The problem with 3 is global radicalization. Attempts to suppress populations can only work with the ability to convince the population to take your side; in the case of large scale bombing campaigns, the result is more radicalization and an increase in attacks elsewhere.
In some situations the US has gone to war with countries who not long after are close allies. Germany comes to mind, but there are others. In other cases the situation you describe is more accurate. What are the primary factors that influence one outcome or another?
That is not necessary the dilemma. The dilemma could also be whether to let "present time radicals" tease Washington war mongerers into doing something that is in the long term interest of the radicals.
> Personally, the ability to always have access to my money, accept contracts internationally, and to be protected from a fickle financial system.
Doesn't cash also fulfil these? I'd have thought bitcoin is more fickle than cash.
> For other people I’ve seen a wide variety of things they consider valuable that I don’t care for. Trading, community, loans, art, gaming for examples.
Sorry - is this crypto related? Or just examples of things people like?
What’s your bank? I’d like an account there. Every one I’ve checked so far freezes accounts and has a painful process for international wire transfers.
Er. A wire transfer like BACS? You just put in the details, click "yes, I understand this is probably a bad idea" and wait. At least in the UK.
But I'm not saying there's zero value to bitcoin's advantages. I'm saying that that in no way explains the price of bitcoin. What explains it is greater fool theory.
Bitcoin's dollar value is just the amount of it in circulation divided by the people interested, the actual number value doesn't really mean anything directly (e.g if there were 100x more of it then the price would be that much less).
How so? It's pretty easy to see how economic value can be created via stocks and bonds: they're basically indirect ways to give companies or governments money for investment. That money can then be used to hire more/better people, buy equipment, or build infrastructure, which will hopefully produce more value than it cost. What's the equivalent in cryptocurrency speculation or "yield farming"? Can you explain where the value actually comes from there?
Providing a consistent-over-time and tamper-proof record of transfers. It is pretty obvious how that provides value; if you have a system that provides that and one that doesn't, we'd expect the first to be more valuable. We're also seeing the first asset in history which can't be reliably confiscated without the cooperation of its owner which is also worth a lot. Involuntary rules change mid-game by local authorities has been the cost of doing business for all of human history and it is quite exciting to see that change.
Also, if you're assumption is that all government regulation is automatically good then we don't have common ground on this one but ... most government regulation is destructive. The market for bitcoin is implicitly showing the enormous costs of financial regulation where it makes sense to burn absurd amounts of energy rather than get involved in the financial system. Shaking that off is likely to lead to better outcomes. Freer systems tend to prosper more than systems people don't want to be in.
To be honest, I'm still not sure what practical usage scenarios you have in mind. Is it protecting your money from terrible economic policies if you live in a country like Venezuela? Or are you envisioning a whole new financial sector, free from existing financial regulation? In the latter case, while I don't think that all government regulation is good, I don't see how transitioning to cryptocurrency would help you avoid its problems. After all, if you're doing business somewhere, you have to obey that place's laws no matter which currency you're using to do business.
Say I have a friend in Hong Kong, Russia, the US or wherever. I can send them $10k in Monero. Whatever laws the local country may or may not have mean nothing - they can't detect the transfer and they can't stop it or roll it back even if they could detect it.
We don't know exactly what the value of being able to do that is, but it is not something that has ever been possible before and it is a concrete action that would help a friend. So it definitely has some value.
I’m so disgusted by the people who support these violations of rights. Even if someone isn’t a us citizen, they are still a human and should be treated as such
Surveillance of private spaces is a violation of the human right to privacy. As far as international warrants go, these are issued and serviced all the time.
Its honestly takes like those that make me glad i read sci-fi and fantasy. If you had watched star trek or read lotr/got/wot then you would have been exposed to intellectual thought that delicately, but wholly, addresses why this is simply wrong.
Bitcoin is more centralized than some proof of stake chains. Just 3-5 pools control almost all of the hashrate. Many popular proof of stake chains have 20-50 validators, and some have thousands. Proof of stake is proven to be more decentralized than Bitcoin - except in cases like Ethereum which are similarly centralized.
IMHO, You have a wrong idea of what decentralisation means.
- light validator nodes, more than 50ks around the world
- no foundations, CEOs, companies behind
- proposals based on BIP
- miners don’t own the chain since rules are based on nodes (except some quick activations in the past for segwit and taproot)
- no premining
- the only one truly censorship resistant (stratum v2)
- I could go on and on and on
But yes, I agree with you on the mining pools topic.
Why don’t Bitcoin maxis prefer Monero? It seems you get better decentralization plus a more private digital gold and something that’s much more similar to p2p cash than Bitcoin, without needing a proof of stake chain.
Does Monero match all of those attributes of BTC that the parent listed? Lightweight validator is one of the big ones that most seem to trade in exchange for higher transaction throughput.
The article is textbook burnout, including the denials and “friends have it worse”. People need to take care of themselves and their families first, then worry about the rest of the world.
Capitalism has always been a creature of the state. Kings gave licenses to private individuals to invest, operate, and run public companies. Nowadays it’s more complex but the first step to create any public company is still to apply for a license. Power and money have always flown both ways. I suggest you look into the Muscovy Company. Created in 1555 as the first joint stock company, it was highly influential politically and relied on its political connections to earn profits. Nothing has changed in this regard for corporations since.
The big tech companies are not private; they are public companies that rely on state force to maintain their monopolies. Just as an example, intellectual property laws rely on the state for enforcement.
Idk. I like having property rights and so naturally that will extend to others and their homes and businesses else they won’t respect my property rights.
Leveling such a broad criticism against “big tech companies” isn’t helpful, especially when you personally (along with every American) is categorically guilty of the same.
Likewise, a society forced to spend 2x or more the cost of a home-cooked meal on fast food is not going to be a healthy one. From a broad economic perspective, rentals that cost so much more than purchases (which are inaccessible in part because so many are only on the market as rentals) aren't sustainable.
>Thats what you paid for I presume?
I presume I paid for shelter, but also someone's luxury car or home renovation.
If we had the kind of legal system you want (where arguments like the one you just gave sometimes prevailed in court) nothing would ever get done because arguments about who owns what and who owes who (and how much) would abound and go on forever.
No need to throw out the legal system, just change the law. Currently, failure to adhere to norms can lock you out of the market entirely (thanks to companies like SafeRent). If the spectrum is homelessness -> rental -> homeownership, then the opposite should be true: successful and proactive stewardship of a property should entitle you to it, regardless of the current owner's claim (but especially in the case of practical absenteeism).
Note that half of this country was settled this way.
The alternative that is the current status quo is real estate corporations in New York and Delaware disrupting community fabric 200, 500, 1000 miles away in the name of quarterly profits. Legality is not the measure of morality.
"Property rights" are laughable, especially in America. Stolen or conned resources abound, and all that matters is that someone from the state recognizes your ownership over someone else's (however crooked that circumstance may have come about or been perpetuated).
All humans in the world live, have lived, or will live under the exact same circumstances. It’s a good sounding clip but it’s meaningless, rooted in cynicism, and less than useless since it detracts from the ability to make progress.
You offered surface level commentary that was immature and naive. If I can effectively rebut that commentary with a meaningless platitude you should examine your initial commentary and understand why it was unpersuasive (and not very interesting).
>If I can effectively rebut that commentary with a meaningless platitude
Therein lies the rub: you can't. Or, at least, didn't. Each of your statements is falsifiable, particularly the last, which is a confession masquerading as an accusation. There are few worse ways to "make progress" than to dismiss criticism of the status quo out-of-hand.
You are (or were) renting your apartment, you never owned it. Those property rights are held by your landlord or otherwise whoever owns that apartment, you were just a tenant.
If you want to hold and exercise property rights, you need to own property. Renting a property does not mean you own it. It's as simple as that.
>The mindless appeal to "property rights" seems to absolve you of the responsibility to consider these complexities, I guess.
My argument relies on acknowledging what you've said as the current, horribly dysfunctional reality. You don't need to state it plainly.
What happens to a society when a large subset of the population is forced to subsidize a 100% profit margin on the most expensive basic good most will ever put money towards, and it doesn't even buy them stability or predictability in access to that good? I guess we're going to find out.
There’s limits to property rights even among the most extreme voluntaryist political philosophers. Rothbard, a famous anarchocapitalist, wrote extensively about why property rights don’t extend to slaveowners.
Unlike private households and businesses, public companies only exist due to licenses from the state. These include limitation on liability, protection for many types of property, and much, much more. The protections even extend to securities regulations; since public companies aren’t privately owned, there is a misalignment between incentives of owners and managers. The state sides with the owners by using force on managers to prevent them from acting in their own self interest, and instead to act on behalf of the shareholder public.
The NAP cannot extend to public companies as they are not privately owned and can only exist when granted rights by the state. A lot of work has been done by libertarians on the topic of how monopolies are formed; it’s not due to private markets.
I don’t think I argued that there weren’t limits to property rights. Did I?
> Unlike private households and businesses, public companies only exist due to licenses from the state.
There are a few problems with this. To start, private business and private households also exist due to licensure from the state. The distinction between public and private is a matter of technicality, not categorical difference. The monopoly that the state holds on the initiation of violence applies categorically to your ability to purchase a home and pay taxes, and it applies to large tech companies.
The second problem is that public businesses were as a matter of fact private before they were public. So instead of offering shares to the public on government regulated, public markets that anyone can participate in, they could just be private instead.
Humans can be born without a license, and frequently are. Same with private businesses. Public companies cannot exist without a license. Just because birth, household formation, and private business are heavily regulated in some times and places does not mean they always are. We humans were all stateless tribes once, and some of us still are.
Regarding your second issue, we’re in agreement. Yes it’s true under capitalism that with the heavy regulation of private individuals and firms, everything becomes the public sphere. Your house becomes a public place where your actions are subject to judgement.
> Same with private businesses. Public companies cannot exist without a license.
Being public just means that you are selling shares to anyone on a public market. Those markets don't need a license or regulation of any sort to exist. I'm confused as to why you're trying to draw such a sharp distinction between public and private companies in terms of government regulation. Regulation of a stock market and public companies who participate is no different than regulation of private businesses. You can't really divorce the two in a sensible way within this context.
> We humans were all stateless tribes once, and some of us still are.
A tribe is a form of government (I'm not sure that the usage of state makes a difference here versus government but maybe it does make a difference for you?) and your behavior is regulated within your tribe.
Sometimes I think people confuse individual choice or individualism with how humans exist, but humans are pack animals. Always have been. So we're always within a regulated tribe, democracy, religious cult, or other form of government. Even your example of a human being born without a license seems like an unimportant technical detail that doesn't have a basis in reality, because your license would just be you conforming to the rules of your social group. Being formally issued by some people wearing funny hats in an "office" doesn't make a difference except for the purposes of management and efficiency.
States are parasocial, not social. It might feel like state officials are your friends, the president is like a father, and your representative is like a respected community leader you’ve known your whole life. But those relationships aren’t based in natural social human behavior; they require a media ecosystem. Arguments that humans are social and therefore statist doesn’t hold water.
Public markets cannot exist without regulation, for complex reasons you can read about elsewhere. Private markets can exist without the state and do; whether it’s drug markets or decentralized crypto trading apps. The distinction is important to understand for people working in blockchain especially; people have tried to import ideas from corporate governance with general failure. The most successful daos measured by impact are molochdaos, which are designed to be controlled by a small number of private actors. Publicly owned daos such as dash and makerdao have consistently run into issues related to governance, such as decision capture by private organizations, low voter turnout, poor returns to capital, and more. Even now in the case of MakerDao the main driving force is a single developer, Rune, while the dao mostly acts as a discussion platform for his ideas. His endgame plan even will result in the dao governance from having minimal control over the core protocol. Understanding the difference between public and private would have prevented a lot of mistakes.
How are you defining a public market? Because it seems quite clear to me that a public market can exist without state regulation. The original discussion point was:
> public companies only exist due to licenses from the state.
Which seems pretty clearly false to me unless you are defining a public company as a company in which it "has a license" from the state, but then that falls flat on its face because the vast majority of businesses have to have some licensure of some sort to operate. That could be a restaurant being required to pass food safety inspections, it could be a hotel and requirements to be ADA accessible, or various other "licensures", let alone the actual business licenses needed to be filed either at the state of federal level in order to operate.
To bring this back into focus, being irate at "big public tech companies" because they "have a special license from the state" as was implied is quite silly.
> States are parasocial, not social. It might feel like state officials are your friends, the president is like a father, and your representative is like a respected community leader you’ve known your whole life. But those relationships aren’t based in natural social human behavior; they require a media ecosystem. Arguments that humans are social and therefore statist doesn’t hold water.
I think there is merit in arguing that states work because of a shared fiction, in which a media ecosystem is, while not necessary, certainly of great benefit, but I think the key point here is one of scale, not form.
I don't draw a sharp distinction between a 25 person democracy and a 25 person tribe or community. Whether that should change as you scale to 25,000,000 people is a more interesting discussion I think.
Public markets are equity markets that any member of the public can participate in. They cannot exist without regulation due to the owner/agent problem. It’s not just a theoretical problem; daos that have tried to have public markets only regulated by code have run into the same issues. Private markets can exist without regulation since private assets are held by individuals or small groups that are able to coordinate effectively.
It is reasonable to be upset at the use of force by the state to protect big tech companies that are using this protection to violate human rights. We might like the idea that the system functions differently, and perhaps some powerful individuals could institute temporary reforms, but as long as a monopoly of force exists it will be abused due to incentives.
There’s a huge difference between a 25 person “democracy” and a 25m person democracy. Firstly in common modern parlance democracy means a set of institutions with a distributed power base. That’s why Germany is democratic and China is not, even though both appeal to the “will of the people” and both have elections. Obviously a 25 person group will not have these institutions and cannot be democratic. Second the small group is based on fundamental human social relationships, while the second one is necessarily parasocial. You can personally know everyone in a 25 person group; you cannot for a 25m one.
> Public markets are equity markets that any member of the public can participate in.
Yes!
> They cannot exist without regulation
No! In fact, early crypto exchanges are examples of unregulated public markets. But we also know that this is incorrect because you can just imagine a world where the government doesn’t regulate these markets. The owner/agent problem you are describing can be solved without the use of government - you just find a different third party.
> It is reasonable to be upset at the use of force by the state to protect big tech companies
Sure but the criticism wasn’t “the State should stop big tech companies from doing bad things” it was:
* The big tech companies are not private; they are public companies that rely on state force to maintain their monopolies. Just as an example, intellectual property laws rely on the state for enforcement.*
Which is nonsense because being “public” and “licensed” isn’t relevant to the protection of the State here.
> China is not, even though both appeal to the “will of the people” and both have elections.
I lost track of what we were really discussing here but China does not hold elections in a way that resembles what we mean by an election. Chinese citizens don’t go to the voting booth, the appointment of the CCP ruler isn’t up to the public.
Crypto exchanges are trading digital assets, not equities.
Public markets need state intervention because the application of force is required.
The point regarding democracy is that you cannot call a 25 person tribe a democracy just because they vote. “What we mean by an election” is about diverse institutions of power such as multiple parties, independent media, freedom of political speech, etc.
Just because an object can possess a property does not mean it necessarily has the property. Regarding Bitcoin, it does not necessarily require a regulated market (proof: existence of Bisq). Same holds for private households; instead of relying on force for enforcement, you can rely on trade via the non aggression principle- “I won’t steal your property if you don’t steal mine” prevents us from requiring force to settle disputes. This does not hold true for equities because of the owner/manager problem among other issues; there’s a lot of research on equities markets and why they require regulations you can read if it’s interesting to you.
It doesn’t matter whether the state says Bitcoin is an equity or not; it isn’t one. States frequently make all sorts of false claims.
Regarding democracy, in modern parlance it’s a set of institutions; a 25 person tribe is too small to support those institutions; accordingly a 25 person tribe cannot be democracy in the modern sense.
Bigtech is not the main threat. They are the new kids on the block. There is no shortage of privately held data brokers that will provide data to intelligence services. They've been doing it since before the Internet existed.
This is one of Cloudflares well documented tactics to force people to purchase their subscription services. I suspect but have no proof that it is overlooked by the authorities because an internet centralized under Cloudflare is easier to censor.
Why would cloudflare ddos you with their own servers? If they actually wanted to attack random sites to get them to become customers (very much doubt that conspiracy) they probably would use someone elses IP:s.
Deniability. The executives can claim third parties are abusing the platform while simultaneously enabling the abuse. Whether or not that’s true, the outcome is the same; cloudflare’s actions force smaller operators to switch to cloudflare.
