Ive concluded that every discussion involving anarchism on this forum will devolve into ancaps and pro capitalism herpderps idealizing themselves into a hole.
Well, if you want anti-capitalist herpderps, you've come to the wrong place.
Yeah. This isn't the place for it.
Spoken on a Bitcoin forum. How ironic.
How about I make a quick list of Bitcoin's socialist tendencies (not that I'm a socialist or anything, just pointing things out.)
- Relies on infrastructure that's sponsored by someone else. E.g.: distributed memory pool for unconfirmed transactions = unfunded; network resources = unfunded
- Relies on charity to pay for development. So far this kind-of works, but anecdotal evidence suggests it's mostly a loss-making hobby and contributors usually have other day jobs to subsidize it.
- Most direct funding is through a combination of "inflation tax" and exchange rate appreciation.
- As long as participation remains voluntary and transparent, the inflation seems acceptable. If it's ever forced on me, I might start demanding that the miners provide various governmental services in return.
- As people put more of their faith into Bitcoin, the exchange rate goes up and it parasitically steals value from other things. One way to think of Bitcoin is: it's just one bubble in a global washing basin full of other bubbles. If one bubble grows, the other bubbles have less room.
Well, sort o'. The neat thing about capitalism is it's so flexible. Since it has no "higher ideals" to shackle it, it has no problem mutating to absorb & incorporate elements of other economic systems. US could be called a capitalist country (i know, debatable, but give me some rope here, who knows i might ...) And US has charities, social programs, religious communes -- all of that hippie stuff. The main thing that lets us call it capitalist is
most of the means of production are in private hands. Bitcoin is being mined by gear more & more specialized, the miners are no longer consumers (if they ever were). They're Bitcoin's industrialists, controlling the means of production.** Having a wallet & jumping on the network makes one no more of an owner than riding a train makes one a RR tycoon. So, all's well, the motivation is mainly greed ("enlightened self-interest," "invisible hand" etc., etc.), and if some pro bono work happens as a side effect, so be it.
Your last point is a killah, though. It clearly shows that Bitcoin is simply infringing on fiat's territory & not creating a parallel economy that some here try to preach. If there are 5 cows & 5 competing currencies to buy them, the question isn't "how many cows do we divvy up, but "who gets the cows."
Edit: **Well, that's sort-a a slight of hand on my part, bitcoin's not really a commodity. But if we're talking capitalism vs socialism, we have to assume that *something* is being made