Topic: Remove economic nonsense from home page (Read 18182 times)

We need these kind of technology because at this moment people depends on technology. You are talking about value it means what is being worth it from you. Then technology is a worth being and it is really in use now a days because people are attached on it already. As of this time it is easy to communicates because of technology so we can easily value it.

Nothing has monetary value inherently. Inherent value is a measure of how much value it has to people in general. Air and water are essential, so they have high inherent value, but they're so abundant that they have low monetary value. Metals in general are less essential than air and water, but they have significant value to people in general, so their inherent value is also very high. Because metals are much more difficult to obtain, their monetary value is much higher than air and water.

Then we are arguing about the semantics of the word, "value" then.  Fair enough, I accept your point that value is in the eye of the beholder.  Would you accept that a can of soup or an iron nail both have an 'inherent utility' then?  At a minimum, they are both products that have an intended use.  I suppose our disagreement can be summed up with a jar of peanut butter to a starving person who is allergic to peanuts.  The jar of peanut butter has no 'inherent utility' to the allergic person, and therefore no 'inherent value' from his *solitary* perspective.  The jar of peanut butter can only be used in trade with someone who can consume it safely, but to the *other* guy; the jar of peanut butter does, indeed, have an 'inherent utility' and therefore an 'inherent value' from his perspectives.  It is the second guy (and all the other second guys within a given sphere of trade) that imparts an 'inherent value' upon the jar of peanut butter; but the first guy is (presumedly) aware of the jar's 'inherent utility/value' to others, so it has very much the same value to himself.

No, value is not inherent. Value is attributed to things by people, subjectively.
Having a value is not an attribute of stuff. It's the "opinion" of people about stuff. And it may changes as people change their "opinion".

Read what I wrote right after:



No they don't, as anything else doesn't. It's people who value them.

Yay! this is actually coherent enough to address!

So the reason what you write sounds so obviously unsound, is you are only writing about HALF of a banking system.

Loans are barter. I give you something. You give me something.

When I loan someone $9,000 I take something worth $12,000 as collateral. That assures that the borrower has at least 30% "skin in the game". If his idea sucks, he loses more than he borrowed. Now that gives me two ways to win. If he pays me back, I get interest. If he doesn't pay me back, I claim the collateral and sell it. Think of it as loan insurance. It is what real bankers do instead of showing up and breaking the borrowers knee caps. It may be less fun, but it is more profitable.

If you look around, you will see lots of disreputable lenders offering collateralize loans they know people are "overly optimistic" about paying back. Pawnshops are an easy example. The same is done with use car loans.

Now, when the business man puts his $9,000 in my bank its because he needs to pay bills over time. He knows they will come up, but he doesn't need to spend the money now. He may not have to spend it at all if he has sufficient cash flow.

And when I lend that money out again, it's because I do have real value backing that loan. In this case collateral is a very valuable "claim check". If they don't pay, I claim the house, car, company, gold, tools, etc.

So I lend $8,100 and take $11,000 in collateral. If that person deposits the money with me, I can do it all again.

I have the money, its all cash. None of it was made up or came from the Fed.

If someone comes in and want more cash than I have on had, I can go to any other bank for a loan. I can use my collateral as collateral on that loan. It is perfectly sensible to do so.

If everyone requests their cash at once, all my collateral assets get pledged to other banks who happened to have more cash on hand. And that is still perfectly sensible. Because I now have no risk. I paid all my depositors off. The other banks have the risk so they hold the collateral.

Or I can simply sell my loans to an outside investor. They are investments guaranteed by collateral. And the best thing is, as the loan gets paid back the borrower's "skin in the game" increases. Since they have more to lose, they will work harder to make all payments. Who wants to lose a car for missing the last car payment?

Notice, in no case did I go running to the Fed. In most banking transactions the Fed is not required at all.

Where the fed is needed is when all your cash is out on loan, but there is still more opportunity to grow the economy.

Say I did your progression. I lent out all that money and took gobs and gobs more in collateral. Everything is going smoothly, people are making payments. But now I have no cash on hand available to loan.

Now say Fred comes in and has a great business ideal. He also has collateral to back the loan. The problem is I have no cash. So in this case I go to the bank where I can borrow money the cheapest. (sometimes the fed but most banks can't borrow there directly) So I borrow money, and pledge his collateral to back my loan. I do the paperwork, charge him more interest than the fed charges me. Everyone gets paid back.

There is no magic and no scamming.

Unless you SUCK AT BANKING! Which has happened recently. It is not a scam, it is a bunch of fucking morons who failed to do proper risk assessment or take proper collateral. They should all be lined up and SHOT for sucking so much at their one and only job. Most of the fault actually lies with so called "investors" who created a market by purchasing sets of prepackaged loans, without knowing what the fuck they were doing! It is really easy to create and run a hugely profitable business if you customers are fucking morons! And most of the "investors" who bought the loans were fucking morons. They'll claim the guys who packaged up the unvetted loans scammed them. But it is easy to scam a fucking moron.

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By the way, EVERYTHING I wrote works for fractional reserve bitcoin or gold lending as well.

Stick that in your FAQ.  :-)

This is unsupported. I doubt it is true. Central banks and/or collateral simply doesn't work like that.

Feel free to support this point if you want.

Changes in reserve percentages don't effect anything I said. If you have more cash on hand you lose the value that comes from lending it. But you save on time consuming interbank transactions to manage cash levels.

You could lend $9,000.  Ideally you put it into an account at your bank where now you have $19,000 on deposit and $9,000 on loan.  Now you can loan an addition $8,100.  Then you can loan $7,290.  Then you can loan $6,561.  Etc.  Sum up all those loans.  The initial $10,000 causes the creation of far more than $9,000.  It works the same way if there is more than one bank involved, as in that case it is "the banking system" creates all the new money in total, rather than just one bank where the initial deposit was made.

Or you could use the $10,000 as collateral to borrow from the central bank.  They will give you $100,000 to loan out.

Of course, all those numbers assume a 10% fractional reserve.  Currently in the U.S. the reserve requirement for savings accounts, certificates of deposit, etc. is 0% and for checking (demand) accounts it is 3%.  (Read the fine print on your savings account, they are required to warn you that withdrawals might be denied until convenient for the bank up to typically 30 days.)

And just HOW are you going to do that with bitcoins?  It's all nice to say "in theory" but in this case the theory has a huge hole so it is like saying "in theory gold is worthless because we could mine all the gold we want from other planets."

So, what is the hole in the fractional reserve bitcoin bank theory?

A "real" bank creates dollars and is allowed by the system to issue those new dollars into circulation.

But you cannot issue more bitcoins into circulation than you have.  You can only get bitcoins when they are created in the normal process either by you or transferred to you.  Therefore you will not be able to accept bitcoins on deposit and loan bitcoins unless you loan those coins that are on deposit.  If you loan them, they will not be on deposit any more and you cannot return them to the depositor.

In a way bitcoins are like gold.  If a bank accepted gold on deposit and all loans were made by gold going out of the bank, there would be no fractional reserve banking.  The fractions happen if a substitute is allowed to circulate instead of gold.  (E.g. warehouse receipts)  There are not yet (to my knowledge) any "warehouse receipts" for bitcoins, and hopefully nobody is stupid enough to take a promise for bitcoins in lieu of actual bitcoins.

Do you know of a substitute (a "warehouse receipt") for bitcoins that circulates equivalent to bitcoins?  If that substitute can be created more easily than bitcoins then you could have fractional reserve bitcoin banking.

They didn't die from natural causes, they were assasinated by edict.

Actually I was writing an example of third party trade but it was a lame example so I erases it. Yours was much better.

I think we are in "violent agreement" on the topic. :-)

I prefer my currency as an abstract accounting that, I feel, should not have commodity characteristics.

My best example is I don't think currency should increase in value as a result of demand. All commodity have this characteristic naturally.

Some feel differently and certainly commodity currencies have existed in the past but they died out. I think that is less conspiracy than a diminishing in utility compared to non-commodity based currencies.

Pretty good up to this point, but it's become obvious to me that you still don't understand the difference between a barter system and a currency system.  Money 'evoloves' is any free society to permit an unknwn third party trade.  So that the chicken farmer does not have to negotiate with the baker to accept a trade in chickens.  The farmer can sell his extra chicken to the doctor, and then by some bread, then the baker can go get his checkup.  No two parties must need be aware of the third in order for the trade to occur.  The thing that is traded between all three parties is the currency.  It's not neccessary that this currency be a commodity, but historicly that is the case.

Yes, an educated mind.



The utility that I get from bitcoins, or from US dollars or Euros, is only in what I can trade them for.  They have no 'intrinsic' utility.  Not for me, and not for anyone else.  Feel free to try and come up with a use for currencies outside of their monetary trade uses.

The Romans used many things as money, besides gold and silver.  More popular than either of the traditional metals were salt and iron nails.  It should be obvious enough that both of those have utility beyond their uses as a medium of exchange.

As an aside, that is where we get the convention of sizing nails in "pennies" even though the actual metric is denoted in a small letter "d".  It was originally measured in 'denarius', the *official" standard silver coin of the Roman empire.  That alone should give one a clue as to how highly valued a simple iron nail was to the common Roman, since a normal nail for home construction is called a "16 penny"; and a man named Jesus from Nazarath was betrayed for 30 denarius, significantly less than the value of the three large nails used to pin that man to a dead tree.

I think that a great many people on this list would benefit from a book called, "Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?" by Ray Bradbury.

Truly this is nonsense.

If I have $10,000 from deposits, a 10% reserve means I need to reserve 10% of my deposits. So I must reserve $1,000. Therefore I can lend $9,000.


I already have the $9,000 on hand. It's already borrowed from the depositor. I don't need to ask the central bank for anything.


Yes, I made the account entry when the depositor gave me the money. Yes, they can take have the money when they want it.


If my borrower wants his money, I have it. You haven't even mentioned me loaning it out any yet.

But let's just say, I did loan out $9,000 to Suzy as partial payment for a used car worth $15,000. She paid $6,000 to the seller out of her wallet. I paid the other $9,000 to the seller in cash when he came by the bank. In exchange the seller signed the title to the $15,000 car to me. I'm holding that title until Suzy pays back the $9,000 plus interest.

==

So back to your point. I have only $1,000 cash-on-hand. And let's say my depositor want's his whole $10,000 back.

So I have to call ANY other bank and BORROW $9,000 cash to pay him. I can do this easily, because I can show them I have the means to pay them back. I own either a car worth $15,000 or a loan worth $10,000 principle+interest. If necessary I can sell either one.

So I borrow the money from the bank next door. I still don't see money coming out of thin air.


Good, the borrower paid me back $9,000 + $1,000 in interest. I now have $10,000 and I owe the bank next door $9,000 plus $500 interest.

I pay them back. I now have $500 profit, in cash. In my hand.

Still no money created from thin air.


This is all gibberish. It is not supported by math. It is not supported by English semantics. It's not supported by references that explain the mismatch. It just literally makes no sense at all.

Justify your association between the ability to lend NINE TIMES your deposits with the phrase 10% reserve. This math doesn't work. This semantics doesn't work.
$10,000 * 0.1 reserve = $1,000 reserve   
$10,000 - 1,000 reserve = 9,000 unreserved   
There I showed my work.

So even if I had $90,000 in secure interest paying loans out. There is no such thing as "recalling a loan".
If I need cash, I have collateral. I can borrow cash. It is simple barter. I don't need special treatment.



Really? Is this representative of how people think banking works?

Some days, typos seem like my first language. :-) But if your asking. All of my other languages are worse than English.


commodity |kəˈmäditē|
noun ( pl. -ties)
a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee.
• a useful or valuable thing, such as water or time.


If I can barter for it. It is a commodity. What I choose to do with it is up to me.

Most of the discussion on this list as it relates to bitcoins comes from a barter mentality. Perhaps you haven't noticed.

Really, no European says, "My salary is an investment in Euros". American's don't say, "I'm putting penny's in this piggy bank waiting on an increase in demand for pennies."

Money is a medium of exchange. I swapped an ounce of gold for 1000 loaves of bread, using $1000 to speed the process. I did three months of work and I'm going to buy a car with it after my vacation, using the $20,000 in my wallet.

If there is "excess demand" for money, that is a flaw in a monetary system not a feature. It is only when you think of commodities that such terms make sense.

You have a utity-o-meter? You are sure I get 0 utility from having bitcoins? Your meter is broken.

A personal question, Red.  Is English your first language? 

If there is no use for something outside of the context of a currency, then it is not a commodity.

That's not true at all.  It seems too many people who post on these lists, do so under the pretense of understanding economic theories.


Gold has an "inherent" value, not because other people value it as a medium of exchange or a store of value, (a currency) but because it has real utility outside of this context.  Gold is used in many products that *require* it, and would be used in many more if not for the monetary premium that the desires of all of the people who desire it for it's currency uses.  Gold is, in fact, less abundant in our modern world in an "above ground" refined state than silver.  Silver, however, is not prized (by enough people) for it's properties as a currency.  So it's value is much closer to it's value for it's industrial uses, for which there are many. 

And are you are seriously going to claim that a can of soup or a can of soda doesn't have an 'inherent' value?

I curious, say I want to start a bank and create money out of thin air, how do I do it? I would like to engage in this business.

My name is Joel Bernanke and I've got some connections. But if you can I'd prefer an explanation that a friend my dad doesn't like could use.

Thanks!

Banks do create new dollars out of thin air, it doesn't matter if it's physical paper or account balance as the two are interchangeable. Both are counted as actual dollars in economy as there is no way to tell the difference.

But you are right, I was confused about how fractional reserves work. You could create fractional reserve bank but you are also right that there is no need to actually deposit any money there Unless people are tricked into it by promises of "investments" and good  "returns".

I was going to say exactly this. Glad someone catch it before I did.

nimnul, the short answer is that in a free banking-system (such as the bitcoin community), competition amongst banks will lend itself towards 100 percent reserve banking.  Additionally, since you don't need to physically store your bitcoins (since your wallet can be stored, encrypted, and backuped on computers for zero cost), you do not even need to store your bitcoins in any bitcoin bank.  I have actually addressed your concern in another post, so I'm am just copying and pasting that here:

I don't want to engage with detailed specifics of this issue, but I do not think it is actually beneficial to tie Bitcoin "officially" to claims about economic issues like ideal banking systems, especially any that may be perceived as political in nature. I see Bitcoins as useful for people and offering benefits regardless of your opinions about questions like fiscal policy and banking.

It seems the real point of this line of information is to explain that the money supply of bitcoins is very stable and there is a reliable system in place to generate the currency. Perhaps it could be reworded slightly to simply state these positive characteristics and not debate the issue of banking systems.

Second the inherent value of gold.

It is an easy to work metal that conducts electricity well and doesn't tarnish, rust or otherwise degrade over time.

One of the worst possible uses I can think of for gold is to use it as money. As shown in everyday life, anything can be used as money. It's better to use something otherwise useless for money. Say britney spears CDs.

:-)
 

Tell that to people who have gold fillings in their teeth! And professional flautists who feel that a gold flute mouthpiece makes the best sound.

Also, your cellphone contains about $0.40 worth of gold.

Every computer needs gold for some of its internal connections, so in a way every bitcoin minted depends on gold. Is that ironic or what?

[not that it affects the economic arguments being made in this topic; I just didn't want to leave the error about gold not being needed in everyday life uncorrected]

Having value is just a way of saying people want it. I want it, I bet you wouldn't decline if I offered you some at $4/oz.

And regarding inherent, would you rather have something with a little inherent value or more 'non-inherent' value whatever that is. It's a non-distinction.


Banks that can't convince people of their solvency will just go out of business in a free banking world. Maybe there is no 100% fool proof way to know the bank isn't tricking you, but it's the same with hamburgers. You can't be 100% sure they didn't water it down with dog brain, but my burgers taste pretty damn good, and there are things you can do or insist that they do to make it better. Watchdog groups, audits, glass safes, , etc.

We don't really have these technologies because we have a law instead, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to design ways of proving and verifying things.

In reality bitcoins are the first master planned scarce COMMODITY. It is unique to this commodity that we know it's total available quantity in the universe. We also know exactly how hard it will be to discover this commodity over the next XX years. Also this commodity is generally seen as easily divisible and fungible, but otherwise it is useless.

The only thing not master planned about this commodity is what people will do with it. Since there are no other known uses competing for this commodity, some people think bitcoins should be used as money. Others think this is a highly implausible foundation for monetary policy.

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All true, no politics!

Sorry, but I think it's not quite that...

You could, in theory, have fractional reserves of bitcoins, as with dollars. Banks don't create dollars (FDR notes) out of thin air, they create bank account balance out of thin air, and that's is counted as actual dollars in the economy.

Suppose some bank stores bitcoins. People would transfer their bitcoins to the bank and would have an account balance, that they could retrieve when needed. The bank could then lend part of this money without blocking your balance, thus creating fractional reserves.

Of course that, as I said before, there is not much interest in this, because you don't really need to pay for somebody else just to store your bitcoins. You can do it yourself, easily and safe.

So, although in theory it would be possible, in practice it might never happen.


Nothing has inherent value. 

Value is subjective, people give value to stuff, it's not part of stuff.
That's why you can not claim that someone that built an ugly building beside your house damaged your property by reducing its value, for example. The value of your house is not an inherent attribute of it.

You are wrong

You can not operate a fractional reserve bank using bitcoins, it's impossible by definition because you can lend only the money you actually own and no more. Fractional reserve system works such that you need only 10% reserve of actual money and you can create 90% out of thin air ... you can not create new bitcoins out of thin air like that, you have to actually own them to lend them. And that's why a fractional reserve banl can never ever exist in bitcoin economy no matter how anybody tries

And hello to fellow Zeitgeist member


There is some weird gold worship going on in some economic circles, gold is not so special or particularly good money IMO. It does not have any inherent value, I do not need gold in my everyday life and I do not know anybody who does. There is some use for gold but that's not what gives it its value ... in that sense gold is just as fiat as US dollar except it's not unlimited supply of it. But even if we disagree on this which we probably will there is another problem, there is no way for you to know whether there actually is in the safe the amount of gold the bank says there is, this is what led to the fractional reserve in a first place. You do not have to actually create more gold to create money out of thin air, you just have to *cliam* you have. So Bitcoin is much better than gold because you can not fake how much you own.


It is created "from thin air" because when you solve the hash, 50 bitcoins just appear out of nowhere

The trick is that there is no central authority which issues bitcoins so nobody can use this to manipulate the market. It is evenly and at predictable rate distributed through the economy according to CPU power which is the most fair way without any central authority Satochi could think of (and I can't think of any better, can you?)

If it causes drop of monetary value depends on multiple factors, in isolation yes it would result in that but the bitcoin economy is dynamic and if the supply of bitcoins increases just as bitcoin economy expands it can actually be gaining value while new bitcoins are injected. Which seems to be happening now.

I hope I helped to clear up some things

It's not nonsense.

Item 2 is definitely the most important.

Fractional reserves are not that horrifying when alone, it's true.
But Bitcoins may also bring an end to fractional reserves since nobody would need to pay somebody else to protect/keep their money.
It's only the union of "vault" services with "landing" services that allowed banks to create such fractional reserves.

And monetary inflation is whatever that adds new money. Gold mining is monetary inflation if people use gold as money.

This is called monetary inflation. It doesn't matter if it is created out of thin air or not.

The alleged nonsense is:

"Be safe from the instability caused by fractional reserve banking and bad policies of central banks. The limited inflation of the Bitcoin system’s money supply is distributed evenly (by CPU power) throughout the network, not monopolized by the banks."

Having watched Zeitgeist movie and having read one book from mises.org [1], I cannot be an economy expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

1) "instability caused by fractional reserve banking" probably means that in presence of fractional reserve banking, economy enters boom-bust cycle [1]

Bitcoin can protect anyone from instability caused by fractional reserve banking, can it? I can easily operate a fractional reserve bank using Bitcoin, and create fake credit out of thin air. If the created credit becomes significant to the economy, the bitcoin economy will operate in cycles just like any other economy. What "safety" you are talking about? Is safety claim comes from the fact that no fractional reserve BTC banks are known to operate?

2) "Be safe from bad policies of central banks"

By "central banks" you certainly mean "state banks that print paper money".

This seems to be true. Bad problem with central banks is that they print money at will, creating money out of thin air, and that printing is equivalent to stealing money from everyone else, so states are major thieves [1]

Bitcoin is in this aspect very similar to genuine golden money. While in a gold-driven decentralized economy everyone can mine gold and mint golden coins, minting is a business with low profit margin (at least much lower than current "printing business" of state banks").

So bitcoin, while technically a pure fiat money, is very special kind of fiat money that is almost as good as gold in terms of impossibility to create money out of thin air and use these fake money to finance wars, provide bailouts to fractional reserve banks etc [1].

3) "The limited inflation of the Bitcoin system’s money supply is distributed evenly (by CPU power) throughout the network, not monopolized by the banks."

This sounds as complete nonsense to me, can someone explain?

Inflation is essentially a process of creating money out of thin air that causes drop of monetary value of money and rise of prices. Bitcoins are not created out of thin air just like gold is not. Is my definition of inflation wrong?

[1] Hans-Hermann Hoppe "The Economics and Ethics of Private Property"