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So you're telling me that government money, where everyone gets a say in policy through republican institutions, is worse than a system where the most wealthy u

So you're telling me that government money, where everyone gets a say in policy through republican institutions, is worse than a system where the most wealthy users get more control of the currency. Um, okay. I guess the oligarchy is more explicit in the cryptocurrency.

kemiller 9y ago
It’s not really government money though, is it? It’s bank money.
mirimir 9y ago
I don't think that it's necessarily the wealthiest users. There could be a fork with lots of interest, no particularly wealthy users, and no non-user miners. One could probably impose the "no non-user miners" rule in code. But even then, I prefer it, because with enough interest, it can always be forked. And that's much easier than changing governmental monitary policy. That is clearly dominated by the wealthy.
AlexCoventry 9y ago
If you really think you have a say in monetary policy, I suggest you read Barofsky's Bailout.
- musage 9y ago
  You have a say in it in principle. In contrast, you have in principle no say what others do with their private property. That's the difference, and it's an important one.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    You can't control what miners do, sure. But you can fork code that changes the game for them. Contrary to all the noise, Bitcoin does not need commercial miners. They are parasites. Allowing them to dominate mining was a serious bug. It's users who should be mining.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      I mined a little in the early days, but it kept my CPU pinned into the red and frankly all the people online patting themselves on the back on the size of their mining operation were offputting. I'm interested in cryptocurrencies because of their potential to liberate the mass of people from financial bullying by governments and corporations, not as a speculative vehicle to easy riches. This will seem pointlessly ideological to most people, but I'm struck by the fact that the bitcoin blockchain is held up as 'proof of work.' There's no work involved besides that to understand the system initially and any code contributions made to the source tree. The actual calculation is carried out by machine. So mining is basically a game for capitalists to invest in industrial hash table production. People who learn about it later and comprehend it in full but don't have any large sums of capital to invest in mining equipment or as a speculative investment don't really derive much benefit from it. Don't get the idea that I consider it a bad thing because of this - its mere existence speaks to the fact that we've run out of accessible natural frontiers where the curious might stumble upon a fortune, and so we are forced to invent them.
    - ycombobreaker 9y ago
      It's not about need. If it is profitable to mine, professional miners will exist. You can't create an incentive structure and then call it a "bug" when somebody optimizes for it.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        So you can create a disincentive for non-user mining. What would be the downside? This is supposed to be a distributed system.
        AlexCoventry 9y ago
        What kind of discouragement do you have in mind?
        mirimir 9y ago
        One could limit share of hash power. Perhaps by IP address. Or through blockchain links to previously-solved blocks. The Tor Network, for example, has mechanisms for excluding bad participants. There's the bad exit flag, for relays that snoop traffic. Relays that harvest onion hostnames get banned. So do relays that attempt traffic analysis. There's even a policy of discouraging new relays in commonly-used AS. There's no exclusion mechanism. But I don't see why there couldn't be, if there were too much concentration. Edit: See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReportingBadRelays https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReportingB...
  - jedrek 9y ago
    It's interesting how so many people want government to be run like a business while hating it most when it runs like a business. Business is opaque, secretive, with no oversight and loyalty only to the bottom line. Well run government institutions are none of these things.
  - okaram 9y ago
    Although I still see it as a difference, I think it's good to remember you DO have a say in 'private property' .... there's nothing magical or natural about private property. Private property is whatever society/the government says it is.
mseebach 9y ago
Just download a mining program and run it on your computer. Voilà, you now have "a say" that is exactly equivalent to your say in the policy of republican institutions.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  Don't be silly, that's like saying that incorporating a one-person business automatically puts you on-par with the lobbying power of major industries.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    No, it's as silly as suggesting that a single voter has any say what so ever in the policies of republican institutions.
    - radarsat1 9y ago
      1 vote for a poor person = 1 vote for a rich person (ideally). In mining, the more mining power you have, the more "say" you have. One stays constant, the other scales. Don't you think that is an important distinction?
      - spdionis 9y ago
        In a way it's a pretty naive view. The rich person will have more influence over other people that will give him effectively more than 1 vote.
        JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        OP's point is the big mining rig will have more influence than the numpty rig one boots up on their laptop.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Sure, each has one vote. But it's not your one vote that makes any difference, It's how many votes you can influence. And that's all about privilege and money. Campaign funding. Lobbying.
wuliwong 9y ago
In the specific case of the united states, the money is controlled by the Federal Reserve which is a private bank.
- sethev 9y ago
  Most private banks aren't established by an act of Congress and run by people appointed by the President and approved by the Senate.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    No, but in order to get access to the Fed, the bank link systems and so on and so forth, they need to get government approval. In order to be bailed out, which is a necessity, they even need contacts as high up as the president. And even that is ignoring the long history of the government making specific laws specifically to benefit or destroy a single bank. Nope, no government role here at all. This division simply results in privatizing the profits, nationalizing the losses in trade for having politicians name the owners. it is if you want to be a reserve bank of course, which is why anyone wants to have a bank in the first place.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  > the Federal Reserve which is a private bank Not true. Literally by design actually. This is a common misconception about Central Banks and it's one the US system makes worse by being explicitly public but functioning extraordinarily similarly to a private company. This particular structure was actually a compromise between various other possible implementations. But seriously, it's not a private bank. Repeating that just makes you looking like you get your information from websites that put their titles in all-caps and have dodgy grammar.
StanislavPetrov 9y ago
>where everyone gets a say in policy through republican institutions You clearly have no idea how money is "created" or how the Federal Reserve works.

kemiller 9y ago

It’s not really government money though, is it? It’s bank money.

mirimir 9y ago

I don't think that it's necessarily the wealthiest users. There could be a fork with lots of interest, no particularly wealthy users, and no non-user miners. One could probably impose the "no non-user miners" rule in code. But even then, I prefer it, because with enough interest, it can always be forked. And that's much easier than changing governmental monitary policy. That is clearly dominated by the wealthy.

AlexCoventry 9y ago

If you really think you have a say in monetary policy, I suggest you read Barofsky's Bailout.

musage 9y ago
You have a say in it in principle. In contrast, you have in principle no say what others do with their private property. That's the difference, and it's an important one.
- mirimir 9y ago
  You can't control what miners do, sure. But you can fork code that changes the game for them. Contrary to all the noise, Bitcoin does not need commercial miners. They are parasites. Allowing them to dominate mining was a serious bug. It's users who should be mining.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    I mined a little in the early days, but it kept my CPU pinned into the red and frankly all the people online patting themselves on the back on the size of their mining operation were offputting. I'm interested in cryptocurrencies because of their potential to liberate the mass of people from financial bullying by governments and corporations, not as a speculative vehicle to easy riches. This will seem pointlessly ideological to most people, but I'm struck by the fact that the bitcoin blockchain is held up as 'proof of work.' There's no work involved besides that to understand the system initially and any code contributions made to the source tree. The actual calculation is carried out by machine. So mining is basically a game for capitalists to invest in industrial hash table production. People who learn about it later and comprehend it in full but don't have any large sums of capital to invest in mining equipment or as a speculative investment don't really derive much benefit from it. Don't get the idea that I consider it a bad thing because of this - its mere existence speaks to the fact that we've run out of accessible natural frontiers where the curious might stumble upon a fortune, and so we are forced to invent them.
  - ycombobreaker 9y ago
    It's not about need. If it is profitable to mine, professional miners will exist. You can't create an incentive structure and then call it a "bug" when somebody optimizes for it.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      So you can create a disincentive for non-user mining. What would be the downside? This is supposed to be a distributed system.
      - AlexCoventry 9y ago
        What kind of discouragement do you have in mind?
        mirimir 9y ago
        One could limit share of hash power. Perhaps by IP address. Or through blockchain links to previously-solved blocks. The Tor Network, for example, has mechanisms for excluding bad participants. There's the bad exit flag, for relays that snoop traffic. Relays that harvest onion hostnames get banned. So do relays that attempt traffic analysis. There's even a policy of discouraging new relays in commonly-used AS. There's no exclusion mechanism. But I don't see why there couldn't be, if there were too much concentration. Edit: See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReportingBadRelays https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReportingB...
- jedrek 9y ago
  It's interesting how so many people want government to be run like a business while hating it most when it runs like a business. Business is opaque, secretive, with no oversight and loyalty only to the bottom line. Well run government institutions are none of these things.
- okaram 9y ago
  Although I still see it as a difference, I think it's good to remember you DO have a say in 'private property' .... there's nothing magical or natural about private property. Private property is whatever society/the government says it is.

mseebach 9y ago

Just download a mining program and run it on your computer. Voilà, you now have "a say" that is exactly equivalent to your say in the policy of republican institutions.

Terr_ 9y ago
Don't be silly, that's like saying that incorporating a one-person business automatically puts you on-par with the lobbying power of major industries.
- mseebach 9y ago
  No, it's as silly as suggesting that a single voter has any say what so ever in the policies of republican institutions.
  - radarsat1 9y ago
    1 vote for a poor person = 1 vote for a rich person (ideally). In mining, the more mining power you have, the more "say" you have. One stays constant, the other scales. Don't you think that is an important distinction?
    - spdionis 9y ago
      In a way it's a pretty naive view. The rich person will have more influence over other people that will give him effectively more than 1 vote.
      - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        OP's point is the big mining rig will have more influence than the numpty rig one boots up on their laptop.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Sure, each has one vote. But it's not your one vote that makes any difference, It's how many votes you can influence. And that's all about privilege and money. Campaign funding. Lobbying.

wuliwong 9y ago

In the specific case of the united states, the money is controlled by the Federal Reserve which is a private bank.

sethev 9y ago
Most private banks aren't established by an act of Congress and run by people appointed by the President and approved by the Senate.
- candiodari 9y ago
  No, but in order to get access to the Fed, the bank link systems and so on and so forth, they need to get government approval. In order to be bailed out, which is a necessity, they even need contacts as high up as the president. And even that is ignoring the long history of the government making specific laws specifically to benefit or destroy a single bank. Nope, no government role here at all. This division simply results in privatizing the profits, nationalizing the losses in trade for having politicians name the owners. it is if you want to be a reserve bank of course, which is why anyone wants to have a bank in the first place.
abritinthebay 9y ago
> the Federal Reserve which is a private bank Not true. Literally by design actually. This is a common misconception about Central Banks and it's one the US system makes worse by being explicitly public but functioning extraordinarily similarly to a private company. This particular structure was actually a compromise between various other possible implementations. But seriously, it's not a private bank. Repeating that just makes you looking like you get your information from websites that put their titles in all-caps and have dodgy grammar.

StanislavPetrov 9y ago

>where everyone gets a say in policy through republican institutions You clearly have no idea how money is "created" or how the Federal Reserve works.