Topic: What do we do about government monopoly? - page 2. (Read 1600 times)

Yeah, ok, i agree with that.
So it has to be a form of evolution, not revolution.

And why the hell not?

You drive being on drugs and harm or kill anybody? You work for your debt (which the harmed one or his family wants) untill you pay it. Or die. Many peopel drive drunk an nothing happenes. But when does, they shoudl bare all consequences.

You waste your health being on drugs and don't have insurace which covers for that? Well that is your problem, you made yourself addict, than die if nobody is willing to help you.

Tell me, is there anything today which what really prevents people from driving on drugs, or drunk? I think not, if you do, you are so naive. And all those bans can't do anything with that.

Yes you did. You said the answer is to stop trading bitcoin in and out of fiat.
You cannot have 'not trading btc for fiat' and 'owning a computer and using the internet'.
Bitcoin cannot exist without things that are only available in the fiat economy.
So to even suggest to stop trading fiat with bitcoin is silly as you cannot own the stuff you need to run bitcoin without fiat.

Tell me, what does the bitcoin economy have to offer me to build a business on?
What parts of my business can i operate completely with bitcoins?

Why? If anybody wants to help, he can do that, wilingly. I don't like being forced to help somebody I don't even know. Also, high-price means draws competition.


That is just haunting, nothing else. Why would people make it intentionally complicated when their business which feeds them depends on ability to sell? They can just organize into groups. Not that in bureaucracy it is ANY better. When you need anything, you have to usually deal with several burreacrats who mostly deal with you as with pieve of shit they've stepped into. Not mentioning they toss you between one and other like hot potato.


If you are so stupid to sign that contract, well, your problem. You got a choice (unlike today).


Aren't you one of those gun-banning fools? First, if you will be armed, you won't need security to such everyday "protection“, and if they'd like to "protect" you too much without you wanting it (e. g. during night), you may be able to defend yourself (aka shoot them all). Ha?

Second, are you sure they are willing to take it into bloodshet? Nobody reasonable wants bloodshet! Citizens with even small security company on their side may be as big force as firm B, and using force in such situation will result into bloodshet. Nobody wants bloodshet. Also there is no reason for big firm C not to come, ppl not support firm A, or firm A not getting firm C to help.

Anyway, whole firm B behaviour is too strange, they want their money and by doing this, it will only harm their business in long-term, so why the hell would they do that. Also, who is the owner of the watter supply that he alows this?

Last but not least. Tell me, is that today any better? Gotcha. Today water belongs to one company, they can say they want any price for it because you will pay it. Nothing stops them from doing it, do you even realize that? It's even worse if it belongs to the town or even central government. Because they can imprison you for not paying, for holding weapons, for anything. It is no better in socialistic burreaucracy!! Government can do and does many such things. Most likely it is much worse than it could be in free society. There is at least a chance people themselfes will do it better. Government does almost nothing good.

Like taxes. It is robbery if you ask me, and if you refuse to pay, they will sent you to prison. That's *just*great. Man come on, see through it, all you say is just government propaganda to wash your brain so you won't accept anything else than them.

Obviously you wont be able to use it for everything derp. I am simply suggesting that we be as diligent as possible in using it as often as we can.

Babylon wasnt built in a day. One stone at a time.

Hi

I'm a baker.

I need grain in the future at a more or less stable price to be able to support my local community that needs me for their daily bread. If they don't get bread they will revolt.

Where do i get grain in BTC?

How much BTC do i have to pay now to secure a portion of the grain next year?

I never suggested an all or nothing approach. stop with the strawman.

Also, we would have a lot more substance abuse.
Another problem is that drugs can make people do things that they would not normally do by themselfs.
Many drugs cannot regulate themselfs and there is no reason to expect the sellers to regulate their market. More profit is better, right?
If you say a person cannot be manipulated through drugs then you haven't tried any of the good ones.
So if left completely unchecked this will go horribly wrong in society.

Do you want to take the risk that half the population is driving their car while on a new and legal drug that the police is not testing for?
Would you let your kids cross the street to get to school?
Would you wtill willingly participate in traffic?
Does self-regulation mean that first people will need to die before everyone wisens up?

Sure, and the first thing you need to separate yourself from is those nasty fiat computers and internets.
Those are really bad.
Also, all the food that was needed for the people that made the computers? Filty fiat food i tell you.
And you know what? those filty fiat food people drive in filthy fiat cars on filthy fiat roads on filthy fiat fuel.
Boycot it all. It's better for bitcoin.

In reality bitcoin cannot exist without the fiat economy. The moment you kill the fiat economy is the moment you kill bitcoin, for several reasons.

I think the answer is to stop trading btc in for fiat and instead to do everything in our power to find other people to work with who are in the bitcoin ecosystem in our personal lives but even more importantly in our business relations.

If you run a business you can take payment in bitcoins and use the bitcoins to pay for servers for your website and the company that runs the servers can find tech guys to pay in bitcoin to help maintain their services and the tech guy finds ways to buy his supplies with bitcoin and with a litle luck the company that we started with is the one selling those very supplies. This way we have an entire economic ecosystem of bitcoin. The point is unless you are specifically providing a gateway, do everything you can to not turn your bitcoins into fiat!

For those people you just cant convince to take bitcoins, use your bitcoins to buy gold and silver and maybe you can convince them to take that.

Ironically finsen regulations will help to push us in the right direction in this respect  .

Problem being that markets react to highest price, not biggest need.
You show me a market that will willingly sell at a lower price to people who need it most instead of distributing top down in order of who pays the most.

Bureaucracies are not ment to react fast. They are ment to provide a stable bundle of services to society over a long time.
If it changed too much then people would not be able to plan long time. Who would invest in a house when you have no way of knowing what will happen around it? Every step individuals take will be a risk per se. You will have to deal with an enourmous ammount of small forces. You will have to read and understand all the rules of all these entities that you will have to deal with.

You think security firm B is better than A? Sure, untill you read the fine print and see that you have signed a 12 year contract that cannot be disbonded without you losing your head. Anyway, there is no government so noone to uphold a law. There will be nothing protecting you against security firm B making sure you fullfill your contract.
In fact, because security firm B has been so successfull in dealing out these contracts (they only hire the smartest) they now 'protect' most of your city.
They have now decided to 'protect' the water supply of the city.
Anyone who is under the protection of the minor security firm A will not get any water.
Everyone will need to sign the 12 year contract with security firm B.
Security firm A is now too small to pose a risk againt security firm B. The people working for security firm A start to disapear mysteriously.
You may think that maybe you don't need security firm B anymore. So you decide stop paying for the service and you just dig a hole and have your own water.
Of course, once security firm B finds out that you haven't been paying they will pay you a little visit.
You will explain to them that you don't need their protection and that you have your own water now.
So they say, sure kiddo, but you know what? It is a hard world out there. Are you really sure you can live without our protection?
You tell them sure, what can happen?
That night a black car stops by your house. A couple of gorillas with baseball bats get out and redecorate your appartment and your face.
Next day the security firm comes by again. They heared you had some kinds of problems and offer their services. At double the price. Because they can.

So who will protect you against a monopolist security firm?
How will you arrange that these firms act in the best interest of their clients instead of in the best interest of themselfs?

And this is just a little example of the kind of powerplay you get in an unprotected market. Monopolies will form, cartels will form, people will be abused by corporations, it will be a big mess.

That would only help. Look at illegal drugs, alcohol, weapons. Do you have any feeling it does not exist? And why is that? It is banned, it should be! Unless, wait, isn't that forbidden and/or highly taxed only is more wanted and gets attetion to be distributed unofficialy?

If drugs weren't forbidden, they would be less expensive than cigarettes.

Unfortunately government monopoly could easily happen if they legislate bitcoin out of the game.  They have the power to do this and just have to hope they don't bother with it anytime soon.

+1

Actually, +100.

I was going to start making some of these same points, but mobodick has done so more eloquently than I would have anyway.  Bitcoin is great as an exchange medium, and it is excellent because of the fact that it is decentralized and (thus far) robust enough to withstand the shocks that have come its way.  But the present-day existence and ready availability of the hardware to run the entire network has been predicated on the ascendance of some major corporations with oligopoly power in their respective markets, and that isn't the fault of the government.

While I agree that a society based on a lot MORE voluntary interaction between individuals is very desirable, the idea of getting rid of government is pretty far fetched.  Transforming it somethow into something that ensures that market failures and tragedies of the commons do not occur, or otherwise "guides" the market in a manner that is generally agreed upon by the overwhelming majority of the people - that would be a desirable outcome.  I don't see very readily how it would happen, but I love the general idea.  Destruction or elimination of "government" as an entire entity is probably a lot less practical than most people think - and the free market itself is far from magical.  When managed, it permits the best of people and can reduce the worst.  But left unfettered, an absolute free market leads inexorably to the hellish post-apocalyptic vision described above.

That said, I love BTC and I would also love to augment myself with cybernetic prostheses.  Just saying.

I cannot agree more. But think of even worse situation: as you have it with car registration, we have it also with driving licence. And basically with everything else. bureaucracy is growing bigger every year and every year is worse in Europe. But the worse they regulate, the worse the problem gets. What's their response? More regullation, higher taxes, more redistributing.

mobodick: man I don't understand you, really. First you talk logically, and than kill it with bullshit like bureaucrats can solve it by directing. THAT'S THE PROBLEM OF OUR WORLD: BURREACRATS PLANNING. You should realize that

1) most inbalances are CREATED by these social experimentators
2) market is able to react faster than any bureaucracy can
3) bureaucrats have NO obligation to do their work properly (I mean as properly as could be without free market), they are paid regardles what or how they do it
4) they have no responsibility

How can you even say this can work better? Can't you see? Well, you cannot, you have never lived in socialistic regime. They all failed, how can you insist on saying this time it will work? It won't. Can't you see US have been most succesfull when being purely capitalistic? And than with every other social experiment it got worse? Now I don't have many facts about uS? it's kinda far, but from reading tiny pieces of Charles Murray's work, every time government tried to take controll of anything, it just got worse. EVERY TIME.

As for the end, bitcoin is one of the means of GETTING INDEPENDENT on either state ar corporations. It is decentrilzed, uncontrolable. Using independent currency is the start of getting independent itself.

The problem is that we need at least some of those 'one size fits all' structures. You cannot just replace them. You will need to first have something that operates parallel to it so it can support the same kind of societal functions.
There are many things that we centralize in governments. We have treaties that ensure food supplies. What do you think would happen if a city like New York would have to reneg their grain import? I can tell you, either the New Yorkers starve or they pay way too much for bread. I mean, what does New York have to offer to someone who has grain? Managers?
So its pretty difficult to make a transition from our centrally steered economies to self organizing economies without breaking the existing logistics. Breaking the core logistics means breaking society, at least untill a new stability is reached. And nobody knows how long it would take for the new substrate to self order or where the balance will end up.

I mean, maybe it is now economically cheap to educate people to become architects. So a self organizing system will use the opportunity and maximize the output of architects.
But then it takes a couple of years to get these people on the market and only THEN will the self organizing system notice t he effect of the inflow of architects. And then it turns out that there are waaaay too many of them. And also not enough doctors.
So the system cuts down on architects and pushes for doctors.
But those doctors won't be on the market for another 5 years, maybe 10 if they specialize.
So society will have a big shortage of doctors for years while the system sorts itself out.
And these sorts of dynamics will be going on in every specialism.
It takes some amount of high level societal planning to get more or less in the right direction and you would be surprised how much of the world you see outside relies on a steady flow of output from society. We rely on stability, food supplies, infrastructure, goods and skills to be there is a certain quantity.
I don't think we can permit ourselfs to overwrite this with a new untested system.

The problem with self ordering structures is that it is about the structure and not about the people that form the structure. It forces people to act along market dynamics. Market dynamics prefer short term solutions. People will have less freedom then ever because everything will relate in an economical way. Every choice, every relation you have will be based on economics. You'll have to because it will be the only way to survive in a market driven society.
You will also force humanity to go into an arms race on an individual level. When the workers in the next town upgrade their arms with robotic prostheses then you will have to do it as well becasue otherwise they will outcompete you.
Very efficient, i'm sure, but words like 'human' will become increasingly meaningless. Your proper designation in this brave new world will be 'market element #9235874773'.

And a self organizing system doesn't prevent monopolies.
So let's say RoadCorp buys all roads in Los Angeles.
They now have a monopoly on the roads in LA.
Is there any chance for another company to 'order' itself into a competing position?
Nope, no chance at all because there is no room to build competing roads.
So now RoadCorp puts toll booths on all the important interconnects around the city nd ask for an unreasonable amount of money to get through.
How can you top them?
You cannot compete them out of the market.
RoadCorp is privately owned so you can't make them.
There is no police force and RoadCorp has hired a PMC to protect their investment.
How would your self sorting substrate deal with such problems?

Not realy, since you cannot buy anything with bitcoins not created in the non-bitcoin economy.
If you could then the same societal problems would apply to bitcoin and everyone would be screeming for it to be regulated in various ways. Bitcoin, at the moment, works because it is not very big. We still need to see how it will work if it actually is a substantial part of our economies.
The market does its magic by eating itself up. Its easy to do magic if you have lots of resources. But it turns out we never had them in the first place. Market dynamics have eaten the bottom of our financial system.
So i don't think the market by itself is a stable solution. It is only stable while growing but we know for a fact that it cannot grow forever.
Free market is an idiotic way to organize society.

But then again, it did release a lot of creativity and productivity.

I personally think that we need something in between.
We need cleaner/tighter governments that ensure a certain societal base in a democratic way.
And then we need a capitalist arena where people with lots of ambition can fight it out without the possibility to make the societal base dysfunctional.
Some natural monopolies,like water or roads, should be protected agains being hijacked by corporations.

I think there are a lot of ways in which we can optimize our governments and in fact i think the process of pruning is a continuous one.
But i'm not sure your example here will work out the way you think.
The insurance companies have a drive to get people to insure with them.
Why would you trust the information on their plates?
Is that really a Class A driver or is he a Class A on-time payer?
Only the insurance company knows this.
There is also nothing preventing the 'competing' companies to form a cartel. They could all ask for twice the money if they play nice amongst themselfs.

How does your free market deal with cartels?

Yeah, we won't need a government because there won't be a society after the transformation. The will be corporations and their worker slave race.
People will become the actual resource corporations will fight over.
And it's already starting.
If you use google then you are googles product.
If you use facebook then you are facebooks product.
These are the beginnings of the tyranny of law-less megacorporations that compete of planes outside of public interest.

I want you to understand one thing.
No technology will save humanity from humanity.
That includes bitcoin.

I guess you're right. Government should legalize all drugs and kill Bitcoins only use.

Lets get bitcoin to the next level by replacing the current inefficient and chaotic substrate of society that is based on violence and one size fits all "solutions" with one that is self-ordering and based on voluntary interactions.

If you have bitcoins you have less to worry about how the governments have done a poor job of solving problems.

Let's be positive, and recognize that the market does seem to work magic, even though it is really just the unleashing of human creativity and productivity in ways that no politician or bureaucrat can possibly imagine.

Pick one thing you can do that will help rebuild a better society, and concentrate on that.

Here's one example that I think really illustrates the point: car registration and driver's licensing. Our (at least the American version) current way of doing things is ridiculous. We have government's controlling the licensing and car plates, when that is clearly corporate welfare that protects the insurance companies and their profits. Why not instead place the regulatory burden back onto the insurance companies by making them handle licensing and plate issuance. The insurance companies would own the plates, and if you are paid up you can keep the plates on your car. If you stop paying, they repossess the plates. Anyone driving without a plate is uninsured, so other motorists can take notice and be more careful around them. A good insurance company might have a better plate, that can use simple tech to indicate whether or not the current driver has a license and possibly even what skill level they have shown. This allows for more freedom while also allowing people to take more control of their own safety.

Now apply that sort of thinking to any other thing that government currently does and see how that will transform society to the point that we no longer need government.

let's do it. But remember to have your computer ready to pay bitcoins when your house is on fire unless you have paid your firebrigade that month. Also have your BTC ready when you are passing the 47'th tollbooth when visiting your granparents. Btw: hope that you have paid those blackwater folks that patrol the highway in case someone wants to rob you. On your way home, you might wanna pop into that store where you are pretty sure that you get what it says on the lables, at least that's why you are willing to fork up twice the price you would otherwise pay in the "copy-mart" outlet.

playing some monopoly?