Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin Is Reactionary Money

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On February 8, 2021

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This is only the second time I’ve written about Bitcoin. I have friends who have done very well off it, and Bitcoin’s fans are fanatical about it. This post will probably get more hate than everything else I’ve written combined.

The reason they’re fanatical is that it’s made many of them filthy rich, for doing nothing but being a first mover and HODLing (holding.)

Bitcoin’s original selling-proposition was a good one: peer-to-peer money; cut out the middleman. This is something which needs to be done, because the middlemen regularly abuse their power by shutting people they don’t approve of out of the system. This is true on the national levels, with sanctions, and true on the individual and corporate level. I remember when Visa, Matercard and PayPal all cut off Wikileaks, for example (long before 2016). They regularly cut access off from companies selling legal goods they don’t like (for example, various nootropics, or soft-porn.)

So a way of getting past these gatekeepers, whether sovereign or corporate, is needed, as those gatekeepers regularly abuse their power.

The problem is, to quote Stirling Newberry, that the bitcoin is the worst way to do something necessary. It has massive transaction costs, in terms of energy, and thus is bad for the environment. But, as money, it is reactionary money: it was designed to have 21 million bitcoins max, with less produced over time (halving rewards).

What this means is it vastly rewards early-movers. The sooner you got in, the more money you made. The people who made the right decision in the  past, control the future, much as the families who were rich in Florence in the 15th century are rich today.

This would be great if making one important decision good for yourself meant you would always make good decision in the future that were also good for other people. Money is power and people with more money have more power. Bitcoin creates a new power bloc: those who got in early.

There’s no reason, however, to assume one good decision for yourself means you will make future good decisions that are also good for other people. (At the extreme end, Genghis Khan says hi, and so does every other successful conqueror. So do the people who crashed the world economy in 08, but got bailed out.)

Bitcoin is deflationary: it gains value over time (assuming it doesn’t crash). Deflationary money is not good money. It restricts what can be done with it, rewards dead money (people who just sit on what they have), and empowers (again) people who won the past, not people who are doing good things in the present.

There is also the matter that bitcoin isn’t acting like money. It’s acting like a speculative resource bubble, which is because it is a speculative resource bubble. Making bitcoin is called “mining” for a reason: it was modeled after gold, except that unlike gold, you can’t find more of it once it’s done. It was designed to be GoldPLUS, for people who want to win once and be secure forever.

Its other great feature (which is fool’s gold) is that it can be used to bypass government restrictions. Or so fools think, since it’s a blockchain and every single transaction is recorded. Do NOT use bitcoin to pay for anything the government might one day want to track you down over. Use cash or a cryptocurrency engineered for privacy.

The question here is what’s going to happen when BTC is mostly mined out (mining the last block may take quite some time but it will be mined out before that. Twenty-one million coins can be mined, of that 18.5 have been mined.)

What happens to the value when the first mover advantage is gone? When it’s “mined out?”

Well, that depends on if there’s a genuine use-case. Is it a functional peer-to-peer payments system which lets you bypass both censorship and high fees? Right now, bitcoin is slower than many normal transactions. When mining ends, fees are expected to go up (since miners currently subsidize them while mining) and it isn’t actually anonymous money: in fact, given the ledger that permanently records every transaction, it’s almost perfectly engineered to be a totalitarian technology.

That said, what I see possibly happening is that it does stick around. Paypal is bringing it online, for example. Most people don’t hold much BTC in this future, they simply use BTC as a transaction medium, renting it, in effect, from the big HODLers. The lightning network also promises to speed up and cheapen transactions, there can be fixes to the transaction issues.

The other possibility is that once it’s no longer possible to get rich, we find out this is a bubble and a ponzi scheme. The first movers who were smart enough to cash out along the way do great and the bubble bursts. (If I were a big HODLer I’d hedge: cash out about half and buy off-chain assets, keep the rest in case BTC sticks around as infrastructure.)

Much of this depends on legal status and institutional support. Contrary to what a lot of BTC maximalists think, BTC can absolutely be shut down if enough big governments decide to do so. Set the forensics on the transaction chains and make its use illegal, subject to penalties or even jail time and yeah, that will destroy much of the value. It’s only a store of value if you can turn it into real world goods. If you can’t, it’s just a digital asset, worth less than a high level MMORPG character.

All that aside, the main issue is, again, that it’s reactionary money, intended to create a new class of winners who are then protected by the fact that they got in early enough, by the design of the coin itself.

It’s why BTC worked: because it was designed to create a protected asset class that rewarded first movers. The utopian stuff is overstated (because of the ledger). BTC is a greed project dressed up in idealist clothes, which doesn’t mean many people don’t genuinely believe its utopian promise. (Much as big capitalists constantly say how wonderful capitalism is for everyone and how they deserve to be rich because they make life better for everyone.)

All that said, I like a lot of BTC people I know and if it’s something of a scam, well, it’s not one-one hundredth as bad as what Wall Street does every day. In a world where almost all fortunes are illegitimate, based on scams or hurting other people, BTC at least gave some people outside the usual class a chance to get rich or make a bit of extra money.

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Who Bans or Encourages Crypto?

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On July 24, 2019

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Iran, apparently, intends to legalize crypto.

India intends to ban it.

Iran needs a way to get money and resources in and out of the country, because it is under sanctions.

India has had a huge war on cash, ostensibly to crack down on corruption. (Well, partially that, but partially to give corporations a cut of every transaction.)

It’s fairly clear who is doing what, why.

Also, anyone who cracks down against cash is anti-freedom. This includes our otherwise decent Nordic brothers. Crypto isn’t actually a freedom technology, by the very nature of the ledger (tracking every transaction). It’s more naturally a totalitarian technology, we just haven’t caught up to the fact (just as drones are a weapon of the weak).

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Major Governments Can Shut Down CryptoCurrencies at Will

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On January 14, 2018

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Government can shut down the cryptocurrency experiment any time it wants. Government money creation worked because the government insists you pay taxes in their money and they have people with guns. Crypto exists as long as governments wants it to and no longer.

There is a great deal of triumphalism in the crypto-world, because it has made a bunch of people rich. People who get rich virtually always think it is because they are great people. They feel empowered and so on. (And, according to the research, generally become selfish jerks with a reduced empathic response.)

The simple power relationship is this: Any government can put the hurt on crypto and largely shut it down in their country simply by criminalizing it and having their taxation folks watch the entrances and exits.

Crypto can be badly hurt by three governments: China, the EU, and the US, in exactly the same way. Crypto is arguably in violation of a host of security laws as it stands, and could be made more illegal any time a regulator or government chooses to.

People with guns beat people with cryptography. Code is not law, and the people who thought it was were fools. Law is what people with something approaching a monopoly on violence in an area say it is, and nothing else.

Peer-to-peer financial networks are a good idea: Cutting out banks for exchanging money is a good idea. (Bitcoin is a bad way to do both, but that’s not this article. Other coins do a better job.)

But it must be allowed by those people who control organized violence, and if they choose not to, all your technical wizardry will not save your networks, even if some crippled, black web version remains.

Nor is money creation quite what you think it is. Money exists mostly because powerful people want to be able to coerce the non-powerful through either taxation or debt-farming. Other benefits are incidental, if appreciated.

That doesn’t mean that crypto can’t, in theory, grab money creation from banks (though co-optation is far more likely). It means that, like banks, whether crypto can do so rests on whether they can cut a deal with, and prove their usefulness to, state-sanctioned, organized violence.

This is all it is ever about.

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As Bitcoin Falls Apart

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On January 16, 2016

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It seems Bitcoin is skirting disaster. They need to increase the amount of memory allocated per block, but have refused to do so. The result is that transactions can take hours to occur. To manage this, fees for bitcoin usage are increasing, to the point where it costs more than a credit card. (Accepted by a lot less people, and costs more. The upside is…?)

One proposed solution is to, oh, increase the memory, but doing so is opposed by three of the five members of the people with access to the code base, and by the Chinese miners who control most of the “mining” which creates Bitcoins. (You can read about the adolescent infighting details here).

Now remember, Bitcoin was a Libertarian experiment in money. You have to “mine” it using computers which do nothing worthwhile except mine it. There is a built-in limit to the number of bitcoins which can ever be created, to  ensure that, in the long run, Bitcoins will be deflationary. All in all, it’s structure was designed to create huge, first-mover advantages and no governance worth speaking of (because that will all just “sort itself out”).

Or, as Daniel put it:

Yeah.

Now, Bitcoin was about the worst way possible to do something which REALLY needed to be done, which is to create a peer-to-peer payment system which cuts out the middleman. You do this so that banks/credit card companies can’t get what amounts to unearned money (the amounts of which are far more than the cost of the service provided), and also so that companies and governments can’t shut down the ability of people they don’t like to send and receive money, a power which has been terribly abused–especially by the US Treasury Department.

Bitcoin, minus Libertarian assumptions, with a bit of decent governance, could have really changed the world in a good way.

It didn’t, though the underlying technology of blockchains may yet. We’ll see about that, because what I’m hearing from the blockchain world is that banks are investing in it highly because they think it may help them with “know your customer,” “anti-money laundering,” and reduce transaction costs (for them, obviously, not necessarily the clients).

A “revolutionary” technology, thus, is likely to wind up reinforcing the status quo, though we’ll see.

Another contributing factor in all this is that, in addition to Bitcoin being a way for early movers to get rich (and for speculation), it’s real use has been primarily moving money in and out of countries.

It is important in China and tolerated, not just because the miners cluster there, but because the Chinese (including many of their officials) want an unofficial way to get money out of the country. Everyone has known China was going to run off the Mercantalist cliff, and people have wanted to get money out of there (the US dollar spiking like it is almost always a sign of flight to safety and presages a global recession).

Bitcoin got its first spike of fame outside tech circles by helping people get their money out of Cyprus when their banking sector had its collapse.

Political theory, which includes economic theory as a subset, matters. Bitcoin was based on libertarian theories which do not and cannot work in the real world. That is why it has not and will not live up to the utopian dreams of its early political backers.

We will see how the Blockchain is used by other cryptocurrencies, and whether any of them manage to create a functional peer-to-peer payments system.

I hope they do.

The failure of the Bitcoin dream (as opposed to the actual creation) doesn’t make me happy. We can use it as a lesson, the first of which is: “get your motives straight,” and the second of which is “Have a workable political and economic ideology.”

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