Bitcoin trades the inequity of dynastic power for the inequity of early adoption

[revans]

So, one of the main arguments I encounter when discussing Bitcoin with its promulgators is that it can potentially free the financial system from the cabal of plutocrats that currently run the show, and who have lavished enormous  wealth on themselves and their cronies. This argument seems to entirely dismiss the actions of the shady cabal who mined huge numbers of Bitcoins when doing so was trivial (and prior to any public availability), and to a lesser extent the early adopters.

When central bankers throw money like confetti at themselves and their friends whilst most others must struggle to earn small amounts of it this is deemed a moral evil. Yet when the progenitors of Bitcoin and their acolytes do much the same; capture the low hanging fruit and leave everyone else fighting over increasingly complex computational scraps this is hailed as a brave new world of financial freedom.

Should Bitcoin ever achieve the kind of ubiquity its most ardent fans hope for, these people will wield more financial power than any of the Banksters they decry. They will also control such a large amount of the monetary base that they too could end up becoming plutocrats

Far from being a revolution, the future as envisaged by Bitcoin fanboys will be little more than a changing of the cast of villains.

The "shady cabal"?  Really?  And "their acolytes"?  Yeah - we're the new generation of the Illuminati.  [That reminds me... I got some lizard blood on my ceremonial robes at the last secret meetup... gotta get to the secret drycleaners.]

Do you even know anything about the history of bitcoin?  At all?

Why don't you read the Hal Finney thread.  He mined (No link:  forgive me - but I'm thinking you can do your own research)  block #14 I think?  It was all open on the web - for those with vision and desire - after the genesis block was mined.  Just because you do not appear to have vision, and your desire appears to extend only to dissing those who posses it, doesn't mean that what you say is true.

If you think the early adopters are getting wealthy sitting on their asses, you're a complete idiot.  Bitcoin was only an opportunity - it made just the right people work their asses off:  those people with vision and desire.  That's part of the brilliance of it.

I am grateful every day for what little I have been able to contribute, what little coin I have accumulated since 2011 when I started, and how remarkably my life has changed for having been able to participate in this.

And what of all those people with similar vision and desire too young to know about this burgeoning revolution; if the Bitcoin masturbators get their way these children will grow up in a world from which they are financially disenfranchised unless Mummy or Daddy happened to be a Bitcoin early adopter; so very little difference from the inequity of the world of state fiat.

[BitSmile]

Bitcoin fanboys

Out of curiousity, what combined currency/payment processing network/ledger system has your devotion?

You're missing an important point: no person or group issues the currency in Bitcoin. That kind of power is removed from mere human whim and given over to an agreed upon protocol. If you don't like the protocol, you can go start your own.

The bankster cabal would never think to tell us, "Hey, go start your own currency if you don't like ours."

Umm, yes a rather special group does issue the currency in Bitcoin: the miners with enough state fiat capital to invest in the increasingly expensive equipment required to mine Bitcoins.

The underlying Bitcoin implementation is fine, but I find the mining aspect hugely problematic. Bitcoins should been distributed freely to people that want them so as to provide everyone an opportunity to be part of a financial reboot. Sadly Bitcoin went down the road of having engineered inequity and is as morally bankrupt as the system it seeks to supplant.

Bitcoin is like gold. You can mine gold too. Do you also think the same about gold, that some people thousands of years ago mined it all and now you can only get a few little nuggets out of heavy buckets of dirt from bed rock?

[Severian]

I jut wish Bitcoin fanboys

Envy is an ugly thing.

[revans]

Bitcoin fanboys

Out of curiousity, what combined currency/payment processing network/ledger system has your devotion?

You're missing an important point: no person or group issues the currency in Bitcoin. That kind of power is removed from mere human whim and given over to an agreed upon protocol. If you don't like the protocol, you can go start your own.

The bankster cabal would never think to tell us, "Hey, go start your own currency if you don't like ours."

Umm, yes a rather special group does issue the currency in Bitcoin: the miners with enough state fiat capital to invest in the increasingly expensive equipment required to mine Bitcoins.

The underlying Bitcoin implementation is fine, but I find the mining aspect hugely problematic. Bitcoins should been distributed freely to people that want them so as to provide everyone an opportunity to be part of a financial reboot. Sadly Bitcoin went down the road of having engineered inequity and is as morally bankrupt as the system it seeks to supplant.

Bitcoin is like gold. You can mine gold too. Do you also think the same about gold, that some people thousands of years ago mined it all and now you can only get a few little nuggets out of heavy buckets of dirt from bed rock?

Gold is a commodity not a medium of exchange (at least not to any significant degree). Gold is not a contrived creation born of high-minded ideals.

[BTC Books]

You clearly don't know as much as you think.

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1009

That Ron & Shamir paper has been, in the main, discredited - they got so much wrong, and missed so much, that it's basically useless.  There's plenty of threads on it - read them.

You reference a website with a post entitled "Shitcoin: a Modest Proposal" - and which has a bitcoin donation address?  Seriously?

I may not know as much as I think I do - probably don't - but I know a hell of a lot more about bitcoin than you do.

I know why it exists, and you have no clue.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I jut wish Bitcoin fanboys would stop pretending that whatever high-minded ideals they espouse with regard to Bitcoin, the reality is most people involved with it (especially the founders) are simply hoping to become 'rich' beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, and just like their Bankster counterparts they will spout no end of  marketspeak argot to justify their new found power.


People like myself want to see a world free of plutorats, whereas it seems to me a great many Bitcoin fantasists simply want to become plutocrats themselves.

1) Choose a claim and stick to it. Are current bitcoiners too wealth-oriented or is the risk taken by early adopters throwing their hard-earned money and time into a nothing-currency experiment that most people shyed away from disproportionate to their reward?

2) Decentralization does not allow for plutoCRATS, because in a decetralized world there is no long-term overconcentratiom of power that is in any way comparable to the level we have today. Even imagine someone had half the bitcoins that ever existed, just as it was said that the Rothschilds once controlled half the world's wealth through their banking dynasty. This very wealthy individual still would not have access to a money printer, so once he started spending his fortune it'd deplete.

[revans]

I jut wish Bitcoin fanboys

Envy is an ugly thing.

And that is the response of a child.

You are exactly like the central bankster pondlife you decry, they too assume anyone that criticises them is simply poisoned by envy. It's a very easy way of never having to engage with critics.

[BTC Books]

And what of all those people with similar vision and desire too young to know about this burgeoning revolution; if the Bitcoin masturbators get their way these children will grow up in a world from which they are financially disenfranchised unless Mummy or Daddy happened to be a Bitcoin early adopter; so very little difference from the inequity of the world of state fiat.

Yeah.  Brilliant point.

I spend part of every day feeling bad for all those kids in middle-school today, who were too young to know about investing in IBM back when they made typewriters the ubiquitous office tool.

[BitSmile]

Admit it, you are envyous of the early adopters, even if most of them don't trade massive amounts of bitcoin for fiat currency.
You are just a typical zeitgeist-or-something-guy-that-can't-do-anything-in-life. A wannabe communist. Bitcoin is anarchy.

[BTC Books]

And that is the response of a child.

No.  THAT is the response of a child.

[randrace]

I don't see any speculating going on here.

[myrkul]

Gold is a commodity not a medium of exchange (at least not to any significant degree). Gold is not a contrived creation born of high-minded ideals.

Gold has been the go-to (You might even say "standard") medium of exchange for most of human history. It's only recently that it was decoupled from currency, and look where that's lead us.

Like it or not, Botcoin is the digital equivalent of gold.

I'm sorry you missed the stage where you could just pick it up off the ground, or even pan it out of rivers. Now we need heavy equipment to mine it, which means you'll need to make an investment to get any returns, or you can just buy the gold on the open market.

Now read that last paragraph, but replace "gold" with "bitcoin," and you might finally understand.

[BitSmile]

I don't see any speculating going on here.

Yeah, just an envyous wannabe communist.

[BTC Books]

I don't see any speculating going on here.

Yeah, just an envyous wannabe communist.

Well, that's your speculation.   

Y'see, mods - there is too speculating stuff going on here!

[revans]

You clearly don't know as much as you think.

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1009

That Ron & Shamir paper has been, in the main, discredited - they got so much wrong, and missed so much, that it's basically useless.  There's plenty of threads on it - read them.

You reference a website with a post entitled "Shitcoin: a Modest Proposal" - and which has a bitcoin donation address?  Seriously?

I may not know as much as I think I do - probably don't - but I know a hell of a lot more about bitcoin than you do.

I know why it exists, and you have no clue.

It was decried, never discredited.

[Severian]

It was decried, never discredited.

It was discredited. For one, they scraped a website instead of using a copy of the blockchain from a client. blockchain.info isn't authoritative and is known to contain errors from time to time.

https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921

[revans]

And what of all those people with similar vision and desire too young to know about this burgeoning revolution; if the Bitcoin masturbators get their way these children will grow up in a world from which they are financially disenfranchised unless Mummy or Daddy happened to be a Bitcoin early adopter; so very little difference from the inequity of the world of state fiat.

Yeah.  Brilliant point.

I spend part of every day feeling bad for all those kids in middle-school today, who were too young to know about investing in IBM back when they made typewriters the ubiquitous office tool.

And that you think a currency is comparable to share equity reveals the depths of your stupidity.

[jojo69]

Bitcoin trades the inequity of dynastic power for the inequity of early adoption

yes, yes it does, but at least it will shake things up

[Severian]

Gold has been the go-to (You might even say "standard") medium of exchange for most of human history. It's only recently that it was decoupled from currency, and look where that's lead us.

Off topic, but you might dig this, myrkul:

A history of the precious metals, from the earliest times to the present (1902)

Del Mar spent 20 years working on this book. It originally came out 1880's. Well worth the hang time.

[zoolander]

So, one of the main arguments I encounter when discussing Bitcoin with its promulgators is that it can potentially free the financial system from the cabal of plutocrats that currently run the show, and who have lavished enormous  wealth on themselves and their cronies. This argument seems to entirely dismiss the actions of the shady cabal who mined huge numbers of Bitcoins when doing so was trivial (and prior to any public availability), and to a lesser extent the early adopters.

When central bankers throw money like confetti at themselves and their friends whilst most others must struggle to earn small amounts of it this is deemed a moral evil. Yet when the progenitors of Bitcoin and their acolytes do much the same; capture the low hanging fruit and leave everyone else fighting over increasingly complex computational scraps this is hailed as a brave new world of financial freedom.

Should Bitcoin ever achieve the kind of ubiquity its most ardent fans hope for, these people will wield more financial power than any of the Banksters they decry. They will also control such a large amount of the monetary base that they too could end up becoming plutocrats

Far from being a revolution, the future as envisaged by Bitcoin fanboys will be little more than a changing of the cast of villains.

Revans I agree partially

Yes. This benefits early adopters . But the makers would not have expected such price swings so if the real libertarians fout against tyranny, those  real libertarians must be feeling sad ...IMHO

However there is a beautiful way to increase equality and reduce crony capitalism..... Develop the next crypto / cyber / virtual currency ...evangelize and make that next one grow....there is place of more than one crypto / virtual currency just as there have been multiple fiats at an time in history

More currencies will make a much larger market and make adoption much more easier and the price much more stable

If currency is a medium of exchange and NOT just a medium of hoarding, why not a second or a third or a fourth .....n th medium ?

There is more than one model car , or one type of vehicle on roads

Any thoughts

At this point I'd take my chances with a new bunch plutocrats over the old ones - even though I know the majority of Bitcoin EAs will hail from the richest parts of the planet, not to mention being young and male - just like me.

However there is a danger of this revolution being like many revolutions before it and not really changing much in the end. This is why I'm generally in favour of progressive change, rather than disruption - it normally leads to better outcomes in the long term.

I've had plenty of wacky thoughts about some of the things I would like to see in an alternative crypto-currency. For example thinking about how might we counter the deflationary aspect (which does serve a purpose for EAs) by either incentivising redistribution in some way beyond selling out for FIAT? I'd like to see a coin that doesn't ultimately favour those with large amount of FIAT to buy up coins and I don't believe the mining mechanisms does that adequately.

Out of all the alternative crypto currencies so far I like PPCoin the most because it is trying to be innovative in a number of ways. I believe we will need a number of crypto-currencies, with a number of different design characteristics to satisfy our needs.