4 ms·

This is BS. Money printing and 'trickle down' distribution of the newly created money is subsidizing incumbents and making it impossible for competitors to comp

This is BS. Money printing and 'trickle down' distribution of the newly created money is subsidizing incumbents and making it impossible for competitors to compete with them. Anyone who has worked for a big corporations knows how ridiculously inefficient they are and seen that this has 0 effect on the bottom line. Imagine you open a coffee shop and then some billionaire opens a coffee shop next to yours. Imagine his coffee shop receives a $10 million government contract to provide coffee to the nearby FBI bureau for 1 year... On the other hand, you get no government contracts or subsidies of any kind... You cannot compete! Impossible! He can afford to sell his coffee at a loss to regular customers. On the other hand, you cannot! You cannot compete on price, so you go out of business. The same dynamics permeate pretty much every part of the economy. A similar story can be told without government contracts (which is entirely funded by newly printed money BTW). Big capital holders have access to cheaper credit and lower tax rates than everyone else; they have an unbeatable competitive edge. It's not merely hard to compete; it's impossible! They can make so much money from big institutions that they can operate their front businesses at a loss! That's why they get all the customers! Because they're subsidized by the money printers. Big corporations can setup shell companies to take out huge loans at 0% interest and then give each other huge phony contracts to get that freshly printed currency circulating between themselves. This creates huge revenue numbers on each other's balance sheets. If the shell companies go bankrupt, no big deal, just make new ones and repeat! That's what limited liability is for. Always use 'intangible assets' as collateral that way you always have the upper hand over the banks when repo time arrives and they collect your worthless intangibles... Just like the Fed did buying all these intangible toxic assets. All the companies and all the banks behind them are offloading their toxic intangibles onto the central banks which are paying for them by diluting the salaries of average workers through money printing. The worst part of this is that even if you manage to negotiate up your salary over the years, you will get pushed up into a higher tax bracket. This effect was described by Milton Friedman several decades ago. The system eviscerates workers in countless different ways. It's a kind of slavery which keeps getting worse over time.

shadowgovt 5y ago
I don't see how the "The government-subsidized billionaire out-competes the small player" scenario differs from "Imagine satoshi decides the billionaire's coffee shop is great and gifts them 5,000 BTC from his stash of 1 million." Even if we assume fiat currency is a mechanism to disadvantage individuals through inflation and unfair fiat distribution, I think it's not proven that cryptocurrencies solve those problems. Cryptocurrencies don't change the fact that in a system where wealth is unevenly distributed, the wealthy can wield outsized power. They merely change who's wielding the power. And new BTC is continuously being printed; miners generate new coins with every solved block. That process continues through the year 2140.
- cryptica 5y ago
  >> And new BTC is continuously being printed But unlike fiat inflation which compounds, this inflation is fixed so each year it represents a smaller percentage of the total in circulation. The inflation percentage goes down each year and as it approaches 0% by 2140. The hard cap of 21 million BTC helps as well. The point is that with crypto, those who have power lose it as they spend their crypto (since the 'money printing' cannot keep up with their spending; they can't afford to waste money). In fiat, because the value of assets keeps compounding ad-infinitum (propped up by constant money printing) the elite can keep spending more and more (wasting quite a lot of money) and they will never lose any power or wealth because their wealth is constantly compounding.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    > they can't afford to waste money satoshi has a million BTC. He can spend it in 500 BTC increments once a day for half a decade (about 14 million-dollar outlay per day at the current exchange rate). It's true that that BTC won't automatically refresh... Unless, of course, he's spending it on mining equipment and is dominating generation. If he owned enough computing power to generate about half the hashes, then at the current generation rate he would almost be replacing his 500 BTC a day. Later, his ability to generate new currency dies out in the mid-2100s, but of course, if he's controlling the majority of the infrastructure he can just change the rules at that point. BTC as currently constructed doesn't have theoretically infinite coins, but in practice, the only functional difference between it and fiat currency is the power rests in the hands of a digital oligarchy instead of a government monopoly. The fundamental principle that money is power applies to both scenarios.

shadowgovt 5y ago

I don't see how the "The government-subsidized billionaire out-competes the small player" scenario differs from "Imagine satoshi decides the billionaire's coffee shop is great and gifts them 5,000 BTC from his stash of 1 million." Even if we assume fiat currency is a mechanism to disadvantage individuals through inflation and unfair fiat distribution, I think it's not proven that cryptocurrencies solve those problems. Cryptocurrencies don't change the fact that in a system where wealth is unevenly distributed, the wealthy can wield outsized power. They merely change who's wielding the power. And new BTC is continuously being printed; miners generate new coins with every solved block. That process continues through the year 2140.

cryptica 5y ago
>> And new BTC is continuously being printed But unlike fiat inflation which compounds, this inflation is fixed so each year it represents a smaller percentage of the total in circulation. The inflation percentage goes down each year and as it approaches 0% by 2140. The hard cap of 21 million BTC helps as well. The point is that with crypto, those who have power lose it as they spend their crypto (since the 'money printing' cannot keep up with their spending; they can't afford to waste money). In fiat, because the value of assets keeps compounding ad-infinitum (propped up by constant money printing) the elite can keep spending more and more (wasting quite a lot of money) and they will never lose any power or wealth because their wealth is constantly compounding.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > they can't afford to waste money satoshi has a million BTC. He can spend it in 500 BTC increments once a day for half a decade (about 14 million-dollar outlay per day at the current exchange rate). It's true that that BTC won't automatically refresh... Unless, of course, he's spending it on mining equipment and is dominating generation. If he owned enough computing power to generate about half the hashes, then at the current generation rate he would almost be replacing his 500 BTC a day. Later, his ability to generate new currency dies out in the mid-2100s, but of course, if he's controlling the majority of the infrastructure he can just change the rules at that point. BTC as currently constructed doesn't have theoretically infinite coins, but in practice, the only functional difference between it and fiat currency is the power rests in the hands of a digital oligarchy instead of a government monopoly. The fundamental principle that money is power applies to both scenarios.