" Bitcoin is a way for me to step outside that debt I did not want or deserve"
Try paying your taxes in Bitcoin. Then you'll find that it has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with avoiding having your assets stripped by the IRS.
You want to live in a jurisdiction, then you pony up the tokens that jurisdiction demands. Or you lose your liberty and everything you own.
> You want to live in a jurisdiction, then you pony up the tokens that jurisdiction demands.
It has less to do with paying the taxes in the currency used by the State and more with protecting your wealth at the same that you can keep yourself liquid. If you ever experienced hyperinflation you would understand. Growing up in the 80's in Brazil, I remember how every 5th of the month (when my dad and my mom would get paid) was very busy.
- Pay school, bills as early as possible to try to get a discount. Prices were adjusted 20-25% every month and if you paid earlier you could get some 5-10% off.
- Going to the supermarket to buy 3/4 shopping carts of groceries.
- Fueling up the car. I remember the traffic(!!) caused by car lines backed at the gas stations, waiting to get fuel before the prices went up.
- If we needed any clothes / school stuff, head to the mall.
As soon everything was paid that month, my father would get whatever money was left in the bank and would buy US dollars. For him it was worth the 5-10% spread between the black market rate and the official rate because the alternative was to see all his melt away.
But not enough clearly given the lack of saving and underdeveloped productive capacity, otherwise there wouldn't be inflation.
"If you ever experienced hyperinflation you would understand."
By analogy because planes crash due to bad piloting heavier than air flight is clearly completely impossible and we shouldn't attempt it.
Moreover we should design planes based solely on lurid tales from those who have survived plane crashes and are suffering PSTD from it not by listening to those who have studied aeronautics and actually understand the physics involved.
Your experiences may be sad, but you have the cause and effect completely wrong in your mind. Like those who believe 5G causes cancer.
What we need are better trained pilots. Preferably those who know they are flying an aircraft, not driving a bus.
Not paid enough taxes? Is that really what you think it was the problem? That the middle class was not paying its fair share of taxes?
How much more you think they should be paying in taxes for the absolutely shitty public services provided?
You are right, part of the issue to solve inflation was related with increased taxes. So now the average Brazilian pays taxes like they are in some Western European country, but still get the same shitty public services and we have removed the ability for the middle class to save.
> By analogy because planes crash due to bad piloting heavier than air flight is clearly completely impossible and we shouldn't attempt it.
No. The analogy is that we shouldn't board into any plane where the pilots have parachutes for themselves but not for the passengers.
The lack of aligned incentives between Government (and its elites) and the governed is the problem.
> Your experiences may be sad.
Actually, no. There is nothing sad about it. Looking back, my (relative) standard of living was never as high as it was then. Two-parent family income was "needed" to afford private schools and our own home, but I'd wager that even if we depended only on my not-college-educated mother salary we would be better off then as the standard single-income family of today. And that comparison applies to even living in Europe like I am today.
> What we need are better trained pilots.
Yes, the old "We havent't tried real socialism/communism/my-favorite-pet-theory-of-everything". Piss off, will ya?
> well administered flexible ms > fixed ms > badly administered flexible ms
The issue then becomes of how to have "well administered flexible money supply". Is it working in the US? EU? China? Turkey? Lebanon? Japan? Argentina? Brazil? Venezuela?
Besides the financial elites, are people seeing their work turn into prosperity? Are people from lower income nowadays more capable of saving and investing, or is it becoming something available only for the rich?
Even if we consider the rich countries: do we really want to live in a world where the majority of people depend on welfare and a perpetual money printer running to keep people consuming crap that no one really needs and enabling governments to fund armies to fight over resources across the globe? How sustainable is this?
> So, let central bankers do their job, unimpeded by politicians.
You might have trust in a bunch of technocrats, I don't.
Alternatively, let people make experiments with different crypto currencies, different governance models, different technologies, different requirements and different values. Evolutionary processes are more reliable/less fragile than a rigid central-planning structure. Haven't we learned anything from the almost-century-long experiment called USSR?
This is not to me saying "all flexible money supplies are crap, let's get rid of it." Only Bitcoin maxis would say something silly like that. What I am saying though is that Bitcoin was the first successful attempt at decentralized governance and that has a lot of value and (to some) is better than many of the existing central banks.
They did it in Zermatt as well (because apparently the mayor is a crypto fan), and no one used it. Also the city doesn't actually receive Bitcoin, they use an intermediary that gives them Swiss Francs.
> At the city level, [Miami mayor] Suarez’s ambitions are equally ambitious. He’s “looking at” ways to pay municipal employees a percentage of their salary in bitcoin and allow residents to use bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for “payments and fees,” including taxes.
What about when people DON'T want to live in a jurisdiction?
So far even attempts are seastading failed due to traditional countries destroying them militarily (one italian attempt for example was just bombed until nothing remained, and an attempt the pacific resulted in nearby countries landing troops on the built islands and kicking people out)
Because thats whats happens when you don't have a government, either one will come in and become your government through force, or you become a government with enough force to prevent take over.
Some entity (state) has to have the monopoly on violence to enforce laws or there are no enforceable laws.
Exactly! You can have "total liberty" to the extent that you can defend it. Since the cost of defending it against nation states (or frankly even against well-resourced pirates) is so high, most people group together and form their own nation state.
Do you have an example of this happening where people didn't settle on land/sea that was already claimed by another entity? Because that's still in someone's jurisdiction.
When there was some kind of micronation-mania some years ago, with multiple mainstream papers mentioning Sealand and that Australian farmer and whatnot, I went to check, and found out that the UN itself is quite dangerous, in fact is why being "UN recognized" as a country is so important (for example why Taiwan would want to be a country officially), the UN navigation laws state that everyone that is a member of the UN has several rights of navigation, and the US for example is one of the main enforcers of these (US warships patrol around the world to ensure "free passage"), but the way those rigths is written, imply that if you are NOT a member of the UN, any member can sink you without any penalty.
Thus the only way to be anywhere on the sea while not being in the UN, is if you are ally of the US (Taiwan), because otherwise you are at risk of being shot at.
I don't think China has yet the navy needed to counterbalance that.
Try paying your taxes in Bitcoin. Then you'll find that it has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with avoiding having your assets stripped by the IRS.
You want to live in a jurisdiction, then you pony up the tokens that jurisdiction demands. Or you lose your liberty and everything you own.