Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

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At least he defines his terms. Words like "government" can mean a multitude of things and these meaning change over time.

In general I have found that arguments are often not really about the points of an essay but about the definitions used, ie one person uses definition 1 and the other uses definition 2 and they just argue past each other.

For example if I say "Bitcoin is money", I don't think that statement is meaningful without defining what I mean by "money" and perhaps "bitcoin".

I don't think understanding the linked essay really depends on knowing what he means by "MoMT", he defines it just fine for us.

"Basically, MoMT tells us that money has anomalous value only because economic agents rationally speculate in it, whereas conventional thought (whether Austrian or orthodox) holds that money's price is explained primarily by its use in trade."

To me that's an interesting idea. Why not debate that? Instead all of the comments here are about a bunch of superficial bullshit (yours excluded).

I agree that much arguing is really about definitions, and that a clear definition at the start is worthwhile. However, definitions can also be used to covertly get the reader to agree to something. Back when I actually read up on his "neo-cameralism", I remember stopping and thinking "I didn't agree with that", and realizing that his argument depended on a definition that was pages and pages ago, and that I now had to take a thousand steps back and re-read, keeping in mind my disagreement with a small facet of something he specially defined. That's pretty much when I gave up.

Edit 1: "That's an interesting idea. Why not debate it?" Because MM doesn't offer bon mots like this for debate, he piles a hundreds bricks made out of these special definitions and then offers a controversial thesis on top of it. If you stopped to debate all these interesting facets, you'd never get to the meat of the essay--so you just accept them and move on. Again, a rhetorical technique to get you to covertly agree to premises that let him define the battlefield.

OK yeah I can see where you're coming from. Man... that is tricky.

That's actually where I stopped reading and switched over to these comments. It seems obvious to me that according to "conventional thought" without the exchanges bitcoins would lose all value. Without the exchanges, you can only use bitcoins for a few things, mostly drugs and online services (hosting, usenet, vpn, etc). The thing is, these services will stop accepting bitcoins, because the operators will no longer be able to convert them into USD. Until you can buy food and gas and pay your bills with bitcoins, their value will rely on the existence of some kind of btc/"real currency" exchange.

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