[HN Gopher] GNU Taler 0.8
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GNU Taler 0.8
Author : jrepinc
Score : 20 points
Date : 2021-08-25 13:07 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (taler.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (taler.net)
| miohtama wrote:
| I did a presentation on the history of cryptocurrencies a while
| back. GNU Taler has its independent lineage that never had much
| popularity. The original promoter, DigiCash, bankcrupted
| somewhere early 2000
|
| https://capitalgram.com/posts/history-of-cryptocurrencies/
| imtringued wrote:
| >Because boomers have robbed generations of having means to
| become wealthy otherwise; Buyers are buying lottery tickets in
| hoping it will lift them over the edge.
|
| You're just doing the same thing again. "Boomers" invest into
| real estate and hope that the future generation buys their
| "bags". "Zoomers" invest into cryptocurrency and hope that the
| future generation buys their "bags".
|
| The only meaningful difference is that shelter is a basic need
| and shelter is built on top of land. Thus it is very easy to
| extort people. Meanwhile with Bitcoin there is no way to extort
| people other than by a government mandating its exclusive use
| to pay incomes and taxes. (El Salvador doesn't count because it
| accepts two currencies as legal tender).
|
| Ah, yes, it does mean that an exclusive legal tender has an
| extortionate quality attached to it. This is regardless of what
| you actually use as currency. Jellyfish would be just as bad as
| cryptocurrency or the USD (with or without gold standard). What
| exactly is the problem? When the economy "runs out" of the
| legal tender, it becomes impossible to pay existing salaries
| and debts. Salaries have to be cut or people fired, interest
| rates must become negative. That's what deflation does and
| that's why it is considered a death knell for an economy.
|
| How would an economy run out of legal tender? In the case of
| gold a foreign country could attempt to obtain gold reserves by
| taking them out of your country. Alternatively your country
| decided that its currency be used for global trade. As the
| global economy grows it needs to run trade surpluses against
| your country meaning the currency is leaving the domestic
| economy and entering the global economy. Alternatively you are
| in a currency union whose level of development between nations
| is not compatible with each other. The country that had the
| strongest currency would end up having a much weaker shared
| currency which creates permanent trade surpluses in that nation
| and deficits in another, salaries drop in the deficit nation
| and its debt burden becomes unsustainable.
|
| Adoption of Bitcoin as exclusive legal tender would pump those
| "bags" but it would benefit "investors" at the expense of stake
| holders (the real economy consisting of businesses and working
| people). The cycle of extortion is now complete.
|
| Think about it this way. If the entire world adopted Bitcoin as
| exclusive legal tender then Satoshi Nakamoto would be the
| richest person on the planet, but why? What explanation other
| than extortion is there? I can create my own ledger, assign
| myself 100% of the supply and then I would own the world if my
| ledger was accepted as exclusive legal tender. The power
| clearly doesn't lie in the ledger, it's the power of the
| exclusive legal tender that did all the work.
|
| Now imagine a world in which we adopt cryptocurrencies without
| exclusiveness. They would just pay with a random basket of
| cryptocurrencies. The economy ran out of Bitcoin? Okay, lets
| throw Ethereum into the mix. That's not enough? Okay, do
| Litecoin. This actually happened in the united states. There
| was a bimetal standard in the US which died because of the
| impossibility of fixed setting exchange rates between metals.
| What was the idea? Rich people had all the gold. Farmers wanted
| silver because it met their needs much better. The problem with
| a crypto-basket is that it wouldn't actually play into the
| extortion cycle. They'd simply work for a less expensive
| cryptocurrency. No "bags" would be pumped so to speak.
|
| How did I come up with the idea of "exclusive legal tender"?
| Well, I didn't. I just read this PDF [0] which has some
| interesting ideas as a starting point. I do not agree with
| everything in the PDF but you can only gain insights by finding
| ideas that counter your preconceptions. e.g. you cannot know
| your own position if you don't know where others stand.
|
| [0]
| https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3...
| egberts1 wrote:
| very nice summary of crypto history.
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