Quote from: IIOII on July 11, 2015, 02:10:57 PM

Ask yourself: Would it be any better if you had to trust a central authority instead of trusting a decentralized authority of miners?

First off, I am a starch economic libertarian, so see my comments in that light. Centralization is bad!

What may be troubling some people is that free market rules are being applied to quasi-free markets.

The US is NOT a free market, the percentage to which it is not free can be measured by the percentage of regulation it is under.

Non US economies are NOT free since many aspects of them are subsidized by the Gov't.

I read a post recently about a man in Argentina that was living on bitcoin. He took every paycheck and converted it to bitcoin as fast as he could. All money he could save went to buying miners and he was approaching the point where he was making more money from the miners than his job. Now the one line that caught me is the critical peace that made this possible. He doesn't pay for electricity, or at least not all of it. The utilities are not an open market. The price of electricity is set by the Gov't at like about 1-2% of what we pay here in the states. Argentina is not the only country like this. For many years China subsidized the operational costs of companies making LiOn batteries.

So imagine if miners didn't have to pay for electricity, or had some other operational cost subsidized by the Gov't. Now compare that to another miner who has to compete in a free market, and pay additional regulations or bribes. There is a clear winner here.

So long term (10 yr time) we might see mining centralized in favorable countries. So eventually we will come to a world where we have international negotiations with countries about the "free-ness" of their miners in the same way that we talk about the "free-ness" of their currency.