Topic: Bitcoin's Dystopian Future - page 9. (Read 28215 times)

Agreed, but nevermind those low density (ambient) energy sources. They are not economic. Micro-hydropower is what you are looking for. I studied the numbers.

And I how can we have decentralization if Bitcoin is the only currency? See this:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3594303

Yes, the next age will be the age of decentrilazation.

 -decentralized energy - Buildings as Power Plants(Wind / Solar), Smart Grid, Energy Storages of Electric Cars/ Hybrids as Grid Buffers.

 - decentralized Production - 3d-Printing manufactures

 - decentralized money - Bitcoin


In the new era, everyone can potentially be their own manufacturer, their own internet site, their own power company and their own Bank.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Industrial_Revolution

It is obvious to me that the OP has missed a major piece of the puzzle.

It's not just cryptocurrency that is making all of these changes... It is decentralization itself that is... And those changes will be far, far larger than monetary.

Decentralization is nothing less than the removal of power from those who have it and scattering it around to all that want it.

Gnutella was technically the first decentralized program. (That I know of.) They may have fizzled, but today we have Bittorrent, Mega, and TOR, among others, to share information through. Together these make IP laws start to seem kinda silly.

Bitcoin is a bigger jump, because it represents half the economy; any product or service that someone wants to sell, worldwide, we can now buy in a decentralized way. But it's just the buying half...

3D Printing using DEFCAD search and the resulting industry built around downloadable products will represent an even larger jump... They are the other half of the economy, and everything one could sell will eventually be manufactured and sold this way. (Destroying pretty much all existing industry worldwide.)

But that's not all! What else can we decentralize?

Well, if the government does it today, why can't we decentralize that too?

Security? But of course. Why use the .govs police when you can have free-market security services bought and sold in a decentralized environment?

Law? No problem. There are already websites like judge.me that offer non-nationalized law... Making those into a decentralized solution would be childsplay.

Whenever you think it can't be decentralized, trust me, it can. Even roads can be built privately, and decentralized marketplaces can expedite them. Fire services? Same as security. It can all be done without any government once the interest to do so is there.

So I submit that bitcoin's influence on our future is one of many 'decentralizers.' -And not the largest one by far.

Pure fantasy to propose the masses (the 99%) are going to tolerate a 100000X devaluation of the western financial system handing half of society's net worth to the bitcoins minted in the first 4 years.

To be a viable currency, Bitcoin would have to be distributed to the masses, because the 97% only gain their wealth from money spent as currency. The wealthy Bitcoin early adopters aren't going to spend, rather they will invest their coins to gain more coins than they had.

Thus the masses would be forever impoverished in Bitcoin's coin supply model.

Sorry Buttcoin is a Trojan horse. See the links my prior post for details.

Thanks, OP!

For the most part I agree. A word you were probably looking for (or trying to avoid in order to stick to plain English) is seigniorage, which I've mentioned a few times before. Just like the issuers of governmental cash make profit from money supply inflation, the 'issuers' (early adopters) of bitcoins profit immensely from Bitcoin's growth. We steal other people's slices of the "global value pie".

However, I have confidence that most people can adapt, so I'll put an alternative spin on your points:

Re: The Bleak Future of Fiat Currencies
I think it's only as bleak as governments are untrustworthy and unstable. I guess we'll have to wait and see how they'll cope, and how people will adapt their governments.

Re: Wealth Disparities
You seem to assume people will continue to rally behind Bitcoin's brand-name chain, and that the spin-offs will continue to be small-time wannabes. Maybe, but I hope that Ripple (or something similar) takes off, enabling easier exchange between various esoteric "coin ideas". I doubt they made it Open Source just so everyone would religiously rally behind the real Bitcoin. The way I see it, the free knowledge is supposed to help redress the unfairness of seigniorage. Everyone is welcome to create their own crypto flight miles, crypto discount coupons, crypto shares,... whatever their imagination comes up with.

Re: Law enforcement
I suspect many law enforcement agencies are well aware (or at least have some awareness) of the economics of crime. The harder they fight against drugs or child porn etc., the more scarce and therefore more lucrative it becomes. But how would society react if politicians said "actually, we shouldn't take child pornography off the Internet. If we just leave it there and ignore it, it'll be freely available for all the sickos and the makers of new stuff will go out of business." Maybe there would be an uproar and it would be the end of that person's political career. Maybe not. Drug reform is probably a safer bet because it's less contentious. It will take time.

Re: What should we do?
Never stop learning.

You overestimate the dedication the government has to their own organization. They are in it for the money, mostly. When it is no longer profitable to keep the structure in place they abandon it.

That's exactly what happened in the USSR. Everybody in the government could see that the system was headed for collapse due to unavoidable mathematical realities, and when that knowledge spread they looted what they could and abandoned ship. The number of true believers who were addicted to power for its own sake weren't great enough in number to hold things together.

The same thing will happen to the western governments when socialism collapses here. As Bitcoin grows large enough to represent a real threat governments might make noise about regulating it or shutting it down, but the entire time politicians are spewing hot air insiders throughout the bureaucracy are going to be quietly stashing whatever money they can get control over in Bitcoins. All the scare stories that pop up between then and now are designed solely for the purpose of scaring early adopters into letting go of their bitcoins so those who don't have them yet can buy in cheaply.

Nah, everyone else will just mine Bytecoin, Trytecoin, Crumbcoin, or Hexcoin or whatever name they come up with next.   Bitcoin's current value is based mostly on the fact that most people don't know how it works. Once the other iterations of bitcoins start getting attention, the value will probably even out between them.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this chaos gives rise to a strong, centralized, one-world government which gets its revenues by tightly reigning in freedom of commerce in order to collect taxes. For instance, I will not be surprised to see a requirement someday that every person buying or selling have an implant which tightly binds their identity to the sale. Perhaps the implant will even be located on the back of the right hand or the forehead! This may seem repugnant to you now, but wait until you have lived in the storm for a while before you call it impossible. The natural reaction to the deadly chaos of decentralized currency is for the populace to embrace increasingly centralized controls on commerce. The battle lines are only just starting to be drawn, and your guess is as good as mine for how it will play out.

Does anyone really expect the government to sit back quietly and watch while their currency is debased, terrorism is funded, and children are kidnapped? The only question is when and how they will strike back against these forces. While the government does have a lot of options, ultimately those options only slow things down. At some point, we collectively with our governments face a difficult choice between trying to survive this deadly storm or attempting to destroy all decentralized computer networks (including the internet). The former seems unthinkable, the latter, impossible.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this chaos gives rise to a strong, centralized, one-world government which gets its revenues by tightly reigning in freedom of commerce in order to collect taxes. For instance, I will not be surprised to see a requirement someday that every person buying or selling have an implant which tightly binds their identity to the sale. Perhaps the implant will even be located on the back of the right hand or the forehead! This may seem repugnant to you now, but wait until you have lived in the storm for a while before you call it impossible. The natural reaction to the deadly chaos of decentralized currency is for the populace to embrace increasingly centralized controls on commerce. The battle lines are only just starting to be drawn, and your guess is as good as mine for how it will play out.