Florian Cramer on Tue, 3 May 2016 23:04:08 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Live Your Models |
Jaromil, Sure, global currencies like Bitcoin address urgent practical issues that national currencies create in a migrant world - an issue now embodied by each Western Union logo in big city neighborhoods. My issue with Bitcoin in particular (aside from the fact that it has ended up as a speculative investment Ponzi scheme where the first got rich) is that it is based on the economics of Friedrich Hayek and his advocacy of the gold standard for currencies. If applied to macroeconomic scale, this is the same recipe for disaster that the Euro currency spelled for Southern Europe. Actually, the Euro and Bitcoin were founded on the same principles/teachings of market-liberal macroeconomics that advocate strict autonomy of currencies and exchange rates from governmental politics. If Bitcoin would become the global currency, the story of Northern and Southern Europe (or, in short: Germany and Greece) would repeat itself for the global North and the global South. Without the instrument of exchange rates and interest - i.e.: control over their own currency -, poorer communities would no longer have the possibility to rid themselves of debt through devaluing their currencies. And in the case of Bitcoin, the picture is actually much worse. Since mining of Bitcoins is artificially capped (when the predetermined number of Bitcoins has been reached and can no longer be extended), deflation is hard-wired into Bitcoin. If Bitcoin was the global currency, and some people would have assets in Bitcoin while others would have debt in it (since on a macroeconomic scale, every monetary asset of someone is someone else's debt), automatic deflation would mean that the richer get automatically richer while the poorer are drowned in automatically increasing, never repayable debt. It is the same yet worse story as with the Euro, which for Northern Europe meant inflation and hence economic stimulus for exports, while for Southern Europe, it meant deflation and hence the collapse of economies after a short consumerist boom. (This is also what happened to East Germany, btw., after the reunification and the introduction of the West German Mark as a unified currency.) Even without the mining cap, Bitcoin as a crypto-ensured gold standard currency is poisonous because it removes every possibility of saving communities from bankruptcy and debt slavery through monetary politics. Iceland wouldn't have been able to recover as well and fend off foreign financial claims if it hadn't been in control of its own currency, and if that currency didn't inflate with up to 18% after the collapse of the Icelandic banking system. Eastern Europe currently faces a crisis because many home owners have their mortgage debt in Swiss Francs; if Bitcoin were the world currency, _everyone_ would have their mortgage or study loan, figuratively, in Swiss Francs. Bitcoin repeats the history of so-called "neoliberalism" precisely because it _is_ neoliberalism (in the sense we understand the word today), in its most extreme form of libertarian anarcho-capitalism. In fact, it is based on the very same economic theories and theorists. All of it can be read up in Hayek's books. > > Too few people question prophecies like the "Singularity", too few > > activists ever got their hands dirty with hardware and software development > > - and manufacturing - to really grasp their complications. > > This also doesn't computes for me. There are many today who understood that > trans-humanism is just a plain new declination of fascism, but we have other > channels and even the most kosher of all cultural funded EU events can't > catch anymore such crowds. I was referring to Srnicek/Williams, Graeber (and implicitly: Bob Black, the Situationists and other leftist thinkers) who still believe that automation will abolish work and hence capitalism. From my perspective, this expectation is based on naive cyber utopias; the same naive cyber utopias that are nowadays propagated by the 'Singularity'/transhumanist movement and popular figures like Jeremy Rifkin. Among the hackers and artists who get their hands dirty with software and hardware, actually knowing their material constraints, hardly anyone would subscribe to these naive utopias. I am not against bottom-up electronic currencies at all, but only against their current political-economic design. Accepting this design amounts to yet another pact with the devil, repeating all the fatal alliances of 1990s Internet culture against the common enemy of governments and corporations - which only yielded new monsters that operate outside any political and social control. In that regard, the accelerationists do have a point with their critique of "Folk Politics". Florian # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: