Thread

I disagree. Bitcoin is a technology that allows the individual to move their time and energy outside the state’s reach. When enough individuals do this, that creates a group. A group that can starve the government of economic power, thus forcing it to decrease in size and act in a cooperative manner.

The only way to make government folks behave in a cooperative manner is to dismantle their monopoly privileges

How would you do that?

Privatize everything

And how are you going to do that?

By privatising?

What am I missing here?

I agree with privatization being the goal but how do you plan to accomplish privatization? What methods? You say no person, group, or technology can fix it. And that Bitcoin can’t either. So what’s the plan? Because I see Bitcoin the technology, the individuals adopting it, and that larger group as being the only viable option to reduce government monopoly.

Libertarian ideas are the solution to the problem of government. Spreading them, convincing people of them and being radical in communicating about them. Technology is neutral by nature. If people who adopt Bitcoin are all statists, then the change they bring about won't look all that different from what we have right now, except that they will be the new batch of cronies.

Btw, so that you get where I'm coming from: I do hold the view that sound money, especially Bitcoin, can enable more freedom for individuals. I'm talking of the problems that arise from the monopolistic nature of government and the consequences caused by such a monopoly. Addressing the root cause is what I was doing. I wasn't being dismissive of Bitcoin's potential impact. You'd have probably noticed that it was a rhetorical statement.

Spreading ideas and trying to convince people in the hopes that we will vote people into power who will privatize and decrease government monopoly will not work. The incentive structure of credit based money cannot allow that to happen. I believe you have the root cause wrong. The root cause is not the monopolistic nature of government. The root cause is fiat money which enables their monopoly. The problem is the money which is a technical issue and Bitcoin fixes that. Individuals must take back their freedom with nation state resistant cryptography. That’s the only way.

My whole point was that voting is not going to change anything. It's not the incentive structure of credit based system that won't allow that. It's the incentive structure of democracy itself which is broken. Bitcoin can't fix democracy, because democracy itself is broken. Let's say you have price controls, monopolies and socialism on a Bitcoin standard. Does that mean price controls, monopolies and socialism will work well? No. The effects and consequences will be the same. My intention was not to downplay the problems caused by fiat money. It was to point out that the effects and consequences of monopolies will be the same on a sound money standard as much as on a fiat standard. The government is essentially a terrorial monopoly of violence. It also has a monopoly on other things like legal services, infrastructure provision, defense, roads, courts, radiowaves, etc etc. A government on a bitcoin standard doesn't change the fact that the government under question is a monopoly. It will still cut production and provision of its services and raise prices. Consumers (citizens) will still not have their needs satisfied. It still won't be able to allocate resources efficiently. It will still be poorly run. It will continue to brainwash people and engineer consent. It will still be open to regulatory capture. It will continue find ways to to steal people wealth to keep its operations going. And needing to steal from people, it will continue to find ways to surveil everyone's finances. The nature of the state is broken. And bitcoin will not fix that. That's my point. The only fixing it can do will be through abolishing it altogether, not by reforming it or reducing it. And when abolition happens, the ideas that people hold will determine what comes to replace it. If people only know to live as slaves under a government, then that's what they will go back to and create a cage for themselves all over again. Slaves have to first believe that they deserve to be free men with free will. If they understand how free market competition works, what the natural law and natural rights are, what the right method of identifying legal principles are (reason vs observation), understand what causes economic effects (human action), then they'll be in a position to come up with solutions themselves according to their expertise. Sound money is important. But it's not as important as liberty. It's just a means to achieve ends, and not the end in and of itself.

*Edit: Terrorial > Territorial

I believe money is superordinate to law. So I disagree when you say the incentive structure of democracy (government) is the root cause. I believe destroying fiat completely realigns the idea of government to be smaller, more cooperative, and based on libertarian ideals. I agree that the only solution is abolishing the state. Bitcoin is the only tool we have to do that. I don’t agree with your idea of a government operating on a Bitcoin standard but continuing to perpetuate the government evils that exist today. Basically the idea that they can successfully co-opt Bitcoin. If Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure, these systems are incompatible. The state will have to try and kill Bitcoin. And when it does, it will fail at doing so. Then, a winding down of the state can happen. Yes, what lies on the other side of that partly depends on the values people hold. But in a world where people hold their private keys, we have inverted the power balance with the state in favor of the individual. I just find there to be a lot of nihilism in libertarianism. I believe Bitcoin is THE tool that gives libertarian ideals a chance. Libertarianism is nothing without Bitcoin.

Let's agree to disagree then 🤝 Bitcoin and Liberty are complimentary to each other. Perhaps we can settle on that. I highly recommend reading this book though: https://mises.org/library/book/new-liberty-libertarian-manifesto Its influence and quality is comparable to Saifedean's excellent Bitcoin Standard. Folks like Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have had and continue to have a lot of influence on many, many Bitcoiners. I highly recommend exploring their work, especially if you're someone who likes thinking about what politics, economics and law will look like on a Bitcoin standard. It will be worth your time.