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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

The author addresses this and I think is right about it. It doesn’t at all really matter about what happens in step 2 and what weird complex rules you put in place because fundamentally votes on the network are now coin instead of compute power. It’s the same with PoW chains. How you turn “I have some compute” into votes doesn’t change that the fact that compute is the thing that produces votes.

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That's a good point but it seems like fiat currency has similar snake-eats-tail flaws (he who has the gold makes the rules), but somehow the global economy hasn't completely collapsed, yet.

Fiat currency is backed by something like “proof of military,” or “proof of governmental power.”

I think you're looking for "proof of gun" by either the military in a macro sense or the police in a more micro sense.

Proof of gun happens to be the ultimate answer in real life, though.

I’m bullish on blockchain and cryptocurrency in general, but eventually it’s going to have to be backed up with guns. In that respect every currency is a fiat currency.

> ...but eventually it’s going to have to be backed up with guns.

You forgot to include your rationale. Or is it <complexity>?

The rationale is obvious. Ultimately, the ability to exercise physical force decides every dispute. Before you can even have such a thing as currency to exchange for goods and services, you need to have enough rule of law to prevent people with guns from just taking whatever goods and services they want without your consent. So how do you maintain rule of law? Government—which is defined as a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Right now, legal tender laws rely on proof of gun. If you owe me a debt and I try to collect on that debt by showing up at your house with a gun to take your gold or bitcoins or whatever, that’s not going to work. More men with more guns will show up and throw me in a cage. So instead of using my gun, I ask the government to use their guns. I sue you, and if I win, the court decides you should pay me, and through a complicated process they end up helping me to your money that you owe me. But the government has a condition: all debts can be paid in USD. I can’t take your gold or bitcoins, unless I have more guns than the government, which kind of makes me the government in the long run.

Are you implying fiat can't coexist with Bitcoin? Why does it have to be one or the other?

The way I see it, Bitcoin's mission is to simply hold the fiat currencies of this world in check. Nothing less, nothing more.

If all of the sudden we stop debasing, Bitcoin's raison d'être is largely gone.

I don’t disagree with any of that.

My only point is that if enough men with guns want to shut down cryptocurrency, they can. If enough men with guns want to do anything, they can. The only thing that can stop them is even more men with even more guns.

Sure, except that with fiat there is more accountability.

Individual fiat currencies have collapsed in eg Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Weimar Germany. However, their currencies were not the reserve currencies of global trade. Historically, the international reserve currency was gold, but now it’s just other fiat currencies. So we have to trust that the ECB and FED won’t repeat the mistakes of other fiat currencies.

The FED seems like a trustworthy bunch who know what they’re doing. But then again, so did the CDC two years ago. So, hmm.

> So we have to trust that the ECB and FED...

"Fed", not "FED". It isn't an acronym.

> But then again, so did the CDC two years ago.

Oh. Sigh... Yeah, that weird capitalisation seems to be more popular among alt-right nutjobs.

I picked up the habit of capitalizing FED from my Econ 102 professor.

Fuck you for assuming I’m an “alt-right nutjob” because I’m disappointed in the CDC’s handling of the pandemic. The CDC had a reputation as a world-class institution before they made several well-publicized mistakes (e.g. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/999194177/early-cdc-coronavir... I personally had a much higher opinion of them two years ago than I do now. How am I an “alt-right nutjob” for remembering high profile mistakes like that?

1) I can't help that your professor was an idiot.

2) OK, maybe you aren't actually an alt-right nutjob... But:

a) They're in the habit of spreading conspiracy theories about the CDC, and

b) They also often write "FED" like that.

You can blame your professor, not me, for making you look like one. (And yourself: How many years have you had to notice that his spelling is wrong?)

So there’s a few attestations for the all-caps FED listed here, including some from such sources as the IMF: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/FED

I guess you’re going to say the IMF are also idiots, and it’s the IMF’s fault that I “look like an alt-right nutjob”? In any case, it’s a hard question to research, especially since queries like “Fed capitalization” are ambiguous.

In any case, I’m not really inclined to take seriously the opinions of internet trolls whose only contribution is to call me an “alt-right nutjob” for criticizing the CDC and capitalizing FED. Your bizarre paranoia is not my responsibility and I’m frankly still not convinced that it’s actually wrong to capitalize FED. In my experience, people who issue bizarre and unsubstantiated insults to complete strangers over the internet are usually neither intelligent nor well-informed, and so you’ll understand if I don’t take your advice, or you, seriously.

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