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> Only, without the oversight of a central bank Yes, that's a good thing. > Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea. Currency that can't be manipulat

> Only, without the oversight of a central bank Yes, that's a good thing. > Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea. Currency that can't be manipulated or devalued by the state or central banks. In other words: eliminates the potential for exactly what's taking place worldwide right now.

erulabs 4y ago
With inflation at the rate it's at, I can't help but laugh at "crypto is so volatile!" That argument made sense in the endless bull markets - but these days? What's not volatile? I-Bonds? The idea that the US Dollar is the eternal pinnacle of stability always seemed naive in principle, but now its clearly naive in practice.
- rglover 4y ago
  It certainly could have been if our government didn't: 1. Unpeg it from a gold standard. 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon. The power and greed were too intoxicating.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Yes, because tying deflation and inflation to the rate of 'how quickly do we mine gold' is a brilliant way to run an economy. Don't open enough gold mines? Here comes the deflationary spiral of death to strangle the economy. Too many gold mines? Inflation, inflation, inflation. Can we do anything to dampen either one? Nope. > 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon. Sure as hell beats getting involved in an actual shooting war.
    - not2b 4y ago
      This was exactly the history of the American economy in the 19th century. Rapid episodes of deflation would regularly bankrupt farmers, who couldn't sell their crops for enough to repay their loans.
    - rglover 4y ago
      > Sure as hell beats getting involved in an actual shooting war. Until it backfires and creates the potential for a nuclear war.
      - vkou 4y ago
        Nobody's going to start a nuclear war over sanctions.
  - gunshai 4y ago
    I'm not really sure why people opine about not using the gold standard. Especially crypo-enthusiasts or even libertarians (I consider my self tangent to both these groups). Gold is terrible for the following reasons. * Supply is unknown so your market cap value is volatile to any sudden prospected windfall. This one is ESPECIALLY bad if you are a central government. Why would a central bank want to be beholden (with respect to purchasing power) to some random gold find that devalues the currency unexpectedly? (see wiki article about Mansa Musa who just went around destroying local economies because he just literally threw his gold around.) * Gold is not very divisible, in that there are real costs to trying to divide the mint. * Gold comes with high storage/security costs (especially if it is your currency back). * Gold isn't really that transferable, the stuff is a pain in the ass to actually move around. Gold has two things going for it. 1. It has manufacturing uses that provide real world value 2. Through out time people have a perception that it should have value. This perception spans across cultures and geography.
    - rglover 4y ago
      There's no opining about it. It was the best solution at the time and removing it eliminated the last remaining dam preventing absolute corruption of our money by the state. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
      - agentultra 4y ago
        [flagged]
        rglover 4y ago
        I'm a Bitcoin maximalist and only a few notches away from an anarchist. A website showing charts that demonstrate a shift in data since 1971 is not a conspiracy theory. That requires...an actual theory.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    The collapse of the Bretton-Woods system was really bad. It got so bad that Nixon had to temporarily suspend exchange of notes for gold. It eventually dragged all currencies into a death-spiral. You can read all about it in the history books. Why should it be repeated? The Austrian school of economics radically simplifies economic theory to an absurd degree (I assume that's what you're signalling you follow given your statements). It treats empirical evidence as heresy. The only driving force behind all of their conspiracy theories and racist/anti-semitic dog-whistling is a belief that governments are evil and all inflation is bad. It's really reductive and anti-intellectual. Inflation isn't inherently bad and not all inflation is the same. In terms of geopolitics the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system has had many benefits. Much of the world eventually recovered by the mid-80s by the economic crises of the late-60s. Also in the history books. War and debt are bedfellows. Everyone knows this. Also well known are the economic consequences of creating such debt by going to war. It turns out mostly authoritarian psychopaths will go to war or make crypto-currencies official currencies despite the economic consequences and impacts it would have on their citizens.
    - rglover 4y ago
      > War and debt are bedfellows. Because fiat enables them to be as much. If you can print money, you don't need public consent to go blow people out of the water, nor to justify obscene spending on the military. Every war the U.S. has been involved in since Vietnam has been a banker war, not a state war. What's reductive and anti-intellectual is deluding people into believing that giving the government (or even worse, "economists" or central bankers) authority over their wealth is, somehow, going to multiply or protect it when we have ample examples to the contrary. To your point, governments historically are evil and inflation is bad (it's arguably an inherent property of government as you're giving absolute power to the unproductive class). The idea that it's not (MMT) is the rationalization of a failed economic strategy that's put everyone's well-being in the crosshairs. The idea that any of that is untrue is a result of unrelenting propaganda and indoctrination (or, in certain cases, someone who has directly benefited from the scheme). Any way you shake it, to think that what's happening isn't the result of malfeasance is denial, wholesale. Mayer Rothschild codified the potential for this way of thinking with his Economic Inductance theory: > Currency, or deposit loan accounts, has the required appearance of power that could be used to induce people into surrendering their real wealth in exchange for a promise of greater wealth (interests). When applied gradually, the public adapts to its presence and learns to tolerate its encroachment on their lives until the pressure (psychological via economic) becomes too great and they crack up, depending on their resilience capacity. Flip on the television if you need insight into what people do when they "crack up."
banannaise 4y ago
Yeah, instead it's manipulated by an entirely different set of equally nefarious actors! We did it, everyone!
- rglover 4y ago
  You don't understand how Bitcoin works, and that's okay, but you need to do your homework before you make foolish comments like this. Bitcoin's supply is regulated via a timed algorithm, meaning, it doles out an increasingly diminished amount of Bitcoin on a pre-timed cycle that will end in ~2140. In order to get that Bitcoin, "miners" need to perform work (via calculation of a nonce which as an auto-adjusting difficulty of computation—the "proof of work") that can't be faked or manipulated. The beauty of that is that, unlike a central bank, no one can go and change a variable in a database to say "omg we have more money now!"
  - danShumway 4y ago
    Looking at how Bitcoin's price has fluctuated over the years, it should be pretty obvious by now that manipulating, inflating, and devaluing a currency doesn't only happen through releasing new notes. Bitcoin isn't immune from manipulation just because the supply is pre-decided.
    - rglover 4y ago
      Bitcoin's price has fluctuated because of the same market dynamics that play out everywhere. Most people are panicky and hair-triggered, very few are patient. Especially with a new technology that has the potential to make outsized returns early on, of course, you're going to get a lot of gamblers entering and exiting the market. This is why you see dips when headlines like "China bans mining!" or "Crypto is doomed, look at Luna!" are printed. It conflates things and uses people's ignorance against them (not unlike traditional financial markets/instruments).
      - danShumway 4y ago
        Correct, and all of that stuff is subject to manipulation, often by powerful actors behind the scenes or by grifters playing off of people's insecurities, fear of missing out, etc... Controlling the supply of a coin does not mean the coin's actual value can't be manipulated by dedicated actors, and in the case of cryptocurrency, the "mystique" of the tech behind it, the ease of creating new systems on top of it that are complicated for ordinary users to understand, and the general fear people have of missing out on a speculative investment (as well as the general fear they have that they might be in a speculative bubble) make coins like Bitcoin particularly vulnerable to specific kinds of social manipulation, scams, and phishing, all of which end up affecting the price of the coin. The fed can't release new Bitcoins, sure, but in exchange, now random celebrities on Twitter can cause sell-offs and spikes in value; random Discord groups can pump coins so they can sell off and make a profit before they crash. You haven't gotten rid of currency manipulation, you've just changed who's doing it.
beders 4y ago
You replaced trust in a bank with trust in this centralized service. Where's the merit?
- rglover 4y ago
  In this particular instance, yes. With this specific use case, there isn't. But adoption of Bitcoin in general is a net positive (I think of something like these notes being a gateway drug to self-custody).
  - beders 4y ago
    Adoption of Bitcoin is a net positive on the CO2 being added to the atmosphere for sure.

erulabs 4y ago

With inflation at the rate it's at, I can't help but laugh at "crypto is so volatile!" That argument made sense in the endless bull markets - but these days? What's not volatile? I-Bonds? The idea that the US Dollar is the eternal pinnacle of stability always seemed naive in principle, but now its clearly naive in practice.

rglover 4y ago
It certainly could have been if our government didn't: 1. Unpeg it from a gold standard. 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon. The power and greed were too intoxicating.
- vkou 4y ago
  Yes, because tying deflation and inflation to the rate of 'how quickly do we mine gold' is a brilliant way to run an economy. Don't open enough gold mines? Here comes the deflationary spiral of death to strangle the economy. Too many gold mines? Inflation, inflation, inflation. Can we do anything to dampen either one? Nope. > 2. Use it as a geopolitical weapon. Sure as hell beats getting involved in an actual shooting war.
  - not2b 4y ago
    This was exactly the history of the American economy in the 19th century. Rapid episodes of deflation would regularly bankrupt farmers, who couldn't sell their crops for enough to repay their loans.
  - rglover 4y ago
    > Sure as hell beats getting involved in an actual shooting war. Until it backfires and creates the potential for a nuclear war.
    - vkou 4y ago
      Nobody's going to start a nuclear war over sanctions.
- gunshai 4y ago
  I'm not really sure why people opine about not using the gold standard. Especially crypo-enthusiasts or even libertarians (I consider my self tangent to both these groups). Gold is terrible for the following reasons. * Supply is unknown so your market cap value is volatile to any sudden prospected windfall. This one is ESPECIALLY bad if you are a central government. Why would a central bank want to be beholden (with respect to purchasing power) to some random gold find that devalues the currency unexpectedly? (see wiki article about Mansa Musa who just went around destroying local economies because he just literally threw his gold around.) * Gold is not very divisible, in that there are real costs to trying to divide the mint. * Gold comes with high storage/security costs (especially if it is your currency back). * Gold isn't really that transferable, the stuff is a pain in the ass to actually move around. Gold has two things going for it. 1. It has manufacturing uses that provide real world value 2. Through out time people have a perception that it should have value. This perception spans across cultures and geography.
  - rglover 4y ago
    There's no opining about it. It was the best solution at the time and removing it eliminated the last remaining dam preventing absolute corruption of our money by the state. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
    - agentultra 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - rglover 4y ago
        I'm a Bitcoin maximalist and only a few notches away from an anarchist. A website showing charts that demonstrate a shift in data since 1971 is not a conspiracy theory. That requires...an actual theory.
- agentultra 4y ago
  The collapse of the Bretton-Woods system was really bad. It got so bad that Nixon had to temporarily suspend exchange of notes for gold. It eventually dragged all currencies into a death-spiral. You can read all about it in the history books. Why should it be repeated? The Austrian school of economics radically simplifies economic theory to an absurd degree (I assume that's what you're signalling you follow given your statements). It treats empirical evidence as heresy. The only driving force behind all of their conspiracy theories and racist/anti-semitic dog-whistling is a belief that governments are evil and all inflation is bad. It's really reductive and anti-intellectual. Inflation isn't inherently bad and not all inflation is the same. In terms of geopolitics the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system has had many benefits. Much of the world eventually recovered by the mid-80s by the economic crises of the late-60s. Also in the history books. War and debt are bedfellows. Everyone knows this. Also well known are the economic consequences of creating such debt by going to war. It turns out mostly authoritarian psychopaths will go to war or make crypto-currencies official currencies despite the economic consequences and impacts it would have on their citizens.
  - rglover 4y ago
    > War and debt are bedfellows. Because fiat enables them to be as much. If you can print money, you don't need public consent to go blow people out of the water, nor to justify obscene spending on the military. Every war the U.S. has been involved in since Vietnam has been a banker war, not a state war. What's reductive and anti-intellectual is deluding people into believing that giving the government (or even worse, "economists" or central bankers) authority over their wealth is, somehow, going to multiply or protect it when we have ample examples to the contrary. To your point, governments historically are evil and inflation is bad (it's arguably an inherent property of government as you're giving absolute power to the unproductive class). The idea that it's not (MMT) is the rationalization of a failed economic strategy that's put everyone's well-being in the crosshairs. The idea that any of that is untrue is a result of unrelenting propaganda and indoctrination (or, in certain cases, someone who has directly benefited from the scheme). Any way you shake it, to think that what's happening isn't the result of malfeasance is denial, wholesale. Mayer Rothschild codified the potential for this way of thinking with his Economic Inductance theory: > Currency, or deposit loan accounts, has the required appearance of power that could be used to induce people into surrendering their real wealth in exchange for a promise of greater wealth (interests). When applied gradually, the public adapts to its presence and learns to tolerate its encroachment on their lives until the pressure (psychological via economic) becomes too great and they crack up, depending on their resilience capacity. Flip on the television if you need insight into what people do when they "crack up."

banannaise 4y ago

Yeah, instead it's manipulated by an entirely different set of equally nefarious actors! We did it, everyone!

rglover 4y ago
You don't understand how Bitcoin works, and that's okay, but you need to do your homework before you make foolish comments like this. Bitcoin's supply is regulated via a timed algorithm, meaning, it doles out an increasingly diminished amount of Bitcoin on a pre-timed cycle that will end in ~2140. In order to get that Bitcoin, "miners" need to perform work (via calculation of a nonce which as an auto-adjusting difficulty of computation—the "proof of work") that can't be faked or manipulated. The beauty of that is that, unlike a central bank, no one can go and change a variable in a database to say "omg we have more money now!"
- danShumway 4y ago
  Looking at how Bitcoin's price has fluctuated over the years, it should be pretty obvious by now that manipulating, inflating, and devaluing a currency doesn't only happen through releasing new notes. Bitcoin isn't immune from manipulation just because the supply is pre-decided.
  - rglover 4y ago
    Bitcoin's price has fluctuated because of the same market dynamics that play out everywhere. Most people are panicky and hair-triggered, very few are patient. Especially with a new technology that has the potential to make outsized returns early on, of course, you're going to get a lot of gamblers entering and exiting the market. This is why you see dips when headlines like "China bans mining!" or "Crypto is doomed, look at Luna!" are printed. It conflates things and uses people's ignorance against them (not unlike traditional financial markets/instruments).
    - danShumway 4y ago
      Correct, and all of that stuff is subject to manipulation, often by powerful actors behind the scenes or by grifters playing off of people's insecurities, fear of missing out, etc... Controlling the supply of a coin does not mean the coin's actual value can't be manipulated by dedicated actors, and in the case of cryptocurrency, the "mystique" of the tech behind it, the ease of creating new systems on top of it that are complicated for ordinary users to understand, and the general fear people have of missing out on a speculative investment (as well as the general fear they have that they might be in a speculative bubble) make coins like Bitcoin particularly vulnerable to specific kinds of social manipulation, scams, and phishing, all of which end up affecting the price of the coin. The fed can't release new Bitcoins, sure, but in exchange, now random celebrities on Twitter can cause sell-offs and spikes in value; random Discord groups can pump coins so they can sell off and make a profit before they crash. You haven't gotten rid of currency manipulation, you've just changed who's doing it.

beders 4y ago

You replaced trust in a bank with trust in this centralized service. Where's the merit?

rglover 4y ago
In this particular instance, yes. With this specific use case, there isn't. But adoption of Bitcoin in general is a net positive (I think of something like these notes being a gateway drug to self-custody).
- beders 4y ago
  Adoption of Bitcoin is a net positive on the CO2 being added to the atmosphere for sure.