On 12/23/2013 12:46 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 2:12 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 12/23/2013 9:07 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Crypto-currencies, like cryptography, can surely help to save the freedom of
privacy and privateness.
Crypto-currencies does not need to be a pyramidal con, like Quentin
suspects. They
just allowed to create new independent banks which can do their work
"honestly" or
not.
"honestly" is not moral here, but it means that it is attempted, at the
least, to
not base economy on lies (which often happens to keep jobs despite they
became
obsolete).
Money is both the most wonderful economical tool and the most horrible life
goal.
When money is used honestly, every one (good willing enough) win and is
enriched.
But the longer the play, the bigger the liars can win, so "those who make
money the
main goal" crack, and corrupt the system, which at that moment become
pyramidal.
It is basically a confusion between meaning and use, or goal and tool.
Today, a part of the economy relies on lies, so it is more the actual bank
system
which seems to lead us (partially) to a pyramid.
The existence of crypto-money can help by providing different competing
economies,
and can help in making transition (and awakening from the lies) more smooth.
I don't see it as any different than gold or silver. Banks used to have
reserves of
gold or silver and they issued their own script money that was redeemable
in gold or
silver. BUT they always loaned much more script than they had gold or
silver. They
relied, quite reasonably, on the fact that in any given time interval, only
few
people would want to redeem their script in gold or silver.
Now you may say this is "lying", but so long as not done to excess, it
makes for
good economics. Consider and extreme example: Suppose the 'banker' has no
gold or
silver at all but he's prepared to loan script anyway. Someone comes to him
and
wants to borrow $1000 to build a bridge over small river near the town.
The banker
loans him the script. He pays for material and labor, which he can do
because
people believe the script is backed by gold. The bridge gets built and so
farmers
can come to town much more quickly, productivity is improved and the town
thrives,
so more people deposit money in the bank and the banker can actually buy
some gold
to back up his script. "Artificially" increasing the money supply can be
very
useful; but just as with all kinds of interactions it depends a lot on
trust. If
nobody trusts anybody else, as now so many people automatically distrust
their
government, then the economy is dragged down.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/in-no-one-we-trust/?_r=0
Brent
One difference I see is that with crypto-currencies intermediaries are not required for
either, 1. safe keeping, or 2. transfers. If they are never held by intermediaries then
they have nothing to loan out.
The point of my example is that you don't HAVE to have anything to loan out. Banks loaned
out the value of gold without having the gold (having only a small part of it).
As for security I'm not sure; can't you lose your bitcoins?
Brent
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