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This is so wrong that I don't know where to start. First of all, people tend to forget that government is not made of angels. It is made of humans, who are sus
by mamon 9y ago
This is so wrong that I don't know where to start.
First of all, people tend to forget that government is not made of angels. It is made of humans, who are susceptible to the same flaws as the rest of us: greed, hunger for power, etc. Therefore we should try to limit the power government has over us to only basic necessities.
Second of all, historically, human societies functioned quite well with multiple competing currencies on the same area, some of them private, some state-governed. It might have been pain in the ass if some customers wanted to pay in French coins and others in Belgian ones, but that pain was eased by the fact that they were made of gold or silver, so to compare their worth it was enough to compare weight.
Lastly, control of currency allows goverment to increase it's spending beyond reasonable levels with debt. Which of course happens at the expense of citizens. This is the sole reason government enforces it's monopoly on currency.
Cryptocurrencies are unique oportunity to take control over the currency from governments and put it back in people's hands, exactly how God intended it to be :) We shouldn't give up that control to easily.
In the end money is just a commodity, same as bread, so we should let the market decide which currency to use, without any monopolies, state-owned or other.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI agree with the points you made, and yet still I don't think this invalidates the notion that a state needs some level of control over money in order to function.
- Nursie 9y ago>> Therefore we should try to limit the power government has over us to only basic necessities. A stable monetary climate is one of those that I am very happy to delegate. >> In the end money is just a commodity, same as bread, No, it's not, it's a method of exchange and follows different rules.
- betterunix2 9y ago> In the end money is just a commodity, same as bread, so we should let the market decide which currency to use, without any monopolies, state-owned or other. Is there some reason to believe that markets can exist without government intervention of some kind? At a minimum someone needs to ensure that the participants in the market are not killing each other. Even in prison economies there are de facto "governments" (inmates with power in the prison hierarchy) that keep the "market" orderly and decide the rules. In the absence of government, trade tends to be limited to occasional encounters between groups of people and too infrequent for any kind of market to form as an emergent phenomenon. In the absence of government, an encounter between strangers can quickly turn into a deadly fight, and an offer to trade may just as easily be a pretext for killing someone to steal their possessions. Markets can only exist when the worst outcome of a bad deal is getting swindled.
- nrhk 9y agoWith decentralized systems, the goal is to be in a state where participating outweighs the benefits of usurping. Where it makes more sense to play the game correctly. The system creates trust. Whether we can achieve this goal through cryptography and game theory remains to be seen.