Has the 'Bitcoin Experiment' changed your political or economic views at all?

[Richy_T]

In a deflation world when everyone tries to hoard USD, I don't see the benefit of BTC, but in an inflation world, BTC might gain some ground as a hedge for inflation

After financial crisis, everyone is still trying to save. When they put saving in action, the money supply need to be magnitudes higher than normal volume for transaction purpose

The idea that deflation causes hoarding (to any problematic degree) is a lie used to justify theft of value from your savings.

[Explodicle]

In a deflation world when everyone tries to hoard USD, I don't see the benefit of BTC, but in an inflation world, BTC might gain some ground as a hedge for inflation

After financial crisis, everyone is still trying to save. When they put saving in action, the money supply need to be magnitudes higher than normal volume for transaction purpose

The idea that deflation causes hoarding (to any problematic degree) is a lie used to justify theft of value from your savings.

"Hoarding" = "investing less than I think you should". A person only has limited information to contribute to a market - anything beyond that only contributes noise. This includes one's assessment of who is a qualified investment delegate (like a bank). We shouldn't penalize uninvested savings... if someone can overcome their greed and know when to shut up, we should let them.

I apologize to everyone else for not learning this before the recent financial crisis.

[asdf]

Bitcoin helped to take me from minarchist to market-anarchist. I was infected by the community and exposed to the likes of Stefan Molyneux, who really made the case for no-state.

Can you expand on why? Minarchist sounds like a very reasonable position and I wonder what benefits full blown anarchism would have over a minimal state.

It does, and I was there for about a year. However, once you realise that all these functions can be handled by the market, you see that the state is truly ridiculous. You have created an unaccountable monopoly on defense, police and arbitration; all backed by violence. Check out some Molyneux and you'll undoubtedly change your mind.
 
The difference is, I suppose, a fundamental understanding that the initiation of force is wrong. If you look at it from a pragmatic approach and if you look at if from a moral approach, the conclusion is the same. All the problems caused by the state derive from the violation of the NAP; the state cannot do anything without initiating force. A minimal state is still a state and the lack of respect for the NAP predictably results in chaos.

[johnyj]

BTC born at a time when people all over the world are eager to save more after financial crisis, so it is right on the spot. Currently people are still save in USD since they feel it is still backed by the most powerful country in the world, but sooner or later they will realize that BTC is as good as USD.

[Richy_T]

BTC born at a time when people all over the world are eager to save more after financial crisis, so it is right on the spot. Currently people are still save in USD since they feel it is still backed by the most powerful country in the world, but sooner or later they will realize that BTC is better than USD.

Fixed that for you.

[giszmo]

BTC born at a time when people all over the world are eager to save more after financial crisis, so it is right on the spot. Currently people are still save in USD since they feel it is still backed by the most powerful country in the world, but sooner or later they will realize that BTC is better than USD.

Fixed that for you.

This might be a personal animosity but "Fixed that for you" is slowly becoming an issue in this forum. Miss-quoting people without even bothering to mark the changes gets me slightly mad.

[Richy_T]

This might be a personal animosity but "Fixed that for you" is slowly becoming an issue in this forum. Miss-quoting people without even bothering to mark the changes gets me slightly mad.

[Explodicle]

This might be a personal animosity but "Fixed that for you" is slowly becoming an issue in this forum. Miss-quoting people without even bothering to mark the changes gets me slightly mad.

ftfy

[Richy_T]

This might be a personal animosity but "Fixed that for you" is slowly becoming an issue in this forum. Miss-quoting people without even bothering to mark the changes gets me slightly mad.

ftfy

Ironically, the text I changed would have been easily marked to indicate the change (and normally I would but I was being lazy) but the image change, not so much.

[Vandroiy]

Wuts with Psy's sudden second popularity surge? It's bigger than in summer! (No, I don't mean our local pro-Ponzi inquisitor, unless he's a Korean rapper, which would be awkward but useful in itself).

Err, anyway, @topic: Behavior of the Bitcoin economy so far was unsurprising to me. Thus, I didn't notice any major change in my economic and political views.

Deflation might be an exception. I hadn't thought about it much before I got into Bitcoin. Upon closer analysis, it's not as destructive as it seems at first. I still don't like the idea to allow monetary supply to decrease, as with Bitcoin's lost coins, but I can live with it now. Bitcoin has enough strong points to make up for it.

[Richy_T]

Wuts with Psy's sudden second popularity surge? It's bigger than in summer! (No, I don't mean our local pro-Ponzi inquisitor, unless he's a Korean rapper, which would be awkward but useful in itself).

Not sure. I'd never even heard of him/the song until a couple of weeks ago on that SNL sketch. Maybe it's that.


To return to the topic, I'd already started turning libertarian back in 2001. Since then, I've paid a bit more attention to the political process and, quite frankly, I find it astounding what they are getting away with and how badly things are actually going if you pay attention to what's going on. We're being robbed blind and only quite incredible increases in productivity have allowed it to be sustained for so long. I'd heard of bitcoin in the background in a few places and hadn't really paid attention but when I actually looked into it recently, it seemed clear to me that it's going to have a pretty major impact in the near-to-mid future, one way or another.

[VogueBlackheart]

I've become more dismissive of libertarians. Exposure to the forum has greatly reduced my estimate of their average intelligence level.

Really? While not without its trolls, this forum has impressed me with its participants' level of discourse and economic understanding.

The point is really driven home by the fact that what I want to say in response to a topic has often already been said, and said well, by someone in the thread before I can get caught up. I've started writing--then deleted, seeing my work already done--at least as many posts as I've made. For instance, making the a priori/a posteriori distinction in defending the validity of the Austrian school--I would totally have to have done that myself on most forums! A salute to thee, benjamindees!

OP: I consider Bitcoin's history thus far to be a vindication of my economic views, which are closely Austrian-aligned. That school does seem to have an outsize representation in the Bitcoin community, possibly because orthodox economists seem to consider Bitcoin 1) a Ponzi scheme, or 2) a doomed experiment due to a lack of indefinite growth in the money supply. I would be interested in hearing from an orthodox economist why he or she is interested in Bitcoin and why the happily-recovering, successfully stimulated global economy has use for some crazy new non-state video game money.

[misterbigg]

Minarchist sounds like a very reasonable position and I wonder what benefits full blown anarchism would have over a minimal state.

"Minarchy" still creates two classes of citizens: ordinary people like me and you, and "special" individuals who get powers that ordinary people don't have. In today's society they are the police, the judges, the politicians, and other bureaucrats. The only different is where the line is drawn in terms of defining the size of government.

Any system that gives power to a subset of the population will eventually fall prey to corruption.

...the initiation of force is wrong. If you look at it from a pragmatic approach and if you look at if from a moral approach, the conclusion is the same. All the problems caused by the state derive from the violation of the NAP; the state cannot do anything without initiating force.

This is spot on. What I can't figure out is why so many people accept violence acted against them (theft, proscribed behavior). Even when you explain it and people understand it, they are still OK with being subjugated! In my opinion this is mankind's biggest flaw.

[cunicula]

OP: I consider Bitcoin's history thus far to be a vindication of my economic views, which are closely Austrian-aligned. That school does seem to have an outsize representation in the Bitcoin community, possibly because orthodox economists seem to consider Bitcoin 1) a Ponzi scheme, or 2) a doomed experiment due to a lack of indefinite growth in the money supply. I would be interested in hearing from an orthodox economist why he or she is interested in Bitcoin and why the happily-recovering, successfully stimulated global economy has use for some crazy new non-state video game money.

Really? Simply because it offers a low txn cost payment system based on public memory. Here are completely orthodox articles which support bitcoin as theoretically valuable.

Here is an article supporting the use of public memory as a payment system, i.e. the orthodox economic theory behind bitcoin is well-established.
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf

Here is an article describing how a commodity with no intrinsic value can be adopted as money.
http://cas.umkc.edu/econ/economics/faculty/wray/631Wray/Kiyotaki%20and%20Wright.pdf

Orthodox economists are simply ignoring bitcoin, not dismissing it. Economists who dismiss bitcoin are primarily Austrians. Look up their backgrounds.

[Lethn]

I think Bitcoin has pretty much vindicated my beliefs rather than changed them, I believe in the Austrian school of economics but I can see the value in a currency like Bitcoin, if we're going to have a fiat currency then it has to be one dictated by the people, that said, I still don't believe that anything can top precious metals because they've been used in currencies and trade for years. I think the true value in Bitcoin is that even if the main sites for it get shut down the governments who are against it won't be able to do anything to stop it much like bittorrent, it's just too easy to set everything up we just need one country to legalize it and then everyone who has bitcoins will move there.

[molecular]

Yes, most definitely bitcoin changed the way I think about many things and educated me about a whole lot of topics.

It might also turn me into some kind of a radical... but not quite yet.

[molecular]

Bitcoin helped to take me from minarchist to market-anarchist. I was infected by the community and exposed to the likes of Stefan Molyneux, who really made the case for no-state.

Can you expand on why? Minarchist sounds like a very reasonable position and I wonder what benefits full blown anarchism would have over a minimal state.

Stefan Molyneux recently made the argument in an interview (with VisionVictory, I think, search youtube), that a small state always has the tendency to grow so we would always end up with big government once again.

I'm not sure a state can be kept small.

[Richy_T]

"Minarchy" still creates two classes of citizens: ordinary people like me and you, and "special" individuals who get powers that ordinary people don't have. In today's society they are the police, the judges, the politicians, and other bureaucrats. The only different is where the line is drawn in terms of defining the size of government.

Any system that gives power to a subset of the population will eventually fall prey to corruption.

This is true. So to minimize the system minimizes the potential damage caused by that corruption.

It's important to realize that there will be no perfect system. This is the mistake the statists make. Things will be perfect with just-a-little-bit more government. They accuse libertarian and like-minded people of being Utopianists but that is far from the truth, we merely want to move towards "as good as possible", not "perfect".

[Richy_T]

Bitcoin helped to take me from minarchist to market-anarchist. I was infected by the community and exposed to the likes of Stefan Molyneux, who really made the case for no-state.

Can you expand on why? Minarchist sounds like a very reasonable position and I wonder what benefits full blown anarchism would have over a minimal state.

Stefan Molyneux recently made the argument in an interview (with VisionVictory, I think, search youtube), that a small state always has the tendency to grow so we would always end up with big government once again.

I'm not sure a state can be kept small.

Quite possibly true. And it seems that possibly a democracy can grow even more than other forms of government. Western governments are way out-of-control now and are orders of magnitude larger than they were under monarchs (England's monarchy doesn't really count).

[lemonginger]

I was a left libertarian highly skeptical of "market anarchists" and libertarians. Bitcoin basically confirmed my views. It's still useful as a relatively low volume crypto-currency for TSR (which remains pretty much bitcoin's only large scale viable marketplace) but other than that it seems to be primarily a bunch of people who would screw over their own mother if it made them another buck or two. The fallacy of a perfectly self regulating free market has been exposed as the lie it has always been. Bitcoin will perhaps bootstrap itself into some sort of quasi-stable state without being destroyed by scammers, but I feel that the general character of a right-libertarian project has been plain to see compared to most left libertarian projects I have been involved in.

Many of the smartest and highest integrity people here are right libertarians, so I am not saying that all right libertarians and market anarchists are scammers, just that market anarchism is a sort of cesspool of ultra-greedy people who quite frankly, I don't want to work on anything with.