p13nty

I understand pessimism of author and others in this thread when they notice that free software ideas are attacked from everywhere: companies subverted idea with fake "open source", many young people dislike GPL as "not cool", companies taking over projects such as with redis and so on.

But I noticed change in my personal perception (and I am not alone) towards more positive reception of actually free software and I believe that mass perception may change.

This is what changed my perception:

You see how often proprietary and "fake" open source software gets subverted by companies over time, especially when company is heavily funded by VC. After you see it couple of times you just get tired and there is no motivation to invest yourself into it so you just ignore it. Keybase is perfect example of such failure. Now when I see something like Signal I just ignore it (their recent controversial addition of crypto proved to me that it was right decision).

And it applies to software that I use in my work too, if I get to decide what software to use I try to avoid such projects.

> How exactly does this work? To whom is money being redistributed? It's punishment for holding dollars instead of investing them.

If you want to print money you have to inject it somewhere, and that place where you inject new money benefits from it - they decide how to spend this new money and this stream of wealth skews economy.

This is high level understanding ofc, I am sure there are a lot of technicalities on how this can be done.

Also, I don't think you should not keep currency but instead you should "invest" at least you could do this when you had gold.

> Monetary policy operates on a lower level, it controls only the supply.

I believe what people are implying when they talk against money supply increase is redistribution of wealth using money supply increase.

> If we switched to BTC, to sea shells, to zombie killing ammunition, fiscal and social policy would apply just as it does now.

It would not be equivalent since with BTC you can't just take away value of your share without making you explicitly pay, it removes invisible tax.