I’d take bets against Bitcoin resulting in any significant restructuring of government. Remember, Warren Buffett pays lower tax rates than his secretary. Criminals around the world are already quite successful at money laundering. And yet society has not collapsed. This won’t collapse it either.
I have studied “secular/materialist eschatologies” as a reference class, and probably my biggest heuristic-level updates is “catastrophism memes spread fast and wide while being wrong in their catastrophic details and they are harbingers of the existence of a gradualist version of the same theory that is important for quantitative historical models with genuine human implications”. Less “zombies”, more “soft apocalypse”.
And yet society has not collapsed. This won’t collapse it either.
This is true, but I don’t think it responds to the heart of my concern. I could potentially rewrite this to something I think might be “gradualized” (with links to make it more local and near mode) but which is also potentially false.
And yet society is not stagnating. This won’t change the rate of stagnation, just as, for example, the failure of Bretton Woods had no effect on general prosperity.
I don’t mean to strawman you and claim you “said” the rewritten version. I’m just trying to show that your statement didn’t connect with my reasoning in a way that alleviates concerns, because I don’t think that I’m worried in a way that your statements (true as they may literally be) would mollify.
Nornagest proposes property taxes to replace income taxes, which is not too far my suggestion that “Facebook-based estimates of taxes owed would be amusing, but less ironic forms of surveillance could work as well.” But if that’s the case then it seems to predict that there should be long term arbitrage opportunities between real estate and bitcoins and that kind of insight seems unavailable in the normal ambit of bitcoin discussion… and maybe I need to go looking for such correlations before saying they don’t exist? :-P
Izeinwinter proposed that hedge funds were trading in Bitcoins while using government insider contacts to know when to bail out of the bubble in advance of the sheep. This seems not too far from my suggestion that “maybe the private individuals composing the Treasury Department have non-trivial personal stakes in bitcoin and no civic virtue?”
Ygert suggests I turn my point into a top level discussion post, which isn’t really my personal style. In the meantime he or she basically accepted that bitcoins threatened status quo government operations and vaulted from there into political theology, with mention of tradeoffs between Democracy and Monarchy themselves. If these kinds of tradeoffs were really on the table, I think I’d expect to see more waves in the mainstream?
Even if bitcoin does entail the end of nation-states in current form, a soft transition to anarcho-capitalism need not be apocalyptic. In fact I see signs that we are already moving in that direction, and are already much less of a democracy than is commonly believed.
On the other hand, the USGov by itself is perhaps around 30% or more of the US economy, and it will not be switching to bitcoin anytime soon, if ever. If we add in its influence on the military-industry complex and associated large corporations, there is a very large core base of support for the dollar.
Money laundering at casinos in Australia is as simple as swapping cash for chips then chips for cash in sums of less than 10,000 (the figure above which transactions must be reported to authorities). Society may not collapse, but that’s funding a whole lot of problem gambling misery.
I’d take bets against Bitcoin resulting in any significant restructuring of government. Remember, Warren Buffett pays lower tax rates than his secretary. Criminals around the world are already quite successful at money laundering. And yet society has not collapsed. This won’t collapse it either.
I have studied “secular/materialist eschatologies” as a reference class, and probably my biggest heuristic-level updates is “catastrophism memes spread fast and wide while being wrong in their catastrophic details and they are harbingers of the existence of a gradualist version of the same theory that is important for quantitative historical models with genuine human implications”. Less “zombies”, more “soft apocalypse”.
This is true, but I don’t think it responds to the heart of my concern. I could potentially rewrite this to something I think might be “gradualized” (with links to make it more local and near mode) but which is also potentially false.
I don’t mean to strawman you and claim you “said” the rewritten version. I’m just trying to show that your statement didn’t connect with my reasoning in a way that alleviates concerns, because I don’t think that I’m worried in a way that your statements (true as they may literally be) would mollify.
Nornagest proposes property taxes to replace income taxes, which is not too far my suggestion that “Facebook-based estimates of taxes owed would be amusing, but less ironic forms of surveillance could work as well.” But if that’s the case then it seems to predict that there should be long term arbitrage opportunities between real estate and bitcoins and that kind of insight seems unavailable in the normal ambit of bitcoin discussion… and maybe I need to go looking for such correlations before saying they don’t exist? :-P
Izeinwinter proposed that hedge funds were trading in Bitcoins while using government insider contacts to know when to bail out of the bubble in advance of the sheep. This seems not too far from my suggestion that “maybe the private individuals composing the Treasury Department have non-trivial personal stakes in bitcoin and no civic virtue?”
Ygert suggests I turn my point into a top level discussion post, which isn’t really my personal style. In the meantime he or she basically accepted that bitcoins threatened status quo government operations and vaulted from there into political theology, with mention of tradeoffs between Democracy and Monarchy themselves. If these kinds of tradeoffs were really on the table, I think I’d expect to see more waves in the mainstream?
I think I remain confused :-(
Even if bitcoin does entail the end of nation-states in current form, a soft transition to anarcho-capitalism need not be apocalyptic. In fact I see signs that we are already moving in that direction, and are already much less of a democracy than is commonly believed.
On the other hand, the USGov by itself is perhaps around 30% or more of the US economy, and it will not be switching to bitcoin anytime soon, if ever. If we add in its influence on the military-industry complex and associated large corporations, there is a very large core base of support for the dollar.
Money laundering at casinos in Australia is as simple as swapping cash for chips then chips for cash in sums of less than 10,000 (the figure above which transactions must be reported to authorities). Society may not collapse, but that’s funding a whole lot of problem gambling misery.