7 ms·

They cite environmental and transparency concerns, but somehow I believe it's more about control and ensuring the continuation of the debt based fiat systems.

by desine 5y ago

They cite environmental and transparency concerns, but somehow I believe it's more about control and ensuring the continuation of the debt based fiat systems. I have a litmus test I use when discussing global financial politics with friends - "What were the main factors you think lead to Ghaddafi's killing?"

grahamlee 5y ago
Oh, is it that he refused to give up the key to his crypto wallet?
cassepipe 5y ago
It may be but what is your litmus test about? Can you elaborate on it?
- astrange 5y ago
  Conspiracy theory about moving off the petrodollar, presumably.
  - desine 5y ago
    It's not a conspiracy theory that he wanted to create a gold backed Pan-African currency. He openly promoted it. It's not a conspiracy theory that this would have very possibly undermined the petrodollar and all Western currencies. It's not a conspiracy theory that the United States and its allies have supported coups, rebellions, and the like to maintain their power in the past.
    - astrange 5y ago
      The people who believe this think we have constant secret inflation in the US, except they also think we don't have inflation because the "petrodollar" forces everyone else to absorb USD, except they also don't explain why other countries like Japan printing JPY doesn't cause inflation. I don't think a mere thing like what currency you use stops the FBI from assuming everything in the world is their jurisdiction.
  - desine 5y ago
    One other thing - I hate the term "conspiracy theory". It was literally coined by the CIA to discredit discussion of actual conspiracies. But that's just another crazy conspiracy theory for another HN thread.
    - sgift 5y ago
      > The Oxford English Dictionary defines conspiracy theory as "the theory that an event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties; spec. a belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event". It cites a 1909 article in The American Historical Review as the earliest usage example,[37][38] although it also appeared in print as early as April 1870.[39] And it seems they even used time travel to do it.
      - desine 5y ago
        Sorry, popularized would have been more accurate. Or perhaps weaponized. The term did exist before then, but the usage wasn't prevalent, and more directed at actual "conspiracies" - multiple entities, such as businesses or political rivals, working together illicitly
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- jollybean 5y ago
  The public justification for killing Gaddafi is 'stopping the imminent genocide', which by the way, he literally declared he was about to commit. But the real smart people who have the special knowledge know that it was obviously <<insert conspiracy theory here>>. The thing is, geopolitics is messy and there are quite a number of 'factors' many of them true to some extent. The Gulf tribal leaders absolutely hated him and they (i.e. Qatar) lent their special forces more or less as 'personal vendetta' than anything. There are definitely arguments about Oil and related contracts - but Gaddaffi through the diplomacy of his son was well on his way to 'public reconciliation' to the point where there was a lot of money being made there, and it's entirely doubtful that some new, unknown clan would make it any easier for Westerners to make money. If there were an obvious and very popular contender for power who was on the precipice of uniting the nation and he was already tacit 'backed by the west' - then you could make the argument that the intervention was on the style of the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, but this really wasn't that situation. The question says more about the person asking it than the answer. The real question to ask someone when they are talking about 'Bitcoin' is how much Bitcoin (or other crypto) do you own? Because I find it's like talking to people in Amway or Scientology.
  - anticodon 5y ago
    The public justification for killing Gaddafi is 'stopping the imminent genocide', which by the way, he literally declared he was about to commit. If a country that doesn't have vast amounts of oil "declares imminent genocide", would US or EU intervene? Of course, no. Also we all know that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction".
  - desine 5y ago
    >The public justification for killing Gaddafi is 'stopping the imminent genocide', which by the way, he literally declared he was about to commit. >The thing is, geopolitics is messy and there are quite a number of 'factors' many of them true to some extent. Yes, exactly. It's not that I know I am right, or that there's one answer. But it is interesting only one of the discussions is allowed, and one very plausible explanation is universally labeled as a "conspiracy theory". >The real question to ask someone when they are talking about 'Bitcoin' is how much Bitcoin (or other crypto) do you own? Because I find it's like talking to people in Amway or Scientology. FWIW, basically none. Might have an old wallet on the computer in my closet with ~.1 left on it, from back when I used to buy drugs off the silk road. But I'm not a crypto fanatic, though I do find it interesting.
- anticodon 5y ago
  Ghaddafi planned to stop selling oil for dollars and sell it for gold. It would be a disaster for US, because US enjoys benefits of printing as much money as it needs to purchase anything from abroad exchanging zeros and ones that cost nothing for real natural resources and goods from other countries. Just about any country leader that announced plans to stop using USD for trade, was killed in some way. Or, if USA isn't brave enough to openly attack the country, they declare it "hostile" and try to suffocate using sanctions (e.g. Iran).
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > ones that cost nothing Second largest economy in the world Second-fourth largest industrial country in the world ... costs nothing
    - akiselev 5y ago
      More military spending than the rest of the world's superpowers and their vassal states combined... Costs nothing!
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        1.5 trillion in trade with EU, China and Japan alone. But yeah, sure. The dollar is a worthless piece of paper that has nothing behind it except the military.
        akiselev 5y ago
        I used the same ironic "Costs nothing" phrase as you did. But yeah, sure. Get all defensive about someone agreeing with you. :)
        dmitriid 5y ago
        It's hard to translate sentiment and emotions through short text in the internet :)
        5y ago
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
It can be both. There is no control, or transparency AND we might mess up the environment more? Pass.
tsimionescu 5y ago
The debt based system will not go away if we ever move the entire economy to bitcoin (laughable as that idea is). You'll have fractional bitcoin reserve banking with absolutely no difference compared to today. In fact, the fact that bitcoin has no on-chain notion of credit is a major limitation that relegates it to being digital gold, not a digital dollar.
- jhoechtl 5y ago
  > In fact, the fact that bitcoin has no on-chain notion of credit Precisely that was the OPs point why it is a good alternative to the debt-based financial system we have.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    I first addressed GP's point by observing that, were the global economy to adopt bitcoin as a store of value, they would likely still continue to use fractional reserve banking and continue the debt based economy, jjust dde nominating debt in BTC instead of dollars or other currencies. They are unrelated, especially as long as the BTC block chain isn't even close to fast enough to be used as a medium of exchange for a small town, nevermind the global economy. In this phrase I was just pointing out that, given fractional reserve banking is here to stay, with or without bitcoin, it would have been better if bitcoin had embraced it and actually made it possible to put the real transactions on chain, so that at least you could in principle have a BTC bank that is transparent about the kinds of reserves it actually holds, without being forced to hold a full reserve while competing with banks with fractional reserves.
- beefield 5y ago
  This. So much this. The disruption in finance was moving from things as money to debt as money. And somehow the people who think current crop of crypto could work as money are so delusional that they fail to understand they are trying to turn the clock backwards, not forward. The thought that bitcoin would somehow limit the amount of money (as currently defined, I am talking about M0, M1 etc) in circulation is simply nothing short of delusional. Bitcoin will not stop people wanting to borrow and loan money and it will not stop people using other entities debt as a mean to pay other people (money, that is.) Defi, you say. Show me a defi project that lets people borrow more money than what they have in the first place. Show me a defi project where I actually take the credit risk for the borrowers when lending the money to them. (Show me those and I show you an emerging fractional reserve bank and uncontrolled money creation by the said bank...)
ajmadesc 5y ago
Was it along the lines of, trying to convince OPEC to stop accepting dollars?
Kiro 5y ago
Who are your friends? Not even my most educated friends would be able to provide an answer at all.
- desine 5y ago
  Mostly crazy people. edit: but it's sad how little attention people pay. Ghaddafi predicted the mass-immigration problems that Europe now faces. Libya, for all it's faults, was the place to go for anyone born in Africa looking to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Not just free education - salaried education. Free electricity. Free farmland and equipment. He did plenty of wrong in his life, but he also did some things right as a political leader.
  - sgift 5y ago
    > FWIW Ghaddafi predicted the mass-immigration problems that Europe now faces. Libya, for all it's faults, was the place to go for anyone born in Africa looking to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Not that I want to disregard Gadaffis warning here, but the UN itself predicted that this will happen and asked the countries to please provide more money to help the people in the camps or they will move on to Europe. No one listened, people moved on. This was not some kind of secret knowledge, more a type of "it's not yet a problem, ignore it"
Centrino 5y ago
Gaddafi had launched the idea of a pan-African gold dinar at least since 2002. He was killed in 2011. The driving force for military action against Lybia in 2011 was not the US, but France. Obama and Hillary Clinton only reluctantly went along with Sarkozy's initiative for military action. Your suggested link between Ghaddafi's killing and "debt based fiat systems" is a conspiracy theory promoted by Russian propaganda channels like RT, but not backed up by facts.
- sofixa 5y ago
  And there's a nice angle that Sarkozy's election campaign was maybe financed by Lybian money ( the court case is ongoing as of now) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_French_presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Libyan_financing_in_...
- desine 5y ago
  >Gaddafi had launched the idea of a pan-African gold dinar at least since 2002. He was killed in 2011. True, and I don't claim it's fact (discussed in sibling comments) - just something to consider. But there's also a difference between floating the idea, and amassing enough gold to actually pull it off, and he was acquiring quite the stack from what I hear. >Your suggested link between Ghaddafi's killing and "debt based fiat systems" is a conspiracy theory promoted by Russian propaganda channels like RT, but not backed up by facts. There's that phrase again. Not everything RT says is a lie. I don't make the claim to know the inner workings of the global political elite. I just like to see which of my friends only get their propaganda from MSNBC/CNN/Fox, and which like to sprinkle in a little zerohedge and RT
lxdesk 5y ago
You don't even have to look to geopolitical analogies. It's an everyday thing, all the way down to basic "exclusive club" gatekeeping. There's a longstanding tendency across financial systems historically to use the law to bar access to the "real" products for various reasons that happen to favor the incumbent elite. Instead, if you get any access, it's the version mediated by a middleman of some kind. There is often a rationalization in play, but the effective control over societal outcomes is the same. Want to found a disruptive company in 16th century Europe? You had better have a royal charter. Maybe it's the 19th century and you have a great invention: "Patent fees for England alone amounted to £100-£120 ($585) or approximately four times per capita income in 1860." [0] You're a laborer in 1900, and you've pooled a little nest egg you want to use to trade stocks? You can't afford the real stuff, so you will have to play in a bucket shop. You're a middle-class Black person in the 1950's US and you want to own a home or start a business? Redlining ensures that you won't get a good deal or your neighborhood of choice, neither will you get a loan from the major banks(at least, not one on reasonable terms). And so I have to conclude that the whole basis of the debt system is always subject to some form of gatekeeping, at some point, and that's what has drawn people back to precious metal exchange over centuries, despite its limits. We've been through a long period where debt worked really well, because our economies experienced industrial growth patterns and could coexist within a stable framework(some world wars and interventions notwithstanding). That does not mean it's better or forever. The same kind of framework is in the process of being enforced in cryptocurrency; cypherpunk-friendly privacy coins that have some adherence to Bitcoin's original spirit like Monero or ZCash have been delisted from most exchanges through regulatory pressure, while defanged "blockchain economy" tokens have stones-throw availability and heavy promotion. Meanwhile a substantial number of token exchange services will play games with your ability to withdraw to keys you own. But I think that's going to be about as hopeless an endeavor as stopping music piracy was; it's abundantly clear that we're headed towards a long term trend of breakdown in "trust me" debt economies and their model of operation, even if some of the leaks get plugged in the near term in the way that Spotify "solved" piracy[1]; what "trust me" now results in at Internet scale is increasingly sophisticated ransomware hacking. So, while debt and lending itself could still exist and be a rewarding venture, tokens lacking credible mechanisms to back their fundamental value and consensus are going to wash out. (I also think the El Salvador plan is a stunt - a way of marketing the country with a side of personal benefit - albeit one that could become consequential in surprising, unpredictable ways, in the way Bitcoin has been generally.) [0] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-patent-institutions/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-patent-in... [1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/03/22/music-piracy-spotify-netflix/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/03/22/music-piracy-spo...

by desine 5y ago

grahamlee 5y ago

Oh, is it that he refused to give up the key to his crypto wallet?

cassepipe 5y ago

It may be but what is your litmus test about? Can you elaborate on it?

astrange 5y ago
Conspiracy theory about moving off the petrodollar, presumably.
- desine 5y ago
  It's not a conspiracy theory that he wanted to create a gold backed Pan-African currency. He openly promoted it. It's not a conspiracy theory that this would have very possibly undermined the petrodollar and all Western currencies. It's not a conspiracy theory that the United States and its allies have supported coups, rebellions, and the like to maintain their power in the past.
  - astrange 5y ago
    The people who believe this think we have constant secret inflation in the US, except they also think we don't have inflation because the "petrodollar" forces everyone else to absorb USD, except they also don't explain why other countries like Japan printing JPY doesn't cause inflation. I don't think a mere thing like what currency you use stops the FBI from assuming everything in the world is their jurisdiction.
- desine 5y ago
  One other thing - I hate the term "conspiracy theory". It was literally coined by the CIA to discredit discussion of actual conspiracies. But that's just another crazy conspiracy theory for another HN thread.
  - sgift 5y ago
    > The Oxford English Dictionary defines conspiracy theory as "the theory that an event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties; spec. a belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event". It cites a 1909 article in The American Historical Review as the earliest usage example,[37][38] although it also appeared in print as early as April 1870.[39] And it seems they even used time travel to do it.
    - desine 5y ago
      Sorry, popularized would have been more accurate. Or perhaps weaponized. The term did exist before then, but the usage wasn't prevalent, and more directed at actual "conspiracies" - multiple entities, such as businesses or political rivals, working together illicitly
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jollybean 5y ago
The public justification for killing Gaddafi is 'stopping the imminent genocide', which by the way, he literally declared he was about to commit. But the real smart people who have the special knowledge know that it was obviously <<insert conspiracy theory here>>. The thing is, geopolitics is messy and there are quite a number of 'factors' many of them true to some extent. The Gulf tribal leaders absolutely hated him and they (i.e. Qatar) lent their special forces more or less as 'personal vendetta' than anything. There are definitely arguments about Oil and related contracts - but Gaddaffi through the diplomacy of his son was well on his way to 'public reconciliation' to the point where there was a lot of money being made there, and it's entirely doubtful that some new, unknown clan would make it any easier for Westerners to make money. If there were an obvious and very popular contender for power who was on the precipice of uniting the nation and he was already tacit 'backed by the west' - then you could make the argument that the intervention was on the style of the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, but this really wasn't that situation. The question says more about the person asking it than the answer. The real question to ask someone when they are talking about 'Bitcoin' is how much Bitcoin (or other crypto) do you own? Because I find it's like talking to people in Amway or Scientology.
- anticodon 5y ago
  The public justification for killing Gaddafi is 'stopping the imminent genocide', which by the way, he literally declared he was about to commit. If a country that doesn't have vast amounts of oil "declares imminent genocide", would US or EU intervene? Of course, no. Also we all know that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction".
- desine 5y ago
  >The public justification for killing Gaddafi is 'stopping the imminent genocide', which by the way, he literally declared he was about to commit. >The thing is, geopolitics is messy and there are quite a number of 'factors' many of them true to some extent. Yes, exactly. It's not that I know I am right, or that there's one answer. But it is interesting only one of the discussions is allowed, and one very plausible explanation is universally labeled as a "conspiracy theory". >The real question to ask someone when they are talking about 'Bitcoin' is how much Bitcoin (or other crypto) do you own? Because I find it's like talking to people in Amway or Scientology. FWIW, basically none. Might have an old wallet on the computer in my closet with ~.1 left on it, from back when I used to buy drugs off the silk road. But I'm not a crypto fanatic, though I do find it interesting.
anticodon 5y ago
Ghaddafi planned to stop selling oil for dollars and sell it for gold. It would be a disaster for US, because US enjoys benefits of printing as much money as it needs to purchase anything from abroad exchanging zeros and ones that cost nothing for real natural resources and goods from other countries. Just about any country leader that announced plans to stop using USD for trade, was killed in some way. Or, if USA isn't brave enough to openly attack the country, they declare it "hostile" and try to suffocate using sanctions (e.g. Iran).
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > ones that cost nothing Second largest economy in the world Second-fourth largest industrial country in the world ... costs nothing
  - akiselev 5y ago
    More military spending than the rest of the world's superpowers and their vassal states combined... Costs nothing!
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      1.5 trillion in trade with EU, China and Japan alone. But yeah, sure. The dollar is a worthless piece of paper that has nothing behind it except the military.
      - akiselev 5y ago
        I used the same ironic "Costs nothing" phrase as you did. But yeah, sure. Get all defensive about someone agreeing with you. :)
        dmitriid 5y ago
        It's hard to translate sentiment and emotions through short text in the internet :)
      - 5y ago

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago

It can be both. There is no control, or transparency AND we might mess up the environment more? Pass.

tsimionescu 5y ago

The debt based system will not go away if we ever move the entire economy to bitcoin (laughable as that idea is). You'll have fractional bitcoin reserve banking with absolutely no difference compared to today. In fact, the fact that bitcoin has no on-chain notion of credit is a major limitation that relegates it to being digital gold, not a digital dollar.

jhoechtl 5y ago
> In fact, the fact that bitcoin has no on-chain notion of credit Precisely that was the OPs point why it is a good alternative to the debt-based financial system we have.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  I first addressed GP's point by observing that, were the global economy to adopt bitcoin as a store of value, they would likely still continue to use fractional reserve banking and continue the debt based economy, jjust dde nominating debt in BTC instead of dollars or other currencies. They are unrelated, especially as long as the BTC block chain isn't even close to fast enough to be used as a medium of exchange for a small town, nevermind the global economy. In this phrase I was just pointing out that, given fractional reserve banking is here to stay, with or without bitcoin, it would have been better if bitcoin had embraced it and actually made it possible to put the real transactions on chain, so that at least you could in principle have a BTC bank that is transparent about the kinds of reserves it actually holds, without being forced to hold a full reserve while competing with banks with fractional reserves.
beefield 5y ago
This. So much this. The disruption in finance was moving from things as money to debt as money. And somehow the people who think current crop of crypto could work as money are so delusional that they fail to understand they are trying to turn the clock backwards, not forward. The thought that bitcoin would somehow limit the amount of money (as currently defined, I am talking about M0, M1 etc) in circulation is simply nothing short of delusional. Bitcoin will not stop people wanting to borrow and loan money and it will not stop people using other entities debt as a mean to pay other people (money, that is.) Defi, you say. Show me a defi project that lets people borrow more money than what they have in the first place. Show me a defi project where I actually take the credit risk for the borrowers when lending the money to them. (Show me those and I show you an emerging fractional reserve bank and uncontrolled money creation by the said bank...)

ajmadesc 5y ago

Was it along the lines of, trying to convince OPEC to stop accepting dollars?

Kiro 5y ago

Who are your friends? Not even my most educated friends would be able to provide an answer at all.

desine 5y ago
Mostly crazy people. edit: but it's sad how little attention people pay. Ghaddafi predicted the mass-immigration problems that Europe now faces. Libya, for all it's faults, was the place to go for anyone born in Africa looking to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Not just free education - salaried education. Free electricity. Free farmland and equipment. He did plenty of wrong in his life, but he also did some things right as a political leader.
- sgift 5y ago
  > FWIW Ghaddafi predicted the mass-immigration problems that Europe now faces. Libya, for all it's faults, was the place to go for anyone born in Africa looking to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Not that I want to disregard Gadaffis warning here, but the UN itself predicted that this will happen and asked the countries to please provide more money to help the people in the camps or they will move on to Europe. No one listened, people moved on. This was not some kind of secret knowledge, more a type of "it's not yet a problem, ignore it"

Centrino 5y ago

Gaddafi had launched the idea of a pan-African gold dinar at least since 2002. He was killed in 2011. The driving force for military action against Lybia in 2011 was not the US, but France. Obama and Hillary Clinton only reluctantly went along with Sarkozy's initiative for military action. Your suggested link between Ghaddafi's killing and "debt based fiat systems" is a conspiracy theory promoted by Russian propaganda channels like RT, but not backed up by facts.

sofixa 5y ago
And there's a nice angle that Sarkozy's election campaign was maybe financed by Lybian money ( the court case is ongoing as of now) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_French_presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Libyan_financing_in_...
desine 5y ago
>Gaddafi had launched the idea of a pan-African gold dinar at least since 2002. He was killed in 2011. True, and I don't claim it's fact (discussed in sibling comments) - just something to consider. But there's also a difference between floating the idea, and amassing enough gold to actually pull it off, and he was acquiring quite the stack from what I hear. >Your suggested link between Ghaddafi's killing and "debt based fiat systems" is a conspiracy theory promoted by Russian propaganda channels like RT, but not backed up by facts. There's that phrase again. Not everything RT says is a lie. I don't make the claim to know the inner workings of the global political elite. I just like to see which of my friends only get their propaganda from MSNBC/CNN/Fox, and which like to sprinkle in a little zerohedge and RT

lxdesk 5y ago

You don't even have to look to geopolitical analogies. It's an everyday thing, all the way down to basic "exclusive club" gatekeeping. There's a longstanding tendency across financial systems historically to use the law to bar access to the "real" products for various reasons that happen to favor the incumbent elite. Instead, if you get any access, it's the version mediated by a middleman of some kind. There is often a rationalization in play, but the effective control over societal outcomes is the same. Want to found a disruptive company in 16th century Europe? You had better have a royal charter. Maybe it's the 19th century and you have a great invention: "Patent fees for England alone amounted to £100-£120 ($585) or approximately four times per capita income in 1860." [0] You're a laborer in 1900, and you've pooled a little nest egg you want to use to trade stocks? You can't afford the real stuff, so you will have to play in a bucket shop. You're a middle-class Black person in the 1950's US and you want to own a home or start a business? Redlining ensures that you won't get a good deal or your neighborhood of choice, neither will you get a loan from the major banks(at least, not one on reasonable terms). And so I have to conclude that the whole basis of the debt system is always subject to some form of gatekeeping, at some point, and that's what has drawn people back to precious metal exchange over centuries, despite its limits. We've been through a long period where debt worked really well, because our economies experienced industrial growth patterns and could coexist within a stable framework(some world wars and interventions notwithstanding). That does not mean it's better or forever. The same kind of framework is in the process of being enforced in cryptocurrency; cypherpunk-friendly privacy coins that have some adherence to Bitcoin's original spirit like Monero or ZCash have been delisted from most exchanges through regulatory pressure, while defanged "blockchain economy" tokens have stones-throw availability and heavy promotion. Meanwhile a substantial number of token exchange services will play games with your ability to withdraw to keys you own. But I think that's going to be about as hopeless an endeavor as stopping music piracy was; it's abundantly clear that we're headed towards a long term trend of breakdown in "trust me" debt economies and their model of operation, even if some of the leaks get plugged in the near term in the way that Spotify "solved" piracy[1]; what "trust me" now results in at Internet scale is increasingly sophisticated ransomware hacking. So, while debt and lending itself could still exist and be a rewarding venture, tokens lacking credible mechanisms to back their fundamental value and consensus are going to wash out. (I also think the El Salvador plan is a stunt - a way of marketing the country with a side of personal benefit - albeit one that could become consequential in surprising, unpredictable ways, in the way Bitcoin has been generally.) [0] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-patent-institutions/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-patent-in... [1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/03/22/music-piracy-spotify-netflix/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/03/22/music-piracy-spo...