Topic: A way to lessen inequality in Bitcoin (Read 2756 times)

Correct.  But the time-scale is the issue here.  US debt has grown a trillion a year.  If the US carries on expanding its debt until it reaches Japanese levels, that will take about 120 years.  Unless you are really optimistic about gene therapy and cloning, you won't be around to worry about it.  And even if you were, the Japanese seem to doing OK with that level of debt.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

It doesn't matter what kind of interest the loans you take to repay your old loans has. Until that number starts going down instead of up, we are getting closer to hyperinflation or default by the day. Make all the excuses and fancy equations you want, reality doesn't change just for that.

Really?  I think you will find that the US debt costs have been falling for a decade or so.  The headline amount grows but its borrowed at a negative interest rate so it doesn't matter.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/09/5-facts-about-the-national-debt-what-you-should-know/

Perhaps when you see countries like Japan having debt issues, we might find out the limit of what a government can borrow.  Japanese debt is over 200% of GDP while the US debt is about 75% and there is no foreseeable future in which it reaches 200%.  And the Japanese have no problems with the debt...

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-debt-now-about-73-of-gdp-cbo-says-2013-09-17-1091240

Maybe we don't need a fund and fingerprints, albeit a group within the Bitcoin-community willing to share their coins among family and friends. I think Jinni's idea deserves more appreciation and sympathy, for it might be the best answer to the stagnation caused by speculators. Bitcoin is too great to fail due to a distorted mindset based upon "Greed is good", whereas Frans de Waal and his primates tells us "In us we trust."

cheers

There is really only one number that matters here and that is the US debt. It keeps growing, and it doesn't look mathematically possible that it will ever stop. This will eventually result in either hyperinflation or a default. That's not an argument or an opinion, it's just numbers.

I agree with your first point - most taxes are wasted. 

The problem with that line of argument is that people have been saying since the New Deal.  At the moment the economy is bouncing back so obviously the crisis you expect is at least 3 years off.  You may well be right but the wait to find out is more likely to be 50 than 5 years. 

Carlton - when you have a moment in between bouts of admiring my decision to invest in Bitcoin in 2011, please google "ad hominem."

That's easy. Feeding the poor by robbing money from the productive under threat of jail leads to the economic disaster we are currently in the beginning of. Revisit this line of thought 2-5 years form now.

I think there are far easier and cheaper ways to prevent starvation than through forcing someone to pay taxes and then spending a small portion of those taxes on actually helping people, while the vast majority of it goes into an ever expanding bureaucracy or to fund wars etc.

Can you make the moral case of how it is moral to have an income and pay taxes if you know that a part of that money will be spent on mass murder?

Anyway, starvation is normally solved by technology, not by government spending.

Hawker's here, prepare yourselves for several bouts of

• over-simplifying
• over-complicating
• ignoring anything inconvenient
• representing what's been said as something else altogether (using the above tactics)
• offering no original or independent thoughts, just repeating what he's read/seen on tv
• never saying anything helpful or useful, just arguing
• gloating about his multi-millionaire lifestyle (the substance of which is a little dubious)

He's an all-round great guy.

Paying taxes is not forced servitude.  The state creates money and the state creates the distribution system for money.  If the state says "Instead of you getting 100% of the profit from selling timber you get 70%" that is not forced servitude - you always have the option of having no money at all and thus avoiding all taxes.

I didn't see jinni advocating "allowing the poor to starve".  I think he believes, as do many, that charities are much more capable than government in providing for the poor since they are much more local, efficient, and accountable.

Forced servitude to provide for someone else is immoral no matter what the person's need is.  Voluntarily saying you will help is a completely different matter.  Most people are more than willing to help others and around here do so.  It isn't charity at the point of a gun, and it isn't charity or moral if you are giving away the products of someone else's life.  In short, someone's "need" doesn't give them a right to force you to work to provide something for them. 

Saying that collecting taxes is immoral doesn't really advance your cause much.  Most people think its immoral to allow the poor to starve and thus collecting taxes is the lesser of two evils.  What you need to do is either make a moral case for allowing the poor to starve or stop complaining about taxation being immoral.

Agreed.

100 years ago, you could move to America if you didn't like socialist style governments. You could vote with your feet. Since the US started the income tax and the Federal Reserve, that declined, slowly, but declined. They've still got vestiges of a republican system in the US, but it's slowly turning into a centralised, corporatist caricature of the type of country that the US constitution was meant to safeguard.

The people of the world need a free choice again. If you like communist/socialist style government, there should be some opportunity to live like that. Centralised or decentralised (the decentralised version of communism has not been practiced in anywhere but tiny little tribes that live outside the reach of a central government AFAIK). And if you want libertarian/liberal capitalism with a republican constitution, there should be an opportunity to live like that too.

The 20th century was spent molding the world's people into the belief that whatever system you thought your country was living under, that was definitely what you were getting. All the nice people at the newspapers, and those noble politicians, and the glamorous celebrities, they all told us so! But it was all a long con; US capitalism was a long con, Soviet communism was a long con, European socialism was a long con. All of those systems would have been fine if they worked as advertised, but "reality" always ended up contorting the system into corporatism with a little flavour of what the people thought was supposed to be the ruling doctrine. There was always some event that came along where the politicians would basically say "this communist/capitalist/socialist thing is all fine, but this is also real life, and we've been forced to do something that goes against it! Sorry!"

I agree, and these people make up the majority of western populations. It's worse than what you've outlined, some of these people have no assets and no income (and no prospect of getting some any time soon). Telling this category of people that their debts are absolved because of the biggest economic depression of all time might be a pretty short-lived celebration.


My preference would be that a measure to redistribute hardship funds to people isn't needed. It's only really a big problem under circumstances where large amounts of people with no assets, zero savings and no income don't take the chance to hedge their bets with cryptocurrency. From the way that people everywhere, in all sorts of contexts, are beginning to talk about it now, I wonder whether most people won't at least know someone to turn to on a personal level. It sounds cold, but if ~5% of people don't take some stake, that would be just about tolerable. Half of those people could be doing out of conservatism, and if they're vulnerable, they might get the help they need from someone they know in the 95%.

But if 35% of people are too stubborn to at least hold a little cryptocurrency, we could have a real nightmare on our doorsteps. For decades. Then it turns into a case of who's quick enough to buy a stake in the limited seasteads... before full-on zombie apocalypse ensues! 

Where's the flashpoint for chaos though? 90/10? 85/15? I not sure if I like the sound of 80/20 at all...

Certainly they can, but as long as they keep collecting the money through taxes it is an immoral use of force.

It they don't have assets then they likely don't have any significant money either.  People don't just sit around with mountains of cash and no assets.   Cash continually loses value.  Other than death and taxes it is one of the certainties of life.  If fact quite a few people have a negative net worth which means in a currency failure their negative networth would rapidly approach zero (a net improvement).

Before giving away bitcoin to every person in the world, I think it would be better to do this on a smaller scale with targeted objectives. Take for example a small country like Cyprus, which is already becoming a bitcoin leader. If everyone in Cyprus were given some bitcoin, we would see the process of near total adoption of bitcoin in a country quickly realized. Imagine the media coverage that would generate. Or do this to a small town in the United States. Offer free bitcoin to everyone in the town if every business agrees to accept bitcoin payments. The Native American bitcoin activist who is trying to get his tribe to adopt bitcoin is another great example - targeted donations to a group like that would have greater benefits than universal micro-donations to everyone in the world.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

basic income is a well studied economic proposal - if government wishes to start this they could certainly pay people in btc.