7 ms·

It’s worse than that, the crypto-people are learning the lessons of the 1800’s financial crises by reenacting them. Soon they’ll realise why central banks exis

by mmarq 4y ago

It’s worse than that, the crypto-people are learning the lessons of the 1800’s financial crises by reenacting them. Soon they’ll realise why central banks exist and after 10-20 years they’ll learn why the gold standard stopped being cool.

pibechorro 4y ago
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
You had me at everything except why the gold standard isn’t cool. I actually think the whole world is about to get a lesson in why the gold standard was cool.
- account-5 4y ago
  Can you elaborate? I'm a complete novice in this area, so genuine question.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    It's a standard "(hyper-)inflation is coming" line.
  - FabHK 4y ago
    The typical argument is that the value of gold is somehow super stable (often the story is brought up that in biblical times, an amount X of gold would purchase Y loaves of bread, and today it is still the same!). By contrast, the dollar lost 96% or so of its purchasing power over the last century, so clearly gold is much better, and if you tie the value of the currency to gold (=gold standard), you have the best of both worlds. However, that story neglects many things. 1. A worker can buy many more loaves of bread (not to mention other things) with a week of wages than two thousand years ago. So, who cares about the price of gold? 2. Everyone is free to buy gold with their money, anyway, if desired [0]. 3. A moderate amount of inflation is not bad, and in fact what most central banks target for, and what they have achieved for decades. 4. If you have a lot of money lying around, invest it in the markets (or into gold), don't leave it in currency. 5. A gold standard would remove the central bank's ability to control the money supply, and hamstring its ability to conduct monetary policy. Gold standard proponents consider that a feature, but almost all modern economists consider it a bug. An instructive parable is the story of the Babysitting Coop [1]. My overall take is that good fiat > gold standard > bad fiat, and policy should be focused on good fiat, ie keeping the central bank competent and politically independent and with a clear mandate. [0] There have been exceptions, eg in the US in 1933, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 [1] https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy.html https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy....
    - Siira 4y ago
      The problem with “good” fiat is that it is never good for everyone. Inflation usually hits discriminatorily. And it doesn’t last. Even the US now has high inflation. The gold standard has its problems, but putting hard limits on currency creation and manipulation is prudent.
    - salawat 4y ago
      The "competent" part is doing some really heavy lifting there, and to be frank.
      - ATsch 4y ago
        I personally have a lot more trust in the competency of a central bank than some random, unchangeable numbers an anonymous person pulled out of their hat in 2008. Or the gold mining cartels, for that matter. At least the central banks have some vague semblance of democratic control.
      - compiler-guy 4y ago
        Central banks have their problems, but a history of banking in the US, especially in the early 1800s make modern central banks look amazing.
        salawat 4y ago
        Said Central Bank was famously killed once, for equally good reasons, in our country's history. We've quite literally built in "endless growth" imto the fundamental architecture of our monetary system, which breaks the fractal self-similarity between the different levels of abstraction of an ideal State. (Given nature's love of pattern reuse, finance on micro ()individual), should resemble finance slightly more macro (family), dhould resemble finance even more macro, (industry, state, nation)) Whereas what we have now is some horrible abomination where at the top-end, we get these debt fueled monstrosities that continually push asset prices into more and more ludicrous places where barrier to entry gets higher and higher, and the requisite concentrations of resources one must accrue before the power laws start kicking in relegates a greater and greater portion of the population to basically treading water in the hopes less than a single percent of it makes good capital allocation decisions. Call me a contrarian nut if you want, but something is completely off. I accept unintuitive things can exist, but modern economic theory requires too mich fairy dust (Dude, trust us) to keep churning along for my liking. .
  - JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
    https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com is a good start. The wheels seem to start falling off of everything when you can just create fake money out of thin air. Most of the money goes to those near the money printer and you get massive wealth inequality and all the problems that causes. Maybe gold is silly but it at least pegs the money creation to something.
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      A serious reply with a link: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/i9ycy9/the_brutalist_housing_block_sticky_come_shoot_the/g1qr7z6/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/i9ycy9/the_br... But I always feel like I should reply to people who argue via a link (whether re: the gold standard, COVID-19, or any other topic) with http://web.archive.org/web/20160112000701/http://www.timecube.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160112000701/http://www.timecub... .
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Gold itself is just another fiat currency, with the only advantage being that almost every society known to mankind has somehow evolved to accept gold as the one and only "true value" storage. Only 10% of the world's gold production goes to industrial usage (mostly electroplating of connectors), the rest off to plain investment and jewelry.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    ... except those that preferred silver.
  - toomim 4y ago
    It also has the advantage that it can't be inflated as quickly as fiat. You can't just print more.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    That is factually rather incomplete. Silver was the original metal of currency and was far more widely used historically. Silver wasn't fully supplanted by a gold only backed currency until 100-200 years ago in many countries. I am always curious why silver never gets any love from the "gold is the only true currency" crowd."
- orwin 4y ago
  You ought to look into the longest financial crisis of the 19th century and what caused it
- kd913 4y ago
  Limiting the growth of an economy (i.e. construction of houses, loans to new businesses) because not enough gold has been mined is silly.
  - Siira 4y ago
    Perhaps, but replacing the gold standard with no backing is not then the answer. There should be hard accountability on anyone who can create money. Cryptographic measures seem promising in this regard, but I have never heard of governments funding research on limiting themselves. China has been doing some work in digitizing its money, but it seems it is making the government even more powerful.
    - kd913 4y ago
      >Cryptographic measures seem promising in this regard Have you not seen the absolute mess of stable coins? Tether has 'printed' the equivalent of 86 billion dollars from nothing. >There should be hard accountability on anyone who can create money. The bigger issue is a lack of accountability on the political systems. Most of which have been rife with corruption. They print dollars and give it away with 0 accountability of whether economic value is returned for what is being printed. High speed rail, national broadband, national healthcare, upgraded powerlines, renewable infrastructure, desal plants. Food for kids in schools, shelter for the homeless, high rise infrastructure (rather than shitty suburban shits that bankrupt cities in 50 years). The above are effective, efficient and provide multiple dividends for the initial capital. Yet are viewed as socialist policies frankly and hence political suicide. The Government can't even recognize how cryptocurrencies are by itself a negative sum game and hence should be heavily taxed or made illegal.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    "Growth" isn't always helpful. See: LA
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      True, but artificially limiting growth based on your ability to mine gold (or steal it from other countries) is still silly. If you want to constrain growth in a controlled fashion, you still need a central bank managing the supply of currency.
roenxi 4y ago
> ...they’ll learn why the gold standard stopped being cool. Because governments are massive borrowers and the gold standard tilts the market towards people having to repay their debts from time to time? Literally the reason not to be on a gold standard is to enable money creation. Creating money has winners and losers - the losers shouldn't be happy about that. I own enough assets that I've been making out like a bandit (eg, by owning gold) but the situation is hardly fair to people who think that working productively at a job should be linked to better outcomes.
- charwalker 4y ago
  Gold has had a weak return vs most assets over the past decade and is usually upsold as a worthwhile asset by the people making money off selling gold. It sounds like you're drinking the flavor aid.
- neffy 4y ago
  The gold standard didn't stop money creation. The linkage in the banking system was to the price of gold, as fractional reserve lending slowly increased the amount of deposits in the system, the price of gold drifted up, and the amount of lending increased with it. Then the entire system eventually broke apart (several times), because gold wasn't evenly distributed, and so the resulting rates of money creation drifted apart in different countries.
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >I own enough assets that I've been making out like a bandit (eg, by owning gold) The returns for gold have been absolutely trounced by just about every asset out there. It's worth less today than it was 10 years ago. I know, because I also own some. Even with inflation, it has a ton of ground to make up versus real estate or SPY or BTC. So, pray tell, how have you "made out like a bandit" by owning gold?
  - roenxi 4y ago
    > It's worth less today than it was 10 years ago. I know, because I also own some. You're dating yourself with this comment, you hit a pretty small window around 2012 to manage to lose money. I didn't buy then so I'm doing well. Now, admittedly, the reason the price was high in that window was because a lot of people panicked and wanted to buy in so there are probably an unusual number of stories of people who managed to lose money. But the rest of the time gold is posting (alleged) real returns. Which is fantastic work for a shiny rock. People call what is happening in bitcoin crazy, but the idea that I'm making a productive contribution to society by owning a rock is bananas. Really it just means that money is losing value faster than the powers that be admit. > The returns for gold have been absolutely trounced by just about every asset out there. Well yeah, it sits there and does nothing. The return is not competitive with more productive assets. Still crushing the poor fools who think that they should be using inflation as a reference point to plan/negotiate their finances. Or anyone who thinks they can use wages to get ahead; they're getting washed out by the money hose that has been pointed at assets for the last 15 years.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
barnabee 4y ago
And if that happens and a the end of it here's a parallel system or systems on the internet that look a lot like what we have today[1] but exist globally and outside the surveillance and control of governments, then crypto has to some extent succeeded. How much those systems are controlled by their users rather than just different concentrated groups holding a majority of power and wealth is in some ways a measure of that success. I am not too optimistic about this for bitcoin and systems based on it, but bitcoin is far from the only game in town. Whether or not the space needs to learn every lesson, no matter how obvious, by regularly losing money reproducing each crisis in turn remains to be seen. As someone who spent a long time in finance and can see that many of the experiments/"products" in crypto are dumb and won't work, I would certainly hope we can do a bit better, but if that's what it takes, so be it. [1] Hopefully we can at least improve some bits of the actual products and systems along the way as well as getting the basics in place, too.
- elchupanebre 4y ago
  There is a contradiction in your reasoning. The system we have today requires surveillance and control of governments to function. The parallel system or systems on the internet would also require some form of external, i.e. off blockchain, control to function as well as the current system. So far humanity has not invented anything better than democratically elected governments to implement such controls. Blockchain cannot in principle replace governments because governing comes down to use of violence. Unless, of course, you are advocating going back to times when barons fought each other with private armies.
  - barnabee 4y ago
    > The system we have today requires surveillance and control of governments to function. The parallel system or systems on the internet would also require some form of external, i.e. off blockchain, control to function as well as the current system. Two issues here: 1. The assumption that such, let's call it "government style" control (or at leaast a significant part of it) is necessary for such a system to function as well as the current one (a whole other question is what "as well as" means here). That seems possibly reasonable, but is certainly an assumption worth testing. 2. The assumption that you need a government to exert this "government style" control. Maybe humanity hasn't invented anything better and never will. But also maybe such things can exist, especially within a limited field like finance, and even if they can't, I'd take the Democratically Elected Government of Cyberspace[1], should such a thing be needed/emerge, over the squabbling and overreach of nation state governments into the internet. There are already plenty of projects experimenting with "on-chain governance" and there are a myriad areas of research into governance of decentralised systems. It is perfectly possible that a system of financial (or other) projects/protocols might emerge that all subscribe to a protocol for such governance, which could even go as far as enforcing collateral ratios, risk reporting, whatever, but would still be fundamnetally controlled by its users in a way outside of government control. Or perhaps individual protocol level governance will be enough. Either way it seems completely unlikely that the present system is the best we can do. In this case, there would still of course continue to be the wild west of systems outside that regime, in competing regimes, or even working within the legacy financial system, but that freedom to innovate is a feature not a bug. > Blockchain cannot in principle replace governments because governing comes down to use of violence. Unless, of course, you are advocating going back to times when barons fought each other with private armies. This is why I qualified the goal with "on the internet". If you have privacy, pseudonymous participation, Tor (or Tor-like networks/blockchains, like Nym) , etc. and smart contract platforms that can issue, move, and lock up/control funds using composable code, run entirely on chain, then of course you can build protocols and systems that govern them that sit outside government control as long as they manifest themselves only virtually. It is only at the edges, where you interact with and move to and from virtual (the internet) and physical society that you become subject to state violence. Blockchains and related technology might help organise the push for some kind of change to how governments work (as the internet itself has), but whatever happens, you can probably do what you like when it's purely online, and you will probably still need a good answer to questions like "where did you get that money?". I think that's OK. [1] see https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
ankaAr 4y ago
I almost choke thinking this situation. https://imgflip.com/i/6jjsdv https://imgflip.com/i/6jjsdv I needed to do this, sorry.

by mmarq 4y ago

pibechorro 4y ago

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

You had me at everything except why the gold standard isn’t cool. I actually think the whole world is about to get a lesson in why the gold standard was cool.

account-5 4y ago
Can you elaborate? I'm a complete novice in this area, so genuine question.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  It's a standard "(hyper-)inflation is coming" line.
- FabHK 4y ago
  The typical argument is that the value of gold is somehow super stable (often the story is brought up that in biblical times, an amount X of gold would purchase Y loaves of bread, and today it is still the same!). By contrast, the dollar lost 96% or so of its purchasing power over the last century, so clearly gold is much better, and if you tie the value of the currency to gold (=gold standard), you have the best of both worlds. However, that story neglects many things. 1. A worker can buy many more loaves of bread (not to mention other things) with a week of wages than two thousand years ago. So, who cares about the price of gold? 2. Everyone is free to buy gold with their money, anyway, if desired [0]. 3. A moderate amount of inflation is not bad, and in fact what most central banks target for, and what they have achieved for decades. 4. If you have a lot of money lying around, invest it in the markets (or into gold), don't leave it in currency. 5. A gold standard would remove the central bank's ability to control the money supply, and hamstring its ability to conduct monetary policy. Gold standard proponents consider that a feature, but almost all modern economists consider it a bug. An instructive parable is the story of the Babysitting Coop [1]. My overall take is that good fiat > gold standard > bad fiat, and policy should be focused on good fiat, ie keeping the central bank competent and politically independent and with a clear mandate. [0] There have been exceptions, eg in the US in 1933, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 [1] https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy.html https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy....
  - Siira 4y ago
    The problem with “good” fiat is that it is never good for everyone. Inflation usually hits discriminatorily. And it doesn’t last. Even the US now has high inflation. The gold standard has its problems, but putting hard limits on currency creation and manipulation is prudent.
  - salawat 4y ago
    The "competent" part is doing some really heavy lifting there, and to be frank.
    - ATsch 4y ago
      I personally have a lot more trust in the competency of a central bank than some random, unchangeable numbers an anonymous person pulled out of their hat in 2008. Or the gold mining cartels, for that matter. At least the central banks have some vague semblance of democratic control.
    - compiler-guy 4y ago
      Central banks have their problems, but a history of banking in the US, especially in the early 1800s make modern central banks look amazing.
      - salawat 4y ago
        Said Central Bank was famously killed once, for equally good reasons, in our country's history. We've quite literally built in "endless growth" imto the fundamental architecture of our monetary system, which breaks the fractal self-similarity between the different levels of abstraction of an ideal State. (Given nature's love of pattern reuse, finance on micro ()individual), should resemble finance slightly more macro (family), dhould resemble finance even more macro, (industry, state, nation)) Whereas what we have now is some horrible abomination where at the top-end, we get these debt fueled monstrosities that continually push asset prices into more and more ludicrous places where barrier to entry gets higher and higher, and the requisite concentrations of resources one must accrue before the power laws start kicking in relegates a greater and greater portion of the population to basically treading water in the hopes less than a single percent of it makes good capital allocation decisions. Call me a contrarian nut if you want, but something is completely off. I accept unintuitive things can exist, but modern economic theory requires too mich fairy dust (Dude, trust us) to keep churning along for my liking. .
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com is a good start. The wheels seem to start falling off of everything when you can just create fake money out of thin air. Most of the money goes to those near the money printer and you get massive wealth inequality and all the problems that causes. Maybe gold is silly but it at least pegs the money creation to something.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    A serious reply with a link: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/i9ycy9/the_brutalist_housing_block_sticky_come_shoot_the/g1qr7z6/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/i9ycy9/the_br... But I always feel like I should reply to people who argue via a link (whether re: the gold standard, COVID-19, or any other topic) with http://web.archive.org/web/20160112000701/http://www.timecube.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160112000701/http://www.timecub... .
mschuster91 4y ago
Gold itself is just another fiat currency, with the only advantage being that almost every society known to mankind has somehow evolved to accept gold as the one and only "true value" storage. Only 10% of the world's gold production goes to industrial usage (mostly electroplating of connectors), the rest off to plain investment and jewelry.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  ... except those that preferred silver.
- toomim 4y ago
  It also has the advantage that it can't be inflated as quickly as fiat. You can't just print more.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  That is factually rather incomplete. Silver was the original metal of currency and was far more widely used historically. Silver wasn't fully supplanted by a gold only backed currency until 100-200 years ago in many countries. I am always curious why silver never gets any love from the "gold is the only true currency" crowd."
orwin 4y ago
You ought to look into the longest financial crisis of the 19th century and what caused it
kd913 4y ago
Limiting the growth of an economy (i.e. construction of houses, loans to new businesses) because not enough gold has been mined is silly.
- Siira 4y ago
  Perhaps, but replacing the gold standard with no backing is not then the answer. There should be hard accountability on anyone who can create money. Cryptographic measures seem promising in this regard, but I have never heard of governments funding research on limiting themselves. China has been doing some work in digitizing its money, but it seems it is making the government even more powerful.
  - kd913 4y ago
    >Cryptographic measures seem promising in this regard Have you not seen the absolute mess of stable coins? Tether has 'printed' the equivalent of 86 billion dollars from nothing. >There should be hard accountability on anyone who can create money. The bigger issue is a lack of accountability on the political systems. Most of which have been rife with corruption. They print dollars and give it away with 0 accountability of whether economic value is returned for what is being printed. High speed rail, national broadband, national healthcare, upgraded powerlines, renewable infrastructure, desal plants. Food for kids in schools, shelter for the homeless, high rise infrastructure (rather than shitty suburban shits that bankrupt cities in 50 years). The above are effective, efficient and provide multiple dividends for the initial capital. Yet are viewed as socialist policies frankly and hence political suicide. The Government can't even recognize how cryptocurrencies are by itself a negative sum game and hence should be heavily taxed or made illegal.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  "Growth" isn't always helpful. See: LA
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    True, but artificially limiting growth based on your ability to mine gold (or steal it from other countries) is still silly. If you want to constrain growth in a controlled fashion, you still need a central bank managing the supply of currency.

roenxi 4y ago

> ...they’ll learn why the gold standard stopped being cool. Because governments are massive borrowers and the gold standard tilts the market towards people having to repay their debts from time to time? Literally the reason not to be on a gold standard is to enable money creation. Creating money has winners and losers - the losers shouldn't be happy about that. I own enough assets that I've been making out like a bandit (eg, by owning gold) but the situation is hardly fair to people who think that working productively at a job should be linked to better outcomes.

charwalker 4y ago
Gold has had a weak return vs most assets over the past decade and is usually upsold as a worthwhile asset by the people making money off selling gold. It sounds like you're drinking the flavor aid.
neffy 4y ago
The gold standard didn't stop money creation. The linkage in the banking system was to the price of gold, as fractional reserve lending slowly increased the amount of deposits in the system, the price of gold drifted up, and the amount of lending increased with it. Then the entire system eventually broke apart (several times), because gold wasn't evenly distributed, and so the resulting rates of money creation drifted apart in different countries.
itsoktocry 4y ago
>I own enough assets that I've been making out like a bandit (eg, by owning gold) The returns for gold have been absolutely trounced by just about every asset out there. It's worth less today than it was 10 years ago. I know, because I also own some. Even with inflation, it has a ton of ground to make up versus real estate or SPY or BTC. So, pray tell, how have you "made out like a bandit" by owning gold?
- roenxi 4y ago
  > It's worth less today than it was 10 years ago. I know, because I also own some. You're dating yourself with this comment, you hit a pretty small window around 2012 to manage to lose money. I didn't buy then so I'm doing well. Now, admittedly, the reason the price was high in that window was because a lot of people panicked and wanted to buy in so there are probably an unusual number of stories of people who managed to lose money. But the rest of the time gold is posting (alleged) real returns. Which is fantastic work for a shiny rock. People call what is happening in bitcoin crazy, but the idea that I'm making a productive contribution to society by owning a rock is bananas. Really it just means that money is losing value faster than the powers that be admit. > The returns for gold have been absolutely trounced by just about every asset out there. Well yeah, it sits there and does nothing. The return is not competitive with more productive assets. Still crushing the poor fools who think that they should be using inflation as a reference point to plan/negotiate their finances. Or anyone who thinks they can use wages to get ahead; they're getting washed out by the money hose that has been pointed at assets for the last 15 years.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

barnabee 4y ago

And if that happens and a the end of it here's a parallel system or systems on the internet that look a lot like what we have today[1] but exist globally and outside the surveillance and control of governments, then crypto has to some extent succeeded. How much those systems are controlled by their users rather than just different concentrated groups holding a majority of power and wealth is in some ways a measure of that success. I am not too optimistic about this for bitcoin and systems based on it, but bitcoin is far from the only game in town. Whether or not the space needs to learn every lesson, no matter how obvious, by regularly losing money reproducing each crisis in turn remains to be seen. As someone who spent a long time in finance and can see that many of the experiments/"products" in crypto are dumb and won't work, I would certainly hope we can do a bit better, but if that's what it takes, so be it. [1] Hopefully we can at least improve some bits of the actual products and systems along the way as well as getting the basics in place, too.

elchupanebre 4y ago
There is a contradiction in your reasoning. The system we have today requires surveillance and control of governments to function. The parallel system or systems on the internet would also require some form of external, i.e. off blockchain, control to function as well as the current system. So far humanity has not invented anything better than democratically elected governments to implement such controls. Blockchain cannot in principle replace governments because governing comes down to use of violence. Unless, of course, you are advocating going back to times when barons fought each other with private armies.
- barnabee 4y ago
  > The system we have today requires surveillance and control of governments to function. The parallel system or systems on the internet would also require some form of external, i.e. off blockchain, control to function as well as the current system. Two issues here: 1. The assumption that such, let's call it "government style" control (or at leaast a significant part of it) is necessary for such a system to function as well as the current one (a whole other question is what "as well as" means here). That seems possibly reasonable, but is certainly an assumption worth testing. 2. The assumption that you need a government to exert this "government style" control. Maybe humanity hasn't invented anything better and never will. But also maybe such things can exist, especially within a limited field like finance, and even if they can't, I'd take the Democratically Elected Government of Cyberspace[1], should such a thing be needed/emerge, over the squabbling and overreach of nation state governments into the internet. There are already plenty of projects experimenting with "on-chain governance" and there are a myriad areas of research into governance of decentralised systems. It is perfectly possible that a system of financial (or other) projects/protocols might emerge that all subscribe to a protocol for such governance, which could even go as far as enforcing collateral ratios, risk reporting, whatever, but would still be fundamnetally controlled by its users in a way outside of government control. Or perhaps individual protocol level governance will be enough. Either way it seems completely unlikely that the present system is the best we can do. In this case, there would still of course continue to be the wild west of systems outside that regime, in competing regimes, or even working within the legacy financial system, but that freedom to innovate is a feature not a bug. > Blockchain cannot in principle replace governments because governing comes down to use of violence. Unless, of course, you are advocating going back to times when barons fought each other with private armies. This is why I qualified the goal with "on the internet". If you have privacy, pseudonymous participation, Tor (or Tor-like networks/blockchains, like Nym) , etc. and smart contract platforms that can issue, move, and lock up/control funds using composable code, run entirely on chain, then of course you can build protocols and systems that govern them that sit outside government control as long as they manifest themselves only virtually. It is only at the edges, where you interact with and move to and from virtual (the internet) and physical society that you become subject to state violence. Blockchains and related technology might help organise the push for some kind of change to how governments work (as the internet itself has), but whatever happens, you can probably do what you like when it's purely online, and you will probably still need a good answer to questions like "where did you get that money?". I think that's OK. [1] see https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

ankaAr 4y ago

I almost choke thinking this situation. https://imgflip.com/i/6jjsdv https://imgflip.com/i/6jjsdv I needed to do this, sorry.