Thread - Nostr Hypermedia

StackSats.IO StackSatsIO@nostr.com.au 1 year ago

WHAT COMES AFTER FIAT? Last year I watched this Murray Rothbard speech given shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union: He makes the point that for the decades of talk by academics and think tanks and policy institutes, pretty much no-one had paid any real mind to the question “what comes next?” If you could wave a magic wand and make your ideological enemy collapse tomorrow, or they hand you the keys and surrender, what do you do? I’ve thought a lot about this in the context of fiat but have noticed that very few Bitcoiners talk about it. It’s all just assumptions that status quo nation states (the source of all fiat) adopt our economic system and.. And then, what? Are those parasites going to magically stop being fiat? Are the bureaucrat class just going to resign and enter productive industry? The MIC is just going to stop hankering for wars? Israel is just going to start playing nice? Spooks are going to stop overthrowing foes? Pharma is going to stop poisoning people? The mass immigrants are just going to go home? And what of Bitcoiners and their families, how are they going to handle this new found generational wealth? Are we bringing back primogeniture? Are we going to start arranging marriages of children? Are we going to fund pogroms to exterminate the parasites? Are we going to lobby the power centre, or take it over? As positive a future as Bitcoin could enable, this needs some influence to take the shape we would want to see or I can tell you the answer to what comes after fiat: Fiat 2.0, backed by Bitcoin. I’m not interested in another spin on that merry-go-round and if you’re not either, I hope you’ll join me in beginning to discuss these ideas.

Replies (5)

DireMunchkin 3 weeks ago

Bitcoin will reduce various statism by defunding it - It's not magic, it's just that without a money printer to pay for the state, you get a smaller state, just by virtue of the real tax intake going down. As for what happens afterwards it's hard to predict, but I see only good things coming of people being able to keep their wealth instead of getting it debased. @Saifedean Ammous took a stab at predicting what a Bitcoin standard society would look like: He guessed it would resemble The Belle Epoque, e.g. a extended period of peace and prosperity and a renaissance of science and the arts. The Belle Epoque not coincidentally took place on the classical gold standard. Another post-Bitcoin hypothesis comes from the book *The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.* The books authors predicted that we would get a gradual shift to competitive minarchist government with the spread of digital technologies. This would culminate in some people becoming legally sovereign, that is acquiring something similar to diplomatic immunity. Notably this book actually predates Bitcoin, it was published in 1999.

StackSats.IO StackSatsIO@nostr.com.au 3 weeks ago

Short term I see a whole lot more pain. Take your average western country; the economy is 30-55% the government. 15-30% of people are employed by governments of various levels. If you pull the rug on that with a Sovereign debt bubble, a lot of people with ZERO free-market transferable skills are now competing with grafters who will do anything for a dollar. That’s Mandibles stuff. What is the Government funded 55-yo Keynesian economist going to do? What’s the 45-yo climate change scientists living off research grants going to do? What’s the 35-yo DMV worker who never had a real job going to do? Saif’s prediction is more bleak than mine. I’d go Venetian renaissance for a Bitcoin-led era. Both were merchant led aristocracys but Venice lasted a good 400 years and wasn’t humiliatingly crushed like the frogs were after 40 years of good living. The Sovereign Individual is a great book but it paints a future, not a path to get there. I’m interested in the path. The path is where we are; we won’t get to bask in the glory, we’ve got to get our kids there and make sure they can hold on for more than 2 generations!

1 replies ↓

DireMunchkin 3 weeks ago

I'm more optimistic - Sure, a lot of people will lose their jobs in the state sector, but frankly they were not producing anything valuable anyway, so their continued employment was basically malinvestment I think the quality of the human capital in statist activities is not as bad a as you make it out to be either - E.G a Keynesian economist regardless of his other failings is not stupid. Most climate activists went to university and so on. Most of them can adapt to doing something useful with their lives for once. 😏 Freeing all the resources that are wasted in negative value added government jobs today will unleash a boom in the actually productive economy. This will go some way to cushioning the impact on society in the short term, and long term it's of course just better.

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StackSats.IO StackSatsIO@nostr.com.au 3 weeks ago

Oh brother.. Why do you think they made the socialists face the wall? Because ideologues are useless once the ideology is finished. The Keynesian economist, the climate change scientist, the DMV worker - your society is losing nothing when they’re gone. Sorry if that hurts your feelings but that’s the truth. They literally can’t adapt. That’s part of the point of Mandibles - as a Keynesian economist you have absolutely nothing to offer the private sector once reality bites. As a climate scientist signing on as part of the 97% of climate scientists agreeing to tax and spend more on “””climate”””, you have nothing to provide the private sector. I’m not some AI-doomer but the little skills they did have are gone by a Mac mini. This ain’t gonna be pretty mate. Things are gonna get messy..

1 replies ↓

Des Imoto マキシ desimoto@nostrplebs.com 3 weeks ago

99.9 % of the people are lazy, social creatures of habit. Even Winston in 1984: He becomes a model citizen, sitting in a café, fully brainwashed, and genuinely loving Big Brother.