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Sorry to be "that guy", but libertarianism != laissez faire, it's a principle about governance of people. The gold standard is just as libertarian as cryptocurr

Sorry to be "that guy", but libertarianism != laissez faire, it's a principle about governance of people. The gold standard is just as libertarian as cryptocurrencies, and that doesn't require governance to function, and governance through a private centralized bank that everyone opts into is also libertarian. Governance certainly helps in making things more convenient, but it's not required or necessarily desired. For example, if there are problems with scams or whatever (e.g. impure gold scams, or cryptocurrency manipulation), people may choose non-coercive governance, like banks (e.g. through something like GNU Taler with a bank-backed currency). You could do this with any currency you choose, so which currency you use has little impact on the structure of government and how it interacts with the population, provided the government stays out of it. Because of this, fiat and resource-based currencies are equivalently acceptable for libertarianism. So yeah, maybe cryptocurrency is tangentially related to libertarianism in that many libertarians are interested in them as an alternative to central, coercive banking, but that's about where the relationship ends. Libertarianism doesn't care if you have governance, as long as that governance doesn't use force. And since cryptocurrencies aren't really used for real transactions, we can't really see how they would fare in a competitive currency market.

buboard 8y ago
your definition of libertarianism is off by a century
skohan 8y ago
> And since cryptocurrencies aren't really used for real transactions, we can't really see how they would fare in a competitive currency market. They used to be. I made online purchases and bought coffee in real life using Bitcoin just a few years ago. The evolution of Cryptocurrency has been away from any real-world usefulness, and toward its current incarnation as a largely speculative instrument. And I would argue that in fact this has been the result of a Libertarian experiment playing out. Everything about Bitcoin has been opt-in: in principal anyone is free to own a node, and the community would have been free to opt-in to a governance structure which would have discouraged actions which made Bitcoin less useful to the majority of users, but this is not what happened. Instead power was consolidated in the hands of a few, who chose their own self-interest to the detriment of the larger community. I am not a fan of coercive government, but I struggle to see how the story of cryptocurrency to this point does not provide evidence that some strategy is needed, beyond maximal personal liberty, to discourage bad actors from causing disproportionate harm to the collective.

buboard 8y ago

your definition of libertarianism is off by a century

skohan 8y ago

> And since cryptocurrencies aren't really used for real transactions, we can't really see how they would fare in a competitive currency market. They used to be. I made online purchases and bought coffee in real life using Bitcoin just a few years ago. The evolution of Cryptocurrency has been away from any real-world usefulness, and toward its current incarnation as a largely speculative instrument. And I would argue that in fact this has been the result of a Libertarian experiment playing out. Everything about Bitcoin has been opt-in: in principal anyone is free to own a node, and the community would have been free to opt-in to a governance structure which would have discouraged actions which made Bitcoin less useful to the majority of users, but this is not what happened. Instead power was consolidated in the hands of a few, who chose their own self-interest to the detriment of the larger community. I am not a fan of coercive government, but I struggle to see how the story of cryptocurrency to this point does not provide evidence that some strategy is needed, beyond maximal personal liberty, to discourage bad actors from causing disproportionate harm to the collective.