Topic: Are Bitcoiners Neoliberals? - page 5. (Read 9243 times)

We should meet up then, because I am absolutely "perfectly okay with paying taxes".
An ineffective or a broken system is not an excuse to exist without one.
I know it's cool to scream blue murder at taxes, but in the real world, charity, noble intents and self-preservation will not hold a society together.

To those who insists that society can still function without taxes, I urge you to just consider why there are over 400,000 orphans in the United States and over 150,000,000 around the world that still depend on their respective government's foster systems to survive. Where are these altruistic individuals that we so often hear about in narratives of no-tax utopias?

No, paleoliberal is just another in a long line of vague and convenient labels.
The Founding Fathers were certainly not "paleoliberals".


Self-professed libertarians of CATO (associated/influenced/converted), for the most part, are thoughtful individuals who recognize the subtleties of theories and philosophies and the exigencies of real world - at least until the Koch brothers' hostile takeover a few years ago. Self-proclaimed born again and paleo libertarians, on the other hand, live in a world that is increasingly detached from reality.


And lastly,


No, 'Bitcoiners' is not a superorganism that can be definitively defined and classified by a single label.
The Bitcoin demographic consists of (my speculation) intelligent, opinionated and independent-minded individuals.
'Bitcoiners', believe it or not, is not similar to fungal colonies or coral reefs.

Absolute Madness. I was losing buckets of blood from an unprovoked stabbing in a serious dodgy part of an English town.

The people who saved me SAVED me - saved my life. What they ask for - nothing. Free health care.

Neo-liberalists live in a bubble of their own design. 

This is spot on.

Technical and economical.

Allow me to explain in generalizations:

Would you rather get a 5Ƀ discount, or avoid a 5Ƀ surcharge?

Using bitcoin (as an actual currency, not as an anonymous proxy token for USD) means merchants will keep asking this question. And it will be equally uncomfortable for consumers.

Secondly, most people are not actually speculators. While holding bitcoin is indeed zero-sum gamble in the long term, most will incline to avoid the potential 5Ƀ loss than hope for the potential 5Ƀ profit. Irrational loss aversion cognitive bias. Opposite of gamblers fallacy.

This results in catch-22 situation: for price to stabilize, the adoption must be massive, so no bagholders can actually move the market anymore. but for that to happen, the price would have to be stable for a long time...

The only way to escape the death spiral I see is bag holders ganging up and coordinate to "act as a central bank" to ensure long-term sustainability. Unfortunately rational players (and unregulated markets in general) tend to not follow the game-theoretic golden rules where cooperation (even coerced!) brings much better results than individual competition.

Remember Nash saying: If we all go for the blonde...

Coercive action with better result for everyone might be cock-blocking the uncooperative agent. I'm sure many can relate to the real life....

I've never meet a Bitcoiner in real life that was perfectly okay with paying taxes.

I think one of the strenghts of Bitcoin is that users are  ideologically various.

A few references:

https://blog.caseykuhlman.com/entries/2014/bitcoin-somaliland.html

http://prestonbyrne.com/2014/08/19/interview-on-lets-talk-bitcoin-no-137-the-eye-of-the-beholder/

I was thinking of the potential of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, not it's current state. Sorry for the poor choice of words.

the claim was that the black market is "increasing dramatically."  Another hyperbolic claim.

The claim is by the Bitcoins Not Bombs people in a panel hosted by Stephanie Murphy that Bitcoin is currently increasing exponentially.  If you look at things like number of transactions. merchant adoption, etc. you can see mostly linear growth.  They are promoting their agenda and they think the success of Bitcoin is going to prove their ideas to the rest of the world.

The claim was that is increasing dramatically.  That means it was a certain value before and now it has "increased dramatically."  Where does that come from?

That's true. However, if Bitcoin can be an anonymous, decentralized, cheap to use medium of exchange then black markets will naturally gravitate towards it.

Right now it's an unfinished unproven technology, so it's anyone's guess what it's growth rate will be.

The "informal economy" and black market are pretty thoroughly interwoven to the point that I think it's pretty hard to find an economic activity that is untaxed and unregulated that is also not technically illegal. After all, in the United States you're supposed to write down all of your economic activity even if it isn't taxed.

Bitcoin is only a tiny fraction of the black market. The black market is considered a subset of the informal economy, of which 1.8 billion people worldwide are employed. Market revenue is estimated to be 1829 billion $.  The bitcoin market cap has not reached such sizes.

Where do you come up with the claim that the black market is expanding dramatically?  That sounds like the people who keep claiming Bitcoin is expanding "exponentially."

If Bitcoin can't stand by it's own technical merits then no amount of excellent cheerleading is going to make any difference.

I don't really follow the people you're talking about, so I can't really defend them, but if you don't like what they're saying about bitcoin, then all you can do is make a better case yourself.

The way I think about cryptocurrency is that it is the basis of defacto libertarian society if it can live up to its goals. It is a borderless country without recognizing any authoritative leaders (anarchy).

Another way to look at it is a dramatic expansion of the black market (System D), and the increase in economic freedom that comes along with it.

That's if the problems with anonymity and the blocksize limit can be resolved.

I have already explained that I agree with limited government and reducing their power.  I have also explained that any discussion about Bitcoin reducing or ending wars and many of the economic arguments are based on an assumption that the entire economy will switch over to Bitcoin.  Those discussion are, for the most part, are interesting as thought experiments but otherwise worthless.  I am not going to waste my time arguing minute details about that stuff.  The real discussion is when Bitcoin gets some significant percentage of the economy how that will effect the economy and policies of things like central bankers.  That is the rational discussion.  it is discussed now and then but most of the discussion if that we have almost 100% government fiat or 100% Bitcoin.

I would agree that the fringe wackos like Vorhees, Shrem, Mayer, etc. don't represent the majority but they are the loudest and they get the most coverage.  My issue is that people like that are making it difficult to present Bitcoin to the general public.  While they were champions early on they are now detrimental to the adoption of Bitcoin and are making it weaker.  Many Bitcoiners don't realize that because they don't interact with the public at large and they just call the public all stupid because they don't understand Bitcoin and generally like State-run institutions.  It is like an election where one candidate gets wiped out at the polls and their supporters stand around all confused because "everybody" they knew supported the losing candidate.

You keep making these wild assertions about how certain Bitcoiners/libertarians/"pseudo-liberals" are wrong and delusional about their "arguments". Then you don't even bother to mention what those arguments are, and then when you can be bothered to actually state the argument and what you think is wrong with it, you ignore any counterargument.

Case in point was you saying "pseudo-liberals" are crazy because they think that Bitcoin will stop all wars. I then pointed out that war is actually very tightly linked to inflation, and that bitcoin is immune to inflation, and therefore there is a case to be made that Bitcoin could make war difficult.
You, of course, don't respond to that at all.

You do understand that when people are at speaking engagements they tend to use demagoguery, hyperbole, undefended assertions, and take incredibly optimistic long positions? That doesn't say anything about the foundation of their thinking, or how they got to that position, it just stirs debate, gets people interested, and makes the speaker more fun to listen to. It's just rhetoric, not some thorough peer reviewed paper that they've taken months to consider. You seem to be perfectly happy to take a few soundbites and go off on a tirade about how crazy certain people are.

Or, perhaps you're only listening to fringe wackos that don't even represent the majority position of the people you're referring to. I can't really know, since you are anything but specific about the problems you have.

No, it means I did research and I listened to people who knew what they were talking about and not a bunch of people on discussion boards who repeat meme's.  I generally don't talk about economics.  Most of the economics discussion on here is based on the claim that the entire word will switch over to Bitcoin so they are just thought experiments and not realistic discussions. 

The issue is you don't know how to argue about with a Bitcoin supporter who doesn't agree with your ideology.  The arguments usually are that someone is a Bitcoin hater so, therefore, they are stupid and any objections to our arguments are because they are stupid.  Well I am a huge Bitcoin supporter and I say the Bitcoin protocol is great ... but I am also saying that the so-called "heroes" of Bitcoin are not just wrong, they are delusional and the loudest voices don't even do basic research beyond their self-serving discussion boards about what they are trying to talk about. 

I never realized that Free State project was so bad until I got involved in Bitcoin.  In fact, I used to think it was a good thing.  Apparently they have isolated themselves from the real world and they sit around reinforcing each other with nonsense and then they act like the rest of world is stupid.  Right, we are all stupid and we can't read dictionaries and we can't read experts in economics. 

Thats stretching credulity a little too far IMHO.

Correct. It's a good thing to debate using the same kind of vocabulary as the person you're speaking with, whenever possible. If someone is arguing about fiat currency and you respond that, "That isn't a fiat currency", and then the other guy says, "Well no, this is the definition I'm working with." The correct response from that position is to just use that definition whether you like it or not, not go into a hissy fit because he refuses to use your definition unless his definition is so esoteric that no one could be reasonably expected to have a rational discussion using it.

Well, on a positive note, at least there seems to be some agreement that Erik Voorhees and Roger Ver are not neoliberals in whatever sense Harvey means it.

A lot of disagreements come down to definitions. This could be avoided if people would simply agree during the discussion to be clear about their definitions and assign different words to different definitions. It's easy enough to discuss fiat1 vs. fiat2 as being different concepts and during the discussion to explicitly say fiat1 or fiat2 to indicate which one is meant. I wonder why people are reluctant to do that.

In other words, you're totally unqualified to talk with any kind of authority about economics or language. Plus a nice little ad-hominem tacked on at the end. Classy.

If you're going to do the "argument from authority" fallacy you should at least do it right...