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Id take it a step further. The immorality of cryptocurrency isn't complicated and defines why it never has become more. Fiat money exists within a social cont
by beepbopboopp 2y ago
Id take it a step further. The immorality of cryptocurrency isn't complicated and defines why it never has become more.
Fiat money exists within a social contract - governments that issue currency must also maintain the infrastructure that makes society work. They're accountable for everything from roads to retirement plans.
When cryptocurrency advocates push to separate money from government, they're not just pursuing financial innovation. They're deliberately undermining the mechanism that funds our shared existence. They want the benefits of living in society without contributing to its maintenance.
This isn't freedom - it's freeloading. Cryptocurrency, at its philosophical core, enables wealth hoarding while disconnecting the hoarders from any responsibility to the communities that made their wealth possible in the first place.
- friendzis 2y agoLibertarians are like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.
- card_zero 2y agoIt's true, am a cat. But tax is coercion. Make it voluntary, and people won't pay it. Despite this, a lot of people are fine with it because it gets them roads and state pensions and healthcare or whatever. Some people want it to be increased, thereby volunteering to pay more and volunteering others to do the same. Everything is based on force, and the social contract is a kind of Stockholm syndrome.
- friendzis 2y ago> social contract is a kind of Stockholm syndrome One could always retreat to wildlands of Siberia and live their own happy life away from roads and reddit. One would not survive for long without the same society, which produced the survival knowledge, but one could at least try. > Everything is based on force How do you reconcile "what's stopping me from hitting you with 5 euro wrench" without the fantasyland non-aggression principle? Without that "social contract" and with absolute personal liberty, any rights/liberties/freedoms exist solely to the extent one themselves can enforce them against the mighty five euro wrench.
- beeflet 2y agoOutside cats, at least, are independent. It's evidenced by the existence of so many stray cats. They have leverage that other pets don't. They don't need to understand the whole household. They only need to understand if they are being mistreated, in which case they can choose to leave and hunt vermon until the end of their (very few) days. So I think it is better to be a housecat than a lapdog at least.
- Acrobatic_Road 2y ago>Fiat money exists within a social contract - governments that issue currency must also maintain the infrastructure that makes society work. Imagine saying this to someone who lost their home in the LA wildfires despite paying high taxes all their life to live there. Some social contract.
- roboror 2y agoShould I say it before after they get their government subsidized insurance money?
- Acrobatic_Road 2y agoGovernment subsidized? >After saying it would run out of funds by March, California’s last-resort fire insurance provider will impose a special charge of $1 billion on insurance companies — which will in turn pass the costs along to homeowners — the first such move in more than three decades. https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-costs-rising-in-california-fair-plan/ https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-...
- sanderjd 2y agoI'm a little confused... You're citing the existence of the government subsidy as a way to question its existence?
- Acrobatic_Road 2y agoThe state (and city of LA): 1. Created dangerous conditions through inadequate fire management. 2. Prevented the private market from adequately communicating the risk through price increases. As a result, 7/12 of insurers stopped or restricted selling new policies. 3. Created a moral hazard by selling it's own policies to homeowners who were dropped by the private market. 4. Failed to respond to the fires. 5. Failed to cover claims through its insurance program. 6. Is trying to bail itself out by extracting $1 billion tax from the rest of the state. Yet we're supposed to be thankful for this? You could say the people whose homes burned are grateful they are being bailed out at everyone else's expense. But I bet they would be much happier if their homes had never burned down in the first place - a debacle that was entirely avoidable.
- jack_pp 2y ago> They're deliberately undermining the mechanism that funds our shared existence. They want the benefits of living in society without contributing to its maintenance. So I pay income tax, property tax, road tax, sales tax and even my savings I have to put in the hands of the govt which has been unreliable, corrupt and mostly serves the interests of the few over the interests of the many regardless of which political party has been elected.
- bitcoin_anon 2y agoIndeed. Was Beepboop arguing that inflation is the mechanism that funds our shared existence? Why do you think cryptocurrency at its philosophical core enables wealth hoarding? If I don’t pay my property taxes, I lose my house, regardless of how much cryptocurrency I own. Why can’t we have a separation of money and state where the state receives its due through taxes and is unable to inflate the money supply?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sanderjd 2y agoI'm having trouble making sense of anything in this comment.
- beeflet 2y agoI think he's just advocating for the idea that money (and monetary policy) should be separated from taxation, like the gold standard. Or maybe an imaginary silver standard, where the citizens hold the precious metal directly (and pay taxes in it) instead of just having the currency backed by precious metal. Just because the government and banking institutions can't easily censor and restrict the money supply, doesn't mean they can't collect taxes on it. In a word where crypto is the dominant form of money they can just throw you in jail if you don't pay taxes. If you need to pay X amount of taxes, maybe the government should explicitly collect X amount of taxes transparently instead of collecting Y amount of taxes, selling a bunch of debt that needs to be financed at a later date, inflating the currency, etc. Because the more transparency in a democracy, the fewer ways for politicians to hijack taxation.
- beeflet 2y agoI think that taxes can and should be funded through the single tax on property proposed by Henry George as opposed to sales or income tax. Widespread adoption of private cryptocurrency may be sufficient to enable adoption of the single tax system.
- cwmma 2y agoGeorgism is orthogonal to cryptocurrency. Like how is cryptocurrency even related to consolidating all taxes into one on the unimproved value of land, this seems like such a nonsequitur.
- beeflet 2y agoCryptocurrency makes direct cash-like payments possible over the internet more easily. It makes collection of sales and income tax more difficult to collect.
- beepbopboopp 2y agoMore easy? Crypto is significantly more complicated than modern banking/credit cards. The second part is true though.
- cwmma 2y agoIs the 2nd part true though? In the US sales taxes are mostly applied at the state level where the governments don't have particularly privileged access to the banking system and is enforced by being able to physically go to the merchant in question. Bitcoin would probably make that easier for the government as you could now track merchants sales volumes directly on the blockchain. For the federal government being able to deputize the banks to flag suspicious transactions certainly helps find tax avoidance, we've had an income tax way longer then we've had credit cards.
- red-iron-pine 2y agomore easy? requiring ever increasing computational requirements to move money? we figured out bank transfers decades ago, and there is no exponentially increasing challenges with a wire transfer.