6 ms·

Bitcoin Is Evil (2013)

53 points by endisukaj 9y ago

alexnewman 9y ago
Totally agree that the goal is to smash central banking. I also think that the cryptoanarchist community must h8 central banking. How could anyone blame them with where our economy has gone. That being said, i think central banking is a great tool, it is just the fed is too conservative.
- taoistextremist 9y ago
  >How could anyone blame them with where our economy has gone. We're like the richest we've ever been as a society. Even poor Americans are pretty damn rich compared to the past. Even if you want to make an argument about wealth inequality, crypto doesn't really solve that. The Federal Reserve is actually an extremely responsible body, despite what people claim or what banks that they have no real control over do.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    whether or not it's extremely responsible is irrelevant; while I don't think they intend it that way, their mission is to extract the wealth from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of 'growth' and 'stability'. You do not see folks wandering around the tenderloin getting negative real interest rate loans or their businesses bailed out. The economic value to fund the fed's operations comes out of the spending power of the rest of us.
    - chatmasta 9y ago
      > their mission is to extract the wealth from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of 'growth' and 'stability'. Citation needed. Even if you mean it as obvious hyperbole, I’d like to hear some evidence for how central banks “extract money from the poor.”
      - dnautics 9y ago
        I never said extract money, I said extract wealth. Increasing the cost of living by targetting positive inflation. If you're poor and the cost of living goes up the relative margin of survival decreases faster than for the wealthy. Let's say you spend 98% and there's 1% inflation. Your margin of survival goes down 50%, whereas someone spending 20% barely feels it. If you have more questions, my contact is in the profile. This is only scratching the surface.
  - indubitable 9y ago
    While it's regularly said that 'we're the richest we've ever been', how justifiable a comment is that? At the most basic level we surely would consider wealth to be the ability to comfortably afford housing, food, healthcare, some solid entertainment, and have plenty saved away for a comfortable retirement or in cases of emergencies. Yet we live in a nation where 69% [1] of people have less than $1k saved, and 85% have less than $10k. About 1 out of 8 people are on food stamps. Education is completely unaffordable for most people without taking on very substantial levels of debt. One of the few things able to compete against education costs are healthcare costs which are growing similarly unreasonable for most people. How has the average life experience between the quintiles changed? I think this is something that cannot be so easily quantified, even more so when there's subjectivity involved in the quantification. So for instance it's easy to consider ourselves rich when we do things like look at prices 'back in the day.' A quick search for prices in the 50s gives me $21 [2] for a toaster in 1951. That'd be about $200 today. So, at a glance, it makes it seem like we must be fabulously wealthy for anybody to be able to afford for $10 or $20 what would have been a fairly meaningful purchase back then. But then we get into weird things when we start looking at relative pricing. Another datum [3] there is that you could get a 1958 Chevrolet Corvette for $3631 in 1958 dollars. But wait... that's only about 180 toasters...? In toaster relative prices that'd be like getting a nice Porsche today for $1800 - $3600! Of course the relative prices of things change over time, and this is something that inflation completely misses. I'd be curious to know exactly how, which is why I think examining a representative lifestyle in the different quintiles over time would be most informative. How much of the representative income was spent on what things? How distant were their remaining consumer desires away from their means? How much were they able to save? What would be the expected economic impact of some sort of emergency? Inflation alone is far too imprecise a measurement to answer these questions or, equivalently, to justify the grand statements it's used to make. [1] - https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/25/how-much-does-the-average-american-have-in-their-s.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/25/how-much-does-the-... [2] - http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html [3] - http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1950s.html http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1950s.html
    - taoistextremist 9y ago
- jgalt212 9y ago
  > goal is to smash central banking Well, if that's the goal, BTC with its high transaction costs/low throughput/high backlog is not going to do it. It would be some other CCY. The problem with this is that once BTC is no longer "special" than all crytpo currencies are just fiat money and even if you cannot create more than 21MM bitcoins, you can create unlimited crypto currencies. put another way, set membership is fixed, but the number of sets is limitless. So the biggest risk from a valuation perspective is if BTC starts to seem less "special".
  - chatmasta 9y ago
    I’m of the belief that BitCoin is also effectively unlimited supply, since its minimum denomination can be changed via consensus. The supply is limited to 21mm full “coins” yes, but the precision is configurable according to consensus. Currently it’s 1mm Satoshi per BTC but that can be changed even without a hard fork.
- T-A 9y ago
  This is the Federal Reserve's balance sheet: http://www.econdataus.com/fedbal.html http://www.econdataus.com/fedbal.html This is the effective federal funds rate: https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/images/education/publications/extra-credit/2013/spring/primer-on-nontraditional-monetary-policy-tools-maturity-extension-program/02.jpg https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/images/education/publicat... Do those charts really look "conservative" to you?
- matte_black 9y ago
  > How could anyone blame them with where our economy has gone. This economy has gone nowhere but up. Those who are not going up with it are likely being held down by other systemic issues, not because the game is "rigged".
  - chipgap98 9y ago
    Curious about what the difference between "systemic issues" and 'the game being "rigged"' is?
    - sli 9y ago
      One is usually an an inherent problem (e.g. with design, implementation) and the other implies a bad actor manipulating the thing in question.
      - dnautics 9y ago
        A system can be rigged even when everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. For example, the system for academic promotion at universities is a very much 'rigged' game, there are the 'real rules' and the 'rules they say are the rules', but nobody is manipulating it, it's just an emergent phenomenon from a series of well-intentioned processes. probably obtaining VC funding in the valley is the same way.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    > This economy has gone nowhere but up that's a subjective call encodes what things you care about. Look nobody's going to say the median standard of living hasn't increased (although it has stagnated of late), but we don't know what it could have been. How much of the increase in standard of living is due to the economic structure, and how much is due to technological improvement? People aren't starving in the streets when we have a depression-level economic displacement. The fed loves to argue that it's because of its stewardship, but let's be honest, it's because of Norman Borlaug (and the like). Finally, you can't be sure that the 'systemic issues' that are 'holding down' those who are 'not going up' aren't the factors that causing the rest of the economy to go up. If you don't think the game is 'rigged' show me where I can get one of those negative real interest rate loan I keep hearing are getting floated to 'keep our economy stable'.
chubot 9y ago
In general, "X is evil" sounds like a troll (even though I don't own any BitCoin, etc.) This author is well known for incorrect predictions, and for not particularly caring about the truth of what he writes: http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-internet-quote-2013-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-inte... By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's. His defense was essentially that he writes things to attract attention: It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/paul-krugman-the-economic-fallout https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/elec... On election night: It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? ... Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never. Regardless of what you think of Trump, this statement is hilariously inaccurate.
- twblalock 9y ago
  You're attacking the author rather than the argument. What aspect of this particular article do you have a problem with?
  - endisukaj 9y ago
    He fails to understand the fact that it's not necessarily Bitcoin _per-se_ that will bring change to world economy and the banking structure; it's the underlying technology that has value and perhaps even for Bitcoin itself it's where the store of value lies.
    - thisisit 9y ago
      And what exactly is the value proposition of the underlying technology?
      - eitland 9y ago
en4bz 9y ago
I don't think it takes a Nobel prize to realize that BitCoin, given its recent extreme volatility, currently makes for a poor medium of exchange. EDIT: This article is actually from 2013. Around the time Bitcoin went from ~10 to ~1000 USD. I suppose the same was true at that time. Bitcoin was relatively stable hovering around ~500USD from 2014 to 2017.
- anon7334 9y ago
  Friendly reminder, the c in bitcoin is not capitalized.
- jk2323 9y ago
  This reminds me of a quote it once read on a board. Someone claimed that his gold "became much much more". The other guy replied: "Lucky you. I checked mine. It did not become more at all, it is the same amount of gold that was there before. Only the dollar declined."
jarym 9y ago
"To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value." - BitCoin isn't 'money' though. As for the Charlie Stross link and the claim that BitCoin is 'designed to damage central bankers' - that depends. It certainly is likely to have the effect of making central bankers more honest. Up until recently there were real consequences to printing free-money but after the 2007 financial crisis it seems central bankers banded together to collectively print money from nothing - it became ok as long as others were doing it too. Well the reality is that printing money does have repercussions and one could well argue that the rise of BitCoin is one such repercussion. Same with the global attempt to eliminate physical cash - it's all great to go digital but when the central bankers decide they want to force everyone to spend more with negative interest rates it can indiscriminately hurt an average worker trying to save money to buy a home! Same goes for taxation - governments think its easy to raise money by increasing taxation, the offshore finance industry used to keep a lid on that until they were cracked down on - digital currencies can fill that gap. Now there's no doubt that governments and central bankers might dislike control being taken away from them but to claim BitCoin hurts them is a bit like claiming jails hurt convicted felons... IMO.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > control being taken away from them To whom is this control being handed? It's not going to be the ordinary citizen; it's going to be the global wealthy plus a few early adopters. > force everyone to spend more with negative interest rates it can indiscriminately hurt an average worker trying to save money to buy a home Buying a home on a negative interest rate mortgage could be an interesting experience.
  - jarym 9y ago
    - Being a finite resource, control would seemingly belong to whoever holds the largest amount. The point isn't that the ordinary citizen is going to control it, it is that whatever quantity you have is fixed and can't be debased. - Negative interest rates are horrible because they tend to impact savers whilst borrowers are typically now subject to a minimum interest rate on their loans.
- 9y ago
jk2323 9y ago
"This author is well known for incorrect predictions, and for not particularly caring about the truth of what he writes" ROTFL. This really describes Krugman well. Of cause bitcoin is "evil" since it limits his ideas of how to "experiment" with money.
quantumofmalice 9y ago
> BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. "evil"
- Danihan 9y ago
  https://i.imgflip.com/siw7k.jpg?a420576 https://i.imgflip.com/siw7k.jpg?a420576
- zionic 9y ago
  I immediately pictured him making this statement from the bridge of the death star
- matte_black 9y ago
  Why wouldn't it be evil? Without the ability to collect tax the first ones to suffer are the poor who get increasingly deprived of social welfare programs or rejected for loans and fair interest rates by banks who have to increasingly tighten their credit standards. Without the ability to monitor financial transactions black markets run wild and facilitate the exchange of money for illegal goods and services.
  - thescribe 9y ago
    I think you could equally say it allows bypassing oppressive taxes and allows citizens to bypass draconian snooping, it is all a matter of perspective.
    - cies 9y ago
      Something high-net-worth-individuals had access to since forever, not more-and-more available to the common man. Disruption?
Nokinside 9y ago
Bitcoin as unit of account (measure of value) does not exist. Products sold in bitcoin are priced in local conventional currencies and bitcoin price is altered frequently to match the changes in Bitcoin valuations. Now somebody may say "That's now but wait until Bitcoin takes over the world." That's a another problem. Global currency or fixing exchange rates is not a good idea (Bretton Woods was a failure). There is thing called optimum currency area. Euroarea is in trouble because it misses many criteria for optimum currency area. They are fixing them now. Without global fiscal union, world government and free movement of labour, global currency and single global unit of account is not a good thing. As a payment system it's already choking and can't easily move value form one person to another. You need intermediaries and intermediaries between intermediaries to fix the system. If you end up using Visa or Mastercard payment system to pay in BTC what's the point? I think cryptocurrencies and have a place in the future, but Bitcoin is not it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
thisisit 9y ago
This whole thing is a reference to the argument presented in another article from 2013: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-w...
zerostar07 9y ago
From his writing it is clear that he hasn't invested time researching the cryptocoin ecosystem. Who cares if bitcoin is evil it was just a start, and there 's now an entire new financial system being built. He's too hung up on this: BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Stross doesn’t like that agenda, and neither do I pity
- Danihan 9y ago
  >BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. That's exactly why I (and most people) like it so much..
busterarm 9y ago
Can we add "2013" to the title?
ryanmarsh 9y ago
I began working in the late 90’s as a web developer. Then adoption of the “consumer” internet was growing rapidly. I recall there was much excitement, naysaying, thoughtful analysis by very smart people, and pure FUD. There seemed to be a set of fundamentals or values borrowed from existing phonomena and applied to the internet, internet companies, and their potential (for great or evil). These of course lacked the benefit of hindsight and today much of what was said (although well intentioned) turned out to be frankly ridiculous. I have a gut feeling that in 10 or 20 years we will look back and realize that this new thing has a set of fundamentals all its own. Once those emerge we will be able to have wonderful arguments. Until then I just try to focus on the technology. It’s the only thing I can make reasonable sense of. Let the talking people talk. Let the builders build and let’s just see where this goes. Crypto currencies like we see now are a new phonomena. We won’t know who the brilliant minds and the fools are until this all shakes out.
llcoolv 9y ago
So many presumptions about governments being good and libertarians bad. In order to label something evil, one should try much harder than that. I would categorise the article as typical leftist bullshit.

53 points by endisukaj 9y ago

Totally agree that the goal is to smash central banking. I also think that the cryptoanarchist community must h8 central banking. How could anyone blame them with where our economy has gone. That being said, i think central banking is a great tool, it is just the fed is too conservative.

taoistextremist 9y ago
>How could anyone blame them with where our economy has gone. We're like the richest we've ever been as a society. Even poor Americans are pretty damn rich compared to the past. Even if you want to make an argument about wealth inequality, crypto doesn't really solve that. The Federal Reserve is actually an extremely responsible body, despite what people claim or what banks that they have no real control over do.
- dnautics 9y ago
  whether or not it's extremely responsible is irrelevant; while I don't think they intend it that way, their mission is to extract the wealth from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of 'growth' and 'stability'. You do not see folks wandering around the tenderloin getting negative real interest rate loans or their businesses bailed out. The economic value to fund the fed's operations comes out of the spending power of the rest of us.
  - chatmasta 9y ago
    > their mission is to extract the wealth from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of 'growth' and 'stability'. Citation needed. Even if you mean it as obvious hyperbole, I’d like to hear some evidence for how central banks “extract money from the poor.”
    - dnautics 9y ago
      I never said extract money, I said extract wealth. Increasing the cost of living by targetting positive inflation. If you're poor and the cost of living goes up the relative margin of survival decreases faster than for the wealthy. Let's say you spend 98% and there's 1% inflation. Your margin of survival goes down 50%, whereas someone spending 20% barely feels it. If you have more questions, my contact is in the profile. This is only scratching the surface.
- indubitable 9y ago
  While it's regularly said that 'we're the richest we've ever been', how justifiable a comment is that? At the most basic level we surely would consider wealth to be the ability to comfortably afford housing, food, healthcare, some solid entertainment, and have plenty saved away for a comfortable retirement or in cases of emergencies. Yet we live in a nation where 69% [1] of people have less than $1k saved, and 85% have less than $10k. About 1 out of 8 people are on food stamps. Education is completely unaffordable for most people without taking on very substantial levels of debt. One of the few things able to compete against education costs are healthcare costs which are growing similarly unreasonable for most people. How has the average life experience between the quintiles changed? I think this is something that cannot be so easily quantified, even more so when there's subjectivity involved in the quantification. So for instance it's easy to consider ourselves rich when we do things like look at prices 'back in the day.' A quick search for prices in the 50s gives me $21 [2] for a toaster in 1951. That'd be about $200 today. So, at a glance, it makes it seem like we must be fabulously wealthy for anybody to be able to afford for $10 or $20 what would have been a fairly meaningful purchase back then. But then we get into weird things when we start looking at relative pricing. Another datum [3] there is that you could get a 1958 Chevrolet Corvette for $3631 in 1958 dollars. But wait... that's only about 180 toasters...? In toaster relative prices that'd be like getting a nice Porsche today for $1800 - $3600! Of course the relative prices of things change over time, and this is something that inflation completely misses. I'd be curious to know exactly how, which is why I think examining a representative lifestyle in the different quintiles over time would be most informative. How much of the representative income was spent on what things? How distant were their remaining consumer desires away from their means? How much were they able to save? What would be the expected economic impact of some sort of emergency? Inflation alone is far too imprecise a measurement to answer these questions or, equivalently, to justify the grand statements it's used to make. [1] - https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/25/how-much-does-the-average-american-have-in-their-s.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/25/how-much-does-the-... [2] - http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html [3] - http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1950s.html http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1950s.html
  - taoistextremist 9y ago
jgalt212 9y ago
> goal is to smash central banking Well, if that's the goal, BTC with its high transaction costs/low throughput/high backlog is not going to do it. It would be some other CCY. The problem with this is that once BTC is no longer "special" than all crytpo currencies are just fiat money and even if you cannot create more than 21MM bitcoins, you can create unlimited crypto currencies. put another way, set membership is fixed, but the number of sets is limitless. So the biggest risk from a valuation perspective is if BTC starts to seem less "special".
- chatmasta 9y ago
  I’m of the belief that BitCoin is also effectively unlimited supply, since its minimum denomination can be changed via consensus. The supply is limited to 21mm full “coins” yes, but the precision is configurable according to consensus. Currently it’s 1mm Satoshi per BTC but that can be changed even without a hard fork.
T-A 9y ago
This is the Federal Reserve's balance sheet: http://www.econdataus.com/fedbal.html http://www.econdataus.com/fedbal.html This is the effective federal funds rate: https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/images/education/publications/extra-credit/2013/spring/primer-on-nontraditional-monetary-policy-tools-maturity-extension-program/02.jpg https://www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/images/education/publicat... Do those charts really look "conservative" to you?
matte_black 9y ago
> How could anyone blame them with where our economy has gone. This economy has gone nowhere but up. Those who are not going up with it are likely being held down by other systemic issues, not because the game is "rigged".
- chipgap98 9y ago
  Curious about what the difference between "systemic issues" and 'the game being "rigged"' is?
  - sli 9y ago
    One is usually an an inherent problem (e.g. with design, implementation) and the other implies a bad actor manipulating the thing in question.
    - dnautics 9y ago
      A system can be rigged even when everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. For example, the system for academic promotion at universities is a very much 'rigged' game, there are the 'real rules' and the 'rules they say are the rules', but nobody is manipulating it, it's just an emergent phenomenon from a series of well-intentioned processes. probably obtaining VC funding in the valley is the same way.
- dnautics 9y ago
  > This economy has gone nowhere but up that's a subjective call encodes what things you care about. Look nobody's going to say the median standard of living hasn't increased (although it has stagnated of late), but we don't know what it could have been. How much of the increase in standard of living is due to the economic structure, and how much is due to technological improvement? People aren't starving in the streets when we have a depression-level economic displacement. The fed loves to argue that it's because of its stewardship, but let's be honest, it's because of Norman Borlaug (and the like). Finally, you can't be sure that the 'systemic issues' that are 'holding down' those who are 'not going up' aren't the factors that causing the rest of the economy to go up. If you don't think the game is 'rigged' show me where I can get one of those negative real interest rate loan I keep hearing are getting floated to 'keep our economy stable'.

chubot 9y ago

In general, "X is evil" sounds like a troll (even though I don't own any BitCoin, etc.) This author is well known for incorrect predictions, and for not particularly caring about the truth of what he writes: http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-internet-quote-2013-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-inte... By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's. His defense was essentially that he writes things to attract attention: It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/paul-krugman-the-economic-fallout https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/elec... On election night: It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? ... Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never. Regardless of what you think of Trump, this statement is hilariously inaccurate.

twblalock 9y ago
You're attacking the author rather than the argument. What aspect of this particular article do you have a problem with?
- endisukaj 9y ago
  He fails to understand the fact that it's not necessarily Bitcoin _per-se_ that will bring change to world economy and the banking structure; it's the underlying technology that has value and perhaps even for Bitcoin itself it's where the store of value lies.
  - thisisit 9y ago
    And what exactly is the value proposition of the underlying technology?
    - eitland 9y ago

en4bz 9y ago

I don't think it takes a Nobel prize to realize that BitCoin, given its recent extreme volatility, currently makes for a poor medium of exchange. EDIT: This article is actually from 2013. Around the time Bitcoin went from ~10 to ~1000 USD. I suppose the same was true at that time. Bitcoin was relatively stable hovering around ~500USD from 2014 to 2017.

anon7334 9y ago
Friendly reminder, the c in bitcoin is not capitalized.
jk2323 9y ago
This reminds me of a quote it once read on a board. Someone claimed that his gold "became much much more". The other guy replied: "Lucky you. I checked mine. It did not become more at all, it is the same amount of gold that was there before. Only the dollar declined."

jarym 9y ago

"To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value." - BitCoin isn't 'money' though. As for the Charlie Stross link and the claim that BitCoin is 'designed to damage central bankers' - that depends. It certainly is likely to have the effect of making central bankers more honest. Up until recently there were real consequences to printing free-money but after the 2007 financial crisis it seems central bankers banded together to collectively print money from nothing - it became ok as long as others were doing it too. Well the reality is that printing money does have repercussions and one could well argue that the rise of BitCoin is one such repercussion. Same with the global attempt to eliminate physical cash - it's all great to go digital but when the central bankers decide they want to force everyone to spend more with negative interest rates it can indiscriminately hurt an average worker trying to save money to buy a home! Same goes for taxation - governments think its easy to raise money by increasing taxation, the offshore finance industry used to keep a lid on that until they were cracked down on - digital currencies can fill that gap. Now there's no doubt that governments and central bankers might dislike control being taken away from them but to claim BitCoin hurts them is a bit like claiming jails hurt convicted felons... IMO.

pjc50 9y ago
> control being taken away from them To whom is this control being handed? It's not going to be the ordinary citizen; it's going to be the global wealthy plus a few early adopters. > force everyone to spend more with negative interest rates it can indiscriminately hurt an average worker trying to save money to buy a home Buying a home on a negative interest rate mortgage could be an interesting experience.
- jarym 9y ago
  - Being a finite resource, control would seemingly belong to whoever holds the largest amount. The point isn't that the ordinary citizen is going to control it, it is that whatever quantity you have is fixed and can't be debased. - Negative interest rates are horrible because they tend to impact savers whilst borrowers are typically now subject to a minimum interest rate on their loans.
9y ago

jk2323 9y ago

"This author is well known for incorrect predictions, and for not particularly caring about the truth of what he writes" ROTFL. This really describes Krugman well. Of cause bitcoin is "evil" since it limits his ideas of how to "experiment" with money.

quantumofmalice 9y ago

> BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. "evil"

Danihan 9y ago
https://i.imgflip.com/siw7k.jpg?a420576 https://i.imgflip.com/siw7k.jpg?a420576
zionic 9y ago
I immediately pictured him making this statement from the bridge of the death star
matte_black 9y ago
Why wouldn't it be evil? Without the ability to collect tax the first ones to suffer are the poor who get increasingly deprived of social welfare programs or rejected for loans and fair interest rates by banks who have to increasingly tighten their credit standards. Without the ability to monitor financial transactions black markets run wild and facilitate the exchange of money for illegal goods and services.
- thescribe 9y ago
  I think you could equally say it allows bypassing oppressive taxes and allows citizens to bypass draconian snooping, it is all a matter of perspective.
  - cies 9y ago
    Something high-net-worth-individuals had access to since forever, not more-and-more available to the common man. Disruption?

Nokinside 9y ago

Bitcoin as unit of account (measure of value) does not exist. Products sold in bitcoin are priced in local conventional currencies and bitcoin price is altered frequently to match the changes in Bitcoin valuations. Now somebody may say "That's now but wait until Bitcoin takes over the world." That's a another problem. Global currency or fixing exchange rates is not a good idea (Bretton Woods was a failure). There is thing called optimum currency area. Euroarea is in trouble because it misses many criteria for optimum currency area. They are fixing them now. Without global fiscal union, world government and free movement of labour, global currency and single global unit of account is not a good thing. As a payment system it's already choking and can't easily move value form one person to another. You need intermediaries and intermediaries between intermediaries to fix the system. If you end up using Visa or Mastercard payment system to pay in BTC what's the point? I think cryptocurrencies and have a place in the future, but Bitcoin is not it.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

thisisit 9y ago

This whole thing is a reference to the argument presented in another article from 2013: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-w...

zerostar07 9y ago

From his writing it is clear that he hasn't invested time researching the cryptocoin ecosystem. Who cares if bitcoin is evil it was just a start, and there 's now an entire new financial system being built. He's too hung up on this: BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Stross doesn’t like that agenda, and neither do I pity

Danihan 9y ago
>BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. That's exactly why I (and most people) like it so much..

busterarm 9y ago

Can we add "2013" to the title?

ryanmarsh 9y ago

I began working in the late 90’s as a web developer. Then adoption of the “consumer” internet was growing rapidly. I recall there was much excitement, naysaying, thoughtful analysis by very smart people, and pure FUD. There seemed to be a set of fundamentals or values borrowed from existing phonomena and applied to the internet, internet companies, and their potential (for great or evil). These of course lacked the benefit of hindsight and today much of what was said (although well intentioned) turned out to be frankly ridiculous. I have a gut feeling that in 10 or 20 years we will look back and realize that this new thing has a set of fundamentals all its own. Once those emerge we will be able to have wonderful arguments. Until then I just try to focus on the technology. It’s the only thing I can make reasonable sense of. Let the talking people talk. Let the builders build and let’s just see where this goes. Crypto currencies like we see now are a new phonomena. We won’t know who the brilliant minds and the fools are until this all shakes out.

llcoolv 9y ago

So many presumptions about governments being good and libertarians bad. In order to label something evil, one should try much harder than that. I would categorise the article as typical leftist bullshit.