As I'm reading this article, I found myself agreeing, and thinking, so that's why a certain kind of people likes bitcoin - they're marks - too clever by half, doing well while doing good. "Especially if there’s also a pot of gold associated with being on the right side of that Big Idea."
Then comes the kicker: the author is a bitcoin believer who believes it's Libra that is the con.
I don't really understand the author's conclusion either. He thinks Libra is the con... so he's going to buy it? And even though he'll buy Libra coins he's going to "win" the con because he's not going to give them his trust? If Facebook valued trust more than money their business model would look very different.
>Honestly, I wonder what failings I have in a similar vein?
Well, since you asked... No looking up please:
- Do you believe recycling is good for the environment? Paper, plastic, glass, aluminum.
- What various ways to die should you be concerned with: medical errors, serial killers, sharks, lightning strikes, drowning in bathtub, police killing, flu, inattentive driving, plane crash, terrorists.
- Do you believe the streets are getting less safe in America?
- Do you believe we're losing or gaining civil liberties in America as years wear on?
- Do you believe that fiat money is inherently unstable? Meaning it would crash and burn if people start losing faith.
It's hard to talk about some of these things because people get mad and then signal gets lost in the noise, so I left out some more flamewar-prone, and more interesting, questions. Which is too bad, really.
I'll be back in about 6 hours with answers, or my version of answers anyway.
You never came back, but these seem fun to answer:
- Recycling? Generally, no. I think aluminium is the only one that's actually efficient, but potentially glass, though that might be re-use only.
- The only ways to die from that list that I'm concerned about is inattentive driving, since I interact with cars on the regular, the others not so much.
- I'm in Canada, but I'd say on average the streets are less safe (vehicular accidents going up, at least in Toronto), but crime is going down (if you meant that as a euphemism) in both our countries.
- I think the "we" in the losing/gaining civil liberties modifies that question. I'm a straight white dude, and I'm probably gaining liberties at a rapid pace, at least in terms of those I can exercise. There are definitely other groups that are losing effective access to those liberties. Black men, for example, aren't being treated fairly in the justice system at all, not really getting the advantage of the right to a fair trial, and instead taking coercive plea deals. So that's a tricky question to answer.
- Fiat money has already crashed and burned in several countries. I believe it was the Zimbabwe dollar that skyrocketed up towards trillion dollar bills for loaves of bread?
That said, I've already had my assumptions challenged on a few of these over the years. It wouldn't surprise me too much to find that the situation had changed in the meantime, and the new rules of thumb I had ingrained about them don't apply.
On recycling we're mostly on the same page, only you may have missed the part where recycling paper is not just pointless but harmful - when paper hits the landfill it sequesters the carbon out of the air and into the ground. Recycled paper remains in circulation, thus reducing incentive for tree growers to plant more trees [3].
Medical errors kill a huge number of people [1]. It's less of a problem for you of course if you don't have a need to be near a doctor. Flu kills tons of people too, mostly those with immune system problems, mostly the elderly [2]. Agree on car deaths. Everything else on that list is much smaller. Of note, police killings (both justified and not) are on the same plane as bathtub drownings (less than 2x difference).
Crime is way down, as you noted. It wasn't an euphemism though, it's a question of whether one would allow an unsupervised child outside. There was never a safer time.
Civil liberties are on the march. 10 years ago gays could not marry, 20 years ago they went to jail for having sex, 70 years ago they were mutilated, earlier still they may have been killed. Black kids today face injustice, 50 years ago they were not allowed to enter school (or bus), 100 years ago they were facing the klan, 150 years ago there were considered property. Women today have higher earning power than men, 50 years ago they were chased/laughed out of any medium-to-high-paying job, 100 years ago they could not vote and they employment prospects were worse still. Divorce was an option for women 100 years ago. Protesting against the war 100 years ago would send you to jail for sedition, that is to say 100 years ago we did not have the freedom of speech. The progress is dramatic.
Zimbabwe shows us that fiat can be messed up, but does it show that it is inherently messed up? There is a small number of conditions that allow fiat currency to be rock solid. Detractors usually point out fiat is only viable due to trust (unlike gold) and people may just stop wanting it one day. They forget that fiat is always in high demand by the people who must have taxes, and this captive audience cannot stop wanting.
Well, that was fun! Would you like to go on? I might have messed something up here, and surely have some hangups of my own.
Basically, anything you hold sacred is a vulnerability, because they allow people to appeal to your values to avoid critical evaluation by your rationality. And conversely, looking at those areas that you couldn't imagine living life without tells you what areas you're probably being taken advantage of. Do you value your family and children's future? Any company that promises to make life easy for them has a direct line to your purse strings. (This, BTW, is probably why the price of education and single-family housing is skyrocketing.) Value independence? Companies that give you flexible working conditions (think Uber) can exploit this to pay you less. Want to do good in the world? It comes at a price, as any non-profit or social-services employee can tell you. Can't imagine living without the nation-state? You're being fucked over by the government.
The only person who is truly immune to cons is a nihilistic sociopath who doesn't actually believe social reality exists and works solely for personal benefit. But the flip side of that is that it's debatable whether such a person is actually alive and human in the way most of us think about it.
(Note that money itself is a long-con designed to convince said nihilistic sociopaths into working for the general public benefit. As long as you can convince them that "personal benefit" = "money", you can get them to do things that have social value to others, because that's how they get money.)
This article is truly a delightful piece of satire, which is made even better because it seems like the author is unaware of its satirical nature. Laying out the Spanish Prisoner trap to build trust and then pushing Bitcoin as a way to make money fighting the oppressive state: a work of ironic genius.
The article is basically unreadable, but the fundamental point is probably correct in that if you care about the fact that Mastercard can and does impose pretty horrid censorship requirements on a lot of platforms, and a state that can see everything you do money wise has some pretty scary implications, then Bitcoin has offered some hope there. And Libra is intended (probably) to remove those advantages by co-opting the idea.
Of course, the Libra consortium would also say that it doesn't do those things, because it seems to have promised a bunch of contradictory things to different people. Dystopian levels of control to regulators and banks and Facebook shareholders, but also "people can totally have independent wallets that will enable bypassing KYC etc! We've just not built it yet!"
You'd have to be very silly to believe the latter plan will not be quietly dropped in favour of the former (and it's sadly logical to do so as far as FB are concerned).
I agree, the article gradually became more incomprehensible but the core point seems to be that the author has realized that mainstream currency will become crypto with government/corporate backing and lose the anonymity.
which is true. It couldn’t have gone any other way, realistically.
I’ve made my peace with it, at least the we keep making tiny steps forward. It sure beats the credit card networks and paypal.
> It sure beats the credit card networks and paypal.
The credit card networks and paypal are part of the Libra alliance. My guess is, Libra will have the same problems as the current solutions but it will make onboarding easier for unbanked people in other countries who just need a whatsapp account to start using Libra. But for countries where most people already have a Visa/Mastercard, it's kind of redundant. Kind of like bitcoin in fact without the censorship but with price stability.
> The article is basically unreadable, but the fundamental point is probably correct
A lot of the articles on this blog are like that - barely-coherent ramblings. I think the general thesis of the site is that financial markets are driven by narratives, not maths / rational behaviours.
They really need an editor, or someone to tell them to cut the pretentious writing style, weird metaphors, obscure poetry and movie references, and just get to the point.
"At the core, we believe that a network that helps move more [private speech] — where a lot of illicit activities happen — to a digital network that [requires speech permits] with proper [deanonymizing] practices, combined with the ability for law enforcement and regulators [to no longer have fourth-amendment barriers to viewing the panopitcon], will be a big opportunity to increase the efficacy of [eradicating unapproved speech]."
The actual quote: "At the core, we believe that a network that helps move more cash transactions — where a lot of illicit activities happen — to a digital network that features regulated on and off ramps with proper know-your-customer (KYC) practices, combined with the ability for law enforcement and regulators to conduct their own analysis of on-chain activity, will be a big opportunity to increase the efficacy of financial crimes monitoring and enforcement"
>I will TAKE the protocols and the KYC procedures and everything else Libra offers, and I will USE all of that to further the social justice goals that I maintain.
No, you won't. If your goals really are opposed to the current crop of political elites, then they won't let you use Libra to replace them.
When your opponents make up unfair rules to stop you, dont play by their rules.
The author is painfully edgy and seems to be oblivious to the fact that the main use-case for Bitcoin, aside from transferring wealth from marks to whales, is the purchase of contraband, which Libra presumably won't allow. The article is a reasonably fun read, despite this.
Most people couldn't give two shi*ts about the government monitoring their financial activity, in fact they would like their money to have some sort of regulation from the government. As far as bitcoin goes, it is completely controlled by very few entities, it in no way benefits the common man (just benefits a different oligarchy, one that is shadier).
The way this article is written I feel like I'm being conned while reading it. It's basically repeating the same thing for 90% of the article; talking about the spanish prisoner movie. Nothing about why zuckerberg is 'running a con' or what the con even is.
Then at the end of it, I'm supposed to believe that the con is the fact that libra, while potentially facilitating ecommerce and being generally a good thing, is going to kill bitcoin. Why is that a bad thing? If it's better at ecommerce than bitcoin is, then bitcoin deserves to die. It's not insidious to win at something if it's better.
I don't even know if I agree that Libra is a good thing, but the conclusions drawn here don't make any sense.
24 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 59.7 ms ] threadThen comes the kicker: the author is a bitcoin believer who believes it's Libra that is the con.
Delightfully ironic.
Demonstrating that he is exactly the kind of person he describes as being the perfect mark. And yeah, also, no surprise he is into Bitcoin.
Honestly, I wonder what failings I have in a similar vein?
Well, since you asked... No looking up please:
- Do you believe recycling is good for the environment? Paper, plastic, glass, aluminum.
- What various ways to die should you be concerned with: medical errors, serial killers, sharks, lightning strikes, drowning in bathtub, police killing, flu, inattentive driving, plane crash, terrorists.
- Do you believe the streets are getting less safe in America?
- Do you believe we're losing or gaining civil liberties in America as years wear on?
- Do you believe that fiat money is inherently unstable? Meaning it would crash and burn if people start losing faith.
It's hard to talk about some of these things because people get mad and then signal gets lost in the noise, so I left out some more flamewar-prone, and more interesting, questions. Which is too bad, really.
I'll be back in about 6 hours with answers, or my version of answers anyway.
- Recycling? Generally, no. I think aluminium is the only one that's actually efficient, but potentially glass, though that might be re-use only. - The only ways to die from that list that I'm concerned about is inattentive driving, since I interact with cars on the regular, the others not so much. - I'm in Canada, but I'd say on average the streets are less safe (vehicular accidents going up, at least in Toronto), but crime is going down (if you meant that as a euphemism) in both our countries. - I think the "we" in the losing/gaining civil liberties modifies that question. I'm a straight white dude, and I'm probably gaining liberties at a rapid pace, at least in terms of those I can exercise. There are definitely other groups that are losing effective access to those liberties. Black men, for example, aren't being treated fairly in the justice system at all, not really getting the advantage of the right to a fair trial, and instead taking coercive plea deals. So that's a tricky question to answer. - Fiat money has already crashed and burned in several countries. I believe it was the Zimbabwe dollar that skyrocketed up towards trillion dollar bills for loaves of bread?
That said, I've already had my assumptions challenged on a few of these over the years. It wouldn't surprise me too much to find that the situation had changed in the meantime, and the new rules of thumb I had ingrained about them don't apply.
Medical errors kill a huge number of people [1]. It's less of a problem for you of course if you don't have a need to be near a doctor. Flu kills tons of people too, mostly those with immune system problems, mostly the elderly [2]. Agree on car deaths. Everything else on that list is much smaller. Of note, police killings (both justified and not) are on the same plane as bathtub drownings (less than 2x difference).
Crime is way down, as you noted. It wasn't an euphemism though, it's a question of whether one would allow an unsupervised child outside. There was never a safer time.
Civil liberties are on the march. 10 years ago gays could not marry, 20 years ago they went to jail for having sex, 70 years ago they were mutilated, earlier still they may have been killed. Black kids today face injustice, 50 years ago they were not allowed to enter school (or bus), 100 years ago they were facing the klan, 150 years ago there were considered property. Women today have higher earning power than men, 50 years ago they were chased/laughed out of any medium-to-high-paying job, 100 years ago they could not vote and they employment prospects were worse still. Divorce was an option for women 100 years ago. Protesting against the war 100 years ago would send you to jail for sedition, that is to say 100 years ago we did not have the freedom of speech. The progress is dramatic.
Zimbabwe shows us that fiat can be messed up, but does it show that it is inherently messed up? There is a small number of conditions that allow fiat currency to be rock solid. Detractors usually point out fiat is only viable due to trust (unlike gold) and people may just stop wanting it one day. They forget that fiat is always in high demand by the people who must have taxes, and this captive audience cannot stop wanting.
Well, that was fun! Would you like to go on? I might have messed something up here, and surely have some hangups of my own.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading...
[2] https://www.verywellhealth.com/deaths-from-flu-2633829
[3] http://www.paperbecause.com/paper-is-sustainable/paper-truth...
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-price...
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/
Basically, anything you hold sacred is a vulnerability, because they allow people to appeal to your values to avoid critical evaluation by your rationality. And conversely, looking at those areas that you couldn't imagine living life without tells you what areas you're probably being taken advantage of. Do you value your family and children's future? Any company that promises to make life easy for them has a direct line to your purse strings. (This, BTW, is probably why the price of education and single-family housing is skyrocketing.) Value independence? Companies that give you flexible working conditions (think Uber) can exploit this to pay you less. Want to do good in the world? It comes at a price, as any non-profit or social-services employee can tell you. Can't imagine living without the nation-state? You're being fucked over by the government.
The only person who is truly immune to cons is a nihilistic sociopath who doesn't actually believe social reality exists and works solely for personal benefit. But the flip side of that is that it's debatable whether such a person is actually alive and human in the way most of us think about it.
(Note that money itself is a long-con designed to convince said nihilistic sociopaths into working for the general public benefit. As long as you can convince them that "personal benefit" = "money", you can get them to do things that have social value to others, because that's how they get money.)
As if bitcoin and Libra can't be the same side of the co(i)n.
Of course, the Libra consortium would also say that it doesn't do those things, because it seems to have promised a bunch of contradictory things to different people. Dystopian levels of control to regulators and banks and Facebook shareholders, but also "people can totally have independent wallets that will enable bypassing KYC etc! We've just not built it yet!"
You'd have to be very silly to believe the latter plan will not be quietly dropped in favour of the former (and it's sadly logical to do so as far as FB are concerned).
which is true. It couldn’t have gone any other way, realistically.
I’ve made my peace with it, at least the we keep making tiny steps forward. It sure beats the credit card networks and paypal.
The credit card networks and paypal are part of the Libra alliance. My guess is, Libra will have the same problems as the current solutions but it will make onboarding easier for unbanked people in other countries who just need a whatsapp account to start using Libra. But for countries where most people already have a Visa/Mastercard, it's kind of redundant. Kind of like bitcoin in fact without the censorship but with price stability.
A lot of the articles on this blog are like that - barely-coherent ramblings. I think the general thesis of the site is that financial markets are driven by narratives, not maths / rational behaviours.
They really need an editor, or someone to tell them to cut the pretentious writing style, weird metaphors, obscure poetry and movie references, and just get to the point.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/david-marcus/libra-2-weeks-in...
No, you won't. If your goals really are opposed to the current crop of political elites, then they won't let you use Libra to replace them.
When your opponents make up unfair rules to stop you, dont play by their rules.
Then at the end of it, I'm supposed to believe that the con is the fact that libra, while potentially facilitating ecommerce and being generally a good thing, is going to kill bitcoin. Why is that a bad thing? If it's better at ecommerce than bitcoin is, then bitcoin deserves to die. It's not insidious to win at something if it's better.
I don't even know if I agree that Libra is a good thing, but the conclusions drawn here don't make any sense.