Re:Why I’m Cryptophobic
by catlifeonmars on Thursday July 14, 2022 @10:15AM
(#32096351)
> Physical currency is an absolutely vital component of a stable economy. Its very lack of instantaneous fluidity (it relative inconvenience) means it acts like a capacitor to stabilise markets if you can manage circulation and interest.
Based on this statement, the currency need not be physical. It sounds like all that’s really necessary is to moderate the money supply (something that is already done in a federal reserve banking system).
What am I missing? Is there some other aspect of physical currency that makes it advantageous?
Re:Why I’m Cryptophobic
by aaaaaaaaata on Friday July 01, 2022 @09:55AM
(#31946429)
> Physical currency is an absolutely vital component of a stable economy. Its very lack of instantaneous fluidity (it relative inconvenience) means it acts like a capacitor to stabilise markets if you can manage circulation and interest. Moreover, governments have a strict monopoly on that, and physical currencies can take on many new guises with modern cash technology. Abandoning that would be suicide.
Governments are made of individual actors, in the US these are often buying cryptocurrency. Their friends have invested in and built cryptocurrency companies. They hold investments in cryptocurrency companies.
Cryptocurrency IS the capacitor you're talking about, the policy of the US is showing this more weekly.
Re:Why I’m Cryptophobic
by catlifeonmars on Thursday July 14, 2022 @10:26AM
(#32096469)
Curious, do “modern” cryptocurrencies (aka not bitcoin) still tightly couple money creation and transactions? I feel like this would be a blocker to being able to use a cryptocurrency as an automated economic manager directly (although perhaps this could be mitigated by using derivative currencies backed by the primary cryptocurrency).
Were.
I don't know if you subscribe to the political analysis of Adam Curtis but in the past two decades governments have been passing their power to private banks, corporations, QANGOs and "non majoritarian" think-tanks like it's a hot potato. The new breed of politicians are not statesmen but revolving-door temporary managers who would sell-off and outsource the whole country for personal convenience.
Other than a monopoly on violent power (which is vanishing fast in the USA as private cops and prisons take over) it's hard to locate the power of government sometimes. Even the military is dissolving into a loose collection of defence contractors. In the UK our intellgence services were more or less sold to Amazon.
The OP article seems dead set against anarcho-libertarianism but it is by no means pro-government, or explicitly pro-democracy. With regard to money and economics, from my moderately pro-government/state stance I see the great mistake governments are making is giving up on cash.
Physical currency is an absolutely vital component of a stable economy. Its very lack of instantaneous fluidity (it relative inconvenience) means it acts like a capacitor to stabilise markets if you can manage circulation and interest. Moreover, governments have a strict monopoly on that, and physical currencies can take on many new guises with modern cash technology. Abandoning that would be suicide.
If governments get into a battle to take the ground of purely digital currencies against crypto, they will lose. They are making this mistake in an attempt to gain legibility (surveillance). Ultimately they will have to choose between surveillance and economic control. And since the value of surveillance is massively over-rated I am optimistic we'll pull out of the Orwellian misadventure in time.
Anyone genuinely interested in defending against the "ideology of crypto" (as this article posits) should be investing in new cash technologies (some of which I have mentioned in earlier comments here). They should be promoting a plurality of diverse cash equivalents (many of which can be implemented using cryptographic technology - not necessarily block-chain).