Quote from: mindrust on December 30, 2017, 03:17:22 PM

Quote from: trust.no.one on December 30, 2017, 02:58:05 PM

No capitalism is not about decentralization. Capitalism has a number of bad and useless definitions, useful only for its attackers who want to dominate markets themselves, but the primary essence of real capitalism is voluntary exchange with a lack of coercion. Centralization happens everywhere, even in capitalist systems, and in the absence of state interventionism like bank bailouts, too much centralization can in fact lead to the downfall of firms which get too large and therefore too bureaucratic and inefficient. That's what used to be called creative destruction and it was great. Now the government just picks winners and losers. This fear of giant monopolistic firms overrunning markets has never happened, except when the state made it happen, which is everywhere now.

Decentralized systems are honest. Everybody can see everything, can check anything and see if something is going wrong or not. Most importantly it runs itself. That's bitcoin.

Centralized systems are closed to the external eyes. You don't know what's inside and they can easily be turned into a scam. Without the central authority, there is nothing. That's ripple. Basically a cental bank.

There is nothing honest about bitcoin or decentralization per se. That doesn't even have any meaning. It's just emotional rhetoric. What does it mean for an abstraction to be honest? People can be honest. Bitcoin cannot be honest because it doesn't talk.

Bitcoin itself is worthless. I liken it to intellectual property, and I think it kind of spawned out of these kinds of distortions of reality. You cannot own information and that's all bitcoin is. It's nothing. You are just owning information stored on other computers, worthless. Yes you can currently legally own information in the modern world, but you don't really own it. You just have the state enacting violence to protect your claim of ownership. This is not the same as actual ownership. You can do all kinds of wacky stuff under positive law systems. It is just a state-enforced market distortion based on this fallacy, and it's causing enormous economic harm to all of us except the few patent holders and authors who struck it rich with these state run monopolies. But who cares about definitions when the state determines reality for us?

Yes Ripple also is along the same lines. The difference is Ripple is backed by its ability to lower costs of international transfers, so it's value is directly tied to fiat. Bitcoin has no such claim and is really not even functional. You can say fiat is backed by nothing, to which I would counter it is backed by the most valuable resource of all, your life, through the violence of the state and legal tender laws. You can consider it a negative backing rather than a positive one. Positive backing would be "take this paper and you will get gold for it later." Negative backing is "take this paper or we will kill you." Bitcoin has none of this and the people in the bitcoin cult don't appreciate any kind of nuanced discussion. They are too blinded by rhetorical notions like honesty and decentralization and their delusions of vast wealth for producing nothing of any value whatsoever.

And there is one very important aspect of centralization that you are overlooking. People have diverse abilities distributed along something of a bell curve. You want the smarter people to be in charge of things, especially when your property is at stake. I don't want your average Joe to have any influence over my life. They can't even run their own lives. I don't want them running mine. This is why democracy is such a failure. All the idiots become bureaucrats and go on power trips. Everything good has come from entrepreneurs and markets, in centralized firms, not open decentralized systems.

trust.no.one

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