and a currency whose value approaches zero as time grows. if bitcoin is bad, how is that much better?
run businesses? to say nothing about whether those businesses are sustainable or actually generating wealth & human prosperity. if you look at all the worst aspects of the economy, they're based in expansionary monetary policy and high time preference
> inflation as the thing that keeps money in circulation
it keeps people spending money on usually wasteful things and incentivizes the consumption of cheap goods, if you want an economy built on prosperity and enduring goods, you need to actually incentivize saving (not wasteful consumerism)
surely people value things other than paying off liabilities?
why are you getting so defensive about the fact that fiat currency exponentially decreases in value
This is an attack on this whimsical philosophizing crypto-boosters use as a defense. No one cares about this "what is money" commentary. If you believe in your moon money so much why not just actually use it as money? Of course you'll have to lose those gainz but real money is just worthless paper right?
I don't buy stuff with it though it's being used to facilitate transactions for people. I route around $40k a month.
Whether it be war, tyranny and unjust sanctions, crashing economies, or just avoiding the arbitrary and often unjust fees, rules, seizures, and bannings imposed by private payment networks and services like paypal or visa, humanity will always need way to exchange cash. I for one am glad crypto (as a means to transfer funds) exists, glad it will continue to exist, and will continue to support it in any way I can.
To me, what it provides to humanity far outweighs the negatives.
Trillions of dollars are stolen from the people by money laundering and tax evasion every year, and cryptocurrencies are one of the ways this is accomplished.
Yes, some people live in countries where the law is hostile. However, your solution, "Let's evade all laws concerning money," is WORSE, not better.
If the argument is bad stuff possible then your argument is to abolish government.
We cannot presuppose that breaking the law is necessarily bad or that following the law is not bad.
What took you finance apologists so long to figure that one out? That was what - last summer or the summer before that SWIFT finally figured out how to process text fields independently, so line items didn't get confused with addresses? Talk about high-tech!
I'm sure your cousin's friend's sister's neighbor's dog flagged a real-life criminal account once, and maybe even some girl selling feet pics, but the overwhelming majority of people I've heard in my 30 years here have had their accounts flagged for what the common person might describe as "nonsense" and/or "bullshit".
Man, I hate banker simps.
I'm not going to pretend to be surprised - many American conservatives have expressed the same sentiments to me. However, I am surprised you post it in a public forum.
In my view, society is propped up by future expectations. This includes the value of government money.
No one else denies this or doesn't believe it's true, I hasten to add. For most of us, we think that this is a good thing, but also such an obvious thing that it doesn't need to be mentioned.
The people who keep mentioning it are people who think it's a bad, bad thing. They want everyone to have access to violence at all times.
The sane majority does not.
No. If your going to targrt political stratas, don't be narrow sighted.
The BLM and Antifa riots of "Defund the police" is exactly about the same concern, and supporters caused widespread violence to prove that point. There's a different reason, but many prominent Democrats urged those protests on, making it more broad than just some leftists commies.
The major difference is that BLM/antifa targeted local police with a national organization and got their way in many places, whereas conservatives are weary of the federal government are just some disorganized people that become easily targeted by the feds.
It's also worth mentioning that '0' and 'many' are the only options that offer even the possibility of uniformly distributed means of violence. IMO the population has highest security when violence is not monopolized by a privileged elite such as police officers and armed forces.
>society is propped up by future expectations. This includes the value of government money.
Then I think Ludwig has a point here. It's constantly touted that USD value is propped up in part because you have to pay taxes with it and backed by Nobel Peace Prize winners who bomb kids with drones from 5000 miles away. Thinking "hey some powerful people will toss me in a cage if I don't get this paper" may create real economic incentives but maybe we should be thinking about which incentives we want to be creating.
*Note: I fought in the civil war (YPG) in Syria. People I were with were much freer under civil war than when Assad controlled country.
I have no idea where you came up with "Many is civil war". Quite the opposite. Civil war erupts when one entity has a monopoly on violence and enough people decide that they've had quite enough of that, thank you very much.
There are all sorts of sayings. Is this one true?
The United States is the most heavily armed country of any size in the world. It is also more heavily armed than any time in its past.
And yet politeness appears to be at an all-time low. Certainly, a lot of political figures say things that are just astonishingly rude and horrible and false, things that would have destroyed their careers even twenty years ago but seem to make them very popular today.
It seems that saying is wildly false.
> I have no idea where you came up with "Many is civil war".
Probably they are knowledgeable about history, as their statement is simply true.
> Civil war erupts when one entity has a monopoly on violence and enough people decide that they've had quite enough of that, thank you very much.
I'm baffled as to how this makes sense to you.
How exactly do these people "decide they have had enough of that" without abrogating the states monopoly on violence? Surely by the time you get to civil war, there are _two sides fighting_??
It's like you just cut and paste a lot of slogans and stop thinking critically there.
I really suggesting reading some history.
So you use crypto to break the law, and you believe you are justified in doing that. Thing is, most of the people using crypto for crime are simply using it to not pay taxes.
> Wow, shitcoins sound so much worse than pieces of paper that are propped up by a legal decree, which legitimacy rests solely on the monopoly on violence. Wait, does it actually sound worse?
Yes, it absolutely does sound worse.
On one side, we have the United States - the largest economy in the history of the world, backed by the government with the largest income of any government in history, a court system, the police and their "monopoly on violence".
On the other side, you have a cryptocurrency backed by nothing, created by anonymous individuals, with no form of conflict resolution whatsoever.
Cryptocurrencies have been around for almost as long as the smart phone. You would think one or two of you would have taken even a first year economics course during this time.
Using it for crime? That just makes crypto even more similar to traditional finance.
> Yes, it absolutely does sound worse.
So you think all countries should switch their currencies to the US dollar? Do you think it is just as good for countries to give up their financial sovereignty as it is for common people?
> Cryptocurrencies have been around for almost as long as the smart phone. You would think one or two of you would have taken even a first year economics course during this time.
I was a teaching assistant for a graduate course in macroeconomics in a top 50 department during my PhD. Arrow-Debreu and all that.
I don't think _anyone_ is against using cryptocurrencies as a way of transferring money. It doesn't make sense to transfer wealth via something that rapidly changes its value, right? Because means of transferring wealth requires preserving the value of the wealth. Bitcoin today does not preserve its value, as evident by the rapid decline in value in the past few days.
Crypto allowed me to transfer my wealth across border and helped me survive while Visa blocked my cards and local banks harassed me with their KYC/AML requirements and creative nonsense based out of fear of the US and EU sanctions. The utility of that is much higher than any dividends.
> Instead it's a pyramid scheme, easily replaceable by any other shitcoin out there, and the value of it should be close to $1 or less.
Wow, shitcoins sound so much worse than pieces of paper that are propped up by a legal decree, which legitimacy rests solely on the monopoly on violence. Wait, does it actually sound worse?