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Also, in case anybody is still wondering what this has with the Labor Theory of Value, I'll clarify.
My understanding, though brief, of the labor theory of value is that value is created based upon how much work goes into it.
The thesis of this article, which I should modify to state upfront, is this: The labor theory of value is correct inasmuch as the amount of labor it takes to create a unit of a good affects the supply curve; a good which takes more labor to create will have a steeper supply curve than a good that takes less labor to create.
That's more accurately described as a labor theory of cost. Value is subjective. Labor has nothing to do with it. The amount of (socially necessary) labor involved determines a value of an object, but not necessarily its use or exchange value. |
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In my mind, there is no difference between Anarchy and Communism, both are based on lawlessness, mutual benefit and a non-existent human hierarchy.
This is despite on all scales and across all times of the universe there is hierarchy. From the structure of the atom, to the evolution of life, the way networks process traffic, the existence of solar systems, the fractal structure of weather systems and galaxy super-clusters there is a hierarchy where something is apart of the whole. Your telling me that somehow we humans, us mere little people are so special that we are above this rule.
That there is something so magnificent, so amazing about us that the system you propose will somehow just completely disregard this fundamental law of the universe. Your telling me that despite the recent human hierarchies, the hierarchies of our primate cousins and all other lifeforms that we are so so so special, that we are god-like and do not belong in this category.
We are gods and that we are above the rest of the universe and we are capable of creating a system that does not obey the universe. So when you say that this new Society is great, because we will be all “fundamentally equal, there will not be a hierarchy”, remember to wipe your mouth with toilet paper once you’ve finished speaking. Because what you just said is the abstract logical equivalent of what I hear at church. That your system is above the mechanics of the universe and that's why it will work.
This why I don't bother reading about such fantasies.
Justice Dragons will always exist, get use to it and learn how to ride them.
(Socialist) anarchists do not oppose hierarchical structure, but rather coercive power relationships. |
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Democracy is a reasonably effective way to implement group decision making. Adding elements of sortition to voting-based implementations may be useful.
Allowing free association among small units of governance would be nice, but then you are bringing the problems of international politics must closer to home.
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Time will tell if this is Bitcoin's darkest moment or finest hour.
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No person, group of persons, or government may initiate force, threat of force, or fraud against any individual's self or property. The problem with this, of course, is that property turns out to be a slippery concept. As written, this article is wildly open to interpretation depending on what school of thought one subscribes to with regard to property. Property is not so slippery a concept as you may think. If you start with self-ownership, the rest just flows naturally. It becomes slightly slippery with the fact that those rules were violated in places in the past. |
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You are forgetting a very important factor in the real economy. That is, A needed that widget when he needed it. If he could wait for it, and thus pay less bitcoin for it, then he would. For the sake of argument, let's say that the widget in question was a refrigerator, a water heater, a washing machine; whatever. If you refrigerator dies, do you say to your spouse "we can get it for less by doing without a refrigerator for another month"? Do you think that works out? Now, if the widget is something that A actually can do without, why would he buy it anyway? The only possible answer is that it's something that he wants rather than needs. And wants tend to be even less likely to be rationally delayed. This is called the 'time preference' of money, and inflation certainly does increase the likelyhood that the holder is going to decide to spend sooner rather than later, but that is not necessarily a good thing.
Would we not be reducing the GDP of our economy from needs + wants to needs only then? And why would that be a good thing? If we could have more instead of less, why would we choose less? Do it in the name of a deflationary currency? This situation has existed in the case of electronics for multiple decades and the world hasn't imploded yet. |
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AFAIK quantum computers are hypothesized to solve the factoring problem, but not the discrete logarithm and SHA256 hash collision problems bitcoin security depends on.
Quantum computers do speed up brute force attacks, but that can be countered by doubling the size of the search space (in bits) if it poses a problem. |
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Mining performance on a RTOS should be about the same as mining performance on standard OSes, so the comparison table should be useful.
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Not to be very blunt.... But what would stop someone from hiring a botnet of 30.000 PC's, install a shitload of modified clients and poison the network into uselessness with false transactions ? As long as those 30.000 PC's are spitting out 'valid' packets of what they say is true, there's a lot of legitimate CPU/GPU power needed to counter that.. Just a thought though  The unmodified clients won't accept the invalid blocks generated by the modified clients, and so the coins produced by the modified clients won't be accepted by the other users. In effect, the person ends up creating a new currency accepted by no one. |
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IIRC, when left anarchists use the word 'hierarchy' it is only hierarchy in the form of coercive power relationships that they mean. Left anarchists have no problems with the implicit hierarchy formed from natural authority, for example.
I still don't get it. Perhaps the confusion stems from what is considered coercion. I don't get how owning stuff is coercive given my understanding of the word. Where or not owning stuff is considered coercive depends on how it is used. If the owner works their property themselves, left anarchists call that property 'possession' and have no issue with it. In fact, many left anarchists would wish the world of labor consisted only of artisans and syndicates. (When you combine this with the free market, one gets Mutualism.) When one has a working class (a class of people who only own their labor), then paying someone a fraction of what they produce to use the property is viewed as coercive (and many left anarchists will not recogne your claim to the property as legitimate). The reason why they find this coercive is that the needs of the worker compel them to work for someone like you, hence why they consider the "you can always work for someone else" retort to be invalid. |
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Hierarchy isn't a big deal to me. It's a tool, and I'm not going to tell people which tools they can and can't use. I'm just going to expose, ridicule, boycott and ostracise those who initiate violence.
It seems there's lot more of a difference between left and right anarchists than meets the eye.
I really don't get left anarchists opposition to hierarchy, mainly because of what I percieve as the inconsistency I outlined. I'd like to get a left anarchist's take on things, preferably in the form of a skype chat .. I do have a lot of questions.
IIRC, when left anarchists use the word 'hierarchy' it is only hierarchy in the form of coercive power relationships that they mean. Left anarchists have no problems with the implicit hierarchy formed from natural authority, for example. |
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The way capitalism is defined by the majority of anarcho-socialists makes it incompatible with anarchism. There is, however, at least a subset of anarcho-capitalists that define capitalism in such a way that it is compatible with anarcho-socialism.
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If the bitcoin economy became large enough for the US government cared enough about it to throw a ton of hashing power it, wouldn't it make more sense for them to generate a majority of the blocks and only include transactions that pay at least a certain transaction fee? In effect, they would then be taxing bitcoin. They could then use all of the bitcoin they gather to spend on government projects, or move it out of bitcoin into dollars.
Of course, if the government wanted to shutdown bitcoin, there would be far easier methods than out hashing the rest of us.
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Keeping the current generation rate will ensure that lost bitcoins are effectively replaced forever.
If the bitcoin economy fails to at least double in the period of 2012-2016, keeping the generation rate at 50 BTC/block will cause inflation, but wouldn't a bigger issue be with the lack of growth in the economy at that point?
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