Topic: Are Bitcoiners Neoliberals? - page 7. (Read 9243 times)

Labeling is dangerous and very often leads to strawman arguements.

It's not like every one is equipped with a PGP key to understand exactly what you mean. There is a world of subversion out there that challenges even the core treatments of 'main' stream - ie the essentially 10 degree to the left or 10 degree right 'modern liberalism' that dominates (and some would say nose dived the West's) position.

For me to adopt a label is, in my opinion, only going to open me to a series of critics. Everyones a critic.

I like BTC - I seen it way back in 2008 at $11 - shuda, wouda, couda - but whats been fascinating to me is that the way the market has payed out.

***deep apologies for any derailment of thread*** but does the fact that 70% of of BTC has never been traded concern those from all ideologies?

Personally I'm a humanist, a trans-humanist - although I think it may not be the optimum state for our species. Evolution is an incredibly, effective, but generationally, default. It was never designed for Moore's Law or the singularity.

I work 2.5 jobs, I'm a loving father, I believe in considerably more than the 'eye' can see, i take Modafinial. I have a good life. How could a label benefit me?

they are libertarian not neoliberal
neolilberal taxes you 1% less than the democrats , talks a populist, socially conservative line on abortion and queers but does nothing about it, accepts mass immigration, central banks, ever increasing debt to fund welfare spending and bullshit wars and international institutions
not much difference between neoliberal bush and social democract obama when you think about it
libertarian are rich people who want no government spending on anything except police and military because they are pussies and require protection from real men who would take their stuff by force in a genuine free for all

Bitcoiners are not political, no matter how much they dream of it.

They are just delusional.

"Neoliberal" is a phony made-up word by people who want to limit others' choices.  It's not a valid descriptor of anything other than, "I wish people had less say in what they do with their stuff".

we are all aobut dropping taxes

Indeed, the neo* prefix is a generalization too broad.


Let's keep it to economics. The dissonance I perceive is essentialy austrian vs keynesian money. Good example is usury - the more is wealth distribution skewed, the more society starts to resemble slavery, as the poor are left with no choice other than to borrow. Later on, it gets to the point that the wealthy spend less than the interest they're owed. Sugarscape mentioned earlier allows sugar lending, rent-seeking is the end game. Poor masses are caught in the hamster wheel.

Now, libertarians just shrug their shoulders "should not have borrowed if they can't utilize the capital" and that's true to an extent, but they completely dismiss the perspective of the poor - the game was rigged from the start (rich were rich from the beggining, and the poor just got poorer). Poor one getting lucky and escaping the trap, as well a wealthy one becoming poor because of bad investments is more of an exception, rather than rule. tl;dr: The term old money exists for a reason.

Leftism/marxism in the form of keynesian money and taxation of the rich is intended to level the playing field. Libertarians call bloody murder over this. I call it return to common ownership. The fact that governments are notoriously bad at it and can't counter the pressure of the bag holders in current fiat monetary system is just how it is now, but in some places (sweden, canada) it used to work fairly well until recently.
 
Finally, it should be noted that most governments actually don't indulge in wars. I tend to generalize, hence no tunnel vision on the US.

That is exactly the impression I got after spending 5 minutes on here.  One of the first posts I saw was this big long explanation about Bitcoin and how I needed to be a member of World of Warcraft and how I needed to read Vorhees' blog to understand what Bitcoin is.  I was thinking, "what the hell is this?"  Most people would end their interest in Bitcoin right there.  I was able to poke through all that and look at the technology but that is a difficult bridge to cross.  

Theymos had a tremendous opportunity with this forum and look what he has done.  People selling accounts, endless scams, etc.  If you read his stuff about things like GLBSE he talks about virtual companies and I have often said he sounds like he lives his life in a video game.  Almost nothing that goes on in this forum happens in the real world.  One of these clowns advocated breaking into the FBI computers because he said they were too stupid to keep the Silk Road bitcoins secure.  Guess where the guy works?  For the State of Maryland.  This stuff is beyond ridiculous.  These people think that because they promoted Bitcoin early on that they know more than the rest of the world or that somehow everybody owes them something.

I also noticed that many here are not up on things outside of video games and reddit.  It was comical to watch Ver and Vorhees say how great their honey badger billboard was.  When people pointed out almost nobody in the general public will understand it they argued the opposite.  

I also did a Bitcoin public event once at the Philly Punk Rock Flea market.  Most of the Bitcoin Philly group would not come because I refused to allow them to hand out "Bitcoin Not Bombs" stuff at my table.  I talked to a large number of people who mostly never heard of Bitcoin.  Not a single person asked about collapsing banks, ending wars, replacing the dollar, or any of the other nonsense you see here on a daily basis.  Just try it yourself.

I retired from my job as a federal employee of 27 years for the FAA..  I worked on research of explosives and weapons detection systems and then on information security requirements for large FAA systems.  While I was a researcher rather than regulator I worked in the system for a long time, including 9 years in Washington, DC.  I also participated in many of these public comment things involving privacy and I testified at a few FTC workshops such as the first couple "spam summits" back in the late 90's.  I can say with absolute certainty that comments like Erik Vorhees makes about the Bitlicense and the motives of regulators is completely wrong and his meme-based arguments are going to be disregarded.  He has a few correct points here and there but his arguments don't fit together.  Patrick Murck is pretty good be he still works for the Foundation and Vessenes.  Jerry Brito and Coincenter.org is the place to watch because he is good and I think he is independent or at least more independent than Murck.  




 

You talk pretty authoritatively about people who are complete strangers on the internet, people you don't know.  I'm a libertarian anarchist, and you don't know anything about me.  I don't play violent video games, you don't know which of my parents I've discussed my political views with or if my parents are even alive, I suspect that I am older than you (you certainly trash talk people like a young disrespectful person), and you have no idea what I do for entertainment in my life.

And I'm just one of many.

Who are you to say that libertarians are internet dwellers who have no life?  How would you know?

You aren't claiming to have psychic powers, are you?

Maybe real people aren't like caricatures.


I don't think I have any cognitive dissonance.  If I were to get what I want and what I think should be in the world by forcing other people to cooperate with my plans, that would cause cognitive dissonance for me.

So, I believe in helping the poor, so I do it.  I don't employ schemes to make other people do it.  I don't believe in any current wars, so I expect people who do believe in them to pay for them themselves.

mostly, it's a philosophy that lives entirely on the Internet.  You'll find it's greatest outspoken proponents are anons on twitter or random forums like this.  Few people would confess such beliefs to their mother, that's for sure.  It's a sort of attitude that builds up over time.   I think a lot of these people, especially on here dont really transition their psychological state from playing violent video games to interacting on these forums.  They say and do things they would never dream of in 'real life'.  Sometimes I even think Ulbricht lost touch with reality at some point.  People have said he spent all day on his laptop and never spoke with anyone.

If you get to know any of these cryptokids on here, it's a pretty typical profile.  Young, no social life, loves video games, marginally employed, etc.  They encounter another player-character in the forum video game that angers them, the solution is throw a grenade or fire rocket launchers.  They just don't understand that theyre in public and they're accountable for their actions.

You've also got a class of people, typically from Eastern Europe/Soviet rim regions who are paid trolls.  There is practically no laws against internet abuses so they know they can do what they please- you'll find a lot of the really odious trolls seems to emanate from the Transnistria region.

I used the stats zhoutong published. I wonder if some wallet/exchange published more recent numbers since then.


To be fair, kleptocracy (Eastern europe here :) is just failure of (cultural) morals. To me, when someone says "neocon/neoliberal", I imagine ruthless robber baron capitalist who truly believes that market is end-all solution to everything, ethics be damned. Surprisingly, significant amount of those "white straight male reddit fedora libertarians who love to shoot guns" appear to not discard basic human decency in their dogma. However truly free markets are in contradiction with that - having no "silly morals" is very effective competetive edge after all.

This cognitive dissonance is my main problem with the ideology, I'd love to hear how one is supposed to address it, short of brainwashing people who are supposed to think for themselves with christian values.

It's mostly impossible to measure.  You can't just use accounts because one person may be holding many accounts.  To measure GINI you need a reliable way to measure WHO owns which accounts.


commonly, the "libertarians" are highly privileged white American males who really have no clue how good they have it.  They take America and civilization for granted.  As you say, it's not hard to live the libertarian dream in Mogadishu.


I've seen things like this before but I'll have a look.  I'm familiar with basic Game Theory.


curious points,

thx.  -bm

Yes.

This debate always derails into left vs right, 80 who own 20% vs 20 who own 80%. Such is the nature of human condition until post-scarcity becomes a thing. More interesting is debate how can we fix it (no Bitcoin itself can not, if the GINI of bitcoin is any indication, on the contrary).

As for the "death to the gubbermint" argument, ask people in sub-saharan africa how well it works for them.

Anarcho-syndicalism itself is a deceptive construct. While agent-based game theory is arguably rather vague approximation of sociology, its the closest thing to scientific method to guess behaviour of crowds (I'd recommend you sugarscape if you're interested in agent models of government-free capitalism).

There is a strong indication that the group benefits only if all, the 100% play by the rules. Libertarian tit-for-tat yields even worse outcome than agents randomly assigned to bins of kinship (which self-selects into 20/80 as per pareto much later in the sim compared to tit-for-tat).

fairly distant concepts.  I believe they refer to that as 'Paleoliberal'.

isn't neo-liberals just classical liberals like our founding fathers?

I think we're miscommunicating somehow. Anarcho-capitalism also isn't a new idea. If he has a tweet where he says "Hey everyone, look at my great new idea of anarcho-capitalism/pure libertarianism/...!" then that would be evidence that he's presenting it as a new idea.

Anyway, gotta go; nice talking to you. I hope I didn't come off like I was claiming new ideas as my own...except words as base58 of sha256 of definition thing. I totally invented that.

Germans just love Ordnung dont they?

"Ordnung ist das halbe Leben"




Read his tweets.  It's over-the-top anarcho-capitalism.




Yes it's like 'herding cats'.  The are by nature disagreeable people.

also see "The Wörgl Experiment", Community Currency theorists worship this incident in history and insinuate that had we accepted what was learned at Wörgl, we never would have had WWII.  They are god-tier Godwinists.  I think they get a bit excessive about this particular moment and use this to parade around other ideas such as Demurrage.  We had, and still have, quite a few community currencies here in the US.

And given that I think a lot of the free market ideas and people ended up in America because they were pushed out by the Nationalist Socialists(Nazi).

and btw- not sure why were knocking Preston Byrne.  He wrote some great articles about BitShares.

Wait. I think ordoliberalism refers exactly to what neoliberalism originally meant! Maybe they should be called neo-ordos. Ordiots would be to negative.

Regarding Voorhees. I'm curious. Is there evidence that Voorhees presents what I would call liberatarianism and you would call neoliberalism as "new ideas"?

Bitcoin can be very fairly called a "new idea", but the ideas of individual liberty have a long history and my impression of libertarians is that most of them learn something of this long history. I mean, at least people tend to know who von Mises, Hayek, Friedman and Rothbard were. They also know Ayn Rand, but that leads to lots more infighting. Even earlier there were influences from Lysander Spooner to Rose Wilder Lane that get talked about. Go to a libertarian meeting. They'd rather bore you with history than pretend all their ideas are new. But get ready for arguments. Libertarians always discuss until they find an area where they disagree. And there's always an area where they disagree with each other.

some factions might be described this way.  This isn't the Voorhees/Ver coalition though, they are hard-core libertarian/anarchist.

I have read a bit of Amitai Etzioni.

Moin moin,

Well if you want to learn about something or someone, you can

 1) listen to that person's opponents,

 2) listen to those that praise that person

 3) listen to what that person says him/herself.

So the same goes for Neoliberalism.  You're not going to get the complete picture of a philosophy by reading Murry Rothbard or Ayn Rand.

btw- Germans do have some of the best economic thinking in the world at the present.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism

re. Erik, some accuse me here of attacking him.  That's not true, although he has made unwarranted accusations towards BM in the past.  Erik is an outspoken 'leader' and naturally you can expect to be criticized.  You can't start complaining everyone is attacking you if you volunteer to take a public role.