Tyler H

I didn’t say it did. My argument is that if it were easy to produce, it would be hyper-abundant and therefore, by virtue of supply and demand, be of very little value. Expending resources does not ensure value, but it allows for value to be found. It is necessary but not sufficient. I didn’t say that either. Adoption alone does not make bitcoin valuable. Adoption happens because bitcoin already provides value outside of adoption. Now the more people who recognize that value the greater that value becomes, but it is not only adoption that contributes to the value of the currency. It needs the other aspects required of a good currency: fungibility, durability, scarcity, divisibility, and transferability. Without those characteristics it has no value as a medium of exchange and widespread adoption would be, as you say, pragmatic mass delusion. I argue pragmatic mass delusion does not apply to bitcoin, or even fiat. The adoption of bitcoin is voluntary, the adoption of fiat is not. People see the value bitcoin can provide as a currency and as a system of ownership tracking, and invest in promoting that goal, creating awareness, and educating people. On the other hand, with fiat, people are forced to use the currency at the point of a gun; they have no choice. How many people invested in bitcoin are like this woman? I’d be willing to bet that most people don’t know how bitcoin operates, and there are some people like this woman who invest blindly, or perhaps on the advice of a trusted friend, but how do you know there are so many like her? So many as to draw the conclusion that bitcoin is a bubble?

I think I’ll need some definitions then. So is the military, but getting rid of it would be a bad for a politicians health. They created it, but it doesn’t mean they can just get rid of it with no personal consequences; wolf by the ears and all. Would you like to move this to a new thread, or an MMT one if it exists already?

I’d have to push back against all of those people being grouped together. The Austrian school differentiates between voluntary mediums of exchange and fiat currency. So when you say they all misunderstand money, perhaps they misunderstand the function of fiat currency, but is it your contention that the Austrians also misunderstand all mediums of exchange? Do they? Seems like a mutually assured destruction type scenario. The Fed could make things real bad and most people would blame congress. Congress could take the power away, but why would they? They get to bribe people for votes with promises paid for by the Fed. Yes This doesn’t seem to be consistent with examples of hyperflation we’ve seen. Is Venezuela at productive capacity? Was Zimbabwe? Or Weimar Germany? I can see where parts of what you’re saying make sense, and other parts I’m finding hard to understand, so it’s worth to me a further look. Would you recommend a book you think would explain MMT in greater detail? My only exposure so far is your posts, Nima’s, and a debate I saw with Bob Murphy and Warren Mosler. Perhaps I’ll rewatch that as well.

@Mishi2 Ok, so our common ground is reason and evidence; how do I get to the existence of God from there?

No pain- everything you’re saying about God. His existence, motives, what morality does or does not apply to him. You answer apologetics, which to my understanding is pure argumentation, not reason and evidence, so I ask to be stepped through the argument since I have not heard it before - or of course corrected in my understanding of apologetics if I have mischaracterized it.

So why don’t they just pay the debt? Why have the debt at all if they can just issue currency to pay for stuff? I agree the debt will never be paid back, but increasing the amount of currency relative to goods and services will inevitably lead to a currency crisis, will it not? Combining this with the massive misallocation of resources which we can attribute to government intervention in the market produces a serious problem that will inflict serious damage to society. Wouldn’t you agree? I would love to be persuaded otherwise, but an economic armageddon does seem likely.

I’d like it back as well.

Ah ok. Thank you for getting back to me.

I’m asking what is your methodology for determining whether what you’re saying is true or false.

Are you asking me a question? If not, ok, would you mind stepping me through the reason from first principles?

Sure! Enforceability is what differentiates morality from opinion. Whenever someone wants to inflict their opinion on others they call it morality in order to justify its enforcement. This is why it’s very important to refrain from declaring arbitrary moral proclamations; when the wrong moral system is adopted hundreds of millions of people are killed. If you haven’t read (or listened to) Universally Preferable Behavior yet then I would strongly suggest that you do. UPB is a framework for evaluating moral theories so we can avoid the catastrophes of history and rely on an objective standard for moral behavior.

Yes I think that’s definitely part of it. I don’t think monopolization is necessarily bad, as long as it’s voluntary- but the coercive monopolization certainly is. I also think the branch of coercive monopolization has a root we should be striking instead. When a more efficient medium of exchange is developed, a shortcut to resources emerges. Whereas before you needed to produce something yourself to obtain products from others (or steal it which has its own risks), now if you can just get ahold of the medium of exchange (much easier to steal and pass off as your own due to the qualities that make it a good currency - viz. fungibility and portability) then you don’t need to produce anything. If you can control that medium of exchange, now you’re really in a fine position. It is natural through biological evolution for people to want to acquire the most resources through the least effort. The willingness to eschew morality, to attain resources through another’s labor and not your own, is what distorts our progress as a society. It is not the love of money, but the desire for the unearned (which leads to the violent monopolization of a medium of exchange) that is bending us the wrong way through history so to speak.

@Mishi2 @Jsbrads How is it that you have come to know this information?

All you’ve done is propose a false dichotomy that addresses none of my points.

Thank you Barnsley! Specie is a great way to hedge against inflation, but I don’t think its value relative to other goods will increase much over time. Bitcoin, I think, will be either a huge success or a regretful failure. If mass adoption occurs then each coin could be worth hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars. You could, with limited risk, make a significant return on investment. Of course I would never suggest investing any amount you aren’t prepared to lose. In regards to the pushback, digital currencies like bitcoin remove the power from the elites to manipulate the economy and fund things like war and the welfare state, a major source of that power itself. I think the biggest fight is still yet to come. There will be a lot of pushback and it will get worse. I would absolutely agree that the best investment you can make is that which you mentioned; in yourself. Having a valuable skill is the original currency.

Does he believe in global warming? You can tell him that exhaling is contributing to the rise in CO2 and that he should stop breathing.

Do you mean would I use force to prevent it? No, I would not. Circumstances change nothing. Considering that in every voluntary economic transaction one man’s cost is the other’s benefit, in other words, the same thing is a benefit and a cost at the same time to two different people; who decides what constitutes a benefit worth murdering someone? So far you’re principle is if you determine something is a benefit then you can murder someone.

My amateur understanding- A bubble is when the perceived value of a good rises significantly above equilibrium (where supply equals demand). False market signals are created through speculation or government intervention and the value of a good rises (the bubble is inflated) above what it would be without this intervention or speculation. When the intervention is stopped or speculation corrected (when air is no longer blown into the bubble), or for whatever reason is recognized as a temporary inflation due to factors that will cease, the market realization of this results in a rapid decrease in price (the bubble pops). The property bubble burst because the government told banks they had to give loans to certain groups of people based on factors other than their ability to pay the loans back. In return the banks were guaranteed the government would cover the losses. Of course this incentivized the banks to make poor investment decisions which led to a massive surplus in homebuyers, driving demand for housing, raising prices, and stimulating the construction industry. When people who could not afford to make their mortgage payments started defaulting creating a surplus of empty homes, the false market signal to build more houses was realized and the value of people’s homes collapsed. People who were using their housing as ATMs, borrowing against their equity, were now in a tremendous amount of debt. The construction industry which was artificially stimulated was now not needed. Men who were drawn to the industry were now not needed leading to a spike in unemployment, not to mention the industries that didn’t grow which could’ve sustained these men had they not been lured away by high paying, in demand construction jobs. John A. Allison’s The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure is great for more of this. Stef interviewed him if you want to listen to that podcast here. There are a lot of different cryptos but Bitcoin is like to gold and nothing like fiat in that significant resources must be expended in order to produce it, there is not a monopoly on it’s production, there is a limited supply, and its adoption is entirely voluntary. It’s better than gold in its security, fungibility, transferability, durability, and divisibility, but lacks the adoption gold has attained. Mining refers to the process of creating bitcoins and adding blocks to the chain. Each block contains the transaction data on the network, creating an unalterable ledger of account. The goal is that every ten minutes a new block is created and added to the blockchain. To achieve this timeline, a math problem is created that a computer must solve. Depending on the amount of processing power being applied to solve this problem (i.e. how many people are mining) the harder the problem becomes. If it is too easy and there are a lot of miners, then the blocks are solved and created too quickly, if the reverse is true then the blocks are solved too slowly and the transactions take too long to be confirmed. So as the value of the coin increases, more people are drawn to the profits, more people mine, the blocks are solved more quickly, the difficulty of the problem adjusts upwards, and now it becomes more expensive to mine. If the value drops, less people mine, the blocks are solved slowly, the difficulty adjusts downwards, and it now becomes less expensive to mine. The reward for miners expending their resources and recording transactions are bitcoins, a reward that is halved every 210,000 blocks, resulting in an asymptotic climb towards 21 million. As far as I know, no. Someone would need to match or exceed the processing power of the entire network in order to fake a block and get the network to recognize it as legitimate. If they had this processing power under their command they could just mine and make far more than they could counterfeit. Or they could point that horsepower at a careless exchange and steal the private keys. Don’t keep your coins on an exchange! There are always mutterings about replay protection (where people might be able to double spend) during a fork, but that seems to be an avoidable vulnerability that can only happen through transactions directly following a contentious fork. It’s recorded on a network, it’s the internet of money! I think these are good answers, but my grasp of the topic is nowhere near complete. Take it with a grain of salt from an amateur, and please correct me if I’ve gotten anything wrong. I hope this was helpful.

It’s not created out of nothing, people have to expend resources in order to create it (electricity, a lot of electricity). What makes it difficult to recreate is adoption. Bitcoin has every quality that is required for a currency except mass adoption, which it is currently marching towards. If bitcoin is taken down it will be taken down by bitcoin cash - which is closer to the original vision of the currency.

A hammer could be used to brain someone.... Why does the responsibility for this child rest on some stranger on the internet and not the child’s parents? A stronger argument against porn is that your exploiting the results of child abuse since the “actress” most likely entered the profession based on a wretched childhood. I still don’t think it would be classified as immoral though. You’re not initiating force against anyone.

Because I couldn’t possibly say it any better. http://capitalismmagazine.com/2002/08/franciscos-money-speech/

A man has a plant. Another man dislikes the possession of said plant. The second man says to the first man, “give me that plant so that I can destroy it.” First man says, “uhh, no.” Second man pulls out a gun and says, “I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood, that was not a request. Give me that plant so that I can destroy it. And oh by the way, you’re coming with me so that I can “rehabilitate” you by locking you in a cage where you will need to adapt to a base criminal element and be rendered inadmissible to society for the remainder of your life - oh and there’s a good chance you might be raped. You may be thinking right now of resisting this obviously unjust use of force against you, but I assure you, that if you do, you will be met with such an insurmountable, overwhelming force that you will eventually either succumb or cease to draw breath.” So kidnapping, raping, murdering, destroying someone’s life; these things are fine as long as they actually stopped people from using marijuana? Also, would you follow the same policy for alcohol if it were effective?

How were the infants who drowned in the flood evil? Or the ones burned alive in Sodom and Gomorrah? Or the first born sons of people who didn’t smear sheeps blood on their door, what did they do?

I signed up for the email subscription not long after you guys started offering it and have not received anything yet. Didn’t see anything in my junk folder either. Should I try again?

Same here