4 ms·

> blockchain in the context of the society you describe is a fascists wet dream. Please elaborate? BTC would break the money printer and iff people self custo

> blockchain in the context of the society you describe is a fascists wet dream. Please elaborate? BTC would break the money printer and iff people self custody and use lightning then privacy can also be achieved. Monero does all that by default.

IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
The whole philosophy behind Bitcoin is a mistrust of institutions, primarily the FED, and the wish to replace them with what’s supposed to be “neutral”. But the criticism that is offered tends to be far off the mark: the FED isn’t a “private bank”, to name just one conspiracy theory. It is also far better at its job as people make you believe: the time of runaway inflation is a 100 years behind us, and even the worst of recent crises in the financial industry is but a shadow of the Great Depression that saw actual starvation. It seems that economists may have improved somewhat, to the point where they are at least able to outperform the outcome of an algorithm that doesn’t even try to use monetary policy for the greater good. Despite its flaws, the FED is also, ultimately, democratically legitimized. Bitcoin, despite its talk of democratization, allocates power proportional to mining power or, ultimately, wealth. That’s closer to feudalism than any recent idea of democracy. There are dozens of other misconceptions that were baked into BC and other coins only to blow up. Sometimes spectacularly so. For example, the community seems to believe the law is nothing but pretense allowing judges to arbitrarily enforce their opinions. Hence, it is seen as desirable to allow for contracts that are not subject to any interpretation. This mostly comes up when someone makes a stupid mistake like omitting a decimal separator and paying 100x what’s reasonable. In the “normal” economy, such errors are almost always easily healed. But the cryptocurrency community believes that anything that cannot be expressed in source code is somehow invalid. Indeed, they seem to take some gleeful enjoyment from seeing people subjected to punishment for minor mistakes, even where it is completely out of proportion. That points at where it could be called “fascist”: that ideology abhors all deviation from the norm and punishes it severely. That’s why Singapore’s extreme laws against drugs or chewing gum are sometimes called fascist, and also why some on the right can’t really understand why anybody would take offense at the idea of public executions for weed dealers.
AlexandrB 5y ago
> BTC would break the money printer How? What would be the scenario here? The Fed stops issuing USD and starts managing the economy using BTC? Why would the US ever undermine their own sovereignty by doing that? Even if I give you that BTC is a viable currency, it's another currency alongside all the others. What is the viable path to it becoming the primary currency of a country without that country's consent? The IRS is still going to want your taxes paid in USD.
godelski 5y ago
It depends how the Blockchain is implemented. A common misconception about cryptocurrencies is that they are private. The crypto means cryptographically secure, not cryptographically private. A Blockchain based digital currency could also hold the entire history of all transactions made by people and a privileged party could identify the holder of each wallet. In fact we can kinda do this with BTC, but we can't identify who holds the wallet until they cash in or out through an institution. This technology is the wet dream of a fascist regime. There are no secret transactions. Cash is non existent. Cash is only used by criminals. If you aren't using a traceable currency then you have something to hide. All transactions are stored. This should also be an issue for many because laws change and aren't consistent. Buy weed legally today, it gets criminalized, get punished. Buy a drink at the local gay bar, travel to a LGBTQ unfriendly country, get interrogated. It's not about what is happening so much about what could happen. How can the technology be abused. Maybe it's fine with our government but is it everywhere? It's about not giving power to saints that devil's my inherit. But this is why we have privacy coins. Some coins don't even maintain the leger but a hash of it (hashes all the way down). You can't peek at the leger but you can verify it is consistent (added benefit of keeping a static leger size too). You can have zero knowledge transactions. You can have differential privacy. All these technologies are not a necessary condition of a blockchain but are privacy enhancing. These are not a fascists wet dream but rather a major roadblock for them. Those fighting against them are allowed to operate beyond their knowledge. So the bigger again is what is the cost benefit analysis? Are terrorists and tax evaders such a problem that it is worth the technology that a future fascist could inherit? Or are they not?

IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago

The whole philosophy behind Bitcoin is a mistrust of institutions, primarily the FED, and the wish to replace them with what’s supposed to be “neutral”. But the criticism that is offered tends to be far off the mark: the FED isn’t a “private bank”, to name just one conspiracy theory. It is also far better at its job as people make you believe: the time of runaway inflation is a 100 years behind us, and even the worst of recent crises in the financial industry is but a shadow of the Great Depression that saw actual starvation. It seems that economists may have improved somewhat, to the point where they are at least able to outperform the outcome of an algorithm that doesn’t even try to use monetary policy for the greater good. Despite its flaws, the FED is also, ultimately, democratically legitimized. Bitcoin, despite its talk of democratization, allocates power proportional to mining power or, ultimately, wealth. That’s closer to feudalism than any recent idea of democracy. There are dozens of other misconceptions that were baked into BC and other coins only to blow up. Sometimes spectacularly so. For example, the community seems to believe the law is nothing but pretense allowing judges to arbitrarily enforce their opinions. Hence, it is seen as desirable to allow for contracts that are not subject to any interpretation. This mostly comes up when someone makes a stupid mistake like omitting a decimal separator and paying 100x what’s reasonable. In the “normal” economy, such errors are almost always easily healed. But the cryptocurrency community believes that anything that cannot be expressed in source code is somehow invalid. Indeed, they seem to take some gleeful enjoyment from seeing people subjected to punishment for minor mistakes, even where it is completely out of proportion. That points at where it could be called “fascist”: that ideology abhors all deviation from the norm and punishes it severely. That’s why Singapore’s extreme laws against drugs or chewing gum are sometimes called fascist, and also why some on the right can’t really understand why anybody would take offense at the idea of public executions for weed dealers.

AlexandrB 5y ago

> BTC would break the money printer How? What would be the scenario here? The Fed stops issuing USD and starts managing the economy using BTC? Why would the US ever undermine their own sovereignty by doing that? Even if I give you that BTC is a viable currency, it's another currency alongside all the others. What is the viable path to it becoming the primary currency of a country without that country's consent? The IRS is still going to want your taxes paid in USD.

godelski 5y ago

It depends how the Blockchain is implemented. A common misconception about cryptocurrencies is that they are private. The crypto means cryptographically secure, not cryptographically private. A Blockchain based digital currency could also hold the entire history of all transactions made by people and a privileged party could identify the holder of each wallet. In fact we can kinda do this with BTC, but we can't identify who holds the wallet until they cash in or out through an institution. This technology is the wet dream of a fascist regime. There are no secret transactions. Cash is non existent. Cash is only used by criminals. If you aren't using a traceable currency then you have something to hide. All transactions are stored. This should also be an issue for many because laws change and aren't consistent. Buy weed legally today, it gets criminalized, get punished. Buy a drink at the local gay bar, travel to a LGBTQ unfriendly country, get interrogated. It's not about what is happening so much about what could happen. How can the technology be abused. Maybe it's fine with our government but is it everywhere? It's about not giving power to saints that devil's my inherit. But this is why we have privacy coins. Some coins don't even maintain the leger but a hash of it (hashes all the way down). You can't peek at the leger but you can verify it is consistent (added benefit of keeping a static leger size too). You can have zero knowledge transactions. You can have differential privacy. All these technologies are not a necessary condition of a blockchain but are privacy enhancing. These are not a fascists wet dream but rather a major roadblock for them. Those fighting against them are allowed to operate beyond their knowledge. So the bigger again is what is the cost benefit analysis? Are terrorists and tax evaders such a problem that it is worth the technology that a future fascist could inherit? Or are they not?