Jason Calacanis is Wrong: Bitcoin is Greatest Hope for Liberty

https://signnow.com/blog/2011/05/16/bitcoin-p2p-currency-ou-greatest-hope-for-liberty/

by shanecox1 • 15 years ago

11 31 15 years ago

This article is a response to "L019: Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We’ve Ever Seen" by Jason Calacanis and the LAUNCH team.

jsprinkles9• 15 years ago

Bitcoin’s success would be the greatest victory for human liberty since the creation of limited democracy, the emancipation of slaves, or woman’s suffrage.

The Bitcoin community needs a serious check. I didn't even make it past that because fuck you for putting your cryptocurrency in the same class as those historic human moments. Who the hell do you think you are?

----

Since everyone is running up to criticize me for coming up against BitCoin let me make clear that I vehemently disagree with any kind of assertion that BitCoin is on the same level as the aforementioned triumphs of humanity. I think BitCoin has potential and I even dabbled in mining them.

Feel free to attack me as an enemy of liberty but know that you really suck at disagreeing. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Di... (I'm just as guilty of one of the lower ones, here, but Christ - emancipation? Seriously?)

mchusma6• 15 years ago

Someone who understands currency, liberty, history, and cryptography better than you.

jsprinkles9• 15 years ago

Thank you for proving my point with an ad hominem. Clearly because I disagree with minimizing the emancipation of an entire race by comparing it to a software project, I am unqualified to make such a remark. What a fantastically logical argument you have there.

The important part that all this circlejerking seems to miss is that BitCoin has not accomplished ANYTHING yet. However everybody is ready to chalk it up as a humanity-changing experience with the article's comparison the most nauseating fucking example of worth inflation I have ever seen. If BitCoin ends up disrupting every currency in the world you MIGHT, repeat MIGHT, be able to make that claim.

But not a single moment sooner.

aisalwaysa3• 15 years ago

Hey Sprinkles, I'm reading your comments and trying to figure out if you support freedom or not...

If the government is robbing its citizens, and forcing the poorest of them to pay a monstrous inflation tax, why is a FREE CHOICE alternative to fight government oppression a threat to you?

dablya2• 15 years ago

"I'm reading your comments and trying to figure out if you support freedom or not..."

It's shit like this that makes it difficult to take libertarians seriously.

sethg3• 15 years ago

Inflation is not a tax.

Furthermore, a rise in the dollar-denominated price of gold is not inflation; inflation is a rise in the nominal price of things we actually buy.

kevin_morrill• 15 years ago

Let's put it this way... who knows whether Bitcoin will amount to much at all. But the horrors of inflation are just as serious as the horrors of tyrannical governments and slavery. Inflation causes capital miss-allocations in the hundreds of billions of dollars, possibly even trillions. Eventually you have to put a price on this and say that millions of man years worth of effort are either out right wasted or lost in opportunity cost.

This is hard to grasp, because it's the productive output you don't get and will never see that's at stake. What are you missing out on? Things real people want: better healthcare, cheaper/healthier food, more time away from work with their families. What did you get instead? Multiple housing booms, useless dot com companies, acres of useless tulips fields. I am not saying the latter have no value, but rather that they are pursued because of inaccurate market signals and come at the cost of non-investment in more valuable, life saving and life improving pursuits.

Inflation is just as deadly serious as mass graves, because at massive scale that's what it quietly causes.

jsprinkles9• 15 years ago

> But the horrors of inflation are just as serious as [...] slavery.

Do tell me how. That is a hilarious assertion. I really hope you're kidding.

Somehow, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer doesn't quite have the same ring to it of publicly lynching people because their skin is a different color. Problems with a market aren't even on the same level as buying and selling humans because they are a minority.

I'm not a member of a race that generally suffered from forced slavery, and even I am offended that you would draw the parallel.

dynosaur3• 15 years ago

Longterm economic servitude under the rule of banking-government complex has a small chance to be broken with this tool. Recall that the shortsighted among us also were fussing and fuming when email went from being in the domain of academic geeks to the unwashed masses.

Some people just dislike change for the better, I guess.

sethg3• 15 years ago

I was born in 1969. The US went off the gold standard when I was about two years old. I remember news reports of the rate of inflation going above 15%. I remember the economy being one of the reasons Carter lost the Presidency. I remember the rate being brought down, not by going back on the gold standard, but by the Federal Reserve following the standard Keynesian prescription, i.e., cranking up interest rates and causing a recession that brought unemployment up to about 10%.

I think I was more politically aware than the average ten-year-old, but somehow I missed anything comparable to mass graves.

mchusma6• 15 years ago

jsprinkles - Just looked at your pyramid. So are your attacks ad hominem or name calling? You definately are not at the refuting the central point section. I laid out an argument why that is true, you have failed to address it at all. I maintain that it would be the biggest win for liberty since those events. Can you think of a better example?

And yes. I am being serious.

morphoyle• 15 years ago

...which is why it will be made illegal soon. Governments aren't interested in granting liberties. It tends to make law enforcement more difficult, and law enforcement tends to be lazy in the first place.

mchusma6• 15 years ago

It will be tough to enforce though...

jsprinkles9• 15 years ago

Clearly you have never dealt with a government.

You are hedging your entire startup on the government not getting involved and freezing your accounts, by the way. Smart move! (Clever promotion, might I add, especially with that little footer.)

MatthewB• 15 years ago

I'm a little confused - why would losing your laptop for example cause you to lose your bitcoins? Wouldn't the current value of each user be stored in this chain they mention?

Shouldn't there be a way to back up your bitcoins? Seems like it would be very vulnerable to an EMP attack, right?

tzs• 15 years ago

What exactly stops someone (even a government) from creating a Bitcoin2 that is similar to Bitcoin but uses different parameters? And then a Bitcoin3, and so on?

That turns Bitcoin into just one of several P2P currency-like commodities, with the government able to control the overall P2P currency supply just like they control the current currency supply.

Jason Calacanis is Wrong: Bitcoin is Greatest Hope for Liberty

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