The problem of bitcoin is that there is a finite amount of it that will be available.
As use of bitcoin is scheduled to grow, the pace of the production of bitcoins needed to support the market does not keep up.
This results in a steady increase of the value of bitcoin, which is good for adoption (more people will buy it to speculate and sellers will accept it), but endangers it as a mean of paiement as buyers are always better of paying in $, which devaluates over time, instead of Btc, which will increase over time.
The reason bitcoin will not be used for daily exchanges is the same as we do not use gold anymore. But since Btc has no intrisic value, I hardly see it as a reserve money.
> The reason bitcoin will not be used for daily exchanges is the same as we do not use gold anymore.
Everybody has a cellphone. You pay and receive "money" with your cellphone. Wallets will be redundant in the future, everything that is in your wallet will be stored in your phone.
And you know which currency can be paid with your phone? Exactly!
Well you could do the same with paper-gold. But since its value increases over time you have no incentive to prefer it over $, which have a decreasing value.
Stop focusing on tech and try to think about underlying market forces.
I don't know about you, but I prefer to store the value that I work for, in something that doesn't burn 2% off each year.
And if I have to buy something, I will just trade in my value stored with the thing I want to buy. I don't see any need to go to an intermediate thing that keeps decreasing in value.
Paper money was preferred over gold because it was inconvenient to keep working with gold, not because the paper loses its value.
Said in another way, do you prefer paying for your car in bitcoins, which is likely to increase in the next years, or $, which will decrease?
Bitcoin may be good to store value (gold or land being the best), but isn't adapted for exchange, as no one wants to use it to buy something. Sellers should offer steep discount for the opportunity cost in order to obtain the money, which isn't very likely.
I have a Ms in Economics and work as an economist. Most of the criticism and debate I see here is quite interesting, and the reflexions of the author of the article are similar to mines after working several years in the field.
You fall in the category of people who think that debate about science should be limited to those who know science theory. The problem I saw in the field is that people talking have to much to loose, hence forbidding a reworking of the fundamental assumption and a trashing of the useless models that we keep producing.
If you want to do real science, go ask the ones who are practicing economics daily about their heuristics. Nightclub owners figured out their economics interest long before two-sided market theory was out there, after all.
I work as an economist at my country's ministry of finance. Since my daily job is to write studies and reports about IT, HN is quite useful to keep in touch with what's happening. I like as well when people submit content about other topics, and I think I learned many things here unrelated to tech.
Otherwise, I think the community here is great, and I really enjoy reading the comments and analysis of my fellow readers!
> I work as an economist at my country's ministry of finance.
Out of curiosity, do you feel that the ministry is actually making informed decisions or just acting as an executive branch while the decision makers are elsewhere?
The problem with this explaination is that it focuses on the technical aspect and not on the economical one : how is the value created shared among the people in the economy?
Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient capital : with the new machine you can make 15 buns whereas you made less with the new one. The employee is not paid more : the capitalist earns the cost saved.
Problem is that the capitalist doesn't spend 100% of his income : he will consume some, invest some and save the rest in unproductive accounts or stocks. He may produce 50% more hot dogs, but the demand will not follow.
Economics theory says that in this case prices may go down, but that would mean a lowering of the capitalist's profits. He may in this case reduce quality in order to lower the prices while preserving his margins.
Hence we see here 3 things : accumation of capital in a few hands, an era of deflation and low yields due to low demand and high monetary stock needed to be invested, and a reduction of quality of the product.
The last one is counter intuitive but may be seen in reality : buildings have reached the point where it's commodity, replaced every 30 years, clothes are worthless and the quality of food has been decreasing for the last 30 years (at least in my country, France).
If we get richer everyday, why can't we make buildings that are aesthical, solid and durable anymore? Why is quality food reserved only for rich people?
Returns to capital in the form of ownership of companies (including eg. the source code to automate labor that's owned by those companies) have been flat. Higher returns on capital have almost entirely been caused by higher housing prices. See eg. Rognlie's paper at http://www.mit.edu/~mrognlie/piketty_diminishing_returns.pdf.
The non-violent solution is thus a land-value tax. Hopefully forcing most if not all the non-economically active people to move to cheaper COL areas.
That is not to say we should discourage home ownership, but we should discourage multiple home ownership for the purpose of rent extraction. Land is a zero-sum market and landlords who are against development and housing construction are effectively stealing value from those who would use thee homes as a residence.
Does "returns to capital in the form of ownership of companies" mean "returns to capital on stocks and equities"? I'm confused because returns on equities certainly haven't been flat.
> Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient capital
I do not think that is true. The consumers of all goods and services also benefit from technological progress, because they become cheaper, more widely available, higher quality (different ways of saying the same thing).
Technological progress in the last ~200 years has radically improved the lives of everyone, most significantly by freeing them from being subsistence farmers and clothes-makers. Even though most people today do not own a lot of capital, the cost of living well has come down so substantially that even poor people today arguably have much better quality of life than historical kings. For example, the majority of US households below the poverty line own an automobile, have multiple televisions with cable TV, a refrigerator, air conditioning, mobile phones, etc. [1] Despite owning no capital, the life of even those in poverty is astronomically better off than 200 years ago.
Are you familiar with the trope where poor people from the distant past would wear clothes until they literally turned into rags? The reason that happened is because clothing was ridiculously expensive compared to today. There was an article about this on Hacker News about two years ago called "The $3500 Shirt - A History Lesson in Economics" [2]. To summarize, in the pre-industrial age, a single shirt required so much labor that its cost was on the order of $3500 - $4000 in modern dollars. Buying a single piece of clothing could cost you multiple months' wages.
> Back in the pre-industrial days, the making of thread, cloth, and clothing ate up all the time that a woman wasn't spending cooking and cleaning and raising the children. That's why single women were called "spinsters" - spinning thread was their primary job. "I somehow or somewhere got the idea," wrote Lucy Larcom in the 18th century, "when I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind." [2]
NPR also published an article on called "The History Of Light" [3] which traces how much light (like candle light or lamp light) you could buy with a day's worth of labor, at various points in history. In Babylonian times, your day's wages could buy you 10 minutes worth of light. Light was therefore relatively expensive and in-affordable. By the 1990s, a day's wages can buy about 20,000 hours worth of light. Light is so cheap everyone has practically unlimited amounts, which led to substantial changes across modern society.
Technological progress has drastically improved the lives of everyone. It has not made everyone rich, but those in poverty today are phenomenally better off than at any time in the past.
Whether you believe it or not it doesn't really matter. What matters is that it is true. We can see this today, and through out history. There is an an accelerating concentration of wealth. Which is caused directly because the return on capital is greater than labor. So yes, while costs of goods has decreased, that doesn't mean that the benefits of technology are distributed evenly, or even fairly. The total cost of goods is irrelevant, if share of wealth has actually decreased, and that the economic ladder has been pulled up.
It contradicts one specific bit in your reasoning, namely the "[modern] clothes are worthless" part.
I think the point that Pyxl101 was getting at is that your assertion that modern clothes are of vastly inferior quality compared to older clothes is maybe not well-founded.
Whether or not that's true, idk. Whether or not it's fair to pick out one specific bit of your reasoning, idk.
If you have sources for any of your claims, then maybe we could continue discussion.
I was referring to fast-fashion brands such as Zara, H&M, etc... On a large scale in the near past, you can see a drop of quality in the clothes sold on the market. You may say that it is a conterpart of lower prices, but even expensive clothes are degrading quality in order to preserve their margins.
Since ever fewer people are able to extract the profits from ever more goods it seems clear that there should be a natural tendency toward wealth accumulation and stratification.
There's a rough transition, but eventually we'll get to the point that everything is so cheap that people will produce it for fun, not profit.
Think of how much free open source labor there is, people working together to produce software on their own free time because they like to do it. I see much of the future economy functioning like this, but it only can when automation reaches a level where people can produce enough having fun.
If everyone can purchase a small factory that lives in a room which can built copies of itself, large portions of the economy disappear which is excellent. It could turn most of the economy into small local barter-economies where people did what they wanted and exchanged the outputs with other specialists in their area. (There have been and still are local economies that still function very much like this at least to a degree)
For it to work you have to remove scarcity which is what automation does. Switching from one to the other will be awkward, but it will work eventually.
This is quite a lot like what Marx thought would happen, he was just wrong in his estimation of how effective 19th century automation was going to be.
"The lack of patentability of software is one reason why the market is so innovative"
uh..? I hate to burst your bubble, but software patents are common. The idea that software (as a representation of math) is not patentable died back in the early 1990s.
It could if the internet ecosystem wasn't dominated by platforms that concentrate exchange and thus the value created. Linux is very innovative but lacks enough users to endanger the mains OSes of the market.
When was the last time you ate a real tomato? Not the one grown on hydroponic farm and full of water, but a real one coming from an old and tasty variety full of flesh?
Big food processing firms have been decreasing the quality of food over the years to keep the price low. No more yoghurt but "milk preparations". No more raw milk cheese costly but tasty. Biscuits are getting smaller. Fruits are tasteless and full of pesticides. Let's not even talk about swine, which almost no one knows the real taste anymore since it is produced in industrial facilities and then chemically processed to give it the "standard" tase and color. All of these were not happening on such a large scale 30 or 40 years ago.
My point is that there are other variables to take into account other than prices. Quality is one. You think you have more, but is it of the same quality as before?
> My point is that there are other variables to take into account other than prices.
You said quality food was reserved only for rich people. People with a median income in western countries can comfortably afford to regularly eat locally grown, ethically-produced, non-intensive farm-shop food if that's what they're into. Bill Gates & Donald Trump aren't eating higher quality food than they are.
It's incredibly trivial to get this kind of quality if you're willing to go out of your way and pay a relatively small premium to get it. Many local markets exist.
Personally, I don't find it to be worth it, I don't notice the "quality" as much as some people seem to and I'm not willing to pay even a small premium for it. You've picked a few particular things, some of which only appeal to a very small niche market - you might argue that people have learned out "quality" in their tastes, but that's an opinion, not a fact.
While that was my reaction, in the interest of quality and depth of conversation it would be good if you expanded on why you disagree here.
I'm not sure what the parent meant by this. Quality what? Lobsters? Fresh fruit and vegetables; nuts, seeds, and whole grains; animal flesh - these are all relatively inexpensive compared to processsed "value added" food products, regardless of where you are in the world.
Grass fed beef is higher quality than corn fed beef, but much more expensive today. Many of the classic high value fish are much harder to get and further as lot of seafood is sold under the wrong name. Even Milk is now much older than it used to be. Granted pre pasteurization Milk was dangerous, but there was a period when people still got fairly fresh pasteurized milk.
> Grass fed beef is higher quality than corn fed beef
So - can I taste the difference? In what way is it "higher quality"? Is it a difference I'm willing to pay for or one that isn't really worth it? I think we've settled with what we have because the quality improvement just isn't that much, if it's noticeable at all.
I've compared many organic and local products side by side with commodity variants and found little to no difference to my tastes, so I have to wonder - is it worth it at all? Certainly not to my cheap palate at least.
Its popular to believe so, since corn is branded as evil these days. But of course corn-fed beef is tender, juicy and flavorful. Grass-fed is tougher, leaner and less flavorful. I know which one I prefer.
Deer meat is lean and considered very tasty by many, but as with any food difference people are going to defend what they are used to. However, nutritionally corn fed beef has a higher fat content and is worse for you.
First I said nutrition, fat is close to empty calories. Protein poisoning / rabit starvation is possible, but for the vast majority of people low fat content is much better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning
The issue, of course, is time to prepare food. If you're well-off, you can choose to spend time cooking, or have someone else do it for you sometimes - if you're not, then you might not have time to spend cooking (especially if you have children), and almost definitely won't have the mental or physical energy to prepare three healthy meals a day. Job insecurity is draining and causes low-paid workers to put significantly more effort into their work than they're paid for, and many people across the US (and some other countries, like the UK) suffer from it.
In my country, people watch TV an average of 3 hours every single day. It isn't billionaires doing that. It's people that "don't have time to go to the gym". And while Millennials might laugh at this, they're spending just as much on social media sites, Netflix and YouTube.
This whole "I don't have enough time to not neglect myself" it just excuses all the way down. Everyone can find time to exercise and eat well.
People using "not enough time" as an excuse is just a symptom of low self-esteem and self-neglect, which is the real issue. That's the epidemic, and there's great inequality there, though it isn't tied to socioeconomic status.
Watching TV is a low-effort activity. The vast majority of TV (and Netflix and Youtube) is designed specifically not to take any mental power to watch, and it certainly doesn't take any physical power. (Also, watching TV when you have kids is code for watching your kids.)
I'm glad that you've never been in a position where you were under mental stress.
>I'm glad that you've never been in a position where you were under mental stress.
I have, and distracting myself only made it worse, and made it harder to come up with solutions. Why aren't the people who watch TV meditating instead? Rest isn't why people watch TV.
If the harder you worked, the more entertainment you needed, CEOs would be spending 12 hours a day watching TV.
Again, the root problem isn't socioeconomics. There is an inequality, but it's in mindset. It's inside, not environmental.
It's not necessarily to do with harder working alone - it's the stress from job insecurity. If you're an IT worker and lose your job, you can probably find a new one before your rent/mortgage is up. Worst case, you miss a payment or two or you have to cut down on nights out/coffee/whatever.
If you're working something unskilled or where there's no shortage of workers? And you're living paycheque-to-paycheque in the first place? That's mentally distressing on a long-term scale, on top of requiring more physical work. It's not something that's ever going to get fixed - education is unaffordable even before you realise that your kids are going to starve while you're seeking it.
CEOs do not do physical work most of their workday, by the way, so even if the point was solely about physical exhaustion your point would be moot. They are also broadly not worried about not being able to pay their bills.
Basically - there's an intersection of issues which low-wage workers suffer from. Job insecurity causes many of them. The solution is to ensure that people don't feel like they're going to struggle to keep their living-place and pay their bills when they lose their job.
"...how is the value created shared among the people in the economy? ...Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the capital..."
Capital as the term is usually used is getting a severe beating right along with labor. Goods used to be much more capital-intensive than they are now. Look at the rotting carcasses of factories in Detroit.
And I am sorry - but you immediately switched from "wealth" to "power" and in a service economy, those are disjoint - perhaps in-opposition - things.
Buildings are built to the aesthetics of rich people - in the "mount the TV over the fireplace" style. There's a critic who tears apart crappy McMansion aesthetics all day long. Things like strip malls are an artifact of incentives in real estate development. And good quality food is plentiful and in cases, quite cheap.
Quality food is cheap? Have you ever lived in a big city?
If you come to Europe, you'll see that building a nice house wasn't reserved to the rich. And anyway, if we believe GDP figures, a rich man 200 years ago had the purchasing power of a middle-class american living in a McMansion.
Capital can depreciate, of course. It did, and wealth went from the rustbelt to the techies and financiers who own the algorithms.
> Capital as the term is usually used is getting a severe beating right along with labor. Goods used to be much more capital-intensive than they are now. Look at the rotting carcasses of factories in Detroit.
What the heck are you talking about? Those factories didn't shutter because you don't need a factory to make cars anymore.
René Girard is a joke. His theory about mimetic desire is pseudo-science and does not rely on evidence. Girard is a litterature teacher that got the mimetic idea reading 19th century novels and then proceded to prove it using 19th century novels.
The fact that he taught for so long at a major US university is telling about the poor state of social siences and the coward mentality of the academic world.
If you speak French, read "René Girard, un allumé qui se prenait pour un phare" by René Pommier, it's a very clever and funny refutation of this theory.
Google is a search engine of indexed webpages. Not a universal delivery machine of the TRUTH (tm) nor an annex of your brain.
Besides, this kind of debate is one step away from lyssenkism where only google-friendly opinions will be displayed. If you fight for freedom of speech only in the case of opinions that you like, then it's not freedom of speech.
If we let society keep a list of facts that may not be questioned, it will inevitably have crap like "the sun orbits the earth" and "a god named zeus created the universe" that need to be questioned.
When you declare an answer to be wrong and suppress it, the only difference is whether you go on to murder/imprison/exile the heretic or merely silence them.
I think the difference between murdering someone and not putting their website at the top of a search result page is pretty significant. That the Holocaust happened is a fact. Giving correct responses to factual queries should not be a controversial goal.
When I type 5 + 6 into Google search, are people being oppressed when the top result is 11? Would this be similar to murdering ideological opponents if my page declaring the answer to be 13 wasn't at or near the top of the results?
