[Exo_Tartarus]

Governments should make it illegal because governments need to have control over the money supply.

We need taxation. We need monetary policy. The Bitcoin obsessives think these are bad things. No. They are very important and good things.

[mindslight]

I'd rather not be fighting my fellow humans because they've been claimed by a different empire - either violently through the funding of outright war or nonviolently through economic wage slavery. Governments are unable to resist the siren song of the inflationary treadmill, as the alternative is to fall behind the others. Uniformly diminishing their ability to conscript (militarily or economically) is one actual step towards world peace.

(disclaimer: I'm not personally bullish on bitcoin itself)

[Exo_Tartarus]

Inflation can be properly managed by responsible central banks. It's not really a problem.

Also "wage slavery" is perpetuated by private companies not governments, so not sure how you aim to eliminate that by killing governments.

[Frogolocalypse]

> Inflation can be properly managed by responsible central banks. It's not really a problem.

But it isn't, so it is.

> "wage slavery"

Wage slavery is perpetuated by debasing the unit in which you are paid. That's inflation. I don't want to eliminate governments. I want governments to stick to the role of governing, not punishing people because they want to save to better themselves.

[Exo_Tartarus]

People need to work not because of inflation, but because they get a fixed amount of money and spend most of it on things they want.

Not only that, but wages largely track inflation so your argument fails.

[Frogolocalypse]

> Not only that, but wages largely track inflation so your argument fails.

They might track 'inflation'. They don't track prices.

Wage over 20 years 2x. House price over 20 years 10x.

[phkahler]

>> House price over 20 years 10x.

Mortgage payment over 20 years 2x. House prices vary inversely with interest rates. When you go to get a loan the bank figures out how much cash flow you've got and assumes some percentage will go to paying the loan back. They start from that monthly payment and figure out how much you can borrow at the current interest rate (this is where lower interest rates mean borrow more money for the same monthly payment) then you run off to but a house and everyone (seller, agent, appraiser, everyone) has an incentive to get you to spend as much as you possibly can. So ultimately you're 30 years of payments will be based on your income. How much of that money goes to the bank vs the seller depends on interest rates. Low rates mean higher prices and more money to the seller. High rates mean lower prices and more money to the lender.

This all stems from people living paycheck to paycheck too, so the affordability of things has nothing to do with price and everything to do with size of payments.

[chiaro]

Spot where inflation started to be managed by the central bank:

https://media.ycharts.com/charts/2dd4f9a7b087a1eb6f763d81a97...

[Frogolocalypse]

Spot the part where hedonic quality adjustments started being made to the CPI.

More importantly, in your graph, spot where they removed house pricing from the CPI.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/home.htm

HINT: 1983.

[Frogolocalypse]

> We need taxation. We need monetary policy.

Yes to one, no to two. Monetary inflation allows governments to tax you by stealth. They then manipulate the inflation statistics (hedonic regression anyone?) to make it seem that inflation is lower than it is, so that your purchasing power is debased faster than the statistics. That's why house prices have exploded for 40 years, and just about anything you buy costs more by some orders of magnitude than what it should given CPI.

Bitcoin is the reckoning for that system. The government will be forced to accept that people will not hold their token except to pay taxes. When it is not possible to know the worth of someone, which is already painfully obvious for the very wealthy, the only taxable system will be on the use of goods and services in their respective governanace area.

[e3b0c]

> Monetary inflation allows governments to tax you by stealth.

It's even worth since rich people can easily exempt from it by allocating their wealth into inflation-proof assets while working class have to take a full exposure of it.

[dnautics]

moreover monetary inflation absolutely kills poor people and enables rich people to do things like leveraged investments, and drives the middle class into investing in corporations to stay afloat for retirement (essentially a subsidy for the wealthy).

[Frogolocalypse]

I think bitcoin will finally separate the good debt from the bad debt. It is my personal belief ( as in i don't know of any formal theory ) that debt should only be incurred for the use of building a productive asset. In a deflationary currency, this encourages businesses to ensure that productivity increases will have greater returns than savings. Instead, our financial system has encouraged the acquisition of debt for fixed assets. The only thing this has done is bid up the price of those fixed debts with debt, and handed over the money for supporting that system to banks and their owners. In order to stimulate growth in such a system, the only way that you can function is to tax savings. That's what inflation is. What it forces people to do is to invest in increasingly risky assets, because of the loss of their purchasing power. Hence bubble after bubble after bubble. Crisis after crisis after crisis.

Bitcoin will eventually stabilize to an ever appreciating value asset. But what it will allow you to do is save for a house. If you have a business proposal that encourages people to pay you for a good or service, people will invest their savings in it and take on that risk. Banks will instead move back to providing capital to businesses, using savings from people that are willing to invest. Businesses will again focus on productivity increases, because that's how you get access to capital.

I also don't think it is going to be resisted quite as much as people think it will be. People still need to pay their taxes, and that is not going to stop. The main thing it is going to do is prick the bubble of consumer debt, and remove the banking middle-men from that space. That alone is a multi-trillion dollar industry, let alone the annuities that banks own and graft from, from those assets. Removing these people (i.e. banking debt suppliers) from positions of power, by strangling their access to capital, is a justification for bitcoin in its own right. Imagine a world in which banks didn't control governments.

That's the way it is supposed to work i think. It is pure genius.

[21]

Your argument fails even with traditional currencies.

It's legal to own Euros in US (or the other way around), even if the US government can't control the Euro money supply, or people exchanging USD for Euros (yes, they have some levers, but it's not control)