Money as a System of Control (2017)
thedistillery.pub
thedistillery.pub
Even if you think crypto is a fad, stupid, or whatever, I think they're still great reads explaining the why of the decisions, how of the implementations, and the challenges for these two technologies. If this video is your first impression of him, the books are much less abrasive(?).
Crypto currency view of money is that money is a store of value. Money is far more subtle and interesting than that. Money is has always has been a system of control. Those that can issue money, wield incredible power of the economy, and have done so since monies inception.
That's what private banknotes used to be in eg Canada or Scotland before they were outlawed.
Add a transfer feature to some bitcoin-exchange balances, and you are getting close. Have different bitcoin exchanges agree to accept each others balances, and you are getting even further.
(It's in a bitcoin-exchanges profitable interest to accept a transfer from another bitcoin exchange: they can demand real bitcoin from the competing exchange, and just have to give their receiving customer an entry on their own balance sheet for the time being.)
Correct. As a matter of fact, this already exists: some Swiss Bank has started issuing certificates of ownership where the underlying is BTC.
My prediction: bitcoin will become successful iff it evolves a fractional reserve ecosystem.
Where successful means something like it's being used not just for speculation, but routinely for eg making every-day transactions.
(Originally, I was only going to predict fractional reserve as a necessary condition for success. But thinking about it, I realized that no-one would bother with the legal complexities in the non-success case.)
The only way to achieve the level of freedom Antonopoulos is talking about is with real scaling, so people can directly use cryptocurrency in everyday transactions.
A Bitcoin based fractional reserve would be based on something which fundamentally can’t be created at the whim of any single government at the base monetary level.
So yes, you could still over promise Bitcoin but the difference is you cannot be bailed out on a whim.
This is an important distinction that would lead to (IMO) healthy outcomes like banks genuinely going bankrupt if they can’t get a ‘real’ bail out of hard Bitcoin instead of bail out socialised by future tax payers’ money and inflation.
https://structuredproducts-ch.leonteq.com/valor/36663487
They claim that the underlying is 100% in custody, yes, but as with all paper, who's to really know in the end...
They certainly don't provide any sort of crypto verification mechanism so the bearer can verify that the underlying actually exist and is uniquely bound to the paper.
[edit]: nevermind. now that I actually look at it, it's cash-settled.
Only if they can issue the money at will. If the issuance of money is controlled by a distributed transparent cryptographic algorithm, then the power from issuing the money is not in the hands of the issuers (miners, in the case of cryptocurrencies). And that's a good thing.
Money is a social construct. It isn't a thing, mined out of the ground or a cryptographic nonce that satisfies a a constraint on a hashing algorithm. Money is a social agreement that expresses credit worthiness as assessed by people regarded as reliable assessors credit worthiness.
Crypto, which repudiates centralised control, cannot be money. Not until someone figures out a way to guarantee that credit worthiness can somehow be reliably encoded into a trustless p2p algorithm. Given that crypto currency can barely scrape through with a solution to the double spend problem, extending to a solution to assessing credit in a decentralized, anonymous way might as well be on the other side of the galaxy. It is impossibly inaccessible.
Crypto is intended to automate the role of the trusted third party. Bitcoin's ledger is much less intelligent than even the dullest central banker, but it has no self-interest. In cases where the trusted third party to a transaction has a reason to abuse their power - see e.g. 2008 bank bailouts - having a transparent algorithm handle that role is a massive savings. The problem of assigning creditworthiness remains, it's just that there is one less party whose trustworthiness needs to be assessed (and compensated). It's not that it solves the creditworthiness problem, but it makes the problem easier for others to solve.
I would say, modern money is debt, transferable or not. It is interesting in a sly way as the true nature is hidden from the populace at large so that money as a system of control remains effective.
I think the major problems we face w.r.t money are due to this dual nature of money. You cannot simultaneously satisfy both the creditors and the debtors.
Not in the case for gold. The reason gold was used so much has a long term storage was due to it's stability. Gold doesn't decay in generational lifetimes. Doesn't really rust and reacts with very few chemicals. Silver was actually used as an everyday currency more than gold. But gold was the main body.
The use of precious metals as a form of currency was not an accident. Yea, it has value largely based on "faith". Any currency will. No cryptocoin is immune from that. You have to have faith that it has value. I find it weird that people just say "crypto has inherent value unlike fiat currency". Yea, what value? If you want to argue "Well, gold has no real value, so bitcoin is no different from that. They both lack real value. Why can't bitcoin be a currency?" Good question! That's a good point! We're getting somewhere!
It peeves me when people take a shit on thousands of years worth of social trial and error and dismiss it all because they watch a youtube cartoon about "the truth behind money".
Your point is something much vaguer, and not really true. Commodity money, like Spanish pieces-of-eight, has an intrinsic value. Commodity-backed and fiat money are debts of the government, but for you they are assets. If you held a US gold certificate, the government owed you gold. With fiat money, the government basically doesn't owe you anything, but it's still a debt for the government and an asset for you in accounting terms. Before electronic money, the government had very little control over what purposes that money was put to, so it wasn't much of a power.
You don't understand how money works. “Money is created by the government” is a myth. In western countries (and most of the world, including China!), money is created by private banks and the money on your bank account is a debt from some guy somewhere (likely a mortgage, a student loan or some corporate debt).
Why are bank accounts denominated in units of currency? It's because demand deposits are an extremely close substitutes of actual currency. Anyway, they work the same way. Money in the bank is an asset to you, and a liability to the bank.
This is incompatible with your previous statement:
> it's still a debt for the government and an asset for you in accounting terms.
You don't own a single dollar of reserve money as an asset.
And the monetary base is a tiny fraction of money. The vast majority of which is debt.
The asset I put in bank as deposits are too derived via this mechanism. It is an asset to the bank because they have lent it to the government. Part of it is a liability to them because i have lent it to them to further loan it out in multiples which become their assets ..... infinite recursion.
It is turtles all the way.
Except fractional reserve banking isn't an accurate model of how money works today. Money is created by bank loans, not deposits - a bank with zero deposits could still lend money.
Even for a central bank, the government has to capitalize it first with some amount to kickstart the process so that it can borrow more from it.
People will still lock up cryptocurrencies like BTC on the Bitcoin chain and wrap that in debt-tokens on chains that enable this, for example Ethereum.
Bitcoin maximalists who don't agree with debt-based economy are obviously not happy about this. To better understand that point of view, The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous is a great read, whether you will agree with it or not.
His views are pretty extreme but I suspect they will become more mainstream as the time goes by. Not that he will change his mind, but most of us will realize many of the things he says were right.
I checked my bank account, and it had $30k in it (my life savings at the time). So I thought nothing was wrong and went to bed.
Next morning I try to pay for groceries and my card is again declined. I call my bank. They say my account has been flagged and it’s frozen. They can’t tell me why, or how to appeal.
I go into the bank. I ask why I wasn’t notified my account was frozen. They said they “oh sorry someone should have called you”. I ask what I did to get my account frozen. They said they don’t know, it’s part of some social security electronic audit. They say it’s all automated and because it’s the government it was out of their control. I ask how long will it take to unfreeze they say they don’t know. They tell me to call an 800 number, and that nobody in the physical branch has any power over really anything.
I tell them my rent check is going to bounce, they said “we’re sorry”.
Long story short: 2 weeks later my account is unfrozen for no reason. I was never given a reason. I missed rent. I couldn’t buy food.
I committed no crime, and was never accused of committing any crime. This was a personal account not involved in any business. I deposited paychecks into it and bought food and paid my rent. That’s mostly it.
Just FYI money in the bank is not yours. If the government wants to freeze it for no reason they can, despite all the people who say otherwise. It happened to me. This was at Chase bank in US. I now keep thousands in cash hidden in various places, and bought some bitcoin as well. At least if the thugs in the federal government want it they’ll have to fucking physically take it.
I also moved to hoard a few types of liquid assets, and also have accounts with three banks (and multiple cards) to reduce the risk of a single-bank causing this level of impact to me.
There are services that split your money between multiple banks just for this reason.
Someone is watching...
it is illegal for the bank to inform you of any AML investigation undertaken whether internally or the FBI or fincen or any of the other federal bodies. if you don't like the way this is done, i suggest you take it up to your congressmen.
If the bank can give you a straight answer, it's clearly not AML. If they start giving you no answer, it's presumably that. Id' expect if you were seriously in that game, that's one of the clear signs something's awry and you'd better start activating panic measures.
I'm also sort of confused about the concept of freezing accounts during an investigation. If it was late stage and they were saying "okay, shut it down, we'll be sending over the cops with the arrest warrant within an hour", that's one thing, but any sudden movement on accounts is likely to change the behaviour you're trying to monitor and document. The darkweb market seizures seemed smarter in that regard-- they let some of them run with no obvious changes so they could gather data, only taking it down once the case was completely built.
I wish they would listen. Everyone in congress right now supports an unconstrained federal government that does things like freeze your bank account without any reason or due process. Both parties are hellbent on expanding their power at the expense of liberty in the name of safety or security.
This Jennifer Lawrence video summarises some desirable reforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfQij4aQq1k
See also Lawrence Lessig's "Our democracy no longer represents the people. Here's how we fix it": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE
Is this an actual law that was voted by congress, or just some regulation that the FBI pulled out of their ear one bright Monday morning ?
> i suggest you take it up to your congressmen.
That'd assume the answer to my first question is yes. Citation needed.
As I understand it, a lot of things work like this in some unitary (as opposed to federal), parliamentary (as opposed to presidential) democracies. In at least some such countries all governmental power ultimately depends on the elected legislature, but it can be delegated to other bodies (including to the executive and to local government) as the legislature chooses. The legislature can reclaim its power, too, even from directly-elected local authorities.
Where do you keep your savings?
It's harsh to say it, but that statement is a demonstration of your ignorance.
Investing is great. Put $10,000 in something diverse and passive and sit on it. But also keep a savings account for immediate emergencies, and keep some cash on hand for even more immediate emergencies.
I can withdraw money from my ETrade or IB margin accounts using the debit card that came with those accounts (or write a check on them), same as you can with a savings account.
I do keep a few thousand at a local bank and have a separate checking account at USAA that I use for most daily/monthly transactions, but that's for convenience not access/liquidity reasons.
It depends on what they are saving for - if they need the 20-30K a year down the line it is alright to keep it in the savings account.
If it is for general long term asset building - may be they haven't yet figured out how best to start investing. Again no harm to keep it parked till you figure it out instead of investing in haste and then regret later - for the rest of your life.
One in particular has been sitting on the sidelines since before the 2016 election season. They have foregone about a 50% gain that they'd have gotten over that period. That money also can never be recouped.
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...
If one owns a stock and the price goes up 10% they don’t make any money. They would have to sell to make money.
At some point “Bob” needs to retire, hopefully that’s not during a downturn.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Permanent-Portfolio-Long-Term-Investm...
You can never recover the time you spent earning money to make up for missing investment gains.
May be this needs some elaboration. For me, the low probability event of blowing up your life's worth of saving beats the ephemeral gains you would expect to get from a higher risk investments, every single time. For me, it is irrational to think otherwise, something I can't understand why people do. I will invest in the riskier investments only so much as I am comfortable to lose completely.
And there is the rub, with the modern banking systems, it is very difficult to achieve that unless you use real hard assets like gold which is becoming difficult, real estate which is quite illiquid.
Is one missing out on potential gains ? Perhaps, but one is ok with that.
P.S >> You can never recover the time you spent earning money to make up for missing investment gains.
I didn't quite understand this. The investment gains are not certain or guaranteed. You talk as if they are a certainty.
The PP does pretty well at limiting drawdowns. A variation that works especially well is the "Golden Butterfly," which just takes the PP and weights a little more towards stocks. In my own experiments on the site, I've found it also helps a lot to include international stocks, and weight towards small value.
Also, the stock market doesn't disappear overnight.
The main idea is to keep separate accounts for "everyday life" and savings.
* In bank 1, a current account, for everyday use. This should not have more money than 1-2 months of expenses.
* In bank 1, a savings account, which is your primary savings.
* In bank 2, a savings account, which has enough money for a few months of rent.
* Stash somewhere in your house, in cash, enough money for a week of outside food and transport to family/friends who can take you in, in case of you losing your primary accommodation.
This all depends on you being rich enough to afford all of this, but I imagine 30K in the bank account is rich enough. Also, as others have pointed out, you should consider investing.
Or have no account at all and pay cash. Which is not very convenient with physical money. But becomes fairly workable with something like Bitcoin.
For example: Monday "can be confiscated at whim, frozen by any banker at any point in time". Oh really? Any banker can confiscate any customer's money on a whim?
There's more. I find it very annoying.
"How many Greeks do you think had insurance on their bank accounts? All of them. What happened to that? Poof, in one afternoon. Vanished. 20% haircut." He makes it sound as if deposit insurance is supposed to insure against a tax claim by the state (in this case a rather sudden, surprising tax).
It's admirable, in a way, how some people manage to make weird things sound reasonable.
There are other examples. Such as the foreclosure mills set up around 2008 which literally stole some people's houses - even if they didn't have a mortgage.
And in the UK the banks make a lot of their profits from excessive "overdraft fees", which they claim - on a whim, just because they can - unless legislation is passed to prevent them.
And in times of financial stress, banks have the option to prevent withdrawals of customer funds. That's not a permanent confiscation, but it's a very bad thing if you need to buy food and have no idea why your card isn't working.
These can all be fought through the courts, but most individuals have neither the time nor the resources to fight them.
The bottom line is that banks like an unofficial branch of government. From the Fed down, they control the money supply - and since there is no such thing as "money" in any tangible sense that isn't symbolic of political power, that's identical to being able to exercise immense power over people's lives with no political accountability.
I can't read Greek and haven't read that particular insurance policy's scope. But I've read all of mine, and they all say "insures against <list> and only that". They don't insure me against generic other mishaps, and exclude force majeure.
If the legislature decides to expropriate all or part of someone's property, that act doesn't extend the list of protections afforded by an insurance policy. Perhaps the legislature shouldn't have done what it did, I'm not arguing that point. But a legislature is sovereign, it can do things.
If a bank or someone else tricks, cajoles, persuades the legislature to expropriate all or part of someone's property, that act still doesn't extend the list of protections afforded by any insurance policies.
That they banks could have done other things instead of going to the legislature is entirely correct, but not relevant. Once the legislature acted, the thing that actually happened was out of scope for the deposit insurance, because the legislature's sovereignty is a unique force.
And after that digression, my point is that the original article bends the truth too much. In this case by making it sounds as if an insurance policy was worthless ("poof") because it didn't protect citizen against expropriation ordered by the legislature of the citizens' country, without arguing that what happened was in-scope for that insurance.
He didn't argue either that the legislature was acting beyond its powers, or that the insurance policy covered the what happened. He could have argued, but didn't, he just put words next to other words. The words are spatial connected, not causally, and my point is that that's ugly and misleading.
It sucks for the Greek who lost part of their deposit, but that doesn't license anyone to be bend the truth about what a particular insurance covers.
If a bank does this to you, you call up (in the USA) the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency). They do a check on you to make sure no law enforcement agency considers you a terrorist. Once cleared, they tell the bank to release the funds. No court needed. This literally happened to me after depositing a check for my business.
I agree, banks, especially the top 5, can be cunts. But don't go all tin foil hat about it. Don't watch 10 minute youtube cartoons about "how money really works because the lizard Illuminati actually control it". It's bad for your mental health.
But 30 day is still beyond me as to where that comes from. 3 to 5 day. Sure. But 30 makes zero sense. My situation was a bit unique due to the account being frozen out of the blue.
Cryptocurrency advocates promise you freedom from everyone else's action, but at the cost of no way to correct mistakes. So if your computer security is ever 100% less than perfect, or you're defrauded by your counterparty, there's no way to recover the loss. (Well, there's legal action, but "freedom from legal action" is also cited as a benefit..)
You can dispute the charge, and an individual will decide whether it is valid or not. That decision, as the author put it, is based upon the relative privilege of the two parties. If I am a weird kid on the internet, the bank will always give you your money back. But what if I am a utility or a city government? You will almost always lose your money without months of beurocracy or legal work. In fact, they don't even have to take it from your bank account. They can merely send you a sheet of paper which says you owe them, and your credit rating (money privilege) will rapidly erode if you disagree with their assessment.
It is not even about crime or errors all of the time either. Have you ever tried to buy a car from a private party on a Sunday? Even with $1M in the bank, you have no access to your money due to arbitrary decisions of local bank branch managers. Buy from a privilleged seller (dealer)? No problem. In fact, they can invent the money with which you purchase it (assuming you are privilleged enough, of course)
In this context, I interpret the word "insurance" as the belief that the government will "defend" their savings.
> "Remaining good assets and deposits below €100,000 with Laiki Bank would be saved and transferred to Bank of Cyprus (BoC), while shareholder capital would be written off, and the uninsured deposits above €100,000 – along with other creditor claims – would be lost to the degree being decided by how much the receivership subsequently can recover from liquidation of the remaining bad assets. As an extra safety measure, uninsured deposits above €100,000 in BoC will also remain frozen until a recapitalisation has been implemented (with a possible imposed haircut if this is later deemed needed to reach the requirement for a 9% tier 1 capital ratio)"
It was not a tax by the state. It was the other way round: it was the refusal (or rather inability) of the state to act as lender of last resort and cover a private company (in this case a bank) which had gone insolvent.
The average Cypriot, not having €100k in their bank account, was not affected. Some local business owners were. The majority of victims were those using Cyprus as a tax haven due to its low corporation tax rate: https://www.taxjustice.net/2017/10/26/21561/
The bail in was carried out by the bank though. The stolen haircut amounts was converted to BoC shares.
That's the point behind the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency). They're to make sure that does not happen. Broad brush stroke, SEC for the banks. Chase bank actually tried this on me after depositing a check from a client. They wanted to hold the check for 31 days and they froze my account (which included my payroll and day to day funds). Granted, it was a big check and the biggest one I ever got by a large amount. But verification of legality for that amount was only supposed to be about 3 days (which I don't have problems with). Anyways, did about 5 minutes of extreme panic research and discovered the OCC. Literally that easy to find. Called them up, explained the situation and they said they need to do their due diligence with my info. 2 days later (they researched the payment, fyi I was sub-sub-contract on a gov job) they scheduled a call between me and Chase bank at a branch. They forced the funds released and account back in working order. Chase gave me a huge apology. I literally told them to shove their apology in their ass and to cash out my company's account so I could open a new one elsewhere. They claimed they can't cash out in such short notice, the guy from the OCC on speakerphone speaks for me and goes "Your office has 30 minutes to figure it out."
Literally, my favorite gov agency since I did feel pretty baller going against Chase bank. The Chase branch had 2 lawyers and a regional vp with their branch manager waiting for me. I think the CFPB got involved too, on my side, but OCC took lead. At least the guy I always talked to was OCC. I was just surprised how fast acting these people were. From account freeze to walking out was only 3 days.
Makes me wonder though, what other agencies are out there, that baller, that protects the public?
Now Greece, sure. Not like they truly have a functioning government to begin with.
Confiscated a whim? Not really in western countries
Frozen at whim? Why yes, many countries implement capital controls.
No, it doesn't. Accredited investor (by the meaning the author most likely intended) is $1MM net worth (ex residence) or $200K in income for each of the last two years and an expectation for that to continue. There are 42 million millionaires or about 0.55% of the world population. There is an additional population who have the income but not the net worth to qualify, so it's possible that nearly 1% of the world adults would be accredited investors.
~1% is a lot more than ~0.001%, a thousand times more in fact.
Do you have a source for this statistic? Do you know if that excludes residences?
The gov't will not protect accredited investors the same way they do the general public. Therefore, firms only need to ask on their forms, and no need to actually verify imho.
By your reckoning, he's admittedly still off by a factor of 10, but not by a factor of 1000.
(note: the phrasing is made needlessly confusing by his use of "one-tenth percentile" instead of just "tenth percentile" - I suspect this is merely a transcription error, as there seem to be a number of these)
The tenth percentile is actually the bottom 10%. The top 10% is the ninetieth percentile.
The clip starts at 4m42s. He clearly says "one-tenth of one-tenth of one-tenth percentile". One percentile is 1 part in 100. One tenth of that is 1 in 1000. One tenth of that two more times makes it 1 in 100,000. Across the world population, that's ~75,000. (There are more millionaire households in Kentucky than that figure.)
It doesn't, percentile refers to percents. Tenth percentile means is the 10%, twentieth percentile means the 20%, etc.
It can make a plane come for you to take you to a different city where a room will be waiting for you, people will give you food etc.
It's downright magic if you ask me. Without the magic of money, nobody would lift their finger to help you unless they're a friend or a relative
You don't need money to have prices either. It's just convenient.
Money is just extremely convenient, it has no magical properties.
If you can stop working for 8 years and not end up on the streets, then you're ultimately working for someone who _can_ stop working for 8 years. This is why less than 10 people own more collective wealth than the poor half of the world population. This is not even considering monopolies, corruption, state intervention, etc.
As for what we can do about it, I don't think redistributing wealth is a great idea. Instead I think we should encourage an entrepreneurial spirit, i.e. encourage people to do what so many in Silicon valley have done: start their own business in their garage. I suspect people find entrepreneurship to be worthwhile despite the risk because their work can translate to profits directly, and they're able to use e.g. LISP instead of Java, make an entire system instead of just writing the tests.
They don't make more money. They make more wealth.
You are confusing metaphorical use of world money as synonym of wealth to what actually happens.
Jeff Bezos is not owning much money. Warren Buffet id not owning money. Neither is Bill Gates. Money is just one asset you can own and most people hold very little of it.
If it's written in English, it's not because the author seeks to exclude people who speak something else. It's because I the author knows English.
Getting anything to work at all is hard. It's made harder in a highly multicultural world of billions.
If you think only of your culture, you get a colonial system. Europeans came to the US and saw wilderness. They did not recognize lands actively managed by a mobile society with a completely alien culture.
Trappers would show up first. Natives felt there was enough to share and saw no reason to forbid their activities or kill them. The trappers operated much like the Natives.
Settlers followed. Settlers did not operate like Natives. They laid claim to specific plots of land, usually the best plots. They often showed up while there was no current presence of people. When Natives returned to the area, as they tended to do seasonally, the settlers saw them as trespassers. They didn't recognize that they were the trespassers.
Agricultural societies can readily outcompete hunter-gatherer societies. You produce more per acre if you cultivate the land. So the conflict was probably inevitable.
I don't know the solution here. But I don't think that seeing the exclusion of the masses as intentional despotism is particularly helpful.
Everyone decries the downside of regulation when they have it. They fail to recognize the benefits.
Before we had regulation, fire fighters from neighboring towns couldn't help in a serious emergency because their equipment wasn't compatible. They would show up, then find they couldn't connect their hoses because it was a different size.
When I was a child, the Swiss were famous for their neutrality during WW2. That was seen as virtue. At some point, that narrative changed and I began seeing stories about how the Swiss were guilty of being Nazi collaborators due to their neutrality.
Most things are a two-edged sword. We laud them when we can see how it benefits us. We attack them when we are the ones getting hurt.
Designing good systems that work well for everyone is tough. It's made all the tougher when you want it to serve billions.
That's not nefarious intent. That's just how it is.
This may be true of the examples you cited for the more distant era. However post WW2, with the invention of technologies of mass control, this has really become a default case now.
>> Designing good systems that work well for everyone is tough. It's made all the tougher when you want it to serve billions.
If one is aware of this then one should factor that into the systems to minimize the harm or refrain from building such systems. We don't see any evidence for that.
I don't know that the world would be a better place had we not done x, y or z. When people decry a thing, they routinely focus on the harm it has done without accounting for the good it did.
Maybe the path not taken is far worse than the problems we currently struggle with.
They built wells in India and Bangladesh, iirc. The intent was to stop a quarter of a million deaths annually from contaminated surface waters, such as collected rainwater.
Some of the wells caused arsenic poisoning. The scale of this new disaster was compared to Chernobyl and pronounced worse than that.
This comparison largely ignored the millions of lives already saved by the wells.
We solve a problem. We find some new bug in the system. We iterate.
That's how progress works.
I find Progress to be a nebulous/relative term. Defining it depends whether on you can measure things. Things that cannot be measured are outside its purview. For all our pervasive data gathering capability we lack intuitive understanding of how the complex interconnected adaptive system, that is the real world, works. Some change one would consider minor or harmless might balloon into a crisis years down the line, because the conditions have changed or we didn't consider feedback or were not even aware of it.
I agree with you that whether to act or not is indeed a dilemma. But when we do, the question is, are we acting with this humbling awareness, or are we just arrogantly tinkering with it. In hindsight, we find it has been mostly the latter, at least for the last 500 years.
And you are right, that is just how it is.
Often we don't measure what we have lost, except may be weight or net worth.
Most of us recognized the benefits of regulation, and then we recognized those systems being brutally and hopelessly overwhelmed.
The regulatory state has not withstood history: the regulatory capture that goes all the way back to the earliest of political machines, the two-tier justice system (as the speaker mentioned, and as the Holder doctrine confessed), the russian-doll configurations of persona ficta (corporations, universities, non-profits, etc) that hide the personal agendas of wealth behind faceless platitudes.
It's just like the libertarians who go, "If only we returned to our founding priciples..." In other words, regression, but with the expectation that things will work out differently this time.
Establishing conventions solves this problem, and doesn't imply any regulation.
I think the system has no other purpose but to circumvent sanctions.
Competition is a good thing.
The day the US dollar loses its reserve currency status will be a very bright day for the world.
I'd guess none? I think it just gives you access to riskier forms of investment like hedge funds.
If you want to swing for the fences with angel investing, you need to be accredited.
Investing in an angel phase company as a normal wealth individual would be like if someone asked you if you wanted to be the house at a roulette wheel where someone is going to bet $100,000 on red. Sure, the bet is in your favor, but there is a good chance you are going to lose it all. Most of us can't afford that.
(Not sure if 10% and 50:1 is anywhere close to what angel investors shoot for.)
Yes. Not so much on your own, but as part of a friends&family pool of investments.
Scale is off though, any startup worth investing in will want investment lots 10x to 1000x larger than that. Any investment willing to accept $1000 would be a large red flag. Thus the accredited system IMHO is super reasonable. Anyone with enough capital that investments of 10kUSD to 100kUSD into high risk investments makes sense must have significant other capital. Meanwhile it saves the regular Joe from getting scammed out of his $1000 emergency fund.
Not running lotteries, for example. Or regulating the health care market to bring doctors' and lawyers' salaries down to European levels. Or taxing income in the 6-digit range at the rates of comparable countries. Or taxing investment returns at levels comparable to incomes.
But there really isn't even a theory of why "regular Joe" striking it rich is in any way threatening to the status quo, is there?
The assumption is accredited investors are more capable of doing their own diligence and better able to weather the loss of a $50K angel investment than Regular Joe.
Anytime someone advocates cryptocurrency x, ask them if you’re allowed to mint the money for the same amount of work as they (the sellers, speculators, advocates) are/did.
Presumably people wouldn't want a cryptocurrency as plutocratic and centralized as Bitcoin has become. Some lessons were learned with BTC as an experiment, and as we can see there's evolution taking place and plenty of more advanced alternatives are making prior software like bitcoin obsolete. It's especially troubling how centralized the minting and mining has become. And it's easy to forget there's the problem with energy consumption related to the PoW algorithm eating almost 1% of the entire world's energy simply for an accounting database. The major reason you don't see payment processors dealing with cryptocurrencies is because the major usecase for most cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Monereo, and Ethereum is money laundering. One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And if we just include all balances, we include many dust balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH per address. So this is the distribution of ownership among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 2017.
In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like
this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the
ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking
information on all holders with balances >$20,000.
Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini
coefficient would mean that a government would only need
to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a
large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with
it the ability to tank the price.
With that said, two points. First, while one would not
want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as
then only one person would have all of the digital
currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost
the network), in practice it appears that a very high
level of wealth centralization is still compatible with
the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we
show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better
metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder
concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of
arbitrarily choosing a threshold.
...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious
issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion
of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini
coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it
does not directly measure the number of individuals or
entities required to compromise a system.
Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a
subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini
coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners
with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that
compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be
sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the
maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges
rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.
Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries
with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem,
then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would
again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a
Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in
>51% of mining being compromised.
- Balaji S. Srinivasan (the CTO of Coinbase)
When you take out a loan, you are now obligated to pay the money back with interest at some time in the future. Some part of your future efforts are no longer yours to do with as you choose, but have to be directed towards an economically productive activity that will raise the money to pay the lender.
Debt is the real whip that drives the workforce in the capitalist system based on hourly and salaried compensation. Ownership of slaves and physical whips are no longer needed. The debt and employee system is more efficient, since workers can be laid off and not supported when not needed.
Debt is also older than money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
Even without any debt I still have to work to feed and shelter myself though..
As well, if I'm looking to switch fields, I'm pretty confident I could get comfortable in a new domain in a month or so. Still, I don't think anyone would hire me in those domains (e.g. GIS / remote sensing).
Then there is the option of if I wanted to get out of computers all together. Yoga instructors don't make enough for me to justify that career move to myself.
Where are our 3d printed houses and autonomous indoor farms? With that I could probably figure out what I actually wanted my life to be and what would make me happy, rather than just playing in the system of maximizing income and telling myself I'm doing well.
> Where are our 3d printed houses and autonomous indoor farms?
The shell or frame is the single most expensive part of the house but there's a lot more that has to be done to turn the concrete shell into a livable home: utilities, interior fixtures, interior finish, exterior finish, foundation, site readying.
As for the farms there are some but they're toys because open air farming is so much cheaper that there's no real money behind the indoor farm idea at the moment, until land or transport becomes much more expensive the cost of providing all the light for the plants is going to lose out to getting it for free. Also robotic handling of small plants isn't really there yet, partially because there's cheap labor that can do everything already and partially because it's a hard set of problems to generically pick and handle all types of produce.
There are plenty of aspects of nuance with it of course including 'stealing to save yourself from starvation and causing someone else to starve' isn't morally right along with 'stealing when there were other viable alternatives without harm' is wrong.
And of course messy matters of scale when things get really messed up like the Great Depression where farmers may have had plenty of food but were fiscally precarious - and many of the hungry couldn't afford it - one person shoplifting bread may be a lesser harm but if farms were robbed enmasse could cause them to go under.
TL;DR - It is complicated and circumstantial.
I think you are on a interesting topic, but seems like you are comparing some quite different things.
In your example cutting open a drain cover is not directly away from anyone, where as stealing food is.
The thing you seem to be missing in your case, is that you are not taking into account the time factor and only looking at a single action.
I agree that cutting open a drain cover (vandalism) is less bad when saving a trapped child. However, I do not agree that there should be nothing bad happening to the cutter. Imagine if instead of a drain cover it was someone's house.
Would breaking a window and then being absolved of all responsibility be okay? Should there not be a middle ground where nobody is solely at a loss.
Perhaps the breaker could pay for part of the new window? Perhaps the city could pay for the window as appreciation for the effort of saving one of their citizens?
Perhaps here instead of stealing, the bread could be loaned, or sold at a cheaper price to those in need.
Do you see what I am saying here?
Investors and lenders play an important role in the economy. If theft makes what they do impossible it will cause a drop in the total productivity of the country as a whole. Which is to say stealing from them, especially at scale, is likely to cause far more starvation than it will solve.
Your idea has been tried: the peasants were hungry, it was the Kulaks with the excess food and money and the process of taking it from them was called dekulakization. Between 500,000 and 5,000,000 people died. This also led to the Holodomor with its estimated 7.5 million dead.
This all started with the observation that there were rich people and poor people right next to each other, and that taking from the rich to give to the poor must be a good thing. But it turned out to be one of the worst events in human history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
David Graeber: "DEBT: The First 5,000 Years" | Talks at Google - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs
As if money and debt are unrelated. Debt is a function of money, and most of us are born in debt because the country we are born in keeps lending money(trillions). We have to acquire money to get and stay out of debt.
Debt, although denominated in amounts of currency units, is a contractual obligation to pay money at a future date. It's a legal contract enforceable at law using the machinery of the state.
For example, if a bitcoin holder lends you bitcoin to buy a house, the mortgage is still a contract between you and the bitcoin lender. The mortgage has nothing to do with the bitcoin system. It is still registered by the government, and the sheriff still comes to evict you if you don't pay up.
Yeah in some fantasy Bitcoin world millennials say that. Who might say shit like this is Venezuelans or the Iranians. Don't know if BTC is working for them at all these days.
You seem to hold a very curious combination of opinions? In favour of globally regulating labour markets (and threatening trade restrictions to enforce that), but also in favour of Austrian economics?
As a result, people become increasingly entrenched in using votes to promote certain ideologies or norms and attempt to hide or obscure competing or contrary views, often without even thinking, just party politics applied to every distinct idea spectrum.
It attributes too much blame for the monetary system, never attempting to quantize how much the alleged harm is caused by monetary system. If you dwell even little deeper you discover that it's not even wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
This should be an ideal, and I think we can agree on some basic level of human rights (no forced labor, for instance). But refusing to deal with countries who don’t adhere to our moral code would just lead to a bigger bifurcated market. As examples, we did this to Cuba and North Korea, yet neither of them have changed to meet our demands. Short story is that boycotts have limited power when the group you’re boycotting has an alternative.
However, as China has so amply shown, there is a recipe they pioneered that others can now follow to engage globalization's benefits without dragging in the accompanying democratization precepts. In light of that, it is far from clear that globalization from now on will bring about the kinds of change liberal democracies desire to see. There may even be an argument to be made that China is leading the way to demonstrate how to co-opt most of the benefits of globalization, while blocking every attribute they deem subversive.
So if globalization has become just another tool to accelerate despotic/adverse power consolidation (and there is an argument to be made that there is adverse power developments even in "advanced" economies from globalization), boycotts aren't about/solely a moral action, and add a dimension as a realistic response to avoid further anti-pattern enablement.
I think we were naïve to believe that globalization would automatically expand democratic government, but don’t think it will automatically lead to a despotic one, either. A moral code exists on top of whatever form of commerce you engage in.
It's a lot harder to get people rallied against an "enemy" who supplies your food/favourite consumer goods.
That's impossible IMO.
A) Labor laws reflect local requirements, e.g. the agricultural / fisheries sector won't benefit from rigid work hours.
B) Labor is affected by more than laws, e.g. a weak currency affect the affordability of imports more than minimum wage.
C) Transshipment, e.g. Singapore / Vietnam makes skirting trade restrictions trivial.
The American economy already suffers enough from having lots of complications like banning of low paying jobs.
No need to make their lives even harder and stop trading with them. Trade is good for everyone involved.
There's an inflation-unemployment trade-off. You want to ensure that there's never any inflation? Get used to regular periods of 10% unemployment.
There is a storm coming, wether it is migration, climate change or some other malthusian trap. We see these problems coming and direct resources to prevent or alleviate these ill. The old problem of "who should do what, when, how and why" is left be be decided. That is what politics is for. The self evident truth that all men are created equal, and that human-rights do not stop at the border. Where are the neocons now that we need them? To me all this talk about monitory policy and therefor bitcoin is a side-show.