Why the heck would you use Facebook's currency that they tax at 30% when you could use Bitcoin??

True, and ultimately hyperinflation would destroy the Fed itself, so despite what people think the Fed would not desire this. They do, of course, want to inflate to bail out their buddies etc, but just so long as they do it discretely and slowly enough so that the public doesn't lose trust in their crappy money.

bitcoin=QE2...oh wait, it doesn't affect me.

Did you make this video? It's fantastic!

I mean, does he have a username here?

In case you don’t know who John Carmack is, he’s the famous 3D game programmer that gave us Doom and Quake.

Seems like he might be a bit of a libertarian too.

from http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/misc/government.htm

John Carmack on 10-28-2010

Almost everything that I write publicly is about technical details in software or aerospace, and the points are usually not very contentious.  I’m going to go out on a limb today and talk about a much more banal topic -– government.  This is sort of an open letter to my mother and stepfather, who are intelligent people, but we don’t see eye to eye on political issues.  A couple brief conversations a year during visits doesn’t really establish much, and I have wanted to make a more carefully considered set of points.

I had nearly disqualified myself from discuss politics by not bothering to cast a vote for almost 20 years after I was legally able to.  I was busy.  I paid millions of dollars of taxes without any dodges, and just focused on my work.  Listening to political speeches full of carefully calculated rhetoric is almost physically painful to me, and I diligently avoided it.

A couple things slowly brought me around to paying more attention.  A computer game company doesn’t need to have much to do with the government, but a company that flies rocket ships is a different matter.  Due to Armadillo Aerospace, in the last decade I have observed and interacted with a lot of different agencies, civil servants, and congressmen, and I have collected enough data points to form some opinions.  The second thing that has changed for me is becoming a father; with two young sons, I think more about how the world might look in twenty or thirty years when they are adults.

I am an optimist on almost all fronts.  Throughout history, there have always been those that argue that the world is going to hell, yet here we are, better off than any previous generation.  Not only are things pretty damn good, but there is a lot of positive inertia that makes it likely that things will continue to  improve for quite some time.  We aren’t balanced at a precipice, where the result of any given election can pitch us into darkness.

However, trends do matter.  Small, nearly painless losses accumulate over the years, and the world can slowly change into something you don’t want while you weren’t paying attention.  It doesn’t take a cataclysmic crash, just a slow accretion of over regulation, taxation, and dependency that chokes the vibrant processes that produce wealth and growth.  Without growth, you get a zero sum game of fighting over the pie that breeds all sorts of problems in government and society.

My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious.  This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services, but that the cost of having the government provide them is much higher than you would tolerate from a company or individual you chose to do business with.  For almost every task, it is a poor tool.

So much of the government just grinds up money, like shoveling cash into a wood chipper.  It is ghastly to watch.  Billions and billions of dollars.  Imagine every stupid dot-com company that you ever heard of that suckered in millions of dollars of investor money before leaving a smoking crater in the ground with nothing to show for it.  Add up all that waste, all that stupidity.  All together, it is a rounding error versus the analogous program results in the government.  Private enterprises can’t go on squandering resources like that for long, but it is standard operating procedure for the government.

Well, can’t we make the government more efficient, so they can accomplish its tasks for less, or do more good work?  Sure, there is room for improvement everywhere, but there are important fundamental limits.  It is entertaining to imagine a corporate turnaround expert being told to get the federal house in shape, but it can’t happen.  The modern civil service employment arrangement is probably superior to the historic jobs-as-political-spoils approach, but it insulates the workforce from the forces that improve commercial enterprises, and the voting influence of each worker is completely uncorrelated with their value.  Without the goal and scorecard of profit, it is hard to even make value judgments between people and programs, so there are few checks against mounting inefficiency and abject failure, let alone evolution towards improvement.

Even if you could snap your fingers and get it, do you really want a razor sharp federal apparatus ready to efficiently carry out the mandates of whoever is the supreme central planner at the moment?  The US government was explicitly designed to make that difficult, and I think that was wise. 

So, the federal government is essentially doomed to inefficiency, no matter who is in charge or what policies they want it to implement.  I probably haven’t lost too many people at this point – almost nobody thinks that the federal government is a paragon of efficiency, and it doesn’t take too much of an open mind to entertain the possibility that it might be much worse than you thought (it is).

Given the inefficiency, why is the federal government called upon to do so many things?  A large part is naked self interest, which is never going to go away -- lots of people play the game to their best advantage, and even take pride in their ability to get more than they give.

However, a lot is done in the name of misplaced idealism.  It isn’t hard to look around the world and find something that you feel needs fixing.  The world gets to be a better place by people taking action to improve things, but it is easy for the thought to occur that if the government can be made to address your issue, it could give results far greater than what you would be able to accomplish with direct action.  Even if you knew that it wasn’t going to be managed especially well, it would make up for it in volume.  This has an obvious appeal.

Every idealistic cry for the government to “Do Something” means raising revenue, which means taking money from people to spend in the name of the new cause instead of letting it be used for whatever purpose the earner would have preferred.

It is unfortunate that income taxes get deducted automatically from most people’s paychecks, before they ever see the money they earned.  A large chunk of the population thinks that tax day is when you get a nice little refund check.  Good trick, that.  If everyone was required to pay taxes like they pay their utilities, attitudes would probably change.  When you get an appallingly high utility bill, you start thinking about turning off some lights and changing the thermostat.  When your taxes are higher than all your other bills put together, what do you do?  You can make a bit of a difference by living in Texas instead of California, but you don’t have many options regarding the bulk of it.

Also, it is horribly crass to say it, but taxes are extracted by the threat of force.  I know a man (Walt Anderson), who has been in jail for a decade because the IRS disagreed with how his foundations were set up, so it isn’t an academic statement.  What things do you care strongly enough about to feel morally justified in pointing a gun at me to get me to pay for them?  A few layers of distance by proxy let most people avoid thinking about it, but that is really what it boils down to.  Feeding starving children?  The justice system?  Chemotherapy for the elderly?  Viagra for the indigent?  Corn subsidies?

Helping people directly can be a noble thing.  Forcing other people to do it with great inefficiency?  Not so much.  There isn’t a single thing that I would petition the federal government to add to its task list, and I would ask that it stop doing the majority of the things that it is currently doing.  My vote is going to the candidates that at least vector in that direction.

Who does the blog "The Monetary Future"? Anyone know? I have a question for them.

Thanks!

Same here. I had completely given up on the EFF, even after they sent the mail confirming that they would do this. Mega surprise!

I bet the recent increase in valuations made them crave bitcoins all the more! I mean, when we made the original donations, Bitcoins were only at 6 cents each.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!!

Me very excite!!

Some cool stats at:

http://www.sharenator.com/w/bitcoin.org

Looks like the Russians are particularly interested. I'm guessing it's because they're both highly technological and also have experienced immense monetary corruption under the government there.

Trading partner found, thanks!

Liberal as in classical liberal, correct? The left kind of stole the term liberal...

I don't have a Koan for you but I can tell you a joke.

Three men are waiting for an interview. The first is called in. The interviewer learns that the first man is a mathematician. As the interview is wrapping up, the inerviewer says "Now before you go, I have one last question. What's 1+1?". "Exactly 2" says the mathematician.

Next, the interviewer calls in the second man, who is an engineer. Towards the end of the interview, again, he says "One last question. What's 1+1?". "Well..." says the engineer "that depends on the accuracy of the original measurement. So I'd say around 2, plus or minus some amount of error".

Finally, the interviewer calls in the third man, who is a lawyer. Again, at the end of the interview, he asks "One final question - what's 1+1?". The lawyer gets up from his seat and goes over the nearby window and closes the shades. He sits back down, and looks plainly into the interviewer's eyes: "What do you want it to be?"

+1

Government is pure evil.

The more I use Bitcoin the more the idea of using fiat money makes me physically sick. Honestly one day I hope I can completely get out of the government's coercion-based money system and solely use something like Bitcoin.

It is the most freedom I have ever experienced... quite a rush, really, to do business in Bitcoin. Nothing quite like listening to the QE2 talks on CNBC, the taxation talks, the national debt, etc etc... and knowing... some small part of me is now safe from all that violence, safe from the majority and their whims of fancy, safe from the predation of government goons... such an amazing feeling.

It's small but it's something. Bitcoin is precious.

PM me if interested, thanks

Whoa Macho, you totally hijacked my thread ...

The best thing about Bitcoin is that it is indifferent to your opinions, or mine, or anyone else's... that's why it's so wonderful. It's 100% voluntary. Unlike the USD, which is subject to Bernanke's every whim. If anything, the Bitcoin community is the anti-Fed, anti-Wall Street, anti-monetary centralization. It is not here to rip anyone off like fiat currency, Bitcoin just IS. What is there not to like?

LOL, honestly I just re-read my post here and now I'm thinking it's really irrelevant, it's like someone complaining about the way the Earth rotates around the Sun.

Financial markets will always behave the way they do, that is, insanely. Hopefully longer-term Bitcoin will increase its stability, so people can still speculate to their hearts content, but they'll do so with more leverage for smaller moves (like FOREX) so that it doesn't affect business.

So, IMO, the problem will solve itself in the long run. Case closed for me on this issue.

Definitely an opinion, I don't dispute you on that . My general point is that a quick 6X rise followed by a 50% crash is definitely a market overheated by speculation. The technical analysis guy posted nearly 100% bulls on bitcoin near the recent top.

That said, I absolutely agree with you that some of that rise is probably very real and based on fundamentals and business adoption, so to an extent I didn't really phrase my opinion fully -- it's a mixture, so we're not exactly in disagreement here (I'm not claiming 100% speculation is where the volume is coming from), but rather that obviously there's a LOT of it going on, and that Bitcoin it nowhere near stable. As to what the ratio of fundamental vs speculative juices are, nobody knows.

I think this week's 50% crash should answer your question. Bitcoin is extremely volatile, and like any financial asset, has the potential to experience bubbles. I think we've just burst our first mini-bubble (50 cents down to 23 cents is a huge move for anyone wanting to use Bitcoin as a paypal substitute!)

This doesn't mean Bitcoin won't continue to go up in the long run -- I strongly believe the long-term trend is up for fundamental reasons -- but I certainly could feel the "froth" of excitement on the forums lately. Psychology is at work here as much as fundamentals.

I have nothing against speculation, and I certainly believe attempts to curtail it do more harm than good. I'm just warning, from personal experience, that business is way, way better and more long-term profitable than speculation, and that I greatly would prefer stability to volatility in my choice of cryptocurrency.

Is an increase in stability possible while keeping everything voluntary? Yes. The only way is if we continue to focus on using it as a currency. Speculators will be speculators, but the rest of us need to keep our heads and continue to push Bitcoin businesses. Monetization (usage as currency, rather than investment) always increases stability -- just like gold used to be more stable when it was used as currency rather than as a commodity investment like it is today.

Exactly. My general point is that most of the recent activity has been due to an increase in speculation rather than huge inroads into business. I think that business inroads will increase the stability of Bitcoin.

Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that my coins have increased 6X in value in the past two months, but at the same time doing business with something with that insane level of volatility is difficult to say the least. Maybe Bitcoin businesses should peg to the dollar