I understand your thinking here. I really do - I actually think the same as you about some of this. But I have spent a fair lot of time reading and thinking about these things over the last year or two, and I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is the only system that will work. But I agree that it should regulated in a way that spread wealth more fairly somehow. I think what you’re missing is that in ANY financial system - capitalism, socialism, communism, or any new system you can dream up - wealth will ALWAYS flow up in an unequal way. It’s how you deal with this inequality that matters. And currently every western system is failing to resolve it. Money is being printed and flowing up, decimating the middle class and will end a two class system. As for your comments on crypto - bitcoin is not crypto. The two are vastly different. I could write essays on why, so I will just say: Bitcoin is the best shot we have at changing the current paradigm to a more fair system that rewards real workers IMO.
This shows the change in Labour, under Starmer. Party HQ staff voting to strike as a result of a pitiful pay award, that amounts to a pay cut. Starmer is completely undermining the principles of the Labour Party. https://labourheartlands.com/labour...lZwwiUCHCF6zE7BOd4yU92hHywOl0EDdOook45G5f2dto
This shows why it requires a bloody miracle for a party of the left, ever to win an election; the energy wasted on infighting and the preference shown by certain factions for attacking their own leadership, rather than the Tories.
Its because the far left will always have a victim mindset. Nothing will ever appease them. They hate seeing others do well. I’ve said it for ages now, The Labour Party is totally unelectable. They can’t even agree on anything internally let alone lead the country. It’s painful but true. They don’t truly represent the working class at all. We need powerful unions (or to rethink them altogether), someone to stand up for communities and money to be spent on infrastructure and improving society. Someone needs to form a credible opposition to the tories. It isn’t the Labour Party in its current form. There is an absolute vacuum where once the Labour Party stood to protect workers.
This comment from Tony Blair recently resonated : “On cultural issues, one after another, the Labour Party is being backed into electorally off-putting positions. A progressive party seeking power which looks askance at the likes of Trevor Phillips, Sara Khan or JK Rowling is not going to win. Progressive politics needs to debate these cultural questions urgently and openly. It needs to push back strongly against those who will try to shout down the debate. And to search for a new governing coalition. All the evidence is that it can only do this by building out from the centre ground.” The left and Labour have lost a lot of people recently with their approach to cultural issues There are commentators online who claim to have been formerly on the left of issues but have been driven away by an intolerant approach to certain issues where no debate or discussion is allowed. And intriguingly they often end up having dialogue that leads to accusations of them being on the “Alt Right”. People don’t just shift from The Left to the Alt Right in one step. It doesn’t happen. It takes a lot I guess a similar example can be applied to the immigration/anti globalism people. There were UKIP and pro Brexit supporters who were previously Labour voters (or in the case of the latter remained Labour likely as recently as 2019). It shocked me to hear an older relative talk about being a Labour supporter and then a UKIP one. That shouldn’t make sense and shouldn’t really have been able to happen - but did
More evidence of the problems at Dover being caused by Brexit. A short video included in the report. https://bylinetimes.com/2022/01/28/...ewRqcNjF81CZMBXnq72uTgXGNX47GiBuWd_j-mmd6iHb4
And another report warning that a similar thing could happen when biometric checks start, for tourists in 9 months or so, which as things stand would mean everyone in a car having to vacate it to be processed before boarding a ferry. No plan in place to deal with it, as things stand. https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/n...ite-knowing-about-problem-for-2-years-309819/
A lot of this is a matter of perception imo. Right wing populists, in the press and the Tory Party, especially since Brexit, has been effective at labelling Labour the “woke” party. As far as I can discern, being woke means being neither racist nor homophobic. As for Labour voters turning to UKIP, there’s really no surprise there. This phenomenon is prevalent in communities which feel abandoned and left behind, partly by the loss of well paid but often dirty and unpleasant jobs in heavy industry. This trend certainly isn’t confined to the U.K., it’s also widespread in the USA, parts of France, Eastern Germany and much of East Europe.
Fresh revelations about Jennifer Arcuri affair threaten to damage Boris Johnson. https://www.theguardian.com/politic...rcuri-affair-threaten-to-damage-boris-johnson Quote:- "the original IOPC inquiry was hampered by the deletion of key email and phone records at City Hall that prevented the watchdog from “reviewing relevant evidence”. Looks like the Sue Gray report isn’t the only inquiry, Boris has hampered and prevented full disclosure.
I disagree. I truly think that culture has moved more left, and alienated the working class. My views have pretty much always been the same: treat everyone equally, and with respect. Race, colour, creed. Doesn’t matter. Just treat people equally. Now I’m being asked to accept transgender sportswomen in female sports, and mixed sex toilets. Not to mention being told that men can be pregnant. And I don’t accept any of those things. I think Labour is the woke party.
I'm not calling for an end to capitalism, just cautioning that unfettered capitalism is very much not the solution. Speculation is, from the perspective even of capitalist thinking, a really bad thing. It leads to bubble economics, it leads to distortion of supply/demand curves, and it leaves us with such absurdities as oil trading at a negative because 90% of the people buying futures contracts have no desire to ever actually own the commodity. But having highly speculative markets is a nearly unavoidable feature because current incentives favour it so heavily. The solution? High capital gains taxes, per-transaction fees on trading, wealth taxes, things that force the wealthy to actually use that money to make things. Regulated capitalism. And I'd be interested in that essay, because Bitcoin very much is crypto. And Bitcoin is an extraordinarily bad medium of exchange. It can take hours to process transactions, and the cost to do so is too high to make it viable to actually use as a currency. Its value fluctuates wildly. The distribution of Bitcoin in the general public is even more heavily skewed toward the ultra-wealthy than actual currency. And even crypto enthusiasts admit that the means of quickly turning Bitcoin into money and vice versa (Tether) is probably a shell game and could collapse at any time, taking Bitcoin and much of the crypto market with it.
Only the ultra wealthy or people who got in early and are now “playing with the house’s money” can afford to ride out the massive swings in bitcoin price and/or take advantage of the dips to buy. That is not functional or a long term solution
Ah in which case we aren’t arguing, we are totally in agreement . I totally agree with you. Speculation is ruining capitalism, but I think the speculative bubbles that we both hate are a direct a symptom of central bank policy. This policy can be fixed by backing the currency with a hard asset again - as the speculative bubbles are caused because the financial system is detached from reality. On bitcoin, there’s too much to say, but I’ll try: Bitcoin & crypto are fundamentally totally different. I agree with you that crypto is speculative and a shell game. There will be winners and losers there. I see NFTs and ethereum as potential winners, but still likely to lose all money. Stablecoins like tether seem ripe for corruption. However, Bitcoin itself is a totally different kettle of fish. For a few reasons: 1) It separates money from state. This is its most important function. It cannot be confiscated. It cannot be stopped. It’s freeing people globally. For example; podcast i listened to the other day of a woman in Afghanistan using it to escape from the taliban. She managed to save enough money and then convert it to bitcoin to escape. The ability to store your working energy in an untouchable way is revolutionary. The fact it’s immune to inflation, and will retain value for decades is unique. But also this immutable nature means that it can be used to bring the capital markets back in touch with reality and pop the speculative bubbles that you talk about. 2) Its the first ever human invention which can’t be changed or broken by humans. This makes it the best asset for storing value in history. It’s better than property, stocks, bonds, gold, silver. And it’s accessible to everyone in the world, unlike any other. Therefore it’s fundamentally more fair for the less well off. 3) It incentivises clean energy and innovation/hard work over fossil fuels & violence.
I find the argument that returning to the gold standard or similar would have any impact fairly unpersuasive. All of these ills existed long before the end of the gold standard. The crash of 1929 resulted from a speculative bubble in the stock market. The gold standard existed then. The crash of 1907 resulted from an attempt to corner the stock market (and the subsequent collapse of the banks that backed that move). The gold standard existed then, too. Some of the speculative bubbles even involved gold, which had knock-on problems, given that gold could effectively be the tail that wagged the dog, causing rampant inflation or deflation given that it could quickly devalue or overvalue currency, and put a run on gold reserves. It absolutely can be confiscated. It can be stopped, as well. The very nature of blockchain is that transactions are trackable, and at the end of that chain is a physical device with a wallet which contains Bitcoin. Cash -- or barterable goods -- are actually far harder to track than Bitcoin. In a world where Bitcoin was actually used for everyday transactions, that would mean a publicly available ledger of everything you buy and sell, which could very easily be connected back to you. Sure, the wallet addresses are anonymized; so are IP addresses. But if you know my IP address, with a bit of work, you can find out who I am and where I am. The same holds for Bitcoin. And when someone confiscates your Bitcoin, it's going to be impossible to get back; if they steal your PS5, they'll have to fence it somewhere, and that gives you a chance to recover it. Your iPhone has identifiers that you can use to locate it. If they steal your credit card, the credit card company can reverse the charges. If they steal your Bitcoin wallet, either forcing or tricking you into providing your private key, they can launder it quite easily, because laundering money is what Bitcoin is very good at. And because transactions are immutable, as you say, you're never seeing that money again. And that doesn't even touch on the vast privacy concerns of a world in which anyone, with a bit of effort and some clever algorithmic work, can figure out who you are, everything you purchase, every place you frequent. I find it difficult to believe that a commodity, to use the term loosely, that is itself so hideously prone to speculative bubbles can at any time be a tool to prevent speculative bubbles. It's not easily accessible by everyone. These stories of some person in Afghanistan or Cambodia or Lesotho or wherever using Bitcoin to better their lives? You like to talk about the corrupt media; that doesn't just go for 'old media' types like newspapers and television channels. I'd scrutinize your sources for this information, and their incentives. Most of the evangelists for Bitcoin are themselves holding a lot of Bitcoin. You could argue that's because they are true believers. But it also provides them with a strong incentive to make other people true believers, because it inflates the value of their holdings. The most important part of being involved in a Ponzi scheme is ensuring that as many people as possible join the Ponzi scheme. Really going to need to see a citation on this one. Right now, it incentivizes the deployment of six-figure mining rigs which use an extraordinary amount of power and are only available to the people with the resources to set up a large facility with all of the necessary cooling etc. And the means by which you do anything with it is controlled by the exchanges and nodes that serve as the medium of exchange and write to the blockchain, which have demonstrated themselves to be prone to theft on a scale that no bank robber in the world could dream of, when they aren't outright committing fraud. I can hand $50 to someone, and they will give me goods. You can't hand the Bitcoin equivalent of $50 to someone without involving a third party, because that it an immutable characteristic of the blockchain. And that's a real problem.
I think the wtfhappenedin1971 argument to be extremely compelling personally. The world functioned extremely well on a gold standard before the 1900s. Most of the worlds great innovations happened on a goldstandard and on a currency which wasn’t being debased away. I also don’t think that crashes you talked about were a problem. Nor recessions - not in an actual functioning market. In a hard currency those that weren’t invested could be sheltered from those crashes. Nowadays crashes are worse because no one has a choice but to invest. I personally believe we are currently seeing a decline of society similar to the end of the Roman Empire where the currency was debased, and that it will take a hard currency to bring us to a new renaissance. And that bitcoin is that currency. But I admit that might be dreaming. To answer your points in order that you raised them: - It can’t be confiscated or stopped. Imagine having to leave your country because a new regime took over (eg taliban). All you need is to remember 24 random words, and you have access to your life savings anywhere in the world. This is completely revolutionary. - Yes. The ledger is public. That’s the entire point. It’s public and trustable and backed by maths and code. That’s much better than a hidden system based on debt and lies. - when you say bitcoin is volatile, have you considered that a lot of that volatility is actually the fiat currency swinging and not bitcoin? Bitcoin has a fixed supply. - You absolutely can pay someone in bitcoin without a 3rd party - again that’s the entire point of it. - When you say I need to be careful about the media; I truly am. 99.9% of articles about bitcoin are negative. Why do you think that is? - First man made invention that can’t be changed by man. It is pure truth. Pure math. Even in covid when the world shut down, the bitcoin network carried on. And it will continue on - The energy incentives one; there are citations and sources. The bitcoin mining council has studied this I believe. But also it’s quite a logical thought process. Imagine you have a solar farm. Bitcoin gives you a way to directly transfer solar energy into monetary value, and then transfer it anywhere in the world.
I feel like this lacks a significant understanding of history. Economic collapses pre-1970 were worse, and more common. Governments also had fewer tools to be able to address them. I agree. This is absolutely a dream. You can still have debt and lies with Bitcoin. You also just have a system of finance where everyone knows everything you have ever purchased. I would consider it if it were true. It isn't. In the past year, as an example, USD has been worth as much as .76 GBP, and as little as .70. In the same span, BTC has been worth as much as $67.5k USD, and as little as $29.8k. There is absolutely no comparison. No, you cannot. It needs to be registered on the blockchain...that is the very idea, right? And you are not registering it on the blockchain. The guy at the 7/11 isn't registering it on the blockchain. A third party, who is taking a rent in so doing, is registering it on the blockchain. Because Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme that is too far progressed for it to be likely to be profitable for any late adopters. Some will profit, sure; the vast majority will lose. It will continue on so long as the pool of people willing to provide liquidity to the network continues. Which is to say: it's viable up until the point where it drops enough that the cost of mining Bitcoin will exceed the value of Bitcoin. Which will, at some point, happen. And once it happens, Bitcoin will collapse such that it never recovers. Be sure that you are not holding Bitcoin at that time. Or, y'know, you could just provide energy to the grid, which is more profitable and less chaotic than using solar energy to mine Bitcoin that may or may not be worth something.
- Economic collapses and recessions were more common, but not as devastating. Almost like a soft reset of the economy compared to the worldwide devastation that we see today. - Your understanding of blockchain and the decentralised nature of bitcoin is really flawed. It’s hard to have a chat about the philosophical implications of bitcoin when you’re misrepresenting it’s technology. Solving the Byzantine generals problem and distributing bitcoin in a decentralised way was something close to a miracle. There is a good chance bitcoin is as important of an invention as the internet itself. Possibly more important, as it allows you to transfer value across time and space. - Bitcoin will not drop below its mining price. People have been saying this for 12 years and it’s simply insane knowing the interest in it. The way the world is going makes bitcoin more and more valuable over time. Consider this - two things about you are 100% true when you die - your physical body (DNA) and your bitcoin wallet. These are the only two things that can provably not be tampered with. All these points plus the main one which I talked about: the ability for those in lesser economically developed countries to actually have access to a more equal financial system means that this is truly a special invention
The 1929 collapse created a sequence of knock-on effects that, among other things, resulted in the end of the Weimar Republic and the advent of Nazi Germany. Trust, nothing that has happened in recent years has had the same result. And part of the reason governments have been able to head off such consequences is that they have monetary tools that were not available in the past. The two-generals problem is not a major issue in modern finance. Hell, it isn't a problem at all using actual currency; I cannot give the same $20 bill to two merchants. The systems that you consider it miraculous for Bitcoin to fix doesn't actually already exist in any business that has a balance sheet. This is silly. There are three things that are 100% true when I die: my physical body, my Bitcoin wallet, and my collection of Beanie Babies. Or there are four things that are 100% true when I die, my physical body, my Bitcoin wallet, my collection of Beanie Babies, and my Diana Princess of Wales collectible spoons. Or there are five things... That there is a record of transactions for Bitcoin isn't even novel. Most high-end collectible items have a record of transactions. But most high-end collectibles at least involve a physical item that isn't dependent on a Potemkin village of influencers to actually exist, even if they may rely on those things to have value. What makes Bitcoin, a resource that requires exceptional amounts of computing power and hardware to generate, more accessible? I'm going to be blunt here. The continued ascendance of Bitcoin requires people who have bought in despite all of the reasons why they should shy away given the exorbitant price and complete lack of everyday utility. It requires suckers. It requires people like you. You are being used by people with large sums of money who also want your money. You do not realize that now. At some point you will. I hope very much that, when you realize it, it's at a time when you have not 'invested' sums that you cannot afford to lose.
Of course, but 1929 was after the creation of the fed and the total disruption of capitalism thanks to centralised control It’s not a major problem that you’ve thought about deeply* In actual fact it is and has always been a huge problem. It is in fact the one of the biggest problems worth solving. It stops Wall Street, the Bank of England, the ECB, the IMF, the WEF governments, bankers and financiers etc. taking the fruits of your Labour. It means that you have a way to store the value that you create in an asset which is incorruptible. Nope. You are wrong. The spoons, wallets, beanie babies gold whatever are liable to corruption, forgery, replication, age, etc. With bitcoin, unless someone knows your seed phrase, all of that property disappears with you to the grave. This is a much bigger idea than it seems when you first come across it. No, ledgers have been around for 2 thousand years. No one is claiming that. What is being claimed is that immutable ledgers which are backed by distributed consensus is new. Mining bitcoin is insanely cheap compared to traditional alternatives. Consider how much money is wasted on the current financial system. Obviously mining has become more expensive and is now at the point where companies mine instead of individuals. But individuals can easily set up a node and become an integral part of the consensus network for under £40. They get an actual vote on the financial system, instead of accepting the imaginary money from government fools. I’m also going to be blunt here. You sound exactly like me about five years ago. I also used to think bitcoin was a Ponzi. But anyone that studies it properly, eventually realises that it isn’t some scam or Ponzi. It is in fact a world changing technology. Just the last six months Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, stripe, Twitter, Facebook, Google, intel, Tesla, Apple and even some South American nations are working on bitcoin & crypto solutions. What do you know that these guys don’t? You are being used by an economic system that can create money out of thin air. This means that for every single second you work, someone takes some of that created value for themselves. Storing your wealth in a trustless fixed supply asset makes all the sense in the world.
