It's "fair" if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.
Most public places used to have bathrooms which anyone could walk into but no one could easily roll into on a wheelchair. That was equal opportunity.
Nowadays many places have been mandated to have bathrooms such that anyone who uses the space can access a bathroom without difficulty. That is an enforced equal outcome.
Which is the correct approach?
No, it's an extremely relevant debate because a certain political faction has been trying to redefine "equality" from its original definition of "equal opportunity" to a completely different one of "equal outcomes".
> Which is the correct approach?
This is a false dichotomy. You can want equal opportunity in most places, and equal outcome in a select few (just like you can want freedom of speech for everything but a select few edge cases).
This is the correct way to do it, actually - enforced equal outcome is inextricably linked with tyranny and oppression, and invariably results in massive loss of human life when it has been ((ostensibly) attempted to be) implemented in the real world.
If you have to pick one, tell me, which is better - for tens of thousands of handicapped people to not be able to access some public bathrooms, or for tens of millions to die in another Cultural Revolution?
Imagine if half of all gold on earth was already mined in the first 4 years (and over 99% in the first 27 years) of gold mining millenia ago.
Whilst anybody is forgiven for not knowing about the very start of BTC at some obscure mailing list, since then there has been a decade of mainstream media exposure, a huge amount of time to acquire BTC. Failing to make use of this enormous time window is on the individual.
If I have to believe the below articles, miners own less than 10% of supply, so the gold comparison is misplaced:
What I mean by equal opportunity is that Bitcoin treats every wallet owner the same and does not favor any elite or closed group in any way. There's not been a "hidden" period where insiders could jump in, whilst others could not.
That's much different from almost any other crypto, where the development team pre-mines supply and rewards them to themselves before opening sales of their tokens.
Likewise, owning lots of Bitcoin does not reward additional Bitcoin. This rich get richer effect is simply not there. Although rich people do tend to get richer in other ways, but that's not Bitcoin's fault.
This too is different from PoS crypto, where owning lots of crypto rewards you even more of the token.
Sure, and that's fine for equity but really bad for currency.
> Whilst anybody is forgiven for not knowing about the very start of BTC at some obscure mailing list, since then there has been a decade of mainstream media exposure, a huge amount of time to acquire BTC. Failing to make use of this enormous time window is on the individual.
Again, totally fine for equity, shameful for currency.
Fairness and equality are different. Imagine 2 people of different heights who can't see over a wall - equality is giving them both a ladder of exactly the same height even if that means just the tallest person can now see over the wall, while fairness is giving them each potentially different height ladders so they can both see over the wall.
The PoW equivalent (not factoring in premine) would be to give the first person the tallest ladder, and each successive person vanishingly small ladders, which doesn't really come under fair or equal. PoW with premine puts you in front of the wall so you don't need a ladder, plus it gives you a pile of ladders which you can sell to the people behind the wall, and maybe even some bricks so you can arbitrarily make the wall higher if you want.
The above poster was right — it's fair if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.
I've seen this whole ladder analogy commonly used in radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts, used to reframe discrimination in a positive light.
That doesn't imply simplistically equal treatment. If the definition was "equal treatment" that's what it would say instead of "impartial and just".
Impartial and just and no favoritism or discrimination isn't meant to literally complain "hey, you're discriminating in favor of car crash survivors getting physical therapy, that's not fair, everyone should get the same physical therapy".
The definition probably would be better to use the term "prejudice" instead of "discrimination". There's no reality in which people see fairness in absolute lack of discrimination. It's fair to discriminate based on something like medical diagnosis or any other sort of fair judgment of situations.
The false dichotomy of opportunity vs outcomes is stupid. We can't make true equality of either, and we can care about both. And just saying that you see extremists use an analogy is not a reason to reject an analogy. Extremists also wear pants or sleep at night. Anyway, an absolutist no-discrimination view is about as extreme as we can find.
I'm not an expert on "radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts", but I'd have thought they would be more into equality rather than fairness, e.g. everyone gets the same pay irrespective of how much effort they put in or the quality of results.
FWIW in the "Oxford Dictionary of English" that's built into iOS, if I look up "fairness" I get
> 1. impartial and just treatment or behaviour without favouritism or discrimination.
> [...]
(the other definitions refer to pale skin or beauty)
It sounds like your definition is more of a list of synonyms — I was using the current Oxford dictionary available on iOS and Google.
> I'm not an expert on "radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts", but I'd have thought they would be more into equality rather than fairness, e.g. everyone gets the same pay irrespective of how much effort they put in or the quality of results.
Yes, exactly that, and that's what your comment above was doing, no? You reframed fairness as meaning equality of outcome, and framed equality as meaning equality of opportunity. (Equality of outcome = same end-height, equality of opportunity = same ladder height)
We have had repeated instances throughout history of groups of people practicing common ownership, and they do seem to work reasonably well. (I completely grant they aren't super-popular, but, again, I'm not advocating change, I'm trying to understand why you think this qualifies as "impossible")
What do you think prevents this on a planet-level scale?
If everybody has the exact same amount of wealth, it means you've decoupled wealth from anything that is variable, most importantly human individual qualities like risk taking, hard work, talent, brilliance, persistence.
In a world where you can't better yourself economically, most incentives to innovate or produce would cease to exist. To still get a functioning society, a deeply oppressive regime is the only likely answer. After all, why would anybody work?
I suppose you're right that it's not impossible in the short term, just not sustainable in the long term. If nothing matters at all and is pointless, societies' output will degrade over time until the point it is unbearable.
That said, this is current thinking. It's possible to imagine a different equal wealth world that is futuristic. If we get so advanced as to achieve technical abundance, any citizen on the planet would have a high living standard, say upper middle class. Which satisfies almost everybody. And the standard is guaranteed over time, there's no insecurity to it. And those wanting even more things, have everything at their finger tips. Usage based, not owning things.
In such a world, money becomes meaningless. It's no longer a way to reflect scarcity, a way to secure your personal future, or a differentiator of status. Everybody is materially equal at a high and lasting standard. Differentiation might then be found intellectually or in social status. But probably the robots have taken over by then.
We also have repeated instances throughout history of groups claiming to try to implement common ownership, and instead killing millions and installing tyrannical governments (see: most communist revolutions), of consistently larger scale (orders of magnitude) than the successes.
Historically, it's far more probable that such a common ownership experiment will result in death and tyranny (and not actual common ownership!) than a success - and, given the relative difference in scale between the successes and failures, there's a strong argument to be made that as the scale goes up, the probability of tyranny goes up.
This is one of the justifications for it being impossible in a practical sense (yeah, it's annoying that there's more than one definition for "impossible"). It's a fact that power attracts corruption, and it's also a fact that planet-level-scale common ownership would require more power to implement than any government has achieved so far. So, while not "impossible" in the hard-science sense, it's improbable (with a correspondingly large chance of a catastrophically bad alternative) to the point that it's not reasonable to attempt.
That said, your comment is a measured and thoughtful answer to a potentially-inflammatory topic, and I hope that my response is equally thoughtful.
I do hear the "scale" concern, and it's interesting to think about it. I.e. for me, it immediately pops the question "why is scale a problem for common ownership, but not for individual ownership". I suspect - without having any proof - that scale is the thing that makes the transition impossible, not that it's an inherent problem for community property itself. Practically, the outcome is indeed the same - if you can't safely transition, the end state is impossible, even if it itself would be a stable state.
This also raises the question of democracy & unequal ownership as a possible stable state - Plato was certainly concerned enough about it, and history has done nothing to discourage that belief since then. There are plenty of rather deadly examples of failed non-communist states.
If nothing else, your comment (and the subthread in general) has lead me to a rather interesting paper: "Social instability and redistribution of income", by Josef Falkinger. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762... (Yeah, as usual, paywalled. Elsevier)
It's a deliberate attempt at modelling outcomes based on income distribution - which I think attempts to get to the heart of the "impossible" issue. It only tackles income, not wealth, but there's a rich set of references :)
The number of early adopters with “diamond hands”, as they say, who resisted the temptation to sell at $2, $10, $100, … is vanishingly small. History is littered with early adopters who bailed out. Everyone has had years of opportunity to buy into Bitcoin at a fraction of its current value, and if the gamble pays off then people can currently buy Bitcoin at a fraction of its presumptive future value. There’s no unfairness here.
Everyone has had equal access the entire time, and Bitcoin people have been doing their best to get as many people onboarded as possible so they’re not left with “crumbs” after a monetary transition.
Of course, it’s not totally unreasonable to have believed that Bitcoin wasn’t going to work out, but in that case people have no grounds to complain about unfairness - they simply made a wrong choice (by current appearances).
Making money by buying and selling bitcoin is zero sum. People are only making money because other people are losing out. There is no possible way that everyone buys bitcoins and gets rich from it. Bitcoins depends on the existence of rubes and the continual expansion of the pyramid to make money for "investors".
Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset - because people need a place to live and you can either live in a house yourself or you can rent it to others. This demand doesn't go away through the introduction of Bitcoin.
Gold is a commodity, not a monetary asset. While a large amount of its value is attributable to speculation it has myriad industrial uses, and jewelry use. Some of this demand may go away as there's a large overlap between goldbuggery and bitcoin maxis.
Dollars have no intrinsic value, but instead their value is derived from demand which is created for them when they enter circulation. They're created via fractional reserve lending meaning that when a loan is issued, new dollars are created but also a debt is recorded - creating demand for those same dollars. That means dollars are 100% backed by demand for those dollars. This demand doesn't go away through the introduction of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is nothing. It has no intrinsic value, it has no demand, it's simply a speculative number-go-up machine. It's not money, that's for sure. You could try and use it as money but that would be an utter disaster from a macroeconomic perspective.
So yeah, parent is right, its roughly a pyramid shaped MLM with a negative-sum component - the $60,000,000 per day you have to pay to miners to keep the music playing.
[edit] Also note that gold and real estate are not classically defined as "monetary assets" - those are for instance cash, bank deposits, investments in debt capital markets and lease investments. Monetary assets need to have a prescribed value in exact dollar terms.
> Real estate is not a monetary asset, it's a productive asset… Gold is a commodity, not a monetary asset.
This is wrong. Any asset with monetary properties can (and will, in the right environments) be monetized. When the primary medium of exchange is inflationary, people will use whatever non-inflationary value stores they can find with sufficient liquidity. Most of the value of gold, and much of the value of real estate, lie in their capacity as a wealth storage mechanism. They are monetized. Bitcoin does a better job of this and will likely subsume their monetization value.
> It has no intrinsic value
Invocation of “intrinsic value” is a 100% surefire sign of a dysfunctional economic mental model.
That is not the definition of a monetary asset.
"A monetary item is an asset or liability carrying a value in dollars that will not change in the future. These items have a fixed numerical value in dollars, and a dollar is always worth a dollar. The numbers do not change even though the purchasing power of a dollar can potentially change." [1]
Words have meaning, so I guess I'm not 100% sure what you're talking about.
> Invocation of “intrinsic value” is a 100% surefire sign of a dysfunctional economic mental model.
[citation needed]
> citation needed
Give me a minute to find a copy of the Official Rules of Economic Epistemology.
If you’d like to put forward any particular theory that assigns “intrinsic value” to objects I could address it specifically.
Real estate is a productive asset and gold is a commodity. I'm not sure in what way they "behave like money" - their prices float with respect to a currency and have roughly zero of the attributes of money [1] - but monetization just means to find ways to make money off an unproductive asset, rather than transmuting it into something that's basically money.
> Give me a minute to find a copy of the Official Rules of Economic Epistemology.
I'll wait. If you're going to accuse someone of a "dysfunctional mental economic model" it's best to have a case made.
I'm referring to intrinsic value in the economic sense not in the epistemological sense. Economic intrinsic value is an independent mathematical derivation of the market value of an asset - based on its qualities and attributes - divorced from the price at which it trades.
For instance, the intrinsic value of a SPAC is the cash on hand, and its extrinsic value is whatever its trading at on the hopes of an acquisition.
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/education/economic-lowdown-podcas....
This doesn’t exist except in the imagination. It has no causal bearing on any economic process except through the influence it has on the person imagining it.
> their prices float with respect to a currency
So does EUR with respect to USD
> and have roughly zero of the attributes of money
Scarcity, fungibility, liquidity, durability, portability - gold’s 5/5 and real estate is 4.5/5. What properties are you thinking about?
No, it exists in math, with addition and subtraction. Like I said, a publicly traded bank account like a SPAC has an intrinsic value equal to its cash on hand. This is the economic definition of intrinsic value, and you're trying to once again substitute your epistemological definition. Same word, different meanings in different contexts, and it's disingenuous to try and substitute your definition as though it's the commonly accepted one in this context.
> So does EUR with respect to USD
This does not follow. Money isn't an asset, it's a currency, and a foreign exchange trade is a pair trade on the relative domestic purchasing power of the two. Currencies do not float with respect to other currencies because they are not priced in terms of each other.
> Scarcity, fungibility, liquidity, durability, portability - gold’s 5/5 and real estate is 4.5/5. What properties are you thinking about?
Ok let's talk about real estate. It's not fungible, each house is different. It's not liquid, in fact, sales take a substantial period of time. It's not necessarily durable, it decays without constant upkeep. It's totally not portable. And it's not broadly accepted as money. That's 0. Try bringing your deed to the Apple store to buy a MacBook. How is that 4.5 out of 5?
Gold of course isn't broadly accepted either, so that's a critical one. Try bringing a gold brick to the Apple store and see if you can buy an iPhone. Yes it could be money, it was at some point, but we replaced it because it was bad at being money, and these days it definitely is not.
I’m sure you can imagine a formula. If you’d like to share a particular formula that works for determining the “intrinsic value” of any arbitrary asset I can explain why it’s wrong or meaningless.
> This does not follow
EUR literally floats wrt USD. There is no coherent way to disagree with this.
> Currencies do not float with respect to other currencies because they are not priced in terms of each other.
Yes they are, any time someone does an FX trade.
> Ok let's talk about real estate.
Typo, meant 3.5/5. Durable - yes, it persists better over arbitrary timescales than the dollar, especially raw land. Scarce - yes. Fungible - 0.5. Liquid - long settlement times don’t mean illiquid (although I probably should apply a penalty here) - yes. Portable - 0. I think you meant “1” since you didn’t disagree with scarcity.
> Try bringing your deed to the Apple store to buy a MacBook… Try bringing a gold brick to the Apple store and see if you can buy an iPhone
Try bringing EUR to a US Apple store.
> we replaced it because it was bad at being money
Do you really think that’s why Nixon suspended gold convertibility? That’s a… very charitable explanation
Sure. Net of assets minus liabilities. Book value.
> EUR literally floats wrt USD. There is no coherent way to disagree with this.
They both change value with respect to eachother but neither is priced in the other. Goods in the US are priced in dollars. Goods in Europe are priced in Euros. Euros are not priced in dollars, and dollars are not priced in euros. They're independent and exchangeable at a market rate based on relative purchasing power and demand.
The price of a euro is not determined by the dollar - although a rate of exchange exists. The price of an apple in the US is determined by the dollar. The price of a dollar isn't determined by the euro. The price of an apple in the EU is determined by the euro. I'm sure there's a name for this.
> Yes they are, any time someone does an FX trade.
I see what you mean, and yes the rate of exchange floats.
> I think you meant “1” since you didn’t disagree with scarcity.
It's not scarce, you can just build up. We impose artificial scarcity with zoning considerations, but it's not inherently scarce.
> Try bringing EUR to a US Apple store.
Why would I do that? I don't live in Europe, I don't participate in the European economy. I can exchange one for the other, or have Visa do it free of charge, as they participate in both. Currencies only apply within their boundaries of acceptance. The euro is not a currency in America which is kind of the point I'm making about acceptance. It's a currency somewhere but real estate is a currency nowhere like gold.
So given it carries few (or IMO very few) attributes of money and is not used as money anywhere and its price fluctuates with respect to a currency, it's not a monetary asset. It's not monetized. It's totally independent.
> Do you really think that’s why Nixon suspended gold convertibility? That’s a… very charitable explanation
I don't really care why we got where we got - the result is better. FDR really took the US off the gold standard in 1933 - following the UK ending the gold standard in 1931 "abruptly and unilaterally." [1] Nixon simply killed off the last vestiges.
Uh huh… and how do you calculate the values of these subterms? You told me you could calculate a number, not an expression with free variables doing all the work.
> It's not scarce, you can just build up.
Building land is not cost effective. Economists say land has an “essentially fixed supply”, cf analysis of Georgism.
> It's a currency somewhere but real estate is a currency nowhere like gold.
Bitcoin is a currency in El Salvador. More to come.
> I don't really care why we got where we got - the result is better
I weep daily for my zombie coins.
I'm certainly not defending any of this … however, it should be noted that "creators can allocate arbitrary amounts to themselves" is a typical thing even in regulated markets. Notice how Trump's new social media became a public company through a SPAC? The man behind that move has two degrees from MIT.
If you want to go down that rabbit hole, go for it. But people become very wealthy, very fast, via allocating "arbitrary amounts to themselves" even in regulated markets. Financial shenanigans.
If you haven't heard of the $100 million deli in New Jersey, feel free to Google that one.
Then again, even PoW coins with no premine can be unfair if most of the long-term supply gets distributed in just the first few years, leaving only crumbs for late adopters.