On 12/23/2013 12:46 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 2:12 PM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> 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 BrentOne 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
