Felix Stalder on Fri, 5 Jan 2018 00:12:09 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain |
On 12/31/17 8:11 PM, Brian Holmes wrote: > Beyond that, bravo for excavating the Austrian ideology of Bitcoin, > they're all goldbugs and sure looks and acts like synthetic gold to me. The other part of the Austrian ideology of bitcoin lies, I think, in appeal that the argument about the "Denationalisation of money", put forward by Hayek in 1976, still holds. The book can be easily found online. (Despite their unceasing support of markets and property, they sure make those texts available easily and freely). In the introduction (which, I admit, is all I read), Hayek explains the argument as follows: "In my despair about the hopelessness of finding a politically feasible solution to what is technically the simplest possible problem, namely to stop inflation, I threw out ... a somewhat startling suggestion ... that government should be deprived of its monopoly of the issue of money. The task of preventing inflation has always seemed to me to be of the greatest importance, not only because of the harm and suffering major inflations cause, but also because I have long been convinced that even mild inflations ultimately produce the recurring depressions and unemployment which have been a justified grievance against the free enterprise system and must be prevented if a free society is to survive. As soon as one succeeds in freeing oneself of the universally but tacitly accepted creed that a country must be supplied by its government with its own distinctive and exclusive currency, all sorts of interesting questions arise which have never been examined. The main result at this stage is that the chief blemish of the market order which has been the cause of well-justified reproaches, its susceptibility to recurrent periods of depression and unemployment, is a consequence of the age-old government monopoly of the issue of money. I have now no doubt whatever that private enterprise, if it had not been prevented by government, could and would long ago have provided the public with a choice of currencies, and those that prevailed in the competition would have been essentially stable in value and would have prevented both excessive stimulation of investment and the consequent periods of contraction. [Because] government more often than any private enterprise had provided us with the Schwundgeld (shrinking money) that Silvio Gesell had recommended." This argument about the beneficial effects of competition among currencies was very strong in the early days of crypto-currencies. Now, of course, it's a speculative frenzy, which goes totally against this theory, but then again, who needs theoretical consistency when you can make big bucks. -- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: