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January 6 - January 8, 2022
to be “free” simply is to be “free” from government.
these views suggest bizarrely that only government is capable of violence, and that even when private institutions and enterprises engage in what appears to be physical violence, it is in some sense of a different order than that practiced by governments.
Rather than the standard economic definition of inflation as an increase in prices, the JBS defines inflation as “an increase in the amount of currency in circulation,” despite the fact that inflation frequently does occur without any such increase
The idea that inflation is a “destruction of value” and that the U.S. dollar has lost most or all of its purchasing power over the course of a hundred years has long been a staple of conspiracy theories, in no small part used by demagogues like Alex Jones to drive the unsuspecting toward purchases of gold and other precious metals
It is a cardinal feature of right-wing financial thought to promote idea that inflation and deflation are the result of central bank actions, rather than the far more mainstream view that banks take action to manage inflation or deflation in response to external economic pressures.
the process is known as mining, in a deliberate reference to gold.
No effort is made to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of governmental power: rather, all governmental power is inherently taken to be illegitimate.
Yet what is critical about Bitcoin discourse, like other parts of cyberlibertarian discourse, is less the overtly political alliances of those who engage with it than the politics that is entailed by their practice.
Bitcoin is obviously built to escape the kind of regulation the Federal Reserve exerts over U.S. interest rates and the money supply (which I’ll refer to as “money supply regulation” in what follows), yet this is frequently taken to mean that it somehow inherently escapes the second kind of regulation (which I’ll call “legal regulation”) despite there being very little reason to think that might be true.
Bitcoin is not the same as physical cash. So we cannot dismiss criticisms of it by emphasizing their similarities, unless we are also prepared to abandon Bitcoin altogether for physical cash.
since money is inherently a creation of the state, regardless of whether it is based on a token of intrinsic value, even a gold standard would be “fiat currency” according to this definition.
Schroeder (2015, 1n2) writes that Bitcoin “can be considered a fiat currency in that it also has no underlying asset.” Yet because of the appeal of currencies with intrinsic value to the right wing, one of the most frequent objects of Bitcoin discourse has been either to redefine “fiat” so as to exclude Bitcoin (see, e.g., both Kelly 2015; and Cox 2013 for this sort of ad-hoc redefinition), or to redefine “intrinsic value” so that some aspect of the Bitcoin software system (e.g., the energy put into mining, or the “trust” put into the system by its users) can qualify.
If the presence of scams is an indication of the health of a given product or technology, then cold fusion, patent medicine, unregulated mutual funds (the kind that were shut down in the midst of the financial crises of the 1920s and 1930s), and penny stocks should all be excellent candidates for safe and successful investment.
