Why would people pick Bitcoin? It costs less and does more. Among adopters, it’s simpler and more direct. It pays the right people and not the wrong ones. It rewards good behavior instead of bad
The money, the unaccountable, uninhibited release of tokens can do more than just buy centuries of hard labor in seconds, it‘s also a method of control. Banks, our present issuers of money, can approve or destroy businesses by denying loans. They can do this to individuals, like denying loans to unpopular figures, or to whole sectors, like gun shops. They can also offer money for free to Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla, which have no profitable business model or any hope of getting one, and deny loans to power plants, railroads, farms, and bridges as they fall into the Mississippi.
The result is banks and their attending insiders are a de facto Committee of Central Planners in the great Soviet style. What is fashionable and exciting to them can happen, and what they dislike or disapprove of for any reason can never happen. And once on a completely fiat system, this is how capital is allocated through our entire system: badly. What’s worse has been a 20-year turn toward Disaster Capitalism, whereby loans are extended to a business, sector, person, or nation, and then suddenly cut off, leading to the rapid foreclosure and confiscation of companies, assets, or continents by the “Development Team.”
Imagine a Bitcoin where Satoshi could erase your coins in your wallet for giving him a bad haircut. Or because he likes your wife. Nor is there any help for independent nations like Iran, or even nuclear powers like Russia. Both have been cut off, their funds suspended at a whim with no recourse. Even being a fellow insider is no insurance, as the NY banks cut off Lehman from funds they were owed, driving it into bankruptcy to buy the pieces in receivership. Unpopular Billionaires are treated likewise. This is a system with no justice, no order, no rules, and no predictability. Anyone within it is at grave and total risk. And yet before Bitcoin it was the only system we had, short of returning to the 19th century, it was the only way for modern commerce to deliver food, water, power, or function at all.
This is seen in its abuses, but also by its effects. The present system not only controls whether you are a winner or loser, whether you may go or stay, whether you may live or die, but also tracks every purchase, every location, in effect, every action throughout your entire life. These records will describe what books you read, what movies you watch, what associates you have, in real time Already these daily actions are being approved or denied. Take out a variable-rate jumbo loan? We’ll give you 110% of the value, paying you to be irresponsible (we’ll foreclose later). Want to buy gas when driving through Cheyenne 3:30 at night? Sorry, we disabled your card as a suspicious transaction. Sorry about you dying there of crime or of cold; we didn’t know and didn’t care. All your base are belong to us.
You say you don’t care if JP Morgan has your pay stubs to disturbing porn sites and Uber purchases to see your mistress? Well the future Mayor of Atlanta will, and he hasn’t graduated college yet. With those records it’s child’s play to blackmail policemen, reporters, judges, senators, or generals, even Presidents. And all those future Presidents are making those purchases right now, the ones that can be spun into political hay, real or unreal. So if you don’t worry what everyone knows about you, that’s fine, but imagine reading the open bank records, the life histories of every political opponent from now until doomsday. Then Don’t. Do. It. The people who have those records – not you – then have not just all the assets, not just all the money, but all the power and influence. Forever.
Are you signing up for that? Bitcoin doesn’t. Bitcoin doesn’t care who you are and with some care can make it very difficult to track you. And without tracking you, it makes it impossible to boycott you. And without a central repository, it’s impossible to march in with tanks and make them give you the records, turn money on or off, to make other people live or die and bend to your will by violence.
Source/More: Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 3 – The Automatic Earth
