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by olvar_
3084 days ago
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Not a libertarian nor a bitcoin fan, but I have to disagree with OP.
First, he postulates a gedankenexperiment where bitcoin replaces the dollar, but since it tends to appreciate in value, no one actually spends their money, so the economy halts. This train of though obviously neglects the fact that, if it actually replaced the dollar, people would _need_ to use and spend their bitcoins, so its price action would be very different to what we have seen. Then he goes and mocks the idea of having a trustless currency system but IMO he misunderstands the idea. If you use the currency for exchange you still have to trust other people, for instance if I use bitcoin on Amazon, I'd still need to trust Amazon and possibly some other merchant. The part of trust you are taking away is not between people, but towards the ability of the State to issue money and regulate its value. But then libertarians may come up with some other ways to achieve this that do not involve cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, you don't need to be a libertarian to agree on that principle. One example of this is Chilean Central Bank, which -unlike the FED and by the Chilean constitution- cannot buy the government's debt, so the government can't just keep printing money for political reasons, like many countries in the region have been doing for decades. So whatever lesson he is trying to teach seems a bit farfetched. Bitcoin may die and not mean a single thing for libertarianism, because IMO it's success depends on technical implementation, not ideological barriers. |
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100% agree. The technical details of bitcoin's implementation are taken up (despite being a red herring) by the author as an indictment of libertarian principles themselves, probably the reason he focuses on the oldest and most technologically outdated crypto out of the major ones.