Disturbing Rise of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
guerrilla-capitalism.com
guerrilla-capitalism.com
I'm not convinced. Deficit hawks have been beating the inflation drums for decades now, with zilch to show for it.
We do see inflation. But rather than inflated consumer prices, we see inflated asset prices as measured by historical valuations of stocks and record-low (or even negative) bond yields for example.
MMT seems like a prescription, not for Weimar-style hyperinflation, but a world in which asset prices rise beyond any reasonable level only to collapse in a terrifying catastrophe, only to be rescued by central banks which buy up even more assets to continue the cycle.
The Bank of Japan has a leg up on the US here. It currently owns a sizable share of the Japanese stock market:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/BOJ-is-top-10-shareholder-in...
Why?
1. Because there are people alive with large debts on the other side of those inflated assets. Any deflation will kill the lender (if borrower defaults) and the borrower (if the asset's value declines or they can't make any more payments)
2. There are entire populations unable to make asset purchases because assets are too expensive, thus they are left out.
The Fed's actions jumpstarted the economy by creating this massive inequality and has left out many behind.
This should not be surprising to anyone.
Bernanke’s stated goal was to inflate asset prices through QE, so that consumers would feel an increased “wealth effect”[1] and spend more.
The lie at the root of this policy is that spending == productivity which is probably the biggest bald-faced lie ever told. We don’t call an overleveraged man with 30k in credit card debt rich or productive. That would be absurd.
Yet it is this lie that is at the root of quantitative easing and the overleveraged American economy.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/other/o_bernanke20...
[Edit: And an MMT system is not the same as what we've been doing, so it is not relevant that the deficit hawks have been wrong.]
Isn't, say rent, part of the "consumer prices" bit? If so, it is definitely tied to "asset price" of the said home.
> MMT-ers believe that currency is nothing more than an economic scoreboard or tally, and any government that denominates it’s own currency can never go broke because they can always create more currency. Of course, as Weimar Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia and more recently Zimbabwe and Venezuela have all found out, you have to watch out for hyperinflation.
> The MMT magic bullet for this is… taxation. Through taxation the government can drain excess liquidity from the system while printing as much currency as it needs to fund its projects and as long as the total value of currency printed doesn’t exceed the productive capacity of the economy as a whole.[0]
[0] https://medium.com/@markjeftovic/the-disturbing-rise-of-mode...
Of course, as Japan awkwardly found out, you can have the highest debt/gdp in the world and still get deflation.
(I remember hyperinflation frequently being predicted as the obvious outcome of Japan's staggering deficits in the 90s though... by people who would doubtless pour scorn on MMT)
The difference between all of those above examples and Japan is that their economic output was substantially impared (e.g. with Zimbabwe by effectively destroying their agricultural sector) and they were trying to pay off externally denominated debts as well as sustain themselves.
None of this requires deficits, it can happen even in surplus.
Call me unreasonable, but given recent (even last 80 years) history I can certainly understand why they believe this. The truth is not just that I (and I'm almost 40) can't remember any time it didn't work, you'd have to go back to my grandfather's time (he died at >100 years old in 2015) to find counterexamples. Even back then, in the US he would have been too young to realize the last time the US was confronted with this.
A reason why thy might not have had enough money in the system until QE was that the steady state market equilibrium before the 2008 crash might have genuinely required less cash. There is no law that says that after shocks that the market will always equilibrate to the same place. it is specially the nature of shocks that market conditions are shown to not be in the equilibrium that we assumed they were. You may see signs of one happening, but it is far from clear that you could correctly navigate all policies and market participants to re-equilibriate peacefully.
The problem was that, before the Great Recession, there was probably too much money, rather than too little. The Fed avoided a deflationary spiral, but now the trick is to drain off the excess slowly and carefully, without breaking anything.
Newb question here: People that "advocate MMT" are basically saying it's fine that our deficit keeps rising because geopolitics and inflation/tax control?
And the people disturbed by that actually want our existing tax structure to start making headway against the debt instead of increasing it?
And secondary question to this, is MMT a mostly left theory (because we need to pay for the free stuff)?
I'm not trying to cause arguments I just want to make sure I got how people see this issue.
It’s not a particularly leftist idea - the right has tacitly treated government spending in this way for decades. It was Dick Cheney who said “deficits don’t matter” after all.
The author of this article is confused: hyperinflations are a symptom of collapsing economies, not a cause in and of themselves. Having external debts that you can’t default on in a situation where your economy is shrinking is what drives hyperinflation. Look at every major hyperinflation (Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe etc etc) and you’ll see those are the drivers of hyperinflation.
The total amount of money commands a fixed set of resources. Increasing the amount of money in circulation does not matter at all for reality. It's just an abstraction. An accounting fiction. If the government spends, there's someone else not using those same resources the government's now using.
Even the Soviets didn't control 100% of the money supply. I once read that it was about 99.6%.
And in both the Weimar and the Zimbabwe (and Venezuela) examples, it is very much the case that the government made the economy collapse, not the other way around. So yes, it is definitely possible to cause hyperinflation through government spending.
Neither had an economy that was capable (at the time) of sustaining these payments. Hyperinflation was the inevitable result.
Do you seriously think it matters whether it was a choice to overspend or not ? In Weimar Germany's case it was not a choice and arguably it was not really a choice in Zimbabwe either. In Venezuela I think it may have been a choice.
I find a lot of people are obsessed with this justice thing, in various context. With guilt. As if some all powerful deity is just about to descend and decide if you've been good or bad, despite being atheists. And for guilt, of course choice matters. But being entirely innocent and a sac is worth one sac. So is being 100% guilty and a sac. If I gave you a choice of being a worker in Venezuela, Zimbabwe or Wiemar Germany what do you base your choice on ? I would base my choice on in which case I would be able to change my situation the easiest, so I'd pick Venezuela out of those options, because I think my odds of successfully working my way out of that situation is the highest, and that I think Venezuela is more "guilty" than Zimbabwe and more than Weimar Germany just doesn't factor into it.
The governments in question could have chosen not to print money. All that would have done would be to alter the distribution & order of the collapse. Its occurrence was inevitably either way.
Obviously the Zimbabwean experience was caused by awful choices made by the government. But these were not 'spending' choices. They were policy choices that in turn led to the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy.
“Justice” has nothing to do with any of this. Economics does: Hyperinflation is a result, not a cause.
No ! That's EXACTLY my point. There was a serious problem (self-inflicted or otherwise) and monetary policy, whichever one was chosen, was just not going to resolve it.
Just like TODAY monetary policy choice are NOT going to save us from the impact of, say, free healthcare, or massive economic efforts to "fight" climate change, or ...
We should choose to implement (or not) those policies assuming that the cost for those projects is a very real cost that will have to be paid, one way or another. It will be paid in real resources that individuals, meaning you and me and everyone, won't have access to anymore.
If some policy costs 1.5 billion dollars you should judge that policy on the basis it's going to cost you 1 less coffee at starbucks per month, or some other 5$ worth of resources. Because that is true for government expenditure regardless of where the money actually comes from.
And I would still argue that Zimbabwe, and for that matter Germany, got into the issues they got into because of their ideas of "justice". Racial justice in Zimbabwe's case. Imperialism in Germany's case (which they of course considered just at that time, and it's just a fact of life that justice changes over time). But you're right too, these were not monetary policy choices.
It's akin to being in tens of thousands in medical debt, losing your job at walmart because you tried to punch a customer and being told that the only real problem with your finances is that you didn't rein in your spending after you lost your job.
Zimbabwe was destined for hyperinflation even if they had a budget surplus, meanwhile Japan had the biggest deficit in the world and still got deflation. MMT is mostly just not being in denial about that. There's no moral component to it.
In neither case was the hyperinflation caused by "spending just a bit too much" - it was a side effect of killing economically productive industries and attempts to pay off externally denominated debts.
You’re completely ignoring the velocity of money. This kind of confusion of stocks and flows is endemic in online macroeconomic discourse sadly. (Some have said that it’s endemic in the economics profession too.)
Sometimes it seems that way because of rhetoric, but at the end of the day we need inflation, as without it the incentive to add value grind away.
It seems like the kind of policy that you can flirt with occasionally, but not embrace or actually use. You can get forgiveness for periods of justifiably high deficit spending in a Keynesian model, but if you tell people that you don't think you'll ever need to pay it back...well, they'll try to sell those debts real quick.
This is, without doubt, the most stupid sentence I have read in my entire life.
I really wanted to write a comment that explains why I think that, but then I realized I would be forced to pick the entire article apart piece-by-piece, and I just cannot stomach that. In short, though, even if MMT were the very worst economic theory ever invented (it's not), it would always be possible to re-build the economy after a fatal crash. Value does not "collapse on itself and disappear forever" under any political regime, environmental catastrophes threatening extinction being the possible exception.
> Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.
Most prior economic systems have failed to do both of these. Either they didn't have that much capacity for growth (e.g. once you're farming all the arable land, your agrarian kingdom isn't going to be producing much more land), or necessitated violent expansion (only way to get wealthier is to raid or annex somebody else's territory).
Unless we have examples of societies experience consistent economic growth, without any substantial form of expansion of territory or use of state power, then this isn't survivorship bias. It's just a sober analysis of history.
We're at 2.4% (In the US) but that's still too low and the Fed is trapped. They can't go higher, they've paused and depending on what happens over the next while, they may very well have to cut.
So I use the phrase trapped at the zero bound because once you actually touch that bound I think you get stuck there.
That old post was: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-14/trapped-inside-zer...
(The way out of the mess is to stop trying to use monetary policy to manipulate market interest rates, and to instead shift to a short-term policy target that fosters stability rather than instability. Such as, e.g. the money-price of gold. Or some measure of the money supply. Or the market forecast of nominal incomes x months in the future. There are lots of plausible choices!)
I'm going to need more info before I believe someone telling me the end is neigh.
"Compared to what I see as the inevitable “dual death spirals of MMT”, letting all those banksters fry in 2008 looks a lot more palatable in retrospect. David Stockman’s Great Deformation shows how the economy would have fully recovered by 2010 or 2011 instead of being where we are now: trapped at the Zero bound and headed toward democratic socialism and MMT."
By comparison, MMT is basically telling the government to use quantitative easing to pay for everything. When you really dig down into it, the proponents of MMT know exactly how deceptive the scheme really is. They fully understand that it's allowing the government to pay for whatever it wants by printing money and letting the populace lose their savings due to larger inflation. And it fails to address immediate shortcomings: namely the fact that people will stop accepting payment in dollars if the government starts rampantly increasing inflation.
MMT doesn't say to ignore inflation - it thinks inflation is a key measure to keep an eye on just like the current system - it just says that taxes and debt bonds should be used as independent control parameters from deficit.
In theory, yes. In practice, not at all. Recessions are exigent circumstances, and no one was under the impression that the government would continue increasing the supply of money to pay for arbitrary things. Not to mention, the bulk of this quantatitive easing took place during two years were we saw deflation - so increasing the money supply was something the government would have likely done anyway.
By comparison, if the government announced that starting in 2020 it would start paying for everything by printing more money then the first thing that will happen is that smart, wealthy, people will just move their assets into things other than dollars. Like resources futures, which are independent of inflation.
The people who actually take on the burden of taxation are people who don't have the means or know-how to manage their assets. So the result is probably that poor and middle class people are even worse off.
This is just underlining my question. If the congress were operating with an MMT view of the world, they could have injected money into beneficial social program without handwringing over deficits, avoided QE. Regular people would have more wealth in their hands, and less money would be running around the stock market inflating assets. We would have a healthier economy today.
> By comparison, if the government announced that starting in 2020 it would start paying for everything by printing more money
This isn't what MMT says to do, it keeps taxation as a control parameter, it just wouldn't be singularly obsessed about the budget deficit.
Avoiding bank runs and the collapse of financial institutions is a pretty massive social benefit, even if it does turn into "bailing out wall street" memes.
> This isn't what MMT says to do, it keeps taxation as a control parameter, it just wouldn't be singularly obsessed about the budget deficit.
The whole premise over MMT as compared to standard government revenue streams is to reduce or substantially eliminate dependency on taxation by having the government print the money it needs. As pointed out earlier, if MMT simply refers to any amount of increase in the money supply then governments already have been practicing MMT for decades.
Again, simply look at what the proponents of MMT are promising. Universal service and government provided jobs for everyone that wants one. Peel off the veneer of the whole premise of inflation vs. taxation and it's really just a means of trying to let the government spend way more money by obfuscating revenue streams.
In the immediate crash, I agree, but in the years after as QE kept being needed to stabilize the system, there were other choices. There could have been a different program to inject money directly to the people who took out mortgages, requiring lenders to take a principal write down at the same time. This would have left more wealth in peoples hands, instead of funneling more wealth and assets into bank hands. And in large part it was fear of deficits that prevented consideration of these options.
The argument isn't to "government spend way more money", it's to make a more balanced consideration of how we actually use the power of currency for beneficial purposes in the long term.
From [1], a list of US recessions:
"The National Bureau of Economic Research dates recessions on a monthly basis back to 1854; according to their chronology, from 1854 to 1919, there were 16 cycles. The average recession lasted 22 months, and the average expansion 27. From 1919 to 1945, there were six cycles; recessions lasted an average 18 months and expansions for 35. From 1945 to 2001, and 10 cycles, recessions lasted an average 10 months and expansions an average of 57 months. This has prompted some economists to declare that the business cycle has become less severe. Many factors that may have contributed to this moderation including the establishment of deposit insurance in the form of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933 and increased regulation of the banking sector. Other changes include the use of fiscal policy in the form of automatic stabilizers to alleviate cyclical volatility. The creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 has been disputed as a source of stability with it and its policies having mixed successes. Since the early 1980s the sources of the Great Moderation has been attributed to numerous causes including public policy, industry practices, technology, and even good luck."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
Is the current system brittle, and growing more so over time? Absolutely.
Is MM Theory the answer? I couldn't say. But part of ascertaining whether or not MM Theory can help us is taking a look at all of its wrinkles. (We should be taking a look at all of its benefits too. Again, just intellectual honesty, and necessary to the full analysis of the idea.)
The current system is growing brittle along one axis.
After World War II, there was a cycle of recession and recovery, but each cycle had a higher level of inflation... until Reagan (or, if you prefer, Volcker). Since then, we've had the same cycle of recession and recovery, but each one with a lower level of inflation. But the problem has moved to a different axis - real wages.
Money is not just a unit of account, it's a claim on stuff. If you create a bunch more claims on stuff, without creating any more stuff, that's going to be a problem. (You might call it inflation.) If you try to solve the problem via taxation, then you wind up with a bunch more claims on stuff, no more stuff, and the government holding most of the claims. That's not going to work out well for people who need to use those claims to get stuff - like food, say, or housing, or medicine.
I'm not sure whether the fact that the government's method of doing so and the unchecked nature of this power is obscured by currently makes this better or worse than straightforward proposals for command economies.
It's one where the government has unilateral authority to marshal all of a society's resources. Do we really want, say, Trump to be able to print as much money as he wants to fund his wall?
assumes that government would be a single person deciding. If power were sufficiently spread out it seems to me that having government allocate resources doesn't have to be worse than the current system.
In a true command economy absolutely everything is determined by the government's "no", to everything. And the disappointing BIG main reason for "no" is because no bureaucrat is ever going to risk his/her position for either your fate, or your idea. Money printing does not come with any "no".
In a capitalist, even highly taxed and money printing economy, whatever you want to do, if you can do it while being sufficiently positive for the economy, you are allowed to do it (within reason).
In a true command economy, you can do nothing. You can't change jobs. You can't move. You can't start a business. You can't educate yourself. You can't help anyone with anything (even trivial things are a risk). You can't ... EVERYTHING is determined by the absolute contempt and incredible jealousy of everyone. You literally carry an old ladies' bag up a staircase ... you've just made enemies of every old lady on the block, one of which has a son who runs the town's transport department and you lose your driver's license.
There are a lot of ex-Soviets running around everywhere. Find one and talk to them.
In fact, it might even behave like an inverse tax, since the wealthy will be the first to move their savings out of dollars while most everyday people will be stuck with their savings becoming worthless.
> There are a lot of ex-Soviets running around everywhere. Find one and talk to them.
I have spoken to many people who used to be in state run economies (USSR, Cuba). Effectively all of them are skeptical of schemes like MMT that function to give the government more power without public knowledge or consent.
With wealth returning to the countries it was taken from, the western world is finally returning the place it always should have been.
It couldn't be further from the case that command economies are the default state. They're a relatively possibility in the scope of human civilization.
So maybe you're underestimating abilities of some people to master multiple fields
If Elon Musk built a 3 star Michelin restaurant himself from scratch then yes I would classify that he has mastery of the fine dining industry. You could be an amazing chef but couldn't run a restaurant if your life depended on it. Just like how there are brilliant engineers that aren't good at being CEOs of a tech company.
That doesn't make us experts on stuff, but a human should have at least some understanding of a broad range of topics, including economics.
Outside of all the noise and fud surrounding Bitcoin, within it lies a new economic system which has lots of similarities with the gold standard and Austrian economics.
BTC inflation is currently higher than USD
Historically, Bitcoin started off as a hyperinflationary mint in order to produce the supply rapidly for a small user group before the general public would be able to access the production methods and before the difficulty settings Satoshi chose would increase the cost of production and reduce the ROI and increase the CAPEX/OPEX dictacted by the BTC mining software and network.
Aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation. Also there's a chance that something will make Bitcoin obsolete in the near future - immediately destroying the trade value of Bitcoin, either a new cryptocurrency, a quantum computer or cryptographic breakthrough that would allow theft of BTC private keys or more predictably a bug like what recently happened in the main Bitcoin core wallet client software which allowed a user to inflate the supply of Bitcoins past 21 million and mint more BTC for free.
https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/cve-2018-17144-the-aftermath...
Here’s an explanation on how the Bitcoin market differs vastly from Gold speculation markets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r04gfWfRkE
Then there's the story of Bitfinex, assumed to be a lingering MTGOX scale exit scam using a "stablecoin" which is pegged 1:1 with USD across all other major cryptocurrency exchanges. With no audit, Bitfinex has printed aprox $2,042,257,000 USD as of today. Much of which is alleged to be used by their own accounts to manipulate the levered futures markets.
The main points I presented are provable, leaving only the Bitfinex'ed theory up to the evidence and allegations presented which have been backed up with additional university studies. [1]
A] Bitcoin hyperinflation and low cost ROI/CAPEX/OPEX supply acquisition by Satoshi's Bitcoin mining rule set can be understood by reading the original Bitcoin white paper and factoring in the low difficulty and tiny user base during the initial period of hyper inflation.
B] The current inflation rate for the United States is 1.9% for the 12 months ended December 2018, as published on January 11, 2019 by the U.S. Labor Department.
Bitcoin inflation rate per annum: 3.83% [3]
C] Control of the Bitcoin supply being owned by an oligarchy. This is provable by looking though any of the Blockchain explorer APIs or by analyzing the blockchain yourself.
Even if we were to assume the 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) who control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation were actually the main exchanges, this is still much worse than the traditional banking/financial markets due to the current unaccountable nature of how those exchanges operate. An ongoing trend in the Bitcoin markets is the famous BART phenomenon, presumably one of the largest owners of Bitcoins is manipulating the entire market though short squeezes which last a few minutes before the market returns to where nearly exactly where it was before. The most plausible explanation is one or more exchange operators are capable of mixing fractional reserve deposits with manipulation of the futures markets to fraudulently terminate market contracts with those extreme temporary spikes in volatility and minimize their risk by returning the market price back to where it was prior before any deposits/withdraws can be confirmed between exchanges.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/professor...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066&...
[2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
Bitcoin hyperinflation during the early period is part of the design? It gave incentive to people invest money into the network and asset.
Many of those addresses are known addresses of exchanges, yes it's a problem that everyone puts money into the exchanges. However that is changing, new decentralized exchanges, atomic swap technologies already exist for people to move away from centralized exchanges. The industry has come a long way and still has further to go. Also the "regulated" banks that you speak of, plunged the world into the financial crisis and got away with it no harm. These "regulated" are constantly caught break multiple laws and manipulating markets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/12/11/hsbc-spared-... http://www.cityam.com/269831/goldman-sachs-hit-52m-fine-shor... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-01/goldman-s...
Decentralized exchanges are a myth. Someone is creating the software and with the added complexity, lack of accountability with anonymous developers comes the risk of malware hidden in software updates.
The only reason I can imagine you or anyone would try to argue that the answer to an imperfect legal, regulatory, and financial system is to abolish it and move to a new system designed to bypass accountability and where the money supply was designed to be minted very rapidly to an anonymous group of oligarchs who then simply horde it, would be because there's a strong psychological motivation for you to attempt to convince other people to "buy" into your deregulated penny stock database not because there's any real world benefit over a regulated system, but because you simply want to sell your stock for a higher price - leaving the greater fools who buy database tokens holding a bag of something they can't use anywhere.
Deregulation helps against malicious actors how??
https://medium.com/cryptopay/list-of-known-bitcoin-scams-bew...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=576337
Bitcoin and cryptocoins have been plagued with malicious actors since its inception. From Satoshi's wallets to MTGOX, the countless Bitcoin hacks and scams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=576337#post_linode_h...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=576337#post_allinvai...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=576337#post_bitfloor...
yet another major Bitcoin bank/exchange has exit scammed.
https://www.blockhaven.ca/releases/quadrigacx-a-potential-ri...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/18/bitcoin-d...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/fraudulent-south-korean...
When was the last time a Bank collapsed and FDIC insured deposits were lost?
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/01/17/bitconnect-bitcoi...
https://coinnewstelegraph.com/ethereum-news-new-zealand-base...
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/willardfoxton2/10000...
As the saying goes in the community, "Not your keys, not your coins", you're not supposed to store coins on an exchange. But nearly everyone does. Everyone is encouraged to hold their own keys and be responsible for their coins. As UX and wallets improve more and more people are holding their own coins. The people that store coins on exchanges must understand the risk of holding coins on exchanges. It's a reality of crypto.
It's true, current iterations of DEX are not really DEX, they are all centralized companies, these things take time to build, it's not a simple photo-sharing app. If it turns out that is impossible to build a true DEX then you can always do shapeshift style atomic swaps and those are here today!
Bitcoin hacks and scams are not related to Bitcoin. There are even more hacks and scams that happen in the regular finance industry. From SWIFT being hacked to countless and countless of scams by small and big companies. Are you seriously saying that Bitcoin only suffers from scams??
The difference between a Bitcoin bank failing and regular bank failing is that, if Bitcoin bank fails, for people who have stored their coins safely won't be affected. Sure the price will fluctuate because of the news but I still have my coins.
When a regular bank fails the entire country has to pay the price and money is printed and currency is debased. Everyone has to pay for the mistake of a few.
Shapeshift is not an atomic swap, it's an exchange and they charge a large fee on top of the current spot price determined by other major exchanges.
Bitcoin hacks are related to Bitcoin because Bitcoin/Ethereum is software.
See: https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/cve-2018-17144-the-aftermath...
When was the SWIFT protocol hacked? I'm guessing you're confusing stolen credentials with "hack" in that case which is indeed similar to the many cases where cryptocoin exchanges get hacked though stolen credentials and user funds are taken - except if that happens to your account at a normal bank you're protected with FDIC insurance or something similar depending on your bank.
You're confused. Regular banks fail, and customer funds are protected. When a regular bank fails, that has absolutely nothing to do with debasing currency, nor does it affect the inflation rate.
When you use Bitcoin there's a lot of trust needed that can't be guaranteed or verified, and while problems exist with traditional payment systems at least customers have protections and criminals or bad businesses can be held accountable.
I'm not sure why you think avoiding a legal system, or avoiding financial regulations would help solve any of the problems with malicious scams and abuse?
It sounds more like you're attempting to sell a product that does not fix any of those things, hoping to convince an audience to buy into an oligarchical penny stock
You are confusing Bitcoin with a payment network like VISA or PayPal. Hacks of exchanges are not related to Bitcoin itself, it is like saying, someone broke into my Gmail account because my password was easily guessed but you say TCP/IP broken. It does not make sense at all!
> No customer protection and irreversible transactions = "This is a feature not a bug of bitcoin."
Bitcoin has the economic principles of gold.
* Pure raw gold has no consumer protection and it is irreversible.
* Government cannot give FDIC insurance to gold bars, because governments cannot print gold bars out of thin air.
* Unlike gold, Bitcoin is digital, which means it can be sent across borders at a low cost, (Almost free with LN)
* You're comparing multiple things (Payment network, economic system, and governance system) with 1 piece of software.
if you want to compare payment network features, then you have to compare bitcoin/LN transactions to VISA, PayPal..etc
If you want to compare the economic system, then it's mostly Austrian vs Keynesian.
If you want to compare governance then it's about libertarian/anarchist/decentralization vs Centralised governance.
Unfortunately, you are coming across as very closed minded with same old tired arguments that were laid against bitcoin from inception, because the general population has a poor grasp of what it really is.
Have a read of this, it's a bit dated but it's still good, if you want to have a better understanding of what bitcoin is: https://www.coindesk.com/nobody-understands-bitcoin-thats-ok
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...
CVE-2010-5141 remote attack can spend anyone's balance
CVE-2010-5139 On 15 August 2010 over 184 billion bitcoins were generated
in a transaction, and sent to two addresses on the
network.
CVE-2012-2459 2012-05-14 This could be used to fork the
blockchain, including deep double-spend attacks.
CVE-2013-3219 Attacker can double-spend with 1 confirmation
CVE-2018-17144 Multiple double spend bugs allowing a user
to send more funds then available in wallet balance.
If you look at the previous comments you keep ignoring the specific points explained against why your claims are disingenuous and naive and repeating the same tired marketing falsehoods in your attempt to convince rubes into buying database software which may very likely become obsolete at any moment in the immediate future. Why would you want to store your "money" in a fragile software system with no protection or safeguards? At least with gold, you won't have someone on the other side of the world capable of breaking into your house remotely and stealing your savings.
Here's a recent research paper analysis on Bitcoin and the lightening network:
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/01/23/1548238967000/BIS-tro...
https://www.bis.org/publ/work765.pdf
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...
Yes, of course. Like all software Bitcoin has bugs, however, none of Bitcoin's bugs has been catastrophic, or else it would have collapsed to $0 and stayed there. The odds of catastrophic bugs still exist but with the most development moved to layer 2, it's hard to see any more changes coming to the core software for the foreseeable future.
I'm not saying Bitcoin is perfect and it has many problems. However, the problems you bring up are mostly incorrect.
* Mining centralization is an issue. Due to the fact that Mining hardware is currently produced mainly by 1 company. Hopefully, simple economics will change that and larger companies will start making dedicated mining chips.
* On chain transaction costs. If the number of transactions on BTC spikes, the fees will also skyrocket. LN is the solution to this problem but the network is still in development.
* Confidential transactions (CT) and fungibility. Currently, Bitcoin is not fungible and you must go through several steps in order to clear coin's history. Gold is fungible and so is cash. However Bitcoin devs have been working on CT for some time now and hopefully, we might see an implementation this year and pushed on to the network within the next 2 years.
* Push of centralization. Everything naturally trends towards centralization. A centralized bitcoin is useless, no matter how secure the chain is or how stable the software is. The community must reject all centralization efforts so BTC can keep its value
To your point that if a catastrophic bug is discovered which enables double spend and/or inflation, the Ethereum community showed that it is possible to hard fork and reverse the chain given unanimous approval by all factions of the network. So if you wake up one day and the network has collapsed due to some bug in Bitcoin Core then Bitcoin's governance system will kick in to save the network.
To your point that you think i'm "scamming" you. I couldn't care less if you bought Bitcoin or not, that's the beauty of Bitcoin. No one is forced to use it and no one really cares about what anyone thinks. You can sit there and call everyone a scammer, you can sit there and point out all the problems it has (Like anything man-made is perfect), people can write all the research paper they want about how it will fail HOWEVER, The reality is that the Bitcoin network and ecosystem is thriving and has survived incredible obstacles. The fact that you've pointed out at all the past issues and the fact that it has overcome just says that Bitcoin works!
Have a good day sir :)
The more a government borrows through bond issuance, the more it has to borrow later to service the debt they didn’t pay for before. Eventually this runs away to the point where there are not enough buyers for all of the debt issuance at reasonable interest rates so the borrowing costs sky rocket. This means even more debt has to be issued to service that debt... you see where this is going.
A country’s spending is capped by it’s ability to find borrowers of its bonds. Given that normal tax rates aren’t covering the spending, it’s not likely that even 100% tax rates would be enough revenue to offset these scenarios.
Do MMT proponents just advocate literally printing money that is never tied to an instrument to be paid back?
They don't see any problem with that, and they have some evidence to support the idea.