bitcoin transaction bar the past three days (and those will too), that people paid over 5c for has been committed to the blockchain.
Oh wait, no it didn't.
How's education costing these days, anyway? Healthcare?
If the person from Europe comes to US, goes to McDonald's, buys a meal whose price is denominated in USD with his European credit card and tells me he made the purchase with Euro, I would consider that a false statement. To me, he made the purchase in USD, his credit card company just will make the FX conversion for him and accept EUR from him when he pays his credit card bill.
Converting BTC to fiat currency on the spot is not really the same thing as using Bitcoin to pay your bills, any more than selling some shares of stock and using the money to buy a house is the same thing as buying a house using shares of stock.
People think that banks hold their money: they don't. The bank simply owes you your money but they don't hold it for you. What you get in return for your money is a statement from the bank what debt they owe you and a device to convert that debt into goods whenever you feel like it. That device is not the same as the underlying money, it is merely a proxy for your debt.
Which you'd find out about in a hurry if your bank ever went under and your card stopped to work.
All the cards I've seen when I looked into it a bit ago converted into fiat at the time of charging the card with BTC (ie, you send BTC, that got converted into fiat immediately (at pretty mediocre rates), and then you could use that fiat to purchase stuff or withdraw cash (at pretty mediocre rates, again)).
All the remarks about the skyrocketing fees can be cut short by pointing out that Bitcoin Cash (which is much closer to the Bitcoin described in the white paper than Bitcoin Segwit [BTC]) doesn't have this problem. Just like Satoshi Nakamoto said that the block size limit could be raised once blocks started to get full, the developers of the Bitcoin Cash software also say the current max. block size of 8 MB can be raised if the blocks get full.
Look at the price. Going bananas.
Not sure there's any response possible for that one. "I don't know how it works, but I think it's dumb."
> Now the transaction fees are exorbitant.
Every standard sized bitcoin transaction bar the past three days (and those will too), that people paid over 5c for has been committed to the blockchain.
Replace by fee is a thing, as long as the tx is unconfirmed it could be replaced. You're effectively saying the wait time is now 3 days unless you want to pay a fee of several dollars. So that rules out most transactions.
How do you pay for anything given those restrictions?
Then you don't understand how bitcoin works, so it's probably best you refrain from commenting on bitcoin architecture.
Lightning network hasn't been rolled out yet. It has nothing to do with our conversation.
(And of course, if I can pay my taxes and mortgage, how can anyone claim to have removed the central authority from money? Just like the gold standard, nothing would prevent a government from changing its mind about whether or not to accept Bitcoin for tax payments.)
Like I said, if you already believe that money can exist without a central authority, Bitcoin simply serves as validation. Otherwise it does not really change anything, because if you accept mainstream views of money, then the premise of Bitcoin makes no sense at all.
You think Bitcoin is a decentralized store of value? Tell that to all those people whining about the Mtgox bankruptcy proceeding, which is being resolved by paying for the lost BTC according to the price in Yen at the time Mtgox declared bankruptcy which is a tiny fraction of the current prices. When push comes to shove the "value" being stored is measured in fiat currency, with all its associated central authorities.
That is a gross misrepresentation and a misunderstanding of the point of a decentralized store of value. "All those people whining about the Mtgox bankruptcy proceeding" were not using a decentralized store of value. They were using a centralized broker that handled things for them. If they kept their own private keys and managed their coins directly, in a decentralized way, they would be still whole today.
Not sure what your point is, dollars(cash) can be stolen as well.
In other words, even if you think Bitcoin acts as a "store of value," that still does not make it "money" according to the law. You can have 1BTC or 100BTC, but the law is only concerned with the monetary (i.e. fiat currency) value at some particular time (not necessarily right now).
That belief structure is being challenged as we speak.
> Tell that to all those people whining about the Mtgox bankruptcy proceeding
The only thing that proved, is that you can't trust a bank.
Reading history is fun and can help one understand the present. I'd highly recommend it. "Debt: The first 5000 years" is a great book and a good start at trying to understand what money is/has been.
In itself, that always existed: it's called gold and gems. It's the most primitive store of value ever- modern economies were born when we went past it.
Name-calling cryptocurrencies "primitive" when they're clearly not doesn't lend a lot of weight to your argument.
> Name-calling cryptocurrencies "primitive"
I called gold primitive as a currency. And made an argument for bitcoin (specifically) being similar to gold.
Edit: btw, gold 500 years ago had the same exact property of bitcoin today: it was immediately transferable to anybody you were in contact with and could buy goods from. That didn't make it better.
Not really; it only serves to validate the beliefs of people who already agreed with the basic premise that money is something that can exist without central authority. That view was already common long before the Bitcoin paper. Plenty of libertarians believe that money is an emergent phenomenon of free markets, something which arises on its own as the market converges on a common currency as its medium of exchange.
On the other hand, if you are aligned with the mainstream of economics, the entire premise of the paper is easily dismissed. In that view, money can never be separated from banks, the paper is basically nonsense.