Bitcoin: What Would Marx Think?
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Just to bookmark:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/maduro-sets-venezuela-s-debut-cryptocurrency-sale-for-february
Quote:Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro said the country is pushing ahead with plans for the first sale of its cryptocurrency next month, and developing plans for its use with a national ID card held by at least 15 million Venezuelans…Previous drafts of the white paper showed each coin would be backed by one barrel of Venezuelan crude, though the coins can’t be exchanged for the actual oil. The petro will be divisible into 100 million units and the minimum exchange unit will be called the mene, according to the draft proposal.Following is a discussion on the page titled: Bitcoin: What Would Marx Think?.
Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!According to this article, the authorities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq are toyng with the idea — or at least are being urged to — of doing something similar with their oil. The author, however, does seem a bit over-enthusiastic:www.kurdistan24.net/en/opinion/93e50bc0-f3e4-4669-9cca-a728720ff775Personally, I'd prefer to use Paypal.
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/face-value-bitcoin-proof-work-labour-theory-value/2018/02/01This is a really interesting article, that tries to use Marx' thinking to "fix" bitcoin.
Quote:If there is value in the original vision of Bitcoin, to have a form of money that can be used to make payments across the internet in a way that makes government unnecessary and doesn’t reveal real names or physical location, it needs to be programmed differently. Such a currency would need to work in such a way that the supply of the currency increases when more mining capacity is added to the pool. This allows the market to regulate its exchange value by the natural increase and decrease of investment in mining relative to demand for the currency.It is possible to create a cyptocurrency with a with a stable value by simply eliminating the feedback loop, creating a rational cryptocurrency with a consistent work:coin ratio. Bitcoin could be made rational by increasing and decreasing the number of Bitcoins produced per block along with the increase and decrease of the difficulty of the proof of work. This way, the number of Bitcoins produced would scale in proportion with the investment in mining.Agreed that that's a good article. Not sure, though, that even if bitcoin could be made bubble-free as suggested and become the alternative payments system it was supposed to be, this woud make it "rational".Bitcin "mining" is no more rational than Keynes's joke suggestion that one way to prime pump the economy would be employ people to dig holes and then to fill them up again. Bitcoin "mining" involves using specialised computers to solve complicated mathematical problems of no interest or use The labour-time involved in this is not "socially necessary" in any sense of the term.It is a waste of time and computing power and computer use.As I said, what's wrong with Paypal or Visa — unless, that is, you are a drug dealer, merchant of death, tax dodger, money launderer, or a government subject to economic sanctions?
What do the capitalists think of Bitcoinhttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/15/bitcoin-is-noxious-poison-says-warren-buffett-investment-chiefCharles Munger , the vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, said he considered the bitcoin craze to be “totally asinine”. Munger said: “I never considered for one second having anything to do with it. I detested it the moment it was raised. It’s just disgusting. Bitcoin is noxious poison.”
This might be of interest. Any thoughts?https://www.sciencealert.com/bitcoin-illegal-almost-everywhere-after-shocking-blockchain-discovery-child-pornography
Here's a comment on this from the author of the article on blockchains in the December Socialist Standard:
Quote:Seems to me this is a bit similar to the Facebook 'crisis', where the platform has been exploited for unforeseen purposes, and that the solution is also the same: close the gaps to prevent it. If a block is only 80 bytes and therefore it can't store pictures directly but only links (leaving aside the legal grey area of whether a link to child porn is itself technically child porn), the solution is to prevent links being stored in a block, or prevent them being followed. Any decent programmer could write that code in less than five minutes, I should think. The idea that this hack suddenly renders all cryptocurrencies de facto illegal sounds like absurd hysteria aimed at grabbing headlines, or maybe shorting bitcoin stock or otherwise discrediting it, if that's not too conspiratorial, but – like Facebook – the situation does remind us that it's naive to expect capitalist companies to police themselves.The drivel that passes for serious comment on cryto-currency and the Blockchain in particular seems never ending. That the US immediately banned the Venezuelan crypto should tell you all you need to know – they fear it. Porno on the Bitcoin blockchain is a total joke, have you tried to make a transaction recently? The constsnt attacks on crypto and Bitcoin in particular have failed to crack its underlying value to users. You want to launder drug money – use the banks. You want to watch porn use DVDs or the internet or join a club. You want to sexually abuse children join the police or get in to politics! Porno (or just about anything else) on different blockchains is/will definitely happen. To get some idea of the future have a look at where the Steemit project is going. In the future the world, including a socialist world, is going to run on blockchains. If you think the wheel, internet or the invention of god were a big deal then you are in for shock in the relatively short term as this technology mushrooms/explodes. Yes, they'll even design, build, fly, target and drone us using AI machines created and 'living' on the Blockchain!
alien1 wrote:The drivel that passes for serious comment on cryto-currency and the Blockchain in particular seems never ending. That the US immediately banned the Venezuelan crypto should tell you all you need to know – they fear it. Porno on the Bitcoin blockchain is a total joke, have you tried to make a transaction recently? The constsnt attacks on crypto and Bitcoin in particular have failed to crack its underlying value to users. You want to launder drug money – use the banks. You want to watch porn use DVDs or the internet or join a club. You want to sexually abuse children join the police or get in to politics! Porno (or just about anything else) on different blockchains is/will definitely happen. To get some idea of the future have a look at where the Steemit project is going. In the future the world, including a socialist world, is going to run on blockchains. If you think the wheel, internet or the invention of god were a big deal then you are in for shock in the relatively short term as this technology mushrooms/explodes. Yes, they'll even design, build, fly, target and drone us using AI machines created and 'living' on the Blockchain!An interesting post, alien1, but I wonder if you could elaborate on your point :"To get some idea of the future have a look at where the Steemit project is going. In the future the world, including a socialist world, is going to run on blockchains" It would also be helpful if you could explain in simply layman's terms for folk like me who dont really understand this technology, what exactly blockchain is and what it does.
Hi Robbo, I suggested looking at the Steemit.com platform as one popular example of what can be done with the blockchain technology – it is not just crypto. Steemit is an all-in-one social media blogging, etc platform. As things move forward we'll see entire design/production/distribution systems built on the technology. So much more efficient than existing methods. I wish I could help other 'laymen' out there but as one myself I can only suggest that a bit of on-line searching will bring in plenty to interest and intrigue. Crypto is just one small, highly publisised and, by the establishment, hated, aspect of what will/is coming with this technology.
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