You're getting taxes either way, either via inflationary supply or paying a portion of your paycheck. Those gains get taxes when they assets are sold so in theory that's fine, but buy-borrow-die is a loophole to get around that which should be fixed.
makeasnek
joined 1 year ago
Agreed workers need to unionize but your first paragraph is preposterous.
This works because people consider their own labor to have a fixed value.
No they don't. Do they not choose to apply to one place over the other? Scrutinize the benefits they offer, the location, the pay? Do they not make "lateral moves" to increase their wages? Do they not expect to make more as they gain more experience and knowledge? Do employers not generally pay "senior" employees more than new ones? Plenty of workers realize their labor does not have a fixed value.
The idea that only a special class of people can negotiate on their behalf is reductive and dis-empowering. Workers are capable of negotiating individually and as a union. And if my working conditions suck, and my union sucks at bargaining, I'll go find a job elsewhere or consider joining a different union.
No, I specifically pointed out he was not the president during the great depression.
From your link:
The government held the $35 per ounce price until August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon announced that the United States would no longer convert dollars to gold at a fixed value, thus completely abandoning the gold standard
I'm saying Nixon took the USD off the gold standard and changed the USD to an inflationary currency (and effectively ended Bretton Woods) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
Agree that wealth hoarding is a key issue we need to address as a society.
Imagine instead if we had a gold standard. And the rich could both hoard money and watch it go up in value by doing so.
- That's what taxes and other methods of wealth distribution are for.
- There is an opportunity cost. By your argument, rich people would just hoard gold and put all their money into gold. We're not on the gold standard currently but nothing's stopping them from buying into precious metals. But there are better ways to make money. If you own 1oz of gold today and you own 1oz of gold 30 years later, whatever the "price" of gold is, the value has remained exactly the same: it's 1oz of gold.
If I bought one unit of Apple stock, if the USD loses value, it doesn't effect the value of my apple stock. It now takes more dollars to buy an Apple share, but my Apple share is still 1/100 of Apple. Currency devaluing makes it look like I'm making money because the share price rose, but I'm not. To be fair, I'm making money but the total value has not changed. I can trade that Apple share for more dollars now, but I probably can't trade it for more bread or other "assets".
If the currency loses 8% of its value, one would expect the share of Apple stock to cost 8% more currency. So if my "return on investment" is 4% but the currency is worth 8% less, that means Apple's value has changed in addition to inflation happening. My stock lost value there. Not due to inflation, but due to Apple being valued less by the market for some unknown reason.
The impact is still disproportionate. While I lost 4% in your example, a pleb holding cash lost 8%. And plebs have a greater share of their net wealth in cash.
If I take out a $10,000 loan, which for simplicity's sake let's say is worth 10,000 loaves of bread, and next year, when payment is due, $10,000 is "worth half as much" ie I can only buy 5,000 loaves of bread with it, I only have to pay back "half the loan". I still pay the same $10k, but at the time I paid it back, I only had to trade half as much bread (my storage asset of choice) for it.
Increasing the money supply, all other things equal, decreases the value of the currency. It's that simple. The price, or value of the currency is the net of supply and demand for that currency. Same demand, higher supply, lower value per unit.
This link argues inflation is more complicated than that, which I agree with in my opening sentence, inflation has many causes. Of course it's more complicated than that. But that doesn't change the underlying basic reality that inflating the supply on its own reduces the value of the money. Supply and demand is simple, unpacking which % of the 10% inflation experienced in an economy is caused by money printing or push-pull or supply chain disruptions is a more complex and possibly impossible to fully answer question. The complexity of answering that question is a good argument for why we shouldn't give central banks the ability to change the money supply or interest rates, as they cannot have the information required to know whether raising interest rates will fix inflation because they can't even know for sure what is even causing it. I mean, inflating the currency supply is certainly a part of it, but picking apart the other pieces is when it enters that grey area of unknowability.
You can't save if your currency is constantly losing value. Putting money in a savings account is just slowly moving value from you to whoever controls the money printer and expands the supply.
You're right about NFTs. There's no reason to store the data on chain. Chain stores the metadata and pointers to the files (IPFS, torrent/magnet link whatever). Chain administers how many copies etc should exist and enforces those rules. Filecoin etc have already successfully done this.
Downvote this guy all you want, but this is an incredibly true point. For 15 years, Bitcoin has maintained a distributed, uncensorable ledger, the question is, can we use similar ledger tech to store archive.org? Wikipedia is a single point of failure, so is Archive.org. So is the library of congress. We could easily store all the text content of wikipedia on chain that's under 100GB, along with IPFS pointers to media content. Long-term, humanity needs a resilient censorship-resistant system to store our collective knowledge and history. These systems, when sufficiently large, are uncensorable and incredibly difficult to exercise undue influence against or shut down. Ask anybody whose tried to get a judge to enforce a judgement against the bitcoin blockchain lol. And they can survive quite well major disruptive events like wars, natural disasters, and even widespread network disruptions. Blockchain can also solve the spam problem that plagued early P2P systems like Gnutella/Ed2k/etc. Everybody moved to BitTorrent because we could trust custodians (trackers and indexers) to curate lists of valid torrents. But that can be decentralized now.
There's over a dozen different blockchain projects working on the "file storage problem", some of them have very interesting proposals, at least one of those is going to emerge from the smoke with something that will replicate archive.org's current role, but it might be a few years before that happens. Already, we have blockchains which offer "decentralized file storage marketplace" that competes pretty well with current file storage providers (AWS etc), and some of them have been running for years.
We need more censorship-resistant, private, decentralized communication protocols. We need them to be widespread enough that lawmakers see censoring/controlling them as technically impossible and politically unwise. That means they need to be easy to use for the average person so we can get sufficient adoption. Donate to your software of choice, that's how it happens.
This is kinda how Bitcoin is. Even if a nation-sate wants to "ban" it or attack the network, the network is gonna keep working and doing its thing (technically impossible) and they will piss off a bunch of voters and/or other keys to political power and potentially lose out on businesses and jobs building in this sector (politically unwise). The CCP tried to ban Bitcoin some years ago, did not work at all, and the network wasn't nearly as strong or large as it is today.