Topic: Cryptocurrency Socialist Revolution? (Read 3189 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

Actually your DNA would be unique, even if you were a fraternal twin.
DNA mutations after conception would leave minute differences in your DNA.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10511087/Identical-twins-need-never-be-tried-for-same-crime-after-DNA-breakthrough.html

Well, I prefer the term Libertarian Socialist for a number of reasons. I'm not afraid of being labelled as an Anarchist, I'd just rather not fall victim to peoples' ignorance on the subject and because Socialism fits my specific beliefs better. It's easier to tell people with a fresh mind what Libertarian Socialism is rather than try convince them what Anarchism is not. Also, Anarchism is a broader more general term and has a bigger scope as well. It's like calling a dog a canine. Yes, a dog is a canine, but so are wolves and foxes, but they are all different.

I see. I don't want to troll you about it, but doesn't this constitute "being afraid of calling oneself an anarchist" a little bit?

I'm curious, because have sort of the opposite approach towards this. I will call myself an anarchist when talking to someone and then try to ruin their misconceptions about it by not throwing any molotov cocktails at them  

It is anarchism. No, I'm not afraid to call myself an anarchist, but most people have a popular misconception of anarchists/anarchism as complete chaos/armageddon and propagated by these ignorant faux punk-looking fuck da establishment types (but yes, fuck tha government ).

Thanks for the reply.

So...I'm wondering: are you just afraid to call yourself an anarchist? This label "Libertarian Socialist" sounds extremely funny to me  (I havent heard it before)

I cannot speak for all Libertarian Socialists as there are many differing views and schools of thought, but you can start with the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

Chomsky has lots of things to say on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31VAUFVPF8E (5 minute video) & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkaO12X-h1Y (80 minutes)

If you want some books to read I can recommend some.

What the hell is that?

Can you please describe, what a Libertarian Socialist believes in?

I understand that money in bank accounts is all invested in physical goods so it can't be claimed without seizing people's physical assets. But wouldn't this cryptocurrency succeed in redistributing all the cash in the world? The coins and bills I mean.

I think I understand your perspective: the money is only valuable as a means of exchanging the underlying goods, if the ownership doesn't change then the power relationships don't change. So in the event of a cryptocurrency that redistributed all the wealth in the world equally, value would revert solely to the stuff instead of the stuff and the money. Essentially the cryptocurrency would succeed in a transfer wealth from people who have stuff and wealth in the form of money to all the people who have stuff. All the people who have money would lose that value, it would be bestowed upon everyone's stuff. So that is in fact a meaningful redistribution of wealth; I'm not completely sure what the end result would be though. I think the rich people would have more wealth in the vulnerable abstract form and the poor might have more collective stuff to receive value, haha  

As I said, money is the absence of wealth; nobody wants money, what they really want to do is get rid of it so they can enjoy wealth.  No matter which money you use, it doesn't change who owns what land; so long as a small group of people own large swathes of land, and charge other people to live on that land, and prevent people from claiming that land for their own, money is always going to move into the hands of the few, and the divide continues to grow.

Consider the following example:

Two men are using this currency; they now have $10,000 worth of this coin each, for example.  One man is the CEO of a global corporate empire.  The other man, who works for said corporation, has an apartment and needs to buy a car to get to work.  Are they now equals?

Even if money disappeared completely i.e. communism, if the few still owned the many, the power structure remains unchanged and you would still have an enormous disparity between the aristocracy and the working class.  You're not redistributing the wealth, you're just changing how that wealth is represented; the rich still own all the wealth.

My understanding is this: people have valuable physical assets and they have something called money. Money helps people to live together in large cooperative groups because we agree to use it as a store of value. It can be in the form of physical notes or numbers in an account, etc. If we want to live together in those large groups and have complex relationships with each other we need to use money. However some people have accumulated large amounts of money making them disproportionately powerful in our society.

Our economic system allows wealth to be passed on from generation to generation creating a kind of multi-tiered caste system. Sometimes a family's wealth stretches back many generations to when human beings did things which we no longer deem ethical such as slavery. Some people who made their money recently did so unethically, such as the bankers who caused our economic system to crash. Others worked hard for their money but the predominant determiner of how much value a person produces is on what tier of the system they were born.

If people are dissatisfied with the current distribution of wealth why should they agree to play a game that is rigged against them from the beginning? They have no obligation to honor the store of value that accumulated wealth represents. The only reason they agreed to start using money was so that they could live in large complex groups and enjoy the benefits of that arrangement such as the development of technology, medicine, improved nutrition, etc. If there are aspects of that arrangement which they do not like; such as wealth accumulating in concentrated nodes, they are under no obligation to fulfill the 'promise' that the money is supposed to represent. They can achieve this redistribution by ditching FIAT currency and using an egalitarian cryptocurrency instead.

Money is not wealth; money is the absence of wealth.  The rich will still have their wealth--i.e. capital--and the poor will still have nothing.  The only solution to squash this divide is to disallow the rich a monopoly over force, the setup which stops the working man from taking ownership over his time and product.  See here if you're having trouble understanding why the wealth always moves to a few hands.

@Mike Christ

Consider our current power structure:
1. The rich have money and the poor don't
2. The poor harvest commodities and manufacture luxury goods for just enough money to survive
3. There is very little social mobility and inequality gradually grows more extreme

So yeah, I think I prefer my power structure buddy. No it will not immediately provide everyone in the world with a rich person's lifestlye; but YES it will be fairer, happier and more productive than what we have now.

There won't even be 'poor' and 'rich' people because we'll all have the same amount of money. There will be people with valuable assets and there will be people with valuable skills and they will indeed have an advantage in the new world; but to say that if we redistributed all the money in the world equally it would all just end up like it is now after... how long exactly? A few days? A few generations? Immediately? It seems very unlikely that a complete overhaul of the entire economic system redistributing every single dollar would have no impact on our economic lives.

It's true that inequalities would emerge again, and some would exist from the very beginning because people would still possess valuable physical assets but make no mistake: redistributing the world's 'money' by universal adoption of an egalitarian cryptocurrency would have a CONSIDERABLE impact on inequality. Essentially we would cease to focus all our efforts and energy on producing luxuries for a small number of people. The energy would be distributed a bit more equally, that is all. 

Assuming the power structures have not changed, this is what happens:

1. Everyone gets their coins
2. The poor buy the things they need to survive from the rich
3. The rich wind up with all the money and the poor have to work for the rich to get it back

A person uses a DNA reader to upload their DNA signature to a decentralized database. This database essentially says: the human being with this DNA signature has received their universal allotment of coins. There is no need to identify the claimant by name or know anything about them. A digital wallet with their coins is created and they are given their password, their DNA signature is recorded and they can't claim again. This data as well as transaction data can be decentralized the same way Bitcoin is decentralized: every user has a copy of the blockchain on their computer and it is constantly updated as users mine.

It's true that DNA readers are a little expensive http://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-cost...-for-patients/
They cost about $1,000. With today's technology we could probably have the entire world's population registered in a few months. If we made a concerted effort to ramp up production of readers and improve the technology we could do it in a lot less time. This technology is only going to get cheaper and faster. Fingerprints could be a simpler substitute but I don't know if it would be as reliable, it might be possible to forge or the scanner just might not be able to identify the person with enough certainty to support the system.

@BigBear
How did your friend 'waste' his money exactly? You mean he spent it? And what exactly do rich people do with their money? I see rich idiots on TV buying diamonds for their pet chihuahua; is that not wasting money? Could it be that rich people can afford to waste their money because they have a lot of money? Let say we do the Restart and people 'waste' their money by spending it, how would that be any worse than rich people spending it? Aside from the fact that a greater number of people would enjoy the goods and services. So they end up broke which they would be anyway; the question is whether are collective efforts are better spent by concentrating all our time and energy on a small group of people (which they might be) or would we be happier and more productive if we concentrated our efforts on a wider distribution of people.

Thanks for your response. I agree that it's uncertain what would happen and whether a better functioning and more just world could be formed by executing this 'Restart' and redistributing the world's wealth. You're right that some people would waste their coins, for example drug addicts would spend them on drugs. However it's possible that a majority of people would see the coins as a means to reassert their position in society. I'm thinking about a poor illiterate guy in the slums somewhere; in the current world I have no good reason to interact with him, he simply cannot pay me. Imagine that we still used gold like in the old days, now imagine that all the world's gold is distributed equally among all citizens. Now I have a compelling reason to help that guy in the slum: feed him, teach him to read, help him build a house.

Really the 'Restart' would be a declaration of intent, the intent to show all people the same basic level of respect. It's not true that the same people would rise to the top, a person without skills whose only source of wealth is the money in their bank account would have no particular advantage in the new world. It is true however that inequality would still emerge but it would be a 'fairer' inequality than the inequality that exists in the world today. Inequality would still exist because some people are more talented and can provide more valuable services than others. We aren't talking about seizing people's physical assets. We're talking about shifting our efforts from pleasing a wealthy few to industrializing and modernizing the developing world. I believe there would be a kind of pendulum effect; first people in the developed would flood into developing countries and share their skills because that's where the greatest opportunities to earn 'gold' would be (it is also where they can do the most good and have the greatest impact on people's lives). As a result people in the developing world would be better equipped to 'return the favor' when people in the developed world spend their coins.

Giving people free money doesn't solve anything. People who don't have money, there tends to be a reason for that, they make poor financial choices. If you give them money, they're going to continue to make poor choices. For example, one of my friends who got divorced, I let him move into one of my bedrooms to get on his feet. He was paying less than half of what he paid before in rent, and no utilities. He still had trouble paying his rent, simply because he had poor planning skills, and no concept of money management. If he had an extra hundred dollars, he was absolutely going to spend it before his next paycheck, just because he had it. He stayed for almost a year until I finally asked him to leave, and in that time he had saved no money at all. He still owes me hundreds of dollars in rent to this day. He's now 32 years old and living with his mom. Better education is the only way to solve that problem. Giving everyone 10,000 dollars won't change anything, it will still end up in the same hands as before.

The same people would still rise to the top.

I'm a Libertarian Socialist, but don't really believe in this redistribution of wealth. Giving everybody free money wont make people equal. Some people are just bad at dealing with cash for a start.

I do believe Bitcoins/cryptocurrencies could be part of a revolution, and really can fuck the banksters and corporations over bigtime. How and when is up to the people.

I was recently wondering if the cryptocurrency concept could be used by socialists to stage a bloodless revolution? Imagine if a program could read and record a user's DNA and then provide them with a digital wallet with a one-off payment of say 1000 'DNAcoins'. The idea would be that everyone in the world would be entitled to a one-off payment of an equal number of coins. This way people would only have to insist on using the new digital currency in order to redistribute much of the world's wealth equally among every human being.

If we imagine that there are about $70 trillion in circulation and there are about 7 billion people it would work out as about $10,000 each. Of course $10,000 would have a very different value in a world where everyone has $10,000 than it has in our world today. Presumably the people with more than $10,000 would refuse to adopt the new currency but would they be a large enough minority to resist the change? I'm well aware that chaos could ensue, but could this economic 'Restart' ever happen? What would likely be the result?