I smile every time a solo miner finds a block.

#780,112

The US bond market is worth 40-50 trillion. That’s a lot of debt that’s being held by other banks. They will never be able to hold to maturity if people come looking for their deposits or start defaulting on loans.

Maybe the demonetization of debt will make people think that they’d rather store value in an asset that doesn’t depend on ever-decreasing interest rates.

👍😎 I’ll order it tonight

Book recommendation:

Killing the Host. Michael Hudson 🐿

“Costs and risks are socialized, and the profit is privatized. That’s called capitalism.”

Noam Chomsky

Bitcoin is an excellent tool and moves us in the right direction. Though it is but one improvement within a whole gamut of social needs that must be addressed for an improved world order. I hope the excitement and tribalism characteristic of this ilk doesn’t blind us to those other injustices

I try not to advocate for any “ism” on a public forum. I absolutely advocate for understanding these constructions for what they are rather than for what we are told they are. My understanding of Marx and Smith as diametrically opposed economists was wrong. After reading them both, I see them as economic philosophers who both advocated for an improved social order and warned us of the dangers of unrestrained capital accumulation

The very issues that Bitcoiners see as the world’s most important financial issues were described years ago by these economists. And the reasons were given. Yet there is still a large group of us that accept the causes passed down to us from our overlords, that lead us to blame social programs, entitlement spending, and the poor and destitute for the markets’ inequities.

I have yet to meet anyone who disparages Marx who has ever picked up Das Capital, or who could remotely describe its themes.

Agree. And yet the staunchest opponents to your statement hold firm to an understanding of capitalism that is completely different than the definition given to us by classical economists like Marx, Ricardo, Smith, et al.

And unfortunately, many of the economists most appreciated by this community, are those very ones that advocated for the neoliberal agenda, masked by rhetoric about free markets and minimizing government oversight. These things sound good, until Adam Smith reminds us that a free market does not mean freedom from oversight, but means that governments should act in a way as to prevent monopolies and legal manipulation by large interests, so that small people can compete fairly. The fair playing field that Satoshi gave us would have appealed to Smith greatly

Such is the transition from industrial capitalism appreciated by classical economists, to financial capitalism as designed by neoliberal economists within the Chicago School

Yep. And the banking propaganda is real considering how so many of us have a hate on the government for its banking policies. Those banking policies are private policies…whether created explicitly by the Fed, or written by bankers and pushed through congress using subversive tactics.

And also, to say that central banks are government banks isn’t really correct. The US’s central bank, at least, is a collection of private banks that loans money to the government for interest.

RobOK, if you’re asking about countries without central banks, then Iran, North Korea, and Cuba. Also other countries that we have destroyed for that very reason: Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The power of a good scientific theory is less about what it definitively explains, and more about what questions, observations, and experiments it stimulates.

Bank bailouts do not stabilize the economy as billionaires would have us believe. They shift liabilities onto taxpayers. The financial class who yell “free market” are precisely those who designed a legal system that protects the rich at the expense of the poor.

Bank bailouts shift liabilities of large, profitable corporations and banks onto our children. CEO’s go home happy, and our offspring condemn us for letting it happen.

Let. Banks. Fail.

Such is the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism. This is the game now. Not make things…borrow, leverage, exchange, and move money