Topic: Cryptocurrency Socialist Revolution? (Read 3200 times)

Rich people own stuff, that's what makes them powerful. If we all go out and spend all our money on physical stuff and the next day switch to an egalitarian cryptocurrency, we take their stuff, therefore we take a part of their power and we don't give them back anything in return; we will refuse to honor the money we gave them that promises them goods and services in exchange for their stuff. We can repeat this process as many times as we want, this means that we have to either eliminate money and go back to bartering or the rich have to accept they have lost control of physical wealth because we can redistribute money whenever we want. Spend, spend, spend, switch currency. It's a form of disobedience. In order to avoid this large corporations will have to refuse to sell their goods, which obviously won't allow them to survive. The owners of corporations will have to accept that there are going to be large expensive purges on a semi-regular basis or sell their shares and quit working for those corporations, essentially we are going to find out what is the maximum amount of corporation tax these companies can sustain because that's what they're going to be paying from now on.

Another Libertarian Socialist here.

Socialism is not about redistribution of wealth, it's about redistribution of power. Redistribution of wealth happens in capitalism all the time. The reason is because it doesn't make the rich less powerful.

The thing about a revolution is control over production. If people don't manage and own their own place of work, then your revolution will fail (see every state-socialist revolution).

It appears to me that the most advanced large range application of socialism was the short lived anarchist revolution in Spain. And that happened because of managing reasons, not currency distribution.

So guys I've been giving this some thought and I've figured out how we can turn this cryptocurrency into real wealth, physical goods! It would be easy enough to convince poor countries to adopt the egalitarian cryptocurrency, of course they would be happy to receive the $600 each. But they wouldn't accept it in places like Walmart giving it limited use in rich countries like the US; poor Americans could perhaps be persuaded to adopt the currency but they wouldn't be able to use it in America, large chains and real businesses wouldn't accept it. The solution: Americans just have to spend all their dollars buying products from large corporations. When they've spent everything, they go home and download their DNAcoins. They start using them as currency the next day, they start off with about $600 and they don't lose any money, they got their dollars' value in stuff the day before. Essentially it would function as a kind of corporation tax. A direct transfer of real wealth from the wealthiest corporations to the world's population. And it would all be totally legal. Cryptocurrency Socialist Revolution accomplished?

Good article, it's great that Bitcoin is helping people everywhere and in all kinds of unexpected ways.

Just wrote an article about Bitcoin from a socialist perspective:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3949955

They won't have to try too hard in this case, the data will be public on the Blockchain. But I don't think that'll make too much difference to some peasant farmer in Colombia; it's just a way for poor people to say "from now on we are going to interact with each other using these coins and we will all start from an equal standpoint which if we can successfully pressure the world's population into using them should be worth about $600." Again there isn't much that the government can do with a list of DNA signatures, they don't know which signature corresponds to which person (name and social security number).

The trouble with any kind of database is it's valuable to the powers that be, so they'll try to get their dirty little hands on the data, whether illegally or legally. Just look at the back-door access the US gov have on social networks already.

Yep the main thing stopping me from doing this right now is that I'm not a programmer, someone else is going to have to have to create the program because it would take me while to learn how to code  And it has to be open source!!

Another issue would be that DNA readers cost about $1,000 and I think they take about 5 days to process DNA. So with current technology it would be challenging to get everyone in the world registered. Also because the currency is digital people would need computers or smartphones hooked up to the internet to make transactions, that would be difficult to achieve in poor parts of the world. But there is no major reason why large numbers of people couldn't share a single computer or DNA reader to get registered and make transactions. 5 years from now these might not be issues at all; and if we made a concerted effort to tackle these problems by developing DNA reading technology and getting the developing world online, they could disappear a lot sooner.

Yeah it's pretty Orwellian hehe. The upside is that there would be no need to connect each DNA signature to a name; so even if the police found your DNA at a crime scene they wouldn't be able to connect it to a real person, they might be able to get some Metadata such as 'he downloaded his coins on such and such a date' but not much else. If anything else could be used as reliably as DNA to identify a person and record their participation it would be fine, so maybe finger prints or a retina scan could work. DNA is kind of cool though because it's a code and computers are good at processing codes 

Conspiracy theorists would have a field day with this DNA databank idea . I think if bitcoin does become truly mainstream, some sort of fingerprint scanner app would be a good idea before you can send/spend coins.

Oh now I see, I thought your plan involved taking the current monetary wealth by force and then redistributing it. But you're talking about just creating a new currency and distributing that in an equal manner, that much can be done without a central authority. If we continue to NOT rely on force and coercion, we would then have to convince a critical mass of people to adopt the currency - a daunting task indeed. Good news is that there stands nothing in your way if you want to go ahead and try it right now

I'm sorry but I don't see why you need a centralized authority at any point any more than Bitcoin ever needed a central authority. You are correct that you need to convince people to use the coins instead of their existing currency; this requires CONSENSUS and COOPERATION. You need a lot of people to understand what's happening but I don't think that's impossible or really too unfeasible. It's the same as any other form of striking. About 40% of the world's population earn less than $2.50 a day. For these people an allotment of $600 would represent many months salary. The question is if all of the people in the world with less than $600 insisted on being paid and paying with these coins would they be able to put enough pressure on the wealthy minority to get them to use the currency? It's a form of striking.

Once the system is up and running you won't need the central institution. But at the beginning, for a period of time, you will - that's where the plan is vulnerable. Don't forget, that even if you create a decentralized system of distributing the allocated coins from the get go, you still need some way how to "level the playing field" before that, meaning getting people to give up/destroy their current monetary wealth. I submit to you that this is probably impossible without force & a central authority.

No, there would be no need for it to be centralized for the same reason that there is no reason to centralize Bitcoin. As long as the DNA readers couldn't be hacked or messed with to cheat the system there would be no need for there to be any central authority. Just like Bitcoin a program is created and released. A user connects to the internet with a DNA reader connected to his computer, the reader uploads his unique DNA signature to the Blockchain, a digital wallet is created with 1000 DNAcoins and the user is shown the password to their wallet. The DNA uploading and transactions are processed by mining.

Yeah I realize now that it wouldn't be possible to redistribute most of the wealth because it is in physical things with owners that will fight for it. However the part of the wealth that is represented by cash could be redistributed. Imagine if everyone woke up tomorrow and burnt their cash; the government would have to print more but there would be no way of knowing who had what cash before it was all burned. They might decide to redistribute society's cash equally, or they might decide to calculate the shares another way based on how much property you own or how much tax you paid last year or whatever. Some people might end up doing better after the shuffle.

The cryptocurrency idea is similar. If a very large portion of society ever had no cash and a small portion of society had most of the cash, it would be possible to get a majority of people to start using this cryptocurrency with an equal allotment of coins. All they would have to do is refuse to touch the old currency, don't accept it for goods and services and the cash rich minority would eventually have to agree to use the new currency. This would successfully redistribute the cash. I read an estimate there is about 4 trillion US dollars worth of cash in the world, divided between 7 billion that makes $600. Perhaps all the people in the world with less than $600 would adopt the currency and insist only on being paid and paying with it, and just maybe this would pressure the people with more than $600 to cave in and adopt the new currency. Essentially it's a form of protest or striking for more money; a way to hold cash hostage.

However I don't think it would work on a global scale because while poor countries would be happy to do it, in rich countries like the US people probably wouldn't participate and most of the wealth would be coming from those rich countries. I could see it working on a national level in countries where there is an extremely unequal distribution of cash; for example it might have been an effective form of protest in apartheid era South Africa; the problem with doing it at a national level is that you can't really use DNA as your identifier because people from outside the country could collect coins. I'm not sure about globally though, could all the people in the world semi-regularly go on strike for a redistribution of cash by adopting and insisting on using this egalitarian cryptocurrency?

Ah a the twin thing. Do you really think if this was going to work people would change their mind because identical twins wouldn't get their fair share? That would effect only a small number of people.

If you want people to be equal, the solution is easy, remove the factor of money.  Then you all can do whatever you want.  If you're working your job because you like to, then you can continue to do so without the influence of bribery persuading you.

This will inevitably happen one day as it's the only real solution to end coercion.  Bitcoin can help move the players around, but it can't stop greed.

Libertarian Socialism seems fine to me, it's a little bit similar to Georgism which I think is very reasonable too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

I also consider myself a Fractal Cosmologist, haha

I also dislike labels and would rather do without them, but if we are pigeon-holing then Libertarian Socialism is what I'd fall under .

How do you confiscate the wealth to redistribute without bloodshed? If you tried to do that to me, someone's blood would shed: either mine or yours.

I'm an identical twin, so my DNA isn't unique. How do I opt out of your socialist revolution?

You have a fair point my friend and I salute you!

I distrust any label anyway, for they lead to dogma and I prefer to deal in catma instead

Also I would like to point out to the OP, that in his thought experiment there remains the need for some sort of organization or authority to execute this plan. We're talking about one single entity controlling all the monetary wealth of the world (for some period of time). Good luck populating it with people of good will, who will resist the corrupting influence such a position of power brings with itself