The confusion is probably from your internal semantics of the phrase "backing".
When you say
> the "we the nation" backing of fiat money.
what do you think that means?
First, I'll tell you what it doesn't mean: It doesn't mean that people are forced to accept it in the general case. It doesn't mean that the government guarantees it to have some value. (It's not even clear what that would entail.) It doesn't mean that if you undervalue a dollar, the army is going to come in and shoot you.
Here's what it does mean: First, the court can compel you to repay debts or settlements in that currency. That's the "legal tender" part. Second, you have to pay taxes in it (usually).
So what, exactly, do you think the advantage of "government backing" is? It's really not tremendously useful. It's also completely orthogonal from the value of the currency, which (along with its time derivatives) is a much more relevant property.
Here are a few reasons I think Bitcoin is better than USD for many applications:
* It's more private than anything but cash/barter, especially with mixing
* It's not subject to arbitrary freezes or confiscations (which has happened to me, without warning, after a paperwork error by the state comptroller)
* It's not subject to arbitrary export controls, so it's more convenient for international payments
* It's cheaper than most existing money transfer systems (Western Union, Paypal, etc.), even with the currently elevated transaction fees
* It's deflationary. You can argue all you want about whether this is good or bad for "the economy", however you define it, but all I know is that it's good for me, a person who wants a store of value. In this respect, it emulates a physical commodity like gold (although with gold, you have the substantial risk of asteroid mining saturating the market many years from now).
* Cash and gold has some of the advantages listed above. Advantages of bitcoin over cash and gold: Easier to move long distances, easier to carry large amounts without attracting notice, harder to steal. Advantages over cash alone: Harder to forge (or inflate). Advantages over gold alone: More fungible.
> So what, exactly, do you think the advantage of "government backing" is?
By backing I meant a .gov's ability to tax or confiscate wealth, or for that matter impose capital controls. You incidentally - and intriguingly, at least to me - highlight the second point, if not also the third, as strong points for Bitcoin. Might I be missing something?
It's like, if shit hits the fan, my dollars are worth whatever US .gov and its taxpayers agree they're OK with, backed by .gov's ability to enforce (through all of the latter three points) that it's worth this or that.
In Bitcoin's case, or other crypto currencies', it seems like pure faith built-in with no ability to say "hey we've a taxpayer down the line". If the thing goes crashing to the ground, there's no guarantee anyone will pickup the tab - in steong contrast with fiat money, where a Nation's work output offers some guarantee on the value.
> By backing I meant a .gov's ability to tax or confiscate wealth, or for that matter impose capital controls.
Neither of these are an advantage of a fiat currency. They are both very bad for users of the currency. These are precisely the reasons people prefer Bitcoin.
> Might I be missing something?
Yeah, although I can't imagine how. People don't like having their money stolen or messed with. That seems fairly clear to me. Bitcoin makes it a lot harder to do either of those things, which is an advantage.
> if shit hits the fan, my dollars are worth whatever US .gov and its taxpayers agree they're OK with
This statement doesn't make any sense. Can you please explain what your reasoning is here? Not to be condescending, but this sounds like you only have a very vague idea of what value is.
> backed by .gov's ability to enforce (through all of the latter three points) that it's worth this or that.
This is a very important lesson to absorb; a government cannot "enforce" a value. That doesn't even make sense. The closest thing they could do is kill people who use the market value, in which case all you're doing is devaluing other currencies by making them more dangerous to use. This catches up with you very quickly, when you can no longer afford to interact with external markets that don't have a crazy military trying to shoot the truth out of existence.
> with no ability to say "hey we've a taxpayer down the line"
Again, what does this even mean? The dollar doesn't derive its value from the existence of people who pay taxes in USD. Not even close.
> If the thing goes crashing to the ground, there's no guarantee anyone will pickup the tab
If the dollar goes crashing to the ground, no one will "pick up the tab either".
> fiat money, where a Nation's work output offers some guarantee on the value.
OK, this also doesn't make any sense. Fiat money doesn't entitle you to dividends sourced from tax revenue. There is zero relationship between the number of dollars and the "work output" of the US. What region's "work output" is gold tied to?
Again, I'm not intending to be condescending here, but I'm not sure how else to say this; I think you have a very deep and fundamental misunderstanding of what money actually is. Most of your arguments here "aren't even wrong", so to speak. They are just completely out of the ball park. There's no easy fix for this, and I can't recommend any particular reading. There are probably some good economics courses on coursera or something. But if you take nothing else away from this post, at least take this: having a dollar entitles you to nothing from the government. The government makes no guarantees about the dollar. The only relationship between the dollar and the US government is that it's the "approved" payment method for court-mandated debt repayments and tax payments, and enjoys a number of less significant legal privileges, especially w.r.t bank regulation and government debt instruments.
So, then a primary argument for the current/recent instability (is presumably?) is its relative widespread lack of adoption? Does economic theory tell us n = number of people using currency such that we can begin to expect more stability? (Presumably, as some function of average transaction size?)
Forgive the assumptions and less-relevant questions, but I appreciated your points and you seem to have a good knowledge of the topic. Edited quickly for clarity.
Experimental evidence suggests that having lots of users isn't a guarantee of stability. See Venezuela (right now), Zimambwe Dollar, German Reichsmark, Argentine Peso, Mexican Peso, Thai Baht, etc. All of these had tremendous collapses despite a solid user base.
However, I think you are right in that a small user base implies some level of volatility. A large user base is perhaps a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for stability. Bitcoin's instability is also generally overstated, in my opinion. There have only been a few instances where it was so volatile that you wouldn't want to use it for day-to-day transactions.
> Experimental evidence suggests that having lots of users isn't a guarantee of stability. See Venezuela (right now), Zimambwe Dollar, German Reichsmark, Argentine Peso, Mexican Peso, Thai Baht, etc. All of these had tremendous collapses despite a solid user base.
True. I don't think this negates your point, but it's worth noting that in each (or at least most) of these cases there's a feedback loop between the financial and socio/political collapse which might increase the currency's volatility. In fact, perhaps we see this even more strongly with Bitcoin vs. a state-backed currency due to the current speculatory climate, but this may be another false characterization of the current culture (I'm not sure).
> Bitcoin's instability is also generally overstated, in my opinion. There have only been a few instances where it was so volatile that you wouldn't want to use it for day-to-day transactions.
As someone who's only tinkered with Bitcoin and tends to otherwise read about it only in the news in situations like this, I think you're right.
Yeah that's always a tricky stylistic choice - I include them because I know some readers prefer to scan headlines as opposed to reading every word, and I want to help them take something useful away, too. Though I do really appreciate thorough readers like you so I hope it's not too off putting :)
FYI, pull quotes usually duplicate segments of writing from the article body---they're the article quoting itself, pulling out the highlights. You're supposed to be able to skip over them when reading the full article.
~~~~ "they're the article quoting itself, pulling out the highlights" ~~~~
Like this comment: the pull quote was already present in the text.
CS is very left-leaning compared to most engineering professions, so if you include CS it throws the overall numbers towards left-leaning, but I personally wouldn't consider general CS to be an engineering field. Certain subfields, certainly, but they're a minority. My uni doesn't even have it in the same department as engineering, so that my inform my opinion there.
For example, people on the alt-right frequently claim that the Bogdanoffs are heavily involved in alt-right politics. Is this true? Almost certainly, but it's impossible to know for sure.
Nope, they did use contrails. I happened to see the /hwndu/ board while it was happening. They only sent people out in cars after triangulating the flag using the sun (for camera direction) and flight data (for location).
While this was certainly illegal, I think it's hard to say that it was malicious. This has essentially become a (somewhat one-sided) prank war. If they intended to deplatform or suppress Shia, they could have done something much more mean-spirited than photobomb his video streams and snatch his flag.
> This has essentially become a (somewhat one-sided) prank war.
Isn't there another term for a one-sided prank war? I think it's called harassment or something? Combined with theft and vandalism... I can see why they prefer to be anonymous.
Compare his campaign messaging with some of the messaging out of the clinton machine and you will see how deep it goes.
Consider Trump's
1) Make America Great Again (subtext: we've been letting the establishment make america not-great)
2) Build a wall (subtext: I'm going to do something audacious and unpopular and there's not a damn thing they can do to stop me)
Clinton came back with several messages beyond the core "I'm with her" and none of them stuck, because they were the sort of thing you'd hear the teacher's pet say. Nobody likes a teacher's pet--they're no fun at parties.
I've been a part of many prank wars. You know when they stopped being fun and ended up getting people in trouble? When one side stopped enjoying it. I don't think the receiving team in this case is enjoying the prank. Which just makes it mean-spirited and low class.
Anon is just being a bag of dicks in this case, which means they either stop, or should get in legal trouble.
When deciding whether or not something is malicious, I don't think "they could have done something even worse" is the standard you judge it by. I think you're definitely right that they could have done worse but I'd argue it's already pretty malicious as it is.
It's funny how anti-doxxing the chan people are when it's directed at them, but they cheerfully do it against their enemies.
And let's not forget that along with relatively minor stuff like this, they'll be getting death threats and swatting attempts for the foreseeable future.
This one was 8chan, not 4chan. While I'm nothing more than an occasional passive observer of the chan communities, it seems that most of the "talent", so to speak, has left 4chan amidst increasingly strict rules against various forms of tomfoolery.
As far as I understand most of the work was done on 8chan because the 4chan moderators banned discussions of the live stream from /pol/, but most users of the /hwndu/ board on 8chan originally came from 4chan's /pol/.
>it seems that most of the "talent", so to speak, has left 4chan amidst increasingly strict rules against various forms of tomfoolery.
I don't have any number to prove this but to me it seems that the overlap between 8 and 4chan is huge. There's very few 8chan users that absolutely never visit 4chan anymore. 8chan is tiny in comparison to 4chan so the signal-to-noise ratio may seem better there. (according to their front page they get roughly 2k posts/hour, if it was a 4chan board it would be medium-sized and 3 times slower than big boards like /b/, /v/ or /pol/)
When you say
> the "we the nation" backing of fiat money.
what do you think that means?
First, I'll tell you what it doesn't mean: It doesn't mean that people are forced to accept it in the general case. It doesn't mean that the government guarantees it to have some value. (It's not even clear what that would entail.) It doesn't mean that if you undervalue a dollar, the army is going to come in and shoot you.
Here's what it does mean: First, the court can compel you to repay debts or settlements in that currency. That's the "legal tender" part. Second, you have to pay taxes in it (usually).
So what, exactly, do you think the advantage of "government backing" is? It's really not tremendously useful. It's also completely orthogonal from the value of the currency, which (along with its time derivatives) is a much more relevant property.
Here are a few reasons I think Bitcoin is better than USD for many applications:
* It's more private than anything but cash/barter, especially with mixing
* It's not subject to arbitrary freezes or confiscations (which has happened to me, without warning, after a paperwork error by the state comptroller)
* It's not subject to arbitrary export controls, so it's more convenient for international payments
* It's cheaper than most existing money transfer systems (Western Union, Paypal, etc.), even with the currently elevated transaction fees
* It's deflationary. You can argue all you want about whether this is good or bad for "the economy", however you define it, but all I know is that it's good for me, a person who wants a store of value. In this respect, it emulates a physical commodity like gold (although with gold, you have the substantial risk of asteroid mining saturating the market many years from now).
* Cash and gold has some of the advantages listed above. Advantages of bitcoin over cash and gold: Easier to move long distances, easier to carry large amounts without attracting notice, harder to steal. Advantages over cash alone: Harder to forge (or inflate). Advantages over gold alone: More fungible.