Re:1Password Has Raised $620M
by Sohcahtoa82 on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @11:28AM
(#29995785)
I don't see how cryptocurrency solves any of the problems. Items 1-4 would still exist. The only difference is that the corporations would be funded with ETH/BTC/DOGE/whatever rather than US Dollars.
No, not at all. It is the difference betweena credit union and a bank, a housing cooperstive vs a landlord owned building.
To use a real world example: DisneyWorld is a city owned by a corporation, instead of democratically run. Because the people who own DisneyWorld shares (shareholder class) aren’t the visitors — the visitors buy DisneyDollars. They are the consumer class.
And there is also the working class (people who work in DisneyWorld) and their employers (small capitalists) who run a business inside DisneyWorld and pay rent.
Disneyworld and other cities could have its own smart economy with DisneyDollars and never have to raise money from speculators. Think of DisneyDollars as utility tokens and shares as security tokens for speculators.
Here is how it works in detail: https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf
1) whenever VCs invest in shares of a project
2) they tend to subsidize money-losing unit economics to “reduce friction” resulting in attempts to lock-in people and monetize their attention later
3) when the VCs later dump it on the public, the company has to now answer to wall street shareholders and its executives are heavily pressured to have quarterly earnings calls
4) they must find ways to extract rents forever because whoever bought at the top (the majority) wants to see their shares go higher, even at the expense of the public interest
5) whereas cryptocurrency could be about collective ownership, if there is no separate shareholder class then the network participants ARE collectively owning the means of production (basically, textbook socialism)
Whenever something like this is stated, anarcho-capitalists and right wing libertarians say:
Oh, there is NOTHING wrong with capitalism. That’s not REAL capitalism. That is corporatism / cronyism. (Some go further and quote Mises/Say/Praxeology: “only individuals can act, organizations can’t act.”)
Then about collective ownership of the means of production / distribution / the network they say… “That’s not REAL SOCIALISM. Socialism is when you use central government and planning and has led to so much misery and famine…”
So, a mainstream application of capitalism isn’t “real” capitalism because laissez faire capitalism doesn’t require the State. But credit unions, housing cooperatives, democratically run universities and now cryptocurrency DAOs are not “real” socialism because socialism requires the State?
There is a huge double-standard here, and I would encourage ancaps to answer the following questions:
Also, we can move beyond Libertarian Capitalism vs Libertarian Socialism discussions, to simply ask how to best structure decision making in a project.You can have cryptocurrency run top-down where people work on stuff to survive, and the parent company must make profits. Or you can remove the profit motive and have wikipedia, open source, science, etc. But then you’d need to subsidize people’s maslow’s needs with a UBI.
See for example how your very news and media is affected by the profit motive… compare something like WikiNews vs CNN and Fox. Where are the movements to do something about it? Here is one example I am working on myself: https://rational.app