Bitcoin, a libertarians perspective - Via Mike Lorrey Bitcoin is apolitical only in as much as any technology is apolitical and amoral. What matters is what you do with any technology you develop. Thats first glance. HOWEVER, having been around in the pre-Satoshi days of bitgold, when the digital money world and cypherpunks were trying to come up with a viable electronic alternative to the dollar that was both cryptographically secure and anonymous, I can say that there were a lot of political motivations for people involved in the scene. We all pretty much loathed the Federal Reserve and the idea of fiat money in general, and supported sound money principles. There were soft-core libertarians as well as hard core anarchists, but also much more moderate people who simply saw the current monetary system as fiscally unsustainable and needing a technological reboot, if we were to preserve civilization from an economic collapse not seen since the end of the Roman Empire. If you recognize that the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was one of the three pillars upon which the US government built both its military-industrial complex that it used to establish the Pax Americana hegemony of the 20th century, and its liberal-democratic welfare state (as well as enabling other developed nations to do likewise) to keep the masses satisfied enough to avoid their own socialist revolution, then anyone interested in ending the cycles of superpower games of brinksmanship and proxy wars, would have an interest in creating a superior monetary system that is both non-fiat, cryptographically secure to protect individuals against government surveillance, and decentralized so that no government can shut it down with an attack on any central system, was a part of that movement. Neal Stephenson wrote about that sort of world in his classic cyberpunk epic “Snow Crash”, the sequel to “Cryptonomicon”, in which a post-federal world, where fiscal collapse caused the government to become just one more corporation among many, all offering citizenship to customers, in an anarcho-capitalist future that many saw as dystopic, while others saw as merely transitional between our present federal system to a future non-geographic civilization of voluntary associations based on culture and interests called Phyles (which he then wrote about in the conclusive “The Diamond Age”). Some say such a collapse is caused by cryptocurrencies enabling citizens to avoid the tax man, thus starving government of revenues at a time when demand for entitlement spending is only rising higher and higher. I would argue that cryptocurrencies will be the savior of government, because they really aren’t that private, although that may just be a transitional feature based on PATRIOT ACT “know your customer” regulations (though I will note that those regulations post-date the publication of “Snow Crash”, possibly for good reason), and cryptocurrencies have a feature that enable governments to not only reduce its operating costs by turning over larger and larger parts of its administrative burden into the “blockchain”, so that the public is processing data and authenticating government functions through cryptocoin mining that is currently done by hand by bureaucrats. If instead, we have those receiving entitlements, i.e. those on welfare, medicated, unemployment, disability, social security, and public employee pensions, doing the mining in order to generate the money they earn, then we turn people who are otherwise drags on the system into productive contributors to the economy, we drastically reduce the cost of government, while making it far more open and transparent in the process.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 09:02:42 +0000