A Response to Paul Krugman from a Keynesian Bitcoiner
saito.tech
saito.tech
edit: but it turns out the article author is a crypto bro, not a bitcoin person.
What I believe OP is talking about is how the blockchain made it possible to incentivize people to mine, thereby delivering the service of the public good of the blockchain.
Sure, all of those individual points are of perhaps debatable value, but he acknowledges that while maybe mining or staking aren't quite it yet, the fundamental blockchain tech still enables decentralized coordination and the creation of a public good through private incentive.
Which is no small feat.
The P2P network consists of volunteers who are not paid for running nodes, and whose contribution is basically guaranteeing open access to all of the data flows (confirmed and unconfirmed blocks and transactions) needed for other participants to join the network and participate on equal terms.
One of the major problems in the crypto space is that people attribute to "decentralization" the properties of openness that are actually there because of the volunteer (non-profit) provision of the open network from which miners/stakers are extracting their profits.
But first your basic conception of Bitcoin will be addressed, since its all you opined on (why even respond if you aren't addressing the article?)
If Bitcoin only served miners it would not be around. Miners are paid indirectly by the rising price in Bitcoin, so those purchasing it are the ones who are setting that value - they are fully consenting to the simple and genius system for its economic and technological properties which they cannot get anywhere else. The Bitcoin system is very simple; if it was purely extractive as you claim people would not use it as a store of value and transaction layer. Considering large portions of users hold their coins through large price action, and have done so for the entire duration of its lifetime, they consider it useful beyond speculation. Who are you to tell them they are wrong in so few words? And if an invention is deemed valuable, why shouldn't it use energy?
And we haven't even gotten to the article yet, because you misunderstood the economic context for your preconception of a vocal subset of a community that the author is in disagreement with.
Do the maintainers of SMTP do so as a public good, eg: provide us with decentralized email systems? Encryption protocols? ECMAscript?
Internet protocols are maintained as a public good. The Bitcoin developers are certainly not trying to extract profits, they are trying to deliver the world an open source monetary system.
What they are trying to deliver and what they are actually delivering are two wildly different things. They've built a platform that destroys the environment faster than the entire banking sector, enables scams and ponzi schemes at unprecedented scale and anonymity, meanwhile delivering a whopping transaction throughput of around 20/s - enough to support a few moderately busy supermarkets in a single small city.
That's precisely the point of the article isn't it?
It seems that he disagrees with certain fundamental intellectual premises of bitcoin.
You don't get to call yourself a member of a movement if you fundamentally disagree with it. No; you're somebody criticizing it from the outside. That's fine, but don't conflate the two. You can't be an anti-bitcoin bitcoiner, an anti-left leftist, or an anti-Nazi Nazi.
Satoshi Nakamoto never said that.
Satoshi did comment on the need for the network to provide a better incentive to P2P network nodes. He was well aware that a major class of essential nodes is expected to do work for free while miners are handed the profits from consensus operations.
What is the economic benefit of Bitcoin, net of the environmental cost of powering its provision mechanism? If in the long term the cost of energy expenditure to generate a new coin surpasses its value, then society is in the red.
Goodluck with that. It's funny when a pro-X convinces you more that X is doomed.
"The Bigger the Bubble the Better" ? What is this in reference to?
You know, the kind that say that vaccines cause autism, global warming is a hoax, evolution is just a theory, Covid-19 is a scam by the globalists to better control people, ...
Wake up, sheeple!
/s
He is one of the most influential academic economists by number of citations, started a whole new field of Applied Economics (New Economic Geography).
His textbooks (including Econ 101 and International Economics, 12 editions since 1987!) sell very well, which must mean that they are well regarded by the professors that assign them.
In policy debates around the response to the Great Recession he revived the Liquidity Trap idea central to which was admitted as valid by the central banks and formulated a modern theoretic explanation for it (instead and in addition to the old IS-LM).
In his punditry at the New York Times and elsewhere he has represented the mainstream/orthodoxy of economic opinion. The liquidity trap was controversial initially, but it is well accepted now - by central banks, policymakers in governments and economists in the private sector.
If you think he is outlandish, you have to check your assumptions to what other academic economists think, and although it might different in style and presentation it will be the same.
He is hated intensely for his politics (he has a book called a "The Conscience of a liberal" and hasn't held back criticising people like George W. Bush, Trump and Putin) and by followers of heterodox economic schools and crypto-enthusiasts. It is your loss to ignore his insights.
His NYT opinion articles are mainstream/orthodoxy according to what measure?
The Nobel Prize people seem to think it is:
* https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/
> It wasn't funded by Nobel, and it isn't issued by the same committee.
It is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:
> Every year, the academy awards the Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, the Crafoord Prize, the Sjöberg Prize and several other awards. The Academy maintains close relations with foreign academies, learned societies and international scientific organizations and also promotes international scientific cooperation. The Academy of Sciences is located within the Stockholm region's Royal National City Park.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Swedish_Academy_of_Scien...
* https://www.nobelprize.org/about/the-economic-sciences-prize...
The same folks who do physics and chemistry.
> Each September the Academy's Economics Prize Committee, which consists of five elected members [...]
> Some critics argue that the prestige of the Prize in Economics derives in part from its association with the Nobel Prizes, an association that has often been a source of controversy. Among them is the Swedish human rights lawyer Peter Nobel, a great-grandnephew of Ludvig Nobel. [...] saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...