Today I stumbled upon a very intersting (but also lengthy) blog post discussing currencies (crypto and fiat).
Thought provoking.
I definitely recommend reading it.
If anyone has any opinions on what is being said I'd be interested to hear them.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of the article, but points out a lot of interesting things which might be very relevant now that trump was elected.
The people behind bitcoin 10 years later: We don't have all the bitcoins. Stop accusing us of having all the bitcoins. No one is behind bitcoin! Ignore the man behind the curtain! Why don't you buy more bitcoins? Buy more bitcoins pleeease I have so much invested in them!
Bitcoin can be verified by anyone, easily and cheaplyHahaha oh wow.
@serapath
> I'm not entirely sure what to make of the article
It's neither a technical nor a political-economic analysis. It's a religious one.
I skimmed a couple of pages, which were so full of motivated reasoning, and so smugly and unambiguously wrong on the basics, that I stopped reading.
@strypey interesting.
yes - i do notice that he is obviously very excited, but it also seems the arguments as such are valid.
could you point out a few things that were wrong? i might have missed them.
@serapath
> could you point out a few things that were wrong?
I'm not sure this is a good use of your time or mine at this point. Because I consider the whole thing obviously wrong, based on a huge memeplex of premises and assumptions that are also obviously wrong.
The fact that you consider it mostly right means we have a *huge* amount of ground to cover. Given how long we were able to debate Nostr vs. the fediverse alone, we'd need to strap in for months to get anywhere with it.
(2/2)
But just an example, the author assumes that money is valuable because it's scarce. This is the sort of myth that needs to be corrected in high school classes on economic history.
As Graeber pointed out in Debt, money began as coins that warlords issued to their soldiers, and demanded back (in "taxes") from the peasants in the territories they held. This is still what gives money it's value; whoever holds the monopoly of violence in a territory (the "state") guarantees that it is.
@strypey hahaha 🙂
i mean the gist imho is:
no young person can afford houses or anything apart from food and rent and even that is difficult.
the money printing worldwide is through the roof since 2008 and inflation too. stuff is insanely expensive and it apways gets worse.
if you dont have a job that pays you high salaries you are disadvantaged.
bitcoin does not solve all problems, but it ends the capitalist class. we (the ppl) never had momey printers, but bitcoin has no more than 21 mio
@strypey thus... no more money printers for capitalists either.
musk from multimillionaire to richest multibillionaire in the world in like ... ~10 years?
mental. ...same for the others.
most of his businesses arent even break even.
how do they do it?
also - how do they fund war?
...money printing.
private (investment) banks & VCs, but also government ...the latter in the US wil now be trump.
...the ppl nenver benefit from it
no money for welfare or pensions or anything to raise living standard. homeless ppl on the street. ... but ppenty of money for the military and plenty of other corrupt projects.
just like the silicon valleys od this world print to enrich investors and the other privileged capitalist and never returns real value to the ppl that outbenefits the costs.
bitcoin ends money printing, thus ends apl of this.
if you have bitcoin and we all adopt it. it will grow forever in value
@strypey ...normal ppl anyway have to work to earn any money... but if they ever earn some, it will now grow in value over time instead of lose it.
that is the gist
that is the plausible promise based on ince tives and what is enabped IF everyone switches to bitcoin
Brics and many others who might not trust the USD anymore have incentives too.
and for 15 years bitcoin grows.
soke BRICs countries mine bitcoin with government funds. soke minor countries declared it legal tender too.
blackrock and other big companies hold significant amounts including pension funds.
in switzerland you can pay taxes with it.
..soo yeah, what do you think?
(1/?)
@serapath
> soo yeah, what do you think?
I agree with Jason Hickel;
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/113647624222641778
It's well worth listening to the full podcast. But the rash of quotes I posted in that thread will give you a taste of just how differently we think about political economy.
I wasn't joking when I said a decent discussion would take months, I was being optimistic. It would probably require us to write blog length replies to each other and paste links here.
I'm up for this, after summer ; )
(2/?)
I think we're tacking towards the same destination. But one of us is going east to get there, and one to the west. So figuring out where we are in relation to each other right now, is going to take some careful descriptions, and poring over of maps.
This would be a complete waste of your time if I was a statist (whether marxist or liberal). But I'm not. Although as an environmentalist I do see a limited role for territorial governance, including making tactical use of existing ones.
(3/?)
Having given all that context, since you're asking what I think of BitCoin, I'll be blunt. I think the same thing I've thought about it since about a decade ago. It's not tulips, it's clearly more than a passing speculation fad, but It's not money either. It's value is a pure derivative of the value of fiat currencies, particularly the USD.
(4/?)
The main reason BTC holds value, more consistently that other crypto-tokens, is that the USAmerican elite are using it to stash stolen wealth and evade taxes. When the petrodollar scam finally ends, and the US financial system goes into freefall, BTC will tank along with the USD.
But by then those US elites will have turned their holdings back into land, and gold, and other things that hold their value in an economic crash. Most of it outside the US, which will probably deepen the crash.
(5/?)
Having said all that I'm less bearish on 2 strips of bandage on the "crypto" mummy. Blockchains are a genuinely clever data structure, and when the crypto wars are over and the dust settles, they'll turn out to work really well for a particular set of use cases. Few if any of them to do with finance.
(6/6)
In the shorter term, I am interested in blockchain tokens as payment systems, for the same reason I'm interested in *every* kind of digital payment system.
Efficient digital payments are an unsolved problem. As I learned in some depth when I had a contract helping Permaculture in NZ improve their website, including a payment gateway for accepting membership dues and event registration fees.
InterLedger protocol interests me more than BitCoin though.
@strypey interesting.
i dont see what this is backed by.
it seems BRICS and other countries are mining BTC woth government resources and see it to some degree as an option to get rid of USD dependency?
Given that the west froze lots of savings from russia when the russian invasion of ukraine started (i think it was billions), wpuldnt countries in general be happier to save in something that is more independent and reliably protects from that?
i wonder what use cases those could be.
to me anything that doesnt benefit from global consensus (and there are extremely few things that need that) ... seems to be better solved wothout blockchains.
I do see many altcoins running interesting experiments and was involved in some of them for some time, but at the moment i dont wanna get near any of them and apart from bitcoin they all feel like scams to me right now
@strypey
i follow interledger for some time now, longer than blockchains actually, but my impression was its mostly a system to allow payments on the internet ...including bitcoin.
I did not think interledger by itself works, but havent checked it for some time now.
maybe i'm missing some essentials about how it works. i found it difficult to wrap my head around it
i dont think bitcion needs or is supposed to use a lot of energy - because your tech wont save us link was kinda about that too
Once block rewards go to zero and all figure it is pointless to attack and block rewards go to zero, it makes more sense to stop mining unless to again correct and protrct the chain, thus it should get less energy intensive. right now its crypto war time and block rewards exist so it continues, but apart from that, i feel its main proposal is 21mio limit
(1/2)
@serapath
> i follow interledger for some time now, longer than blockchains actually, but my impression was its mostly a system to allow payments on the internet ...including bitcoin
Yes. I've seen it described as a kind of Internet Protocol of payments, a neutral way of connecting 2 payment systems across a network. One of the founders describes it quote well in this interview;
https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/w3c-interview-coil-on-interledger-protocol-and-web-monetization/
I'm interested in BTC payments in the short term because they're one way to use it.
(2/2)
I recently joined a thread discussing where Interledger is at, and asked how it relates to GNU Taler, which has broadly similar goals;
https://indieweb.social/@johnallsopp/113619430595140949
My intuition is that the two could work together somehow. But I'd need to learn more about the nuts and bolts of both to figure out what that could look like in practice.
(1/?)
@serapath
> Once [BitCoin] block rewards go to zero ... it makes more sense to stop mining unless to again correct and protrct the chain, thus it should get less energy intensive
I'll admit it's been a *long* time since I read the white paper. However ...
My understanding is that mining blocks in a Proof of Work system isn't pointless make-work, designed merely to slow the release or new coins. But rather its the computation work that confirms transactions, preventing double-spending.
(2/?)
Which is why new tokens get harder and harder to mine as time goes on. The algorithm is trying to make sure the number of new tokens to be issued approaches but *never reaches* zero. Because if mining ever stops, the whole shamozzle comes to a shuddering halt.
So not only is mining baked in, so is its exponentially increasing computational cost, and ergo, it's energy usage. All to create a form of purely artificial scarcity that we don't really need.
It's techno isolationist insanity.
(3/?)
From what I understand, this is why Ethereum and a bunch of other blockchains have used or pivoted to Proof of Stake (Ethereum, Cardano et al).
I don't know how this affects energy use but it comes with new problems. It basically simulates capitalism (in the original Marxist sense of the term) on top of the blockchain. Whoever starts with the most tokens has a baked in advantage. Much more so than in PoW systems, where pools of holding power can be checked by pools of computation power.
(4/?)
The holy war between card-carrying BitCoiners, and the crypto protestants interested in wider use of blockchains, is IMHO explained by my conspiracy theory of BTC as a vector for elites hiding stolen wealth.
Their strategy doesn't work if people accept that BitCoin was a Proof of Concept, never intended to be used as day-to-day infrastructure. From memory (again, it's been a while), the white paper anticipated some of the limitations that are now confirmed. Offering idea for workarounds.
(5/?)
From memory (again, it's been a while), the BitCoin white paper anticipated some of the limitations that are now confirmed. As well as offering idea for possible workarounds, some of which have been adopted by other blockchains, and some by adjacent projects like Lightening.
Yet whenever I dip my toes into Nostr, I see this blind loyalty to the one true BitCoin, just as I see it in the link you posted, that kicked off this branch of our hellthread.
(6/6)
In summary, IMHO the BTC maximalism we see today is based not only on a bunch of fundamental misunderstandings of how political economy works, but also on a profound ignorance of the underlying technology of BitCoin itself.
How many BitCoiners do you think have actually read the white paper? Of those, how many do you think understood it?
(1/2)
@serapath
> i wonder what use cases those could be
My go-to example is the JamiNS blockchain;
https://docs.jami.net/en_US/user/jami-distributed-network.html
Interested in your thoughts on GNU Jami, not just JamiNS, but in general.
(2/2)
@serapath
> to me anything that doesnt benefit from global consensus ... seems to be better solved wothout blockchains ... they all feel like scams to me right now
Exactly. Most blockchain projects so far have been people in love with hammers trying to treat every problem as a nail.
That was the tulip mania aspect of blockchain fandom. But that's pretty much moved on to MOLE Training now.
(1/?)
@serapath
> BRICS and other countries are mining BTC with government resources and see it to some degree as an option to get rid of USD dependency?
Got any links on the first bit? Even accepting it for the sake of argument, the second bit doesn't necessarily follow.
The Euro was an attempt to escape USD dependency. The Libyans were trying to set up an African EU equivalent with it's own currency, but Secretary Clinton made short work of that (only one reason she's contemptible scum).
i wasnt super impressed by taler.
they dont seem to improve anything unless they jave a secret plan hidden in plain sight that should maybe occur in a future when gnu taler was adopted by everyone as a mainstream thing...
...but apart from that, it seems messy and custodial to some degree and maybe i am doing it wrong, but interledger or not still requires the decision ofusing SOME payment network among the many to use interledger with i guess?
...for now after my experience its BTC
@strypey
i think it mainly serves to decide how to reach consensus. in this case get one peer to produce the next block with transactions then broadcast to everyone else ... every 10 minutes.
if the block is cheating, double spends or anything, it will be corrected by the next miner.
having little mining going on makes it easy to cheat, but everypne will see and can correct it, so the cheating will be undone.
if ppl know all cheating will always be corrected, then why spending resource on it
@strypey hmmm... not entirely.
the mining reward will go to literally zero around the year 2100, but already before it will be miniscule.
the mining difficulty goes up ...or down, with the amount of miners... based on how fast blocks get mined. target is every 10 minutes.
if its faster, difficulty goes up, if its lower, difficulty goes down
@strypey agree.
that is why i am not up for any blockchain without fixed number of tokens... e.g 21mio.
because whether proof of work as in Doge coin or proof of stake as in ethereum... the rich always get the new printed moneu. the poor get dilluted.
that is the same shit we already have.
and i saw ethereum, polkadot and some more of web3 from the inside.
to me it feels like microsoft joined forces with silicon valley and wallstreet and its a hoard of employees building out the web3 based
@strypey based of microsofts HR capabilitirs.
all the rich ones are early investors who own the majority of tokens and hence get all the new tokens and decide everything.
totally rigges, but they are telling a marketing story of true decentralization.
imho its all fake apart from bitcoin
bitcoin is extremely transparent, tokens can be tracked forever, thus especially if somebody is very rich - its not a good way of hiding transactions imho. its worse than the current monetary system with obviously allows for plenty of criminality already
yeah. it could be something else than bitcoin, but if the elites should lose their capitalist class money printer privilege i can only see how that cnan happen with a finite amount of tokens.
imho litecoin also has a finite amount, but bitcoin seems to be a better "schelling point"
@strypey i dont know.
there are a lot of youtube videos and books explaining the white paper or all the parts of it.
the white paper does not include important things like representing a keypair as 12 english words. and many more things.
they are technically not essential, but in prqctice a lot of stuff build in the ecosystem makes it actually usable
maybe this CNBC show?
https://youtu.be/QUJNIMh3sMA?si=qN7-gNDJT7FV0Gcv
el salvador uses it as legal tender
swiss canton zug allows to pay taxes in BTC
i think argentina is mining with goverment resources? ...but heard a bunch of others as well.
china did in the past, but i am unsure about the current status
@strypey have to take a look. will answer in a bit
(2/?)
The only way a country can really be independent of the USD - short of replacing all fossil fuel use - is by finding countries willing to sell oil in currencies other than USD. Are there any selling oil for BTC?
If not, then BTC mining like as not has nothing to do with USD independence, one way or the other. It's more likely to be a strategy of converting underused computation or capital into a money printing machine. Which is what crypto-mining looks like from the outside.
JamiNS is 100% guaranteed an ethereum based project. ..so no. wouldnt touch it with a stick imho.
name registratiin is either not needed or plenty of solutions are already out there.
thr DHT bit sounds like dat, but dat is a 501c3 started in 2013 and has no blockchains involved at all, because not needed.
name registration is a feature you might or might not need. i am not convinced it is needed, but if, exisiting solutions exist
(3/?)
As for the banks seizing Russian savings, you've got to ask why a country the size of Russia is storing so much wealth outside its own borders in the first place?
There's some exploration of some possible reasons in this, notably where he talks about repatriating the savings of trade surplus countries;
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/pb183/episodes/Can-Trumps-Tariffs-Work-e2s4ab3
But my money is on Russian oligarchs storing their ill-gotten gains where their government and the population they stole it from can't easily access it.
(4/?)
Circling back to your opening question;
@serapath
> i dont see what this is backed by
I presume you're asking precisely how the US elite stashing their ill-gotten gains in BTC drives up the price? The logic of this seems pretty obvious to me.
(5/?)
* the price of BTC - like any unsecured derivative - goes up when there's more willing buyers than sellers
* If people are using it to launder hoards of stolen wealth, that massively drives up demand
* With demand going up, it's reasonable to assume that price will go up, which reduces willingness to sell
* Given a) relatively static number of tokens, b) rising demand, and c) static or falling supply, this must drive up the price
* the rising price drives up b) and c), rinse, repeat.
(6/?)
People see number go up, and erroneously assume that high price = high value. But most of the real world value is in the wealth that is being laundered through it.
Yes, if you manage to buy low and sell high you can realise real value. But that's true of any speculation activity, whether on stocks and bonds, fiat currencies, or financial derivatives, including blockchain tokens.
(7/7)
A good friend of mine who studied International Relations at postgraduate level likes to ask; how many armoured divisions does BitCoin have?
This pithy question sums up the overlap between IR Realist, anarchist *and* MMT theories about money;
The value of a currency is guaranteed by a monopoly of violence on a territory, and backed by the assets and productive capacity of that territory.
BitCoin has no territory, nor any way of depending it if it did. So its not a currency.
(1/?)
@serapath
> i am not up for any blockchain without fixed number of tokens
Two things;
1) When the tokens have no fixed value, this is ultimately an illusion. The number of tokens can be increased by breaking BTC into Satoshis, and then by breaking Satoshis onto micro-Satoshis.
But this is details. The more important reason the fixed number of tokens doesn't matter is ...
(2/2)
2) Goldbugs are wrong. The value of a currency does not come from scarcity, and never has. Much wrongthink in tokenomics comes from this variant of the 'all trout are fish therefore all fish are trout' fallacy.
Overabundance of a currency reduces the value of a currency, ergo, reducing the number of units increases the value.
The problem is inflation is caused by increasing *not* the absolute number of currency units, but the number
*relative* to the value of the economy backing it.
@serapath
> totally rigges, but they are telling a marketing story of true decentralization ... imho its all fake apart from bitcoin
As I've explained, I think this BitCoin exceptionalism is self-deluding. But let's revisit this conversation in a decade or so and see if either of us were right, or if we're both wrong ; )
@serapath
> bitcoin is extremely transparent, tokens can be tracked forever
True. Good to see people are moving on from the 'BitCoin is anonymous' nonsense ; )
> its not a good way of hiding transactions imho. its worse than the current monetary system
It's very much not. If you've ever tried to move money between countries without using crypto, you'll know that fiat currencies have a huge number of checks and balances (AML, KYC, etc), which make it hard to move large volumes offshore.
(2/?)
When I lived in China, I quickly noticed that the financial system was organised such that it was very easy to move money *into* the country. I could just go to any ATM and withdraw cash from my NZ bank account.
But getting money *out* of China was a whole different story. To do that, I had to go to a specialist teller, only the central branch of the bank where I had my Chinese account, with a whole folder of paperwork. There are laws limiting outward cross-border cash movements too.
(3/3)
This isn't unique to China either. Aside from fraud mitigation, every country that cares about its sovereignty has a whole range of regulations on capital movements, offshore ownership, etc. Which hedge against the risk of ending up with the bulk of its economy owned by another country, which can use that as geopolitical leverage.
So if you're a Chinese oligarch wanting to move wealth out of China, BTC would be ideal, if the CCP hadn't caught on and regulated to prevent that.
@serapath
> it could be something else than bitcoin, but if the elites should lose their capitalist class money printer privilege
What do you think "cryptocurrencies" are other than a new kind of capitalist money printer?! Adopted as a potential replacement for the last kind; trading banks issuing mortgages. Which were turned into money printers to replace the original kind, nation-states, which they lost control of to communist and social democratic revolutions in the early 20th century.
@serapath
> there are a lot of youtube videos and books explaining the white paper or all the parts of it
How many of those were created by people who read it themselves and fully understood what they read? It's advanced computer science, even now. I knew enough basic computer science to know I didn't fully understand it, and would need to study it in depth and read some of the references before I did.
How many BitCoiners are that reflexive?
(1/?)
@serapath
> maybe this CNBC show?
Web videos are not famous for being credible sources, and neither are CNBC. Especially on a topic that has so many people blowing smoke around it, for their own pecuniary purposes.
I'd be looking for academic or primary sources when evaluating claims about what states are and aren't doing with BTC and other crypto-tokens.
(2/?)
@serapath
> el salvador uses it as legal tender
AFAIK the countries doing this are vassal states of the US, where USD is already used as if it's legal tender, whether or not that's official. Mainly because of USD coming across the US border as remittances from workers.
Now the US highway cops are becoming highwaymen, stealing from anyone carrying cash interstate, let alone cross border. Recognising BTC as legal tender is mainly a way to mitigate this, and reduce internal need for USD.
(3/?)
@serapath
> swiss canton zug allows to pay taxes in BTC
"Due to Zug's status as a business center and tax haven, 5.74% of the tertiary sector is in management and business consultancy, 4.67% provide information technology services, 4% provide legal and tax consultancy and nearly 4% provide financial service"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_of_Zug
Swiss banks are infamous for being one of the main vector for the laundering of stolen wealth internationally. Of course they're getting on board.
(4/4)
> china did in the past, but i am unsure about the current status
See the other branch of the thread where I talked about the challenges of moving money out of China. The CCP were bullish on crypto-mining when they saw it as a magic money printer. As soon as they realised it was a vector for unregulated cross-border/currency flows, they cracked down hard.
Argentina and others will have the same experience.
The blockchain is used to solve Zooko's triangle. Jami has unique addresses on a decentralised network, but they're not human-readable. Pet names can be mapped to these long, cryptic addresses, but not uniquely. JamiNS allows a Jami app to resolve the username "Strypey" to a specific address.
@serapath
> name registration is either not needed or plenty of solutions are already out there
I'd love to see you open an issue on the Jami forge and propose one. Send me a link, I'll make popcorn ; )
Bitcoin has 8 digits after the comma.
0.00000001 BTC is called one Satoshi or SAT
It cant be divided smaller than that, because digital does not have infinite digits.
The point is also more in: no new tokens for capitalist class ppl. no more money printers.
with money printers, the printing class gets more, the rest loses. in bitcoin, everyone gets more when the value of BTC goes up. that is a big improvement and in absolute terms nobody gets more.
if you spend you spend
@strypey
we can revisit in the future.
i am not cou ting on the bitcoin community or in general on anything that makes folks special, only on the rules
@strypey i personally dont have large amounts to move around, but i am pretty sure criminals know how to do it.
buy something... shares? cash? or a car or diamonds or gold or whatever? or set up multiple businesses and sell a business from Mafia A to Mafia B for under the price in Country 1 and sell another business from Mafia B to Mafia A in country 2 for a bigher price... and yay... you transferred the diference.
I mean criminals will be criminals with or without crypto.
probably.
but then again, criminals and big criminal businesses have always existed and they always managed to move or hide theirnmoney, transport and sell drugs or do all sorts of things...and nothing could really stop them.
With bitcoin, if anything, i expect it to get better rather than worse. ...but even if things stay the same, i havent heard of any reports that said BTC creates more crimnals.
crypto in general is a different story though. i think altcoins are all scams
really?
obviously that didnt prevent from some chinese getting filthy rich and buying loads ofnhouses overseas ..while the majority has little money.
I dont really see how it helps. maybe the government loyal capitalists get protected while non-government competitive mafia is kept in check? ...i dont know - sounds weird though 🙂
most crypto is that what you say, but crypto currencies with a max supply (minority of them) does not have the printer built in.
e.g. ethereum and all of web3 or musks preferred doge coin issue new tokens forever and they go to the rich with most tokens or compute or whatever, essentially giving them fresh money forever on the account of the peasants who get diluted.
in bitcoin everyone is in the same boat.
i do think bitcoiners in general are very much about educating and providing information
not saying all content is great or every bitcoiner understood everything, but i have experienced web3, which is the opposite. from ethereum to the last tiny shitcoin, their goal is to hide the details from end users and ideally move them into crypto behind the scenes, so nothing changes for end users... e.g. all your services and products you use run on ceypto behind the scenes, but you wont know
@strypey i see. i heard it is Argentina, UAE and Ethiopia, but also Russia now. But dont k ow whether there are papers... probably, but yeah, cant provide any links to scientific papers - more just financial mainstream news sources, which to me still seems different from specifically "crypto news"
you have alreqdy .ens domains im ethereum and you have the original namecoin and you have HNS and probably every major altcoin has some sort of solution... of course, they are all blockchain based domains.
But i think folks anyway type into search bars and autocomplete or click links sent or found on messengers/websites.
so ceyptolinks arent a problem and urlbar autocomplete can look up your or your peers/friends petnames for cryptolinks or if anyone you know knows the link.
@strypey so the human readable is unnecessary.
also, a standard could allow the address maker to store a human readable petname, thus that can be looked up tok, to get an initial name in case you know nobody.
other than that, identicons and other ways of translating crypto addresses into unique images or icons helps too.
to me thats enough. you avoid the entire madness that comes with creating a human readable namespace system and you can just avoid it entirely
so bitcoin being limited supply, so no capitalist money printer class, earliest and most adopted, mosy secured of the bunch, makes it a good candidate to adopt it.
once we have one global money, we dont need a second one. that just opens up attqck vectors to speculation again and complicatw sthings unnecessarily, so its not that bitcoin as such is so superior... but it is important that things are stable, because any change makes it unreliable or unpredictable
@serapath
> more just financial mainstream news sources, which to me still seems different from specifically "crypto news"
Heh. Large news media outlets don't know whether to report it as tech news, business news, financial news, or political news. Of course it's all four. Even the tech press reporting on it is about as reliable as their reporting on the fediverse, ie not very.
That's why I specified primary sources, or academic ones, where they're getting better at interdisciplinary work.
(1/2)
You seem to have missed the bit where I said;
> But this is details
But sure, let's split hairs ; )
@serapath
> 0.00000001 BTC is called one Satoshi or SAT
The point is that the original pitch had a fixed number of tokens (BTC), and that was considered to be a feature, not a bug. But that money supply limit didn't survive contact with real world use at scale. So now the number of tokens has been increased (conceptually but not technically), by defining a subtokens called a SAT.
(2/2)
You'd think that this would have taught people that there are sound reasons that a finite supply of monetary units has been abandoned, in every economic system in which it's been tried. *Including* the BitCoin economy. But this dogmatic and completely mistaken belief in scarcity as the source of monetary value seems to be the only bit of OG BitCoin that *has* survived contact with real world economics ; )
@serapath
> started before silicon valley, big tech and wallstreet knew, so its not again the already rich who have the most. it has the most fair distribution possible compared to all cryptos
What evidence base do you have for these claims? For a start;
Also, in a PoW blockchain, whoever has the most computing power in the network can mine the most coins. You really think this has nothing to do with ...
> silicon valley, big tech and wallstreet
Really? Why?
@serapath
Honestly, if you really want to get to the root of our disagreement here, you need stop getting lost in the weeds of the tech and interfactional drama in the crypto world, and focus on the underlying *economics*;
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/113665691857278151
Why exactly do you think ...
> bitcoin being limited supply
... is a good thing?
What exactly do you mean by ...
> capitalist money printer
... and why is it a bad thing?
What is a blockchain mining pool if not a money printer?
Etc, etc.
(1/2)
@serapath
> i personally dont have large amounts to move around, but i am pretty sure criminals know how to do it
They find ways, financial regulators find ways to mitigate them. It's an arms race.
> I mean criminals will be criminals with or without crypto
True. Blockchains are not, in themselves, better suited to financial shenanigans than fine art, or any other kind of unsecured asset, whose value is purely speculative.
(2/2)
What makes crypto-tokens different is;
a) being relatively new and mostly unregulated.
b) having a network of partisans who are highly allergic to any attempt to regulate them, to make them harder to use for financial shenanigans
This network of partisans forms part of the speculative value of crypto-tokens as an asset class. It's a built-in hedge against the risk of new regulation exposing and stopping tax evasion, wealth misappropriation, etc, using cross-border crypto trade.
@serapath
> that didnt prevent from some chinese getting filthy rich and buying loads of houses overseas ..while the majority has little money
I did say it was a hedge against, not a guaranteed solution in every case. See;
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/113671295066964258
Besides, this seems like a deflection, because it doesn't even try to refute the point I was making;
> if you're a Chinese oligarch wanting to move wealth out of China, BTC would be ideal, if the CCP hadn't caught on and regulated to prevent that.
(1/2)
Me:
> Recognising BTC as legal tender is mainly a way to mitigate this, and reduce internal need for USD
It's worth specifying that in practice, this looks exactly like the only time I ever traded crypto-tokens for money. I bought tokens using RNB in a Chinese bank account, then immediately sold them to someone else doing the same thing, who deposited NZD in my NZ bank account.
Making BTC legal tender just simplifies regulation of these cross-border currency flows.
(2/2)
If currency exchanges could use pork futures as the intermediary asset, it would work just as well. But futures, like most forms of established financial trading, are heavily regulated to hedge against them being used this way. So are fine art sale, for the same reason, and to hedge against trade in stolen antiquities.
If you have evidence of people in El Salvador or Argentina or anywhere else are using BTC as cash, to actually buy things for their everyday needs, I'm keen to see it.
(1/?)
@serapath
> you have already .ens domains im ethereum and you have the original namecoin
There's a large and growing literature on the abject failure of existing attempts, including the 2 you mention;
The @Jami team tried to learn from this when designing JamiNS. Which is *not* a DNS alternative BTW, but a solution specifically for use with Jami and compatible apps (if there are any).
(2/?)
> folks anyway type into search bars and autocomplete or click links sent or found on messengers/websites
Maybe. But I still think it's useful for someone to be able to;
1) install Jami
2) wonder who they can talk to as a test
3) think to themselves, Strypey must be using this, I'll find him
4) knowing that I'm "strypey" almost everywhere, search for that username
5) Find my Jami account (via JamiNS), instead of a bunch of namesquatters who are not me
(3/?)
Obviously the Jami developers have had enough requests for this kind of UX that they thought it was worth hacking together a solution to Zooko's Triangle. It's equally obvious they thought a blockchain was the right tool for the job. Otherwise, given the rise of hard anti-blockchainism (even among BitCoiners it seems), they would have used something else.
(4/4)
FWIW your reactions suggest that GNU Jami is totally new to you. If so, I suggest worth learning a bit more a about the project and its history.
It began as a SIP client for GNU/Linux called SFLPhone, which pivoted into a P2P messenger app called Ring, before being adopted by the GNU Project. It was then renamed again to Jami;
It's not blockchain-based, and can be used quite happily without JamiNS. I last tested it, about 5 years ago,
@serapath FYI I was want to flag that I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. When I feel overwhelmed, I can tend to get defensive, and that can manifest as snarky. While any snark coming from me is unintentional, I acknowledge that I still hold responsibility for it. To that end;
Checking in with myself, what I'm feeling overwhelmed by is not the number of posts (I'm actually loving the detailed replies), but by the complex branching structure of the thread.
(1/2)
(2/2)
It would help me if we could keep the tangents to a minimum, and focus on one topic at a time. I write a string of replies to the last string you wrote, and vice-versa.
Linking back to previous posts as appropriate can be a way of folding tangents back into the mainline discussion for further elaboration, without turning the thread into a thorny tangle of crisscrossing branches. Does that make sense?
Remember also to @mention me only in the first post of a string, to avoid flooding : )
hmmm.. but the original paper always defined 8 digits after the comma. That wasnt introduced later.
It has always been
21,000,000.000,000,00
So it did not get introduced later on is what i want to say. Bitcoin has been successfully ultrqconservative in sticking to the original vision and all kinds of changes and forks have been tried and were not successful.
The only thing that sometimes after endless discussions works is backward compatible additions a.k.a soft forks
Those twins invested in 2012/2013
That is the time when big business took notic of bitcoin and the first couple of bull runs and were getting ready to launch their own web3 shitcoins, starting with ethereum in 2013 and a few other experikents before that, like mastercoin/colored coins, etc...
Yes rich folks can buy more compute to mine more, but eventually that stops. There is no more mining when 21 million is reached, no matter how rich you are
@strypey early adopters who are rich benefit, but they opt into a no money printing world.
old miney late adopter miss out.
The poor do not get money in any world, so the best deal possible imho is a world where we end the capitalist class privilege of money printing so we play on a pevek playing field
some blockchains will always make new tokens. it doesnt matter if proof of work or proof of stake. if there will be new tokens, they go to the rich at the expense of the poor.
any blockchain with fixed supply wont have that at the expense of the poor, such as bitcoin.
money printing is deficits/loans/debt based money that **never gets paid back** and also in practice CAN NEVER be paid back.
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2024/10/15/global-public-debt-is-probably-worse-than-it-looks
yes. i will try.
mastodon makes it hard to keep track of branches, so link8ng to fold them back in is a bit difficult. but let see
@strypey ...so those global debt links are cause by "the system" as such ans how our fiat money works, but in practice its the rich and powerful running it.
its governments on one side and more importantly and almost never talked about, private (investment) banks and VCs on the other side who get access to the never paid back and never stopping debt expansion, which essentially makes it a money printer for them, the capitalist class.
we, the ppl, anyway get diluted and more poor, OR we are ...
@strypey ....or we are privileged enough to receive a salary from those capitalists who get the really big budgets to pay all of us to make us work based on what they want, which makes us "well off wage slaves" ... who dont have any say in what gets done and who gets employed, but we are at least having salaries from the capitalist printers
very broken and works only foe the tiny percentage of privileged first world employees who help to protect their system.
unions also only defend that sadly
@strypey yes, which means its a net neutral effecg... maybe bitcoin transparency makes it even harder for criminals...but in any case, i feel its kinda a niche (irrelecant?) side brqnch when discussing bitcoin. i do agree though, that non-bitcoin blockchains, a.k.a web3, are very dubious and scammy in my experience, but i wpupd anyway not advocate for those...
fair enough, but interestingly, the CCP was able to and in part because bitcoin aplows the tracking, imho by design.
thata different from e.g. monero or other really dark and privacy focusee blockchains designed to be untraceable...
i do think its still early. ppl there experiment with bitcoin payments, but its a new experience and ppl are stipl familiarizing
the reason why i think that bitcoin "lends itself" as a medium to transfer through is, that everyone can be re-assured, that there wont be a single party they need to trust to not "rug pull" or "freeze" or "inflate" the medoum while it is in use
bitcoin is 21mio. period.
this cannot be guaranteed for basicaply anything else, strictly speaking not even gold
@strypey what if i register strypy first in Jami and pretend to be you? now you cant even get it and ppl will always think i am you.
this problem isnt that easily solved
to me a global naming system is irrelevant in practice and the paper suggests namecoin was to cheap so squatting again happened. cool. try many others. In an extreme case Every app can run its own namespace blockchain or centralized database.
i happily opt out of all of them forever for autocomplete i control and shared links
or they did it because they get funded.
offer somthing and make good friends with ppl who uave qccess to funding and you get paid 🙂
David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs
JamiNS is ethereum now
Ethereum marketing or more broadly web3 marketing is hunting for every opportunity to plug themselves into existing open source projects to gain adoption to make web3 more legitimate for scammers to scam more
Jami sounds interesting
JamiNT is probably what they got money for and they took it to continue the project and now need to built blockchain stuff as well
I dont know the details, but if web3 scammers are involved i am not really interested
p2p is dat
(1/2)
@serapath
> the CCP was able to and in part because bitcoin aplows the tracking, imho by design
AFAIK it wasn't nearly as secret squirrel as all that. They just made it it illegal to operate any kind of exchange where people can use RMB to buy crypto-tokens. Without a trusted exchange, most people won't bother trying, and the few who do are easy to track down using standard banking/ financial regulation enforcement.
(2/2)
It's probably still OK to mine crypto in China and sell it for RNB. Just like it's fine to use a foreign bank card to take money out of an ATM in China.
@serapath
> mastodon makes it hard to keep track of branches
If you scroll up to the OP that kicked off the whole thread and click on that, you can then scroll down through the whole thread, and find the orphaned post containing the unexplored tangent you want to fold back in : )
@immibis
what?
is it because it is an article that talks about bitcoin?
@immibis 😳
I assume you find bitcoin so triggering then, it cant even be discussed?
I'm sorry - wasnt my intention to trigger you or anyone. Would be happy if you dont block me.
If you wanna share details, maybe i can improve posts in the future?
That wasnt said and the "triggering" assumption was me trying to guess why anyone would ask a question whether they should block me. What else could it be? ... It's been so many days now, so obviously nobody really wants to discuss their opinions, but still like to share they might block or find things triggering, without revealing what exactly - exactly because everyone is maybe to shy or afraid of actually sharing their opinion.🤷♀️
oh that's true - it says that.
I didnt even think too much about it and more about what kind of arguments it mades about bitcoin, crypto and fiat.
So the article says a lot of things.
If you follow the line of thought, maybe you would conclude that buying makes sense. If you dont follow, you would not buy - but what are consequences is a different discussion.
Do the arguments make sense?
I currently do feel bitcoin is a perfect leftist project. Its a leftist trojan horse which "the capitalists" are currently adopting, ending or moving towards ending their own money printer privilege.
Bitcoin ends the capitalist class.
If you call that a "giant dung heap" ...yeah - not sure i can follow.
@serapath @fleeky @bhaugen @powersource I’m not sure why anyone would want to hodl bitcoin. They’re dead. Sorry to say it. Prices aren’t gonna go back up
Buy some drugs with it that’s their use case
@Zackstarkid @fleeky @bhaugen @powersource
Bitcoin is at an all time high. It is as high as it never was in its 15 years history and it always went up.
https://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/
What else is Bitcoin?
Its a leftist trojan horse project the capitalists are adopting - without realizing they are ending their money printer privilege and hence it is the end of the capitalist class as such
Money is not valuable because it is scarce.
You could have a giant chalk board where you write down for everyone who did what for whom so you can notice if some people only receive benefits without doing anything for anyone in return
The problem is with those who control the chalk board. They can write down extra benefits for themselves and they do. That is the capitalist class
What many people want as money is an "honest chalk board", where nobody controls it to benefit themselves
Bitcoin promises to end the capitalist money printing class by removing the printer, thus it can serve as a tool. As a "chalkboard" you can use with everyone who is also using that "chalkboard" to return favors. Thats it.
That has nothing to do with scarcity, but with a game of favors and returning them.
Of course, if you have many favors because you did alot and the chalkboard shows it clearly (e.g. the bitcoin ledger), then you can just donate some to other people if you like :-)
I do think it is a big issue that web3/altcoin are unregulated. They are essentially all securities (unlike bitcoin) and they are all scams - if nothing else you can see how all their price histories clearly reflect presale, pump and dump after which the price never really recovers.
You also notice it if you ever try to engage in those ecosystems. They are a big fat lie. All of web3 is just new unregulated money printers for capitalists.
@serapath
> the best deal possible imho is a world where we end the capitalist class privilege of money printing so we play on a level playing field
Right, which is why Jason Hickel is right. The power to issue new money belongs in the hands of elected governments, who can spend it into existence paying for public infrastructure, services, etc. Running surpluses when the economy is growing, and deficits when it's not, to keep the money supply in proportion, avoiding inflation.
I think scarcity is the wrong idea anyway.
Money is human made and like a game of how we can structure our economy.
No economy without money ever worked as well.
Now once you have money, it is valuable, because in that game you can exchange it for goods and services.
But some prefer a ledger without a capitalist class controlling it, where they always add extra numbers for themselves to get more from others.
Bitcoin ends that capitalist class privilege, while i dont know others
@strypey again:
> 0.00000001 BTC is called one Satoshi or SAT
SAT is the smallest unit since the beginning. This did not change later on. It was always like that - nothing changed and i bet nothing ever will for as long as people use bitcoin. This is the hardest consensus among all bitcoin features imho.
(2/2)
Politicians following the Washington Consensus ("neoliberalism", Reaganomics, call it what you will) handed over that power to trading banks. Who issue new money as loans, primarily to their mates, at a rate of up to 10 times their reserves. With the government trying to manage inflation indirectly by playing with the interest rate slider.
This is the reality of the capitalist money printer. The solutions to this problem are political-economic, not technological.
@strypey lets see.
I am pretty sure that the rich and wealthy. That old money and every capitalist sooner or later will fight bitcoin.
Bitcoin has the plebs, the people and some capitalists (usually not the biggest ones), who understand the game is rigged and they side with BTC ...giving up on any future capitalist privilege in return for saving as much of their capitalist wealth over into the new order imho.
That is how it seems to me.
Everyone is can sell their stuff for whatever token they want. I will buy exactly as many tokens from them (e.g. USD) as i need to get their stuff
I will sell my stuff only for the currency i believe in - one that cannot be printed by a capitalist class
So far it seems to work for the last 15 years - not that i offer any services in or for Bitcoin, but i definitely see that option as more and more interesting
The more people opt for it, the harder for capitalists who cant print BTC
(1/2)
@serapath
> but the original paper always defined 8 digits after the comma. That wasnt introduced later
I feel like you're working really hard to avoid acknowledging the point here, so I'm just going to restate it;
> the number of tokens has been increased (conceptually but *not technically*)
... because ...
> that money supply limit didn't survive contact with real world use at scale
... because a flexible money supply is a *feature* of all functional monetary systems, not a bug.
Interesting - I would have assumed it is the gas that was sold.
Russia sells so much natural resources, e.g. gas ...and cant or doesnt need to buy equally much from the outside, essentially having an export surplus, just like Germany was a lot of times export world champion and just like china has an export surplus, which means, instead of importing goods and services they have a lot of foreign currency.
So, what else could they have done?
...isnt that natural that this happens?
All capitalists have ill gotten gains, all the way back in colonialist times as well, during slavery, during the time of former empires ... old money and the organisations and families that inherited it - it's all tainted and whether it was wars or other atrocities ...its out history and it is what it is.
Now some of those might stash it into BTC, some into other things, but moving into and hence empowering BTC means opting to abandon the capitalist class.
...which isnt the worst
(2/2)
One way to get your head around this is to learn about mutual credit systems. The oldest forms of documented exchange. In which credit is issued into existence directly, by the payer, whenever a transaction happens.
The only limits on the growth of the credit supply are;
a) people's willingness to trade their goods and services for credit
b) how much credit people are willing to issue in exchange for them
c) the total goods and services produced by people willing to accept credit
It is also possible that people and organistaion actually just drive up demand by buying with legitimate wealth as well.
The main value proposition of BTC, unlike anything else is: nobody can print it, hence no unfair advantage for anyone anymore.
it makes sense for billions to adopt it, because only a miniscule fraction of those billions of people can actually print money.
Those who oppose it usually are relatively close to the money printer and want to defend their privilege imho
The wealth that "is being laundered" through it is just regular people doing regular activity, trading with each other without a capitalist class being able to steal the wealth away which makes them cantillionaires a la Elon Musk in the process.
Governments can still raise taxes and track people on the public bitcoin ledger and prosecute them, so governments should be fine, but capitalists are not.
Wich is what is so brilliant :-)
After 15 years of price only up:
https://bitcoin.zorinaq.com/price/
Why?
The promise to end banksters and capitalists
It is a "Schelling Point" to end capitalism and the rules are open source and relatively simple compared to any other crypto coin and compared to the nebulous endless rules of any fiat legacy monetary system
We can just start consenting on bitcoin as a better game mechanism, because it cuts out capitalists. yay :-) thats value
Just like ending slavery added value for slaves
That is the thing.
The "armoured divisions" are not necesarry if there is no money printer to be captured.
Its so highly decentralized that it can also not be targeted by armored divisions.
That "question" predates bitcoin and is always true for all systems before bitcoin, because they are all centralized and can hence be captured so need armoured divisions...
@serapath @fleeky @bhaugen @powersource how does changing currency systems in any way whatsoever transform class relations?
The problem isn’t that the rich have money. The problem is that the rest of us have jack shit while they protect their property with police and guns.
One single conversation with my grandmother is better leftist praxis than the entirety of the bitcoin project could ever dream to be
@Zackstarkid @fleeky @bhaugen @powersource
The issue is not just that the capitalist class has all the money, which is true. They have also the money printers.
So IF we start successful unions or worker coops or mutual aid networks or all of it and create in alternative ways - as soon as that becomes **actually** threatening, they will use their money printer to print as much as is needed to pay insane salaries to folks who help capitalists. They will pay enormous amounts to campaign against
@Zackstarkid @fleeky @bhaugen @powersource
They will create companies with fake stories that pretend to be just as "alternative" as the real unions, worker coops, mutual aid networks, etc...
They will offer the same products and services **at any loss** to prevent people from buying from the new real alternative so they can starve those alternatives... and so on.
If capitalists can print money, there is no way to win, but once that privilege is gone, you can finally outcompete them
@Zackstarkid @fleeky @bhaugen @powersource
I'm not saying bitcoin **is the solution**. It is far from it. I perceive it as a first step to have a currency that is NOT controlled by the capitalists and where everyone is the same - no special class of printer people.
And then we STILL need all the mutual aid, worker coops, etc... to replace the crap capitalist economy we currently have, but every inch won cant be undone just by printing money, so capitalists will lose at some point then :-)
So you trust into elected governments and I dont.
I can only elect among the shitty options presented, e.g. Biden vs Trump in the USA, or the funny people we have here in the UK or in germany.
I have no influence over those options.
No matter who is elected, nothing changes. Under Obama, all main policies and geopolitics continued regardless of who was running the show.
You get different flavours and narratives, but the budgets still empower the cantillionaires.
Big Politics. Crony Politicians of all colors... and Old Money private sector. The Lobbyists. Elon Musk & Trump.
Sorros and Biden, they all play golf together. Trump was on Clintons Wedding.
Angela Merkles Husband is in the Board of Axel Springer owned by Friede Springer
...where you look, THESE ARE THE SAME PEOPLE.
THESE ARE THE CAPITALISTS!!! :D
What will you vote for?
For whom?
Who will change it?
I dont really understan what you are proposing.
The problem is "political-economic" and the people can solve it and i am not talking about a technological problem. Bitcoin is political-economic.
Its a set of rules we as the people can agree to and behave by adopting it causing certain realities.
Its a mass movement decentralized move the people can do.
It doesnt really matter who or how it is implemented, its more about what is the "contract" we follow. Whats the consensus we follow.
Telefon, Books, Knifes, its technology all the way down - the question is what do we use to achieve what. ...who cares that bitcoin is "technology" (like everything basically)
Flexible money supply is possible, just as inflexible money supply is possible.
The question is not whether it is flexible or inflexible, but rather WHO GETS THE NEW MONEY!!! 🙂
In capitalism, it is the capitalists and always has been. They print hte money and they always have been.
That is how they steal from the people.
Try to buy a house today. Maybe you are a rich capitalists, but my money only works for food and rent and thats it.
Bitcoin only grows and no printing.
Agree. Where does that exist?
This makes for essentially everyone issuing their own money.
strypey tokens and serapath tokens, and so on.
So you need to find people who are willing to take this and that until you find a circle where debt clears, like A -> B -> strypey -> serapath -> C -> D -> A
Which is tedious, so you end up with big third parties that trade with everyone to clear - it's banks all over again and now they have control over the money printer again... yay! :-)
(1/2)
@serapath
> JamiNT is probably what they got money for and they took it to continue the project and now need to built blockchain stuff as well
If you have any evidence of the Jami team taking funding from blockchain bulls, I'd be keen to see it.
(2/2)
You seem to be guessing, and I can't help but you notice you seem to do a *lot* of guessing from first principles.
That can be a useful lense, especially for designing thought experiments. But where possible, it's more rigorous to build theory from empirical observations, rather than looking for empirical evidence to fit your first principles theory.
Confirmation bias is a thing.
@serapath
> what if i register strypy first in Jami and pretend to be you? now you cant even get it and ppl will always think i am you
Ironically, this is an argument for a federated system with admins ; ) Which solves the problems JamiNS is trying to solve, by tying ID to a centralised source of truth (DNS).
But there you go : )
@serapath
> They are essentially all securities (unlike bitcoin) and they are all scams
I agree with all of this, except "unlike BitCoin".
Me
> The fact that you consider it mostly right means we have a *huge* amount of ground to cover
Are you starting to get why I said this @serapath? ; )
I need to break for the holidays. So after today, I'm going to take a break from responding on these threads, or anything that isn't fun shitposting. Feel free to give me a prod around late April/ early March, and we can get back into it.
(1/?)
@serapath
> The question is not whether it is flexible or inflexible, but rather WHO GETS THE NEW MONEY!!!
Consensus unlocked! Compare;
* Obama's GFC bailouts - new money issued by the state, directly to the banks, with no strings attached
* Biden's COVID recovery bailouts - new money issued by the state, directly to everyone's bank account
In both cases, this increased the reserves of the banks, and their capacity to give loans. But the outcome for everyone else was *very* different
(2/?)
> the capitalists ... print the money and they always have been
It's hard to pin down exactly when feudalism was displaced by capitalism, and of course it varies from country to country. But even if we date it from the earliest recorded usage of the word (1872 - https://www.etymonline.com/word/capitalism), money has been issued lots of ways over that time, and not always by capitalists.
(3/3)
One example, Keynsian social democratic governments took direct control of money issue after the Great Depression (FDR in the US, Labour parties in the UK and most of the Commonwealth). They used it to build the social welfare societies we now live in the wreckage of.
Capitalists only got it back in the 1970s/80s (Reaganomics, etc), after decades of working on the Powell Meno master plan;
or in the hands of nobody.
in practice it alwaus enriches the capitalists and their politician amigos. they own the media. they control who is even avaipable to vote for and small alternatives are a thrown away vote, so you rather vote for the crappers who are less bad.
thus again, empowering crony capitalists.
politicians and banksters. one money printer is private, the other one public, but none of them ever save the homeless or needy. its shit
bitcoin puts us all in the same boat
A large chunk of the capitalist class loves the idea of pumping Bitcoin up (now with government spending) and extracting money from everybody else. It has been a force for concentrating wealth and accelerating environmental destruction for more than a decade now.
There's lots of reasons to move away from central bank currencies, but Bitcoin and things like it are neither a path to that nor where we should want to go anyway.
the only alternative is a fixed supply alternative.
yes, we live in a broken system. capitalism. the rich will use it to bend any alternative immediately.
bitcoin having fixed supply means no capitalist can print it.
fiat currencies is what they can print.
proof of work like doge has unlimited supply, thus until.the end of time, the rich get more.
proof of stake, same shit. new coins for the rich, all the time.
bitcoin is the best solution to stop the capitalists
the rich buy a lot, so its not worse than what we already have, but they trade it in for their ability to print in the future. the class privilege goes away. they are still rich, but in the same class as others - which is a big win.
now its finally possible to compete and slowly chip away at their wealth by building apternative mutual aid and worker coop networks who offer better products and services.
if they spend their coins like they are used to, they will just waste it 😁
just to add. its not really changed conceptually.
it always had 21 mio. with 8 digits after the comma.
some ppl who didnt check the details thought its 21mio withput digits behind the comma or maybe jusy 2 digits, but it has always been 8 digits. nothing new.
the co ceptual change happened to those who werent aware because the media just talked about 21 mio.
i know how web3 works.
i saw ethereum and others from the inside.
i see how their marketing and devrel works.
the Jami blockchain uses geth, which is ethereum
i saw many open source projects getting bought or hired... which is great, because devs get some money, but the bigger picture is getting scammy web3 more adopted and more ppl will lose money because of it
maybe. for me its an argument to just build a good UX around crypto addresses with petnames where you query your web of trust for meta information and annotation to display in your address bar on autocomplete.
in chats i share links, so crypto addrrsses are not a problem, i just copy/paste, but even here, a meta info box based on querying my web of trust can be used and this should work totaly fine.
@strypey
a security means its controlled by single person or a small group who can significantly influence... or basically steal/rugpull ppl.
this is difficult with bitcoin.
nibody can print and nobody has such a significant control over it to change the value.
ethereum is controlled by the cabal of founders and early investors who control the code and established a culture of constant arbitrary changes.
it does.
if you habe all the money and then you decide to do something material and labour intensive, such as ...building rockets to fly to mars ...and then you dont find customers, you quickly burn through your wealth and all the ppl who worked for you have now your wealth.
...but if you just constantly print new money diluting everyone, you can do this forever and became a gazillionaire... like eg...
zuckerberg, bezos, musk, and so on...
fair enough, but even covid meant lockdowns and killed ppls businesses and jobs.
second. i know many ppl and who got bailed out was everyone with a government job or job in a big corporation.
if you freelanced of self employed or were unemployed or funemployed or student or on job center or anyone else than a big company employee, you got nothing.
if you got something? it qas based on your income. so if you had low income you got little for doing nothing, but a lot when big income
those who issued money were always the elites even if you didnt call them capitalists, they were the capitalists and the capitalists were their amigos
its what allowed the initial wealth accumulation. it allowed colonialism to print money to pay ppl to go out & conquer and from then on use that wealth accumulated based on money printing to put tourself closer and closer to eventually become the main money printer 🤷♀️
doesnt matter if elites are "left" or "right" ..its bever the ppl
the right wing capitalists were taken over by the labour capitalists who built for themselves and had different stories, but the millions of ppl never got the money. they got nice stories and handouts from the "well meaning" elites... so the story goes. 🤷♀️
its mostly the same ppl, because the rich can buy in and have a lot, but it will be different, because its not the exact same ppl with the exact same wealth distribution.
...bitcoin doesnt solve the problem, but it starts by getting rid of money printer - the real capitalist class privilege, because WITH printers, any progress towards equality can be wiped out by the printer, by printing for the other side ...and that means the printer decides and we can never solve it
(1/2)
@serapath
> Agree. Where does that exist?
LETS, timebanks and other forms of community currencies have been practicing mutual credit all round the world since the 1980s. More recent digital tech initiatives I'm aware of include;
* Community Exchange: https://www.community-exchange.org/home/ces-upgrade/
* Open Credit Network: https://opencredit.network/2019/03/22/introducing-mutual-credit/
* Credit Commons: https://creditcommonssociety.org/about-the-credit-commons/
* my friend @utunga's Together project;
(2/2)
One of our local groups researching and educating about this kind of stuff is Living Economies;
https://www.livingeconomies.nz/
But there's a huge community of people around the word interested in mutual credit. In fact, there has been since the early days of cooperatives. The original (pre-Marx) socialist movement grew out of the mutualism of Proudhon (the "property is theft" guy).
@serapath
> Bitcoin has the plebs, the people and some capitalists (usually not the biggest ones), who understand the game is rigged and they side with BTC ...giving up on any future capitalist privilege in return for saving as much of their capitalist wealth over into the new order imho
Every pyramid scheme has a heroic story it offers to new recruits, as motivation to recruit the next layer of suckers. This is BitCoin's.
As I've been explaining in this thread, this is not the whole story.
@serapath
> its finally possible to compete and slowly chip away at their wealth by building apternative mutual aid and worker coop networks
This has always been possible, because all forms money are backed by the goods and services available in the real economy. BTC adds nothing here except complicated wallet software and exponentially increasing energy usage.
> if they spend their coins like they are used to, they will just waste it
... so BTC is useless as a payment system.
(1/?)
Again, you're hiding in the weeds, so I'll make the point again;
The money supply limit Satoshi built into BitCoin didn't survive contact with real world use at scale.
In the original design, BitCoin was a *payment* system, with 1 token conceptually equivalent to 1USD. Obviously a real world global economy needs more than $; that's not even $1 per person. From memory, Satoshi's white paper said this was an arbitrary limit, chosen for the purposes of a PoC prototype.
(2/?)
Once BTC started to attract interest as a speculative investment (ie people started gambling on its price going up), the price per token rapidly headed up into the hundreds, then thousands of dollars. At which point 1BTC was no longer useful for its designed purpose; a means of everyday exchange.
So that's when the conceptual shift happened that reframed the Satoshi as the unit of transaction. Effectively growing the token supply by orders of magnitude, *without* changing the blockchain.
(3/3)
What this demonstrates is that the money supply needs to grow (and sometimes shrink) in line with the real economy of what it can buy. A fixed money supply is a bug, not a feature. Every experiment with fixed money supplies has confirmed this - *including* BitCoin - since the concept was invented (see @Rushkoff's book Life Inc).
So is it possible to have a system where new money is not issued, by a centralised state, or by capitalists (eg banks)? Yes, again, mutual credit.
@serapath
> i know how web3 works.
I'm not interested in conspiracy theories, and quite frankly, I'm not impressed by the shade you're implicitly throwing on the Jami devs (and by extension the GNU Project), by hinting darkly at purely theoretical funding sources corrupting their dev goals.
Again, if you have any evidence of the Jami team taking funding from blockchain bulls, I'd be keen to see it. Piss or get off the pot, mate.
(1/2)
@serapath
> its an argument to just build a good UX around crypto addresses with petnames where you query your web of trust for meta information and annotation to display in your address bar on autocomplete
As with pure P2P, this makes sense in theory, and people have been talking about it for decades. Let me know when there's a PoC I can test. In the meantime, DNS-based IDs and JamiNS seem to be working just fine ; )
(2/2)
Every time I try to @mention a Nostr address here, I'm reminded how useful human-readable names are.
@serapath
> a security means its controlled by single person or a small group who can significantly influence
Who told you that?
"A security is a tradable financial asset. The term commonly refers to any form of financial instrument, but its legal definition varies by jurisdiction."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_%28finance%29
A security is basically anything people buy that isn't;
* consumable
* real estate, or some other real world asset
* a unit of currency
BTC is none of these, ergo it's a security.
(1/2)
@serapath
> even covid meant lockdowns and killed ppls businesses and jobs
Yes. Which is why some kind of bailout was necessary. Aren't you glad it didn't all get given straight to the banks again, as Obama did, and Orange Stalin would have done if he'd actually won in 2020?
In case it wasn't clear, my argument is *not* that the pandemic was good for the economy, so we should have more of them. It very much wasn't, and even it is was, I'm not a sociopath ... or a utilitarian ; )
The capitalist can't really print money. They can print disney dollars or tokens in your favorite monetized video game, but those things aren't really currency, just pre-purchased merchandise, an agreement between you and one other vendor. The only entity that can print money That's the state, which is not part of a capitalist system by definition.
Even when the state "participates in capitalism", it's like a planet or a sun -- it warps the space around it, becoming a gravity well. It becomes a new point of reference sucking in and modifying everything around it.
Now you might argue that banks print money because of fractional reserve banking.
Who do you think allows such a strange system to exist? Who made it the basis of the whole monetary system?
That isn't to say that totally hands off capitalism would be utopian or perfect, but very often I see people blaming capitalism for an omnipresent state which intervenes in markets constantly such that you can always feel the pull of its gravity well.
I realized recently that bitcoin's fundamental design is broken, and it will never become the universal money standard people think it will. its fixed volume is part of the problem. If you'll only ever have 21 million of a thing (split up into satoshis), then eventually all the bitcoin that have ever existed will exist, and every time more things can be bought with bitcoin (compared to the basically nothing you can buy now other than fiat currency) each satoshi becomes more and more valuable, so where the problem with the money printer is that it pulls value out of the currency that exists and puts it elsewhere (usually in the state's hands because gravity well), in the case of bitcoin it pulls the value out of the things being bought and put it in the existing currency, so as the economy grows the value of your satoshis grow, and you have ultimately the same problem except instead of the money printers having disproportionate buying power, it's the money havers having disproportionate buying power.
That said, I think crypto could nonetheless be the answer. The ideal would be to have some sort of intelligent daemon who would look at the things being bought and sold with the currency you have and exactly shrink or grow the money supply to keep the relative value of each unit the same. What better daemon than an algorithm everyone agrees upon by downloading a piece of open source software?
So how do you solve the second problem? I think it's by being careful about where the new money supply goes or is taken from. I'm imagining that during times of market cap growth the miners and the users (those who are buying and selling with the currency, not just holding it) would get a little bonus, not a huge amount per transaction but enough to grow the overall supply. When the market cap of the currency falls, you'd have fees go up a bit and the extra be destroyed -- not a huge amount per transaction, but enough to shrink the overall supply.
Unfortunately, such a design has a major problem is it doesn't give people a chance to get insanely wealthy through just grabbing a thousand bitcoin back in 2008 for a few pennies, and it doesn't give the state the chance to get insanely wealthy through just printing so much money everyone becomes poor except them. Its strength as a currency would ultimately be why nobody would feel like championing it.
(2/2)
@serapath
> who got bailed out was everyone with a government job or job in a big corporation
Again, where do you get this stuff? Have a look at the 'Key Elements' section here;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Rescue_Plan_Act_of_2021
Money was sprinkled out via a wide range of mechanisms, to get as much of it as possible to the bottom of the stack. Decades of "trickle-down" and "deregulation" make it fiendishly difficult to avoid the money pumps that suck it up to the 1%. But the Biden administration did their best.
@serapath
I'm not even sure what you're talking about with this one. Maybe try fewer replies, with more time and thought put into each?
Otherwise we might as we train a couple of Markov bots on our posting histories, and let them sling key messages at each other ; )
(3/?)
@sj_zero
> the problem with the money printer is that it pulls value out of the currency
This is an odd sentence. A currency is just a representation of the goods and services that can be produced in the economy that issues it. You can pull value out of it, any more than you can pull length out of metres.
> that exists and puts it elsewhere ... usually in the state's hands
Where it can be used to fund common infrastructure and public services. Or weapons and other corporate welfare 🤷♂️
(4/?)
@sj_zero
> What better daemon than an algorithm everyone agrees upon by downloading a piece of open source software?
I don't know, a democratically elected body maybe? But if you hear of a PoC for an automated system that can turn excessive currency units and fund for common goods (ie automate taxation and public spending), I'd be keen to learn about it.
As for the comment about the state getting wealthy at everyone else's expense, see post 1 ; ) Honestly, where do you get this shit?
You can laugh all you want, but it's an important distinction to make. Our problem today is an omnipresent state that is overbearing into every nanometer of our lives. If people get rich off of that, it's just the state rewarding its pawns.
As for the state enforcing property rights, that's part of the problem of pure capitalism, that it can't actually exist because at some point you need to enforce property rights or contracts and the state needs to step in, and every step away from the ideal puts you onto that spectrum. When you get to half the economy being the state and the other half being pawns of the state like we've got, you're well past capitalism, and you can laugh and laugh, but I'll still be correct. I'd be like saying the thing you hate most about fencing is getting shot. If you're getting shot then you're not fencing anymore. "Oh, but I always get shot while fencing, you just don't know what fencing is!"
@sj_zero
> Our problem today is an omnipresent state that is overbearing into every nanometer of our lives. If people get rich off of that, it's just the state rewarding its pawns
This is fantasy. Substitute "corporation" for "state" and you pretty much nail it.
State power has been in decline in anglophone countries since the 1970s, with the exception of military flailing. Which is a combo of military Keynsianism, resource grabs, and policing action, all on behalf of corprorations.
@serapath
@sj_zero
You can redefine "capitalism" to exclude all the bad stuff observable in Actually Existing Capitalism, just as the tankies can redefine "communism" to exclude all the bad stuff observable in Actually Existing Communism. But some wise person once said something along the lines of;
Philosophers have described the world. The point is to change it.
@strypey
Okay. fair enough.
I am german and i did explore the german landscape a lot. They have many so called "Regiogeld" initiatives and they also exist since forever, but they all have in common that they dont really work.
They are a nice gesture, a nice symbol, a nice experiment, something with a passiomate community, but most of them are less active now than in the past and the members are mostly old.
We can discuss their differences and why they did not get to the masses, but...
@strypey ... whether google pay, apple pay, VISA/Mastercard, paypal, etc... none of them scale and non of them are as convenient. Ppl in prqctice dont want to bother and have convenience.
Also, most ppl arent aware and there is a lack of trustm Is it real? is it a scam?
Most of them or basicaply all of them work because of trust in the organizers.
Blockchains are open source and digital and have the potential to get to the same convenience as the mainstream solutions i mentioned initially
@strypey
Now your links look digital and more up to date.
I havent heard of any of them, so i guess i need to read a bit first and see. Its interesting, but to me:
1. if there is a group with trust, it doesnt need money
2. if the froup grts anonymously large, then working together is much easier with some sort of accounting system and hence money helps
...but making such a system in which everyone can trust when it becomes anonymously large is difficult
Funny to me is that opencredit says it works without money, but with a credit clearing system. To me thats "hair splitting". Thats kinda what money is supposed to do as well, so i broadly summerize that under money too. 🤷♀️
By the way, that is what "Bitcoin lighting" is
There you "open a channel" and transact back and forth based on the credit lines, but the difference is, both sides can lock some bitcoin in that channel to define the max amount initially
Who runs the servers here?
Also sounds unserious:
> What are benefits of mutual credit?
> There are multiple benefits of using mutual credit which, just to clarify, is not an alternative currency (since there is no “currency”) or a tax avoidance scheme.
And later:
> If she fills all empty tables with credit paying customers she has ‘optimised’ her business by turning spare capacity into revenue. Now she can spend the credits she received to buy supplies for the restaurant with other businesses in the network
Just like the myriad of "blockchain" projects and tokens... there are different designs and yeah, the ooen credit network is yet another design.
To me thats a currency broadly speaking (maybe not based on crypto, hence more trust is involved) 🤷♀️ ...so also unlikely it wpuld ever be globally accepted.
If a member would want to travel they would need to go through USD, EUR or BTC to get somehing thats accepted far away.
BTC has the chance of global acceptance
The CreditCommon Society describes mutual credit system
Now in the crypto world XRP (Ripple) is that.
Also Bitcoin Lightning is that
You can use blockchain frameworks to encode this "protocols" in any way
The page says there is such a protocl, sadly theg dont have a very obvious link to its details (=suspicious). Second, they say there is a group that controls the rules, but dont have an obviois link to say who they are or how they work (=suspicious)
These imho are worse practices
The togetherproject from @utunga seems to be in development status based on how the website sounds.
Token Engineering Commons is Blockchain/web3 ...more specifically Ethereum, hence we are back to blockchains.
cadCad is a project from the ethereum world and it is used for token bonding curves and it all circles back into web3.
web3 is backed by the typical investors which own it all and they cover every style, vibe and wording to get maximum adoption of web3 which they control🤷♀️
I dont believe or see how the world can remove capitalism. We all (not we specifically, but the mainstream) are employed and organized by managers and bosses.
We all use capitalist money.
All high profile politicians are there forever and know each other. Somwhere its dictators, somewhere its parties with the same faces decade after decade.
Elsewhere its families... bushes, clintons ...even trump was on clinton wedding. senators are there forever... who will help us?
Here's a graph of state spending as % of gdp for several countries. knock yourself out.
- replies
- 1
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 0
So, given the media is controlled by the same media mogules. In europe there are old rich families that control most of them.
It never changes.
And on monday "we" go back to work to work another 40h+ a week.
So given all that, overcoming capitalism seems impossible, but bitcoin does one step in a world which is troubled. it offers to end all money printing.
Thats a first step. Because wealth will be spent over time and cant be reprinted like now
So organizing mutual aid networks and worker coops seems futile as it has always been, because these things are not new. They all existed decades or even centuries ago.
In the 18th ans 19th centuries you already had those.
Why didnt they already succeed?
The answer imho: if you have too much success, the money printing capitalists will grind you down via the printer you dont have access to🤷♀️
Its not a pyramid scheme.
Bitcoin endgame is to stay in BTC and if critical adoption happens this is possible.
Bitcoin adoption is the largest of ALL the blockchains and all the mutual credit networks and everything in between.
A pyramid scheme is one that collapses when it gets too big, because the last joiners cant find anyone anymore who they can scam.
I dont see why that would fit bitcoin.
bitcoin payments work and the rules guarantee no inflation. the game value proposition
No, this is NOT true.
It is impossible if the capitalists have money printers.
if you earn loads of money with your new apternative system of producing goods and services, then the capitalists just print money and buy you dry.
They hire everyone available and pay them printed money to make what you make and offer it for free, so you cant compete.
You have to sell to earn, but they print.
you always lose
That is not true.
I follow bitcoin since 2011.
Back then, before any of web3 and the ceypto craze... before any vinklevoss ever bought any tokens, there wqs already 21 mio with 8ndigits after the comma.
ppl bought pizzas for 10k bitcion, clearly less than 1 USD and the story back then was already that hypothetically, if bitcoin ever became mainstream, its price would become enormous, so basically an economy based on deflation per design.
i dont k ow anything about the jami devs.
i do see its connected to ethereum/web3 though.
i do know a lot about ethereum/web3, but yeah - i understand that this alone might not help.
Just mentiined my opinion, but i get your point
There is a twst called the "Howie" test to define what a security is
what we need is a universal basic income for every person. All newly printed money should go into the economy through that.
That would be worth something.
This will never happen, so bitcoin and its deflationary economy is the second best. ...new value goes to every holder all the time because of deflation ... thats as close as we get i guess
Thats what defines the capitalist class since forever. They co trol the money printers.
every capitalist is friends with the money printers. Thats how they get their money.
it sounds strange but thats the ultimate capitalist power.
yes its technically loans, but they never get paid back
@serapath
> what we need is a universal basic income for every person
Consensus unlocked, again! Twice in one day, we're on a roll, despite my occasional grumpiness : P
UBI is an essential part of a major shift where we complete the democratic revolution, by democratising economies. UBI gives every person a weekly share of votes in what society invests its resources in, and frees us up to make uncoerced choices about what to invest our labour in.
> This will never happen
Never say never ...
@serapath
> There is a twst called the "Howie" test to define what a security is
Ah, that's what the troll meant ; )
Go ahead and finish your point. Give me a sentence or two about what the Howie Test is and where it comes from, and tell me what you think it tells us about BitCoin.
@serapath
> i do see its connected to ethereum/web3 though
What you *see* is that they've used tech derived from a version of the Ethereum blockchain. The rest is all your interpretation. This is my point. It's very important to be clear - in your own mind and in communicating a line of argument - when you're reporting facts and when your editorialising about how you interpret them.
(1/?)
@serapath
You're really allergic to this point, and I get why. It's the single chain that holds the whole BitCoin story together. If you accept that a fixed money supply doesn't work, and can't work, you'll have to refactor a big chunk of your worldview from the ground up.
I fight like hell to avoid that, and obviously you will too. I expect to have to hammer this point home dozens of different ways before you're convinced.
This is why I said on day 1 this would take months ; )
(2/?)
@serapath
> there wqs already 21 mio with 8ndigits after the comma
I'm not sure how to say this any more clearly. Yes, the *tech* has not changed.
> ppl bought pizzas for 10k bitcion, clearly less than 1 USD
True. What I said was not 'BTC was worth $1, but;
> BitCoin was a *payment* system, with 1 token conceptually equivalent to 1USD
Note the word "conceptually", it's doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Remember the context too. I'm talking about the design notes in the white paper.
(3/?)
> the story back then was already that hypothetically, if bitcoin ever became mainstream, its price would become enormous
Well yes. Anyone who thinks about a limited supply of a desired commodity with a fixed supply, and hasn't been sniffing airplane for months, is going to come to that conclusion.
I don't remember anyone thanking about a Satoshi or giving it a name. There was just a vague notion of chopping token into smaller bits, or creating derivatives of them.
(4/4)
Remember, this was post-GFC, anything seemed possible, and most people had gone quite mad. Me for example, in 2011/12 I was living in and visiting a series of public squares and parks, where people had set up camp for months, and spent all day debating politics over copious cups on tea and breaking bread ; )
@serapath
Ughh ... what?
We live in an international system of interlocking institutions. Some of them with hundreds of years of history feeding into their structures and the relationships between them. All of it covering hundreds of countries with states and thousands of nations, each with its own internal class and caste systems.
You're reducing the entire thing down to 'capitalists have magic money tree'.
I'm really not sure how to engage with this. @mlncn? You got anything?
(1/?)
> Its not a pyramid scheme
> I dont see why that would fit bitcoin
That's what everyone who tries to get me to buy into a pyramid scheme tells me. Theirs is always the one that's different, even though it has the two primary qualities;
* the investment has no actual product or service
* the value of the investment grows to the degree that people have confidence it will, and keep buying in
> bitcoin payments work
For what? Other than that 10,000BTC pizza and a few other such stunts?
(2/?)
> the rules guarantee no inflation
Clearly you still don't understand what inflation is, why it happens, or the various theories about mitigating it. A fixed money supply only guarantees no inflation because it guarantees no functional monetary economy.
We've talked about this in a number of branches of the thread. For future reference, mostly linear threads are much more navigable when you want to refresh your memory of the discussion.
> the game value proposition
The what now?
@Forbearance
> when are we getting money where we issue it to do good stuff and not make rich people rich?
Since all money is ultimately backed by networks of social agreements, I guess when we agree to?
(1/?)
@sj_zero
> Here's a graph of state spending as % of gdp for several countries
What this tells me is that state spending was very low in the 19th century. A famously awful time to be alive for everyone but the very wealthiest, and whose political-economic systems set up the conditions for 2 catastrophic world wars.
Also that spending spiked in the 1920s and 1950s, when government spending dug their countries out of the holes those wars had left them in. Particularly the UK.
@serapath
(2/?)
Your graph also shows me that after those wars, people realised that the 1800s way of doing political economy was really shit, and we needed to do something different. So social democratic parties, formed by workers and the unions they were organized in, won elections in pretty much all these states, and set about doing different.
(3/?)
They increased taxes on wealth, particularly on corporations, and spent public money on common infrastructure and social services. What followed was about 50 years of rising living standards, increased literacy, technological innovation, *and* economic growth.
It's hard for us to comprehend just how much this changed life for the average Jo, because even after 50 years of aggressive dismantling, we're still getting some of the benefits.
(4/4)
Which brings me to what your graph *doesn't* tell us, which is what proportion of the state spending in each trend line is spent on social welfare, and how much is social welfare. Because although the rise in spending relative to GDP tails off in the late 1970s/ early 1980s, corporate welfare massively increases. So social spending and public infrastructure spending tanks.
Which is why we're now surrounded by rotting infrastructure, and homeless people with untreated health problems.
@serapath
> They are a nice gesture, a nice symbol, a nice experiment, something with a passionate community, but most of them are less active now than in the past and the members are mostly old.
Sure, if you choose the right criteria you can frame anything as a failure. Whether they still exist, and regardless of how many people participated, they led to real world trades that wouldn't have otherwise happened. How many real world trades has BTC facilitated, not including the infamous pizza?
whilenso far i agree with @strypey on everything, seeing technology get cheaper year after year wirhout the world collapsing. deflation being a threat is a justifying myth by the capitalist money printing class.
imagine working and earning bitcoin, and then losijg a job. ...if one lives frugal, the money brings one way further, because bitcoin always gets more valuable. its like a savings account. perfect.
why would that be a problem apart from capitalist saying so?
yes, i 100% agree with that, but how to get there if ever
Its complicated, but my understanding in a nutshell is, that if something is controlled by a single person or small group so that their qctions can significantly influence the value, then it is a security.
If no small group or single person can influence the value significantly, then it is not a security.
so far, afaik, the SEC only gave the non-security status to bitcoin
there are blockchain frameworks, such as "substrate" or the "cosmos sdk".
There are also very minimalist blockchains to fork and build off, for example "handshake", which is even doing something in the direction of jami.
So building off of "geth" is very surprising.
But yes, maybe they literally just forked it🤷♀️
anyway. good for them. i dont want to ever use a global human readable name system anymore because it alqays comes with too many downsides and i think thats possible.
So even if jami are good folks, happy for them. i wont use something like it
it wasnt like that for me and i dont know where that was written.
Anyway, i think i slowly understand what you are trying to say - basically:
If the supply of money was fixed, prices would come down (deflation) and at some point things would need to be priced in tinier and tinier fractions, thus 21 mio, even with 8 digits after the comma would not be enough.
Fair point. That is theoretically and eventually practically true, and i dont think anyone would disagree here, BUT 🙂 ...
The smalles expressable unit 0.00000001 (1 Sat) currently is aprox. 1000 Sat = 1 USD, which means, in order to get to real problems, bitcoin would need to increase at least somewhere between 10-100 or even 1000 times, making 1 bitcoin worth 1 mio USD or even 10 or 100 mio USD.
That seems far off ...decades, maybe a century.
So just as IPv4 was chosen and worked for a long time and now slowly needa replacement, we in history overcame those limites many times.
Here is how:
Bitcoin is social consensus.
If all bitcoiners would in the majority say we want to change the 21 mio. limit and run a changed version of the software, everything would change, but that is difficult.
If we actually have not enough bitcoin because prices are now fractions of sats because a single bitcoin is worth 10 mio. ...We will all feel it and thst is a pressure towards discussing and raise the limit once by giving bitcoin more digits after the comma, hence leaving wealth the same
@strypey this can then last another many decades or even centuries.
happened with computer architecture from 32bit to 64bit.
The key is to make it as hard and rare as possible, because otherwise it will just be a money printer by and for the rich like every other system
yeah i did.
the 8 digits after the comma were always there.
in 2011 i was camping for weeks and months in front of the central bank participating in the occupy movement, but bitcoin was mostly unheard of by the vast majority of participants sadly. ...so it was hard to discuss bitcoin ...not that i was very familiar with it back then, but i noticed its existence 🙂
@strypey @Forbearance @utunga how?
bitcoin is that?
whats the better alternative and how do we get there?
I mean.
I never heard of what you linked even though it exists for a long time and i did look i to those regional and custom currencies.
BTC is known worldwide. Its in the mainstream news, over and over. Highest politicians talk about it. Black Rock and other large investment funds buy it. Heads of states talk about it. Niche, but Swiss/zug, El Salvador, several other countries are making use of it. It grows for 15 years straight to now again all time high.
On top of that...
@strypey ...companies offer credit cards (mastercards) which can be topped up with bitcoin. Some companies accept it as payment option.
I had a gues organizing a codecamp who paid me or us in bitcoin for participating.
I once paid the rent to a landlord in taiwan after banks wouldnt allow to transfer to a taiwanese account.
I did pay some contractors in the past when banks wouldnt allow us or woupd take horrendous fees.
you can bursh it off, but which other niche regional credit system has it?
you say that, but why?
bitcoin is very transparent.
governments did seize enormous amounts apready and if ppl dont pay taxes its easy to see and governments can still do it.
i do see bezos, musk, zuckerberg and all the other billionaires literally getting rich because of the money printing.
i see all the corruption in politics usually connected to politicians ans lobbyists funneling newly printed government funds to their amigos.
so why do you say that?
i do think, if governments cant print money, then all the crony politicians will disappear, because you cant gain anything anymore if you arent actually interested in good politics.
but at the moment crony politicians just queue for years to raise in ranks to finally be able to get to the printer and funnel funds into their own and their friends pockets which made it worth queueing for all these years.
i dont wanna replace the state, just end capitalist money prints
@immibis @powersource ...because all the trillions printed ALWAYS end up propping up the capitalists even more, never the ppl and that was never different.
The best we can do is end that privilege so we are apl in the same boat under the same incentives imho.
why would you want money printers? and why would you think all of a sudden thata used for good when it never was.
its as unequal now as it never has been and it currently looks it will get even worse...
its different to be rich vs. to have a money printer.
bitcoin doesnt solve everythung, we still need mutual aid and worker coops and so much more, but when we organise and offer alternatives for people, we dont want all that progress to be potentially undone over night by capitalists using the money printer to counter it.
so all i am saying is i think bitcoin or some other way to end money printer privilege is a prerequisite for long term success for any alternative
i would assume yes.
all the offshore shadow banking. all the swiss bank accounts, etc... thats a lot to be tracked, traced and analysed.
raising taxes will definitly be checked and ppl will see what they spend it on.
its alwqys difficult to discuss taxes and where the money goes, which is why politicians rather use the printer.
on top of that. its not just the government printer.
all of VC money and (investment) banks print as well. 80-90% of all money is made by private banks. the reserve they need to give those loans is what they buy with their printed money and the rest is just new money they spend
is it unstable?
just a thought experiment.
tech gets cheaper every year - you could argue thata deflation, yet ppl continue to buy.
second - bitcoin is limited, but the smallest unit, e.g. 0.00000001 btc (1 Sat) needs ~1000 SAT for one USD
so before there is a problem BTC price would need to increase 10 to a 100 times... thats a long way off, maybe forever.
annual growth is not infinite and maybe we anyway need degrowth? so even less of a problem
on top of that.
Bitcion, after all, is still social consensus.
The majority of the network could in theory decide to make more bitcoin, but its good that it is the most hard consensus so that the printing doesnt happen.
If theoretically this would ever become a problem, like 32bit vs 64bit architecture or ipv4 being too limited.. and everyone using bitcoin suffers the same... eventually you would get consensus, but the point is that this is a very rarr or never event
how do you protect mutual aid networks and worker coops from capitalist money printing?
...basically infinite war chest to do whatever is necessary to bring those alternatives down?
Worker coops and mutual aid is not new. They are basicaply as old as capitalism
I'd say the main reason they lost is that whether thatcher or any other capitalist or capitalist asociated could use money printing to fund defense.
its a lot of effort to organize and i rather see it protected
maybe, but also:
if you have a small amount of bitcoin and send it to new accounts ...its like a fish in the ocean.
theoretically traceable, but difficult.
if you have a whale or a giant fish swarm ( a whale psoing as a fish swarm) and makes concerted moves, ita relatively easy to track.
so i do think bitcoin offers some protection to small fish, while makes it increasingly hard for big fish to move around unseen ...which i think is kind of what we want?
there are growth limits and even the wildest bitcoin growth expectations dont see a single bitcion over 10 mio USD, which imho would be extreme already and still meant 10 SAT is 1 USD
which still seems okay for prices
My main issue is that with money printer now and any time in the past, it gets always to the rich to decide where the economy goes next and pay all of us salaries
all newer companies (silicon valley startups).
all money printing.
all the billionaires too
@immibis
monero just like almost all cryptos have a non-fixed amount of tokens and continuously make new tokens and **they go to the rich** ...regardless of proof of work or stake... ita the rich who have the money printer.
Only a fixed token supply ends money printing and hence the distinction between the capitalist class who owns the money to employ us all and the rest of us.
bitcoin for small amounts can be quite anonymous, but not large, which is preferrable to having rich act in shadows
because money printer is controlled by capitalists and always has been.
any alternative will be attacked with infinite funds to dilute everyone and protect the ones who help the capitalists by paying them high salaries to shield them from inflation.
thats how they can always win.
if they cant print money, they kight potentially run out of funds trying to fight against new alternatives
**sigh**
i mean. big gazillionaire acting in the shaodws seems like a much bigger problem than drug dealing.
1. if you do it right i think you can hide if amounts are small, especially if you use bitcoin lightning.
2. many countries by now legalized drugs and hopefully even more so in the future.
niche systems alqays exist to serve speciap use cases, but thevpoint is to switch the mainstream away from capitalism and the vast majority of real world economy isnt drugs🤷♀️
@serapath
> so far, afaik, the SEC only gave the non-security status to bitcoin
I know I said I'd be pausing all replies on this topic after yesterday, until the end of summer, and I will be. But I thought this was worth sharing, as an example of concerns at least one SEC commissioner had about BTC trading in Jan this year;
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/crenshaw-statement-spot-bitcoin-011023
I'll leave you with that for now.
kings had money printers too. theor face was stamped on all coins.
all so called civilization since ancient egypt had some form of money.
I doubt an empire or big civilization is possible without some form of money.
you wpuld immediately run into dunbars number or a multiple of it.
sure there is other power, but at scale, nothing beats money and controlling its supply by controlling the printer.
new tokens are continuously generated and go to whoever spends the most computing power
new tokens are continuously generated and go to whoever has the most tokens
there are no new tokens but value is continuously generated and goes to whoever has the most tokens
3 is the best, by far.
It isn't perfect, but neither is the capitalist money printing system we have and it led to the inequality and continues doing so. Politicians from any party dont change anything and nothing seems to ever improve.
So you can either vote and wait forever or do something - which means we are faced with whats possible as a first/next step to improve what is.
I'll add another toot explaining why i think 3 is the best
Every time whether most compute or most tokens, new token inflate the supply in favor of the rich who get them and at the expense of the poor who get diluted.
Option 3 - at least - increases every tokenholders value. If you had only one salary worth of bitcoin, if bitcoin goes up from e.g. 70k to 100k, you probably still get +1k value as somebody who has almost nothing.
Even if you had only 70 bucks, you get additional 30 bucks.
Its the best option i have seen so far.
Not just that - there are also "absolute" terms, which means, if a rich person or organisation starts buying assets and pays salaries, they literally spend their tokens and wont get them back unless they use their assets and hired personell in a way to generate more revenue than they had in terms of expenses - that is not guaranteed.
But if the rich always get new tokens for free, they can just stop buying and employing and time will restore their wealth.
Now the best possible option was if the only way new tokens would come into existence would be onto every persons account as some sort of UBI, but that requires every person to be verified, otherwise scammers will create endless sock puppet accounts to get more than their fair share and i dont see a realistic option to get to that kind of UBI, so a fixed total supply seems the second best option possible is my current opinion
the early days of nodejs/npm/github, before crypto and before microsoft bought the infrastructure, was voluntary lively collaboration and exchange of resources or contributions to open source packages.
It overcame social, economic and political barrier to meet common goals.
I have seen plenty of projects started by companies and agressive marketing to get the community to adopt projects backed by companies rather than embracing and supporting indy developer projects.
@immibis I saw many crypto projects hiring open source devs to take them away from their projects and put them to work on some cryptocurrency related projects - others were hired full time into companies that did little to no open source anymore - and in general it was often very visible community leaders and in the end it killed the original movement.
But that is just one example.
I am talking about mutual aid networks and worker coops growing and organizing to the degree to take share from
@immibis the private proprietary closed source economy that runs based on capitalist principles.
If there is a trend for people and organisations to massively move into that new paradigm, the money printer can fight it by subsidizing products source and paying people who help defend capitalism ridiculous rates - to create better and cheaper offers - combined with propaganda about why the new mutual aid worker coop based alternative would be bad.
No, to hide from it you would use alternatives. Currently it might mean dealing with things in a moneyless fashion or maybe use cash instead of bank transfers. There are always methods, but they are usually less convenient.
I think it is good that there is diversity and those alternative mechanisms exist, but i do think we need to have a mainstream way that is meant to be adopted by everyone or lets say most people, the masses, so we can leave capitalism behind.
Thats a requirement
Option 2 also distributes tokens according to each tokenholder's value.
No, option 2 gives it only to the rich.
Each block, another rich person gets more tokens. Poor folks never get new tokens.
Have never seen a system that automatically, no strings attached, gives every token holder new tokens relative to what they have and/or no special voting rights on spending to the rich with most tokens.
If we had a no growth economy, no value redistribution in fixed supply systems. In degrowth economy the rich even lose more value.
the network was young and naive.
But its less about microsoft and more about the money bribing, buying, hiring folks and changing the movement.
The more dangerous to the system a movement becomes, the more money printing of any amount necessary becomes an option.
That causes inflation, but everyone on the printer or payroll gets shielded from it, those against capitalism wont and lose.
So better to not have a money printer in the game before trying to change something
@immibis ...basically
capitalist money and the printers IS THE PLATFORM 🙂 ... just like github was.
We shoupd switch that platform first or have a strategy how to exit it and where to go instead.
No i meant - "money" (USD/EUR/...) is the platform.
If we want to overcome capitalism by turning the economy into mutual aid and worker coop networks, but we do it on top of their money, that cant work
So using something that isnt controlled by capitalists and their privilege is a preqrequisite imho
all altcoins, just like fiat money systems are controlled by capitalists
The fixed supply ones arent perfect, but at least kill the money printer privilege to serve as better platform
which chain does that?
Usually you have some sort of "validators" and only those are randomly chosen to get new tokens. All proof of stake chains have a list of validators with a fixed limit. When there are more validators, the richest stay in the set and the poor ones get kicked out
Some chains have hard coded fixed lists of validators (not very decentralized), others have it open, but e.g. could have 1024 slots or any other number, but never space for millions or billions of ppl
i know only one chain that does this and it includes governqnce mechanism where the rich decide the rules at any time and can vote to pay treasury to themselves to drain money out of the system whoch is reflected in that chains all time price history.
also how feasible is it if billions of accounts would set their nomination and received a fraction of block rewards. woupd that scale?
how big is that chain? who can verify?
fixed token supply gives that for free
also, even in that particular project i am aware of, there are only 22500 nominators. if you are not in that set of rich enough nominating accounts, you get no reward.
btw. i wont even name that chain, because its the most scammy project i have ever had contact with sadly.
If you have an economy based on printable money where someone can control the money printer, you'll develop feudalism, like we have now, because the rich will find ways to control the money printer.
So you need an economy based on money that is printed, but not under anyone's control. Equivalently, both positive and negative balances reset towards zero over time. UBI does this. Mining doesn't really do it, but does it a little better than staking, because at least rich people have to go and buy physical miners and then the people can vote to stop using that algorithm, the digital equivalent of guillotines.
Thats an interesting theory.
I have seen and experienced quite an amount of inefficiencies, corruption, company politics and big corporate tech, that i would rather think you can quite easily outcompete them if they wouldnt have a money printer.
The way how the rich make money flow to them is by printing it and paying themselves and many of their most useful employees a ton of it, but hiding it to some degree in the administrative and bureaucratic overhead.
I dont see how you have a money printer but not under anyones control.
The proof of stake and proof of work mechanisms are literally designed to give the newly printed money to the rich and diluting everyone else.
The nominator/validator example you made does not exist anywhere and i think it is likely impossible to have a working system where micro transactions are distributed to billions of people on every block.
UBI would be nice, but i dont see any way to get there currently.
@immibis
yeah - i guess different people would agree or disagree here, but its fine with me.
I just meant - building worker coops and mutual aid networks and growing it with payment infrastructure, accounting, and so on ...but doing it on top of traditional capitalist money (EUR/USD/...) seems futile, because as soon as there is success that threatens the capitalists, they can "deplatform" you, by printing like mad and giving it only to themselves and their supporters, diminishing/diluting us
Fixed token supply does not give that for free.
I dont think it is that easy.
Something like that was tried in 2017 during the new york agreement (https://www.coin-mining.uk/s/en/Bitcoin+New+York+Agreement/19380)
Even though the majority of wealth and mining power decided for a specific outcome, the many miners in the network not updating their nodes and rejecting blocks with the majority of hashing power, but invalid according to their old client reverted things back.
So maybe hashing power would move on, leaving the remainers with less of it, but they could continue
Another point is, that imho a blockchain is not worth anything if changes are frequent and usually based on experts, because that creates a culture where anything can change at any time and there is never resistance, because "its complicated".
Bitcoin is much more minimal and changes rarely and any major change takes a long time, which means stuff gets discussed and its hard to make changes against the people
In networks like ethereum its routine to change arbitrary stuff over night
It does make sense that if you believe in what Vitalik is doing, you want o keep following his changes automatically, and as soon as you don't believe in it, you can cut the chain loose.
In other words it's not centralized the same way a permissioned chain is, and the anti-fork features are more like sanity checks to make sure everyone either stays up-to-date or consciously chooses not to. Nodes won't just be abandoned and then stay on an old version of the chain by default - they'll stop working.
Bitcoin was a very good minimum viable cryptocurrency. It's not the finish line.
I dont believe ethereum can fork away from vitalik. Culture is everything. Ethereum is centered around the vitalik star cult and beyond that the "inner circle of expert core devs", which define what ethereum is. The masses have a culture which comes without an opinion, thus even discussing and organizing a fork is difficult.
I do feel bitcoin is more resilient in that what you "opt into" likely stays what it is or was when you decided to do so.
But my point was more ...
@immibis
to get rid of capitalist privilege of money printing, which is way to little discussed, but the core of capitalistm. The money we use platforms us all and who owns that platform rules defacto as we can see with the capitalist billionaires taking over in the US
...but is easy to see in theory - if one has an infinite money printer they outbuy, outspend and undercut anyone they want
proof of stake has to limit who can nominate/validate for practical reasons. e.g. max. 22500 nominators
(and, as we see in #Germany, if the constitution says the government shan't be nazi, it prohibits people from even recognizing that the government might become nazi again until it's too late)
@immibis
I do agree.
One thing to note imho is that organising a deviating consensus can be easy or hard.
E.g. voting is a built in mechanism for expressing dissent and changing ...but in our lived practice it comes with all sorts of shortcommings.
Many people might be dissatisfied, maybe even the majority in absolut terms and you could argue that is what reality looks like today.
But as long as there is no new alternative consensus by that majority, they stay **divided and conquered**
Bitcoin changes rarely and people opt in if they agree. It is slow. If there is a new feature with dissent, its a long discussion and its a YES/NO and a topic arround which masses can slowly organize to form a different consensus and stay together.
In Ethereum, the changes are fast and the features complex and it is almost impossible to organise a specific version of ethereum around a specific set of features where everyone agrees.
Not every situation is the same easy to change
@immibis It's a game of "prisoner dilemmas", of "nash equilibriums", of "shelling points" or "network effects" ...it has many shapes/forms/names...
As long as it is difficult for the people to agree to a consensus, they stay divided and conquered.
So something decentralized needs to be organized to avoid a minority to hijack it.
web3 is hijacked by the early investors, who control all web3 chains, fund who works on them, defunds who deviates and pays marketing to keep dissenters divided
If anyone can look at the unaccountable power of BorgSoft;
... or Goggle;
https://www.theverge.com/23869483/us-v-google-search-antitrust-case-updates
... or grApple;
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-apple-monopolizing-smartphone-markets
... or FarceBook;
... or scAmazon;
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/26/1191099421/amazon-ftc-lawsuit-antitrust-monopoly
... or the global power TenCent, ByteDance, Alibaba and Baidu give the CCP, and conclude that the institution that should be anarchist enemy #1 is still states and not corporations ... I don't know what to tell you.
Did you know there is also Terra Classic? (I should know, I theoretically have several thousand Terra Classic "dollars" probably worth less than a cent each because of how AMMs work)
Fair enough, Governance is complicated.
I do think opting into something that almost never just changes over night from what you opted into is a lot better for governance.
But the main point was money or that bitcoin always distributes value to everyone and they dont have to mine or stake, which proof of stake ALWAYS limits to a small maximum number of stakers/validators/nominators (whatever you call them). ..and proof of work requires you to run and participate in mining.
money IS how you capture everything else.
Otherwise its hard to impossible.
Even with an Army, you need to pay them.
bitcoin gives basically no power to the rich apaet from being rich.
web3 gives enormous power to the rich.
they get new tokens constantly and dilute everyone else. Doing nothing means all value slowly goes towards the rich. Web3 culture is not not really care about how web3 works. Its decided by a small internal group and most participants dont care - they just want things "to work".
in some of web3 being rich means you can outvote everyone and dexide where everyones tx fee goes
wouldnt every holder of BTC get a share of the value from when the bitcion price grows or rather when prices deflate.
🤔 i am not sure what you mean or when would it not
For sure. Its an extreme case.
I am a pacifist and wouldnt pay anyone to go to war. I strongly assume almost nobody would join the army or police if not paid.
In a conflict it is really useful to have enough funds to pay your army/police forces and a money printer makes that so much easier.
yes. you can see new "shitcoins" daily.
Just deploy an ERC20 solidity smart contract.
But would anyone accept that as payment?
I think this can be derived from wether one personal would accept all these shitcoins as payment?
To me, a token would need to be widely accepted. If not, it would need to be sellable so i can get rid of it. I would only ever hold it if it has a history of keeping value.
But that is a narrow view.
I want to end capitalism, so a tomen nobody can print helps
The difference is the CEO also loses when the economy shrinks or gets nothing extra when it stagnates. Ans when it grows you get the rice corn.
In money printing proof of work you have to mine and not everyone does it, so only mining folks (a fractiin if users gets the new money) and others get diluted.
In money printing proof of stake its worse, because they always limit who participates in staking to the few thousand richest stakers/nominators/validators, so everyone else dilutes
Also in proof of stake, you might have voting where only rich folks matter and direct funs paid by everyone to themselves making it worse.
no. capitalism in reality always had a money printer and it was always used to give funds to the patriarchy and who wasnt closely connected ended up in utter poverty.
A capitalism without money printing never existed so we dont even know how that would look.
I do not believe that the bilionaire capitalist printer class is smarter or more productive than the masses - often quite the opposite.
Without the printer they would not be able to keep their wealth for long
sounds like defeatism.
sounds like you would say gates, jobs, zuckerberg, musk, bezos, etc... are so awesome and can build successful companies no mutual aid worker coop network based organisatiin could rival, because they are the CEOs and they always win.
I dont believe it. Its the capitalist class which they joined, that gives then access to the money printer to pay an army of us to work and make it happe DESPITE the corporate politics and stupidity, the corruptiin and nonsense
npm and opensource did easily outcompete the corporate world and so did linux and so did wikipedia and so on... the problem is, rent, groceries and literally everything still needs to be paid and open source doesnt pay, which was the weakness microsoft abused to target key figures and bought github/atom/npm to get their foot in the door and started web3 and the chains to hire key figures and disrupt the out of control open source ecosystem growth.
how? money printer goes brrrrrr 🙂
i dont buy it.
this was a phrase at most.
it was fully backed, then fractionally backed, then not backed at all.
it was a rule capitalists made for themselves because it sounded convincing to the ppl and they were the defwcto controllers and when it became inconvenient they just ditched it.
nothing ever bound them to it.
in bitcoin they couldnt remove the rule even if they wanted...
i dont believe in the gold standard.
gold is clunky and thus only a fraction of the ppl would ever convert to gold anyway... and thr moment that got inconvenient they dropped the gold standard, thus is was never a hard anchor.
its like the powerful watching over themselves, but break any promise the moment it gets inconvenient.
But with bitcoin they cant break it.
This is a major difference.
I perceive any gold standard and the likes merely as storytelling to gain more power
...and once more firmly established - if fhat promise would ever become inconvenient, they would just drop it.
There is no higher authority that would take them to court or anything, thus meaningless, even if it qas formally a "gold standard" for a few decades... the story of money is anyway way older and the powerful back then were even more in charge of esssentially doing what they want with their promises... printing money to finance war and colonialism and slavery... dark times
i am buying, but i am also shopping from local farmers and thx to apps and delivery services, they are more easily discoverable now then in the past. i do shop occasionally in supermarkets, but actively reducing it to a minimum whenever alternatives are available.
during the pandemic i did 100% of my shopping by ordering from a network of local farmers and they personally delivered things with a sprinter (once a week)
@bhaugen
I am german and my friends dad has had a copy of "Das Kapital". i have read many excerpts and summary and looked up stuff and skimmed through it, but havent read it in its entirety cover to cover. why? 🙂
The government can always ban anything they want - an interesting question would be on what legal basis they would ban it though.
At the moment it seems the FED will add it to its reserves. Blackrock already bought into it as well after the SEC has approved Bitcoin ETFs... banning stuff needs legal justification.
Also, some things are harder to ban than others. BTV would need global coordination, otherwise usage continues and has a price, but ppl in specific countries are excluded
@immibis i have never heard of pax.
gold is not practical, because its heavy and tedious to store, transport and keep save, especially as a business. how do you send it around on a daily basis to pay suppliers as a business? how do you send it to sellers after buying online?
gold isnt feasible and even less strictly limited than bitcoin.
from new reserves the rich can dig up from underground and spacex from astroid in the future - btc is hard limited by social consensus
delivery services lol. Those are more centralized than the supermarkets. So you prove that even if there was no money printer, you'd still give lots of money to CEOs. That's why they don't need a money printer.
The issue is, every business is a constant maintainance cost.
you pay salaries every month.
you also pay machines, factories, resources, etc... constantly. if you dont offer useful stuff your entire business falls apart. ppl leave if you cant pay and your infrastructure rots.
Thats not very powerful compared to a moneyprinter, which means you dont need people to actually buy. you cant also boykott money printers unless you boykott a currency, which means boykotting everyone
@immibis
basically self custody of gold is and always was quite impractible, but without its just certificates and those issuing get a certificate printer, thus a gold money printer. super bad. ...we just created new capitalists 🫠
@immibis yeah fair enough - definitely agree.
still makes it hard, because bitcoin is used globally and some countries already make bitcoin or crypto illegal and people do itnanyway, but bitcoin usage in the rest of the world continues.
And even if it was illegal everywhere, its difficult to enforce compared to most other things... because similar to bittorrent it is really decentralized and ppl have stake in it.
and lastly, it seems some governments and companies embrace it at the moment
i dont believe in it, because if you dont have the physical gold, its not self custody and the issuer of the certificates can print it, so it seems worth nothing. just another potebtial scam, so why bother and risk
its a problem.
its easier to build houses than it ever was, yet even old houses are crazy expensive, imho because rich folks park money in houses causing price inflation to avoid being diluted by capitalists printing money.
Even though unrented houses are a net maintanance cost, price inflation causes so much "income" for house owners, they dont even bother renting them. I read there are more empty houses than ppl without homes.
If everyone avoids dilution via BTC houses crash
@immibis ...which means houses would become cheap again and a net maintanance cost for landlords, so they would want to sell or rent to avoid further losses, but because there are so many, ppl will have choice and rent becomes cheap by landlords competing for renters over having an empty costly home.
Just until now (without BTC) houses were a cheap haven... anyway, thebmoney printer is enriching folks in the first place to even be abpe to "park money" to avoid dilution.
kill all printers 😁
@immibis oh btw. i worked towards being nomadic. if most ppl were remote working and flexible, they cpuld collectively dodge a pricy area to punishblandlords who raise prices... if ppl arent flexible, landlords have an easyvtime to raise prices, see San Francisco as an extreme example.
if you dont have it in your possession, its not self custody. it is true that you could buy miligrqms of gold and stash them, but if ppl did that a lot, robbers could break in. its much easier to steal gold than memorized 12 words.
But the bigger problem is, that buying, selling and paying with gold is difficult.
Digital payments is what ppl need daybin and day out... gold is quite impractical imho.
@serapath
Don't need to read it cover to cover, just need the part about surplus value.
If you grasp the outline of how capitalism works, it would help your analysis of how money works. As in, capitalists can happily profit from bitcoin as well as any other form of money. All they need is surplus value from underpaid work.
Times changed. Marx work is brilliant, but capitalists true power was hidden back then.
Digital payments werent a thing, so private banks didnt have such enormous global printing power yet AND these were early days, so nobody could imagine capitalistd would just use debt/loans to create money without end for themselves to pay us salaries and buy everything to enrich.
yes they pay us low salaries, BUT where do they even get the funds to pays us. loans that get never paid back
global debt is 307 trillion
https://www.reuters.com/markets/global-debt-hits-record-307-trillion-debt-ratios-climb-iif-2023-09-19/
but global public debt is only 100 trillion
https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt
its crony politicians spending tiny shutup moneu on the public, but the rest into their pockets. but private capitalist debt is 200 of 300 trillion
this is the real steal and how they can pay us in the first place. something marx couldnt know, but if he would know those numbers and had the historic charts, woupd have written on the front cover
yes. there arent many yet, but imho it will increase. nothing keeps value for the last 15 years like bitcoin does.
for daily buying and selling, bitcoin lightning is mandatory. bitcoin payments only make sense for bigger amounts.
and regarding money printers, you dontnhave to mine and do anything, just holding it will give you something. thats more than any alternative ever did and capitalists cant print it. quite good
@immibis
i see it like that
1. bitcoin is what gets rid of the printer, so capitalists cant print it, pay us little and keep the most for themselves to try to allbbecome elons or bezos ppl
2. lightning is what enables p2p payments of chain, but its hard to setup meaningful payment networks that work
This is where i hope/count on mutual aid networks, worker coops and the likes to build alternatives to the capitalist product/services and set up circular economies using lightning.
"siphoning" soke money by being an intermediary is something i always want to work towards avoiding, which is why i love p2p.
i dont think miners are that. when 21 million has been mined they wont get new tokens anymore.
now for lightning, yes, if used naively, but thats why i dont think bitcoin and lightning solves it all. bitcoin gets rid of printers and lightning enables p2p offchain payments, but the hard part is to setup worker coop mutual aid networks to make real use of it
what is your take on a better alternative?
i am not saying there cant be theoretically anything better than bitcoin, but how do you avoid capitalist class privilege of printing?
@immibis started working on a self custodial lightning wallet, but still fighting with it 🙂 ...hope to integrate it into some sort of dat runtime shell later on
@immibis ...i wish though somebody paid or donated for it.
anyway. if one would wait for fubding to get permission, many things would never get made, so it is what it is 🤷♀️
...one gets used to not getting paid. hopefully one day that changes 🙂
Imagine if connecting to another Bitcoin node required both of you to spend a bitcoin, and you could only get it back (minus several transaction fees!) when you disconnect. That's Lightning.
@immibis i know.
its true. this is the hard part.
thats why it only makes sense in networks.
bitcoin n
lightning means, people have to think about opening and closing channels and where payments flow and try to find and build and measure and refine circular self sustainable economies.
in every other system this is abstracted away and hence imho works even less, just like fiat, where debt always growth and insteqd of circular economies we have capitalist noney printers
not saying its easy, but taking responsibility to build those circular economies is the part that needs to be solved.
its all of us making that visible debugging it and trying to route payments between our nodes to sustain our offchain economies to potentially never having a need to settle on chain, thus always paying back and forth offchain.
...or ignoring this problem and having the one chain to pay and capitalists to continue printing to organise us all.
I think every layer 2 system inevitably requires people to pay in money initially, but maybe there are systems where money can be added to the channel from either side. So we set up a channel with 1 coin each, but then I want to pay you 3 coins, so I seamlessly (only taking a transaction fee) expand the size of the channel by putting another 2 coins in, and then the balance is 4-0... it's still a
Altcoins on Ethereum-based rollup-based layer 2's seem to work just a little bit more seamlessly - where you essentially have a channel between millions of people at the same time, and it has its own validators and so on, and only commits when someone wants to move money in or out, and some market maker allows you to exchange between inside-rollup coins and outside-rollup coins at a rate close to parity. You're still aware that you have a different type of coin though. Basically your balance in inside-rollup-coin (like MATIC) is your version of channel capacity. So they're not really all that different, although you can get inside-rollup-coin at good market rates, and everyone using the rollup are peers (there is no network to route through).
but a layer 2 is again a blockchain.
lightning is no blockchain, it only involvea people in the channel, no validators, no mining, no block production, no nominators... zero overhead. just signs and shuffle invoices back and forth and ...expand to more folks by routing... 3 peers, 5 peers, and so on.
peer to peer is challenging, but once it works, it the least overhead possible + doing a "rollup" onto bitcoin if you want. ...this can cut out all in between solutions
@immibis if it gets architected via cebtral nodes, then not much is gained. the key is that it alllows everyone to participate and we can have many nodes connecting peer to peer to avoid the centralized nodes - thats the challenge
ethereum supports a lot more, but do you need it and ...the main issue: it always prints new tokens and they go only to the rich.
that is THE KEY.
ethereum is a plutocracy with the plutocrats having access to the money printer and everyone else will get diluted.
its the worst model, but worse than that. they had a presale, so almost all plutocrats are already predefined as well and they dont ever have to let go their coins and will stay there forever. this disqualifies it upfront
@immibis wow, didnt k ow ledgerloops. sounds great.
maybe it pairs well with lightning.
thats what i mean. you can just send invoices in circles, but an invoice needs to be denominated in a currency and a means of final settlement/payment to measure it in.
thats what bitcoin provides to lightning, but ideally you could eventually never use it.
love it.
do you know who uses it?
i do think more is not needed.
you want a payment network to do business.
and you want some very secure token like bitcion that does not allow the rich capitalist class to print more and dilute others, everything else can and probably should work outside of blockchains
I feel we are moving away from the original issue, which is stop the capitalist class privilege of money printing and dont replace it with another money printing crypto-capitalist class.
Fixed token supply and proof of work, because proof of work means people can permissionlessly compete to become miners.
Fixed token supply with proof of stake means the rich can collude and there is no way to ever break it - because you cant get enough tokens if they dont want you to have them.
Once we have that (it doesnt need bitcoin), bitcoin is just a good schelling point, then we can see what else we might need.
Most problems require trust in oracles and all kinds of other shenengians, but if they already do, you dont need a blockchain for it. dat/hypercore append only logs are enough. sign, or multisign, it can all be done offchain - commit a hash of something onto a chain like bitcoin if you need to.
Benefits: keeps chains small. Eth younger but way larger than BTC
Actually LedgerLoops even says that it is similar to Lightning. I like it - it is also the reason i pretty much think Lightning is great.
While I get that this is about facilitating trades directly, the work of finding a "loop" still needs to be done and thats not trivial given so many possible ways of exchanging - so this is only useful with a proposal for a broader system in which this is actually becomes useful imho.
The main issue i see is:
"A" wants x and can give y and has no way of knowing how many "y" are needed to match the value of an "x". They cant be compared.
Now somebody might want a "y" and has a "z", but has no clue how many "z" would match one "y" ...and so it compounds.
The chances a loop can be found so all the amounts match ...needs plenty of negotiation along a long chain of participants without knowing if this will work out. Seems quite difficult.
Prices are really convenient to have in practice.
If you route through peers you have situations where you have to tell the user "you can't pay this person because even though you have enough money, the payment system is broken"
Calling a system between only 2 nodes a blockchain is weird. There is no regular block production nor any of the other layers and features a blockchain has. You technically dont even need to keep all history, so i cant really agree here.
Otherwise - lightning network, just like any network, can find flows that use many paths between 2 nodes
If there is no path or not enough capacity, then yes, you cant pay
Same issue with LedgerLoops, but lightning routing makes the problem simpler
Hey, what's the Byzantine army doing on the horizon....
@immibis
i mean.
the general idea of LedgerLoop is brilliant imho and shared by a few other similar projects mentioned in the LegerLoop website, one of them being Lightning.
To me, the combination of something ledgerloopish, like lightning, but backed by e.g. bitcoin seems like an interesting idea, because it somehow provides an anchor in case things ever get to a point where they dont work out anymore, without giving any third party control or a money printer (capitalist class privilege)
the rich arent the only ones and not all rich either. rich buying BTC strengthens BTC. the early rich suppport. the late rich dont get as much anymore and when everyone is on BTC everywhere the printers are gone.
So buying BTC is opting into ending capitalism - yeah, the rich who use the printer now will have a pretty awesome start into a BTC world, but at least this is the past time. no more printing from then on
of course, ppl who decide to stay in the old worls and keep accepting capitalist money will still be vulnerable, but probably everyone learns at some point. everyone who transitions away from capitalist money can help to educate.
i assume those who still have a lot of wealth might take a bit longer and have to lose more before they lost enough privilege to reconsider