Left-Wing Chronicles: Billionaires Shouldn't Exist.

in #hive-1679223 years ago

Billionaires.jpg
From April 2020
Also Charlie Munger is 98 years young. Can he just die already? Thanks in advance, universe.

You ever notice how the richest people are never the ones who actually control the money? Never see a central banker on these lists. Weird right? I wouldn't think too heavily on that fact. Don't worry about it.

It's also very interesting that we measure the worth of these "billionaires" in dollars, even though they don't actually have that many dollars. Here on Hive we all know how liquidity works. If you own the majority of shares in a huge company you can't liquidate all your shares for USD, but these assessments of wealth automatically assume that this is possible. We assume that market cap is a measure of total wealth, and this is a very big mistake.

Imagine thinking that central bankers aren't the richest people in the world even when the world literally measures the value of everything in terms of their own product (fiat). Let that sink in for a bit.

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When Elon Musk holds 175 million shares of Tesla stock, that is the 'currency' he is holding. But in our minds we can not measure wealth in this way. We require a unit of account. So everyone looks at the price of Tesla shares in USD and then pretends like it's possible for him to liquidate all his shares into USD without any slippage, which is obviously 100% ridiculous when we actually understand how markets work. By holding those shares and not dumping them on the market, Musk props up the value of his own business by shear force of will.

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If you had asked me five years ago if Billionaires should exist, I probably would have said 'no'. How are these billionaires getting that much money in the first place? By doing shady things and stomping on the backs of the poor, that's how! If you had asked me back then, I'd of said we should increase taxes on the rich so that we could distribute that value back out to the people who actually need it. Unfortunately, the world is a little more complicated than my idealistic/simplistic view of how the world should work.

Again, the entire concept of "billionaire" is baffling.

We call them billionaires, but they aren't actually billionaires. It is only their assets that are theoretically worth billions of dollars if you assume you could liquidate all their assets at market value (which they can't). So what are we supposed to do? Force "billionaires" to sell the stock of their own companies and then force them to give that money to the government?

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Sounds like a pretty shit idea to me.

Because even if that money didn't bleed out through our ridiculous loop-holed swiss-cheese government, there would still be massive diminishing returns. What happens to all the people who were holding that stock who lost money because we forced the "billionaire" to sell? Oops, they all lost money, and now they are pissed. This is why economic systems can't be manipulated in this way. If you tug on a single string of the economy several more will start to unravel. Everything is connected.

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The diamond-oriented Nolan Chart clearly portrays how the political spectrum can be organized as a two dimensional entity. Five years ago I found myself on the far far far left of the spectrum, but after being in crypto for over 4 years I find myself backsliding into extreme Libertarian/Anarchist territory. Crypto has shown me that we now have the tools to build a system of rules that doesn't need to be enforced by rulers like it did before.

Again, the diamond orientation of the Nolan Chart shows that if you want to be more left-wing, then you often have to be more authoritarian to accomplish this goal. How else are you going to fund a social program for the "good of the many" if you don't fund it by 'stealing' the money from those who have it?

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Of course, if you're left-wing like me, you don't care much that rich people are being forced by penalty of torture chamber to pony up that dinero and pay for these things that exist for the benefit of society... or so I thought.

Crypto really changes the entire game.

Being in this community for over 4 years has really forced me to study, not only POW and DPOS consensus algorithms, but also the legacy banking sector itself. After all, if the goal is to replace the legacy economy, we have to understand the weak points of it. In fact, crypto could have never taken root if our current system wasn't totally broken. Decentralization is highly inefficient and totally pointless IF you can trust the centralized middlemen in charge. Unfortunately, we can not, so here we are.

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How does crypto change the game?

It all comes down to communities taking direct control of their own currency. Whereas five years ago I would have made the argument that billionaires should never exist under any circumstance, now I realize that we should want as many billionaires as we can possibly get. With crypto, we can store that value directly at the heart of the community itself. The value provided by the theoretical "billionaires" then trickles into the pockets of everyone on the network via expanding/contracting liquidity pools.

Take Hive for example.

Imagine if a Hive whale was a billionaire. Now imagine that this Hive whale only owns 1% of the circulating supply of Hive tokens. This explicitly implies that the total market cap of Hive is $100B, which would obviously be insane.

With a current market cap of $432M and a token price of $1.16, our new market cap of $100B would pump up the token price x231 to around $268 per Hive token. These are not absurd numbers. They are totally and utterly reasonable. This will happen it's only a matter of time. Gimmy that $2000 upvote, please and thank you. Soon™.

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But who's going to pay for roads?

Imagine if Hive itself founded it's very own city-state in the real world. How would we pay for things without taxing people? This is the question that is always posed to libertarians that say taxation is theft. In fact, the entire reason I wrote this post is because I watched a Joe Rogan podcast with a random libertarian rapper I follow on Twitter @zubymusic

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2kTRMFJWhU2eGRsF5E90br?si=RRIACaHjTMyXRwIvI_XP8w&utm_source=copy-link&nd=1

So the first half of this (90 minutes) is mostly just about how fucked up COVID is and how we shouldn't be mandating vaccines or taking away alternative treatments and such... whatever... I've already given my opinion on such matters so it's overplayed and off topic...

However, when they switch gears and try to talk about other things, the whole "tax is theft" argument comes up. Rogan asks Zuby how we are supposed to pay for things if we don't tax people, and the answer he gives is TERRIBLE. It was something like, "If the government doesn't build the roads, someone will." What? Yeah, he basically said we should just privatize everything. You know, because privatizing the prison-industrial-complex and turning prisoners in Matrix batteries that farm profit is going SO well. This is not the answer.

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Even though that podcast happened in August 2021 I wanted to leap through my goddamn screen and yell at both of them and tell it how it is. It's very obvious that neither of them understand the basic fundamentals of central banking itself or what we are doing over here in crypto land.

So what's the answer?

How do we pay for communal infrastructure?

The answer is simple: just print the money and pay for it. This is what people don't get. The government can't print money. Even the Federal Reserve can't print money. But we can. If Hive needs to build a road, all we have to do is upvote a proposal for building the road, and BOOM: it's funded. End of story. We solved the problem and no one even realizes the gold mine we are sitting on here.

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Now, there's a very good reason why the government can't print money, and there's a very good reason why the Federal Reserve is not allowed to print money either. It's called: Checks and Balances. Allowing an all-powerful agent to unilaterally control money is an obvious conflict of interest, so that power is delegated to retail banks.

Government has a little power over the FED, and the FED has a little power over retail banks, and the retail banks have a little power over corporations and the citizens of the world. In theory, this system distributes power fairly enough so that no entity can make printer go brrrr and send us spiraling into rampaging hyperinflation.

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Only retail banks can print money.

And that money exists as debt that needs to be paid back with interest, which is how hyperinflation is prevented from happening. We can't print money unless entities taking out the loans accept the given interest rate. If people aren't taking out loans, new money is not entering the economy.

Compare the legacy system with Hive.

We cut out all the middle men. We can print as much Hive as we want. Hive is community owned, and we don't need all these silly centralized checks and balances in place to make sure printer doesn't go brrr. If we need to pay for something, we just print the money and pay for it; simple as that. Taxing citizens is completely antiquated within these new systems because these new systems are self-funding and self-regulated from within the system itself.

Hive isn't just a community.

  • Hive is a technology.
  • Hive is a business.
  • Hive is a corporation.
  • Hive is a central bank.
  • Hive is a government.
  • Hive is social media.
  • Hive is gaming.
  • Hive will have healthcare and insurance.
  • Hive will have food/water/shelter.
  • We can do it all; there is no limitation or glass ceiling in play.

See how crazy this is?

When you really actually start parsing what is going on here, it's totally fucking bonker balls bananas. There is no comparison to be made. What is happening now with crypto is a revolutionary transition that is going to completely change the very core fundamentals of economics and government as we know it. There is no question as to if this is happening or not; only wen.

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Back to the real topic at hand.

So yes, within the old broken system, perhaps billionaires should not exist and perhaps they should pay more taxes. But that argument is antiquated and totally irrelevant now. We want as many Hive billionaires as we can get because that value is distributed to everyone on the network in the form of massive exit-liquidity.

This is nothing like a corporation (stock/security).

A corporation doesn't need permission from the employees to print more stock. A board of directors votes to print more stock and boom: everyone's value gets diluted just like that. Of course there are tons of security regulations in play so it's not that simple, but on Hive we can see the way this works is totally different.

On Hive, if the "board of directors" voted to print more stock (Hive) and channel that money into their own pockets, we'd see a pretty aggressive fireworks display. Things like that can cause massive divisions and hardforks within the community. That would also be a great way for the chain to get rolled back and new witnesses to instantly be voted in to replace them. Case in point: blockchains have much more robust systems in place that allow them to be self-governed from the inside without any central agent being able to dilute that value and siphon it into their own pocket.

Conclusion

Making the claim that billionaires shouldn't exist, but if they do exist they should pay more taxes, is a very tricky subject. First of all, we call them "billionaires" when they don't even control billions of dollars. They control assets, securities, commodities, property, etc. Calling a billionaire a billionaire is a total misnomer and oversimplification of the issue.

When we realize the tools crypto has created this argument goes right out the window. We want people on Hive building as much value as they possibly can and HODLing all of it. If they sell the Hive they earned, the liquidity pool gets drained and everyone loses money. The more billionaires we have, the better.

When the community controls money itself, when the community IS the central bank, there is no reason to hate the rich, because the rich are pumping that value directly into the communities we care about. At the same time, this dynamic makes taxation pointless because the network can just print more inflation to pay for anything it needs. This is the future of the economy and government itself.

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When corporations hold millions of dollars on their balance sheet:

Central Banks win.


When Hive whales HODL:

Everyone on Hive wins.


These two systems are not comparable in any way.

We need to learn the difference and teach others the path forward.

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I'd let Julia Koch be my sugar mama, I'd probably have to pass on the rest :)

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If rich people exchange most of their property for crypto assets, I guess the government will value crypto assets and collect taxes in the future, otherwise how can they live?

Thanks for sharing

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All these statistics are just broken, because as you mention, there is impossible to sell all assets in the same time in that big amount for the same price.

@edicted #decentraliztion in crypto has open our eyes to various pictures to life. But more still it has given equal opportunity to leverage, grow and earn wealth.. making everyone potential billionaire either in assets or liquidity worth. But it's really impossible to still doubt the fact that most notion are burnt from poor evaluation and proper research.
My submission equally opportunity is the perfect ways to grow a community which is only achievable via crypto understanding and acceptance.

Even though he's been critical (and like Peter Schiff, completely wrong) about cryptocurrencies, Martin Armstrong has been forward looking on this point of taxation being obsolete. His proposal is to do just money printing instead to pay for government, but from the centralized entity of a central bank, using old school checks and balances to limit the currency dilution. Obviously we know how that ends up, because it always fails, and the incentives are wrong to prevent abuse. You pointed out exactly why Hive, or something like it, is a far superior solution to this. The incentives line up here, and it's bound to work then.

With a central bank, the necessary monopoly currency is coercive in nature, just like taxation. The negative effects are just hidden better. With something like Hive, participation is voluntary, and for small players, they can exit at any time without negative consequence. Monopoly fiat currencies and their currency dilution hurt this group the most, so it seems to be the most effective way to keep them from becoming economically captive in some way. It's the big players who can't just hoist anchor and leave. It would destroy all the wealth they built in the community, so all of the incentives are there to keep their behavior responsible and in support of maintaining the community in good faith.

That political spectrum diamond is genius by the way. When you go to the extremes, the solutions proposed by both left and right wing leaning people tend to converge, so the square shaped diagram doesn't really work. There's another diagram that was floating around the aether a few years back that illustrated it as a horseshoe. I like this diamond much better because it tells us a lot more with a more elegant and simple illustration.

It's funny how I identify with the path you took from the far left to a more libertarian position. I think that's what crypto does to you.

Yeah, the world is messed up in many ways so it's a good thing we have Hive to fix it.

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Glad i read this things and then realize im not that crazy after all :D we are together in most of this vision of the world and the hive ecosystem it self!

This is just an excellent write up.
You drew my attention to things I hadn't thought about before now.

I'm glad to be part of the Hive community!

"Everyone on Hive wins."

Except for their downvote victims.

Thanks!

Edit: years ago I actually posted how Hive (then Steem) was actually a government, and could be used by other governments (IIRC I used the example of an HOA funding roadside flower planting) as means of funding governmental services. This was prior to the proposal system existing, so only involved voting for posts, but it's kind of the same idea.

not being able to get blog post rewards will be a tiny subset by then.
also ignores new tokens that popped up because of this
also ignores the ability for the network to reach consensus to nullify the downvotes
also ignores the ability to avoid downvotes with direct tips and delegations

All of that neglects or minimizes the actual history of censorship effected by whales flagging accounts into negative rep for months on end. I watched @skeptic slammed repeatedly into double digit negative rep and restored to ~50 rep by free speech advocates. Other than being utterly, even rabidly defiant and indomitable, as well as socially toxic as possible, @skeptic was no more than a ball in a game, played by whales.

Billionaires are but examples of failure of an economic system, unless billionaires are the majority of users of tokens issued in quantities that make it relatively trivial to attain. Parasitism on the production of others is inevitably the source of such concentrations of wealth, exemplary of all the ways that centralization breaks healthy functional societies.

Hive will come to some rational means of enabling relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and power, or will be superceded by something that does, as real wealth - independence in securing the necessities of life and the blessings of civilization - increasingly eventuates going forward. Mechanisms that derange society by concentrating wealth and power will be increasingly deprecated as actual wealth and power become nominally distributed to enable prosperity and freedom to be the possession of most or all people, because anything else will be avoided as a detriment to the comity and felicity of the persons participant.

It is in the interest of society that such freedom and prosperity be general and robust, because it is in the interest of society that fair and just commerce and relations be reliable and as broadly available as possible, as the alternative is crime and savagery. Society is comprised of persons, and each of those persons is averse to suffering predation as well as being benefited by communities unaffected by such hazards. We see today great hordes of people protesting the predatory savagery of but relatively few oligarchs and their minions, and no better example of these principles exists.

Either such derangement will end, or society will end, as such counterproductivity is contrary to wealth production which people require to survive and prosper.

history of censorship

So what happens when I make a frontend, and the only way to get on the trending tab is to be downvoted?
The problem with saying that censorship is happening is that... it isn't.
The frontend in question chooses which posts to show users.
That's it.
The frontend is always under centralized control.
People who say that downvoting is censorship do not understand the tech.

I will admit that downvoting is toxic and has massive diminishing returns and that more people should oppose them, especially on political disagreements... but it's not censorship. End of story. In fact I'm tempted to create that frontend just be like see? You're not being censored, if fact getting downvoted got you to the top of trending. Seriously though.

"The frontend is always under centralized control."

The fact is that decentralization of means of production is transcendent, emergent, and is only beginning. Simply noting that something has always been how things are done is no assurance they will always be done that way, or we'd still wear togas and bronze swords would be the state of the art.

The existence of something does not create popularity. Evolution proceeds over time. I reckon improving the code of Hive is potential of more rapidly benefiting the extant community than trying to create a new platform and move the community to it. I am confident you know I could hardly more support your staunch promotion of crypto and decentralization, despite my occasional rants disagreeing with some stance or another you undertake.

Censorship is suppression of speech, and it is ludicrous to claim that preventing speech from receiving rewards the community has directed to it through flagging isn't suppression. Censorship can be utter and total, but just because you don't double tap me in the back of the head or toss me off a balcony like happened to Yegor Prosvirnin doesn't mean you don't censor me if you undertake lesser measures to suppress my speech.

Please don't fall into the trap of refusing to accept the long standing and historically accepted definition of censorship in some attempt to justify your wealth being used as you see fit. You are certainly capable of better IMHO. My confidence in you is because you exercise reason to act as you will, not because you undertake duplicity to falsely justify it.

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I've been taking a very similar path from the far left to libertarian myself. Very strange how crypto, especially HIVE, does that to a person. I'm glad I found this blockchain.

Interesting to read your journey. I think many of us here on Hive and formerly Steem had our eyes open to the way money does and doesn't work and of the potentials crypto offers. It's a long road ahead, there are many things to work out, but the crypto experiment might just yet pull us back from the precipice of a very deep and nasty hole.

crypto has shown me that we now have the tools to build a system of rules that doesn't need to be enforced by rulers like it did before.

This.

This post!

I went through a very similar way, from leftie to more libertarian standpoint, fuller perspective, yeah, however I got financial system before crypto, and just then Hive fall into the right place as an answer.

It sure is different. Would this change if CBDC were implemented and the governments could print as much as they pleased? I am against the CBDCs but it is a possible action if it were to be passed.

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It is really only a matter of time before blockchain "states" are the norm and governance is coded into these states. If you don't like it... power up and vote to change to code, or fork off!

Or just go to a different chain.

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The answer is simple: just print the money and pay for it. This is what people don't get.

That is so cool, but who owns it once it is built? Hive DAO? Do you seriously want Hive DAO to maintain the roads you use? If you do, there is a lot of leftist left in you. The rightist in me wants to do the right thing and let people who voluntarily invest in ROAD token run it while I vote somewhere else on stuff I understand.

The rightist in me wants to do the right thing

lol really? spare me.


ROAD token? So you want every road to be a toll road?
Yeah I'm sure you're not going to complain about that after it happens.

There's a lot to unpack here, but you've made multiple false assumptions here and I'm not about to write another essay on why you haven't thought this through.

Feel free to list the false assumptions, maybe I will be able to write the essay myself then.

Also, you can remember me the last time I complained about paying for a service?
Oh wait, I did it yesterday. OTOH, that was some idiot trying to charge me for using stuff he did not even contribute to.

🤯
Thank you.. I think.
I agree and follow your rationale, I wonder though about the argument you made previously about there being no reason for governments to tax citizens because they can print money. I think this was related to taking the dollar off the gold standard. Our government is like Tether.

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Hive or Bust.. atleast that's what I always say! Great topic, and an even greater write up.
I wish that the solutions that I used to cling so tightly for so many years actually had any efficacy in light of blockchain technology, in the last year I've realized that 90% of what those solutions were, are are completely obliterated by what hive has to offer.
For all those years I was completely ignorant of Bitcoin, and because of that tunnel vision and focus on those solutions, I missed out on one of the best opportunities for me to become wealthy and live comfortably.

This is why I am all in on hive.

It's hard to express how disappointed I am in myself for this mistake, and how thankful I am for the hive community.

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Let it go my friend,Knowledge is power, it's funny how alot of people still don't know about hive or are in doubt if those post rewards are real!
... Do you know how much i learn here every day? Hive is incredible! There is just so much to learn while earning!

Thanks man! Its really hard for me to not be the person that dwells in the past.. a few idle minutes here and there, and I am rite back to thinking about my mistakes haha!

But I am so lucky to have found hive.. I was only 6 months late after the hardfork :)

I want some of what you’re drinking man hahaha. I think there’s definitely lots of opportunity in the future for a place like hive. If it becomes as crazy as it can be, there will be all kinds of attempts to shut it down.

I haven't even done drugs in weeks.

I would be absolutely floored if governments didn't try to shut Hive down.

The problem is that there are going to be a hundred other networks out there that pose just as big a threat if not more.

Imagine trying to explain torrents and pirating to people before the Internet existed.
They'd tell you that was impossible.
They'd tell you the government would obviously shut it down.
Is that what happened?
No.

Crypto is exactly the same scenario, except with money and government instead of music and movies.
The stakes are much higher on both sides.
It's not going to be pretty.

Yeah true, torrents and things like Limewire did change all kinds of shit. Will they go after the ports and hosting companies? I think that's one of the potential attack points. It can be gone around with VPN's and stuff ya but a lot of people won't have the technical knowhow for that yet.

At a certain point if you have a $50k+/year job on blockchain you'll learn VPN real fast if your salary depends on it.

First come the propaganda campaigns (wastes energy, undermines democracy, etc.)
IP block is the most obvious route.
Then delistings from centralized exchanges captured by regulators (Monero).
Then taking the top 0.00001% offenders to court and making a big show about it to instill fear.

You cam after them here. And fortold crypto will not be shut. But will be this underground community the governmenrs frown uporn, yet they can not do anything about it. World economies are too connected and one careless action risks hurting the other and itself real bad. The markets will bring people into crypto and the same markets will push people out if crypto. The cheese hands as you put it. So shall it be in crypto those that study, the other side and handle there emotions will take there cut and enjoy it

A corporation doesn't need permission from the employees to print more stock. A board of directors votes to print more stock and boom: everyone's value gets diluted just like that.

Yeah and have you ever noticed what happens to the stock price when that occurs. We hear all the time about dilution and how that will make each person's holding worth less.

Of course, what does the market say? If it is a decent company, during stock splits, the value goes up. Also, during equity raises, the same thing happens. When something is productive and expanding, grow overtakes any dilution. Naturally, this doesnt apply to a dying company like Sears.

Nevertheless, when did you ever hear people in cryptocurrency project talk about growth. Instead, it is all token burns. And we wonder why projects are failing. Burn tokens make the price go up is the only thing they now.

As companies like Apple and Tesla show, when there is grow, dilute the stock and it still goes up.

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And price is hurting a lot of people on the crypto stace. Because of they want to see are highs in price and them getting closer to the lambo. Not what remains when am out , what is actually being built her and how should i conduct my self to see this economy grow

You know me I love inflation: it's a miracle.

It's even more amazing with crypto because the distribution is fair.

It is all part of the backwards world where up is down and down is up.

What people believe is not true. They fall for the politics, academics, and media. Sadly, the inflation discussion is part of it. They truly do not understand growth, monetary elasticity (including expansion) or technological development.

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Now, there's a very good reason why the government can't print money, and there's a very good reason why the Federal Reserve is not allowed to print money either.

By the way, the Fed hasnt been able to identify what money is in 50 years. Since the Eurodollar system took off in the 1950s and 1960s, money because impossible to identify. 30 years later, Greenspan actually admitted it in public.

So this idea that the Fed prints money and people think they know what is going on by a M2 char is laughable.

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If we need to pay for something, we just print the money and pay for it; simple as that

That's sounds like a solid plan! Only one small thing - who and why would want your printed money then? The only use case for money would be to control the money printing and distribution, which would create the ultimate rat race

who and why would want your printed money then?

What? It's already happening.
We're already doing it... right now.
We print money to pay for infrastructure that everyone needs.
This is a basic principal of government.

We're already doing it... right now.

I don't understand... Taking a loan is not printing money 🤔

Explain how income/sales tax is better than just printing money.

The Decentralized Hive Fund is already paying for communal infrastructure.

Governments that can't print money are becoming antiquated.

Taxes help to keep the total amount of money aligned with available goods and services. Governments that are trying to solve problems by printing money usually fail miserably. At least that's what I've learned from personal experience.

The Decentralized Hive Fund is already paying for communal infrastructure.

Not really. It is just using Hive tokens to re-distribute the USD paid by Hive buyers

It's not really up for debate just wait and see.

👍
I consider this a wish for longevity 😁

Governments that are trying to solve problems by printing money usually fail miserably.

Yes... because giving that much power to a single centralized entity is a terrible idea.
It's a massive conflict of interest.
Crypto fixes this.
It's not really up for debate just wait and see.

I think we will see our own (new) problems as more of the world moves towards crypto and hopefully towards hive, but we DO solve a lot of the old problems, that’s for sure. and it feels like we are still flexible enough to at least attempt to solve the new problems unlike the old rigid economic system.

My understanding of politics and the economy has gone through a similar progression. I don’t like to label myself because it’s more complicated than 2 scales sometimes, (though I like this diamond shape that says the closer to moderate you are, the further from authoritarianism you are). I used to be very very left but these days, (if I were to try and label myself) I feel like one of the few anarcho-centrists out there. I’m still not sure exactly what things should look like, but the experimentation going on in crypto is good if we learn from our mistakes.

Last thing, I sometimes get frustrated with people like Elon Musk but the problem is that they have too much power and influence. We could take away his power and influence and stifle innovation….OR we could try to promote the empowerment of a greater number of capable and competent people with a wider variety of perspectives. The problem isn’t him, it’s his worshippers.

The problem with the future is that anything goes.
Can you not see the cults and outlaws moving effortlessly through permissionless society?
Gonna be insane.
People say the wild west phase of crytpo is ending.
This is downright laughable.
It hasn't even started.

Very true. And organized crime will function with impunity because it’s no longer considered crime. It will be a shit show but in a sense it’s always been a shit show somewhere. Now the shit-show will spread everywhere just as the wealth and freedom and danger and everything else. It’s all just spreading out.

This is why I don’t like to label myself. I only put the word anarcho in there because I think it’s an ideal worth working towards. I don’t know if we ever reach an ideal form of anarchy. In truth I want an honestly anarchistic government that is constantly trying to make itself obsolete. Tricky tricky!

This post is very thought provoking. If I had to choose a label I'd go with "solarpunk anarchist" for myself. I'm very leftist but I'm always arguing with other lefties about crypto because the majority of them are just hating on it without even knowing how it works or assuming it's all the same. I don't like Bitcoin either - but Bitcoin is like, dial up internet at this point. It was the thing that started the thing but isn't the best by a long shot. My main points to fellow leftists are: you need to replace the thing/system you hate; you can't just smash it and now it's dead; it will rise up in a new, more horrible form if there's no alternative available for people to use. The same way we talk about needing to build community supports in any other context, we need to build community supports that can help smash the current monetary system. Hive works like a co-op really, and we've already proven we can fend off the powerful trying to take it over. We're not going to go from the current system to Star Trek Moneyless Future overnight in one leap; nothing works like that, you have to build upon previous steps to something new. We're trying to build an alternative here, in my view; maybe it's not perfect and maybe a more perfect version will come along in the future, but you don't get there without doing the work and figuring out the bugs and making changes like we do all the time here.
It's like, people who ask protesters, oh you think this sucks? Then give me a completely 100% flawless proposal to replace it or your argument is invalid. No. No. You're not ever going to have a 100% complete proposal to replace a shitty system without trial and error and making mistakes and involving lots of people and seeing what works. That's a dismissive argument meant to shut up dissention, and it's ridiculous.
I feel like people don't want to get their hands dirty - and dirty is the right word, because money is seen as dirty - and just want to hover above it all, not tainted by things like economics or trade or whatever because that's yucky capitalist stuff. But again - you can't just wish the shitty system away and pretend like it'll all just magically fall into place if it disappeared in an instant. You need to figure out alternatives so that people can get what they need.

I read this and found it very interesting but I don't know if I fully understand everything in the post. At first glance I don't think I agree with just "printing" more Hive. That would just devalue it to my understanding. The reason that governments can't just print money is because it devalues the currency by leading to higher inflation. Inflation is meant to increase in proportion with the increase in GDP so that the dollar maintains its value. Right now with covid, money is being printed to subsidize businesses and reduced employment, but nothing new is being produced and the effect has been higher inflation - the cost of goods has increased significantly in 2021 compared to previous years.

So in the case of Hive maintaining its value as I understand it: as more and more Hive is printed we need that to be offset by growth in the form of new users, and also with more people locking it up in their wallets.

Did that make sense or did I miss the mark on what you're saying?

What you said about Musk and Tesla is interesting, I never thought of it that way. From a practical perspective (aside from cashing everything out at once) his money in the form of stock is effectively completely liquid and can maintain its value. He can use the stock as collateral at the bank to take out a low interest loan which he can use to pay for his lifestyle. Living off the debt also makes his income tax free. Its kind of one of those perks of being rich, there are all kinds of ways to avoid paying taxes lol.

At first glance I don't think I agree with just "printing" more Hive.

We are already doing this.

It's going fine.

Clearly, you have a very good understanding of the situation.

Much better than average.

You're only missing out on one key variable... actually maybe you aren't.
The key variable is that if the money you print adds more value than it dilute, everyone wins.
You've already somewhat mentioned this by saying this:

Inflation is meant to increase in proportion with the increase in GDP so that the dollar maintains its value.

Exactly. We can print money and pay for things if those things aren't bloated pork and they actually have more value than they cost (investment).

Okay gotcha. That makes sense to me. I realize that we are printing Hive everyday I just didn't get this part

The key variable is that if the money you print adds more value than it dilute

which obviously you just said haha 😆

🤔 So I guess the community would just have to determine what projects add value to the platform which is being done through votes. Okay I think I'm all caught up now hahaha. The light bulb finally turned on 💡