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Yeah lol. That's my argument against full on crypto. It's able to exist because of the safety bubble provided by centralized government and all the complex syst

Yeah lol. That's my argument against full on crypto. It's able to exist because of the safety bubble provided by centralized government and all the complex systems of safety (law, police, army, regulations, etc) that it has created. You could never have crypto in an anarchist vacuum.

gruez 5y ago
>You could never have crypto in an anarchist vacuum. This seems like a strawman to me? You can be for replacing the world's monetary system with cryptocurrency, and still believe in having a government with police, roads, and schools.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  It's not really a straw man because the most vocal advocates of cryptocurrencies tend to be libertarians[1]. Obviously not everyone is like that, but it's still the vocal crowd. That being said, I'd be curious to here pro-crypto arguments from someone “believ[ing] in having a government with police, roads, and schools”. This is especially interesting to me, because “school” appears in this list. [1] which cannot really be qualified as anarchists IMHO, but that's another topic.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >I'd be curious to here pro-crypto arguments from someone “believ[ing] in having a government with police, roads, and schools”. This is especially interesting to me, because “school” appears in this list. Is there something inherently contradictory between "a government should collect taxes and provide police, roads, and schools", and "the government shouldn't be entrusted with the ability to print money and/or dictate monetary policy"?
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      Kind of, because people believing that schools should be provided by the government are usually in favor of some government intervention in the economy (even if limited, nobody's talking about Marxism-Leninism here). And monetary policy is a key part of what government intervention means, especially if you don't want the government to run the businesses directly. And respectively, most people being against government controlling monetary policies do so because they don't want the government intervening in the economy at all (and many of them are in favor of private school). BTW, in most if not all developed economies, the government don't control the monetary policies, the central banks do (and they are independent from governments, by design because people against government intervention made it this way).
- caffeine 5y ago
  It’s not a straw man. There is a substantial faction that believes in the dream of replacing traditional trust based society with trustless executable contracts. Those people discount just how much underlying social stability matters, and how meaningless an executable contract would be in a violent environment.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > There is a substantial faction that believes in the dream of replacing traditional trust based society with trustless executable contracts. >Those people discount just how much underlying social stability matters, and how meaningless an executable contract would be in a violent environment. How did we go from "let's use smart contracts to enforce business contracts, rather than the courts", to "abolish the entire justice system"?
    - the_local_host 5y ago
      If paying taxes becomes voluntary, people are only going to pay for policies that benefit them, rather than what is in the public interest. Social stability, and fairness, would be likely to suffer.
      - gruez 5y ago
        But why would they be voluntary? You still have corporations that have to file annual reports. They pay salaries to their employees, which would be reported. The sales they make would still be subject to VAT/sales tax.
      - dnautics 5y ago
        nobody ever does anything in the public interest unless it is beneficial to themselves, or they are threatened with jail.
        the_local_host 5y ago
        Exactly, which is why neutering tax authorities would lead to plutocracy, where the rich stay rich and the poor have no recourse. A fair society can't rely on the goodwill of the wealthy.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  Given the number of takes I've seen that are "but you haven't included the cost of aircraft carriers for fiat" (when you talk about Bitcoin's energy consumption problem), it isn't all that much of a stretch.
- randomopining 5y ago
  With a truly crypto/defi setup, nobody would have to pay taxes. Everything would be zero-sum and no one would be incentivized to have to pay taxes to a central party to ensure the things you just listed exist. If you are rich and have 1000 BTC in various wallets, able to avoid capital controls, etc... why would you pay the 45% biden cap gains? Thus society loses out and rich whales get to hodl
  - Jiocus 5y ago
    You describe a problem that is beyond any particular technology of choice in tax evasion. These problem already exists in society, and has existed since before the advent of cryptocurrencies. Tax evasion, in the individual style you describe, can be detected in lifestyle choices and consumer habits. Generally, the burden is on you to explain how you've been able to spend more than your official tax records report.
    - randomopining 5y ago
      Yeah so? Crypto improves the ability to evade. You must agree with that. Thus it will increase the problem of people benefitting from society but not paying back into society. Taking resources that would never be able to grow in a vacuum.
      - Jiocus 5y ago
        No, I don't share that view. I think cryptocurrencies seem, at most, equal to conventional evasive techniques, maybe even less useful when factoring in the hoops and overhead in actually translating the funds into real world goods and services. It's also unknown what the future holds in regard to effective tracing capabilities, retroactively, by law enforcement and agencies. My view is based on crypto and society ‘as is’ today. I would have to imagine a different society, with a radical adoption of crypto, to support your argument. But I would if that was the case.
dboreham 5y ago
> You could never have crypto in an anarchist vacuum. This seems a little non-obvious to me. Can you expand a bit on why?
- randomopining 5y ago
  Crypto works because the internet is ubiquitous and open. Govs (mostly western) guarantee that. With nation-states in conflict, they would close their networks and it wouldn't work
  - dboreham 5y ago
    I see. I'm skeptical that a government can close off internet connectivity sufficiently well to block cryptocurrency packets. Do we have evidence that this can be done?
nightski 5y ago
There is a lot of powerful institutional & corporate money tied up in crypto at this point. Not to mention the politicians themselves holding crypto and crypto related companies. It's not the government vs. a bunch of fringe individuals at this point.
- randomopining 5y ago
  Yeah i'm not disagreeing that individuals in gov or buisnesses are benefitting from the run up. But I'm saying that crypto is built on the stability and infrastructure that was created by fairly well-run and well-intentioned centralized govs etc.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    > But I'm saying that crypto is built on the stability and infrastructure that was created by fairly well-run and well-intentioned centralized govs etc. That's a trivially true statement for anything that exists at all. 200 years ago you could have said "democracy is built on the infrastructure that was created by monarchies". Ok. So what? That doesn't ipso facto delegitimize the potential of democracy as a viable alternative to monarchy, and history would have proven you wrong.
    - randomopining 5y ago
      Lol you use too many pseudo-intellectual words. Democracy is self-sustaining. Crypto is not self-sustaining, it requires institutions to be able to exist and provide the stability and infrastructure for it to exist. Crypto detracts from gov/institutions because it enables individual actors to hold on to "their" wealth more easily and evade paying back into the system that allows the wealth to thrive in the beginning.
      - dnautics 5y ago
        social-democratic government detracts from society because it allows people to not give a shit about their neighbor's well-being because taking care of that becomes government's responsibility, enabling individual actors be spared the responsibility and instead figure out how to make rich people pay for it. Or something. If it doesn't work or if it's mismanaged, it's everyone else's fault because they didn't vote the right way.
RhodoGSA 5y ago
your evidence seems to indicate the exact opposite of your conclusion. State-backed Fiat can never exist in an anarchist vacuum, but you could have crypto since it is inherently decentralized and impossible to steal unless i somehow find where you keep your keys (Which could be the size of a thumbdrive)
- randomopining 5y ago
  How does crypto operate? On an open network that was build by agreements and collaboration between govs and entities. How do they build/maintain power/network lines between villages, cities, satellite connections, underwater fiber routes? Thus if everybody locks in their "wealth" with crypto, none of it would go to the commmons - these commons are used to run the crypto network.
  - RhodoGSA 5y ago
    I see your point, but i believe the social construct of a government can fail before key infrastructure fails. People can lose faith in the US Government and still go to work. If all the infrastructure failed that you describe above we'd have mass starvation on a large scale. Also, crypto wealth isn't 'Locked'. I can buy synthetic assets with my crypto with a guarantee that an equal amount of stock has been purchased. I can bond or trade my tokens for different cryptos to be developed that may have fecundity in supply chain, banking, pay for compute time, store, read and write to files, etc. None of that seems 'Locked' and if you think none of that goes to the commons than AWS, all the world banks, financial software, google and pretty much every other tech companies are 'locking wealth away'.

gruez 5y ago

>You could never have crypto in an anarchist vacuum. This seems like a strawman to me? You can be for replacing the world's monetary system with cryptocurrency, and still believe in having a government with police, roads, and schools.

littlestymaar 5y ago
It's not really a straw man because the most vocal advocates of cryptocurrencies tend to be libertarians[1]. Obviously not everyone is like that, but it's still the vocal crowd. That being said, I'd be curious to here pro-crypto arguments from someone “believ[ing] in having a government with police, roads, and schools”. This is especially interesting to me, because “school” appears in this list. [1] which cannot really be qualified as anarchists IMHO, but that's another topic.
- gruez 5y ago
  >I'd be curious to here pro-crypto arguments from someone “believ[ing] in having a government with police, roads, and schools”. This is especially interesting to me, because “school” appears in this list. Is there something inherently contradictory between "a government should collect taxes and provide police, roads, and schools", and "the government shouldn't be entrusted with the ability to print money and/or dictate monetary policy"?
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    Kind of, because people believing that schools should be provided by the government are usually in favor of some government intervention in the economy (even if limited, nobody's talking about Marxism-Leninism here). And monetary policy is a key part of what government intervention means, especially if you don't want the government to run the businesses directly. And respectively, most people being against government controlling monetary policies do so because they don't want the government intervening in the economy at all (and many of them are in favor of private school). BTW, in most if not all developed economies, the government don't control the monetary policies, the central banks do (and they are independent from governments, by design because people against government intervention made it this way).
caffeine 5y ago
It’s not a straw man. There is a substantial faction that believes in the dream of replacing traditional trust based society with trustless executable contracts. Those people discount just how much underlying social stability matters, and how meaningless an executable contract would be in a violent environment.
- gruez 5y ago
  > There is a substantial faction that believes in the dream of replacing traditional trust based society with trustless executable contracts. >Those people discount just how much underlying social stability matters, and how meaningless an executable contract would be in a violent environment. How did we go from "let's use smart contracts to enforce business contracts, rather than the courts", to "abolish the entire justice system"?
  - the_local_host 5y ago
    If paying taxes becomes voluntary, people are only going to pay for policies that benefit them, rather than what is in the public interest. Social stability, and fairness, would be likely to suffer.
    - gruez 5y ago
      But why would they be voluntary? You still have corporations that have to file annual reports. They pay salaries to their employees, which would be reported. The sales they make would still be subject to VAT/sales tax.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      nobody ever does anything in the public interest unless it is beneficial to themselves, or they are threatened with jail.
      - the_local_host 5y ago
        Exactly, which is why neutering tax authorities would lead to plutocracy, where the rich stay rich and the poor have no recourse. A fair society can't rely on the goodwill of the wealthy.
jcranmer 5y ago
Given the number of takes I've seen that are "but you haven't included the cost of aircraft carriers for fiat" (when you talk about Bitcoin's energy consumption problem), it isn't all that much of a stretch.
randomopining 5y ago
With a truly crypto/defi setup, nobody would have to pay taxes. Everything would be zero-sum and no one would be incentivized to have to pay taxes to a central party to ensure the things you just listed exist. If you are rich and have 1000 BTC in various wallets, able to avoid capital controls, etc... why would you pay the 45% biden cap gains? Thus society loses out and rich whales get to hodl
- Jiocus 5y ago
  You describe a problem that is beyond any particular technology of choice in tax evasion. These problem already exists in society, and has existed since before the advent of cryptocurrencies. Tax evasion, in the individual style you describe, can be detected in lifestyle choices and consumer habits. Generally, the burden is on you to explain how you've been able to spend more than your official tax records report.
  - randomopining 5y ago
    Yeah so? Crypto improves the ability to evade. You must agree with that. Thus it will increase the problem of people benefitting from society but not paying back into society. Taking resources that would never be able to grow in a vacuum.
    - Jiocus 5y ago
      No, I don't share that view. I think cryptocurrencies seem, at most, equal to conventional evasive techniques, maybe even less useful when factoring in the hoops and overhead in actually translating the funds into real world goods and services. It's also unknown what the future holds in regard to effective tracing capabilities, retroactively, by law enforcement and agencies. My view is based on crypto and society ‘as is’ today. I would have to imagine a different society, with a radical adoption of crypto, to support your argument. But I would if that was the case.

dboreham 5y ago

> You could never have crypto in an anarchist vacuum. This seems a little non-obvious to me. Can you expand a bit on why?

randomopining 5y ago
Crypto works because the internet is ubiquitous and open. Govs (mostly western) guarantee that. With nation-states in conflict, they would close their networks and it wouldn't work
- dboreham 5y ago
  I see. I'm skeptical that a government can close off internet connectivity sufficiently well to block cryptocurrency packets. Do we have evidence that this can be done?

nightski 5y ago

There is a lot of powerful institutional & corporate money tied up in crypto at this point. Not to mention the politicians themselves holding crypto and crypto related companies. It's not the government vs. a bunch of fringe individuals at this point.

randomopining 5y ago
Yeah i'm not disagreeing that individuals in gov or buisnesses are benefitting from the run up. But I'm saying that crypto is built on the stability and infrastructure that was created by fairly well-run and well-intentioned centralized govs etc.
- dnautics 5y ago
  > But I'm saying that crypto is built on the stability and infrastructure that was created by fairly well-run and well-intentioned centralized govs etc. That's a trivially true statement for anything that exists at all. 200 years ago you could have said "democracy is built on the infrastructure that was created by monarchies". Ok. So what? That doesn't ipso facto delegitimize the potential of democracy as a viable alternative to monarchy, and history would have proven you wrong.
  - randomopining 5y ago
    Lol you use too many pseudo-intellectual words. Democracy is self-sustaining. Crypto is not self-sustaining, it requires institutions to be able to exist and provide the stability and infrastructure for it to exist. Crypto detracts from gov/institutions because it enables individual actors to hold on to "their" wealth more easily and evade paying back into the system that allows the wealth to thrive in the beginning.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      social-democratic government detracts from society because it allows people to not give a shit about their neighbor's well-being because taking care of that becomes government's responsibility, enabling individual actors be spared the responsibility and instead figure out how to make rich people pay for it. Or something. If it doesn't work or if it's mismanaged, it's everyone else's fault because they didn't vote the right way.

RhodoGSA 5y ago

your evidence seems to indicate the exact opposite of your conclusion. State-backed Fiat can never exist in an anarchist vacuum, but you could have crypto since it is inherently decentralized and impossible to steal unless i somehow find where you keep your keys (Which could be the size of a thumbdrive)

randomopining 5y ago
How does crypto operate? On an open network that was build by agreements and collaboration between govs and entities. How do they build/maintain power/network lines between villages, cities, satellite connections, underwater fiber routes? Thus if everybody locks in their "wealth" with crypto, none of it would go to the commmons - these commons are used to run the crypto network.
- RhodoGSA 5y ago
  I see your point, but i believe the social construct of a government can fail before key infrastructure fails. People can lose faith in the US Government and still go to work. If all the infrastructure failed that you describe above we'd have mass starvation on a large scale. Also, crypto wealth isn't 'Locked'. I can buy synthetic assets with my crypto with a guarantee that an equal amount of stock has been purchased. I can bond or trade my tokens for different cryptos to be developed that may have fecundity in supply chain, banking, pay for compute time, store, read and write to files, etc. None of that seems 'Locked' and if you think none of that goes to the commons than AWS, all the world banks, financial software, google and pretty much every other tech companies are 'locking wealth away'.