Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin's Dystopian Future
by
thaaanos
on 07/01/2014, 18:21:00 UTC
USA and EU would propably rather shutdown Internet than lose control over Euro or Dollar.

That would be pretty fun to watch, as every single citizen in the country protests to the point where the politicians who did that are literally dragged out of their government buildings and shot.

Well do you expect their citizens watch their hard earned assets vaporized so bitcoin whales come to scoop them up, and not demand their Gs to fence-double-firewall their net and if that fails to shutit down?

In our current system, citizens don't have hard earned assets. They have tons of debt. So they won't care. And those who do have hard earned assets in the form of cash will likely keep converting them to dollars. The only ones who will be SEVERELY hurt by this are the lenders holding the debts of the citizens, since fiat losing value against bitcoins and eventually inflating like crazy means citizen's debt is shrinking into nothing. Citizens will support this, wealthy asset holders who know what they are doing will support it, and banks who lend money to citizens will get screwed, if not wiped out.
It may be a cultural gap, but in Greece most households are invested in their own house first and in cash second, and believe me they had a hard time aquiring that asset especially in the Euro bubble. Our experience even before the crisis was that Euro was expensive and questioned the sustainability, but we trusted the powers that be especially EU that they had it under control and gave little attention, we used to call it EU-Autopilot. So when the crisis came if we inflated the economy "sticking plaster" we would have all assets and debts equally loosing value and a balance would be kept while diverting value to promote growth. Intead we tried to deflate the economy and the result is that while assets lost value (and in the cypriot case even the savings), while the debts are not only stable but mounting as goverment increased taxation. So if we now magicaly switch to bitcoin even at a constant rate, situation will not revert only accelarate.
BTW Banks dont have reason/opportunity to exist in an deflationary economy anyway.
The only way for a merchant to stay in bussiness is to offload the risk to ... B) producer to delay payment until sold.

This results in a regression of risk down the chain of producers, but the risk is ultimately taken on by the bank.
...
Chances are, the merchant and the bank will be the same, or rather the merchant will be operating on savings instead of on debt.
In bitcoin there is no Bank hence merchant opperates on savings which translate to goods that depreciate both against bitcoin as well as against "errosion" so why a merchant to even bother stock up? So the risk is eventually offloaded to either consumer or producer.
The producer will have to invest savings to equipment, assets, and general means of productions that depreciate, have to deal with merchands that promise to pay when and if they sell, takes all the risk of faults cause none will insure him, so why bother? He will wait for preorders and possible advance payments and only them begin producing. So the consumer will have to preorder/prepay goods at execive prices in his view and wait unknown time until delivery, so he will buy only what he absolutely needs: byebye to consumerism?
Hell Im in, if only I wasn't that brainwashed to need all the shit that are on TV

1) There can still be banks. Loans will just have to be short-term, and for things that are actually worth something, as opposed to for anything at all just to beat inflation. Less garbage for sale, more durable high-quality products, and less impact on environment from resource use and garbage. 2) Just In Time production is already almost a gospel in our economy. Inventory depreciates way faster than money inflates already, so it won't be that much of a difference if that inflation changes to deflation. 3) Once deflation is stable, preorders, or sale prices, can be set to account for that deflation. Also, if you preorder, aka invest, in someone doing something for you now with inflationary money, the money they receive will keep losing value, and they will be working for less and less as time goes on. If you invest in someone using a deflationary currency, such as giving 20BTC to OpenTransaction developers, as time goes on, that 20BTC ($2,000 at the time) will keep going up in value, giving them more and more to work with if they only use small amounts of it at a time.

Nope forget about it can<>will, Banks are non entities in the Bitcoin economy.
Christ you cant fucking JIT FOOD, OIL, get out of IT Industry mindset, there are TIME contrains that work against you in that model, that will get populations freezing,starving waiting for philanthropy by the OT devs.
What Incentive is there to JIT produce now rather than wait a day and screw the customers over? multiply that risk against the supply chain nodes and your product price shoots up. Add now a production Cycle into the model and watch it shrink away.
The economy is not a planar graph to distribute the risk evenly accross the chain, It contains cycles, in that model all those cycles will be negative loops and phased out one by one until everyone is disconnected and becoming a single node of Producer-Consumer or a Planar graph with one way flow of capital : Mercantilism, expect peace to ensue

I am talking on experience here. I live in F*** Greece, we are deflating for 4 years now.

The euro is not deflationary, so that's bullshit. Greece problem is not deflation, it's excessive borrowing.
Right now within greece the functional problem is deflation. Borrowing is the kludge.

Deflation is a shrinking amount of currency, or the economy expanding faster than the money supply (depending on whom you ask). Euro is not shrinking in supply, and Greece's economy is not expanding at all, from what I know. So your problem is that Greece took on too many loans, became way too risky, and now no one wants to lend anyone any more. The problem is entirely from debt and it's risk, not from any money supply issues (deflation).
we have shrinking amount of Euros within greece as we have
1. Savings flights (especialy after what happend in Cyprus)
2. Investment flight (none is willing to invest with a negative outlook)
3. Increasing Taxation to cover external loans.
4. No new internal loans by the banks as they are now zombies: no fractional reserve induced inflation (No savings, To many loans)

All those bailout money simply went to debt restructuring, nothing ended up inside Greek economy. Do the math
Savers? tell that to the Cypriots....

Did the confiscation of wealth in Cyprus from the savers make Cypriots better off? Cause op was saying at the expense of, and you seem to be disagreeing with something...
Yes because the cypriots were *NOT* alleviated and *yet* the savers were fukced
That's what thoughtfan was saying. Taking money from savings to pay for government's debt mistakes doesn't help anyone, especially not the savers.
No he was saying that inflating the economy alleviates the Debtors at the expense of the Savers, which is not what happened in Cyprus
as they got deflated and both were screwed


It was the euro that enabled the mercantilistic? attack on the south, just as bitcoin will create opportunities for new mercantilistic policies globaly, and that *never* ended in War.

Actually, it was inflationary currency and easy credit that enabled those things.
You were asking for anyone to say it, so I will: Deflation is good, inflation is bad:
*On Average* for the Total of the Eurozone it inflates by a small amount. Unluckily the Variation is greater.
Faulty EU treaties/governance, easy credit combined with a empoverished population, lack of due diligence by german banks, corrupted greek politicians hand in hand with corrupt bussiness practices by german firms, persistant greek nepotism both in public and private sector, aggressive takeover and euthanasia of local industries, spaghetti tax laws, FUDed local/foreign investors, Greek-Turkey arms race.
Nevermind the how and why, right now we are deflating and the feeling is that of misery, melancholy, uncertainty and pessimism.

In an inflationary economy, it is cheaper to borrow than to save. It's better to buy something now with a loan, and pay the loan off over time, since even though you are maying more in numbers, you are paying less in actual value. A $600 a month mortgage on a new house now will feel like a $250 a month mortgage 30 years from now. As a result, we now have an economy where 3/4th of people who reach age of 65 have less than $100,000 in their savings and retirement (making them dependent on government), average credit card debt is around $15,000 per person, almost no one has a positive net worth (they owe more than they have), and governments are to the point where most of their tax income is going to pay off debt instead of to pay for infrastructure and actual government services. I would even propose that much of the enormous economic growth over the last 50 years is fake, sustained by borrowiing that will have to be repaid later, and if it can't be, will result in the economies of the governments with massive borrowing dropping right back down to where they would be if no one ever borrowed (i.e. to the level of the country's net worth).
On the other hand, in a deflationary economy, people are incentivised to save and become self-sufficient, instead of relying on government. People would likely be more picky in what they spend their money on, and won't be buying as much. Yes, that will slow our economy considerably compared to what it is in our inflationary system, but as I mentioned above, our current booming inflationary economy many not be "real" to begin with, and may be a giant cycle of global-sized boom and bust. We're just now getting to the bust. In a deflationary economy, there will be booms and busts as well, but more frequent, and much more shallow. Plus less coonsumerism will be much better for the environment. Oh, and don't forget that poor people don't have access to the stock market. Cash is their only means of saving and "investing" for the future. Right now, our inflationary system is robbing their wealth, and giving it to the banks that "print" the new money. A deflationary system will actually allow many poor people to save, invest, and get themselves out of poverty.
Sure if you can withstand 80% UNEMPLOYMENT, Total collapse of the Middle class, Urban centers, Industry, and Return of the Feudal Landlords.
The Feud is a perfect economic system lets go back to it.

Viva la BTC Revolution - Aristocrats no dead