[cyphertruck]

This article is knocking down a squadron of strawmen. First off, bitcoins key attribute is not “privacy” but censorship resistance. It’s why wikileaks has been able to keep operating all these years after being cancelled by the mainstream payments industry. Not to mention many smaller, politically oppressed activist organizations, and much of the marijuana industry.

Secondly, the attributes of money are, according to Rothbard from memory:

- hard to counterfeit: bitcoin has this better than anything else.

- a store of value (not price stability.): It’s doing this great, just don’t buy late in the post halvining revaluation period. (Bitcoin haters don't seem to know the halvening exists. Bitcoiners are not worried about “price stability”.)

- divisible: down to 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin, further possible with lightning. This rnables micro transactions.

- immune to spoilage: bitcoin can’t dissolve in water like salt (a previous form of money) and is quite robust, and can be backed up!

- easy to transport: bitcoin can be stored in any number of ways, more portable than paper money even.

- fungible: bitcoin is pretty fungible, but anti-freedom forces are trying to change that.

- liquid: bitcoin is extremely liquid with a global exchange network and ATMs all over and multiple p2p exchange services like localbitcoins.com to serve even places like the Sudan. Is paypal easy to use in the Sudan? Bitcoin is a more liquid form if money than anything other than the US Dollar and is competitive even there.

What bitcoin IS NOT, is a collectible like baseball cards. Baseball cards are absolutely not fungible— that is what makes them collectible! A babe ruth rookie card in mint is worth a lot more than last years random rookie card.

The author of this piece doesn’t understand what money is, or why bitcoin is the way it is, which means they haven’t done basic research.

I understand, certain people really hate bitcoin— and for good reason. Bitcoin will eventually obsolete the fiat inflation system which has created the wealth inequality in much of the world. The system that lets politicians buy power and escape responsibility for violating rights.

Bitcoin destroys the number one tool of human oppression.

A tool which, by the way, paid money to indoctrinate people into beliefs that result in them hating bitcoin.

But bitcoin isn’t alive. The hate doesn't affect it. Bitcoin is a well constructed set of incentives.

Embrace or ignore, your choice.

[mrpopo]

> I understand, certain people really hate bitcoin— and fir good reason. Bitcoin will eventually obsolete the fiat inflation system which has created all the wealth inequality in much of the world. The system that lets politicians buy power and escape responsibility for violating rights.

What part of Bitcoin abolishes corruption, power-grabbing and bribes? How would it fix anything you accuse the current system of?

Actually, the deflatory effect of Bitcoin is more likely to create the kind of issues you mentioned, as there are historical examples (Great Depression).

I "hate" (rather, despise) Bitcoin because it's an obsolete Blockchain technology that uses absurd amounts of energy for the purpose of calculating SHA-1 hashes. There are dozens of other protocols that have taken off, that either don't use POW, or that use POW in a more useful manner.

[cyphertruck]

When you cannot rob from the poor via inflation then it becomes harder to oppress them.

The Great Depression was caused by the government making gold illegal, effectively confiscating the nations wealth and replacing it with massive fiat inflation. It was a period of monetary inflation that caused and economic contraction.

One if the ways inflation is used to indoctrinate people against their best interests is demonizing “deflation” by conflating it with the contraction in the Great Depression.

A grandma on fixed income shouldn’t have her prices go up %30 because politicians wanted to spend trillions to pay off bribes, as we have seen in the past year, where our monetary base was increased by $7T (or more) with only a fraction going to benefit Americans.

There is nothing yet discovered that can replace proof of work. There are a lot if people selling scams who think proof if work is a weakness, but they are always centralized (ethereum, dash) or PoW masquerading as something else, or simply not a cryptocurrency (ripple).

[qwytw]

What about a farmer with a "fixed" mortgage on his farm who can no longer afford paying it since grain prices fell by 50%? (Which is something that actually happened to millions of people). There is hardly anything worse that can happen to a modern debt based economy than significant deflation.

Claiming that the great depression or the long depression that preceded it were not exacerbated by the governments inability or unwillingness to artificially inflate the money supply is delusional. The deflation rate was above was 9% in 19931, 10% in 1932 this continued until 1934 which when prices started rising again, however 38 and 39 again had negative inflation.

The period preceding the great depression was not inflationary either, inflation in 1921 & 1922 was -10% and -6.15% and the rest of the years had relatively low inflation. In fact the Dollar's value only fell back to what it was in 1920 in 1946.

[mrpopo]

> The Great Depression was caused by the government making gold illegal

Look, I'm not going to try to convince you. You're trying to protect your assets by denying reality, maybe you have a family to feed, maybe you just want to go to the moon, whatever.

For everyone else, I invite you to study history. The depression happened before anyone touched the gold standard. Countries that abandoned the gold standard earlier have recovered faster. Don't believe me, please read books.

Other important note. You can become rich with Bitcoin, yes. Being richer doesn't make you smarter.

[UncleMeat]

> When you cannot rob from the poor via inflation then it becomes harder to oppress them.

As we all know, there was remarkably little oppression of the poor back when we used the gold standard and minting new money was limited.

[rspeele]

It's not quite universal to say inflation robs from the poor. Some poor people like your fixed-income grandma example are hit hard by inflation. Some are hardly affected since they live paycheck to paycheck and don't keep savings. Others benefit from it -- in particular, those who have more debt than savings. Inflation is good for debtors and bad for creditors.

Anyway, I'm hardly opposed to keeping inflation low. I would be fine with 0 inflation, for that matter. By 0 inflation, I don't mean a fixed money supply. I mean $X pays for about the same amount of goods 10 years from now as it does today.

Accepting limitless deflation via a fixed monetary supply is just as absurd as accepting limitless inflation.

It does not make sense to base a monetary system on a token that represents "1/k of all the wealth", where k is a constant. So just by stuffing the token under your mattress, contributing to zero economic activity, you reap the rewards of all economic growth that added wealth to the world.

Here's how I see it:

The US M2 money supply grew from $286B in 1959 to $19,670B in 2021.

With that came inflation: a dollar in 1959 could buy roughly what $9.13 buys today, according to the BLS.

But that level of inflation is not even close to 1:1 with the money supply increase.

The money supply grew to almost 69x its 1959 size, but the dollar is worth 1/9th what it used to be, not 1/69th. That's because the whole pile of dollars put together are representing more real world wealth than existed back then. The economy has grown, more people are participating in it, and it's making more stuff people value.

Maybe the correct level of growth in the money supply would've been 9x smaller, for no inflation. So the dollar today would buy roughly what it did back in 1959. I suppose that would be OK. But that's still a money supply increase from $286B to $2,193B.

What if the money supply was fixed? So instead of roughly 9.1x inflation, we'd have roughly 7.7x deflation: the dollar today would buy 7.7x the stuff it bought back in 1959. How is that fair? Grandpa's pay for a day's work back in '59, which he put in a safe and forgot about, is worth what I get for a week and a half of work in 2021? Talk about oppressing the poor, you're never going to beat "old money" in this system. The longer the family has been wealthy the more unattainable their savings will be in terms of present-day wages and earnings.

And that's all assuming the best case scenario, which is that the 7.7x economic growth still happens with this deflationary currency. I could easily see it being lower given that there's less incentive for anybody to invest in businesses.

[afarrell]

> the fiat inflation system which has created all the wealth inequality in much of the world.

> The system that lets politicians buy power and escape responsibility for violating rights.

Wouldn’t it be more energy-efficient to just go back to golden years before William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 presidential campaign?

Can you think of historical examples of dramatic wealth inequality or misuse of political power? As surely as the Dalai Llama is Catholic, history shows us that empires and robber-barons were vanishingly rare before Bretton Woods.

[cyphertruck]

Your statement about history is probably correct, but I don't agree about energy efficiency. Bitcoin is more energy efficient than gold. Most bitcoin power use is waste power— eg power generated which exceeds instantaneous demand, and bitcoin’s entire power usage is still 1/6th of what is currently thrown away... if bitcoin ever fails to deliver utility beyond its power cost, the network will reduce mining because mining will no longer be profitable.

Cheers!

[mrpopo]

What you're saying about bitcoin power use is just not true.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-03-04/china-s-inn...

[qwytw]

- immune to spoilage: bitcoin can’t dissolve in water like salt (a previous form of money) and is quite robust, and can be backed up!

This is a very silly claim considering that 20% of all bitcoin is considered to be "lost" and can't be recovered. Due to the nature of bitcoin this figure should reach 100% eventually (of course this would be a very slow process as long as it has a very high price).

btw I'm not sure if you're aware but you can actually recover salt which was dissolved in water.

Also historically there is no conclusive evidence that salt's use as currency was ever particularly widespread.

[novok]

Inequality comes from power, and fiat inflation where power determines who gets the newly printed money is just one form of that. Inequality existed back when money was hard, and it will continue to exist even if another form of digital hard money replaces it. Money is a form of social organization of humans and an information system, and you always have to remember the humans is what keeps the entire thing running.

[cyphertruck]

I cannot believe I forgot one of the requirements for money. Thst is scarcity. In this regard bitcoin beats everything else, and especially beats baseball cards. Unlimited dollars can be printed and baseball cards rven more so.

Gold is genuinely scarce but there is %1 inflation and the asteroid mining risk.

Meanwhile bitcoins inflation rate gets cut in half every 4 years until it becomes zero in 2140.

[qwytw]

How is having a inherently deflationary currency a positive thing though? That's the worse attribute a currency can have unless your goal is to maximize wealth inequality...

[rspeele]

> - immune to spoilage: bitcoin can’t dissolve in water like salt (a previous form of money) and is quite robust, and can be backed up!

I presume that in societies that used salt as money, anybody who lost it to "spoilage" was considered to be responsible for their own loss and this was not considered a downside of the salt-based economy.

Similar to throwing out a hard drive with your Bitcoin wallet on it, or sending coins to an address nobody has the private key to, or dying without telling anybody how to access your bitcoins.