Topic: Max Keiser Report on Bitcoins! 4/7/2012 (Read 4703 times)

I'd say it's marketing, and I think you nailed it with there being not enough average Joes who can understand money. What do most people associate with terms like "money" and "currency"? They'll probably think: banks! Financial crisis! Loan repayments! Credit card debt! Income tax!  ... What about "payment system"?: Ebay! Cool toys! Gadgets! Paypal! Amazon! New book DVD in the mail! Yay!

I suppose if we could capture this hypothetical "Joe ADHD-is-my-middle-name Average" specimen and handcuff them to a chair, in theory we could make them learn the error of their ways, but it's just not going to happen. Besides, they might faint from unusually high frontal cortex activity. Perhaps it's cynicism, but how does one re-educate an entire society about money, just so that they can understand Bitcoin? It seems so much easier to just go with the "free beer!" tactic.

Like Evoorhees said: "Bitcoin is two things: it is a digital currency unit and it is the global payment network.

Keiser is only emphasizing the second aspect.

nice to hear someone from the audience mention to max that bitcoin is not only a sort of "online western union", but also a money.

nice to hear someone from the audience mention to max that bitcoin is not only a sort of "online western union", but also a money.

Weird to see him answer something like "well, that's another aspect of it, the value moves up and down", the f..ck!?! And next he mentions Stacy is up 60% on bitcoin, lol. Store of value, Max?

More Bitcoin Evangelism by Max:
During the "Exorcism of Blythe Masters"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlmry45eI3g#t=4008s

you say "growth in the marketplace which benefits all of it's participants". I'm not so sure. What kind of growth is it? Does any growth create benefit?

Here's an example: I talked to a friend last night, he works in engineering and these guys are currently investing thousands of EUR into chaning a certain part of some machinery they sell, a part that is screwed onto some other part of the machine. What's the change? Well, they change it so that it breaks when you screw it off for maintenance so that the customer has to buy that part again.

That's driven by greed. Does it imply growth? Hell yea: more money is moved, more parts sold, GDP increases. Does it benefit all participants (or even just: is the sum of all participants' benefits positive): hell no! More natural resources are used, more work is expended, the uptime of the product is reduced and the maintenance cost increased.

So here we have a case of "growth" not being beneficial for the whole of society. War is another such case.

So no, greed is not necessarily good.

When I said greed is good and that greed without bad consequences is the problem I meant that greed is a healthy and even a required impulse to drive progress, innovation and ultimately growth in the marketplace which benefits all of it's participants and that the cause of problems that arise in the marketplace when it's trying to progress, innovate and grow is the artificially removed risks of a loss.

As long as you have greed coupled with the risk of loss those two forces balance each other out and are healthy and required if your goal is to have the marketplace grow productively.


Oh and I agree there is no objective good or bad outside of trying to reach a specific objective goal.

Imagine you're a martian and you come to this planet and you see this race of humans actually destroying the biosphere. And the reason they do this is because the believe the system is based on the idea that we have infinite material resources. And this is just not true. So becauase of compound interest and other features which mean we have to grow all the time and this creates this compound exponential growth. And the planet can no longer carry it, so this is the real crisis of our system.

More and more scientific evidence seems to show us that cooperation tends to get one a better life than cut-throat
competition. 

Good and bad don't exist outside the individual who labels events/concepts as such.  Some people even go so far as to actively discourage themselves from applying such distinctions to observations and concepts.

In common usage it usually means doing all things primarily in your own interest, at the expense of others.

More and more scientific evidence seems to show us that cooperation tends to get one a better life than cut-throat
competition.  Some may suggest that is what separates humans (potentially) from wild animals... but even modern
studies seem to show us that there is more cooperation in, wild and red in tooth and claw, nature then we had previously
thought.

This little ancient allegory below I feel illustrates it very well ( despite it appearing on the surface as some sappy sunday school story,
it was originally Taoist, I think, but often gets mangled into some Christian form for use in the modern West ):

There is a story about a man who left this earth and was taken on a tour of the inner realms.  He was shown a room where he saw a large group of hungry people trying to eat dinner from a single large pot in the center of the room, but because their spoons were longer than their arms, they were frustrated.  "This," his guide told him, "is hell."  "That's terrible," the man exclaimed.  "Please show me heaven."  "Very well," agreed the guide, and off they went.  When they opened the door to heaven, the man was perplexed to see what looked like exactly the same scene:  there was a group of people with spoons longer than their arms and the same pot of food in the center of the room.  But as he looked more closely, he saw happy faces and well-fed bodies, for there was one important difference:  the people in heaven had learned to feed each other. 

There's no good or bad a priori and evolution is about survival.

Greed is good PERIOD

It's what drives evolution and has driven it since the first spark of life. I kinda like evolution, don't you?