Topic: A way to lessen inequality in Bitcoin (Read 2776 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.

This is not an endorsement of the idea, but you'll have to come up with a better solution than fingerprint scanning. There's no feasible way of making a deterministic hash of someone's fingerprint. Real fingerprint detectors (are fallible and) separate signal from noise; hash functions can't.

Genetic material is more doable because it's discrete, but there's no way to prevent someone from collecting samples from people they encounter and stealing their Satoshis.

They pay the fee once and then they have access to their funds forever. Then they are their own banks. You just scn their fingerprint so they can have access to a blockchain.info account or a paper wallet with the funds - that is a fingerprint scanning service, not a bank.

Hold up. Bitcoin is, among other things, about personal ownership. You are setting up a bank for satoshis that people have to pay a fee to access. Sounds like a great business model.

No, not leaving that out of the scenario. I think you might be assuming that the average person has hard assets. The majority don't, all the more so after the consequences of the last 5 years. They're who I'm worried about.

The fund could be managed just by code. Or maybe the Bitcoin foundation could be custodian. Then you can make this hardware fingerprint-scanner that only works with live fingers, scan and get access to your wallet. The cost of the scanner would be higher than the value of the satoshis but one scanner can be used by many people. So one guy with a computer and a fingerprint scanner could make a business out of scanning peoples fingerprints and giving them access to their wallets for a fee. I think the market will solve the problem.

I think you might be equating wealth with money.  Money makes up a small portion of the average persons wealth.  Property, stocks, real estate, etc would still have value in a currency collapse. 

Zombie welfare rioters. That's probably also why homeland security bought about 300 bullets/american. Fun times ahead.

A crash is rarely smooth. There WILL be problems.

I agree in principle, but what I'm worried about is the weeks and months immediately following some form of crash. That's a real flashpoint, where a future course can get entrenched for quite a while. What direction is taken at that point could mean the difference between a few years of economic recovery and a few decades. The fact that everyone will be better off in 20 years once the balance has evened out isn't going to make those 20 years much fun. Think zombie apocalypse movies! (that's why that genre started getting popular again...!)

I kind of think that concept can solve those problems, but I also agree with the thread's basic premise too.

We can't solve this issue sufficiently well in time for when cryptocurrency over-trumps fiat. Not in 2 years, 5 or 10. So something's gotta be done in the short term, however small. But we must change this dependency culture in the future, and I think the crypto-revolution in general will help to encourage that more than perhaps any awareness campaign ever could.

Next problem: who runs the fund? To who can we trust to distribute these hardship donations? I'm thinking along the lines of, no-one! Maybe these need to be super-localised, someone needs to step up in every locality that covers x thousand people. Kind of removes the temptation toward sticky fingered types.

I totally agree. I do not have a very large number of bitcoins, but I offer to give free bitcoin to everyone I discuss bitcoin with. People who would otherwise laugh at the idea and never consider it seriously instead download a wallet, receive a few dollars worth of bitcoin, see how it works, and come away thinking that it is pretty cool. I also encourage them to tell their friends and invite them to come meet me. If everyone who owns more than 100 BTC (~10,000 people) decided to give away 0.01 BTC (1 BTC total) to 100 people, then there would be 1 million new bitcoin users. I believe that adding 1 million new people to the bitcoin economy would have an upward influence on price of much more than the 1 percent of BTC holdings that people would have given away.

This isn't something so innocent and harmless as facebook or twitter. It's a global economic system that has the potential to revolutionize the world economy. If it can't find solid footing without bribery, which your proposal essentially is, then it is unsound. We don't need it for adoption, or if we do then it's time to pull out.

In such a scenario, those too slow to convert dollars to bitcoin would lose their fiat-denominated assets, but many of those people have much greater fiat-denominated debt.  I see a full-blown currency collapse and stampede into bitcoin as a great jubilee and as something beneficial for the average person (provided the transition is reasonably peaceful).  

"Most normal people" are fools. I don't believe this needs to be contested so why you would try that argument is beyond me. And you appear to be a dick.

When ushering in a new system it makes sense to get everyone started with some satoshis to even the playing field a little.

These posts demonstrate a significant intellectual deficit. The original post described a system of voluntary charitable contributions, not communism. I cannot understand your hatred of what most normal people consider to be basic morality. I strongly suspect that you are a hypocrite because you have accepted kindness and generosity from others many times throughout your life. Clearly you have some serious psychological issues. Are you Michelle Bachmann?

I see. Thanks for clarifying!

Well, most people in the world today already have basically nothing. Even in the United States the average person's net worth is less than 5,000 dollars and they live from paycheck to paycheck. When the fractional reserve system collapses, I believe the new economy will give more people a fair chance to accumulate money and eventually achieve a basic level of financial security.

I meant 70 BTC is enough to give everyone one satoshi, and then everyone has a stake in making Bitcoin more valuable. If more than 70 btc comes in, then great, more satoshis for everyone. If 7000 btc kome in everyone will have 1000 satoshis. That means that the price has to go to $100k/btc for that to be worth $1, but it wont flood the market because it will take time to implement so that people can actually access their wallets. Price went up 100x in 2013. If 7000btc were given away as a free gift, the price could easily go up to $100k in 2014. And according to Dan Arielys Predictably Irrational, the best way to make someone want something is to give away a free gift.

If bitcoin needs to stoop to bribery to become mainstream instead of doing so on its own merits then it won't last and I want no part of it. No matter the form of money, once socialism sets in we will be right back where we were. Only without the ability to print money, which will make the system collapse that much faster. There can not be winners without losers, and everyone being equal means nobody is doing that great. Set up your own private soup kitchen if you want but don't try to drag the world along with it.

It wont solve the worlds problems, but it will at make Bitcoin mainstream.

If you mean each person will have 70 btc, you may want to check the math. :-)

Fucking commies.

There is this saying, maybe some of you know it. Goes something like this: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give a man a fishing rod, and he will trade it for a fish! This is because man is lazy and will always have his hand out as long as there are hand-outs. Charity spreads weakness, it does not cure it.

By simply giving away to everyone Bitcoin you could buy the support for Bitcoin from the entire world population.

Making such a fund will make bitcoin gain legitimacy as everyone has a stake. Once you have 70BTC every human can have a stake in Bitcoin. At least on paper until the fingerprint reading equipment thing is sorted out. It would be in every Bitcoiners best interest to donate a portion of their holdings to such a fund.

Edit: in fact every Bitcoin-holder would benefit from giving away Bitcoin until it hits a sweet spot of potential increase in BTC price and BTC-percentage given away.

Good point. I am not sure if it would be a slow collapse or extremely fast. Or if the currency and bit coin will coexist.  Often I lean towards coexistence for a long time.

However if it happened quickly, it would be terrible for people who lose it all.

I've said this elsewhere already, but if the transition to cryptocurrency is anything but smooth (and that's a seriously optimistic scenario), then there will be alot of people who end up losing all their saved money, even their pocket change, because no-one will sell them cryptocurrency in exchange for it. That number could be higher than we'd all be comfortable with, so there's got to be some contingency for how bad that kind of situation could be.

Put another way, when currencies in a fractional reserve system collapse, only the quickest will get any money out in time. What fraction of those quickest will get their money into hard currency before the real value becomes zero? Troubling to think how many people could be left with nothing. I will not be happy with that situation.

I agree with you.  Charity is always a good thing.

It is important to remember that it isn't charity if it is at the point of a gun and it isn't charity if it is someone else's money. :-).

Such a fund would also give everyone a stake in Bitcoin's success.

While I'm keen on totally brutal free-market principles, they do produce their real-world problems. I think having a full on cultural revolution (where people don't get encouraged to believe that learning is a weakness, most importantly) will solve the problem in the long term, but before that can come about, there's going to be a lot of unfortunate people roaming the streets (hell, there already are).

Some kind of voluntary scheme is sensible, if only to make it safe and comfortable to walk around your neighbourhood. I don't like the idea of being surrounded by beggars and muggers everywhere I go, even if that's what the free market serves up for us.

I'm not setting out to destroy all wealth inequality. One could have a small opt-out automatic donation on for example .01% of all transactions that goes the wallet that spreads it to everyone. So it is voluntary, but you are given a suggestion to donate a little. Which in time will be worth a lot. A basic income is suggested by many and among others Milton Friedmann liked the idea, it's clean and simple. And with Bitcoin even cleaner and simpler.

As for Bitcoin being back in the hands of a few isn't a problem with the idea, in fact it means that those wealthy who give will get the money back. So maybe they could keep giving and keep getting back instead of hording only.

Like all such . . . umm . . . questionable suggestions, this one shows very little real understanding of human nature.

Go ahead, do precisely that distribute them equally among all the people of the world . . . everything is rosy and all will have money . . . within 6 months, the bulk of those bitcoins will again be in the hands of the minority once more.  Out of the hands of the ignorant and non-productive and back into the hands of industrious investors and businessmen.

Nobody set out to cause wealth to be distributed unevenly, it is a simple manifestation of human nature that some will prosper while others don't.  Can't change it, can't social engineer it, it simply is.  There will always be poor and there will always be wealthy.  It's the natural order of things.

One could create a donation-based basic income for everyone.

One sets up a fund. Basically a wallet. People donate to that wallet and one creates one wallet for each person in the world and distribute the btc evenly to all those wallets and it is possible for every single human to claim one by giving their fingerprint which is then stored cryptographically (so that one can see that the fingerprints are different but not how they look like) publicly and decentralized so that the same fingerprint cannot claim a wallet twice. With 7bn people 70btc would be enough to give every human one satoshi. The fund can be created before one develops the technology and slowly accumulate.

And just increasing the amount of people using Bitcoin will increase the value Bitcoin has. If you don't want the money or don't want to give your fingerprint don't claim the wallet. Under inflation, giving people money becomes more expensive, under a deflationary regime giving people money becomes cheap, because some day that satoshi is going to be worth a dollar.

In Bitcoin-terms it would be like a faucet but where you don't have to do anything for it to accumulate.