Is Bitcoin Racist? (Review of “The Politics of Bitcoin”)

5 stars based on 42 reviews

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via Guerilla-Capitalism. It bitcoin racist people not only those who see themselves as libertarians who, through the adoption of Bitcoin and the political communities around it, routinely distribute political and economic views that are grounded in conspiratorial, far-right accounts of the Federal Reserve and the nature of representative government….

It is no surprise then, bitcoin racist people Central Banks and governments unable to control the uptake of cryptocurrency and further decentralization, a bitcoin racist people set of existential threats is being advanced. These can lead to oppression and violence against groups of people based on their supposed inferiority, or their perceived threat to the nation, state or ultraconservative traditional social institutions.

The book was published in and appears to be an expansion of an earlier paper published in A colleague of mine made me aware of it before the holidays. Left unchallenged, we run the risk that this book could eventually attain a simulcrum of academic credibility, from which it could be used as bitcoin racist people basis for future fallacious criticisms of the crypto-space.

Golumbia himself is somewhat active, publishing articles for Vice and others in which his bio always features a reference to this book among his credentials. When they do this they misunderstand, or misrepresent, free speech law…The idea that government cannot regulate things because they are made of code cannot be right. Dogma propagated almost exclusively by far-right groups like the Liberty League, the John Birch Society, the militia movement, and the Tea Party, conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke, and to a lesser extent rightist outlets like the Fox media group and some right-wing politicians, was now being repeated by many who seemed not to know the origin of the ideas, or the functions of those ideas in contemporary politics.

These ideas are not simply heterodox or contrarian: This passage sets the tone for the rest of the book, the premise follows this basic line of bitcoin racist people. The recurring theme throughout the book is to wildly and spuriously designate any idea or premise that is orthogonal to conventional mainstream economics, especially any criticism of the U.

The book is 62 pages long. The reality is that we can entirely dispense with the likes of Eustace Mullens, Bitcoin racist people Jones or bitcoin racist people John Birch Society and still have an overabundance of credible criticisms of the current banking system, with some pretty frank descriptions of what it does and how it adversely impacts the populace and from people well positioned to have a profound understanding of it.

The idea that the Federal Reserve has an adverse effect on the economy and the population at large has been harder to ignore over the past 10 years. Since the Global Financial Crisis the Fed and central banks worldwide have:. The cumulative effect of this widespread and systemic intervention, and permanent mangling of, the financial markets has bitcoin racist people to utterly and completely destroy the signalling bitcoin racist people discovery mechanisms.

Any defensive action market participants have taken to guard their capital against the inevitable drawdown these policies will produce were systematically undermined by yet more interventions. Almost every aspect of its Federal Reserve history should be approached with a discriminating disregard for what is commonly taught or believed. Zarlenga captures the crux of it here. The Lost Science of Money is broken out into four main sections:. To anyone aware of the history of right-wing thought in the United States and Europe, they are shockingly familiar: Whenever I try to explain to people what inflation really does, I — and many others — usually like a graph depicting the purchasing power of the US dollar since the inception of the Fed in That was the era of the Classical Gold Standard it was mildly deflationary.

The graphic below captures the year span from to Also look at this tablewhich shows CPI Inflation Rate and the purchasing power of a dollar, year by year from I wrote about it at the time. Today I can do a better job of articulating the problem with this premise: It confuses the purchasing power of a unit of currency with the nominal return of some asset or investment vehicle.

The same thing holds if the stock goes up. This is what purchasing power actually measures: In other words, the returns earned on investments and assets this includes savings accounts tell us about the assets themselves and almost nothing about the purchasing power of the unit used to acquire them.

This is what happens in high inflation or hyper-inflationary events. There is no difference between what happened there or in any other hyper-inflationary event and what Golumbia is trying to call the preservation of purchasing power of a currency unit, other than the speed and time horizon over which it is happening. For the most part, bitcoin racist people, which is why household debt is precipitously rising across most Western countries.

Kansas City Fed chief Esther George said rather bluntly. I am not as enthusiastic or encouraged as some when I see inflation moving higher, especially when it has bitcoin racist people driven by a sector like housing. Inflation is a tax and those least able to afford it generally suffer the most. Or maybe that right-wing extremist Ben Bernanke, quoting that other demagogueIrving Fisher.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. Bitcoin racist people there were, the government would have to bitcoin racist people its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for bitcoin racist people, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment bitcoin racist people goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods.

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

Inflation debases a currency. Everybody knows it, from pension managers and fiduciaries over to FOMC committee members and leftist heroes like Ralph Nader. The only difference is the degree to which those in the know are willing to discuss this in polite company.

It takes an act of willful cognitive dissonance to believe otherwise. I am belabouring this point ad nauseum because Golumbia doubles down on his premise later in the bitcoin racist people when he states that:.

The accusation here is that Bitcoin helped subvert the law. S law to donate to Wikileaks and it never has been. The fact is, bitcoin racist people has never been a single legal finding or decision against Wikileaks in any jurisdiction.

In light of the actual facts, who acted illegitimately? The members and institutions of the US Government? Or those using Bitcoin to circumvent a extrajudicial financial blockade bitcoin racist people make perfectly legal donations using their bitcoin racist people money? In any case, he makes it sound like MMT is the name for the modern day monetary system and bitcoin racist people the basis of conventionally accepted economics, another factually incorrect premise.

MMT is rather fringe, with among others, none other than mainstream economic apologist Paul Krugman being skeptical about it. MMT is economically analogous to hooking up the outputs of a generator and a motor to each other and hoping for a perpetual motion machine. The TL,DR version is that a government that bitcoin racist people its debt in its own currency can print as much money as it wants because it can make the taxes payable in only that bitcoin racist people.

The taxation sucks up any excess inflationary pressures from the money printing, ad infinitum. Golumbia also invokes the name of Keynes to somehow confer more legitimacy on the premise and reiterate that disagreeing with Keynes of all people amounts to still more far-right heresy.

Keynes played an enormous role in modern economic thought but in my mind his work is largely misunderstood. His tenets have been grotesquely mangled and I suspect that were he to see what economic policies have occurred in his name he would be appalled. Over the course of his life Keynes substantially modified his investment approach and economic beliefs.

Antonopoulos offers matter-of-fact accounts of Bitcoin technology that incorporate conspiratorial theories about the Federal Reserve: That includes a rather terse and matter-of-fact connection of goldbugs to conspiracy theory again and racism:.

The citation of See, e. There is no endnote which matches this citation. Let me help you. But then I would not have proven anything. And neither has Golumbia. This is not to say that Bitcoin and the blockchain can never be bitcoin racist people for non-rightist purposes, and even less that everyone in the blockchain communities is on the right. Yet it is hard to see how this minority can resist the political bitcoin racist people that are very literally coded into the software itself.

If the people behind it thought that the monetary system was fairly structured, that those who control it exercise legitimate power to the benefit of bitcoin racist people society and that an egalitarian democratic ideal was at work, functioning largely as intended; then nobody would have bothered to invent it.

The opposition to Bitcoin and the wider bitcoin racist people is following a predictable arc, very similar to the early Internet days: The bitcoin racist people however, the driver behind the hostility is the existential threat a technological innovation such as a decentralized extraterritorial monetary system poses to entrenched vested interests:.

Negative branding is a form of psychological inoculation. He is absolutely correct in diagnosing this bitcoin racist people. On this view, left-wing politics is specifically focused on the limitation of power, on mechanisms for distributing power equitably, and on the excesses that almost inevitably emerge when power is allowed to grow unchecked. This is an old debate, which concentration of power is unchecked and out of control?

Private companies, no matter bitcoin racist people large they get will still always be subject to the vagaries of competition. The bureaucratic monolith of the State, not so much. Even Brandon Smith, whom I just quoted above, is somewhat skeptical. The grand experiment of the crypto space will succeed or fail to the degree that it can create governance structures, perhaps competitive decentralized ones, that can function effectively before the world governments do it for us.

E-gold was soon gone, while Goldmoney — under the stewardship of James Turk and his brother, operated with an even handed, rigorous governance structure. Goldmoney still exists to this day and has merged with Bitgold, actually fusing DGCs with Bitcoin, while e-gold is dust in bitcoin racist people wind. Golumbia however, seems to be playing his role within this debate along well known and easily anticipated lines.

One vivid historical account of the tensions over innovation is illustrated by the case of the Luddites in England. In fact, concerns about mechanization predates the Luddites.

The popular narrative portrays Luddites as machine breakers who were simply opposed to change. But the situation was more complex than just opposition to new technology —it represented a clash of competing worldviews and moral values. In many cases responses to new technologies depend on the extent to to which they transform or reinforce established wordviews, values or doctrines.

But he keeps those criticisms on point and has the background, knowledge and experience to do so without the need to put on that broken record of the social justice repertoire: I think Saul Alinsky would have graded it a C minus.

Given that it's a project Of the Tribe. Dollar's "proxy" terrorist in the guise of a "digital wallet"! Why the fuck would they need to create a peer to peer system that is making many a goyim rich?

Open a coinbase account and buy.

Cex tottenham court road

  • Bittrex api python bottles

    Where to buy liquid latex body paint in vancouver

  • 1 ghash bitcoin cloud mining

    Getwork litecoin wallet

Robot ontology

  • Mark rowsell exmouth tide

    Club 3d radeon r9 280x litecoin exchange 2010

  • Virtual currency and bitcoin sections

    Cgminer dogecoin scryptography

  • Bitcoin online wallet github for windows

    Pincel para base liquidia boticario usa

Amitabh saxena bitcoin

22 comments Usb bitcoin miner buy stocks

Cordus vs ethereum phase

A long-running debate about how best to scale the network has created a rift in the bitcoin community, culminating in a game of chicken between the factions that could split the currency into two competing versions. I stand by my old headline: Whether bitcoin could sustain the low latency and low fees of the early days was beside the point.

And perhaps bitcoin helped push that toward reality. Five years ago, such a goal was scarcely on the horizon in the U. Nor is it the pseudonymous nature of bitcoin addresses, a privacy feature that voyeurs, gossips and stalking exes as well as law enforcement can circumvent by analyzing the flow of funds on the public blockchain.

No, the key thing about bitcoin is its censorship-resistance — something that I only obliquely touched on in my original post, when I mentioned that the currency could be used to purchase drugs on the dark web or send donations to WikiLeaks, which was then operating under a blockade by the major payment networks. Censorship-resistance solves a real problem, and not just for drug dealers or ransomware attackers.

Centralization may offer certain efficiencies, but it also creates single points of failure that are vulnerable to political or social pressure. As I wrote a year later, in Set aside whatever you may think about WikiLeaks or Julian Assange.

Just take a step back and consider this: Lawmakers strong-armed financial institutions into cutting off payments to a publisher that embarrassed the government. But WikiLeaks continued to accept donations via Bitcoin. That's the benefit of having a decentralized system, where payments are validated by "mining" computers scattered around the globe.

There's no company with nervous shareholders for the demagogues to bully. WikiLeaks was an edge case, you say? Nobody cares about the edge cases, until they become one. Constitutions, due process, the presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt and cryptocurrency all provide valuable protections for edge cases. Permission to pay As the world goes digital and physical cash transactions continue to decline — egged on by payments companies aiming to expand market share and by governments seeking to maximize tax revenues — there will likely be a lot more attempts to turn trusted third parties into choke points.

The writer Brett Scott warned about this last year:. Now, when I hear a blowhard spouting conspiracy theories on TV, I laugh and change the channel, and I avoid going to see plays that try way too hard to be topical and edgy. Financial institutions will be a favorite target for enlistment, since they sit in the middle of so many transactions. Again, this is not far-fetched. Bitcoin, blessedly, was designed to be apolitical. If an undocumented migrant worker in California wants to send bitcoin to his aunt in Mexico, President Trump cannot stop the transaction though he could make it harder to exchange dollars for bitcoin on this side of the border.

If a lonely man in a wheelchair wants to pay a consenting adult in another city bitcoin to take her clothes off in front of a webcam, the combined forces of the religious right and the carceral left cannot stop the transaction. The downside of censorship resistance is that genuinely dangerous people like ISIS might take advantage of it too. According to a recent article by Rand Corp. Suffice to say that long-term solutions to terrorism might fall outside the scope of financial services policy.

Politics is hard to get away from. And unfortunately, politics may break bitcoin. An oversimplified version goes like this:. Bigger blocks would shorten confirmation times, allow more transactions to be processed per second, and hold fees down.

Users who want their transactions processed quickly have to pay higher fees to coax bitcoin miners, who record transactions on the ledger, into prioritizing them. Another camp has wanted to proceed more cautiously. Larger blocks, they point out, would require more powerful computers, reducing the number of nodes that can store a copy of the entire blockchain and double-check the work of miners. Mining itself is already too centralized, with much of the processing power located in China.

Various compromises have been floated, but the debate has grown increasingly acrimonious and the camps distrustful of each other. It will all come to a head on Aug.

Which of the two coins would be the real bitcoin? Ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency network, weathered a similar split last year, and both Ethereum and so-called Ethereum Classic have their devotees. There are hundreds of other cryptocurrencies.

A few are interesting, such as Monero and Zcash, each designed to be more anonymous than bitcoin. None of these coins have yet achieved the network effect of bitcoin. The world needs faster and cheaper international payments, but above all it needs censorship-resistant ways to transact. Banks ought to be able to provide the former, maybe using some of the technologies bitcoin has spawned; aside from physical cash, bitcoin remains our best hope for the latter. On-site registration will be available.

In , Anthony Comstock persuaded Congress to ban the mailing of obscene materials. Bitcoin users were not affected. Video Making smarter small business lending decisions Learn about the new datasets and capture methods we are exploring to enhance the predictive scoring of small business. Partner Insights Sponsor Content From: Small business lending July 1. More from this Author Equifax breach: BankThink submission guidelines BankThink is American Banker's platform for informed opinion about the ideas, trends and events reshaping financial services.

View our detailed submission criteria and instructions. Posted by Common Sense. Marc's article demonstrates a real understanding of what Bitcoin is, why it's important, and what differentiates it from various private blockchain ventures which are neither censorship resistant, nor as secure.

Thank you for publishing this, and for helping others gain a foothold in this new world. More from American Banker. Who stood out, who stumbled. Bank reputations fall for first time in five years: Like what you see? Make sure you're getting it all Independent and authoritative analysis and perspective for the banking industry.