You want to find redeeming qualities in socialism. I rather see socialism as power vacuum for the criminals to capture and no redeemng qualities whatsoever. It is a necessary evil only because the physical economy can always be taxed and controlled with force.
As I explained in my prior post, I don't even think socialism reduces crime. In fact, the police are always the last on the crime scene and the USA has more people in jail than China (which has 4 times larger population and totalitarian governance).
Physically it is a comparatively a cheap system to run without the high cost of a proof of work system.
Not true. We have to pay for all the bloated government, VISA fees, and debt that central banking sustains.
Proof-of-work is much less expensive.
Correct but that is only our present condition. In theory without all the bloated government, VISA fees, and debt (stripped of all the fat) the actual technical cost to run a lean centralized fiat currency is (theoretically) cheaper then a decentralized cryptocurrency. I will concede that this condition is nothing like the world we live in today. The point I am making here is that in theory fiat may become cost competitive again in the (probably distant) future once the waste is stripped from the system. I will clarify the OP in this area.
Emphatically disagree.
The Communists always argue ideologically that it is more efficient to not have competition. However reality has proven their ideology to be more inefficient than decentralized competition.
Have you compared the uptime and reliability of a Microsoft server versus a Linux server. The
Bazaar (decentralized, open source) model trumps the Cathedral (top-down, closed source) model for large scale systems. I wrote about this having the
only known positive scaling law of software engineering. Only vertical markets such as finely tuned graphical software has
so far resisted the Bazaar model.
This appears to be our last remaining area of disagreement.
I am not arguing that fiat currency will in a utopian (communist like future) become dominate once the inefficiency is ironed out.
My argument is that in the future centralized fiat and decentralized anonymous cryptocurrencies are likely to both exist in competitive equilibrium.
Agreed.
But the only competitive advantage of fiat is force. Period.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5044&cpage=1#comment-411923esr on 2013-09-26 at 16:49:08 said:
>Well, yes. I would say that. Governments are based on the threat and use of force, up to and including the killing and inevitable murder of the people they claim to be the governing.
This isnt merely a contingent property of government, its the essential one. Read your Max Weber: a government is, definitionally, an organization which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force (thus, a monopoly on legal murder). Political science has failed to improve on this definition since it was proposed in 1919.
The existence of this competition will drive progress forward in both currency types. Centralized fiat systems perhaps released by a world government or trusted corporation will try to copy the best ideas from the decentralized systems while attempting to leverage economies of scale (lack of proof of work, single server).
Their economy-of-scale will never be technological! (you forget my point that unlike manual labor and fixed capital investment, knowledge production isn't fungible) Rather they will still control the industrial (physical) economy. And the multinationals will gobble up everything in the physical economy, because there is way too much overcapacity from this $150 trillion debt bubble, so the largest economies-of-scale will increase the efficiencies. They will be heavily employing robotics and computer automation too, once the debt bubble bursts 2016ish.
The world government will be for the physical economy. They will try to use their control over the physical economy to maintain dominance, i.e. monopolies and force.
The Knowledge Age will run by DAOs as I explained upthread.
Fiat currencies that successfully exploit economies of scale while restraining their natural tendency to abuse their their vested authority may survive.
They won't restrain themselves. Rather the physical economy is declining, so we have a release valve. This competition (which has always existed, e.g. my point about physical cash in prior post) is what will prevent them from destroying themselves too abruptly and allow the physical economy to die over decades.
I have postulated upthread that they might eventually tap into the brain and then be able to control and tax the Knowledge economy.
This safety comes at the expense of directing monetary inflation to pay for proof of work.
How many times have I explained that there is no expense. That is the way capital is redistributed from the usurists (top 1%) back to the producers (the 99%, represented by the cpu-only miners). Refer to my upthread links which expound on how large capital is dumb and can't raise economic production as fast as small capital can.
Without debasement, we end up with the 1% aggregating all wealth and a feudal Dark Age.
Edit: I see you edited your post.
The only advantage of a top-down digital currency is that it would allow some monetary inflation to be used for purposes other than proof of work. For example, monetary inflation could be used to pay for the necessary constraints on the dynamic system (aka pay for the cost of addressing market failures until a free market solution can be found). This efficiency can only be achieved, however, in the setting of a robust decentralized alternative or the fiat system will collapse for the reasons outlined in the
Economic Devastation thread.
I have never seen a market failure that the government didn't make worse.
Most people don't know we had a depression in 1919, because it was over in 2 years because the government did nothing.
Whereas everyone knows about the Great Depression which lasted for decade and ended with World War 2. Americans were eating more butter, chicken, etc after 1929 and before FDR's New Deal. Then he fucked it all up by paying people to walk on the crops to destroy them and dig holes with spoons.
I agree to Contentionism only because socialism has the force to exist, yet I can't a single redeeming quality to government.
Maybe local community government I could agree with, but even then they appear to do more harm than good.
You are free to disagree with me. It is often difficult to argue ideology, because it is difficult to falsify the effects of government on market failures.
I suppose they meant to imply
a Big Mac is a bad thing, but they failed miserably. Also methane is a fuel or can be synthesized into fertilizer.
Socialists
are uneconomic.
Fat (even saturated) is a good thing. Fats from processed oils not good. Virgin coconut and olive oil the best, all the soybean oil, corn oil, etc is deadly.