> the idea that people must now play like robots to earn a living so as to be human in their spare time is, indeed, the apotheosis of misanthropy
This quote is amazing, and describes most of crypto.
This quote is amazing, and describes most of crypto.
I know I am being a dirty productivist here.
Maybe we can zoom out and say all work is basically psychological: It makes people happy. Including useless things, like overpaying another person to make you a coffee, or to give you a blowjob. So why not pay someone to win a virtual hat you can wear in TF2, if it makes you happy? And why not trade in opium or oxycodone if it changes your customers' mental states in ways that they value? Why not?
It just seems pointless, is the problem. I know I have no way to justify the idea that building a house (which will make someone feel good) is different from sucking a cock (which will make someone feel good) or giving them a rare NFT (same). But building the house somehow seems more meaningful and lasting. It is not just the manipulation of mental states.
The choice is between a family in the Philippines facing severe hunger during the lockdown, and that family being able to sell virtual goods to wealthier people in the developed world, to put food on the table.
More generally, allowing web users to assume genuine ownership - secured by provable scarcity and public key cryptography - over virtual goods, means the profit that the internet generates will not be monopolized by a few internet giants.
Consider, the Ethereum Name Service airdrop rewarded over 100,000 accounts with its ENS tokens. This is a degree of diffusion in the distribution of ownership over critical protocols that was totally impossible before blockchain-based assets and networks.
The answer to capitalism's problems is more capitalism? We are just no doing it hard enough?
Why is the family is the Philippines facing severe hunger in the first place? Capitalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wax7wyWwnAU
You know the same Filipinos have been fighting capitalism for the longest any people have ever fought it?
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3027414/expl...
I do not have an answer for any of this, but I know it is not crypto. If you think money can can save people you know nothing about money or people.
I suspect this strongly depends on local culture, farming skills, and environment, however. The (admittedly not-unbiased) stories of land reform in e.g. Uganda (and the outcomes) are very different from those in Vietnam.
In a tropical place like the Philippines, however, I am more than willing to believe that unaccounted "ecosystem services" could provide a comfortable lifestyle for many people, if the environment were unharnessed from plantation cash-crop production. Largely because the carrying capacity is so high.
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...
The massive decline seen in poverty over the last 50 years is a matter of fact, with broad consensus that it has occurred.
It's just inconvenient to your victimhood narrative.
It's not due to pure capitalism which did nothing to lift people out of poverty in countries where it originated until governments stepped in and reigned it in. Now this is exactly the narrative you chose to ignore because it's inconvenient to your narrative.
There is no evidence at all to support the idea that redistributive social programs, or regulations, accelerated poverty reduction. The exact opposite is indicated by the data.
I'm happy to compare actual data and case studies with you, but it appears that you are not willing to have a meaningful debate on this.
That is why there is a strong and persistent negative correlation between government spending, as a percentage of GDP, and the rate of economic growth:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821004405/http://ime.bg/upl...
The government limiting its role to vigorously defending people's security of person and private property, and enforcing contracts, is the best way we have come up with to facilitate economic development.
We already had unlimited capitalism. It had child labor, literally poison as "medicine" [1] etc.
In modern times unrestricted capitalism keeps doing the same: from sweatshops all over Asia to things like Nestle literally dissuading mothers from breastfeeding in developing nations which led to widespread problems like, you know, children dying.
[1] See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_(horse)?wprov=sfti1
I am not. Economists specifically cite the liberalization of the economy as a major contributor to the decline in poverty, through its positive impact on the rate of economic development.
>>In modern times unrestricted capitalism keeps doing the same: from sweatshops all over Asia
Before sweatshops, the quality of life in those countries was much worse.
>>Nestle literally dissuading mothers from breastfeeding in developing nations which led to widespread problems like, you know, children dying
That can be dealt with perfectly well within the rules of capitalism, which encourages prosecution of fraud, and impartial civil courts where bad actors can be sued.
This is also an anecdote, and says nothing about the broader impact on capitalism, which is captured by statistical evidence like the rate of poverty.
Yes. Yes, you are. There's nothing more liberal than no regulations and no state involvement at all, see 19th century as an example. Nothing more liberal than the government turning a blind eye on child labor, or poisoning water supplies, or company stores, or literally all the examples of unfettered capitalism we literally had many, many, many examples of in history.
> That can be dealt with perfectly well within the rules of capitalism, which encourages prosecution of fraud, and impartial civil courts where bad actors can be sued.
Right... Who exactly is going to "prosecute fraud" and where will those "impartial civil courts" appear from? That never happened to child labor until it was expressly forbidden by the government, for example.
What incentive does capitalism have to "prosecute fraud" and have "impartial courts"? Literally none.
Example from very recent times:
"From 1952 to 1966, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) dumped about 370 million gallons (1,400 million litres) of chromium-tainted wastewater into unlined wastewater spreading ponds around the town of Hinkley, California, located in the Mojave Desert about 120 miles north-northeast of Los Angeles... Although the dumping took place from 1952 to 1966 (when Hinkley was a remote desert community with one school and a general store),[1] PG&E did not inform the local water board about the contamination until December 7, 1987"
This is capitalism. They did that. Where were all the capitalists with "fraud prosecution" and "independent civil courts"? I mean, capitalism is everywhere around the world in all its forms. We have a well-documented history of capitalism. The claims you make should be validated, right?
The total global surveillance and all the issues we have with Facebook and Twitter are also the result of capitalism, where are the "market instruments" that surely should've come into play by now?
> says nothing about the broader impact on capitalism, which is captured by statistical evidence like the rate of poverty.
What was that quote about lies and statistics? Statistics show:
- the shift from totalitarian states to democracies
- the spread of widely available healthcare and education (note: neither are provided by capitalism)
And then it's capitalism, but again: not unrestricted capitalism.
And to remind ourselves that we're in a topic on crypto, crypto is about unrestricted capitalism which is "you pay at the company store with the tokens barely provided to you by the company". And we all (well, some of us) know, how well that works.
Capitalism, i.e. the right to freely exchange, was restricted during the lockdown, with jeepney drivers, restaurant cashiers and almost every other sort of worker prohibited from going to work.
Had the fight against capitalism succeeded in the Philippines, the result would have been every bit as disastrous as it was in Venezuela.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food-idUSKCN1G5...
"Not your keys, not your coins" is the opposite of genuine ownership. Actual ownership is not lost by losing possession of the thing being owned. That's the whole point of ownership.
Adding another trusted third party, like a gaming company, to the mix, to act as the custodian of who owns what, creates a much less-reliable / more-fragile private property system, as that custodian, at their own behest or that of a political faction who holds the reigns to the govenment, can deprive you of your control over the virtual asset.
So to put it another way, trusted third parties can also be a threat to private property. The right balance between being protected by a trusted third party from theft and robbery, and being protected against a trusted third party stealing and robbing you, is the "not your keys, not your coins" setup, where the trusted third party only enforces rules against others trespassing your person or home, without having custody of your property on your behalf, so as to not have intimate knowledge of and control over everything you own.
Of course, a corrupt government is a threat to private property, but it's also true that a non-corrupt government (or some other form of authority) is necessary to enforce property rights. Crypto-currency enthusiasts mistakenly believe that by preventing any authority from interfering with the blockchain they eliminate the threat to private property. Instead, by doing that, they make property rights impossible.
It strikes the right balance between being protected against the state stealing and robbing people, and people being protected by a state from theft and robbery.
Unfortunately, anti-libertarian ideology, which is the dominant ideology in society now, cannot conceive of a need to maintain non-political checks on the power of the state, so the adoption of cryptocurrency, which imposes such checks, is very unsettling to its adherents.
But there are other cases where the state is not able to intervene, because of the immutability of the blockchain protocol.
The limits placed on the state's power is a beneficial trade-off, where the state loses some power to protect people's private property, while losing even more power to rob people's private property.
In other words, it's not a simple binary proposition, between the state being able to seize assets and not being able to. The power of the state to seize assets exists on a spectrum, with less power in the context of blockchains. I contend that this spot on the spectrum, that the blockchain places the state's power to confiscate and surveil on, is better for society at large.
The state being able to confiscate things is the opposite of property rights. The universe enforcing it through math is a more natural state.
I don’t parrot others, I am the Bitcoin influencer. Folks are parroting me.
It’s a silly question. I didn’t say all things, including your house are protected by math, I said Bitcoin was the first thing ever that didn’t need state violence to enforce the money.
Again, a non-answer
> It’s a silly question
It's not. You're telling us that, quote, "The state being able to confiscate things is the opposite of property rights. The universe enforcing it through math is a more natural state."
So. You bought your house with bitcoin, and now you have your property rights through universe and math. You arrive at your property that you have rights to, and it's occupied by someone else. For example, by the person who sold you the house. That person doesn't want to move out.
Now what.
As always, crypto-proponents dismiss this as a "silly question". Because, of course, you're only focused on "state can seize your property", completely forgetting all the other things that state does. Like enforcing the property rights. Without this, your universe can enforce exactly zero through math.
Weaker animals get chased out, and their habitat destroyed or taken over by stronger animals. So your "answer" is violence?
What a great world you want us to live in. And one that we already have lived in, and a world in which some countries still live. Good luck finding money for protection rackets.
I think you are advocating for violence by the state in this question. We are just animals who have invented state violence. Bitcoin et al is another way.
To some extent that's true, but it could still be true that certain limits on the state's power to seize private property make private property rights more secure overall, because:
1. You can increase the cost for the state to seize private property, which would make it less likely that the state does so in cases where there is less justification, i.e. when doing so violates private property rights.
2. You can make it so that the state can only seize private property when a person reports a theft, by denying the state the ability to engage in mass-surveillance over who owns what. This limits when the state can seize private property to when private property has been stolen, and largely prevents it from seizing private property when it has not.
Cryptocurrency has both of these effects.
So, you have "both of these effects through cryptocurrency", but when you arrive at your house, it's taken over by someone else. What now?
I alone have complete ownership of my Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are no trusted third parties and no one can take it away from me. That is real digital ownership.
Also the idea that no one can steal or somehow gain control over someone else's crypto-currency balances has been thoroughly invalidated by experience, and therefore is a very silly point to make.
Arguably YouTube has enabled thousands of new entertainers, making many of them (but well, a small percentage of all) filthy rich and/or famous, by making entertainment products. Funnily, OnlyFans also fits in the category.