Inflation does not mater for bitcoin system, because it will ultimately stop. Distribution of inflation, as it is now, only matters to early adopters. I suggest dropping this topic as it is inconsequential to bitcoin success or failure in the long term.
It is not banned outright. It is banned as money. Legal tender laws define and monopolize what money is - you cant get your paycheck for example in antyhing other than PLN. These laws force you tu use ‘money’ that is constantly devalued to fund government handouts and inefficiencies. You have to pay for converting from one currency to another - currency exchange is business not a charity.
Poland has fairly standard legal tender laws AFAIK. Of course legal tender laws in times of crisis are ignored. You had black market in currencies in Poland because of hyperinflation - you couldn’t get anything for PLN. Threat of violence from the state was nothing compared to danger of starvation.
Government takes your computer and you are screwed. With gold this is less likely because government has no idea who has physical gold in their homes. With bitcoin it is quite possible to know this.
Bitcoin is already banned as money worldwide - legal tender laws exist everywhere AFAIK. Value in high risk scenario would be higher only when demand keeps up.
Solution is simple - buy from trusted source with estabilished market position. They have incentive to sell you genuine gold.
This is post scracity. Wouldn’t money as a concept be useless then? Unless you would need some resource to make replication possible. Then this resource would become money IMO.
Standards are very useful and sought after. It is the same with money, that is why if possible, only one money wins in the end.
I not only see no refutation, but I also do not see any coherent reaction to my posts. All of my arguments are ignored. In a way, the experience is mutual: we are ignoring each other’s arguments. But whereas I provided a reason for my ignorance (such as the assumptions clearly not being met), none of my opponents provided a reason for their ignorance, other than someone in the past thought it makes sense.
The government’s initiation of force does not invalidate the human action axiom, for example: people still act, just their decision processes assign different weight to individual variables. But it invalidates the conclusion that a small number of media of exchange emerges. Clearly, it does not. So, that’s why I object to its usage.
Let me repeat what I said at the very beginning in my first post: this only deductively follows if certain conditions are met, which currently are not met and probably won’t be in a foreseeable future.
The government interference in money and its attacks on gold create a market gap and Bitcoin has features which allow it to fill this gap. If gold was able to fill this gap, it already would have. The fact that it did not is a big hint that there might be something wrong with the argument. Just like you can argue that Bitcoin lacks some properties, I can argue that gold lacks some properties.
Just like tax advisors would not exist on a free market because there would be no taxes, Bitcoin might not exist on a free market either (let’s just assume this for simplicity so that we can stick to what we both agree on). Objecting to the usage of Bitcoins is, from this perspective, the equivalent of objecting to the usage of the services of tax advisors. I don’t know any Austrian that raves how tax advisors are fraud and violate the non-aggression principle or any such irrelevant nonsense. Such reactions would be emotional and not rational. The emergence of tax advisors is the market’s reaction to the force initiated by the state. Just like the emergence of Bitcoin is the market’s reaction to the force initiated by state. If you love gold, turn your hatred towards the state, who is attacking gold owners, minters, digital gold currency issuers. Don’t turn your hatred towards the free market. Bitcoin is not a threat to gold or to people obsessed with the term “money”, rather it provides supplementary features which gold does not have and is able to diminish the state’s power over the economy.
I’m not going to repeat myself again. I already explained my position several times. Am I going to get some meaningful replies or not?
Youy have presented the discovery of absolutely no contradictions. Only confusions in your own understanding of the material. You fundamentally do not understand the regression theorem, do not understand the Austrian insight called “Economic Calculation” and as a consequence you stumble over foundational tenants like Exchange Ratio’s, Money, and the formation of prices(More on Exchange Ratios).
This is incorrect. In a typical democracy nowadays, the force of legal tender is mostly indirect. Instead of prescribing what currency to use in a transaction, the government prescribes how you should do your bookkeeping and how banks should construct their services. That gives the legal tender a comparative advantage. There are situations where you are forced to accept legal tender, but they refer to specific situations like if you’re a bank, when you’re in a legal dispute with someone and when you’re paying to the government. There is no requirement to use the zloty for salaries. During communism, of course, it was more strict, but that’s been over for over 20 years.
If you want, you can rearrange your business so that the only time you’re using legal tender is when paying taxes and levies (and only pay the conversion fees at that time). You can conduct the whole business in any currencies you want, you just need to follow the bookkeeping rules prescribed by the government. You do not even have to have a bank account in Poland (apart from the purpose of paying taxes/levies).
In order for this to be effective, the government needs to first determine where all the copies of your wallet are, and if all of them are encrypted, how to decrypt at least one of them. I’m not even talking about a situation when the copy is stored outside of the jurisdiction of that country. Taking a single computer has as much effect as shutting down a bittorrent peer. Furthermore, the centralisation has fatal consequences to gold-based currencies (digital or physical). Governments, especially the US one, like to raid their issuers. Once that happens, not only is the issuer screwed, but at least som of their customers too (for digital, all of them). If you have a digital gold certificate and the government shuts down the issuer’s servers, the DGC loses backing as well as becomes unusable, since the infrastructure is gone. Other issuers do not have any obligation to redeem them (assuming even they were technically compatible), nor would it make much sense from a business point of view. Not so with Bitcoin: if a miner’s rig is confiscated, all the Bitcoins he mined are still fully valid and perfectly usable. The standard is open source and the infrastructure is peer to peer.
It is much easier to determine where gold is compared to where all copies of a file are. Gold is centralised, Bitcoin is decentralised. Furthermore, a third party (e.g. wife or a foreign business associate) or even an automated system can transfer the Bitcoins to a new address when you are in danger. In order to do this with gold, someone needs to physically move the gold from the old location to the new location. With Bitcoin, any single computer anywhere on the internet can do the transfer.
As I said above, this is false. It may be banned in some obscure countries like Cuba, North Korea or Zimbambwe, but the vast majority of the world is not violating legal tender laws by trading in Bitcoins. Outright bans are uncommon, and usually accompanied by hyperinflation and/or communism.
This, however, runs counter to the requirement of universality: you need to choose between trust and using new opportunities. With Bitcoin, you can have both simultaneously, since the validity of a Bitcoin transfer can be verified very quickly at low cost.
Such thing as “post scarcity” is, in my humble opinion, not possible. The impossibility follows from the action axiom. Replicators would “merely” make a lot of problems much easier, like computers and the internet did, but you’d still have scarcity. However, with replicators it would not make much sense to use commodities as money.
The replicators in Star Trek work on the basis of conversion between matter an energy. The decisive factor for a value of a physical asset would be then its weight: it would be roughly equally costly to produce a kilogram of dung as a kilogram of gold. That eliminates the advantage of gold, or any specific commodity for that matter. However, since you still have scarcity, there is still demand for production, trade and economic calculation. A currency that is based on mathematic rather then physical properties (such as Bitcoin) would be clearly at an advantage.
The replicator “problem” is, of course, only hypothetical, but my point is a reductio ad absurdum of the regression theorem.
Correct. And Bitcoin provides a well defined, decentralised and open standard to build services on. Gold is not necessarily a “bad” standard, but in the world of government intervention it simply might not be able to compete against fiat as effectively as Bitcoin can. If it could, Bitcoin wouldn’t have emerged in the first place.
As I said in other posts, this requires some assumptions, such as the non-interference by government and a homogeneity and stability of requirements for such a standard.
filc, you provide merely more assertions and no arguments. If I’m confused, why don’t you correct me? If my understanding is lacking, why don’t you explain?
A few investor’s? So you think the entire world investing market is only a few investor’s? Please tell me you aren’t a licensed broker, because that would just make your argument here that much worse. Even that house wife whom might have a 401K or a brokerage account is investing in PM’s. BTW my wife does all of her investing and calculation’s based on the fluctuation’s of PM’s. So your assumption that the everyday house wife doesn’t do this, is more so of you opening mouth and inserting foot.
Where was there a claim? It was clearly stated as a question. Again that’s the third time I have corrected your posting here. Twice in one thread.
Ahh, how cute. Yes, and that provides context to the argument you made how? If anything it’s a detraction from the point you were trying to make and counter’s your argument that gold is not used for economic measures when even you use that very same basis if you are investing in PM’s. Logical and rational consistency here is what I’m referring to filc. Either you have them, or you don’t. At this point in time, you do not have either.
I asked you to define what sort of economic calculation you were looking for. I never mentioned praxeology, because I do not use it. I’m an investment adviser and engineer, not an economist. I clearly addressed how exchange ratio’s are balanced when transfer of PM’s is used. The PM’s are always a measuring stick when trading paper.
Nice Ad-Hom, are you going to actually prove me right again in that few people here actually use rational argument’s? By that statement it’s apparent that you are not going to disprove my point there, rather you are going to try and drag this out into directed Ad-Hom territory with more emotive based reasoning. Praxeology has it’s uses, but you are not apparently using it here. If so, you are making bold claim’s that are apprently ignoring how Mutual’s and 401K’s generally operate, and assume that few people if any actually have invested any money whatsoever in their life time.
Yes, because I’m expected to read your mind and know that’s what you were referring to in the first place. I would recommend you go back and read that again to understand what he was really trying to say. As it stand’s now you are making the very same mistakes, and the using the same methodology that he was proving the failures of in that writing. If you are going to support what Mises was advocating, then I would recommend that you learn to speak and think in that manner.
This all goes back to my original statement that a large majority of the people that are claiming to be proponent’s of the Austrian method here are truly failing at this task. Everything I have ever read from Mises, Hayek, and Rothnard states the same basic thing. Never assume anything on a large basis. The only true way to know what is actually going on in the economy, or even on the Individual basis is to simply do your research and look at the data, and then to formulate what you see as a basis of reasoning. In the Investing world it’s called Fundamental Analysis.
Simply running off and saying that gold is not being used for any measure of an economy is making a boldfaced discrediting of the Austrian Method itself. It’s simply not true, as the numerical amount of borkerage firm’s and mutual’s that deal almost exclusively in PM’s, and the Central Bank’s themselves dealing with gold and the such prove this inaccurate at best. Bold claim’s that fly in the face of the evidence are clearly more bold claim’s that are simply not accurate much less true in any way shape or form. The size of the PM market’s in the US is rather small, but this is not true in other countries such as China and India, which are the largest PM market’s in the world. You can add Mexico up there soon as well. The US is not the only country in the world, and basing your assessment’s of the economy on only the US is prone to being a falsification of reality. I can and have travelled all over Asia with nothing more than a suitcase of cloths and a suitcase of silver. I have in the same trip never once had to withdraw fiat once I was in a country and away from the airport. I won’t even go into the PM market manipulation that we all know is going on.
I like the interest in Mises and Libertarian style philosophy, but I do not like the false representation that lead’s people to gather the wrong impression from these two. Principles requires work, and if you are going to assume the position of being Primcipled you have to start changing the way you describe thing’s and the inherent way you understand everything. This is not an attributation of the “Blank Slate” theory, rather it is a condemnation of it, and the methodology used of indoctrinating of how they wish to represent reality. Human’s on the Individual scale can be trained to believe a lot of thing’s, as well as being trained to think certain way’s. You have to break that way of thinking before you can truly move onto thinking the way you are obviously wishing to. Just look at my bio information, and you will see that I understand how this training effects people. My own story is nothing but the realization of how the state has a directed motive of keeping people indoctrinated in the manner that it does. This truly is an argument of Man VS State on every level.
This is why I may seem arrogant, and like a prick. This is not meant as a directed Ad-Hom toward’s anyone here, but rather constructive criticism. I do not hold any ill-will toward’s anyone that does not attack me first. My posting here is sparse, because I do not have the time between work, the family, school and MTG. My goal is to point out the inconsistencies in thought, while helping to encourage free-thought. Filc, I am your friend, and only trying to help.
/rant… Read my edit tag for the horrible spelling. As for the Grammar, well I personally adhere to the school of thought that Latin Grammar rules on a Germanic language are foolish, and do nothing but water down the concept of the possessive.
Being dishonest isn’t going to grant your position any merit. People here have gone way out of their way to explain things. Yet you expect it from them like they owe you.
Just to make sure I didn’t miss it, I reread your old posts. You did not provide an argument. You are rather obsessed with proving that Bitcoin does not fit into the regression theorem, but do not explain why it is relevant. You just make a feeble attempt with showing that it’s only used as a proxy at the moment. But that’s an empirical issue rather than a deductive one. I don’t use USD for economic calculation either, I use EUR. In order to use Bitcoin in economic calculation I go to bitcoincharts.com, get the USD/BTC exchange rate and then google for the USD/EUR exchange rate. By your own logic, USD is not a currency either because I don’t use it for economic calculation. That’s all nonsense of course, it’s not based on deductive reasoning.
I’m saying it’s irrelevant because regression theorem is based on normative assumptions and I clearly listed at least two which are not fulfilled at the moment. You completely ignore it. Regression theorem is not praxeological, because it mixes normative assumptions with deductive reasoning. The only way to fix it is to reformulate it without normative assumptions.
Bitcoin fills (or attempts to fill) a market gap that is predominantly caused by government interference. As long as the gap is there, Bitcoin (or one of its successors) will trade and have value. If Bitcoin fails, it won’t be because it deductively follows from the regression theorem, rather due to empirical issues (internal failure or it will be pushed out of the market gap).
So I’ll leave you to your obsession with obscure terms and faulty logic.
Which is it, either I have an argument or I don’t? Also if I have no argumetn why are you spending an exorbitant amount of time responding to essentially a non-argument?
Finally there have been at least two other people besides me who have emphasized the point that myself and Clayton brought up which caused the original source of contention on this thread. So to say I have no argument is just dishonest.
So regression theorem does not deal with exchange and ultimately human action? What normative assumptions are you talking about?
[edit]
It just dawned on me that I actually re-stated my position to you several pages ago. =p
You are making a separate claim, rather than providing a counterargument to my argument. That is what I am trying to point out, you are enclosed in your own reality, pretend to be interacting with others but actually just talking to yourself.
Of course, purely hypothetically, it is possible that you do have a counterargument and I just don’t get it. That is why I am trying to get you to confront my arguments, which you refuse.
Again, you guys are essentially talking to yourselves. You do not confront your opponents.
It does deal with human action, but it does not reject empirical methods, because it is based on normative assumptions that I have been pointing out since the beginning.
I have expressed and repeated them several times. Just another indication that your goal here is not a genuine discourse, but preaching dogmas.
I think it was established several pages ago that I had no particular argument directed at you. That your argument was inaplicable to the previuos discussion that occured over the past 20 pages.
In fact two different people on seperate occasions, not me, have gone out of their way to remind everyone the topic of the discussion. It certainly is not the case that I am mistaken as to what the OT was about.
The last 25 pages speak otherwise. I have held dialogue’s with many others, before you even came. The fact that you think I have not is just further evidence that you actually did not read everything I posted. Instead you probably just lied and said you did. I haven’t even the slightest why your posting or what your badgering on about.
I have stated this several times over, unless your arguing that BTC’s are a widely accepted currency, a money, then we have no quarrel. How many more times shall I repeat it to you?
If anything I corrected you in the past over your mis-information or mis-interpretation of key Austrian insights. But I have never presented an argument to refute yours. As I have no earthly idea w hat your “argument” is.
The irony of accusing me of talking to myself is over the top here!
Yes, Micah, Moonshadow, and everyone else before you were were pigments of my imagination.
Neither does praxeology. A priorism and a posterori are not mutually exclusive. You place yourself into a false dichotomy to choose extreme degrees of each. They both work in tandem. Praxeology explains to us what we understand about the empirical world. It’s an intregal part to the devleopment of the regressiom theorem. It explains to us the signifigance of exchange ratio’s, the ultimate establishment of prices amongst a common medium and eventualy what is finally established as money. Praxeology and empirical methods are not mutually exclusive. They are necessarily intwined. The very concept of “Human Action” implies the objective observation of preference after action taken.
Your just confusing yourself here. I asked you before, what normative assumptions?
Provide a link to your post where you explained the normative assumptions.
The irony here is I have no direct quarrrel with you, yet you seem bent on creating one.
Hilarious. You must be getting frustrated at this point. Stop and think why? What are you frustrated at? What are you trying to prove to me? You don’t even know what my argument is and you’ve provided evidence that you haven’t read a single thing I’ve posted in the first 25 pages. So why do you invest so much energy in me specifically?
You must have missed all of these since you seem to believe I am talking to myself.
Yet, you started arguing with me, and you object to almost everything I post.
Both of the examples you link to are attempting to show that Bitcoin is not money, however I again repeat that that’s irrelevant.
I think you are projecting your own faults to others. Multiple times you have claimed to not see sentences which I posted just a couple of posts ago and that you yourself have reacted to already. This is a strong indication that you are not genuinly interested in a debate.
I don’t think anyone says that BTC are widely accepted. The debate is about the future, not the present. The future with government interference with money. Not the future with anarchocapitalism.
Often when I showed you a problem with your argument, such as contradiction or a gap, you simply ignore it and start talking about something else.
I reread all the links you provided and there is still nothing new. You have two points:
Bitcoin is not money. I agree that based on the regression theorem it’s not money, but I claim it’s irrelevant
Bitcoin is not used for economic calculation. While I can’t be 100% sure about this since I don’t see in everyone’s head, let’s say for argument’s sake it’s true. However, again I claim it’s irrelevant. If the argument had any weight, you would need to prove that it cannot be used for economic calculation in the future. Furthermore, your example with USD disproves your own argument, since I don’t use USD for economic calculation either.
The reason why it’s irrelevant I posted on my very first post in this thread: government interference with money, mainly by legal tender laws, regulations of financial banking institutions and hatred of gold (I did not even mention illegal trades). This creates a market gap. If money cannot fill that gap, non-money still might be able to and from the perspective of people living in that gap, become the dominant medium of exchange and unit of economic calculation. The fees that paypal charges, bad credit scores preventing you from getting a credit card, identification and forms you need to fill out when opening a bank account, the days and fees it takes to make an international bank transfer, that all creates an opportunity for a competitor. If gold (or any other money) would be able to fill that gap, don’t you think it already would have?
There is nothing wrong per se with that post. In fact, currencies did already come to existence like that. However, US hates them and attacks their issuers. Because digital currencies based on commodity or stock have backing, that presents a single point of failure: government confiscates the backing, shuts down the servers of the issuer and the currency becomes unbacked and technically unusable. This has already happened several times in the past and I said so in my first post. With Bitcoin, there is no centralisation and no backing, so nothing to confiscate. In order to make Bitcoin unusable, a government needs to ban or heavily regulate all computers and network communications. I’m not saying that is impossible, but what is important is that it takes comparatively more resources and is less likely to happen. That creates a comparative advantage and if Bitcoin can utilise it, there is a huge gap in the market that it can fill.
Let’s try to make a more formal analogy. There is a demand for a good type M, which requires the features E and C. Due to network effects, whichever good has the best features E and C will become the dominant type-M good on the market. Let’s call it G. Goods that do not have both of the features E and C will be automatically pushed out of the market for a type-M good and an attempt of them to compete with G would be pointless. Now, enter government. Government creates a new good, F, which does not have feature C. It then uses force to directly or indirectly push G out of the market as a type-M good. Governments being governments, F is kind of crap and people do not want to use given the choice. So, they create a new good, D, a derivative of G. However, the feature C makes it very easy for government to attack D, because it presents a single point of failure and the connection between C and D cannot utilise network effects. Furthermore, governments start attacking people producing D. Some guys then produce a new good, B. Like F, it does not have the feature C. This makes it less vulnerable to government interference, but also makes some people object to it because they require the feature C. However, since F has pushed out G out of certain market sectors, B can fill those. Some people make the theoretical argument that C is necessary for a good to be a type M good. This may be right, but since government is pushing goods that have the feature C out of the market, people who are the most frustrated with F and want the feature E will be better served with B than with G.
In other words, while you see the absence of Commodity foundation in Bitcoin as a disadvantage against Gold, you neglect to see that it is also an advantage compared to Gold when facing Fiat and government interference.
I just realised that The Real Plato has been using Bitcoin for economic calculation during his trip. So yet again, your argument that Bitcoin cannot be used for economic calculation is disproved. Yet again I’m pointing out how your argument is based on induction and normative assumptions, rather than deduction.
It is correct that I have responded and critqued you once. The latter posts however have been response to comments you directed at me.
For you! For you it is irrelevant, but not irrelevant to me, my discussion with everyone, and the entire topic of this thread for the past 30 pages. THIS IS WHAT I AM TRYING TO EXPLAIN TO YOU. Unplug your mind. The truth is your argument has nothing to do with me. We’re talking past one another because each others point has nothing to do with the other. How many times must I repeat this? I said more then once that it doesn’t sound like you or I have a legitimate quarrel yet you persist.
That is not what I claimed. I claimed that I ignore your posts as they have absolutely nothing to do with me or my argument. I have indeed said that multiple times. How many more times must I say it before it clicks with you?
Correct but some people were trying to argue that BTC’s were a currency. That begun a debate of semantics. Again this is the entire premise of the first 25 pages of this thread. Maybe it has nothing to do with you, maybe not but your posts are entirely off base.
You have offered no such evidence. Are you claiming that the regression theorem has gaps and contradictions? I hold no argument of my own, the argument I am putting forth is straight regression theoreem.
I didn’t start a debate with you, you confused man. I responded to you in criticism on a single post. You went off the deepend badgering about all sorts of things.
The funny thing here is that I don’t think you ever actually addressed my criticism in that post.
Thats incorrect but lets just get this on record. You think a priori and a posterori are mutually exclusive? Am I reading that correctly? Through this reasoning you’ve managed to eliminate the praxeological contributions made to regression theorem. Therebye ignoring Mises’s own explanation when he uses Praxeology to arrive at the ultimate conclusion.
Thank god. See I did ignore you. For good reason though.
This is false. I don’t want to debate with you over this. I don’ want to spend the next 5 days explaining basic logic and philosophy to you only for you to disagree simply for the sake of disagreeing. I see no way of making a positive progression with you.
Praxeology and empiricism are not mutually exclusive, it’s the opposite. They are necessarily and implied as mutually dependant. I won’t explain it to you as I’ve long since lost any faith of being able to convince you. Even if I am right I think you’ll just disagree out of spite.
the non-existence of government
Kind of. The regression theorem can still explain a number of things about currencies of decree. You are correct in that it won’t explain how currencies of decree come into existence. This was stated several times over several pages now.
the non-existence of the digital
That is incorreect. Thats the equivilent of saying that if a new element was found in science, and this new element became a money that the regression theorem couldn’t explain. The regression theorem can explain the migration to digital currencies. The type of currency and whether it’s tangible or not has nothing to do with the fundamenntal mechanics of the theorem itself.
It sounds like you just WANT that to be the case. As stated 29384729387423 times over, it’s all about exchange ratio’s. You can’t just hop from one currency to another without pre-established exchange ratio’s. That IS STRAIGHT REGRESSION THEOREM.
Then leave me in peace. Your upset that you don’t understand what I am posting. Well go read a book man! I’m not going to teach you every detail of AE here. Especially if your going to harrass me.
NO you can be 100% sure as it would be radically in-effecient.
ANd if you read all of my posts you would have learned that this was established 25 pages ago(Somewhere in that mess of posts). So this point is mute.
Astronomically improbable. Bitcoin zealots like to think it’s underlying features are more desired for then they really are. It won’t happen for the reasons already explained. What does the gap do to existing exchange ratio’s and economic(and accounting) calculations.
You won’t be able to tell me because you don’t know what economic calculation is, nor do you care about exchange ratio’s and why they are relevant to the formation of a dominant money.
No my friend, this is what we’re going to do. I am through with you and our discussion. As I stated before, I have said everythign thats needed to be said. I have more the sufficiently covered the topic. I am ignoring you for the rest of the day so as not to ruin my sunday.
It’s likely that I’ll ignore most of your future posts as well. =p
Correct. However, you present multiple statements which contain logical fallacies. I listed them, you ignored them. What’s worse, you present this approach as somehow intellectually superiour. Keep mumbling your mantras if you want.
