Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man | Hacker News Reader

Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man

acoup.blog

112 pointsKednicma12 comments

This blog is great, highly recommend. Along with this series, he has some really interesting ones on medieval warfare illustrated via Lord of the Rings:

https://acoup.blog/category/collections/siege-of-gondor/ https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-battle-of-helms-...

I can second that, both the series on the siege of Minas Tirith and the series on the battle of Helm's Deep were outstanding, making great points by comparing book, movie, and historical precedent, to better understand all three.

I wonder if the lack of extraction will doom cryptocurrencies to not being suitable for the impoverished masses; without a government which needs the cryptocurrency to be used for taxation, it seems like coin usage would ebb and flow along with the tides of the market's capitalization.

Cryptocurrency is a form of money unlike any other. Just as the internet is a network unlike any other before it, native internet money simply has no parallels. Bitcoin is related to gold in that it is attempting to be a global store of value separated from governments. But other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum have elements of commodities, energy (ETH is similar to oil in that you need it to run operations on the network), equities, interest bearing assets, among others. It’s all of these at once. No government or regulator sets arbitrary fences around what an asset can be, as it’s just software.

I think the biggest misconception of blockchain is that it’s “worthless”. The people who say this haven’t given crypto a modicum of thought - they read some dingus’ blog post and decided that was all there is to say. I truly think bitcoin / blockchain will be seen as one of the transformative technologies of the 21st century.

I has nothing to do with crypto tho. Whether a monetary instrument works and is adopted as a widespread medium of exchange depends on factors outside whether or not it's impossible to counterfeit or is deflationary or inflationary.

It's been 12 years of bitcoiners telling me any day now, it's going to overthrow the USD and Visa and Mastercard, and yet, no one's buying a Starbucks with BTC.

If you start out with your selling point as some kind of libertarian utopian currency free of regulation, you're going to miss the mark for the same reason that the internet, once seen as free of regulation, geography, and government (Remember, "The Cyberspace Declaration of Independence") is not only regulated now, but you have the public clamoring for more.

We have regulations because a majority of your neighbors want them. And if a majority of your neighbors want a regulated currency, they are not going to adopt yours if your selling point is no controls.

BTC will never be currency, I think it’s more a store of value like gold. But there is a certainly a crypto economy, where employees are paid in a variety of cryptos - stablecoins and others. It’s difficult to understand until you enter this universe. But it’s real!

> no one's buying a Starbucks with BTC.

I paid in UPXAU but I did buy Starbucks with crypto just the other day.

https://uphold.com/en/blog/introducing-the-worlds-first-mult...

> We have regulations because a majority of your neighbors want them

A majority of my neighbors want the promised outcomes of the pitches for regulation given by politicians and big businessmen. If those outcomes can be provided more quickly by other means the regulations themselves become comparatively unpalatable. No one asked for cookie warning popups on every site.

The people who think of blockchain money as useful do so because they generally come from a tech background, and don't know what money actually is.

Blockchain money is worthless, it's definitely not currency, and less of a 'store of value' as say, common art.

Money is used as a basis of common commercial transaction (not hoarding), and gold has some store of value due to its historical relationship to money, but even then it's not that big of a deal.

A 'store of value' generally should retain it's value over long periods. Real estate is 100x a better store of value than BTC and it's much more accessible.

More importantly, the economy lives on credit not money and it's hard to account for that in crypto.

There are zero monetary systems that work well without flex, so this idea of 'irreproducible' is mostly valuable in a system of 'mostly non-trust and transparency'. We have monetary policy now, which is very useful.

Money is a social contract.

Technology is just the means to express the exchange of it.

BTC is a very interesting curiosity, but really its pragmatically missing the point badly.

Good blog though.

Did the assessment of taxes in kind prevent silver and gold from being used for purposes of trade?

No, the impoverished lifestyle of small farmers prevented them from having coins for trade. It's easy to imagine that these farmers were impoverished because they were oppressed, but it's just as true that they did not have opportunities to engage in trade which would have enriched them.

Just like one can convert milk to cheese (easier to store, easier to transport) and grapes to wine or fruit to schnapps (same advantages), one can convert grain to alcohol.

late USSR "vodka economy" as seen from the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24176587

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