
Richard Stallman: We Can Do Better Than Bitcoin - em-bee
https://cryptosumer.com/2018/11/24/free-software-messiah-richard-stallman-we-can-do-better-than-bitcoin/
======
contingencies
Sure, there are better systems in privacy terms. However, the bigger story is
that the world is changing _fast_ : a huge percentage of the world's
population - in China - now lives a reality of instant mobile payment. If you
accept that the general population will always gravitate toward functional,
reliable, cheap, centralized payment systems unless they have specific needs
such as anonymity/illegality, and that those systems are improving rapidly in
features and distribution, then the real challenge to future decentralized
currency is getting anyone to give a damn.

~~~
Barrin92
I still don't understand what problem decentralised currency is supposed to
solve.

As you say, I want cheap, convenient transaction at low cost, and specifically
concerning privacy _I want to know who I send my money_ , and I want legal
recourse should anything fishy happen.

The privacy proposal of crypto in my opinion is bizarre. I am supposed to lay
out my entire financial history in a public wallet (which I don't want), but
trade with people who I don't know (which I don't want), and have all of it
supervised by 'smart contracts', which are anything but smart and make it
necessary to essentially put myself under surveillance?

~~~
ftlio
It's trying to solve the problem of having to involve a 3rd party in on-line
transactions. Chargebacks are expensive to deal with. Jurisdictions are
expensive to deal with. Standing up a multinational e-commerce site requires a
lot of lawyers and accountants.

Will the risk presented by crypto always be greater than the risk of involving
trusted third parties? Maybe. Maybe not.

~~~
walrus01
Counterpoint: There's a lot of people who will stop buying stuff online with
such a system, once they have been bitten by a system that has truly
irrevocable payments. Part of the reason why I trust buying random $25 used
video games from eBay (using Paypal) is that I know I'm about 99% certain to
get my money back if it never arrives, or arrives in poor condition. I can buy
a used Cisco 48-port 1000BaseT/PoE switch on eBay and know that I have some
degree of buyer protection. Or I can go to Newegg and buy a new $700 monitor
and trust that if something goes terribly wrong with the transaction, Visa's
buyer protection/chargeback system can be engaged.

Moving to irrevocable online payments is basically the equivalent of handing a
wad of cash to some stranger in a parking lot selling "new, sealed!" ipads out
of the trunk of a car.

~~~
CamTin
I totally agree with you in practical terms, but what you're really saying is
that you prefer the governance offered by Paypal and the credit card networks
to the governance provided by the government: IOW, it wouldn't even occur to
you (or most sane people) to file a claim in court over a $25 Atari cart you
tried to buy online. In the society these courts are designed to serve
(peasant agricultural economies), the courts were where these issues were
hashed out, and a fair bit of the "state-iness" of the state derived from its
ability to solve these kinds of problems for people. Increasingly, this kind
of justice is inaccessible to ordinary people except through "customer
support" mechanisms at institutions like Amazon or Paypal or by tweeting at
their CEOs.

One of the very real problems that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are concerned
about (but IMO totally failing to actually solve) is that it seems like a
really bad idea to leave such basic functions of state in the hands of
difficult-or-impossible-to-regulate transnational enterprises. When will these
players realize that they've got more "state-iness" than most actual states,
and how will they use it?

~~~
mantas
You won't need a claim either. Chargeback is easy. So in CryptoWorld, people
should go to court and try get their money back from anonymous seller? That'd
be a field day for scammers.

~~~
ric2b
If you need the extra safety you pay for the service of an intermediary, like
PayPal or eBay or (in cryptoland) Purse.io.

If you don't need the extra safety, you don't.

~~~
mantas
Many people take extra safety for granted though. Wether it's chargeback or at
least knowing who you pay to pursue further legal actions.

Let me rephrase consumer safety in crypto. Food safety regulations is kinda
cool and we feel safe eating out. Now crypto food comes. It's cheaper, but
seller now follows it's own understanding of food safety. Or not.

------
yholio
You can build one thousand money transfer networks better than the banking
system - it's irelevant, the incumbents will never let them exist at scale.
Financial intermediation is a trillion dollars industry, do you think the
industry will just let some small startups and OSS developers steal their
lunch? No, they will lobby to hell, they will pressure all regulatory
agencies, they will scream "money laundry, corruption and pedophiles!". In the
end all you will get are paypals and stripes, thin tech veneers over thick
banking gravy.

Cryptocurrecies succeeded to some degree precisely because they were not
merely transfer networks - indeed, despite the dubious usability as such. They
succeeded because they created their own units of value along with the
transfer system, speculative virtual assets that allowed then to bootstrap
without being grandfathered by the banking industry.

A social token that would strive for a balance between privacy and against
criminal behaviour could be imagined. But it would need to follow a similar
path, neither banks nor governments desire to relinquish any control over
their currencies.

~~~
ian0
1\. Remittance networks are constantly being disrupted. Just look at Transfer-
to, Transferwise, Ozforex etc. And the real wallets are just starting (eg
Alipay). Whats not disrupting international remittance markets is crypto. And
the reason is that it didnt solve any problems!

\- Western union built the largest and easiest cash-in cash-out network for
non-banked customers. THEN it sat on this network and collected lots of forex
fees.

\- Banks persuaded people that they were safe places to store their money.
THEN they sat on this and collected fees from forex.

If crypto could do either of those things it would see adoption. As its stands
its light years away from being usable or trustworthy - so this isn't going to
happen anytime soon.

2\. Financial intermediaries don't make that much money. Eg compare the market
cap of your countries largest switch with that of its largest bank. Banks make
most of their money from loaning and investing money, not payments. If crypto
had potential they would be selling you it with interest.

3\. There are entirely rational arguments against crypto being legalised as
currency. And if we are to move forward with replacing our unit of value it
would be wise to understand why, example:

\- Countries rely on taxation to provide social services, how will crypto
adoption impact?

\- People are easily swindled, how will crypto prevent that?

\- People dont like it when their money suddenly devalues overnight - how will
crypto prevent that?

Believe it or not its not a vast conspiracy. The majority of what regulators
do is to react to some past monetary catastrophe. There are ways ahead but
seriously - it's time to get practical with solutions.

Yes. It's a beautiful algorithm. Yes, everyone hates fees, financiers and
inequality. But no, the algorithm alone isn't going to help us fix that.

------
Kaveren
> "It was a strange incident, but apparently not a new experience for
> Stallman, whose emails urge any NSA or FBI agents reading to “follow
> Snowden’s example” and blow the whistle."

I find it extremely hard to believe that the US intelligence agencies haven't
mastered the art of tapping phones without alerting targets over the decades.

> "Asked what he thought about so-called privacy coins, Stallman said he’d
> gotten an expert to assess their potential, and “for each one he would point
> out some serious problems, perhaps in its security or its scalability.”

It would've been nice for the interviewer to ask followup questions in
response to this.

> "Taler never rejects a legitimate customer due to a fraud-detection false
> positive."

This would be nice. PayPal has caused no shortage of headaches for both me and
people who wish to send me money. I wouldn't mind something better catching
on.

~~~
paulsutter
Zcash’s privacy is cryptographic whereas Monero seems more like a chain with a
builtin mixer. Monero has a history of fixing privacy issues as they are
published (for example the paper by the National University of Singapore).
Fixing issues is good, having so many is less good. Zcash has scalability
limitations because it’s hard to add an L2 solution like Lightning because
that would pretty much wreck privacy. But zcash is running at nowhere near
capacity so that’s hypothetical.

They’re both great experiments and Stallman would be more impressive proposing
better solutions than just sniping at the projects.

~~~
daira
There's a pretty detailed proposal of a privacy-preserving L2 solution for
Zcash, called BOLT ([https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-
channels/](https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels/)). The original
paper is at
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701) , and
there's a prototype implementation by J. Ayo Akinyele at
[https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/libbolt](https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/libbolt)
. Further development of that implementation is being funded by the Zcash
Foundation
([https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2/iss...](https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2/issues/29)).
The Blossom upgrade scheduled for October 2019 is intended to include
consensus changes needed for BOLT
([https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/announcing-zcash-
blossom-...](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/announcing-zcash-blossom-and-
proposed-feature-goals/31891) and
[https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3676](https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3676)).

There are also realistic longer-term possibilities for L1 scaling of Zcash,
including the possibility of doing a Coda-like succinct blockchain
([https://codaprotocol.com/](https://codaprotocol.com/)). I've been working on
optimizing recursive validation
([https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3425](https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3425))
and researching how to find more efficient pairing-friendly curves in order to
make this practical. Networking optimizations and other consensus layer
upgrades along the lines of SPECTRE/PHANTOM ([https://medium.com/@drstone/an-
overview-of-spectre-a-blockda...](https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-
spectre-a-blockdag-consensus-protocol-part-2-36d3d2bd33fc) and
[https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-phantom-a-
blockda...](https://medium.com/@drstone/an-overview-of-phantom-a-blockdag-
consensus-protocol-part-3-f28fa5d76ef7)), etc. are also quite feasible.

It's correct that we're not running anywhere near capacity at the moment, and
that gives us time to develop these solutions.

\-- Daira Hopwood (Zcash developer)

~~~
paulsutter
Thanks for the links, nice to see the work on Bolt.

And Coda looks incredible if that can be done

------
eMSF

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      n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;
      n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
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      document,’script’,’//connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
      fbq(‘init’, ‘239547076708948’);
      fbq(‘track’, “PageView”);
    

Interesting footnote.

~~~
Rjevski
Sidenote: does anyone know why all these cancer scripts use this approach of
using an initial Javascript payload to create a `script` tag, instead of just
being a `script` tag directly?

~~~
etaioinshrdlu
A injected script element was last I checked the only way to send a piece of
data to a remote server on a third party domain without a preflight OPTIONS
request.

Less round trips. Less bandwidth.

For more reading look here:[http://dev.housetrip.com/2014/04/17/unleash-your-
ajax-reques...](http://dev.housetrip.com/2014/04/17/unleash-your-ajax-
requests-with-cors/)

But in general here's what is wanted.

\- No OPTIONS request

\- Third party domain.

\- withCredentials - pass cookies in the request.

The best option in this case is actually a injected async script element.

Source: worked in ad tech a few years ago. Looked into all the possible
options, this came up least bad, and explained why it was so popular.

~~~
lancefisher
That's right. Check out JSONP for more info:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP)

This was really common before CORS.

------
jammygit
After a few links, I found an overview of Taler here (scroll down to the
bottom):

[https://taler.net/en/developers.html](https://taler.net/en/developers.html)

edit: the demo seems pretty easy to work with. Its a browser extension,
basically

------
teekert
'Stallman continued:

“I wouldn’t want perfect privacy because that would mean it would be
impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that’s one of the jobs we need
the state to do.”'

What? That doesn't really sounds liks RMS, right? I thought he wanted perfect
privacy for all the things?

I mean I know he is certainly not against law enforcement doing proper
investigation but I thought he was of the "There is either perfect encryption
(and thus privacy) or there is no encryption" -persuasion.

~~~
eric24234
Some years ago in one of RMS interviews he told the seller should not remain
private but the buyers privacy must be protected. So his views has never
changed.

------
shanev
Original article: [https://www.coindesk.com/free-software-messiah-richard-
stall...](https://www.coindesk.com/free-software-messiah-richard-stallman-we-
can-do-better-than-bitcoin).

~~~
em-bee
how embarassing. i usually try to share the original article. i didn't notice
that it was a reprint when reading it.

------
se7entime
Software/system mentioned by RMS: GNU Taler -
[https://taler.net/en/](https://taler.net/en/) Discussion about GNU Taler:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15274110)

------
djohnston
we're still asking a question we've had since times immemorial: where to draw
the line between protection and privacy? it is, in my opinion, an inevitable
tradeoff and you cannot have either in absolute without the other
disintegrating. the stakes seem higher now because of the scale of the systems
in question, but the philosophical arguments are probably the same. i should
read more.

~~~
sigstoat
> we're still asking a question we've had since times immemorial: where to
> draw the line between protection and privacy?

i've got a cookie which says you can't find anyone writing seriously about
that question before the advent of photography.

~~~
trynewideas
In 1621, Geneva faced a syphilis outbreak. Geneva's council demanded that
apothecaries and physicians report every treatment to the council, in the name
of controlling the outbreak. The apothecaries and physicians immediately
protested in writing, claiming that violating their patients' privacy would
exacerbate the outbreak by making them less likely to seek treatment.

A summary of these writings in French, by Leon Gautier:
[https://archive.org/stream/b2475674x/b2475674x_djvu.txt](https://archive.org/stream/b2475674x/b2475674x_djvu.txt)

Relevant excerpt fed through Google Translate for convenience:

> The Council, according to its custom, did not wish to be wrong, but
> practically justified the faculty. From that date, the authority does not
> seem to have required the medical profession to make the mandatory
> declaration of all cases of venereal disease. And even today (1906) the
> problem of reconciling the public interest and the honor of families remains
> before the legislator and the public.

------
catacombs
> Richard Stallman, the fervently committed founder of the free software
> movement, is discussing the term “libertarian,” when he stops talking
> abruptly and says, “Hello?”

> I tell him I’m still listening, but he explains that the confused greeting
> wasn’t intended for me. Instead, he says a man’s voice – neither mine nor an
> echo of his – had just cut in with one word: “liberty.”

> “Does that sort of thing happen a lot?” I ask. I hadn’t heard anything.

> “Yes,” he says. “It wasn’t a voice I recognize.” He added, “It could be … ”

> Then a quick burst of static made his next words inaudible.

> It was a strange incident, but apparently not a new experience for Stallman,
> whose emails urge any NSA or FBI agents reading to “follow Snowden’s
> example” and blow the whistle.

Uh... What happened here?

~~~
roywiggins
I've had cross-talk happen while on a cellphone. It cut over to another voice
saying "... three months!..."\- it sounded like an ad. But it wasn't audible
on the other end and the conversation wasn't interrupted.

Never did work out what happened there.

~~~
belltaco
What are the odds of a random crosstalk saying 'liberty' ?

~~~
stickfigure
The question you should be asking is: What are the odds that some random vocal
sound might be interpreted as "liberty" by a human brain that is primed by
talking about that subject?

Odds seem pretty good to me.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
By _Richard Stallman’s_ brain likely increase the odds somewhat.

------
discoball
The problem is greed, not money in itself. And you can't eliminate greed. You
can make it harder to be greedy but greed always finds a way to corrode any
constraints you build into the system. Greed is necessary but it is not good
if not channeled to push the lever of economic activity rather than left in
its free, destructive form. Hmm.

------
vecio
The privacy feature of Taler is similar to the CryptoNote unlinkable address,
but without using the ring signatures. I'm working on an open source payment
system similar to Taler
[https://github.com/MixinNetwork](https://github.com/MixinNetwork)

------
masonicb00m
RMS has impressive convictions, but unless you've given up your cell phone
because of his views, his thoughts on Bitcoin probably aren't applicable
either.

------
haloux
Free software messiah? OP is laying it on a bit thick with that one.

~~~
drcode
If it was "free software prophet" I would be fully on board: I think RMS was
way ahead of the curve in foreseeing many of our future dilemmas around
privacy, software patents, DRM, the open source movement, and many others.

~~~
rout39574
Or maybe "saint".

~~~
jammygit
Saint Ignucius I hope you mean ;)

------
apo
Stallman's views on Bitcoin and privacy make no sense. It almost sounds like
he doesn't understand how Bitcoin works.

From the original article ([https://www.coindesk.com/free-software-messiah-
richard-stall...](https://www.coindesk.com/free-software-messiah-richard-
stallman-we-can-do-better-than-bitcoin)):

 _“If bitcoin protected privacy, I’d probably have found a way to use it by
now.”_

Bitcoin does protect privacy. It just does so using a model most people,
including apparently RMS, don't see very often. It's called pseudonymity, and
you won't find that word once in the article.

Later RMS claims:

 _“What I’d really like is a way to make purchases anonymously from various
kinds of stores, and unfortunately it wouldn’t be feasible for me with
bitcoin.”_

Whatever distinction between the current Bitcoin experience of buying things
from "various kinds of stores" and what RMS envisions is far from clear.

Then later:

 _“I wouldn’t want perfect privacy because that would mean it would be
impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that’s one of the jobs we need
the state to do.”_

Say what? He doesn't wan't "perfect privacy," yet less than perfect privacy is
exactly what bitcoin offers today. Block chain analytics companies are
everywhere, hawking their data analytics to governments, advertisers, and
anyone else who wants to take advantage of Bitcoin users who make privacy
blunders.

This statement in particular makes me very skeptical about the goals of Taler.
If the system allows the slightest privacy backdoor, then the entire system is
worthless from a privacy perspective.

 _Privacy in the Taler system, then, is limited to users spending their
digital cash. They are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, “the
exchange, when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or
customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look
identical from the exchange.”_

The unanswered question then becomes how exactly does Taler enable the state
to investigate crimes?

------
jondubois
I have mixed feelings about privacy. I think that transparency can be good in
the right context. Selective transparency as a tool for coercion is what I'm
worried about. The financial transparency that some cryptocurrencies promote
is a net positive in my opinion. I like the idea that the most valuable
cryptos are also the most public ones. It's as if society was paying people a
premium for choosing a transparent currency as their base. Celebrities give up
more of their personal privacy as they become more famous so it would make
sense that wealthy people should give up more of their financial privacy as
they become richer.

------
Tepix
How does Taler (using David Chaums double-blind signatures) compare to David
Chaum's current decentralized e-currency project called Elixxir (
[https://elixxir.io](https://elixxir.io) )?

~~~
gibsons77
Is Elixxir just another dPoS system?

------
liquidify
I believe that privacy is key to digital currency. It should be opt out such
that government spending can be tracked, but by default it should be private.
Without privacy, I don't consider any digital currency to be fully baked.

------
sureaboutthis
I'm sure I posted this here before but here goes. I own a restaurant that sits
in the middle of a financial district with three of the largest institutions
in the world. For years, these customers have told me to stay away from
bitcoin. Then my nephew graduated with his degree in finance and went to work
for one of them and, last year, he predicted that, in two years, bitcoin will
be dead cause these institutions will be introducing their own instrument.

Judging by the sell-off over the past year, he just might be right.

~~~
sekai
Sell-off is from the huge run-up in 2017, not because it lost to something
regarding fundamentals side of things, BTC adoption is at the all-time high.

~~~
sureaboutthis
At the moment, it's at 20% of its highest value from just 11 months ago. To me
that's a sell off.

~~~
sekai
Yep, but because of the previous parabolic run-up, not because some new actors
in the fin space are threatening it. In my opinion, BTC is completely unique
and driver by a free-market economy, thus the average economist can't really
know how to define it's movement, because honestly, no one really knows.

------
marknadal
Hmm, yeah, privacy isn't what drives adoption. I think a more interesting
approach is what the D.Tube founder is talking about around money as a source
for curation not labor. Interview here
([https://youtu.be/fhMo0pBkA2A](https://youtu.be/fhMo0pBkA2A)) warning very
long.

------
fiatjaf
> “What I’d really like is a way to make purchases anonymously from various
> kinds of stores, and unfortunately it wouldn’t be feasible for me with
> bitcoin.”

> “I wouldn’t want perfect privacy because that would mean it would be
> impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that’s one of the jobs we need
> the state to do.”

------
josh2600
The well-articulated tension here is that perfect privacy is ungovernable but
zero privacy is undesirable.

------
blueprint
Uh, yeah, it's called _Monero_. It's been out since 2014, guys, and it's FOSS.

~~~
Nursie
Stallman doesn't want to take government out of money, so the sorts of privacy
guarantee that are provided by things like monero are not what he wants.

Government, to him and many of the rest of us, is a useful joint endeavour
that allows us to have many if the nice things we have in our societies.

~~~
blueprint
Cash and gold have been around forever, and are similarly untraceable.
Government has inserted itself into money. It hasn't existed in the position
that taking its oversight out of money has to be justified. The contrary...

~~~
Nursie
Gold is not often transacted in, directly, so it's somewhat spurious to the
discussion at hand.

The vast, vast majority of transactions take place electronically and with
government oversight, so yes, cryptocurrency enthusiasts really are talking
about removing such oversight when they propose wholesale moves to
cryptocurrency.

All of which is orthogonal to the point at hand - whether such things _should_
enable such oversight. Stallman clearly feels they should.

~~~
CryptoPunk
Electronic transactions, and even widespread use of cheques, are very new on
the historical timescale. The current level of financial surveillance by the
central government, that has been enabled by this technological shift, is
unprecendented.

A permissionless and decentralized financial ledger holds the possibility of
reversing this trend and restoring the more decentralized distribution of
power that traditionally existed.

~~~
Nursie
On a historical timescale, many things we take for granted, like centrally
controlled currency, are very new.

> A permissionless and decentralized financial ledger holds the possibility of
> reversing this trend

OK, so let me repeat this for those that didn't get it the first time -

This is not what Stallman's trying to achieve and it's not something he thinks
is a good idea. Whether you agree with this or not, that makes Monero a bad
fit for his ends.

------
techntoke
I think there is a hypothetical system of using tools like TPM 2.0, Secure
Boot and Intel SGX.

~~~
lexs
Proof of Elapsed Time (Hyperledger Sawtooth) is exactly that

~~~
techntoke
Thanks, I'll have to check it out more in-depth.

------
gibsons77
I have a question. Why do cryptocurrencies illicit such strong responses from
both sides?

~~~
wild_preference
One issue with cryptocurrencies that pretty much everyone has a vested
interest and you can't separate out the bullshit.

And it's not just vested interest though, there's vested delusion. If you read
enough comments on /r/bitcoin, for example, you'll find people who seriously
think their 0.001 BTC will buy them a Lambo one day. Completely rational
people must have trouble resisting the temptation of just quick-plugging their
pet cryptocurrency here and there because they own some and they're super
enthusiastic.

And, on the other side, there are people who overreact to that, unable to
separate the community from the tech when they are just talking about the
tech. But I also think a lot of people dump on it because they are bitter that
they missed out. I think the latter group explains more than we realize. Read
patio11's bitcoin rants on twitter and tell me you don't see a flare of that.

It all creates a scenario where it's hard to really trust what anyone says
about anything.

~~~
_Tev
Some people just really dislike the shitty economics theories that are basis
for cryptocurrencies. Hating on something you dislike is not too bad way to
procrastinate.

~~~
sparkie
The great thing about Bitcoin is that people with "shitty economic theories"
are not able to influence the money printers.

Hating on it is wasting your time, because you can't change the fact. No
matter how much you dislike it, or your bankers dislike it, or your
politicians dislike it. It is immune to dislike. You can either chose to live
with it and use it, or live with it and ignore it (at your own peril). It's
not going away.

~~~
_Tev
Current events show that it actually is fading away ...

And considering the shift in tone of comments about crypto on HN some of the
"shitty economic theories" were successfully exposed ...

But hey, keep claiming things about cryptocurrencies, it's fun to watch!

~~~
sparkie
Well, if you only look at a 12 month period, then it might look like "bitcoin
is dying", but when you look at the overall picture of bitcoin over the past
10 years, it tells the complete opposite story. Bitcoin is only trending in
one direction over the long term, and it isn't downwards.

It's certainly fun watching TAs try to predict the price of Bitcoin based on a
few graphs. Both those who are bullish and those who are bearish about its
price in USD. None of this matters.

Bitcoin is not about how much of it you can obtain with USD. It's about sound
money and financial autonomy. Demand for these is only going to continue to
increase, particularly when far-left fintech companies are actively pushing
people towards it, by refusing to conduct trade with people who have "wrong"
political opinions.

~~~
_Tev
> Well, if you only look at a 12 month period, then it might look like
> "bitcoin is dying" ...

Not dying yet (I wonder whether it will ever die), but "fading away". Which
seems obvious, but hey, let's hope for another bubble!

> It's about sound money and financial autonomy. Demand for these is only
> going to continue to increase, particularly when far-left fintech companies
> are actively pushing people towards it, by refusing to conduct trade with
> people who have "wrong" political opinions.

And here comes the "economics theory" behind btc. Especially "sound money" is
always fun to hear ... Nothing sounder than wildly fluctuating speculative
asset! And people will demand it for sure! (or someone is paying for anything
legal with btc again?)

I am not sure why some people keep believing in this. I-cannot-be-wrong
syndrome?

~~~
sparkie
> Not dying yet (I wonder whether it will ever die), but "fading away". Which
> seems obvious, but hey, let's hope for another bubble!

If you're convinced it is fading, be my guest. As far as I can tell adoption
is continuing to increase. You can't take last years FOMO event as evidence
that bitcoin is failing. We all knew it was being overpriced with people's
expectations inflated. We knew because it had done this at least 6 times
before, whenever a new media organization discovered it and announced it to
millions of people who had not previously heard of it.

The difference in the 2017 bull market was that everyone heard of it. Even
your grandma. Every media group published something about it, and everyone who
had not previously heard of it FOMOd into it, expecting it to continue rising.
An event like that is unlikely to happen again, because everyone has already
heard of Bitcoin. There are no new people to inform, other than children who
weren't previously old enough to learn about it.

Bitcoin adoption will be gradual as and when (if) people want to use it. It
really does not matter if adoption stagnates, because there are enough
existing users and enough liquidity in markets that existing users can still
make good use of it, and trade with it.

Sound money will not really occur while bitcoin is under its inflation stage.
It can only occur afterwards. Demand will increase if other currencies
continue to decline in value relative to it. We have over 2000 years of
economic history telling us this, although it was only coined "Gresham's Law"
a few centuries ago. It all boils down to simple decisions people make. If I
have an easy to obtain dollar, and I have a hard to obtain chunk of gold,
which one would I let go of first?

Can you point to any examples in history where two separate monies have been
in circulation and Gresham's Law has not played out?

This does not apply only to money either, but to many items which have
intrinsic value (people desire to possess them) and are scarce. This is why
original artworks continue to appreciate in value over time. Limited edition
products tend to appreciate in value. Abundant items usually get trashed,
until they become scarce, at which point their value starts to increase again
(they become collectors items).

The dollar will not appreciate in value wrt to such limited items. It's just
not scarce, nor does it have any intrinsic value. If Bitcoin has done
anything, it has laid bare for everyone to see how worthless paper money is. I
don't think this effect can be undone at this point. Too many people are too
aware of this fact to ever _revert_ back to using such a worthless store of
value.

~~~
_Tev
You are seeing things that aren't there. Just ask any people on the street
what is more useful (i.e. intrinsically valuable) - dollars or btc. I am not
sure why this isn't obvious to you.

Also, you focused on the bull run, but forgot that people _stopped_ using btc
for payments. For me the breaking point was Steam removing it as a payment
option. Everything after seemed like a show, concealing the main trend. That's
why I added question whether anybody started using it again - I hear only
people longing for days when btc was not valuable and you could pay with it.
Now everyone just hodl's.

And as you say,everyone heard of it already. I don't see how usage can jump
now, when btc made its name as super-crazy digital lottery. You continuously
lean (Gresham law) on the btc being "good", but never mention why it is good,
other than paper money being "worthless".

Which brings me to my "shitty economics" point ...

------
known
Bitcoin doesn't echo real world evolution e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system)

------
vmsplice
Monero already exists, no need to reinvent the wheel.

------
swfsql
> I wouldn’t want [X] because [Y]. And that’s one of the jobs we need the
> state to do.

> jobs we need the state to do

> we need the state

What about libertarianism were you guys talking about? Because the motivation
around this coin is simply NOT libertarian..

~~~
m-i-l
> "What about libertarianism were you guys talking about? Because the
> motivation around this coin is simply NOT libertarian.."

According to the wikipedia article on Libertarianism[0] there are actually two
almost completely opposing definitions of "libertarianism", one they call
"right libertarianism" (which sounds like it aligns with what the original
article calls "anti-socialist"), and the other "left libertarianism". From
what I've seen, when European literature uses the word "libertarian" it
usually means "left libertarian" and when US literature uses the word it is
more likely to mean "right libertarian". Given the same word has almost
opposing definitions, it is usually safest to either define it very carefully
when using it or avoid using the word at all.

BTW, in the context of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, from what I can tell, it
was originally more on the "left libertarian" side with talk of benefits like
"democratising money", but now is more on the "right libertarian" side. From
the original article: "Taler’s design explicitly tries to block opportunities
for tax evasion ... We need a state to do many vital jobs, including fund
research, fund education, provide people with medical care ... provide
justice, including to those who are not rich and powerful, and so the state’s
got to bring in a lot of money."

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism)

~~~
2038AD
Roughly speaking I would say there are actually three groups using the term.

1\. Marxist socialists using the term as it means anarchism

2\. (right-wing) minarchists/classical liberals

3\. Market anarchists (both left and right)

Examples of 3 include Roderick T Long, William Gillis, Hans Hermann Hoppe,
Rothbard etc. There are of course differences within each group but I would
say within market anarchism, the difference between left and right is less
than people generally think.

------
CryptoPunk
Stallman's Taler provides a backdoor for government surveillance. This
articles goes to some pretty extreme lengths to whitewash this aspect of it.

------
idoescompooters
Initiative Q?

------
starbeast
We can do better than money.

~~~
swfsql
such as..?

~~~
starbeast
Well, the open source movement has been a good start. The people playing with
the structure of the underlying economic system are far more interesting to me
than the people introducing new monetary technologies.

Then again, perhaps I have read too many of Ian Banks 'Culture' novels. "Money
is a sign of poverty", being one of the Culture's sayings.

------
coldtea
Still waiting HURD, which would have been "better than UNIX".

------
yarrel
Taler is designed as government spyware. Why it is part of the GNU project is
a mystery.

~~~
cyphar
Absolutely no aspect of Taler could be reasonably described as "government
spyware".

First of all, only receivers of Taler tokens are auditable (and the reason for
this is so that businesses can show they've paid their taxes correctly --
unless you are a "taxation is theft" type of person I'm sure you'll agree that
if you want to have large-scale systems of doing transactions this is a
requirement unless you want government intervention). Consumers are not
auditable, nor is it possible for any third-party to correlate their
purchases.

Comparing this to BitCoin, you would have to also argue that BitCoin is
"government spyware" because it provides a public transaction record -- which
is far more information about consumers' transactions than is available
through Taler.

By the same token, VISA or your bank is government spyware. That's just a
ludicrous argument.

~~~
jstanley
> By the same token, VISA or your bank is government spyware. That's just a
> ludicrous argument.

No it isn't! The fact that visa and banks are government spyware is basically
why bitcoin was invented in the first place.

~~~
cyphar
Bitcoin has a public record of every transaction by every user, with every
users' current balance made public (the former might be possible to reduce
with Lightning, but the latter is not since you have to settle everyone's
balance on-chain at the end of the day). Can you please clarify by which token
VISA and banks (and GNU Taler) are "government spyware" and Bitcoin is not?

I happen to think that none of these systems are "government spyware" but if
you want to argue otherwise, it would be nice to have substantiated
statements.

~~~
jstanley
The part where Visa and banks know your name and address and the blockchain
doesn't.

~~~
cyphar
Every single exchange I've used requires providing multiple forms of
government ID. Practically speaking, most Bitcoin users identify themselves in
this manner. Yeah, there's localbitcoins.com but just because it's technically
possible to do doesn't mean that it is a practical difference if very few
people do it.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that it's generally a problem that all of these
institutions know your name and address. But to be honest, I trust my bank to
better protect my personal information than some random Bitcoin exchange.

~~~
jstanley
But with Bitcoin you don't have to use any exchange. You can get paid directly
in Bitcoin for goods and services.

With fiat, there is no way to do digital transactions without attaching your
name and address.

~~~
cyphar
> You can get paid directly in Bitcoin for goods and services.

While I do understand why this is valuable, no government accepts taxes to be
paid in Bitcoin (nor do banks give out loans in Bitcoin). As a result,
everyone will need to convert some of their Bitcoin to fiat eventually,
allowing for de-anonymisation. Not to mention that basically nobody gets paid
in Bitcoin (personally there's no way I would accept my wage be paid in a
currency that is that volatile).

> With fiat, there is no way to do digital transactions without attaching your
> name and address.

Taler is a system that can work on any medium of exchange (fiat,
cryptocurrency, sheep, whatever) and doesn't attach your name and address to
all transactions.

------
adamnemecek
We can do better than calling Stallman "messiah". Let's stop it with the
hagiography.

~~~
yesenadam
I thought they were being snarky, the tone of the article was belittling.

Before I read it, I thought "Messiah? Hmm yeah I guess that's kind of
appropriate hehe". In the "Free Software Is A Religion" conceptual metaphor,
he's bigger than just a common saint or prophet..

------
czei002
Cash is still my payment method of choice. No tracking, etc... GNUTaler is the
only digital currency that I know that could replace cash!

------
beaner
The Lightning network addresses all of his privacy concerns with payment
channels, onion routing, and multi-path payments.

Snowden seems to have similar criticisms. Neither of them seem to be up on the
latest technology.

~~~
pdpi
The Lightning Network is in many ways worse, rather than better, for privacy
than on-chain Bitcoin transactions, simply because node holders have to at
least know all of the route forward, and because of the forced address reuse.

~~~
beaner
Can you elaborate on why you think this is worse than having the whole network
have a permanent history of a direct transaction between addresses?

~~~
knocte
Exactly. Plus address reuse doesn't really matter: if it ever becomes a
security problem, they would rob satoshi's coins first.

------
ngcc_hk
It is open source. It is distributed and everyone can join. But it turns out
that it is centralise and mainly controlled by one hardware firm (ant miner
90%) and basically controlled by Russia and china (> 50%).

The whole thing has to be rethought.

Internet is now a monitor mechanism using social credit. Free what free. Free
to be controlled easily.

Better work on something really free, not just software free to be copied and
use against humanity.

