Anarchist Discussion Forums

Hey, it's not money's fault that it's not used to properly account for things, don't blame the money!

Seriously, it's up to government (or that is to say, the community as a whole) to factor in the additional costs to things, for instance if hamburgers had environmental costs applied to the price on the menu, they'd be a lot more expensive... but then auditing all that and policing the inevitable black markets that would result, this is how the State grows. Such is a matter of judgment I guess.

You probably know that GDP is merely a measure of the value of receipts a nation has generated, so make a table and sell it, that goes on the GDP, build a car and sell it -> GDP, do some coding -> GDP, hair-do and manicure -> GDP, crash your car -> GDP, house burn down -> GDP, stress related freak-out and attempted suicide leading to months of counseling in an asylum -> GDP. I know that some governments/think-tanks are trying to work out better ways to measure an economy, better ways to 'take account', but yes money is not good at being used to account for everything that perhaps should be accounted for. Nonetheless it is used to account for things.

The good thing about GDP is that it is easily measured (well, easily measured by pen-pushers that like doing that sort of thing anyway). Same thing money. As of yet I've not heard a decent proposal by anarchists that would do without money as to what kind of handle they would use for their economy. (Economy being the production, distribution and consumption of products and services). Some anarchists seem to suggest a kind of horrific anarcho-totalitarianism, cool as a dystopian sci-fi concept but I wouldn't want to live there.

[quote="Cet"]I'm aware of silk road, it's a fascinating site definitely, but somewhat disturbing to me. Selling marijuana or mescalin on the internet, I'm all for that, right on man, but Guns and Meth? I'm not for that at all. Really it represents all that's wrong with the American idea of what anarchy is all about... bunch of free-market sociopaths.[/quote]

For sure. One of the problems I find in capitalism is that it also encourages production and trade of harmful products and activities. I am not really enthusiastic about guns, having at one time been in favor of gun control prior to becoming a radical. I don't think I can really speculate what things will look like when a revolution will come, because it will also depend on what multiple factors.

[quote]I like bitcoin because it's inherent deflationary nature is more suited for life on our finite little planet. As opposed to the infinite pyramid-scheme debt-based model of money that we struggle under now.

I must be honest, I myself am not actually an anarchist, I'm a social democrat. And for me money is a great invention but I don't think there must be poverty. Money is a form of communication, a means of accounting, of transferring energy and effort, of storing and transporting value. It's a great invention, even if I were an actual anarchist I wouldn't be an anarcho capitalist, but would definitely see a place for a form of money that nobody rules.[/quote]

I don't think there must be poverty either, but I don't think it can be contained well as long as we rely heavily on money, at least under current models. Bitcoins still are based on current models of currencies, albeit, it is without the banking system which provides the pyramid system you described.

I have to disagree with you that money as a means of accounting, as short cuts causing an externalization of cost hampers accounting, such as environmental costs. Cheating the system by not compensating for labor or paying labor its full share would still happen.

Foremost, money contributes heavily to alienation.

I'm aware of silk road, it's a fascinating site definitely, but somewhat disturbing to me. Selling marijuana or mescalin on the internet, I'm all for that, right on man, but Guns and Meth? I'm not for that at all. Really it represents all that's wrong with the American idea of what anarchy is all about... bunch of free-market sociopaths.

I like bitcoin because it's inherent deflationary nature is more suited for life on our finite little planet. As opposed to the infinite pyramid-scheme debt-based model of money that we struggle under now.

I must be honest, I myself am not actually an anarchist, I'm a social democrat. And for me money is a great invention but I don't think there must be poverty. Money is a form of communication, a means of accounting, of transferring energy and effort, of storing and transporting value. It's a great invention, even if I were an actual anarchist I wouldn't be an anarcho capitalist, but would definitely see a place for a form of money that nobody rules.

Well, you are certainly right about there being no money in a [i]truly[/i] anarchist society. And I think Bitcoin, while it is decentralized, it still based on cash; which means that people will still make demands for what they produce. This is the main reason why it will still objected by anarchist. The second reason for rejection is why people will get into anarchism as well as other schools of anti capitalist thought is that there still will be accumulation of wealth, which means that a small number of people could still get a lot of money while others will end up being short.

Now having said that, I have other thoughts about Bitcoin, as I have been having idle curiosities about it since I have first heard of it a few months ago.

For one, it does rely heavily on people accepting it, and its value is still fluctuates against other currencies. This is problematic because, at least at this juncture, you still don't know if your paying to much or too little, and the same goes into accepting it. Like all currency exchanges, you still have to pay a usury fees, which will still be a problem unless it gains acceptance several fold, so that you count on using for another transaction it when you get credited for it.

Also regarding mining, I noticed that it often will take a long time to get your coins even when you keep your computer on for a considerable time. When I realized this, I quit bothering with the mining, especially when I don't expect to use coins in the near future.

There are some potential things about it that anarchist may appreciate, as we still live in a society run by money. For starters, if you had to bury your tracks, it is a way to make transactions that are difficult to trace or is difficult to stop. Take for example when people were giving to Wikileaks when suddenly the rug was pulled from under them when Paypal, major credit cards, and financial institutions refused to handle the transactions. This is what drew my attention to Bitcoin, though Wikileaks still aren't using it, probably because the strong limitations. But if such option is available, you could buy your Bitcoins use them for a transaction, and the person on the other end could cash them.

In other words, this is handy for contraband especially if you are carefully using proxies such as Tor. One example is [url=http://silkroadmarket.org/]Silk Road Market[/url], which unfortunately isn't taking new customers right now, but when they were open, you could buy pot or other not so legal stuff. Perhaps you need some weapons for the insurrection? :D

Now in the cover you ass department, I would certainly would not advocate buying illegal things or laundering money. Nor will I advocate for an insurrection or watching American Idol. ;)

Bitcoin

Is a 2 year old open source project. It's a form of money that runs on a peer-to-peer network such that there is no centralized control of the system. Think of bitcoin as like the bit-torrent of money. You can send a bitcoin to anyone with a bitcoin account just by entering their account number into the bitcoin client and pressing send. Bitcoins are 'backed' by the value placed in them by bitcoin users. Right now one bitcoin exchanges for just under a dollar.

The supply of bitcoin is fixed and distributed across the network by people running the 'mining' feature of their bitcoin software. Basically you set the software to solving 'blocks', solve a block and you get 50 bitcoins. As the network becomes more powerful, the difficulty of these 'blocks' increases, so that more processing power is required to solve a block. The 'difficulty' to solve blocks is adjusted by the network to ensure that 50 new bitcoins are 'mined' every 10 minutes across the entire network. Anyone can go out and start mining for bitcoins, just install the open source bitcoin software. As of writing this however the processing power required to solve a block means you should use a fairly decent graphics card (GPU) as these work in a much better way for solving blocks than CPU's do.

Don't think that it's all about mining though, the main way to get bitcoins is to sell something for them, a product or a service, afterall, that's what they are for. The work needed to mine bitcoin is not where the value comes from, the value of them comes from their use in trade. These days some people invest significant amounts of money in mining, buying high end GPU's and running computers nonstop... it means there's a certain 'floor' in the price level of bitcoin, the higher the 'difficulty' of blocks on the network, the more solid the floor for bitcoins becomes. Note however that I don't mean bitcoin is backed by trade just in terms of mining, I mean trade in terms of everything that people trade bitcoins for.

One day, decades from now (assuming the internet lasts that long) all 21 million coins will have been produced. Then the reward for contributing infrastructure will all be in minuscule but cumulative 'transaction fees'. As of this writing there are about 5 and a half million bitcoins in existence.

Although there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins, a bitcoin has 8 decimal places of granularity, so effectively there can be a lot more bitcoin units than 21 million. We'll have to see how large the bitcoin economy grows.

More info here:
http://www.bitcoin.org/

[youtube]Um63OQz3bjo[/youtube]

All of which brings me to my questions, what does this mean for anarchists, and for the Global Economy on the whole? Some anarchists believe that in an anarchist society there would simply be no money, which is a fair point. But other anarchists think money isn't a problem, that it is state control of money that is the problem. Well bitcoin solves that. Now we have an anarchist form of money, what now?

By the way you can get some free bitcoins here if you'd like to see how they work:
http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

But if you think the idea is silly, just send them to me instead: 18voAn2WH42sZqJRkKNrX96Exdogzsa1ZM

:)