Bitcoin Forum

The recent ECB report amply demonstrates that from central banking quarters there will be no informed public discussion of the crucial meta-issue bitcoin raises, why there is no free competition with the supra-state's monopoly money.  For such a thorough report to omit the elephant in the room, the gross market distortions and costs born by society while not allowing the ECB monetary product to be challenged and regulated by the natural forces of the free market, is transparently self-interested and in no way serves the public interest. Amazingly, the totalitarian stance being increasingly adopted by the state money powers to hold together their wretched, creaking fiat currency monopolies has been predicted as long ago as 1976.


http://mises.org/document/3970 (http://mises.org/document/3970)

Is it finally now time to try to coalesce willing partners, around bitcoin's working example, to create a Free Money Movement, as has been advocated already more than 35 years ago? How many more central bank instigated boom-bust cycles, inflations, stagflations, deflations, bouts of economic and financial instability, that benefit only a few at the expense of the majority, must we endure?

For instance, would the Bitcoin Foundation be willing to get involved, sponsor or otherwise support a Free Money Movement? Bitcoin can be exhibited as a transaction instrument to liberate people's economic welfare from the shackles of predatory banks (and states) whilst advocating for legal frameworks allowing people wide freedoms to choose any value transaction technology they prefer. Getting bogged down in moral judgements and details of bad things a minority do with money is a completely skewed perspective of reality, when balanced against the massive economic benefits stemming from efficient value transactions systems.

The more competition and innovation in such systems, as bitcoin, in this period of unprecedented increase in instantaneous inter-connectedness, is vital and the pay-offs to humanity potentially vast, particularly for the common man and less well off. The ECB report is an attempt to subjugate competitors and kill innovations, such as bitcoin, using its own blinkered vision as an "argument from authority" without any scientific, economic or moral basis, when the broader issues have never been debated. Perhaps the ECB are not even aware of them?

It is well past time for a Free Money Movement, are bitcoiners going to get on-board with this?!

Isn't Bitcoin already a 'movement' in its own right? It sounds like you're advocating more marketing, cold-calling, and pseudo-leadership/management mumbo-jumbo wrapped up in a non-profit organisation, but want to see how many suckers will pledge donations before doing anything. ;)

(Edit: sorry, my reply was only meant to be taken lightly, but my sarcasm levels seem to be a bit off today.)

Excellent Post, I really enjoyed reading this.

But more or less the same question as from blablahblah:

Isn't this at least the logical consequence of bitcoin?

Or isn't Bitcoin kind of a symptom that there already is such a movement?

But yes, if there official where something like this, count me in.

If you explained Bitcoin to strangers, in public, fairly often, many would walk away before the first 5 minutes

If you said what the OP said, I reckon you might stand a better chance of getting people interested in Bitcoin, say, 2-6 weeks later when they find it for themselves.

so true, but also understandabel for new people to get the benefits BTC brings...also time will tell them and hopefully for them there money didn,t burn completly away in the system we now have..  :o

It maybe a logical consequence of bitcoin regardless of whether a Free Money Movement exists or not, because the technology is hardened against vindictive political attacks, but do we really need to go there? As I see it, we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way, (the kicking, screaming locking people up, riots-in-the-streets way).

The easy way is to get the debate started already in the halls of academia, and amongst the chattering classes, spread the message as wide and far as possible that we NEED serious ground-up monetary reform now. The hope being to smooth the passage for cultural and political reform that freely allows bitcoin, and any other innovative value transfer technologies that may spring up to develop naturally and unimpeded, and that this is widely understood to be the good and right thing to do.

The ECB has already made clear that it considers bitcoin (and other "virtual currencies") as coming under its purview, this is wrong on several levels. ECB has no mandate to interfere with bitcoin in anyway, whatsoever.  The long bow they try to draw about "bitcoin possibly destabilising the system the public expects us to regulate" is a very tenuous link indeed and is a transparent fabrication to extend its lawful functions outside their mandated boundaries, with the evil intention to strangle the competition in the cradle.

If F. A. Hayek was wise and brave enough to advocate for a Free Money Movement in 1976, that's good enough for me ... my only question is where are all the freedom fighters willing to stand up and have their voices heard today?

PS: thanx for your vote of support, you and I make two.

You can always just delete such a mean-spirited post after the fact you know. If you are of a cynical mind then I guess you should just go looking for suckers ... there are of course many others ways you could help if you went looking for those also.

Such a Free Money Movement would spawn a plethora of non-profits I suppose, I have no interest in operating one. As long as they are getting the message out and spending the donor funds efficiently ... are they so different to the first bitcoin marketing video effort that was created from donated bitcoins?

Almost certainly when I bring up bitcoin, it ends up in a longer discussion.

Sorry to interfere with the general excitement...

The following is the irrational part of that stance:

Myabe Hayek's mind was dazed by some (possibly subconscious) leftovers of religious motives?


Anyway: The free exchange of market forces is similar to nature's forces.
These are not bound to be beneficial. In fact, nature doesn't know "good" and "bad".
Same for the market, which isn't "beneficial" but rather just indifferent.

The market connects in a seemingly random fashion any ends which just might be connected.
In the extreme, if there are people craving to get rich quickly, and if there is a pirate, the market connects them.


In all honesty, our feeling towards nature and anything going the way of nature is ambivalent. We love her like a mother, but the same time, since ages, we're building layers and layers of protection against "mother". More so, since several thousand years, we're living under the influence of formulated religions and have that deeply infested inner demand to do our "deal with the good". Note especially this includes the notion of "doing something".

This makes up for some thoroughly dishonest tendency in the apparent public opinion.
Everyone loves "freedom", especially monetary freedom. Everyone loves to evade tax. Everyone loves to make income and get a sweet life. But the moment something goes "wrong", be it just the natural oscillation of market equilibrium, be it just the average hurricane of the season, or some average pirates for that, immediately there is the demand "that something needs to be done about that".


Sure, there are some sketchy figures, doing extremely well in the vicinity of the state organisation. But it is simply not true that just a bunch of evildoers called "the state" is taking the oh so good population as hostages and brainwashes them. Letting all ideology and focussed conflicts aside, on the average, people roughly agree with the general direction things are going.

Technology wins. Technology is about doing something. Doing something about finances is finance technology.
When we're able to do much, the grand majority of every population will demand that much must be done.

You simply can't tell me that the majority will ever agree not to do large-scale finance technology, since we're capable of doing that.
This way, we get finance and market regulation. To put it maliciously, its just natural we're picking this route.

That's alright -- there won't be any informed private discussion either.  There'll be lots of propaganda to try and assassinate Bitcoin into stillbirth, but informed discussion?  Haha, nope.

-----------------------------------

There is an interesting phenomenon that takes place in large and inflexible organizations like governments and corporations (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong):

It usually is the case that most important issues are never to be discussed openly -- even if everyone is aware of the issues.  People who could conceivably bring those issues up and address them usually don't, because the mere acknowledgement of the issues might come across as "too threatening", or "out of line", or bringing the subject up costs these people status within their organization.  So the issue is dealt on the basis of a "common understanding" on a nod-nod-wink-wink basis.

This situation usually proves fatal to the organization.  That is how revolutions and bankruptcies happen, and people are left saying "well, we didn't see that coming, one day we were getting our paycheck and the next day the doors were boarded up".  It is quite literally the inevitable fault that causes threats to be unaddressed, which ultimately brings them down.

This is why we will prevail.

Welcome to the Free Money movement -- it's already here, and we are it.

Well, after rambling through your words, (some of them good, some misguided and misinformed) ... did you have a topical point regards a Free Money Movement?

I didn't see one in there.

OK intentions, just bad wording, hate deleting posts, and I was too tired to think of anything better. :)


They could also be looking out for Bitcoin? The vibe I got from some of the comments in the report made it seem like some messages were aimed at competing central banks, and there were even some subtle hints of MAD thinking. To paraphrase very loosely: "if you continue your crazy scheme of devaluing the dollar, forcing us to competitively devalue as well, and hoping that the dollar will be 'the last man standing', we may be forced to leverage the power of the media to popularise a viable alternative. If we go down, so do you!" If I can read into it like that, then the message must be very clear for power-hungry nut-jobs who are even more paranoid than I.

Notice that the report was written in English. Had it been aimed at domestic audiences, they could have written it in German or Dutch perhaps.

Your conclusion (or the conclusion within the quote) is superficial; more precisely, it's a merely formal conclusion.
For reasons of symmetry there "needs to be" a Free Money Movement, since this is "bound to be beneficial"

But your so called Free Money Movement is lacking substance -- or is otherwise comprised of mythological thinking.


The very things you're criticising so vigorously, the state, the laws, the monetary controls, the governments, the regulations and all that technocracy were exactly created "for the general good", to defeat specific problems and to improve the situation.

So there are two objections.

Fist, it is not clear how the "prompt removal of all the legal obstacles" will in any way improve the situation. There will certainly be the refreshing shock effect of removing worn-out cruft. But also a lot of old-known and new problems will spring up, to which we don't have any conclusive answer either.

Secondly, there is no impetus for such a "movement", beyond very specific circles of educated people, geeks and technocrates. The average folks neither want to be blessed by socialism, nor do they long for the blessings of libertinarism -- mostly, they just want to be left alone, and when matters go wrong, "something needs to be done about it"


Thus, we even might be successful with igniting a movement of "Hope" and "Change". And then??
Then... the "movement" will find itself right in the middle of the task of addressing this and fixing that -- effectively it will be turned into building --
guess what -- a technological system of monetary control. How brilliant.


So to conclude: We don't need more Manifestos, yet more public relations and all that "movement business".
And we're not going to save the world.
But it is possible, and we should concede that we're reworking and rebuilding a subsystem of an increasingly interconnected world.
Nothing more and nothing less.

No, not really.  I would beg to differ.  While I agree that these things were sold to the public under the pretenses you cite, the real purpose is simply control freakery and profit: to control the tax farm more tightly.  The ostensible purpose does not match the real purpose, and I know this because I can see that the observable effect does not match the allegations.

If a guy on the street grabbed a hammer "for the purpose of hammering a nail", and used it instead to bash someone's head in, would you believe his alleged "purpose"?  Does the ostensible purpose match the observable purpose?

No.

I say the same is true about these things your interlocutor is criticizing.

Now, I could sit here and give you a gigabyte-long printout of exactly how those things were sold under false pretenses, but instead I'll give you the one case I consider to be humanly incontestable.  "Governments" were "created" to allegedly protect their own people, yet just in the 20th century, they slaughtered more than 270 million of their own people, excluding wars.


So.... in closing... these things you speak of?  They're not for your own good.  Anyone who tries to sell you a "solution" to social problems that requires threatening millions of peaceful people with violence, is an anti-social person and you should tell them to GTFO.

Nail on.
And if he actually uses the hammer for nailing?

Your response nicely demonstrates that kind of muddy mythological thinking I am criticising here.

In your thinking style, there are the "evil ones" and the "good ones". Each of them is so substantialy and clear.
Nothing of that matches reality in any way.

In your thinking style, there is an magical mythological evil entity called "the state". Which has nothing to do with the "real people". And "government" activities are obviously always staged, pretended, sold and manipulated, like in the next best, average shady Hollywood-Thriller.


Fact is: "The Government" is up to the very last bit and atom part of a Nation and the population, the people making up the government are right from the middle of the nation, and supported by it. "They" is in fact "us". We're sharing the same believes, the same thinking style, the same values, the same hopes, goals and demands. We all, including the government, are solving problems with roughly the same methods, including "collateral damage" when it comes in handy.

It is utterly true that the government, and thus we are killing our brothers and sisters. Face it.
It is also true that with tax money, we're feeding the poor and helpless, supporting the sick, running schools and universities, building streets and railways, building tanks and bombs and in doing so, are keeping a significant part of the population in employment. Face it.
None of this is "good" or "evil", all of this is mixed. Face it

Umm, you might be confusing me for someone else.  Never have I said anything of the sort, and of course I won't be responding to comments that put words in my mouth.  While I technically could, It wouldn't make any sense for me to defend views I do not hold.

Also, can you tone it down on the "your thinking is mythological" unsubstantiated assertions?  I find it hard to sustain a conversation with someone who from the outset assumes that his interlocutor (me) must necessarily be so wrong as to willfully believe in fantasies.  It frustrates me, because I get the feeling that the other person just won't listen to anything I say.

Now, going back to the topic -- and staying there -- how about responding to the argument http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLODu02R_gA&feature=youtu.be&t=17m13s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLODu02R_gA&feature=youtu.be&t=17m13s)?  Respond directly to what I said instead of introducing new ideas (don't break rule #1 in the handy guide on my signature right here below), and I'll gladly have a conversation with you.  Thanks for your cooperation :-)

...and they're doing such a bang-up job of it. Does Dodd-Frank ring a bell? :-|

It's been said that the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. I think an analogous case can be made for Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies that they can be useful for working around an increasingly broken central-banking system.

...which would underpin, that it's rather an ongoing process of patching and fixing and sometimes maybe improving the situation.

Since the new methods of organising fincance -- i.e. computer based, distributed, decentralised  -- aim at the same goals and are supported by the same basic values than the existing system which they augment and maybe even replace, there is no guarantee that those new methods will actually perform better. There is some likelyhood that -- assumed a "Bitcoin Free Money Movement" takes over, it will do the same kind of a bang-up job, or maybe even worse.

Wer're really far from any clear understanding of our large scale ecoonomy, and thus it would be prudent not to start big movements or promise solutions which are "bound to throw up beneficial results which we cannot now foresee". We should go the unspectacular path.

So after all that, basically you want to say that you think that a Free Money Movement would be a bad idea.

We get it, you disagree with Hayek. Your ideological stance based on your subjective opinion (gut feel?) is that the freedom to experiment with value transfer information technologies of choice would be a bad idea.

(Hint: do some research on efficiencies provided by emergent behaviours if you have doubts about the efficacy of free markets and freedom in general.)

Thanks for your input, can we move back to the topic now, and stop derailing and dragging the thread off on wrong-headed, illogical tangents?

Well said.  Anyone who continues to insist in saying "Bitcoin baaaaaaaaad" can start a new thread, thanks.

This is your supposition. Are you lacking the ability to read my responses and understand them?

Come on, you seem to be the people spreading ideology here.
Hayek to the contrary was a educated and insightful person


And now right away you start the defaming. Is your argumentative position really this weak?

If someone contradicts you, this obviously is "derailing" and "dragging", wrong-headed, illogical and so forth.To apply your kind of "reasoning": it needs to be, since, by presupposition, everyone who doesn't like the "right" point of view needs to be brainwashed.

---

So to draw some intermediary conclusions.
Up to now, you have provided zero arguments to show that there is the necessity of a "Movement". And you have provided zero substantial content for such a "movement". All you have done is to allude vaguely, that, by "prompt removal of all the legal obstacles", somehow magically things will turn to the better. Step-1: destroy existing structures. Step-2: everything becomes "good".

But actually we lack a coherent model of the existing structures. And existing societies aren't coherent either. So we don't know what to "remove". And, even more importantly, it is not clear what is "good" and "the better". Actually this is the most pressing issue. People disagree so vigorously on what is "good" that they're readily start killing each other about those questions of "doing it right".


So we don't need "Movements", actionism and propaganda, but we need understanding.
And we need the empirical approach: build small unspectacular but innovative things and study how they're working out.

If there is something in the last years since the crisis which could be labelled a "movement" of some kind, then it's the new openness within the economic sciences. There isn't just the Austrian school, there is a whole bunch of heterodox schools of thought, which engage in discussions crossing the boundaries of the individual schools. There is even some openness within the mainstream economy at places.

This is a step in the right direction. And it also makes still the more painfully clear, that, overall, putting all the various schools of thought together, we fail to capture even the simplest concepts of the economic reality consistently.

This is where we should start with doing our homework. Abandon the "right solutions" and start understanding the real world.

Economics is not a science.

So in amongst this whole trolling spiel have you come up with one good reason why the maximal amount of freedom possible to experiment with any/all value transfer systems is the wrong solution? Logically, it is the only rational solution to a messy, complicated, real world system, where noone can have complete knowledge ... i.e. as a single controller system it is uncontrollable because there are always system dynamics that are unobservable.

This is my basic supposition, so far you have nothing to refute it instead you spam this topic with some tangential reasoning and underhanded digs and jibes. Clever, but useless and not helpful ... please start your own thread somewhere else, call it the Anti-Free Money Movement or whatever?

The topic was how to get such a movement going, NOT arguments of why it is/isn't a bad idea. Take your arguments elsewhere (this is the third time I've asked you).

PS:
And the one thing you did not re-quote:
(Hint: do some research on efficiencies provided by emergent behaviours if you have doubts about the efficacy of free markets and freedom in general.)

You start a thread, asking "Is it finally now time to try to coalesce willing partners"

So you have to stand that someone answers, no, it is not the time.
Your proposed movement is lacking substance. Unless your goal is to start a believe-system,
a "church of satoshi" where every diverging pont of view will be banned to hell.

Up to now, you were only able to provide vague hints, lots of allusions and propaganda-speak.
And all your messages are coloured by a hymnic tone.

And yes, economy and financial constructions are rational endeavours, so only arguments count.


"the gross market distortions and costs born by society while not allowing the ECB monetary product to be challenged and regulated by the natural forces of the free market"

"How many more central bank instigated boom-bust cycles, inflations, stagflations, deflations, bouts of economic and financial instability, that benefit only a few at the expense of the majority, must we endure? "

unproven pretences.
It is unproven that the current crisis is caused by "regulation". It has some likelihood, but we don't know anything conclusive. Some schools of thought say yes, others pretend that regulation damps and ameliorates the problems. And none of the economic schools has come up with a conclusive model of the macro economy.

It is controversial that the boom-bust cycles are instigated by central banking. The form they are taking on is certainly shaped by the existing economic system. But, given what we know about closely coupled, networked systems, there is a high probability that huge oscillations are inevitable.


And what is even more important: your core assumption is tainted by mythological, irrational concepts.

Hey, come on. What the hell is "natural"?? We're living in a man-made civilisation since ages.
And how come you to assume that "nature" will work to the "good"

And what "freedom"? Freedom for the Americans to consume all the natural resources of the planet? Freedom for the Chinese to do the same? Freedom for the Mafia? and so on.

You're barely scratching the surface of the problem.


"the totalitarian stance being increasingly adopted by the state money powers to hold together their wretched, creaking fiat currency monopolies"

An increase of "totalitarianism" by an purposeful evil instance "state/banks" is also an unproven pretence.

The fact is: we have now increased technological means at our disposal. The economy and especially investment banking system is readily using them. The Mafia is using them. With some delay, the governmental systems are using them. And now, the anarchistic grass-root circles also start using them. Its an arms race. Everyone of these is following their own agenda, and none of these agendas do align with one another. That's our current situation.


No one denies that the global economy is facing difficult times.

But what exactly are you proposing as a solution? Huh?
Well, that's my criticism. You don't have anything substantial to propose.
You want to "remove" some "obstacles" but you can't even tell what to remove precisely.
Nuke away all banks? Fine. And then? what happens then?? This is Kindergarten level.

---

In your initial message, you refer to "Bitcoin's working example"

Please be more specific regarding this "working example"!

Up to now, there is a niche economy, which just extends existing structures of the economy. Most notably there is Silk Road. Then there are lots of clone-copies of financial instruments taken from existing world of finance. Some start-ups create competition in payment systems. Fine, but nothing new. And there is a promising feed of further project-ideas and small shops accepting bitcoin.

The existing economic activity in bitcoin land is afflicted, even scattered by scams. And after the initial excitement is gone, there is now demand within the community for a "Bitcoin Police". There are endless, non-conclusive discussions about "tainted coins" and "regulating bitcoin", becoming "legit" or going to the dark market and so on.

This is all nowhere close to a working example of a healthy economy.

It is promising, indeed. Especially the stuff the developers are working on right now. This stuff has the potential to open some new possibilities, like a -- lets call it "anonymous, mechanised trust" (based on coloured coins, contracts or similar stuff). But, right now, no one really knows how to put all these approaches together, it just has to be tried. There needs to be much of small steps, trial and error, economic failure to learn from.

So we have lots of work to do. The last thing we need right now is a "we against them" and "good against evil" mindset.
So please stop it and provide something rational and substantial.


And now it's your turn.

Okay, so I'll put you down for a definite no then, (timing is wrong).

Next.

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=3420 (http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=3420)


Thought this subtle, yet crucial, point was made succinctly.

The creation of Napster meant the music industry was obsolete.

The creation of Bitcoin means the banking industry is obsolete.

All that is needed is participation, the rest will take care of itself - inexorably and silently until the walls crumble down upon those holding meetings to handle the "new" threat.

Yeah, maybe. But look how the whole Napster, Gnutella, Lime-Wire, MegaUpload thing panned out? We now have massive state apparatus in place globally for monitoring points on the internet ostensibly for "illegal" file-sharing, and who knows what else that will be used for in time? If back when there was enough wisdom and education within policy-making (and less vested interests from the twilight industries) file-sharing may have been widely accepted as a natural evolution of an interconnected network of computers, something to be embraced, not feared and hounded out to the margins of acceptability.

If freedom was widely accepted as the way forward to a prosperous future, not something to be feared in ignorance, and regulated out of existence, how much better off could we be? Maybe there aren't any purely evil actors within the central banking structures (not going to rule that out though) but that does not mean the structure itself can not be systemically evil, an out of control gargantuan machine of oppression.

And how is that 'massive state apparatus' funded? Confiscation through inflation which is a form of taxation without representation.

Bitcoin is a lot different because its very adoption results in less resources channeled to the State without the explicit, voluntary and informed consent of the populace.

http://lfb.org/today/currencies-of-the-future/ (http://lfb.org/today/currencies-of-the-future/)



And so it begins .... the more widely it becomes recognised that the monopoly of the money power is the problem, (to the point of being 'obvious' in retrospect), the faster the market can be allowed to fix it.

Money? I do not see money. Bitcoin is just a sophistcated transaction ledger.

Or maybe it is simply a Digital commodity.

Bitcoin's strength is that it relies on a statistical proof-of-work and cryptographic signature to determine if a given transaction is "legitimate." Authority (and Bankers) see this strength as a weakness since no transaction can be black-listed and reversed. That dynamic does not imply that the "free market" will actually do things "better", since the free market is only concerned with the price sytem (ie: it knows the price of everything and the value of nothing).

The discussion about filesharing brings up an important point: If you are focusing only on "free money", your focus may be too narrow. General Purpose computers are being phased out. Source: My "Common Mathematical Locks" page. (http://www.phillipsjk.ca/math_locks/) Walled gardens are going to be very bad for Bitcoin: since they are the definition of central control.

Could you explain what "statistical proof-of-work" means? I could not find anything on it

It is kind of off topic, but what I mean is that you can not prove that any given winning block really took trillions of trials. What you can do is say that: "On average, solving a block will take X trials, which will conusume Y joules using current hardware."
Since:

• as far as we know, the hashes are unpreditictable

Thus:

• the trials are independent
• and winning blocks will follow a Poisson Distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution) when counting the number of trials required for each block for a given number of trials, assuming the difficulty stays the same.
  

Edit: formatting. I fail statistics forever.

Got it, crystal clear

/off topic

Here's another topical article that's worth a perusal:


http://lfb.org/today/good-money-is-real-money/ (http://lfb.org/today/good-money-is-real-money/)

http://voluntaryist.com/backissues/156.pdf (http://voluntaryist.com/backissues/156.pdf)

"Freedom to Choose your Own Money"

Short article, basic primer on philosophical background and practical considerations.