Indeed. The pronunciation of ‘book’ varies here in the north-east wildly. In Sunderland, f’rinstance, it’s 'bewk, and Newcastle it’s ‘boook’ (don’t even get me started on Ashington. The pit-yakkers might as well be fucking Martians). That’s a distance of approx 20 miles. Same goes for every vowel sound. Seriously.
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#Instant Clbuttic!
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Sure, speculating on Bitcoin is a different kettle of fish because Bitcoin is a joke; Bitcoin is a joke in part because it’s basically owned by no one but speculators.
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If that were true, and I’m not entirely sure it is. Why is that a problem? Gold is mostly owned by speculators too.
That’s you’re problem, right there, I think in this discussion. Money is a social construct, and it has value because human beings use it. If it wasn’t agree upon that gold, diamonds, and other precious metals and stones have value, they’d just be pretty rocks. Currency has value because you can trade it for things you need. I can get behind the fact that currency also carries with it a certain amount of buy into the modern economic/nation-state system. But, unless you are living off in the middle of nowhere, with no interactions with the rest of the world, you have some sort of relationship with that system.
My problem is that there doesn’t seem to be anything modern about it. The technology appears more contemporary, but the motivations behind it seem primitive.
Better to encourage a proliferation of systems instead of monopoly anyway.
I think, though that we have a very long history of both activities [meaning farming and baking] that we can figure out how to make both work over the long haul. People have been farming since before we had human history, and they’ll continue to farm, even if you economic system completely collapses. Same for baking. These are activities that human beings will do, as long as we need food, even if farmers aren’t making a profit on it. We don’t NEED cryptocurrencies, not in the same way we need food. Speculating on our food supply is bad news, and assuming that growing food should be speculated upon in a marketplace has cause major problems.
This is the problem, I think, that was identified by Karl Polyani in the 1940s - that the modern capitalist system had put the market at the center of human life, where as, it really should be the other way around. The most important things are those which ensure human survival, health, and well-being. Everything else is gravy.
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I don’t disagree, but I’d argue that human interests should be at the center of this discussion. And there are a number of competing currencies already - the dollar, the euro, yen, etc… What we need is an end to speculation that impacts people’s ability to live happy, healthy, and productive lives. I’m not really for or against bitcoin, really. I just don’t think it’s any sort of answer the the problems humanity faces and in fact is just another aspect of the capitalist system in general - It seems like a way for a few people to profit. So, yay for them. Meanwhile, people are suffering daily within the system we all live within. And of course, no one can agree on a similar reality - loki’s wager and all.
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I agree that human interests are certainly more vital than the notion of markets or capital existing for their own sake. But I would say that ecological interests comprise a superset to human interests. Also, economic coercion is used by entrenched groups to dictate to others what it means to live as human in the first place.
Several exist, but whether or not symbolic technologies can be properly said to compete with each other is a particular philosophy which some might not buy into. Also, they do tend to be monopolies within a given geographical area. They obtain their strength by use of a captive audience. Those who leverage the strengths of various national currencies seem to typically be the same sort of speculators you have issue with. What I think helps is to have multiple currencies in use even within the same area, or otherwise without being locked to a geographical location.
I’m wondering, do you have any Brooklyn Bridges for sale?
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An easy(ish) way to bypass this entire problem is to design a cryptocurrency which cannot be converted to fiat currency. This has the effect of making it exchange only, and removing speculation by outsiders.
How are you going to enforce that?
I doubt if I will, I lack the cryptography and coding chops to make these sorts of things.
If the block chain keeps records of unit creation and prevents spending a unit twice, then it presumably includes record of the spending of the unit, at which time its identifier is decommissioned. One could probably, without changing much, make it so that they units would not “spend” at a reported exchange.
But that would require a reliable way to connect recipient addresses within the system to real-world entities, something that crypto currencies typically intentionally don’t have, and an infrastructure for blacklisting undesirable recipients, which opens a huge can of worms.
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There must be at least one connection present already, otherwise exchange of the units themselves could not occur. Acting as an exchange effectively de-anonymizes oneself automatically outside of the system, because otherwise they would have no customers. Anonymity can be preserved for users by having the spend-revocation remain within the cryptographic realm and not be human readable.
Blacklist sounds rather ominous, but I am guessing that even signing up to use Bitcoin and other currencies one is confronted with some TOS first. If the currency is upfront about prohibiting fiat currency exchange in the first place, then it becomes more a matter of the exchange user opting out of the system, rather than being vetted by anyone else.
If this is easy then I would hate to see the difficult problems.
You cannot prevent people from buying/selling whatever they have. Every time this happens, a black market occurs, and that’s a good thing.
No, I just believe that in long term things clear out. We are blinded by the present. I cannot say where the equilibrium ends, whether The Most Popular Cryptocurrency will be Bitchcoin or something else, where the exchange rate ends up, how the black market situation will look… but it will end up in some more or less equilibrium-like way. The thing is too new to be familiar with its behavior, hence the hopes and the swings. See the Gartners’ curve of hype-disillusionment-mainstreaming of pretty much any technology.
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Okay. I just get nervous when someone says I should give something and it will then be okay.
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I don't think bitcoin is any more or less real/viable than other currencies.
Depends on how it’s used, in my opinion.
I just think it is a waste of time and a distraction from actually solving real world problems.
What about when people use cryptocurrency to anonymously donate to organizations that are solving world problems via defending individual privacy rights, combating government surveillance, and supporting free expression, etc.?
Being able to do that (Cow waves to EFF) while not worrying about leaving a money trail that can jeopardize employment with corporate, governmental and quasi-governmental contracts and/or expose (and jeapordize) other activist agendas, etc. isn’t a waste of time, in my opinion. It’s quite empowering in the real world in this context.
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How I see it, any such system has a baseline which defines for users how the system works. This is why they also prohibit forged coins, double spending, and other practices which could be seem as fraudulent exploits interfering with the normal operation for prospective users. Taking the units (I refuse to call them “coins”…) out of their native system could be considered such an interference. It’s not telling them that they cannot buy or sell anything - currency is not property.
Because, traditionally, currencies have been a monopoly, so users have needed to bend one existing system to facilitate what they are doing. There wouldn’t be anything stopping speculators from using their own currency which allows and encourages exchanges.
I think many people in both pro/con Bitcoin camps are still accustomed to thinking in terms of a single overarching scheme which needs to suit everybody.
Is it really empowering? It might be more empowering to not affiliate yourself with such groups that are making problems for you, not to mention better for your reputation.
