Patrice Riemens on Fri, 15 Dec 2017 11:45:17 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Never Mind the Bitcoin?


In uncertain times, traditional investments bring in far less returns than speculative ones. Of course the risks of default are higher, but then it's borrowed money anyway, or held by very deep pockets players who behave as venture capitalists: 1 smashing investment makes for 9 dudd ones.

People, in I am sorry to say, 'Anglo', and now 'Global' thinking, have always been the weakest link in the chain, to be eliminated as much as possible - re-read Manuel De Landa. So no wonder fin/tech elites are so enamoured with machines, and wants them to replace ... you.

Taxing all that flush money out of existence? Impossible, since it's totally virtual, that is you can't 'realize' it (reason why saying that 20 corporate people or entities own half the world's wealth (owtte) is very pleasing rhetorically, but makes no sense: if they had to sell out - to pay a punitive wealth tax for instance - only a fraction of the numbers would actually show up) But there is another possible way: wholesale monetary reform, as happened in many European countries after WWII. One of the consequences, if not one of the aims, of neo-liberalism was to prevent governments ever being able to do that again.

Things going to be interesting when/as non-fiat moneys come in big time, and outfits which are not supposed (and perceived) to be financial institutions (think GAFA, and big telecoms), turn out to be exactly that in practice, and will 'own' what pass for a monetary system before soon.

War? Yeah, that's always an option, and some powerful idiots believe in it. We could always try to think like the graffito: "Stell Dir vor: es gibt Krieg, und Keiner geht hin ...

Cheers, p+7D!


On 2017-12-14 10:20, Felix Stalder wrote:
Bitcoin seems, to me, to indicate how much criminal, speculative money
there is out there, seeking risk worth taking, rather than "investing"
in a traditional sense. There is simply too much money held by too few
people who now trade it among themselves, rather than seeking to extract
surplus value from labor. There are only so many apartments one can buy
in Dubai and all that money needs to go somewhere.

Take the bitcoin exchange rate of the last three years as a fractal
image of the income/wealth distribution of the last thirty years.
Exponential acceleration within exponential acceleration.

That vehicle that this money latched onto is about the utopia of machine
peerage, tells us something about the state of the world, in which
technical thinking dominates and people simply don't count and, as long
as they remain necessary, most of them are forcefully written out of the
story. For a micro-account how invisibility is created/enforced, see
Andrew Wilson's great work "Workers Leaving the Googleplex"

https://vimeo.com/15852288

Machines, as Morlock pointed out, are simply more efficient at
everything (often in practice, but particularly in theory), in part
because we defined the world -- and ourselves -- in machine terms, by
accepting information theory as communication theory.

Back to the excess money. The sane option would be to tax that money,
but doesn't look likely in the US/EU, so the other option to break that
extremely unstable distribution of income and wealth become more likely:
war. Historically, this is how I understand Piketty, there have only
been these two options.







On 2017-12-13 20:41, Morlock Elloi wrote:
Bitcoin successfully hijacked a sizable amount of public belief, which
underwrites any fiat currency, and it doesn't get more fiat than Bitcoin.

<...>



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