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Off-Topic discussion about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
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Best ever, according to Jared Diamond anyway, was probably hunter gatherer times - just to throw another even more controversial statement into the mix 😉
😂🤣
Just think about it. Being able to beat shit out of your opponent with stick without being afraid of being arrested and put into jail 😂🤣
everyhing i have i got just by own hard work, i started with literally nothign cause i'm definitely not from rich family.. always i needed some help from state (like when my son got ill and needed costly treatment) state literally dumped on me hard and i had to pay everything by myself.
So dont try this psychologic crap on me. Yes it's nice i don't live in some third world country, i'm also glad i don't live in China, North Korea. I'm also glad i don't live in US :-)). But this doesn't mean i should keep my mouth closed and be happy with what i have, trying to not see shit and injustice which is aaround, made mostly by politicians, caused by this corrupted system. When i see world around is going to shit, i choose to fight. I'm that kind of guy.
Of course, everybody has it's own level of issues and trying to deal with them. It's very sad that for some people main daily goal is to stay alive and eventually found some food. Ironically, this is also result of western geopolitical and financial sick system. Power of petrodollar is fuelled mostly by this.
@dendy People's experience of governance varies from country to country. In the UK where I live if you (or your children) become ill then you are reasonably well looked after - it's not perfect of course, but you will get the care you need and the state will pay for it. One thing you never have to worry about here is medical bills.
There is some corruption in the UK, mostly in the form of political lobbying and crony capitalism (the government outsourcing to specific companies no matter how bad their track record is for example, or to personal friends of ministers).
The solution to this as far as I can see is to demand that politicians have more accountability and transparency, which can only be achieved at the ballot box. A very slow process as we collectively work things out - it's an emergent process that evolves slowly over time.
Personally I can't see how leaving it all to an algorithm or to market forces is going to be any better - both of those are human constructs and as such are as fallible as any other human creation.
But to elaborate on the idea of governance: some countries are hopelessly corrupt, you can't get anything done without bribing officials, government employees have their fingers in pies, and politicians are completely in the pocket of vested interests.
But on the other hand other countries have very low levels of corruption. If bribing policemen and officials is commonplace in Egypt for example, in the UK it will land you in prison, so it's very rare.
In Scandinavian countries outsourcing is open to scrutiny, so in Sweden for example all government contracts can be examined by ordinary citizens, without the cloak of "commercial confidentiality" that is used to hide things here in the UK.
In many countries the only way to get a job is to know someone on the inside, but in others that is frowned upon and you are expected to select the best candidate, rather than your second cousin.
So the point is that many of these factors are cultural, but they can be overcome with more accountability and transparency.
If all politicians are corrupt in one place, that doesn't necessarily apply everywhere else.
So this is a post about the need for a mixed economy, with a balance between the state and the free market.
We know that having a fully planned economy, that is controlled by a small number of central planners making all the important decisions, is doomed to failure, because that's exactly what the Soviet Union did and in the end they couldn't compete with the West.
The free market allows millions of people to interact freely and decide collectively what products and services they want. Anyone can start a business, but only the businesses that serve the needs of people effectively survive (at least in theory).
Over time this leads to a much more dynamic and productive economy than a centrally planned one like the Soviet Union.
So why not just leave everything to the market?
Well, markets always tend to Pareto distribution and uneven outcomes.
In any one market you will usually find one or two big players that dominate, and other competitors struggle for market share. Google dominates search. Facebook and Twitter dominate social media. Facebook then buys Instagram to consolidate its dominance, making it even harder for competitors to touch it.
Even with a lot of investment it can be very hard to displace established leaders. Microsoft for example spent billions in the early 2010s trying to get a foothold in the mobile phone market, but couldn't compete against Apple or Android.
So this creates a real danger of monopolies and cartels distorting the market.
But Pareto distribution also happens within natural networks. For example bus routes, the electricity grid, or the drainage system. Some places are more densely populated than others, so there are different concentrations of customers to deal with.
Let's say you privatise and completely deregulate a bus service in a major city (I've seen this first hand in Manchester in the 90s). What happens is that the busy routes become extremely well served as the bus companies compete for customers in the densely populated areas, but the less profitable routes become totally neglected.
In Manchester that meant that on some routes you never waited more than two or three minutes for a bus, but in less busy areas you could wait an hour. A very fractured service that in the end residents hated.
In London they approached things differently: the buses themselves were run by private operators but the network and the timetables were run by a public body (Transport for London). This was done to ensure even coverage across the city rather than the fragmented service found in fully deregulated areas.
This is why there is no country in the world that has a fully privatised road network: it would be impossible to ensure that the entire network was evenly provided for, because less densely populated areas would not be profitable. Private roads do exist, but they are always cherry-picked busy roads that are profitable to operate. No private company is going to want to manage empty roads in the Scottish Highlands for example, only the state can provide those.
And this is why we need a mixed economy: leave the provision of goods and services to the market, and infrastructure to the state. This is something that even Hayek would agree with BTW.
Some of the more extreme Bitcoin advocates see Bitcoin as a complete replacement for state currency, a fully private and market-based monetary system with no provision for taxation or public goods. This isn't a system that is going to be able to provide effective infrastructure, due to the Pareto effect I've described. Such a system would fail, like the Soviet Union did, because it would be outpaced by the more pragmatic mixed economies.
Also, just in case it needs saying: having good infrastructure is essential for a productive market economy. The better the roads are, the better communications and internet services are, the more productive the economy can be.
A world with no public goods is much less productive.
Incidentally this is exactly one of the aspects of blockchain that interested me – that of identity and authenticity and consequently the affordance of transparency. It probably wouldn’t widen out to a general identity on the blockchain ~ barcode on every baby type of sci-fi scenario, but it should at least be possible for every minor pivotal and slightly significant decision or action to be linked to a blockchain such that it can be traced, authenticated, and verified that this person did indeed say these things to those people at this time. Even if corrected later, both records are there.
One aspect I was interested in was verifying that a person said this thing that they claimed to have said (or didn't say the thing they claimed not to have said) as a counter to what was then the future possibility of modelled productions created by what are now Generative Adversarial Networks. Speech, mainly, was the thing I wanted to link to a blockchain.
That’s an unsupportable assertion. I’d argue a world without private property is far less productive, has far more poverty and has a greater concentration of power in corrupt political systems.
Who mentioned a world without private property? The whole point of my post was about a mixed economy, with both private and public elements.
To conclude that you need to abolish private property in order to have e public goods seems really extreme to me. A worldview completely lacking in nuance.
I’d like your definition of “public goods.” And also your definition of who exactly is the “public”?
This is for me most sad aspect of all that Bitcoin enviromental impact FUD. People are distracted from REAL enviroment desctruction.
Good posts @richardyot. Very well written and informative. Whether one agrees with your views or not, you've laid it out plainly enough that anyone reading with an open mind should be able to understand your points.
The only mild disagreements I have are over cost. To say that in the UK the state pays for one's health bills is inaccurate. The state does not pay for it, the people do. The cost ends up being averaged out over the people in the form of taxes. If your child becomes ill and you don't have the money to pay for care, someone else has had money confiscated to pay for it. That's OK because the people decided that's the kind of system they want.
But, it always bothers me greatly when anyone says that the "state" provides anything. They don't. People do in the form of (lawfully) confiscated funds.
The same can be said for infrastructure. That person enjoying the nice roads to their lonely retreat in the Scottish highlands does so at the expense of people who do not enjoy those benefits. There may be some indirect benefit to those that paid for it in terms of a "more productive society" but those that paid for it have zero choice in the matter other than at the ballot box.
There's a balance of course, and as you say, for the free world for the most part people eventually get to influence that through democratic process. It falls apart where there is corruption. I couldn't agree with you more that added transparency is the key. Unfortunately politicians, and those that control them, have every reason to resist that at every turn.
That's a pretty basic fallacy right there imho. Just by being a white European guy who can afford an ipad and buy crypto, you ARE lucky and rich compared to most people alive today (or ever). That's not psycho crap, just statistics.
As for "everything you got comes just from your own hard work", I offer to your kind attention the following things: School. Roads. Hospitals. Drinkable water. Infrastructure in general. Relative security of your rights and existence guaranteed by the state. No personal experience of racism. Man, I could do this all day.
Of course, my point is not to make you any less proud of your personal achievements which I'm sure are substantial. (I mean my only examples are your NS2 presets and they are excellent.
) But having some perspective and simply seeing how most of us on this forum got pretty good seats to the show of life right from the moment we were born is useful. Enjoy, my friend.
The notion that "the state" (in some sort of democracy) is somehow a completely distinct entity from "the people" is a false distinction. The notion that every individual should somehow get to decide how every penny they contribute to taxes is spent just isn't how any functioning society works.
In no functioning society of any size do individuals get to arbitrarily opt out of participating in structures/rules/rituals because they don't feel like they benefit enough from some particular group decision.
In the U.S. one hears a lot of belly-aching from people that don't like taxes but who enjoy the benefits of their taxes....often in ways that they don't comprehend (such as benefitting from research performed by beneficiaries of public education, or the improved security/stability of having members of society well-compensated for their labor).
If you read my post, you'll see that I was careful not to take a position on whether it's a good thing or not. Please don't try to turn this into another lecture series. We're on the verge of this thread becoming too political as it is.
Since you seem to read more meaning than there is when I say things, let me lay it out plainly then I'll disengage. (I did use the term "confiscated" that could be considered derogatory by some, though I didn't mean it that way. Substitute "collected" if it helps.)
Governments do not create or provide anything. People provide the funds that the "State" spends and distributes. In free societies they get to vote on how that occurs. Period. OK? Buh Bye.
Sure, I don't think the distinction really matters. In theory the state derives its power form the people, and taxes are collected to fund some of the spending.
The state can also add to the economy in a positive-sum way. A good example is in research and development. The US decided to put a man on the moon, at great expense, and marshalled a ton of resources to that end. This in turn led to unforeseen benefits to the private sector, including the fact that you can now navigate on your phone via satellite. Without all that investment in the space race from the US government that would not be possible.
Public goods are all the things that belong to the collective: roads, the court system, the police force, the fire brigade, education, national parks, air traffic control, and in my country the health service.
And the public is us: the demos, the citizens.
In your case I'm sure that's a distinction that doesn't really matter because you understand it. I come across so many people that don't understand this at all. The blank eyed stares that I get when I try to explain it disturb me greatly.
Can you clarify what you mean by "some" of the spending? Where does any other government spending come from?
In other countries, property rights and individual rights are not as well defended (or they are not at all recognized or defended) as in the US. And in the US, collectives don’t have rights. Only individuals have rights.
Deficit spending, by definition, is not paid for by current taxation. With current institutional arrangements it's funded from borrowing.
But if a government funds deficit spending from Bond sales, and then buys those bonds back with QE, then it's hard to argue that the spending was funded by taxation.
But even the US has public goods. The interstate highways, the national parks, the courts, the police etc. etc. etc.
(edit) States' rights could be considered as collective rights, no?
Text of the 10th Amendment, which is the basis for so-called “states’ rights”: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Since the US Federal government exists as a legal agreement between the States, not as a legal agreement between individuals, it is restrained by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. At the State level, citizens have other “rights” which the Federal government has no say over since they may exceed and not conflict with the role of the Federal government and the Constitution.
Since the right to property ownership is defended by Federal law via the Bill of Rights (5th Amendment), individual property ownership is enumerated as an inherent right. There is no “constitutional right” for property owned by collectives, so this is area which local city and State laws attempt to address.
Can an individual “opt out” of being asked or forced to contribute to public property? Of course, individuals have the right to move or leave any city or State which is unreasonable or confiscatory with its property or tax laws. People move to other, friendlier States all the time.
@neum wrote: " And in the US, collectives don’t have rights. Only individuals have rights."
What does this mean and what is its relevance to what is being discussed?
Since there are real distinctions between the roles of State versus Federal government, those distinctions must be clearly understood before making claims of a “public good”.
So how would you describe things such as roads, the court system, government agencies etc?
But still from the people who still pay the interest and the eventual debt.
Ouch. That hurts my brain. Not the part about taxation, but the idea that somehow it doesn't come back on the people in some way. nvm. I think you've clarified what I was asking about. There isn't some incoming source of revenue that I wasn't aware of. 👍🏼
There are private roads, there are public roads, there are even Federally funded roads. There are State courts and there are Federal courts. There are State governments and there is the Federal government.
They’re all different. That’s how I would describe them.
Ok, thanks for your contribution to the debate. 👍
I’ve often said that if I were Prime Monster I’d arrange to have the UK’s defence spending classified under the health service, ie, with our armed forces as a subset of public health.