- cross-posted to:
- bitcoin@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- bitcoin@lemmy.ml
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“We mostly try very hard not to comment of fiscal policy and instruct Congress how to do their job, when they have oversight over us,” said the head of the US private bank cartel.
These finance industry capitalists run the country. They are major donors to politicians’ election campaigns, and they have a revolving door between major corporation C-suites and the US Treasury and other federal regulatory bodies: Regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture is exactly why we should not trust a single, centralized entity to print the global reserve currency.
Bitcoin, with its fixed supply and decentralized production solves this. It is immune to regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture involves:
- A centralized entity which has power
- Influencing that centralized entity.
Bitcoin is decentralized and immune to influence. No matter how rich and powerful you are, you cannot print Bitcoin that is not meant to be printed and you cannot spend BTC which you do not hold the private key to. Period. Rich, powerful people are used to having outsized influence in our legal and political systems, but they are subject to the same laws of physics and math as the rest of us.
Other advantages include:
- The ability to transact for everybody on the planet with access to a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. Including the billions of people who no access to stable banking infrastructure "the unbanked".
- Bitcoin has a clear economic policy: There are 21 million BTC total, no more will ever be printed.
- With Bitcoin lighting, transactions settle in under a second and cost pennies in fees.
- It has functioned 365 days a year, 24 hours a day without a single hack, bank holiday, or hour of downtime for 15 years.
- A market cap of 850 billion, in the top 25 countries by GDP, higher than Sweden, Vietnam, or Israel. Consistent growth in adoption year after year no matter how you measure it. Big banks and hedge funds invest in it because its simply better currency, they see that it is useful.
- And it does this for <1% of global energy usage, mostly from renewables.
Oh right, I remember now, your whole thing is to shill cryptocurrency bullshit.
- Bitcoin has a clear economic policy: There are 21 million BTC total, no more will ever be printed.
....in terms of capitalism, this is horrible. How does an economy grow if the supply of money remains unchanged? That'd be like the US having printed money in the 1960s and then no more. What would it mean for a company to be valued at $1 billion then?
…in terms of capitalism, this is horrible. How does an economy grow if the supply of money remains unchanged?
The economy will be able to grow just fine and normally: by producing an ever-increasing value of goods and services. We have good historical precedent for this: countries and empires that existed before the invention of paper currency. Or the US when it was on the gold standard. In a fixed supply currency economy, when the economy grows, the money becomes more valuable. A dollar is essentially a "share" of the entire US economy. If a company you have a share in becomes more valuable, what happens to your share of it? It becomes more valuable too. In a fixed currency economy, when the economy grows, the benefit is shared with all economic participants according to how much currency they have.
In an inflationary supply economy, when the economy grows, if supply inflation outpaces growth (which it is does) then the currency becomes less valuable. Meanwhile, value transfers to the people to printed the additional currency supply and whomever they decided to give it to. This is what happens every time we do bank bailouts. The 99% end up paying for the investment mistakes of the 1% and the flaws of fractional reserve banking.
Imagine how the world might look different if governments couldn't print money at a whim. If they wanted to fund wars, they would have to raise taxes. That would not be popular. Might we end up with a more peaceful planet if that were the case?
If you expect your currency to generally appreciate in value, somebody has to really convince you to part with it. Might our goods be built to last? Be more repairable? More sustainable?. Perhaps, one can only speculate. Having money that loses its value over time forces people to spend it as quickly as possible. The faster your money depreciates, the more wreckless you will be with spending because even getting your 15th blender is worth more than your 100 Turkish Lira will be in a month. A currency which loses value by design fuels needless consumption/production. On a planet with finite resources, this is a questionable incentive to have in our economic system.
