Friedrich Hayek: Prophet of Cryptocurrency? | Hacker News Reader

Friedrich Hayek: Prophet of Cryptocurrency?

csgs.kcl.ac.uk

6 pointsadultorata5 comments

I watched a Hayek recording a few days back and he was saying exactly what a "genuine" crypto person thinks today.

This is the recording I am talking of : https://t.co/t7nLUskAKs

And what is that?

There's also a very prescient interview with Milton Friedman from the turn of the millenium that says the Internet has revolutionised business and communication, and the next milestone would be creating a digital currency that doesn't have any border or control but it's completely Internet native.

https://youtu.be/leqjwiQidlk

I am probably politically opposed to the school of thought which lies behind this, Not the least because it's a product of Kings, and I worked at UCL and they are poles apart in motivation and intent educationally, historically (in the context of the university of london internal politics this is basically just a declaration of interest/bias)

Dr Adam Tebble is a Reader in Political Theory. Prior to joining King’s in 2011, Dr Adam Tebble taught at the School of Public Policy, UCL. In the United States he has taught at Brown University, where he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow (2004-2006), then Lecturer (2006-2007) at the Department of Political Science.

He's both sides!

What concerns me is the naivety of this writing. Web 3.0 is basically a busted flush at this point. Etherium turned out to be functionally useless at preventing mis-use of the 'code is law' model, there is obvious signs that speculative gain dominates use of chain, in almost all fora of public engagement and the closed financial communities using it (reserve banks) either have specific problems to solve (lack of mutual trust, and a complete lack of a regulator: they're independent nation states, they can't have one) or have the regulator problem (the regulator either does it, or looks at some mutuality they do amongst themselves and asks if they can audit it)

I'm not an economist, or a political philosopher, but I am concerned at some of the implicit and explicit assumptions in the piece. Hayek is not exactly an un-loaded source of theory, any more than Marx is. So, don't mistake this for either words of pure wisdom, or politically neutral: It's not. Hayek leads to Thatcher. Hayek is walking away from the road to serfdom but towards a faux equivalent, in the impoverishment of workers when their rights to unionise are destroyed in the interests of libertarianism theories of what "should" be.

Do not mistake reserve bank interest in digital currency for the game playing inherent in Bitcoin, and do not mistake the pious hope of Etherium for emergent reality.

Have they moved to proof of stake yet? What do economists think about proof of stake? What units are the stake held in again?

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