Why is it that cryptographers made so much more money off Bitcoin than Austrian economists did?
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Most Austrian economists, like economists generally, operate at a layer of society's "protocol stack" that assumes security is already solved. But it was security/trust minimization that had to be solved to provide sound money not dependent on government for its security.
Alas most crypto startups also tacitly make poor security assumptions: it's secure if our biz controls it; if we get hacked call the cops. This has been & will be a source of ongoing struggle, as the dominant value add of crypto remains trust minimization not any other features.
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Source of ongoing struggle, but also workable imo, as centralized services can offload dumb binary logic and security to crypto and specialize in sales, UX, code design, compliance, etc. Who was it that said society advances by maximizing the stuff we don't need to think about?
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Alfred North Whitehead. But his point about trust minimization is salient. In your model, I have to trust the relationship between the company and the crypto (smart contract), where the dumb binary logic is offloaded, is ~infallible.
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Ideally, I would be able to trust less and interface with the crypto (smart contract) directly. There may be a way to be a central intermediary without increasing trust. But minimizing trust is the first thing one needs to solve, not sales, design, or org structure.
End of conversation
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For decades I've been telling "libertarians" they'd better be promoting net asset taxation as a replacement for taxes on economic activity because that's the closest thing they'll get to Spooner's ideal of mutual insurance of property rights. Then they call me a commie.
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This sounds alot like the Islamic excess wealth tax Zakat, which seems to makes some sense on a scarce commodity money base. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat
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Zakat is charity disintermediating the protectors of property rights. A sound local currency system would distribute property taxes as a dividend to the class of individuals placing their flesh blood and bone between civilization and chaos. Charity would be their responsibility.
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These are the individuals you need to convince that civilization is a good deal -- something the kings of old managed to do by inviting the best of his warriors to "court" the "ladies of the court" and "sire" the next generation. Fools are running "civilization" nowadays.
End of conversation
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