Antiwork

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We're trying to improving working conditions and pay.
We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.

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It's true. (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

#1. Ethereum is not designed to have a fixed supply like Bitcoin is.

Which is why Bitcoin in hyper-deflationary, which is a insane economic policy for any serious fiat currency. That policy can be changed in code by programmers just like lawmakers can change economic policy for national fiats. Bitcoin might be taken slightly more seriously as currency rather than a speculative asset if they removed the fixed supply. But that would hurt the existing wealthy stakeholders. Are you starting to see how this is still political?

The difference is that the law makers are in principle — though usually not in practice — supposed to represent the interests of everyone. There are no such lofty ideals on the chain. Whatever group controls the most wealth controls the chain. Its like our government in 2008 but with no pretense of serving everyone.

Ethereum programmers implemented a rollback on the chain in the code early on because many wealthy people close to the project lost money through an attack and needed to be bailed out… like the government did for Wall Street in 2008. The fact that its possible for the programmers to rollback the chain completely undermines the concept that crypto is decentralized in a way that meaningfully solves the problems it claims to. Wealthy players will exert their influence on crypto just like wealthy players did on the US dollar in 2008.

The fact that Ethereum Classic still exists demonstrates that there was not a consensus with the rollback — there was discontent with the rollback — just like people were discontent with the bailouts in 2008.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I would say it's mildly deflationary, the supply is fixed, it's not like 10% of the supply is burned every year or anything.

This is like saying tulip mania was mildly deflationary. At a certain point without changing the rules of the blockchain there will never be another Bitcoin made. That is somehow supposed to represent an ever growing economy forever?… And not be hyper-deflationary? Remember… they were still making more tulips.

As long as Bitcoin remains this deflationary it will be a terrible store of value and a terrible facilitator of trade. In other words a terrible currency. And the people in charge of bitcoin — that is the people who own stakes in the network — will never want to end that because they make too much money with it being deflationary. It would be funny if some people didn’t loose a ton of money in the process.

I'm not making the argument that economic systems are divorced from politics or don't have political or social implications. They obviously do.

If its not divorced from politics then what’s to stop the same or similar political situation that happened in 2008 from happening again?

Remember the thing I disagreed with was…

Satoshi saw this and knew there was a better way, so he created a new currency system in which no one person or organization could ever have the power to just turn on the money printer like that ever again. Because the temptation is just too strong.

If the rules can be changed by someone then what’s to stop whoever that someone is from turning on the money printers on for the wealthy under the right political circumstances?

Sorry but you’re just wrong about the rollback and how that works. The only reason the rollback worked is because the majority of the Ethereum network nodes and miners agreed it was needed.

I understand how it works. I used to mine Ethereum and I’ve run both a Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes. I’ve been following Bitcoin since I saw it on slashdot in 2009.

Of course they “agreed” to give themselves a bailout. That’s no more valid of an argument than saying the US agreed to the bailouts in 2008. Other’s disagreed that’s why we still have the fork.

Randomly forking is terrible for a currency. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and find out that my money is worth half as much because some rich assholes didn’t like some transactions. And because they own enough nodes/ASICs/GPUs/stake and are friends with the programmers on the project they can just fork me over.

They can directly vote on proposed rule changes unlike in a representative democracy where they elect people who can change those rules and in most cases the only recourse if they make bad rules is to elect somebody different next time.

Most representative democracies have direct ballot initiatives and they’re based on 1 person 1 vote. We should work to have more of that because a broad base of people generally have interests different than those with access to wealth.

In the case of crypto none that I know of base their “democracy” on a system of 1 person 1 vote but instead on how much ownership you have on the network in terms of nodes/Mines(GPU, ASICs, etc.)/stake. This is not democracy, this is a system of political power based on ownership. In other words the same system of influence at the root of the 2008 bailouts.

There have been many proposals to change Bitcoin’s core protocol over the years, most of them did not succeed as they required widespread consensus which is hard to get and takes significant time.

Yes, the people who own stakes in the blockchain are going to make very conservative decisions that protect their own wealth. The US congress chose to turn the money printer on in 2008 because that was the best way to protect their wealth and the wealth of their donors. Again… its same system of influence based on wealth and ownership that lead to the 2008 bailouts.