Topic: Is Bitcoin a good model for getting rid of other government services? (Read 659 times)

Yeah, that's the hard part... getting them to realize that the hat doesn't confer special rights.

Apparently most people are ok with stealing from other people. Especially if they can convince themselves that taking money from unwilling participants is not theft if the thief has a funny hat on his head.

It's not competing with free, first off, and you need to get people to realize that right off. It's competing with taxation-funded. Once they see that the other guy is stealing their money, and you're asking for it, competing becomes a lot easier. Even better if you can help them keep that money from being stolen.

It is hard to compete with free government services but I can see people willing to pay for quality.

On second thought, my open source idea would probably be hijacked by those government services that already provide it.

I've been saying that for years now, trying to get the folks buying traditional bullion in case TSHTF to realize that just stacking silver coins in a safe until all of a sudden people miraculously decide to completely switch overnight to sound money isn't realistic. The alternatives need to be in place before TSHTF so the masses don't scream for a dictator to "solve" the problems.

Build up the voluntaryist/agorist businesses to compete with the government to the point that the government's solutions become irrelevant.

But between bitcoin and Shire Silver we have currency pretty much covered - just need to grow them to the point that fiat currencies die off due to irrelevance. I can envision entrepreneurs seeing this challenge and taking it up, selecting one service the government provides and outcompeting it.

Of course, here in New Hampshire the people pursuing politics have actually made some headway, and I appreciate their taking some of the scrutiny off of us working a bit more under the radar 

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=agorism 

I think the biggest problem with most other government services is they provide goods or services in the physical world, and so a distributed open source alternative would have to have a physical presence that the government could shut down.  Bitcoin works because it does not require a physical presence and has no central location to be targeted. 

Doesn't seem to be a bad idea to me.

Can you imagine as all the banksters, politicians, their friends and business partners plus the masterminds behind them peacefully give up their power, ambitions and most of their wealth?

You seem to be advocating policy set by insurance.

Hello,
its all nice what you said, i like the idea of local economy, alt government, alt fed etc,
but lets face ugly truth, its will take generations ~ 40-100 years until this Planet society will change their model where government use financial power to control people.

Lets pick developed capitalistic countries like USA, Japan, they highly dependent on resources from Russia, Latins, Mid East, Africa, because the living standards of western society based on exchange of highly marginal goods And USD debts to low paid resources and low paid works.

Oil and gas prices are dictated by Large corporations and banking demand, all ways are leading to Fed, there is NO way to change USD economy to Bitcoinomy untill Resource prices start make quotations in Cryptocurrency prices.

The Federal Reserve has been around for a century, it took a lot for people to even find out what the Federal Reserve is much less that it should be ended. All of our fighting to get even an audit of the Federal Reserve took two presidential elections with that as the main focus to get a watered down bill passed. The audit showed that they were pouring money to foreign governments and still there is no glimmer in anyone's eyes of getting the Federal Reserve shut down via Congress.

Bitcoin is creating an alternative. It is doing more to the Federal Reserve than has been done in 100 years. We can tell that they are intimidated because they are starting to use their tools to try to stop Bitcoin (The Fed's biggest tool though, besides the media, is war...so do not get too comfortable).

Instead of ending the Fed we are creating a better alternative and bipassing the Federal Reserve. Potentially, this could lead to the end of the Fed as the better alternative wins out.

Could this be the path forward for other government services?

Create a streamlined, open source, distributed service for all communities?

Take fire departments for example. I lived in a county where the fire department was private. They provided the best award winning service of the whole state and every home owner received a discount on their insurance rates because of that fire department. The cost was either $20 a month or a maximum $2,000 for putting out a house fire (which was also covered by insurance).

If we were to take the standard operating procedures of this successful fire department combined with mass purchases to cut down on costs and other streamlining procedures we could probably get that same service offered in many more communities at a lower cost. The towns where they are set up may already have a city fire department but if people are willing to be covered by the new fire department their insurance may go down more than the price per month making adoption easy. And with a fully operational fire department in town, come budget time the town leaders may be more apt to not pay to keep their old fire department going.

And that is just one service that could be replaced.

The key is to have the alternative already available to people before talking about getting rid of the government service.