At least its not the type of equality that is usually present in nation states. The vote of a inbred hillbilly who never paid taxes in his life has equal weight as an educated upstanding member of society who pays loads of taxes in the highest bracket.
"Political scientists get the same one vote as some Arkansas inbred" - NOFX - The idiots have taken over
Topic: George Selgin advocates Bitcoin AGAIN - page 4. (Read 6010 times)
Democracy does not equal equality, although existing states don't seem to comprehend the difference. Democracy is a way of making decisions by selecting a subset of entities or individuals from the society to make decisions for the entire society. Without is, for every decision we would need to have a referendum, which is impracticable. The decision to choose the leaders with a unweighted majority vote of the population is our current (and imo totally flawed) implementation of democracy. Weighing towards the opinion of the more intelligent and more contributing members of society will increase the overall quality of the decisions.
Thankfully Bitcoin is not build on equality. If you mine (contribute) more your say is more heavily weighted. This is great, I am waiting for nation states to cease to exist because I don't think they will ever adopt this policy.
Each Mhash is weighted equally. So if you contribute 10Mhash of effort, you are 10 times more likely to get the reward than someone who only contributes 1Mhash. There is no loading of the dice. Perhaps that's what people meant by equality?
democratic money
Man it irks me when I see this phrase being issued.
Why?
democratic -> pertaining to or characterized by the principle of political or social equality for all: democratic treatment.
Yes that, I can't stand it. We are not equal and pretending or trying to force it on one another only leads to huge problems and actually even greater inequality and I can't stand the fallacious connotation of it being something we should strive for.
Lol
No one is being forced to use Bitcoin. The democracy is built into the system, for those who choose to participate.
Currency of the people, by the people, for the people.
Democracy does not equal equality, although existing states don't seem to comprehend the difference. Democracy is a way of making decisions by selecting a subset of entities or individuals from the society to make decisions for the entire society. Without is, for every decision we would need to have a referendum, which is impracticable. The decision to choose the leaders with a unweighted majority vote of the population is our current (and imo totally flawed) implementation of democracy. Weighing towards the opinion of the more intelligent and more contributing members of society will increase the overall quality of the decisions.
Thankfully Bitcoin is not build on equality. If you mine (contribute) more your say is more heavily weighted. This is great, I am waiting for nation states to cease to exist because I don't think they will ever adopt this policy.
Computerising the FED would just be a fancy gimmick if banks could still exert the same power by controlling lending rates.
I'm pretty sure he didn't mean that. To him the issuing of currency would be defined by an algorithm depending on the spendings (assuming a computer can know these data). The FED would have no power on it once it is launched: he insists on the idea of throwing the key a way, so it is not ambiguous at all.
I doubt there is anyway for a computer to measure economics activities though, since money transfers could easily be fake (with no real economic exchange behind) by anyone willing to increase the money supply. But this is an other matter.
To me a computer should be economicly blind: its only job should be to provide money at a predefined rate, whatever the economic situation is. Selgin doesn't agree with that, but he likes the idea of a monetary system being "human-proof".
To me he sounded supportive of one of Bitcoin's themes, which is to automate the inflation according to a fixed set of rules and take it out of the hands of mere humans.
However, I'm not sure if Selgin fully accepts that the concepts of "central control" and "guaranteed scarcity" are simply irreconcilable. Computerising the FED would just be a fancy gimmick if banks could still exert the same power by controlling lending rates. The entire hierarchy would have to be automated -- so much for his wishful thinking about reducing regulations for his banking buddies. It boils down to 2 rational options: have the whole system nationalised and centrally controlled, or have it decentralised and uncontrollable.
However, I'm not sure if Selgin fully accepts that the concepts of "central control" and "guaranteed scarcity" are simply irreconcilable. Computerising the FED would just be a fancy gimmick if banks could still exert the same power by controlling lending rates. The entire hierarchy would have to be automated -- so much for his wishful thinking about reducing regulations for his banking buddies. It boils down to 2 rational options: have the whole system nationalised and centrally controlled, or have it decentralised and uncontrollable.
democratic money
Man it irks me when I see this phrase being issued.
Why?
democratic -> pertaining to or characterized by the principle of political or social equality for all: democratic treatment.
Yes that, I can't stand it. We are not equal and pretending or trying to force it on one another only leads to huge problems and actually even greater inequality and I can't stand the fallacious connotation of it being something we should strive for.
Lol
No one is being forced to use Bitcoin. The democracy is built into the system, for those who choose to participate.
Currency of the people, by the people, for the people.
democratic money
Man it irks me when I see this phrase being issued.
Why?
democratic -> pertaining to or characterized by the principle of political or social equality for all: democratic treatment.
Yes that, I can't stand it. We are not equal and pretending or trying to force it on one another only leads to huge problems and actually even greater inequality and I can't stand the fallacious connotation of it being something we should strive for.
democratic money
Man it irks me when I see this phrase being issued.
Why?
democratic -> pertaining to or characterized by the principle of political or social equality for all: democratic treatment.
Note that it isn't capitalized and shouldn't be confused with a certain American political party.
democratic money
Man it irks me when I see this phrase being issued.
you can't really expect an academic economist to come right out and say we need to shift to Bitcoin.
everything he says, IMO, comes right up to that point and stops probably as a personal hedging mechanism. i think whats stopping him is that it might be that he believes we need a computer controlled monetary system that introduces a fixed amount of currency on a regular basis w/o interference.
i think he still has a ways to go before fully understanding Bitcoin as he says some things about it that are bizarre or incorrect. but he does understand that it is democratic money not controlled by a special interest group and that it could solve our present problems with fiat money in an unbiased way.
everything he says, IMO, comes right up to that point and stops probably as a personal hedging mechanism. i think whats stopping him is that it might be that he believes we need a computer controlled monetary system that introduces a fixed amount of currency on a regular basis w/o interference.
i think he still has a ways to go before fully understanding Bitcoin as he says some things about it that are bizarre or incorrect. but he does understand that it is democratic money not controlled by a special interest group and that it could solve our present problems with fiat money in an unbiased way.
More like advocated something like it, it wasn't an outright endorsement or anything like that unfortunately.
Hm yea, he mentions bitcoin once and it sounds like 'hey they tried but failed...'
I wonder what he means in specific by bitcoin having it's problems, since it does exactly as he describes 20 seconds later...
I very much disagree. He likes the idea of a monetary policy beeing handled by an unstoppable computer. I guess he would like the bitcoin software to be modified to do so. This is totally a positive attitude towards bitcoin, imho.
If we believe in monetary freedom, then we should hope that more people adopt this idea of modifying bitcoin to comply to their ideas regarding monetary policy. Everyone would just pick the money they agree with and the market find a price for them.
More like advocated something like it, it wasn't an outright endorsement or anything like that unfortunately.
Hm yea, he mentions bitcoin once and it sounds like 'hey they tried but failed...'
I wonder what he means in specific by bitcoin having it's problems, since it does exactly as he describes 20 seconds later...
Nice. I like this guy. I had seen once his speech about private coins and it was very enlightning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gn55fTRXZw
Shouldn't this thread be in the 'press' subforum, though?
More like advocated something like it, it wasn't an outright endorsement or anything like that unfortunately.
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