Bitcoin Forum

It has the potential to hamper the government's ability to run society by allowing for citizens to control the earnings of their labor in an anonymous private environment. There is little accountability in a citizen paying their dues. How could you like this? Why are you here? Why don't you just keep supporting the US dollar or other fiat currencies?

this should be interesting.

It's possible to wish for the government to provide welfare or regulate the economy while also wishing for an honest hard money system. These goals are not incompatible or contradictory.

I don't think Bitcoin hampers a government's ability to fund itself any more than the use of cash does. Any business of significant size won't be able to get around paying all legally required taxes regardless of whether they use USD or alternative currencies. Bitcoin no more subverts the welfare state than shopping at the farmers' market.

there is no BitCoin specific here.
some people have golden hearts, some was had stone-made inside.
also fundamental mistake here: not government run society, but society run government. smoke politology a bit, please.

I think there is no way you could provide social-democratic type of welfare with "honest hard money system". I think welfare is largely based on the dishonesty of the fiat currency and central banking. Fiat currency and ever-growing public debt is a way around the fact that welfare simply leads to bankruptcy. Plain and simple. People just don't see how their money is stolen from them until the government is completely bankrupt like in Greece. With "honest hard money system" people would see it from the start and there would be soon a bloody revolt. If you think you could just rise taxes for some rich people and fund welfare to millions of unproductive types, you are a lunatic.

I see BitCoin as a more secure way to handle money with low transaction fees. Not that I like taxes but governments could still tax corporations and individuals in a BitCoin economy.

This is certainly true.  Do you know any farmers who pay sales taxes because they sell extra veggies at a farmers' market?  I know I don't.  The goverment agents don't get sideways with them because 1) it's a small market with little expected gain 2) it's bad p.r. because they know that the public favors these markets and 3) it would help to come down on publicly advertised farmers' markets because they know that there is already a great deal more private activity that they can't find.  Farmers' markets are like advertising for the farmers that do this kind of thing, they aren't the bulk of the dark market activity.

If Bitcoin ever goes truly mainstream, the governments of the "Western" nations are most definitely going to feel the pinch, and most of them already have enough trouble paying for the social services as it is.  Considering that governments worldwide really do consider "national defense" (however they define it) to be their primary reason for existence, do you think that social safety nets are going to be supported while the pentagon has to hold a bake sale?

I'm sure that they will think of something, rather than just close up shop.  Still, that does not mean that governments will be able to continue as they have for the past 60 years.  Most governments wouldn't stand a chance getting a deficit budget to work without the central bank's implicit ability to manipulate the value of the currency.

Rick Falkvinge had an interesting post on this topic recently:

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/19/the-information-policy-case-for-flat-tax-and-basic-income/

Why you preoccupied with liberals, politics, conservatives - etc.

Who gives a fuck?  Seriously?

I'm here to make money.  Guess what?  No ideology makes sense,  in fact, nothing does.

World record for the most loaded question.

I see no functional difference between bitcoin and cash in this regard.

i don't "like" bitcoin per se, but i find it an interesting idea and am interesting in seeing how an economy will function with a non-inflationary currency.

just because a portion of the bitcoin community is populated by anarchists, lunatics, and hopefully not terrorists doesn't means i can't find bitcoin useful and/or interesting.

Would the poster care to define the term 'liberal'?

It seems some Americans have twisted the definition. In the rest of the world economic liberalism is what American's call conservatism. Social conservatism is something like parenting. From my understanding of the terms, conservative implies content to preserve the status quo, tradition, tending not to change, and obedience to authority. Where as liberal, sharing the same root as liberty and libertarian, stands for freedom, generosity, and equal rights. Liberals rejected hereditary status, established religion, and monarchy in favour of the rule of law and fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property. At what point did the term change for the negative?

Are asking those liberals defined above why they support BitCoin?

Pretty much at the point that liberals decided to abandon the concept of rights in favor of mobocracy and wealth redistribution.

The mob is an evolutionary outcome.  You can't avoid it, just like you can't avoid stupid people.  A product of evolution.

Sometime after the death of FDR, the "progressive" movement that characterized the entire first half of the last century in the United States was discredited as having largely been co-opted by socialists.  Following this, these same socialist-lite progressives altered the public image during the next several decades by taking the term 'liberal' from what was once the libertarians of the day.  The liberty minded liberals of the 1900's and earlier are often called "classical liberals" today, and that means roughly the same thing as the term "libertarian" in the modern lexicon; which is a word that was made up in the 1970's because 'social progressives' had distorted the term in the view of the US political context.  So when you hear someone from the United States say "liberal" or "progressive" in a political context, Europeans can safely hear "socialist" and be pretty close.  Although Europeans are not likely to look at Obama and think that he compares with the socialists or progressives in European politics, this is because Obama can only do so much without severe political backlash and not a fundamental difference in ideology.

However, your understanding of "conservative" in the US context is also a bit wrong.  Generally speaking, a "conservative" in the US political context is not someone who wishes to 'preserve' the status quo, but a 'fascist lite'.

When the conservative election winning professionals blabbed about it to the uneducated fox news viewers.


To answer the OP.

Bitcoins are not going to change the way society operates but if they do, great. If you sit down 1 on 1 with a liberal ask them how they feel about the value of the dollar I doubt your answer would be much different then that of a "conservative". You're implying an awful lot about liberals and come off as rather elitist in your main post.   

In my experience, people who say stuff like this don't watch Fox News enough to even know anything useful about the network or their viewership.  Like those who blab about how crazy Glenn Beck is only know what he looks like from two minutes youtube outakes.

I never implied anything about Glenn Beck. Fox news has great ratings and has the older Conservative demographic and have used that platform to help successfully turn Liberal into a bad word. I'm not bashing fox news and I actually like judge napolitano and bill o'reilly, they seem to be the smartest people on the network. Shepard Smith is great also.

I consider myself a fiscal conservative but a social liberal. The government should help provide for the welfare of its citizens but shouldn't be wasting money on things it shouldn't have a hand in. Military spending is out of control and so are the corporate hand outs. We could easily afford for everyone to have food, shelter, and healthcare if we weren't so busy throwing money down the toilet on bombs and bailouts.

I like bitcoin because in the age of credit default swaps, naked short sells, derivatives, and currency manipulation, there is a community that thrusts a finger at the banksters and is trying to bring sanity back to commerce.

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - Paul Krugman

LotR was a great story, AS only so-so.  Both stories existed to promote an ideology of the author, LotR was just more subtle.

And Paul Krugman is a racist.

This was a true statement as recently as 2006, but it is no longer true.  The US can no longer afford it's own social safety nets even if the entire military and war budgets were completely eliminated.

Liberal was already a bad word long before Fox existed as a network, much less before Fox News did.

Considering this is an international endeavor to create an alternate (if not disruptive) economic system, why not abandon loaded words that don't translate across borders, even while using the same language. Fiscal conservative, classical liberal, libertarian, progressive liberal. It makes the mind spin.

con·ser·va·tive  (adj.) 1. Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change. 2. Traditional or restrained in style. 3. Moderate; cautious: a conservative estimate.

lib·er·al  adj. 1. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. 2. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

Clearly none of these words appropriately describes this group (opposing change while free from bigotry). Why not predictablism, decentralism, In People We Trust.

I like Bitcoin because of its practical applications, not for ideological/political reasons.  

Perhaps Bitcoin, or similar technologies, will shake up the welfare state as we know it. Perhaps it won't. Who cares? IMO it's a waste of time worrying too much about the future of society. There are too many unknowns. We will find a way of dealing with those problems when (if) they happen.

By the way, there are examples of low tax and no tax countries that still have a welfare system, and quite a generous one at that.  Switzerland and Singapore come to mind.  Running a welfare system actually isn't that expensive if it is done well. The problem with the US government is that it's horribly inefficient at running its public welfare and healthcare systems.  It  will soon run out of money, Bitcoin or no Bitcoin.


PS. I'm not strictly speaking a "liberal".

It is a mistake to think there is no political consequences to technologies. Take a look at the Arab Spring. If bitcoin is a libertarian pipe dream, the political implication for conservatives/liberals are simply, dire.

The US can afford them just fine, they just need to stop handing out blank cheques to private industry.

Unless there's some other reason why the US government (federal and state ones) spends more per capita on health than the Canadian government (again, federal and provincial) does, and then spends more than that again in private funding.

Mobs tend to run off of cliffs. Individuals don't. Mobs are as evolutionary inferior to individuals as flagella are to legs.

Sorry, but you're wrong.

O rly? Try observing a mob in action some time. Observe football hooligans, panicked crowds, political rallies. Individuals by themselves are simply not capable of the manically destructive behavior of groups. It's basic sociology - the intelligence and sensibility of a group tends towards the lowest common denominator. One can only say that a mob is superior to an individual if one believes that the only way to get things done is to break things and kill people. And if you believe that, then you're a freaking psychopath and I don't believe you're worth arguing with.

Mobs wouldn't exist if they weren't evolutionary products, try again.

You are mistaken if you believe that the mob is anything new. In fact, it preexists human society. Reason evolved away from it, not into it. Try again.

Just because something evolved doesn't mean it's good. Chickens evolved from dinosaurs. According to you, that makes them superior. But I'm eating a chicken right now. It is human reason - something notably absent from a mob - which has enabled me to do so. Really, I used to think that Ayn Rand was full of it when she wrote villains who saw the mind as a step backwards for the human race. In light of this conversation, I stand corrected.

For a long time the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil was the working of a lone nut living in a cabin far from civilization. Individuals can be incredibly destructive too. That said, there is something very true about your statements regarding mob mentality. For the most part I would not argue that mobs are a good thing, but insofar as they are the mechanism of revolution, violent or not, they have played an important role in history. Mobs, like them or not, are the mechanism by which the masses remind the rulers that they are in power because we allow them to remain so. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Also, OP needs to learn himself some proper vocabulary. To speak of Liberalism (a point along an economic scale) as though it were the opposite of conservatism (a point along a social scale) only serves to reveal that he is not only a troll, but a poorly-educated troll. For the record, the opposite of Liberalism is Communism. Someone who properly qualifies as a "liberal" believes in the right to personal property, whereas someone who is a "communist" believes only in communal property. The second scale I spoke of is a social one, with anarchism (no government) at one end and fascism (all-controlling government) at the other. Conservatism would, therefore, be a point along the sociological anarcho-fascist scale, closer to but still nowhere near fascism.

In summation: Not only is liberalism NOT the opposite of conservatism, they are not even on the same scale. You are comparing apples to chihuhuas.

No individual terrorist was ever as destructive as the wars waged by states. And states are the distillate essence of mob mentality.


Perhaps it's time for violent revolution to be eclipsed by peaceful evolution.

Just because mobs have accomplished things in the past which we may describe as "better" than the conditions they overthrew doesn't mean that it was the best possible outcome. Imagine if the American colonists, for example, had stuck to a strict policy of sniping from the woods instead of following good ol' Generalissimo Washington into muzzle-to-muzzle combat culminating in mobs charging at each other across open field.

The mob mentality is a reversion into savagery.

Actually, revolution is the more evolved form of evolution. Evolution only functions on time scales measured in millions or billions of years. We humans have begun doing things for which evolution is far too slow to react. In fact, over any time scale meaningful to most human civilization, memetics has far more impact than does evolution. Where evolution might slowly lead us to a place where we need no leaders, memetics rapidly leads to the overthrow of leaders who become corrupt.

While I agree that we may not have reached the best of all possible conditions, perhaps you should take a more utilitarian standpoint. The "best of all possible worlds" is certainly something marvelous to hope for, but it's a bit pie-in-the-sky for most versions of reality. I certainly appreciate anyone who tries to move toward that best of worlds and anyone who tries to take others with him/her, but the problem is that we're evolved to be selfish and despite having very large and powerful brains, we still have a tendency to do what we were evolved to do.

We try, we humans, but often we fail. There's a lot of evidence that, evolutionarily speaking, we are not intended to be truly monogamous creatures but most of us try anyway. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. What's important is not the unfortunate fact that we fail but the amazing fact that we're even trying to overcome our nature at all! I hope that within my lifetime I see some kind of glorious bloodless coup in which all humanity puts down their guns and lives in peace, but somehow I just don't see it happening.

Far more likely is that a mob, army or even an individual will do or say something that makes the world just a little better for its inhabitants. As long as we continue the slow trek toward that perfect world, I can't really ask for more.

So? It still sucks. A revolution is nothing more than a change of power from one set of power-hungry thugs to a different set of power-hungry thugs. It's time for something different. And since we humans are not dependent on evolution, there's absolutely no reason why we should wait around for it.


Utilitarianism does fine for dictators. Not for me. Utilitarianism says "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet". I say "human beings are not eggs, you effing psychopath."


Now THAT is what is unlikely. All any mob will ever do is put another group of violent sociopaths in power. My goal isn't to give different groups of people turns at mass murder. My goal is to do away with instruments of mass murder. I realize that won't happen spontaneously, or even soon. But we will NEVER see the emergence of a truly civilized society if we keep trying to form it by means that oppose it. You can't kill your way to peace; you can't tax your way to prosperity; you can't legislate your way to freedom.

There are other problems here, too. Militant behavior is an extension of territorialism, which is really a method of birth control. In highly territorial species, animals cannot breed unless they have "ownership" of a territory, which they defend from outsiders at all costs. Even animals which are not individually territorial might be territorial as a group. What's important is that the territories are a finite resource which limit population growth. We humans have gone far beyond the need for territories, so why still enforce them?

Unfortunately, all the madness serves a purpose. If there were no wars, mobs etc and population growth continued at its current rate, the South American continent would be standing room only in about 500 years. People are not willing to control the birth rate and so the only means nature has to enforce a population limit is the death rate. If we stopped killing each other in wars we'd all die of starvation a generation or two later. Whether the origin of the death is from evolution or memetics, we should remember that these are both tools of nature, whose thumb we are constantly under.

If you truly wish to decrease the death rate, you have to do something about the birth rate first. I'll bet if we lowered the rate at which new humans were being spawned, mother nature would ease up on the rate at which we die, too. If you really want to do something to stop human violence, go pass out condoms. There need to be less of us - at least until we've got the whole "colonization of space" thing figured out...

That's true, but only to some extent. More people also means a more advanced division of labor, as well as more creativity and productive potential.

My 0.02 BTC:

I'm a left-libertarian - a geoist/Georgist. Bitcoin is conveniently very compatible with what I want; one could evade sales/income/death taxes but not land/pollution taxes. If your economic activity has no detectable impact on third parties, then they IMHO have no business interfering with it. Once you start monopolizing natural resources or poisoning the air, then I start to care.

It also means more food and fuel consumed. A finite number of resources cannot sustain any number of people indefinitely and if our use of the renewable resources outpaces the pace of their renewal, we drive them extinct; Food is a renewable resource with a given renewal rate.

As with everything else, though, some brilliant mind has already put it more succinctly than I ever could:

"It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation."
-Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)

Colonize space, and this limitation ceases to exist.

Fail to do anything about this limitation while we're figuring out how to colonize space (we're a ways off still) and WE will cease to exist.

True, but to get the most productive use out of any given resource of any given amount requires a highly advanced division of labor, and more creativity and productive labor rather than less. I don't believe for a second that we have obtained the greatest possible yield of food from a cubic meter of soil. More people, not less, will have to look at that soil before we figure out how to get there.

The problem is that there tends to be more people where the capital necessary for technological development is lacking, and people with more capital tend to spend it on consumption and decrease the rate of their population growth. The solution isn't to control population; it is to (1) free the third world from their parasitic states which inhibit the accumulation of the capital which is the foundation of technological development; and (2) end the political paradigm in the first world which encourages consumerism through cheap credit and debt-financing.

Which brings us around to bitcoin, which may have a significant role to play in both. :)

people screaming about overpopulation need to do a little research and a little math.  the rate of population growth worldwide has been dropping steadily for 50 years now and shows no signs of rising.  within another 40 years, population growth will not be happening.

I certainly do agree with the concept of bitcoin (or something like it) as a solution to a great deal of the problems of inequity. Bringing the third-world out of the slums and into educated modernity would certainly go a long way toward population control, since the third world tends to be the location of the highest birth rates. We would still have many problems to contend with, and overpopulation would not cease to be an issue, but an injection of wealth tends to lower infant mortality rates in a nation which tends to decrease birth rates - albeit after a delay during which the population explodes out of control.

Really I think the issue from a financial sense is that the markets are no longer directly driven by supply and demand. There is so much in this world that is post-scarcity that we continue to pay for without any valid reason. Why should I pay thousands of dollars to a college for knowledge? Knowledge is post-scarcity, I can learn on my own as long as I've got the drive and an internet connection. Helium, on the other hand, is so cheap that we use it to fill colorful balloons for parties, yet our stockpiles are rapidly depleting. If the market were allowed to determine the price of college, it would be free (or nearly so) and if the market were allowed to determine the price of helium, a single party balloon would be worth hundreds of dollars.

Because governments have been allowed to "incentivize" what we purchase and marketing firms have been allowed to lie to us about what is and is not rare (how uncommon are diamonds, really?) our concepts of value are grossly distorted. Bitcoin solves part of the problem by largely removing the ability of governments to interfere with our purchases in the forms of subsidies and tariffs but we also need to do something about the marketing and media that have us convinced that common things are rare and that rare things are of never-ending supply.

The fact that in the last 50 years we've done this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/World_population_increase_history.svg/500px-World_population_increase_history.svg.png

Does little to undo the fact that in the last 10,000 we've done this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Population_curve.svg/500px-Population_curve.svg.png

While I certainly hope that the 50-year trend continues until we stabilize, that ten-millennium-long exponential trend seems hard to break. That said, nature will slow us down one way or another, I'd just prefer to do so of our own volition rather than begin dying of starvation.

I know of no physical limitation that says a person must inhabit a 100-liter sack of carbon and water---and I don't think circumventing that is any more "cheating" than is finding ways of growing more food on the same amount of land. This exponential trend can continue for quite a long time before we hit any hard physical limits on personhood.

Population is less of a problem if you colonize space to extract more energy from the sun.

It is also less of a problem if we decrease the energy requirement of each individuals. That may require genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancement.

I am optimistic that we will reach 1 trillion human beings, no problem.

Believing starvation is coming to decimate us all because there's so much human beings is merely a failure of imagination. People starve not so much because of the lack of  the food but the lack of efficient and robust market that can distribute food and stabilize the supply. There may be lack of speculators who would bear the risk or it is not possible to transport food.

You can have the most efficient agricultural output in the world, but it means dilly squat if you can't get it to the right people.

This is a popular misconception.  Division of labor is in no way limited by the number of people on the planet.

And now my attempt at the OP:
Disclaimer: I don't consider myself a liberal these days, or at least I'm a pretty strange one. That said, I do want jack-booted thugs with rifles to take your money and give it to public schools. Not all of these points apply to me personally, though some of them do.

0 This is perhaps too obvious, but if I think Bitcoin has a good chance of succeeding, then whatever my political platform I will be more able to carry it out in ten years if I have some bitcoins. So even if I outright hated the idea of Bitcoin I still ought to own some.

1 You aren't describing a liberal, you're describing every ordinary person in the world. Most people want the government to control where and how others spend their money, though how they spend their own money is of course their business. Most people want everyone else to pay their fair share of taxes, though they feel like their own share is unfair. Most people want the government to stop giving handouts to the undeserving, but consider everyone they know personally to be deserving. This is called hypocrisy and it's among the most common traits found in humanity.

2 Have you considered that liberalism is perhaps a bit more complex than "The government knows best"? That at its foundation is not social control, but fairness---the radical notion that equality of opportunity is good? Fairness isn't some bizarre modern invention, it's an impulse built into our very genes. A conservative will say, "Well, the world isn't fair. Get over it." A liberal will say, "Well, the world isn't fair. Let's fix that." And in the long run, Bitcoin ought to make the world more fair, since it will reduce the ability of the already-powerful to enrich themselves every time someone wants to buy a cup of coffee. If I can easily send a few mBTC directly to a farmer in Africa, why should I let agribusinesses and warlords have their cut?

3 Large agencies and the super-wealthy already have the power to hide money, violate financial restrictions, and evade taxes through clever accounting and jurisdictional games. Therefore Bitcoin isn't giving those people anything. Instead it's giving that same power to the individuals who don't have the benefit of being born a Hilton. This is like asking why support Tor if you don't like child pornography.

4 Only the least financially savvy are foolish enough to hold their savings in cash. Generally these people are lower working class. So in practice inflation is quite a regressive tax. I don't like regressive taxes, and neither do more ordinary liberals.

5 Just because I want a big bully to extort wealth from rich people and hand it to public works and the disabled, doesn't mean I want to pretend that isn't what they're doing. I'd much rather just say, "Some big bully should extort wealth from that guy and hand it to public works and the disabled." This is because I don't like extortion in itself, and I want to remember that that's what I'm advocating. Otherwise I might find myself saying, "Some big bully should extort wealth from that guy and then pay someone to hold him captive for ten years if he smokes some pot." Bitcoin will force me to be honest, since the only way to take it by force is directly, or at least at one degree of removal through an agency like the IRS.

6 I agree with liberals that a monopoly is frequently a bad thing, and a monopoly propped up by law is pretty much always a bad thing. So why in the world would I support a legally mandated monopoly on currency production?

7 Like liberals, I support harm reduction over cracking down. If we're going to have an industry of people smuggling guns and heroin into the country, at least we don't have to have a parallel industry of people smuggling cash back out. If people are going to evade taxes, I'd prefer that they do it by hiding some cash under the bed rather than by creating a national money laundering network with all the associated violence and seediness attached.

That's really hilarious. I'm not even going to bother refuting it, because the fallacy is so obvious that to believe that you must have left plain logic far behind, which would render any argument pointless. Next you'll be telling me that wars stimulate the economy. :D

Like the fallacy of assuming that labor requires humans?

That's not a fallacy, unless you have a few billion solar-powered robots sitting around somewhere.

Welcome to the Zeitgeist philosophy.

What I don't understand is why you conservatives like bitcoin. It has the potential to hamper the government's ability to monitor society by allowing for citizens to hide their activities in an anonymous private environment. There is little accountability in a single citizen paying their dues, forcing the higher taxation of big businesses and the wealthy who own those businesses. How could you like this? Why are you here? Why don't you just keep supporting the US dollar or other fiat currencies since it enables the existence of the military industrial complex?

...I should have known.

What do you mean by "you conservatives"? Might it be that there is a political philosophy that consistently opposes ALL government violence against peaceful people, which would attract the same sort of people who are interested in depoliticizing money? Hmm...

Also, this should have been in the original post.

http://i54.tinypic.com/4kfgi1.jpg

Actually it's just technocracy, which had as much of an influence on Ayn Rand's industrialist-train-magnate rape fantasies as it did on Jacques Fresco's post-modern communist psycho-babble, and which predates both by several decades.

I never said I was a conservative.

Anyways, good points.

They are good points. And actually, I see a much greater likelihood of resistance from security statist and pro-military conservatives than from liberals of any stripe (other than die-hard Krugmanites, but they're a very small minority).

Wait, there are conservatives here too?

+1

I'm a liberal - the tax-structure, and welfare-structure needs to change... but it kindof needs to change anyway

The pirate-party guy's take on it is here

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/19/the-information-policy-case-for-flat-tax-and-basic-income/

Basically shift income tax to corporation tax and sales-tax. We (as a society) need to pay taxes to avoid becoming debt-slaves to corporations.

The universal, flat-payment welfare thing is actually quite a good idea. Basically extend child-benefit (that civilised, socialist countries have) to be life-long. No means-testing, no discrimination. How to pay for it? Easy. Tax corporations/the aristocracy at the rate that got us out of the last depression - 60%.

How do we tax the aristocracy 60% in a Bitcoin-using society? Their total wealth and income would be anonymous, and luxury taxes hurt the poor producers more (due to inelasticity). Someone who earns much but consumes little would be invisible.

Edit: having actually read the article :-X I see now that he refers to VAT, which is still a sales tax on wholesalers.

Whats stopping the state from creating it's own block-chain, applying constraints on that block-chain  so that taxes in some form are collected and social services offered?

Nothing. In fact I'm already planning to steal the Fed's private keys so I can have free money!  ;D

I can see a tax being incorporated into bitcoin soon. A tax to fund the faucet, more bounties, .....

If the libertarians subsequently forked the project, would you choose to use the taxed version?

Nothing, technically.  But the question is, who would use that system over Bitcoin?

Any conservatives care to say why they like bitcoins? Your using US Government regulated electricity, over the government regulated internet, on your FFC regulated computers, to make money for adding nothing to society and not paying any taxes. Talk about leeching off the government. Get a real job.

I think, if there are any conservatives here, they would say that electricity is regulated by States Rights not the Feds, that the satanic internet is not regulated nearly enough, that FCC Part 15 is not actually a license but an exemption, and that not paying taxes to the Mooslim Communist Non-American Obummer (not my president) is their patriotic duty.  But there probably aren't any here, since they are all busy working at their Real Jobs or Defending Our Freedoms from terrorists or whatever.

Thats what I'm talking about. I want a space ship.  The sun is expanding and in 4 - 6 billion years from now the earth will be uninhabitable.  Better get of this rock before it gets too hot.

Naturally it will depend on how it is taxed, how and what are the taxes used for, i.e commonsense. And the great thing about crypto-currencies is that if no one is willing to back the taxation/spending structure, then people will not use that crypto-currency; the free market at work and very different from today's world, where we have no real choice over how our taxes are spent-> We are geographically constrained to the country we live in.

I could take this further, authorities will arise from the universe of crypto-currencies; all competing for citizens, is such a paradigm really possible, where citizens dictate terms to authorities ??   Could this lead to conflict between the different crypto-currency communities? Maybe this will be offset by citizens participating in multiple crypto-currencies?

All those things would be quite fine without the US government.

Real reason liberals like bitcoins: They get money without doing any work by mining them :P

That's edgy but I was against ideology before it was cool. 8)

The funny thing is, I have never done any mining because it's just too much work!

I may as well use my unemployment benefit to purchase BTC on mtgox directly. ;D

I cant speak for anyone else but this godless heathen believes in a just meritocracy.  Competition, the ability to adapt and include all groups plays to humanities strengths.  Bitcoin may be dangerous to inflexible dictatorial governments but I don't see it as a threat to flexible liberal democracies. I see it as a vehicle to support the proliferation of liberal democracy in that you can allow funding of such underground movements in countries ruled by monarchs and dictators. I think those trying to avoid paying taxes in Europe and North America using bitcoin will be quite disappointed.  Bitcoin represents a payment system that helps small business because of its low transaction fees and low barriers to entry.  If one decides to filter the world through the distorted lens of Objectivism to the exclusion of all other philosophies and advances in human knowledge then one endangers oneself of of putting oneself at odds with reality.

This would be a great post, if a "flexible liberal democracy" existed anywhere on Earth.  But since there is no such thing, it's kinda moot.

I hope bitcoin will help introduce flexibility but I certainly empathize with others peoples frustration with what they see as inflexible bureaucracies.  As soon as flexible liberal democracy turns to tyrany in the minds of the majority of its citizens.... watch out.

It seems you missed the point.  There is no democracy anywhere on Earth, much less a liberal or flexible one.  There cannot be a flexible liberal democracy without a democracy first!

And if one were to arise, you probably wouldn't like the results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy   I think our misunderstanding comes from the mistaken assumption of an agreed upon definition of liberal democracy.

Representative republics are not democracies.  Wikipedia is only as accurate at the people who contribute articles.  The distinction between a representative republic and a democracy is not trivial.  I've witnessed real democracy up close, and larger than a church business meeting or a town hall, (roughly 800 voting members) democracy becomes unscalable.  The results are not pretty.  I've actually personally witnessed fistfights at contentious church meetings.  This is why church splits are so common among Baptist congregations.

Democracy is one person, one vote; all votes equal.  I challenge you to find that at a nation-state level.

Does Switzerland count? They allow an elected legislature to handle the day-to-day, but still have the power to vote on whatever they want. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland#Direct_democracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland#Direct_democracy)

Wow I have never seen a physical confrontation in or out of a church meeting, maybe heated words (no expletives).  Of course all the churches I have gone to people exercize the right to bear arms, ya know sell your cloak and buy a sword and all.

I witnessed this particular fistfight at a church business meeting wherein the church elders had decided to fire the preacher because that same preacher had a gambling addiction, a fact that they were aware of when they hired him a decade prior.  For nine years he was prohibited from any personal access to the church funds, and then suddenly the elders gave him an expense fund with a credit card.  Three months later he was back into his addiction, exactly as they expected he would be.  It was rude.  The elders had county sherriffs at the meeting, and members were prohibited from entering the church armed.  The fights broke out when the elders also announced that they had called the state police about theft of funds for gambling purposes.  The irony is that the state couldn't get him on charges, because he was a sports gambler and he was good.  Not only was there no money lost, he actually turned a profit.  OF course they ended up getting him anyway because gambling profits are taxable income even if you are exempt from income taxes because you are a preacher, so in the end that preacher spent four years in federal prison for tax evasion while the majority of the church ejected six of nine elders who participated in the event.  Roughly a third of the church membership left with them and started another church down the road about a half mile.  That was six years ago, so by now that preacher is out of prison.

Switzerland is close, but their cantons are even closer.  There is at least one better example, but if you elect representatives, it's not democracy.  Still, Switzerland is a European parlimentary model, wherein voters elect a party not an individual.

the united states is not truely a "democracy" like the propaganda machine likes to turn out. the us is a republic, whose "elected" officials make the decisions, not your voting majority. these elected officials will do what is best for them to get re-elected, not what is best for the country or what the majority of citizens want. they always will do whatever fattens up their pockets the fastest. seriously, our government is so incredibly broken it is not even funny. people need to get off their american "high horse" and realize things are falling apart. fiat money is failing because the federal reserve just keeps printing our money and loaning it to us with interest, spending billions of propogandanized "war on terror" faking the assasinations of terrorist leaders and funneling our tax money to themselves and their globalist friends.

for example:

2 days after the FCC approval of the NBC/Comcast merger (NBC is owned by GE) which had a great deal of opposition due to the monolopy that NBC/Comcast would become(owning the content AND the delivery system) a head of the FCC resigned and was given the positin of "head of governmental affairs" at GE.

A government agency who'se purpose is to protect our citizens from abuse over the public media outlets blatantly disregards the financial effects of such a merger because she got hooked up for life.

These things happen all the time and people are more concerned about who is going to be on dancing with the stars and charley sheen.

We need a working/middle class revolution against the elite's blatant abuse of our tax dollars. Bitcoin(for now) is a monetary source free from government taxation and coruption, which is part of the reason I support the movement and hope it grows.

Money, if it exists as a popular idea, should be a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

This is so true. Liberal (or rather socialistic) welfare is not sustainable.

 :D
Are you just trying to stir the pot? Or are you not seeing the endgame?

And land taxes.  And conscription.  And tarrifs.  Etc.

I want to bump this very old topic here on BCT due to relevance.

I'm reading the old posts around here. There are interesting libertarian topics like Tom Woods talks, anarcho-capitalism discussions, etc. Most topics which don't seem to exist anymore but were initially the backbone of the crypto world.

I truly don't understand why leftists would want to support a new system that is literally the opposite of everything they believe in. Hell, I see crypto twitter going on about sjw bullshit. It's quite amusing to me.

Crypto is wholly antithetical to all leftist values.

Unregulated. True freedom from Keynesian economics and debt-based welfare, leeching economy. Privacy from govt oversight. The possibility to not pay taxes. Middle finger to the media and mainstream. Middle finger to the state and the very system that leftists suck cock about everyday.

Summed up: being able to make your own financial decisions without a gun to your head; true economic freedom

Perhaps leftists just like the idea of convenient online transactions and haven't thought much about anything else. Regardless, do you realize you're supporting a system that is antithetical to your most strongly held convictions?

Or perhaps this is something that will be perverted as more leftists enter. I do see many people crying for regulation from daddy government.

Thoughts?

What I don't understand is why you conservatives like bitcoin. It has the potential to hamper the government's ability to monitor citizens like a good big brother. There is little accountability resulting in single citizens not paying their taxes, forcing the higher taxation of big businesses and the wealthy who own those businesses. How could you like this? Why are you here? Why don't you just keep supporting the US dollar or other fiat currencies since it enables the existence of the military industrial complex?  //end sarcasm

You have no idea what leftist values are.

Yes, I do know what leftist values are and crypto is anything but. Apparently you don't understand anything outside of leftism because I lean libertarian, not conservative (ie republican), which was obvious from my initial post about Tom Woods and anarcho-capitalism.

Your sarcasm was cute though, since leftists love the top 1% just as much, if not more than, republicans. Follow the money and the donations.

If I had to guess....they don't? 

my answer is very simple, many people and I am also interested in bitcoin because of its expensive price, so many people are interested to get it like mining and trading bitcoin. as well as ease of use.

Why would especially American liberals like bitcoin? From what I see on this forum, most of Bitcoin adopters are not American at all, and the word "Liberal" is very American, makes little sense out of America where you'd have different political labels.