On Tuesday, December 17th, Bitcoin quietly reached the 100,000€ mark, which made its value spiral into free fall ever since.
As someone who once engaged with this bubble from a different perspective, I still understand the mythical value this value holds.
Not only does this swift rise and even swifter drop demonstrate the classic “bag holding” and “whale” behavior of scams, but also does it show how cryptocurrencies are an asset and should be treated as such. The main context I've ever heard people talk about Bitcoin, is for investments, not the usability of a decentralized coin.
There's no real world application for a currency in which a singular unit equals to 100,000€. That's a meaningless value only having a purpose for the previous bagholders of this grift. The people who were told that Bitcoin were to skyrocket to a different mark, such as 150,000€, are now left holding the bag, having created the fortune of those who helped create the fortune for those of the previous iteration of this never ending cycle. Everyone who's now in the negative will have to spend the coming years propagating the advance of this coin once more, to everyone and their mother, in order to ever see hope of making their money back.
The question is: how long can this continue? Every cycle creates a larger share of bag holders and a smaller share of winners, at what point is the mathematical limit for those who can be engrained in this scam reached? I have no doubt that Bitcoin can reach a laughably high value, from one million to ten million dollar. It's no surprise that such “bullish” turns always occur amidst the largest economic crisis globally; the last time Bitcoin surged in value like this was during the pandemic. Economic instability makes people turn to even more riskier investments, as they seem like the easiest individual ticket out of our societal struggles. Yet, as we always see, the majority of those dreamers is left holding the bag.
My criticism of Bitcoin always ends with the same mantra: the world of finance works surprisingly similar to these cryptocurrencies. If you were to criticise these digital tokens, you'd quickly find yourself criticizing the inner workings of the financial system underlying our global economy. The key difference is that Bitcoin abstracts its inner workings in such a way that it cannot be regulated, or at least it hasn't been attempted yet. The scam happens across multiple layers of abstractions, spread between a multitude of legal entities, private equity firms, individuals with no regard for local laws or borders, as long as it means they can escape law enforcement through such schemes. A system both so complex and obvious as a scam to the naked eye, that we no longer regard the victims of it as such, but rather as bad investors who should've known better. If regarded differently, we may be able to push forward government legislation, finally doing what we've already realized should be done for the real economy centuries ago: regulate or prevent the grift.
As such, Bitcoin represents our world filled with the atomized individuals left over in he rubble of neoliberalism, from every perspective, both in those who participate, and those who criticize.
Under an economic system in which your only chance of peace and happiness is to individually stand above the rest, to remove yourself of the consequences of the modern human's disasters, both in climate and society, we must not wonder why many choose to do so, for they are not selfish when they are only taught selfishness.
The real tragedy is not those individual people's actions, but the loss of a common dream, in which not only you yourself are lifted above the rubble, but your kind is as well. As the chance of becoming a millionaire when participating in this grift is less likely than being hit by a lightning strike ten times in a row, we can deduct that the common man regards this common dream as even less plausible. Buying Bitcoin to become a millionaire, as laughable as it sounds, represents the bright man's idea if seen in comparison to the foolish plan to build solidarity civil rights movements that exist beyond, and can outlast, capitalism.
@ErikUden there is a possibility that this loss is irretrievable. I mean how many years have we been fighting against the tide, trying to build mass movements in an age hostile to them?
That doesn't mean "buy bitcoin" or stand above others.
But it does mean we have to wonder just what the hell are we doing and is it accomplishing that desired goal.
@ErikUden in my research...i often find the recollections of a commonly held dream are more rooted in nostalgia than in actual fact.
Being of my tendency, it is not selfishness that bothers me. It is shortsighted selfishness.
@FinalOverdrive I for one believe that every other system is unstable. While I find your notion, of trying to find out whether our actions will achieve our desired goal or are even meaningful, good to think about, I also see no other alternative. The course we are going at the moment will lead to disaster. A different system may have flaws, but I'd rather deal with those than the current (climate) crisis.
@FinalOverdrive Will we achieve? Is our movement meaningful? Are we crushed in every sector both ideologically and physically? Possibly, but at least we will did not make the seizure of power by fascism as easy as they thought. Best case scenario, we win.
@ErikUden Believe me when I say I agree with your assessment about the current system. I am no partisan of it. No individualist can be. A right wing individualist is like a right wing populist: a contradiction.
@ErikUden Capitalism is built on many things, but individualism is not one of them.
@FinalOverdrive what?
Individuals own capital. Individualism might be a singular foundation of capitalism.
YES! That artisan is putting the capital in capitalism.
That is exactly what I'm telling you.
Doesn't matter if you like it or not, but yes, that is capitalism at its purist. That person with capital holding capital controlling capital and applying capital to their own personal benefit, driving value from the capital that they have used to capitalize their shop, yes that is a capitalist operating in a capitalist system.
Capitalism per se peaked about 150 years ago, and for the past 110 years has been on the decline. A lot of people who don't know economics would fight me on this, but. Depending on the country, the government used to be maybe 1 to 5% of GDP and now it can be as much as 60% of GDP.
The fundamental problem that any economic system is trying to solve is scarcity. Now people blame capitalism scarcity, when in reality they need to be blaming the universe. There's a limited amount of energy, there's a limited amount of stuff, and when that stuff is turned into other stuff there's a limited amount of other stuff. Indeed, this is one of the problems that capitalism solves the best, because it directly creates incentives to create more stuff so that you can get more money and get more stuff. This is an improving in systems such as socialism where the only way to make socialism work is to keep market systems so that individuals are incentivized to do a good job. When China opened its markets and stopped being quite so pure communist they went from starving 100 million people to being one of the most productive countries on the planet.
People end up looking at the problems are today, particularly political corruption and crony capitalism, and they want to blame the capitalism part of things, but both are problems of the state that would not go away even if you completely abolished capitalism. Crony capitalism might go away, but cronyism would get worse because there would be no mechanisms for people who aren't in bed with the state to succeed.
Elon Musk didn't become the world's richest man by being the best capitalist, he did it by making the best use of the state's distortions of the market. As a capitalist he's a bit lame, his car company is small and barely profitable.
I think I would be the first to admit that just because our system today isn't pure capitalism doesn't necessarily mean that that's what's wrong with it. I think it's safe to say most people wouldn't want to live under pure capitalism, which is one reason why most of the world has moved away from it. My core argument here rather than being a defense of capitalism is more that we need to understand what we have when we are criticizing what we have.
It reminds me of people who drive on ice for the first time in a rear wheel drive vehicle. The back end breaks loose, and they want to steer hard to correct, but what they don't realize is the problem isn't that there's aiming the wrong way, it's at the rear wheels have lost traction and their front wheels are pointing in the wrong direction, so rather than doing what you think might be the right thing and trying to correct by steering in the direction you want to go, you have to steer in the direction that's going to straighten out your wheels and let your vehicle recover from the loss of traction.
@sj_zero @ErikUden @FinalOverdrive @volkris People criticize capitalism bc once it scales, it becomes corporatism, which always winds up owned by the ruling class, and it becomes exactly the same as a state run economy. Marx predicted this accurately, the capitalist system is self terminating. It gets worse and worse the more it expands.
It's arguable that there's no real category difference between a corporation and a government at all, only the scale changes.
What Marx gets wrong is in thinking the workers have the capacity for ownership of their own labor. They don't, they're workers, not altruistic political philosophers. Most of the working class has a below average IQ, they can't do anything without a rigid hierarchal infrastructure, so the question is how we manage that hierarchy. It seems like the solution can't be capitalism bc the majority holders of capital can bribe the government, diluted the shareholders' authority, etc.
What self proclaimed free market capitalists often miss is the cooperation between corporation and state. There is no such thing as a distinction between "true" capitalism and crony capitalism. Capitalism creates artificial subsidies for itself and there is literally nothing you can do about it.
@sj_zero @ErikUden @FinalOverdrive @volkris (Likewise, there's no such thing as "socialism." Everything is socialism. If you start a company with three people, and one of you manages the total income of that company, then redistributes it in accordance with the labor/needs of the others, you already have socialism.
Big disagree. Say's law suggests value can be created. Smith talked about the value of air. The most abundant and necessary thing we have has no value.
I don’t think that the concept that economics (and by extension economic systems) is fundamentally about scarcity is a remotely controversial statement. I bet you any money that most econ 101 courses would say the same thing. Ultimately people have unlimited desires and there are limited resources, and so we have to figure out how to allocate those limited resources. That is true under capitalism, it’s true under socialism, it’s true under tribalism, it’s true when there’s no humans around whatsoever and single-celled organisms need to figure out how to use materials around them most efficiently.
Nothing about economics says that value can’t be created. What it says is that we have to deal with scarcity. To create value, you need to take limited materials, limited manpower, limited equipment, and use it to produce something new. It’s just clever use of resources to take something that is abundant and turn it into the thing that you can trade with other regions that are not as abundant in that thing, and that is also been the basis of global trade for most of human civilization. People didn’t cross treacherous seas so they could buy wheat and transport it to places with plenty of wheat. They would end up trying to get rare things such as silk and spices.
Says law is explicitly about scarcity. It’s saying that there isn’t enough of everything to go around, and so if there’s more of a certain thing then more of that thing will get used. If anything, if economics is about limited resources and unlimited human desires, Says law shows that human desires will always expand to fill available resources.
An example of this would be aluminum. When it was first isolated, aluminum was considered a precious metal more valuable than gold. One of the descendants of Napoleon had the aluminum silverware that he only brought out for his most esteemed guests. The tip of the Washington monument is covered in aluminum, and at the time it was considered an ostentatious display of wealth and used up a good chunk of the free aluminum available on the planet of the time. Later on, a process came about for extracting aluminum from more or less regular rocks, and aluminum became much more abundant in metallic form, and as such the price went down and the demand for it when way up. An old retiree would never have purchased an aluminum boat in the days of that Napoleon, but today it’s common and maybe even considered less desirable than a fiberglass boat. I would say that the aluminum example is a perfect example of says law, and shows how the less scarcity there is the more thing gets used, requiring scarcity to be a major factor in how much a thing is used.
Smith maybe thinks that air has no value, well… he’d be wrong. There was once a time that the air contained many atmospheres worth of carbon dioxide. That was the most important thing in the world for the vast oceans of plant life that existed about 2 billion years ago. At that point, however, oxygen was a toxic by-product of photosynthesis, and a combination of the toxicity of oxygen and reverse greenhouse gas effect resulted in the largest Extinction event ever, with approximately 95% of all life being destroyed. At that point only forms of life that had some tolerance to oxygen could survive, but eventually forms of life came about that were able to make use of this oxygen to produce larger amounts of energy than would have been possible otherwise. So there was a scarcity of energy, and a abundance of oxygen, and so life itself ended up making use of the oxygen to deal with the lack of energy problem. In this way, even in the absence of humans, life itself dealt with scarcity and abundance. In the Graysonian ethic, I talk about how economics don’t require money to apply. This is an example of that, where life itself ends up making unintentional economic decisions to make use of abundant resources and economize scarce resources.
Even today, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on getting air to where it needs to be, showing that it isn’t something without value and it isn’t something that people aren’t willing to pay for. It all depends on the circumstance. You may be able to pull enough air out of your local surroundings to survive, but if you are underwater, or underground in a mine, or in space, or in the midst of the house fire, or you’re trying to run a gasoline or diesel engine really hard, or you’re trying to run a coal boiler to run a power plant, you will be willing to pay a premium for air.
One final thing, is that value isn’t really determined by scarcity or abundance per se, it is relatively subjective. If we go back to the oxygen catastrophe, all life on the planet at that point considered oxygen to be a toxic by-product, and it wanted that byproduct gone, it didn’t want it around. What it wanted was the carbon dioxide that was plentiful. Today, animal life desperately wants that oxygen, to the extent that we will die without it after a few minutes, and an excess of carbon dioxide will be toxic to us and to kill us. In spite of its utility, most people don’t want or need any amount of chlorine gas, but there’s a large market for it.
Why yes, you may touch my hand so you can say you touched the trillionaire. (But that'll be 20 American dollars)
@volkris @ErikUden That is a meaningless statement if I ever read one. No, it is wage labor that characterizes capitalism.
Are you really going to sit here and tell me the self-employed artisan who owns their own workshop and tools (by any definition, capital), and does all the work themself without hiring others...a capitalist?
Really?
This is the kind of shit I said when I was an Objectivist. You're literally repeating right wing propertarian ideology.