Edit: it is ironic that socialists bemoan the Capitalists who capture the government (e.g. their incorrect view that big oil companies help cause AGW), yet then they think somehow they can vote to regulate those Capitalists, but those Capitalists are in control of the voting via their ownership of the major media. Even when socialists get regulation it is always the Capitalists who game the system, e.g. Obama was handing out of carbon tax exclusions to his friends while closing coal electric generation plants of those who are not his friends. Thus socialism is an insoluble failure by itself. It needs a counter-balancing force otherwise it is entirely gamed and controlled by those who step in to fill the power vacuum.
You might argue that we are living in a largely post industrial age (growing knowledge economy etc)- but this is academic really with regards the ownership of the means of production and the modus operandi of those in power. Note we are talking about the ownership of the means of production here - not [solely] money - money in itself need not necessarily play any part.
CoinCube linked to my writings in the OP, wherein I claim that knowledge can't be controlled by stored capital, i.e. claims on future human labor because
knowledge creation is not fungible the way manual labor is.
(
CoinCube I will not come back here to repeat that for every new commentator that didn't get the point of the OP, it will be up to you to defend your thread)
My point is, that capitalism and the free market are symbiotic. The free market in 1650 => feudalism. The free market in 1850 =>capitalism. The free market 2050 => post industrial capitalism ?
"Meet the new boss - just the same as the old boss" - for the bulk of the population it has always amounted to the same thing - practical disenfranchisement and debt.
People are attacking the free market today as it is seen as the means by which the powerful maintain their exploitative domination - not Government (whose role in all this is open to debate). The idea that the market being deregulated/liberated will lead to more equitable and just outcomes for the bulk of the population seems anathema to a lot of people - because they have no power within that market - and because even though such a market may operate more "efficiently" than one constrained by regulation, it certainly will not operate to the greater good of the greater numbers of agents within that market.
Indeed you are conflating Capitalism with the free market. The latter is a superset, which also includes the
decentralized free market, i.e. the one I described as
simulated annealing.
What would a "decentralised free market" look like exactly ? LocalBitcoins.com ? I'm not sure I understand the term.
Any positive-scaling, enforceable bottom-up structure that does not require a top-down vote, any trust or knowledge about the participants.Extreme anarchy would have no structure at all, and I am not proposing that.
Positive-scaling (listen to
Eric S Raymond at 4 min in linked audio) means adding more participants makes it better, not worse. In Linus's Law ("given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"), the more decentralized people working on open-source, does not suffer from the
Mythical Man Month in top-down controlled closed-source.
For example this is the genius of Satoshi's proof-of-work scheme:
=========================start AnonyMint Quotes=======================https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.5115441I want decentralized security which does not have the power vacuum. Only Satoshi's Proof-of-Work has that.
but in essence all solutions are the same: consensus is
arrived at when some sufficient number of members of the group agree,
In Satoshi's PoW the miners don't have to reach any centralized census. They ALL agree to use the same protocol (else they are not making Bitcoin block chain). But there is no centralized collection of a vote. They are all free to disagree about which block solution was found first. The longest chain wins, but this concensus is completely decentralized.
...
The author set up this strawman to support the requirement of knowing who all the miners are in his Proof-of-stake (PoS) proposal. Then he commits the entropy error that I said will always occur for non-PoW, in that he requires to randomize the order of the PoS miners ("participants") but of course he can't do it without a centralized vote thus it isn't random at all.
Fail. Sorry.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.5138106Also, I didn't know about TimeKoin. I was investigating cryptocoins that eliminate mining and was thinking it might be a good idea simply to allow a randomly selected user to create the next block.
The problem is where does the entropy for the randomness of sequence come from in non-PoW schemes?
In PoW, the decentralized entropy is coming from the DECENTRALIZED hashrate that is randomly selecting nonces to compute as trialed block solutions until one is found. There is no need to invoke trust nor reputation.
Unfortunately non-PoW schemes have no way to generate that randomness, e.g. the seed for the pseudorandom generator will always derive from some top-down vote or reputation factor. The ordering will always be low-entropy, top-down voting, trust, and reputation. This is inherently top-down and centralized. This will put us right back at fiat again.
Sorry.
The security aspect seems to be currently working ok for Nxt. The distribution issue is purely an economics problem and since any crypto is easily copied what's the problem with distribution?
Security by top-down control and reputation is fiat. That isn't the type of security that I want. I want security from decentralized high entropy where no one can take control of the system.
Without competition in mining, there is no way to select who to give new coins (or demurrage in Freicoin) to that isn't inherently controlled top-down, i.e. fiat. Then you still need socialism to take from the rich and give to the poor. Because the fact of life is that wealth is power-law distributed [1] because the wealthy spend only a small fraction on their personal expenses. So eventually with usury the wealthy own 100%. Thus you need a way to redistribute wealth else society fails into a Dark Age. The socialism way of redistribution can be gamed by the wealthy who buy the government. Thus decentralized competition through PoW mining is the only way to fix the problem that has been plaguing society during the entire history of mankind since Mesopotamia.
[1] Dragulescu & Yakovenko. Exponential and power-law probability distributions of wealth and income in the United Kingdom and the United States
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.5114084Essentially proof-of-stake requires you to move to trust and reputation and call that "security". But that is not the type of security I want, because it ends up as "winner takes all". It is just democracy and fiat again. I want decentralized security which does not have the power vacuum. Only Satoshi's Proof-of-Work has that.
=========================end AnonyMint Quotes======================= And how would such a market address the vast disparities in the distributions [within the free market economy] of wealth, power and opportunity ? Or don't these issues actually need addressing at all - are they after all not a threat to [a] civil society ? Does the sense of injustice that grips a huge proportion of the population because it strikes a note of discord deep within the very fabric of their being count for nothing at all ? Is there no civic duty, responsibility towards our fellow man, compassion after all ? Only, the free market
The
decentralized free market can in theory fix the problem.
(
I don't know how I manage to write a post 2 hours before your post that exactly answers your question. Not luck. There is an order to this.)
My feeling is that a free market economy would be totally powerless to address these issues - because the job of the free market is not to create social harmony and cohesion - its purpose is to allow the firm unhindered means by which to allocate resources that it might more efficiently maximise profit.
No. Just like cooling ice slowly doesn't produce cracks, the decentralized free market (simulated annealing) in absence of top-down power vacuum, will maximize entropy not concentrated profit. Remember low entropy is less resilient. Low entropy means concentrating probabilities (i.e. mass).
It is the power vacuum that mucks it up.
However, as
CoinCube pointed out, entropy has to be harvested else it wanders aimlessly, i.e. decentralized structure has to be decided by a top-down creator, e.g. Satoshi. Entire lack of structure is infinite disorder (infinite entropy) and will resemble a black-hole where nothing exists.
So there must be this contentionism between socialism and anarchism, else we would not exist. Note how the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not say entropy will reach infinity, rather it says it is forever trending to maximum.
I am going to depend on CoinCube to go wandering through my recent writings to find where I explained that more in depth.
I really need to quit. I am giving you all the overviews, someone else has to hammer it in.
I can only say again that to my mind the unregulated free market (wether with or without a central Government sugar daddy) would not represent a utopian idyll - rather, it would resemble a jungle, with all its associated savagery, paranoia and needless suffering.
No that is what the power vacuum causes. You perceived that to be the free market, because you don't realize the decentralized free market is not the same as Capitalism.
Some would prosper but most would live in fear and uncertainty. The lions wouldn't pay any tax, rather they would extract tax from the subordinates - but being a free market it wouldn't be called tax - it would be called surplus value/profit - it might even be called the fruits of economic freedom.
In short it wouldn't be too far removed from what we have already
.
ps. I hope this doesn't make me a collectivist marxist socialist totalitarianist
.
No in a decentralized freedom, the knowledge (thus capital) moves to the producers and away from the stored capital claims on future manual labor. I am positing we couldn't do this on large-scale (i.e. most of the population doing it) before the internet, Satoshi, and the Knowledge Age.