Cryptocurrency Socialist Revolution?

[bitdude55]

I was recently wondering if the cryptocurrency concept could be used by socialists to stage a bloodless revolution? Imagine if a program could read and record a user's DNA and then provide them with a digital wallet with a one-off payment of say 1000 'DNAcoins'. The idea would be that everyone in the world would be entitled to a one-off payment of an equal number of coins. This way people would only have to insist on using the new digital currency in order to redistribute much of the world's wealth equally among every human being.

If we imagine that there are about $70 trillion in circulation and there are about 7 billion people it would work out as about $10,000 each. Of course $10,000 would have a very different value in a world where everyone has $10,000 than it has in our world today. Presumably the people with more than $10,000 would refuse to adopt the new currency but would they be a large enough minority to resist the change? I'm well aware that chaos could ensue, but could this economic 'Restart' ever happen? What would likely be the result?

[hilariousandco]

I'm a Libertarian Socialist, but don't really believe in this redistribution of wealth. Giving everybody free money wont make people equal. Some people are just bad at dealing with cash for a start.

I do believe Bitcoins/cryptocurrencies could be part of a revolution, and really can fuck the banksters and corporations over bigtime. How and when is up to the people.

[kanus1113]

The same people would still rise to the top.

[BadBear]

Giving people free money doesn't solve anything. People who don't have money, there tends to be a reason for that, they make poor financial choices. If you give them money, they're going to continue to make poor choices. For example, one of my friends who got divorced, I let him move into one of my bedrooms to get on his feet. He was paying less than half of what he paid before in rent, and no utilities. He still had trouble paying his rent, simply because he had poor planning skills, and no concept of money management. If he had an extra hundred dollars, he was absolutely going to spend it before his next paycheck, just because he had it. He stayed for almost a year until I finally asked him to leave, and in that time he had saved no money at all. He still owes me hundreds of dollars in rent to this day. He's now 32 years old and living with his mom. Better education is the only way to solve that problem. Giving everyone 10,000 dollars won't change anything, it will still end up in the same hands as before.

[bitdude55]

Thanks for your response. I agree that it's uncertain what would happen and whether a better functioning and more just world could be formed by executing this 'Restart' and redistributing the world's wealth. You're right that some people would waste their coins, for example drug addicts would spend them on drugs. However it's possible that a majority of people would see the coins as a means to reassert their position in society. I'm thinking about a poor illiterate guy in the slums somewhere; in the current world I have no good reason to interact with him, he simply cannot pay me. Imagine that we still used gold like in the old days, now imagine that all the world's gold is distributed equally among all citizens. Now I have a compelling reason to help that guy in the slum: feed him, teach him to read, help him build a house.

Really the 'Restart' would be a declaration of intent, the intent to show all people the same basic level of respect. It's not true that the same people would rise to the top, a person without skills whose only source of wealth is the money in their bank account would have no particular advantage in the new world. It is true however that inequality would still emerge but it would be a 'fairer' inequality than the inequality that exists in the world today. Inequality would still exist because some people are more talented and can provide more valuable services than others. We aren't talking about seizing people's physical assets. We're talking about shifting our efforts from pleasing a wealthy few to industrializing and modernizing the developing world. I believe there would be a kind of pendulum effect; first people in the developed would flood into developing countries and share their skills because that's where the greatest opportunities to earn 'gold' would be (it is also where they can do the most good and have the greatest impact on people's lives). As a result people in the developing world would be better equipped to 'return the favor' when people in the developed world spend their coins.

[bitdude55]

@BigBear
How did your friend 'waste' his money exactly? You mean he spent it? And what exactly do rich people do with their money? I see rich idiots on TV buying diamonds for their pet chihuahua; is that not wasting money? Could it be that rich people can afford to waste their money because they have a lot of money? Let say we do the Restart and people 'waste' their money by spending it, how would that be any worse than rich people spending it? Aside from the fact that a greater number of people would enjoy the goods and services. So they end up broke which they would be anyway; the question is whether are collective efforts are better spent by concentrating all our time and energy on a small group of people (which they might be) or would we be happier and more productive if we concentrated our efforts on a wider distribution of people.

[bitdude55]

A person uses a DNA reader to upload their DNA signature to a decentralized database. This database essentially says: the human being with this DNA signature has received their universal allotment of coins. There is no need to identify the claimant by name or know anything about them. A digital wallet with their coins is created and they are given their password, their DNA signature is recorded and they can't claim again. This data as well as transaction data can be decentralized the same way Bitcoin is decentralized: every user has a copy of the blockchain on their computer and it is constantly updated as users mine.

It's true that DNA readers are a little expensive http://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-cost...-for-patients/
They cost about $1,000. With today's technology we could probably have the entire world's population registered in a few months. If we made a concerted effort to ramp up production of readers and improve the technology we could do it in a lot less time. This technology is only going to get cheaper and faster. Fingerprints could be a simpler substitute but I don't know if it would be as reliable, it might be possible to forge or the scanner just might not be able to identify the person with enough certainty to support the system.

[Mike Christ]

Assuming the power structures have not changed, this is what happens:

1. Everyone gets their coins
2. The poor buy the things they need to survive from the rich
3. The rich wind up with all the money and the poor have to work for the rich to get it back

[bitdude55]

There won't even be 'poor' and 'rich' people because we'll all have the same amount of money. There will be people with valuable assets and there will be people with valuable skills and they will indeed have an advantage in the new world; but to say that if we redistributed all the money in the world equally it would all just end up like it is now after... how long exactly? A few days? A few generations? Immediately? It seems very unlikely that a complete overhaul of the entire economic system redistributing every single dollar would have no impact on our economic lives.

It's true that inequalities would emerge again, and some would exist from the very beginning because people would still possess valuable physical assets but make no mistake: redistributing the world's 'money' by universal adoption of an egalitarian cryptocurrency would have a CONSIDERABLE impact on inequality. Essentially we would cease to focus all our efforts and energy on producing luxuries for a small number of people. The energy would be distributed a bit more equally, that is all. 

[bitdude55]

@Mike Christ

Consider our current power structure:
1. The rich have money and the poor don't
2. The poor harvest commodities and manufacture luxury goods for just enough money to survive
3. There is very little social mobility and inequality gradually grows more extreme

So yeah, I think I prefer my power structure buddy. No it will not immediately provide everyone in the world with a rich person's lifestlye; but YES it will be fairer, happier and more productive than what we have now.

[Mike Christ]

There won't even be 'poor' and 'rich' people because we'll all have the same amount of money. There will be people with valuable assets and there will be people with valuable skills and they will indeed have an advantage in the new world; but to say that if we redistributed all the money in the world equally it would all just end up like it is now after... how long exactly? A few days? A few generations? Immediately? It seems very unlikely that a complete overhaul of the entire economic system redistributing every single dollar would have no impact on our economic lives.

It's true that inequalities would emerge again, and some would exist from the very beginning because people would still possess valuable physical assets but make no mistake: redistributing the world's 'money' by universal adoption of an egalitarian cryptocurrency would have a CONSIDERABLE impact on inequality. Essentially we would cease to focus all our efforts and energy on producing luxuries for a small number of people. The energy would be distributed a bit more equally, that is all. 

Money is not wealth; money is the absence of wealth.  The rich will still have their wealth--i.e. capital--and the poor will still have nothing.  The only solution to squash this divide is to disallow the rich a monopoly over force, the setup which stops the working man from taking ownership over his time and product.  See here if you're having trouble understanding why the wealth always moves to a few hands.

[bitdude55]

My understanding is this: people have valuable physical assets and they have something called money. Money helps people to live together in large cooperative groups because we agree to use it as a store of value. It can be in the form of physical notes or numbers in an account, etc. If we want to live together in those large groups and have complex relationships with each other we need to use money. However some people have accumulated large amounts of money making them disproportionately powerful in our society.

Our economic system allows wealth to be passed on from generation to generation creating a kind of multi-tiered caste system. Sometimes a family's wealth stretches back many generations to when human beings did things which we no longer deem ethical such as slavery. Some people who made their money recently did so unethically, such as the bankers who caused our economic system to crash. Others worked hard for their money but the predominant determiner of how much value a person produces is on what tier of the system they were born.

If people are dissatisfied with the current distribution of wealth why should they agree to play a game that is rigged against them from the beginning? They have no obligation to honor the store of value that accumulated wealth represents. The only reason they agreed to start using money was so that they could live in large complex groups and enjoy the benefits of that arrangement such as the development of technology, medicine, improved nutrition, etc. If there are aspects of that arrangement which they do not like; such as wealth accumulating in concentrated nodes, they are under no obligation to fulfill the 'promise' that the money is supposed to represent. They can achieve this redistribution by ditching FIAT currency and using an egalitarian cryptocurrency instead.

[Mike Christ]

My understanding is this: people have valuable physical assets and they have something called money. Money helps people to live together in large cooperative groups because we agree to use it as a store of value. It can be in the form of physical notes or numbers in an account, etc. If we want to live together in those large groups and have complex relationships with each other we need to use money. However some people have accumulated large amounts of money making them disproportionately powerful in our society.

Our economic system allows wealth to be passed on from generation to generation creating a kind of multi-tiered caste system. Sometimes a family's wealth stretches back many generations to when human beings did things which we no longer deem ethical such as slavery. Some people who made their money recently did so unethically, such as the bankers who caused our economic system to crash. Other worked hard for their money but the predominant determiner of how much value a person produces is on what tier of the system they were born.

If people are dissatisfied with the current distribution of wealth why should they agree to play a game that is rigged against them from the beginning? They have no obligation to honor the store of value that accumulated wealth represents. The only reason they agreed to start using money was so that they could live in large complex groups and enjoy the benefits of that arrangement such as the development of technology, medicine, improved nutrition, etc. If there are aspects of that arrangement which they do not like; such as wealth accumulating in concentrated nodes, they are under no obligation to fulfill the 'promise' that the money is supposed to represent. They can achieve this redistribution by ditching FIAT currency and using an egalitarian cryptocurrency instead.

As I said, money is the absence of wealth; nobody wants money, what they really want to do is get rid of it so they can enjoy wealth.  No matter which money you use, it doesn't change who owns what land; so long as a small group of people own large swathes of land, and charge other people to live on that land, and prevent people from claiming that land for their own, money is always going to move into the hands of the few, and the divide continues to grow.

Consider the following example:

Two men are using this currency; they now have $10,000 worth of this coin each, for example.  One man is the CEO of a global corporate empire.  The other man, who works for said corporation, has an apartment and needs to buy a car to get to work.  Are they now equals?

Even if money disappeared completely i.e. communism, if the few still owned the many, the power structure remains unchanged and you would still have an enormous disparity between the aristocracy and the working class.  You're not redistributing the wealth, you're just changing how that wealth is represented; the rich still own all the wealth.

[bitdude55]

I think I understand your perspective: the money is only valuable as a means of exchanging the underlying goods, if the ownership doesn't change then the power relationships don't change. So in the event of a cryptocurrency that redistributed all the wealth in the world equally, value would revert solely to the stuff instead of the stuff and the money. Essentially the cryptocurrency would succeed in a transfer wealth from people who have stuff and wealth in the form of money to all the people who have stuff. All the people who have money would lose that value, it would be bestowed upon everyone's stuff. So that is in fact a meaningful redistribution of wealth; I'm not completely sure what the end result would be though. I think the rich people would have more wealth in the vulnerable abstract form and the poor might have more collective stuff to receive value, haha  

[bitdude55]

I understand that money in bank accounts is all invested in physical goods so it can't be claimed without seizing people's physical assets. But wouldn't this cryptocurrency succeed in redistributing all the cash in the world? The coins and bills I mean.

[ErisDiscordia]

I'm a Libertarian Socialist...

What the hell is that?

Can you please describe, what a Libertarian Socialist believes in?

[hilariousandco]

I'm a Libertarian Socialist...

What the hell is that?

Can you please describe, what a Libertarian Socialist believes in?

I cannot speak for all Libertarian Socialists as there are many differing views and schools of thought, but you can start with the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

Chomsky has lots of things to say on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31VAUFVPF8E (5 minute video) & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkaO12X-h1Y (80 minutes)

If you want some books to read I can recommend some.

[ErisDiscordia]

Thanks for the reply.

So...I'm wondering: are you just afraid to call yourself an anarchist? This label "Libertarian Socialist" sounds extremely funny to me  (I havent heard it before)

[hilariousandco]

Thanks for the reply.

So...I'm wondering: are you just afraid to call yourself an anarchist? This label "Libertarian Socialist" sounds extremely funny to me   (I havent heard it before)

It is anarchism. No, I'm not afraid to call myself an anarchist, but most people have a popular misconception of anarchists/anarchism as complete chaos/armageddon and propagated by these ignorant faux punk-looking fuck da establishment types (but yes, fuck tha government ).

[ErisDiscordia]

Thanks for the reply.

So...I'm wondering: are you just afraid to call yourself an anarchist? This label "Libertarian Socialist" sounds extremely funny to me   (I havent heard it before)

It is anarchism. No, I'm not afraid to call myself an anarchist, but most people have a popular misconception of anarchists/anarchism as complete chaos/armageddon and propagated by these ignorant faux punk-looking fuck da establishment types (but yes, fuck tha government ).

I see. I don't want to troll you about it, but doesn't this constitute "being afraid of calling oneself an anarchist" a little bit?

I'm curious, because have sort of the opposite approach towards this. I will call myself an anarchist when talking to someone and then try to ruin their misconceptions about it by not throwing any molotov cocktails at them