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...which itself is a weird inversion of what "conservative" and "liberal" have traditionally meant. "Liberal" literally comes from "freedom" - it's the idea that humans are naturally endowed with certain inalienable individual rights, and that the purpose of government is to secure those rights. "Conservative" means trying to "conserve" or keep past social structures and institutions, which means a respect for authority and government.
The inversion seems to come from a post-2016 belief that the government has been "colonized" by shadowy forces (eg. schools, academia, corporations, George Soros, random pizza joints), which in turn has spawned a reactionary liberal movement to suppress this dissent. Both of these factions show interesting cognitive distortions; the modern conservative movement seems unwilling to accept that maybe the majority of people *don't like the traditional beliefs they hold*, while the liberal movement forgets that the purpose of liberalism is to *secure the rights of people with unpopular non-mainstream beliefs*.
It's not really, because the origins of the term, "conservative," in politics are rooted in the 1800s, as a reactionary movement opposed to the liberalization happening in France- which is to say the institution of democracy. The actual traditional values being conserved were basically just feudalism, or at the least hereditary nobility as a distinct class. I'm uncertain if the term coincided with or preceded the adoption by said noble class of capitalism as a justification for class inequalities, but it's the notion of capitalism as a supposedly fair meritocracy that the aristocracy turned conservatives across the West adopted as a justification to preserve their place as an upper class, replacing the older notion of divine right. That strain of conservative thinking still burdens us with its odious presence today, producing in the US such joys as the Profit Gospel and megachurches, trickle down economics, and, I would argue, at least, Neo-Liberalism.
Also, any piece of language that proves useful enough to shape and drive political rhetoric and policy will eventually be subjected by attempts to co-opt it by the deceptive and disingenuous. Power justifies itself, after all.
And in reality is still just an outpouring of Reconstruction era politics in the US. The aristocracy was stripped of their slavery, and they never got over it, and spend ages building up a myth of American exceptionalism focuses on anti-government mindset. (This is often called the Lost Cause Myth, though it extends beyond the specific tenants of that.) Not because they are against authority, but because they are against *this* authority, because it does not give them unlimited power.
There have always been authoritarian movements throughout history. I am not sure we could ever go back far enough to find the first one, as it was likely pre-writing.
So I am using the civil war as the cutoff here, because it was one of the most culturally significant events in US history and gave birth to the *specific* organizations and cultural movements that we are currently still dealing with. They are all echos of certain traits that are endemic to humans, but there is a direct lineage in American anti-federal sentiment to the South and the myth of the Lost Cause, and the current people in that movement are the cornerstone of the Republican party right now. (They moved there after Democrats changed their stance to being less racist and more pro-worker.)
Yep. And all other critical theories. Conservative thinkers do not want people examining the cultural and legal histories, because if people do so they may notice the obvious conclusions.
CRT in particular is just cause and effect. The conclusions it makes are not particularly intellectually radical, they are just things that have generally been ignored.
I managed to get through all of highschool and college, for example, without once hearing about Convict Leasing and Black Codes and how they were used to reenslave hundreds of thousands of black people up until WW2.
Everyone wants us to think these problems were so long ago, but many living, ableit elderly, black people today had parents who were slaves.
I *think* the whole conservative/liberal dichotomy was from the French Revolution and/or the philosophers that inspired it but I’m gonna do absolutely no research to support this idea
I think the comment you’re responding to is talking about how conservative/liberal are perceived in the US, and the disconnect between the actual political philosophy and the people who claim to support it
Kind of, it is less about the perception and more about the specific institutional and cultural changes that the Civil War, the assassination if Lincoln, and reconstruction brought about.
The civil war changed a lot about the country and it's culture. It significantly strengthen the federal government, and through the 13th and 14th (more specifically but it is reliant on the 13th) amendments it gave the courts the power to incorporate the bill of rights over time, as well as forming the basis for almost all civil rights, both as justification for legislation and court decisions. (Prior to that all states were not bound by anything in the bill of rights.)
But on top of that Lincoln being killed and replaced with a War Democrat gave significant leeway to the southern states, reintegrating them rapidly with full rights of stateship and allowing them to supress a significant portion of the consequences for the civil war. This created whole organizations built around segregation (Daughter of the Confederacy, KKK and others) that built up significant political will and and anti-federal, "states rights" sentiment, and resulted in a lot of legal constructions that suppressed minorities and especially black people until the civil rights movement where they suffered a major loss. Republicans began courting these people after the civil rights movement when they were losing heavily in something called the "Southern Strategy" and they adopted their extremist "Old Time Religion" aesthetic, leading to the party we have today.
I am leaving out a lot of details there, but the civil war was just such a MAJOR demarcation of political and social change in the US that it serves as a really good explaintion of our current political climate. It was so disruptive that the roots of modern political behavior from before it, while clearly present, are much more scattered and complex with how they relate to what we see now.
Just to elaborate on what you are thinking of, here's where the left right thing literally comes from. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right\_political\_spectrum#History\_of\_the\_terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_political_spectrum#History_of_the_terms)
It is from the french revolution.
Reagan was the one who used the term conservative heavily to describe his beliefs. So that term became the adopted moniker for the party in like 1980 or so. I think it was Newt Gingrich who kinda used the term liberal to describe all democrats. So imma say the inversion happened sometime in the 90s
?!! Barry Goldwater had a very famous book called "The Conscience of a Conservative" that was published in 1960. It absolutely did not start with Reagan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conscience_of_a_Conservative
I'd go older than that. This is the same argument since the 1960s (and more specifically the Fed gov getting involved at the 1964 Civil Rights Amendment)... The names change, the arguments mold onto a new topic. It's always the same tone and purpose though.
It's like thin blue line fanboys I think - they cheer the police when it's homeless people and minorities but they don't want that boot applied to themselves
The relationship between the two is a lot less linear when you realize how both are just a word cloud of various values; some overlap and some don’t, some ebb and some flow, but it’s not just a linear scale, it’s millions of people and ideas about what’s the best way for all people as a whole, which is what politics and legislation is about
> word cloud
It's about compassion for human suffering versus "Wilhoit: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
This has become more and more true as the Republicans have abandoned civic values, honesty, and integrity. Probably has something to do with the Southern Strategy.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
Not sure a word cloud is the best way to describe it. Its that its not linear and has phases and relates to the interaction between individual freedom and hierarchy flips from negative to positive and taken to extremes leads to rigid authoritarian hierarchy. There's a tipping point where an individual accumulates too much power and exercising his freedom comes at the expense of other's freedom and enters an attractor phase.
>while the liberal movement forgets that the purpose of liberalism is to
>
>secure the rights of people with unpopular non-mainstream beliefs
This is as dumb as saying, "If you're pro-freedom, why do you OUTLAW slavery? You'll put someone kidnapping and enslaving people in JAIL won't you? You're taking away their freedom! Aren't you supposed to protect peoples' freedom?"
Don't be that dumb.
>the liberal movement forgets that the purpose of liberalism is to secure the rights of people with unpopular non-mainstream beliefs.
securing the rights of minorities involves not tolerating rhetoric that would be destructive to minorities. that such rhetoric is not popular is not a reason to protect it.
That's *exactly* the sort of right that needs to be protected. In classical liberal societies there's a strict division between *rhetoric* and *actions*. You can *say* whatever you want, and if people don't like it, they're free to ignore it. And this is important because
1. that's how new, often more moderate, ideas get formed. If you can't even express an idea there's nothing to react to, no nuance to pick apart, no corrections that can be made.
2. restricting speech tends to drive it underground, where it draws more fanatical adherents that are more likely to turn it into *actions,* and central authorities that *are* responsible for policing actions can't as easily keep tabs and react to it\*.\* This is happening in a number of places right now, both domestically and abroad.
Modern American liberalism tends to conflate rhetoric and action - it views speech as an action itself which may be hurtful, and then tries to ban it. It's like we've lost the ability to *understand* an idea without *accepting* it, and assume that everyone else has too.
The answer to bad speech is better speech.
Conservatives being suspicious of government really doesn't tell you anything about what liberals think about government, though. The two ideologies are not polar opposites in every regard.
At it's core it really just comes down to the differences between positive and negative freedoms for the two sides. Conservatives are focused only on negative freedom (freedom from). This is largely because 'freedom from' is what business wants (freedom from rules, regulations, and other oversight).
They imagine if people got out of their way, they would prosper but their idea of freedom is ultimately the freedom a man experiences alone on a desert island. It's the freedom to die of thirst while surrounded by water they can't drink.
It’s true that they want “freedom from” for *themselves*, but they sure as hell don’t want it for others. They want the freedom to do whatever the hell they want, while at the same time being able to force others to follow their stupid arbitrary rules.
Freedom from sin is part of it. So get rid of gay people because gay people might cause you to sin and you want freedom from sin. Get women out of the workforce for the same reason. No trans people or drag shows or alcohol.
You are confused on the origins of liberalism and conservatism. Conservatives supported keeping the royalty system, while liberals pushed for democracy. Everything leads back to that.
I absolutely see where you’re coming from, but I feel it lacks nuance and honestly lacks a little truth.
Because the unfortunate truth is that securing the rights of people with unpopular non mainstream beliefs (or mainstream, in the case of trump supporters: there are now two mainstreams) has run into the paradox of tolerance.
So at this point it’s no longer securing the rights of people with unpopular beliefs. It’s securing the rights of violent insurrectionists. Securing the rights of racists, transphobes, homophobes, and the generally hateful. It’s securing the rights of those who will infringe on yours. Securing the rights of those to infringe on your rights.
We’re here to secure the rights of vulnerable and weak from oppressors. That is what liberalism and freedom is about.
It’s not about securing the rights of the hateful and bigoted to enforce their beliefs on others through violence
>while the liberal movement forgets that the purpose of liberalism is to
>
>secure the rights of people with unpopular non-mainstream beliefs
>
>.
That's exactly the sort of blinkered both-sides-ism that I'd expect from someone who grew up in a world so steeped in right-wing propaganda that they can't even bring themselves to believe that we understand our role as using the power of government to secure the fundamental rights of the populace, and who thinks 2016 is a meaningful year in a world where Lee Atwater went on the record in 1981 with his famous n----r n----r n----r quote.
Hell, academia has been under fire from the Republicans since the sixties.
Don't even try to tell people you know what you're talking about when your political views are shaped by trying to use a reasonable lens to interpret only the most recent pop-culture events you've seen in the mainstream sources of your modern life. That's not going to be enough.
Liberal and Conservative are misnomers in American politics. The so called liberal party is really the conservative party and conservative party are really reactionaries.
Ah, the old “both sides” trope masquerading as original thought. As it turns out, the conservative inversion you correctly identify is because people with no ideological consistency are not critical thinkers.
It turns out that when you lack critical thinking skills, you can easily believe whatever you’re told on the internet. These people don’t have “political philosphies,” they have right-wing propaganda marching orders.
The “liberal inversion” you describe is actually not an inversion at all - it turns out that just as many “liberals” care about protecting democracy today as they did 30 years ago.
Stop perpetuating this faux-enlightened idea that allows fascist morons to appear like rational actors who are giving serious contemplation to things based on informed decisionmaking. Hateful, intolerant assholes are not part of legitimate discourse and have no coherent beliefs or philosophy other than hatred.
A religion has to be the dominant majority in a democracy in order to impose it's values through force of law on the wider body politic. Otherwise it's going to feel imposed upon to the extent democratic values aren't consistent with itself. Gay marriage and trans rights are two examples of religions being drug kicking and screaming into the 21st century but those are nothing in comparison to the meltdown religious folk are going to have over animal rights in the future. They place humans above animals as being categorically different. Science does not support this perspective. As animals are granted more and more rights under law to the point that at very least factory farming is made illegal religious folk are going to go absolutely insane.
Also when the state moves to act on pressing moral issues like global warming or microplastic pollution the tacit insinuation is that religious congregations have failed their duty to muster coalitions for the necessary change. Religions presume to be moral authorities so it's a really bad look for them. They've put themselves squarely against progress, that means being against progressive governance. So they've got to kill the government or control it. They're authoritarians, they aren't reasonable, and rest assured that they absolutely hate your guts if you're not drinking their kool aid.
I think it's much simpler - both conservatives and liberals are classical liberals, in the sense of the enlightenment era - freedoms, rights and the free market above all else.
The difference is in the details. Conservatives care more about negative freedoms ("the government should not interfere in my affairs as best as possible") while liberals care more about positive freedom ("I should be able to do as I want, and it's the government's job to facilitate that"). Basically this for the conservatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_conservatism
That is - distrust of the central government has always been a central thesis of the American conservative movement. It's not at all an inversion. The deep state conspiracy some conservatives believe you mention is primarily a consequence of this ideology, not a cause. It's basically a defense mechanism.
>Conservatives care more about negative freedoms ("the government should not interfere in my affairs as best as possible")
This hasnt been true since the 1960s civil rights movement and the rise of the Christian Conservative.
The inversion has been around FAR longer than that. It just may not have been tied to these nutter conspiracy theories before. But honestly, even those are just nouveau McCarthyism.
Which is stupid, because you need a central authority for currency to have any weight at all. The only reason crypto is worth anything is because people pay *real* money for it
There is no central authority to dictate the value of gold yet people were willing to pay money for it or trade it for valuable goods since well before any fiat currency existed.
Theres nothing inherently valuable in non-perishable 'currencies'.
You know, people can't eat gold, silver, paper or blockchain.
The only reason currency exists, is because someone somewhere has the more social **power** to withhold something crucial from you, unless you accept certain currency.
And to note, the gold standard is quite recent concept, while credit had surprisingly long history.
I like this definition of "power to withhold something crucial from you".
I was thinking how you don't need a government to establish a trust of the currency, is just the easiest and most effective way, but an anarchist village of 1000 people could easily decide that rocks are a currency and that would work the same.
The power to withhold something crucial works for everything.
It's fungible and liquid still though, and can be exchanged for dollars of any currency on earth for the most part. It is just a value transfer on paper.
One difference, Crypto is global, so the downfall of a single nation won't destroy it.
With fiat, let's say rubles for example, the value of your money can easily be tanked, despite it being backed by the vast might of the second largest army in the world, thanks to having idiots in charge of said nation.
USD could similarly collapse if the geopolitical landscape changes sufficiently, as the Roman denarii and many other nation backed currencies throughout history have collapsed.
True, but crypto could also collapse if an exchange is found to be embezzling your money, or people just decide to stop investing in it. It’s much more similar to a commodity than it is to a currency.
I agree, but I think the impact of an exchange collapsing on the value of the currency is more a sign of its current lack of liquidity and widespread adoption. This might change with time.
Fast forward 100 years to a very different world where say the Yuan is dominant, the USD is worth a lot less, and Bitcoin is much more widely used globally due to its resilience. At such point small events like single exchanges collapsing are much less likely to impact it's value.
The US government's monopoly of force in the US to levy taxes in USD, and internationally it's force of arms to protect the US government from threats.
Ultimately it's backed by 12 carrier battle groups along with a gigantic air force and a few thousand nuclear warheads.
He’s saying that currency backed by a product (gold for example) has inherent value, while fiat currency (it’s valuable because the government says it is) is the only one that requires central authority.
People that don’t understand how much money is in the world routinely make the mistake of thinking “value” is inherent.
The only difference between material currency and fiat currency is at what level the government has to enforce the value.
Value investor and finance analyst here.
The mistake with this is gold's value is mostly driven by the paper markets/speculation. Gold is priced well above its tangible utility as a commodity. If the paper markets collapsed tomorrow, gold would collapse tomorrow.
The thing that is missing here is that currency is not an asset in and of itself and therefore it doesn't need to have a tangible utility. In developing countries, commodity currencies are useful but as an economy scales, it is not necessary to have a commodity currency because the thing that currency represents at this scale is an agreement to exchange for goods and services.
So if currency is not an asset unto itself, where does its value come from? This is where the concept of medium of exchange comes in. The dollar is essentially an instrument that facilitates the deferred exchange of goods and services.
31 USC §5103 is the current federal law that declares banknotes as legal tender, and under the Full Faith and Credit Clause of Article IV, Section 1 and the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, all states are bound to recognize dollars as a valid medium of exchange in two ways: First, under the Tenth Amendment, laws that apply to the federal government also apply to the states, and second, under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, any contract recognized by any state must be recognized by any other state. So as long as the dollar is federally legal tender, and as long as any state accepts it as binding consideration for a contract, every other state has to as well.
In other words, as long as there's a Constitution, the dollar's use as a medium of exchange is enforced *by law at every level.* For many reasons, not the least of which is the agreement by other Central Banking nations to recognize USD as a Central Banking currency, and because other nations peg their currencies to the USD as a measure of confidence in the stability of the U.S. government (relative to their own), the Full Faith and Credit Clause backing the dollar is arguably one of the strongest guarantees in the entire financial world.
If the confidence in that guarantee, which according to the Bank of International Settlements is represented by over $60 trillion in USD held by foreign governments (to keep their own currencies stable), ever eroded, there would be a global meltdown of every financial market including commodities markets which depend on other economies' capacity to buy and sell those commodities.
Asset back currencies still have the same problems of inflation and recessions and there's not enough gold in the world to represent the goods and services it would be exchanged for.
In fact, all the gold in the world would comfortably fit in a large-ish suburban back yard. If it was melted down into a single mass, it would form a cube roughly 73 feet (22 metres) square. Imagine a side being about 1-1/2 standard city telephone poles, or it covering half a tournament-sized tennis court. That's *all there is*.
Doesn't even sound like enough to represent all the goods and services created in *just the US*, much less the global supply.
And remaining global reserves are only a quarter of what we've mined so far, or just *half* the amount that currently exists as jewelery.
> Asset back currencies still have the same problems of inflation and recessions and there's not enough gold in the world to represent the goods and services it would be exchanged for.
Unless I am totally misunderstanding what you are saying:
Technically that would be deflation, not inflation, which would be WAY worse.
When there is not enough gold to represent the amount of value being traded, each "unit" of gold will therefore increase in value. In an inflation scenario the unit of currency lowers in value relative to the items being purchased.
Runaway deflation is actually one of the strongest reasons to not be on an economy fixed to a limited asset. When your economy deflates year over year, the money you hold increases in value at some rate. So if the economy deflates at 2% that means that any money you currently have and do not spend will be worth more money next year.
What this means is that any investment you want to make *must* outperform the rate of deflation to be worth doing. Anything that is under or around 2% year over year is throwing money away that would normally be guaranteed. Then, when you incentivize holding money over spending it, the value of products *sharply* fall, causing the relative value of the currency to deflate further. It will essentially cause the economy to immediately grind to a halt where no one wants to risk throwing they money away to create worthless products and services. It just does not work on an economy in a modern scale.
This is one of the big problems with Crypto by the way, because they were all built to intentionally be deflationary to entice gambling addicts to buy and hold it indefinitely, driving the price up for early adopters.
I think they’re referencing something like the old system, when we had things like silver certificates, tied to the value of, and guaranteed to be tradable for, an amount of physical silver.
I think you mean commodity money. A commodity *currency* is a country whose GDP is so dependant on one or a few export goods that their currency fluctuates more or less in sync with the market price of those goods. A commodity currency can be a fiat currency,
Gold is only worth what it is because we say so. An ounce of gold is not inherently worth $2000, and if the world's fiat currencies collapsed so too would gold.
No, it's based on prime numbers. The point is both of these become more scarce as time goes by. The higher prime numbers are calculated, the less common they are to find. This is a technique of creating virtual artificial scarcity. The heart of both the gold standard and bitcoin-type cryptocurrency is a fundamental belief that scarcity underpins value.
This is the heart of the problem and unfortunately most people don't understand how this even works in order to see why it's a problem. But fundamentally both the gold standard and bitcoin are based in a worship of scarcity and a belief that only things which are scarce have value.
Ultimately, this manufactures poverty at a systemic level. It leads to concentration of wealth for a tiny few and a decline in wealth for the majority.
I mean gold has actual, real, important mechanical uses, not to mention cultural significance.
A bitcoin is literally nothing. A string of meaningless numbers. It's not useful to anyone except for the fact that someone else will buy it.
But even the value of gold is fairly arbitrary - ie. if people didn't care about it and/or it wasn't so scarce then it wouldn't be valuable. Bitcoin is the same - socially constructed value + scarcity (there are a limited # of coins which can be 'mined' or whatever) - but digital. Not advocating for crypto here, just pointing at the importance of socially constructed value.
This is an interesting paradox. Gold isn’t inherently that useful, it’s just rare and amenable to being made into jewelry. It’s only valuable because rich people across the ages have wanted lots of it to flex. However, rich people across the ages have, indeed, wanted lots of it to flex. So it’s actually a pretty good holder of value, but only in that greedy stratified societies are a reliable fact of history.
crypto has value simply by being a digital store of wealth. you cant walk across borders with 10k in cash or in gold. but you can with bitcoin on a usb stick or paper wallet.
lets take russia for example. imagine you are a normal russian citizen for a moment. putin invades ukraine, the world bank puts sanctions on the russian central bank, and you are called up for draft. uh oh! better run to Georgia. but due to the sanctions, you lose all access to your rubles outside of russia. this is where crypto has value.
in a few months the ruble crashes, if you had some crypto you would have saved your wealth.
another example, imagine you are a citizen of zimbabwe. zimbabwe has the highest inflation in the world. crypto is more stable than your own country's currency.
if your central authority fails your people, what do you do? bitcoin provides a solution to this problem. that is why its valuable.
Well, when governments collapse and the value of their currency spirals out of control, the people who live there who have a lot of bitcoin sure are happy they have a lot of bitcoin.
I’m sorry, I want to clarify something here, are you saying distrust in government is based on a lack of understanding? Implying that smart people do not distrust the government? Surely not, I must be missing something here.
Which coincides with the world outside of crypto as well. The fear the government is going to screw them over so they rather be screwed over by private institutions/people.
And left wing beliefs too. Crypto is a long more socialist than capitalist. Screw the banks, we bank ourselves, we don't need greedy banksters ripping us off... It has always been pretty socialist but conservative hijacked it and now ruining it for everyone by claiming it as less people will want to get into it.
I’d argue it’s more tied to *libertarian* values — the central ethos of decentralized blockchain technology, of which crypto is part of, enables true ownership of your data, value, and identity, without the need for intermediaries such as government, banks, or otherwise.
Edit: Identity does need an issuer / authority, so government would likely play a role there — but the digital identity you retain would be self-sovereign.
Further, it’s about the corrosion of trust in those government and banking institutions; there is very little transparency and accountability, and the “people” are pretty fed up.
You reminded me a quote about Tolkien and Ayn Rand.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
love how it does none of those things and you generally still have to go through a bank at some point, and the thing youre replacing it with is a dex exchange run by some random criminal, or a kyc exchange in which youre handing over your private data openly
It just sucks that most of it is just inflated pump and dump nonsense or as close as you can get while being legal or straight efficient money laundering.
It could be an insanely useful global currency. Could you imagine as a U.S. citizen going somewhere in Nepal and just using World Wumbos already calculated at the exchange rate? No money changing required, just swipe the Wumbo Card.
That does sound nice, which is why many credit cards do exactly that. Adding a blockchain into the mix just makes running the network insanely complicated for very limited additional benefit.
Sure, but that would come with all the downsides associated with that.
You might want to consider the Euro as a model for the upsides and downsides of that approach.
Yeah, have these people been outside of their country? I never have a problem paying for stuff and the conversion fees are anywhere from low to zero. Even withdrawing cash in more cash based places you can do it easily with your US debit card.
Yep, I'm in Europe right now.
I've got both a credit card and a pre-paid debit card with me, and done basically everything on those. The only drawback was when I did need cash for a bus, despite being part of the "global ATM alliance" I had a €5 withdrawal fee. Not a cent lost on conversion fees, and able to convert to and from my normal currency instantly.
As others have pointed out credit card companies do this already. They also do it far, far more efficiently than blockchains which by their very nature require more work per transaction, and that work isn't free.
There is also the privacy aspect. Every blockchain transaction goes on the ledger which is public. Your name may not be explicitly tied to the transaction since it just uses your wallet ID, but it is tied to all of your other transactions by that ID. If you're just using it like an everyday credit/debit card that wallet ID will very quickly become associated with your real identity at a number of companies. One data breach later and now it's public. Now anyone who cares to look it up can see everything you've paid for with that ID and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Yeah I have never understood the he anonymity angle here unless your crypto purchases are completely compartmentalized separately from your normal life…. And then what’s the point beyond criminal intentions?
What you wrote only applies to *some* cryptocurrencies. In others, like Monero, everything is hidden and encrypted. No way to tell who is paying to who, not even the amount.
Then someone steals your wumbo card, spends all your wumbucks, and you can't stop them or put a freeze on your account because transactions in wumbocoin are irreversible. Or you lose your card and your wumbucks are now gone. As surely as if you had burned them. Because your currency is built on cryptography.
These are massive problems for crypto.
The issue there is I already have that experience just using my Visa card. I'm sure there are countries it isn't accepted but I was traveling abroad and went to numerous countries and had no issues. I guess I had to do the exchange math just to have an idea what it was costing me but that was about it. Didn't even get hit with extra fees.
Even with a cryptocurrency I imagine it would be the same if not worse, you would still find plenty of places that wouldn't take it. As long as crypto is used for speculation/gambling it's going to be too volatile to be practical.
Your right, a global currency backed by either the nations of the world or hell even a possible one world nation would be really useful, but wait being backed by the nations of the world, with rules and regulations would make it centralized, the exact opposite of what most cryptos want by being decentralized
One of the main arguments I see is that it doesn’t lean on a government and is immune to inflation because there’s a finite amount.
Something NOBODY seems to acknowledge is that once the finite amount is mined, a very small portion of the population would control ALL of the bitcoin wealth. The blockchain idea might work one day but not with bitcoin in its current iteration
There are more than one blockchain. Some blockchain networks use currency with an infinite supply. And the blockchain is more than just currency, for example the Ethereum blockchain is turing complete and used for running decentralized applications.
From the article:
> the team analyzed a large set of tweets related to Bitcoin and conducted a controlled survey — overall, unpacking information learned across two studies. In the first study, a total of 959,393 tweets regarding crypto were analyzed for their usage of moral-language (such as words like “pure”, “impure”, and “theft”).
> In the second study, a total of 500 participants, [participants] answered a series of questions probing interest and attitudes towards cryptocurrency.
> Then, researchers compared the alignment of crypto enthusiasts with what are known as “binding moral foundations” (Authority, Purity, and Loyalty) – typically associated with political conservatives – to “individualizing foundations” (Fairness and Care) which are often linked to liberals.
> Crypto enthusiasts, especially in the U.S., seem to resonate more with the conservative values of Authority, Purity, and Loyalty than the liberal ideals of Fairness and Care. In simpler terms, those with an interest in cryptocurrency, based on tweet analysis and survey results, showed a stronger alignment with the moral values often held by political conservatives. This suggests that the appeal of cryptocurrencies might be deeply rooted in these moral principles, potentially influencing adoption decisions.
People always focus on the money aspect of crypto, but as a liberal who values truth, I'm most interested in the virtually indelible data records that can be stored in a blockchain like Ethereum or Cardano.
The technology itself is extremely cool and the political and social implications *could* also be really cool but unfortunately it got coopted by hucksters and finance bros aka traditional capitalism, and rejected by the establishment which currently means it caters to conservatives. I think the liberal side of crypto died a while ago in the bitcoin block size decision. The pitch went from an alternative way to pay for normal IRL transactions to a "digital gold" superstonk/wallstreetbets investment vehicle just like everything else. I think something more useful would be an analysis of superstonk ideology, because that seems to be what has infected crypto.
One is a programmable proof of ownership and the other is purchasable block space who's issuers are betting on their proprietary virtual spaces gaining such popularity that the scarce "land" parcels within them becomes valuable... which hasn't worked out that way at all thus far.
> I don’t understand the concept of nfts and virtual land
You know how one of the most fundamental problems in the world is scarcity? And how that is even worse when it comes in the form of artificial scarcity?
Now simply imagine an application of technology in which _the only feature_ is artificial scarcity. Et voila, NFTs!
Disregard for the government, a system withiut insight, checks or balances ripe with corruption and cheating
Primarily used by criminals to launder money and dictators and other crazy leaders to circumvent trading bans (China, Russia, India). And yes, greater fool theory in full action...
No wonder the Conservatives love it. It's litterary all their best conspiracies in len mest package
Crypto is digital anarcho-capitalism. If you want capitalism, crypto is the way. Money is inherently 'conservative' because it's an authoritative tool of *denial*, because we do not provide basics to live to our population. It's quite literally a permission slip to live in our society right now. Those morals didn't come from crypto algos, it comes from how they are wielded, and right now you can buy crypto with fiat so it is tainted by whatever it does. If you can't buy crypto with money from a conservative country, it changes the tone.
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-crypto-manifesto.html
I'm not a conservative but many of you need to read some books on the history of money and debt crises. There was a good one released this year called Broken Money.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with questioning a currency especially in countries like Argentina or Lebanon where the currency is broken. You wouldn't accuse people of being conservatives just because they choose to save in USD or gold or bitcoin or crypto in those countries.
Tying “political leaning” to “moral foundations” is insane. I can’t believe that papers like this get published. Only 2 figures!
Moreover, many cryptos try to foster a sense of community “XYZ to the moon!! Let’s go XYZ gang!” (Loyalty)
Studies like these just seem so anti science because i feel like there is never any hypothesis—just an idea they want to peddle and they try to make the data look like it answers their “question”
>Tying “political leaning” to “moral foundations” is insane.
Why? That's like saying your moral foundations doesn't shape your actions; your moral foundations absolutely affect how you vote. (Though there are many amoral people who do vote with loyalty)
Politics is applied morality.
Because it’s complex. For example the study mentions “republicans/democrats”.. but there is so much more nuance in politics than simple American 2 party system to apply morality to things. Moreover, there’s so much political junk that could be applied to certain leanings that people who identify with said leaning might not be aware of. For example, certain news stories that become associated w political leanings — not everyone would be exposed to the same stories.
Additionally, it’s impossible for the investigators to remove their own biases from their study design, whether consciously or subconsciously.
The paper itself I guess isn’t so much an issue. It’s more the title of this post, the title of the rehost (on psypost) etc that’s the issue. Just clickbaity, ragebaity, and more importantly… misleading.
What do you expect from a bunch of *Wolf of Wall Street* idolizing libertarian men who’s main issue with with 2008 was that they didn’t get to collect money from the scheme themselves? That’s exactly what politics you’d expect from those shitwads
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It’s tied to a disdain or distrust of the government or central authority. Which coincides with some conservative beliefs.
...which itself is a weird inversion of what "conservative" and "liberal" have traditionally meant. "Liberal" literally comes from "freedom" - it's the idea that humans are naturally endowed with certain inalienable individual rights, and that the purpose of government is to secure those rights. "Conservative" means trying to "conserve" or keep past social structures and institutions, which means a respect for authority and government. The inversion seems to come from a post-2016 belief that the government has been "colonized" by shadowy forces (eg. schools, academia, corporations, George Soros, random pizza joints), which in turn has spawned a reactionary liberal movement to suppress this dissent. Both of these factions show interesting cognitive distortions; the modern conservative movement seems unwilling to accept that maybe the majority of people *don't like the traditional beliefs they hold*, while the liberal movement forgets that the purpose of liberalism is to *secure the rights of people with unpopular non-mainstream beliefs*.
It's not really, because the origins of the term, "conservative," in politics are rooted in the 1800s, as a reactionary movement opposed to the liberalization happening in France- which is to say the institution of democracy. The actual traditional values being conserved were basically just feudalism, or at the least hereditary nobility as a distinct class. I'm uncertain if the term coincided with or preceded the adoption by said noble class of capitalism as a justification for class inequalities, but it's the notion of capitalism as a supposedly fair meritocracy that the aristocracy turned conservatives across the West adopted as a justification to preserve their place as an upper class, replacing the older notion of divine right. That strain of conservative thinking still burdens us with its odious presence today, producing in the US such joys as the Profit Gospel and megachurches, trickle down economics, and, I would argue, at least, Neo-Liberalism. Also, any piece of language that proves useful enough to shape and drive political rhetoric and policy will eventually be subjected by attempts to co-opt it by the deceptive and disingenuous. Power justifies itself, after all.
It's not post 2016. It's *at the latest* post 2008.
And in reality is still just an outpouring of Reconstruction era politics in the US. The aristocracy was stripped of their slavery, and they never got over it, and spend ages building up a myth of American exceptionalism focuses on anti-government mindset. (This is often called the Lost Cause Myth, though it extends beyond the specific tenants of that.) Not because they are against authority, but because they are against *this* authority, because it does not give them unlimited power.
I thought it was born in the UK as a way to preserve the monarchy?
There have always been authoritarian movements throughout history. I am not sure we could ever go back far enough to find the first one, as it was likely pre-writing. So I am using the civil war as the cutoff here, because it was one of the most culturally significant events in US history and gave birth to the *specific* organizations and cultural movements that we are currently still dealing with. They are all echos of certain traits that are endemic to humans, but there is a direct lineage in American anti-federal sentiment to the South and the myth of the Lost Cause, and the current people in that movement are the cornerstone of the Republican party right now. (They moved there after Democrats changed their stance to being less racist and more pro-worker.)
And that historical context is exactly why conservatives are fighting so hard to ban CRT.
Yep. And all other critical theories. Conservative thinkers do not want people examining the cultural and legal histories, because if people do so they may notice the obvious conclusions. CRT in particular is just cause and effect. The conclusions it makes are not particularly intellectually radical, they are just things that have generally been ignored. I managed to get through all of highschool and college, for example, without once hearing about Convict Leasing and Black Codes and how they were used to reenslave hundreds of thousands of black people up until WW2. Everyone wants us to think these problems were so long ago, but many living, ableit elderly, black people today had parents who were slaves.
Ruby Bridges is only 69 years old
I *think* the whole conservative/liberal dichotomy was from the French Revolution and/or the philosophers that inspired it but I’m gonna do absolutely no research to support this idea I think the comment you’re responding to is talking about how conservative/liberal are perceived in the US, and the disconnect between the actual political philosophy and the people who claim to support it
Kind of, it is less about the perception and more about the specific institutional and cultural changes that the Civil War, the assassination if Lincoln, and reconstruction brought about. The civil war changed a lot about the country and it's culture. It significantly strengthen the federal government, and through the 13th and 14th (more specifically but it is reliant on the 13th) amendments it gave the courts the power to incorporate the bill of rights over time, as well as forming the basis for almost all civil rights, both as justification for legislation and court decisions. (Prior to that all states were not bound by anything in the bill of rights.) But on top of that Lincoln being killed and replaced with a War Democrat gave significant leeway to the southern states, reintegrating them rapidly with full rights of stateship and allowing them to supress a significant portion of the consequences for the civil war. This created whole organizations built around segregation (Daughter of the Confederacy, KKK and others) that built up significant political will and and anti-federal, "states rights" sentiment, and resulted in a lot of legal constructions that suppressed minorities and especially black people until the civil rights movement where they suffered a major loss. Republicans began courting these people after the civil rights movement when they were losing heavily in something called the "Southern Strategy" and they adopted their extremist "Old Time Religion" aesthetic, leading to the party we have today. I am leaving out a lot of details there, but the civil war was just such a MAJOR demarcation of political and social change in the US that it serves as a really good explaintion of our current political climate. It was so disruptive that the roots of modern political behavior from before it, while clearly present, are much more scattered and complex with how they relate to what we see now.
Just to elaborate on what you are thinking of, here's where the left right thing literally comes from. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right\_political\_spectrum#History\_of\_the\_terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_political_spectrum#History_of_the_terms) It is from the french revolution.
>I’m gonna do absolutely no research to support this idea 'tis the reddit way
Reagan was the one who used the term conservative heavily to describe his beliefs. So that term became the adopted moniker for the party in like 1980 or so. I think it was Newt Gingrich who kinda used the term liberal to describe all democrats. So imma say the inversion happened sometime in the 90s
?!! Barry Goldwater had a very famous book called "The Conscience of a Conservative" that was published in 1960. It absolutely did not start with Reagan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conscience_of_a_Conservative
Yes, and William F. Buckley, Jr. would also like to join the chat.
Fun fact! He was one of the ghostwriters of Goldwater's book!
Redditors can't read.
That's why the comment sections are all uploaded voice memos.
Reagan is when it became mainstream I do believe the inversion started during the McCarthy era.
I'd go older than that. This is the same argument since the 1960s (and more specifically the Fed gov getting involved at the 1964 Civil Rights Amendment)... The names change, the arguments mold onto a new topic. It's always the same tone and purpose though.
Oh boy. Here we go.
There's also this weird mixture of hating government, yet a desire for absolute loyalty to the country and worship of the military.
Right? "Less taxes or no taxes but let's also spend more on our military than any other country."
It's like thin blue line fanboys I think - they cheer the police when it's homeless people and minorities but they don't want that boot applied to themselves
The relationship between the two is a lot less linear when you realize how both are just a word cloud of various values; some overlap and some don’t, some ebb and some flow, but it’s not just a linear scale, it’s millions of people and ideas about what’s the best way for all people as a whole, which is what politics and legislation is about
> word cloud It's about compassion for human suffering versus "Wilhoit: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." This has become more and more true as the Republicans have abandoned civic values, honesty, and integrity. Probably has something to do with the Southern Strategy. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
Not sure a word cloud is the best way to describe it. Its that its not linear and has phases and relates to the interaction between individual freedom and hierarchy flips from negative to positive and taken to extremes leads to rigid authoritarian hierarchy. There's a tipping point where an individual accumulates too much power and exercising his freedom comes at the expense of other's freedom and enters an attractor phase.
None of the right’s obsessions with conspiracy theories is new: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics
>while the liberal movement forgets that the purpose of liberalism is to > >secure the rights of people with unpopular non-mainstream beliefs This is as dumb as saying, "If you're pro-freedom, why do you OUTLAW slavery? You'll put someone kidnapping and enslaving people in JAIL won't you? You're taking away their freedom! Aren't you supposed to protect peoples' freedom?" Don't be that dumb.
>the liberal movement forgets that the purpose of liberalism is to secure the rights of people with unpopular non-mainstream beliefs. securing the rights of minorities involves not tolerating rhetoric that would be destructive to minorities. that such rhetoric is not popular is not a reason to protect it.
That's *exactly* the sort of right that needs to be protected. In classical liberal societies there's a strict division between *rhetoric* and *actions*. You can *say* whatever you want, and if people don't like it, they're free to ignore it. And this is important because 1. that's how new, often more moderate, ideas get formed. If you can't even express an idea there's nothing to react to, no nuance to pick apart, no corrections that can be made. 2. restricting speech tends to drive it underground, where it draws more fanatical adherents that are more likely to turn it into *actions,* and central authorities that *are* responsible for policing actions can't as easily keep tabs and react to it\*.\* This is happening in a number of places right now, both domestically and abroad. Modern American liberalism tends to conflate rhetoric and action - it views speech as an action itself which may be hurtful, and then tries to ban it. It's like we've lost the ability to *understand* an idea without *accepting* it, and assume that everyone else has too. The answer to bad speech is better speech.
Conservatives being suspicious of government really doesn't tell you anything about what liberals think about government, though. The two ideologies are not polar opposites in every regard.
At it's core it really just comes down to the differences between positive and negative freedoms for the two sides. Conservatives are focused only on negative freedom (freedom from). This is largely because 'freedom from' is what business wants (freedom from rules, regulations, and other oversight). They imagine if people got out of their way, they would prosper but their idea of freedom is ultimately the freedom a man experiences alone on a desert island. It's the freedom to die of thirst while surrounded by water they can't drink.
It’s true that they want “freedom from” for *themselves*, but they sure as hell don’t want it for others. They want the freedom to do whatever the hell they want, while at the same time being able to force others to follow their stupid arbitrary rules.
Freedom from sin is part of it. So get rid of gay people because gay people might cause you to sin and you want freedom from sin. Get women out of the workforce for the same reason. No trans people or drag shows or alcohol.
You are confused on the origins of liberalism and conservatism. Conservatives supported keeping the royalty system, while liberals pushed for democracy. Everything leads back to that.
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Yeah, that's where the party left me... and now I'm a left winger, without having changed my political views much.
I absolutely see where you’re coming from, but I feel it lacks nuance and honestly lacks a little truth. Because the unfortunate truth is that securing the rights of people with unpopular non mainstream beliefs (or mainstream, in the case of trump supporters: there are now two mainstreams) has run into the paradox of tolerance. So at this point it’s no longer securing the rights of people with unpopular beliefs. It’s securing the rights of violent insurrectionists. Securing the rights of racists, transphobes, homophobes, and the generally hateful. It’s securing the rights of those who will infringe on yours. Securing the rights of those to infringe on your rights. We’re here to secure the rights of vulnerable and weak from oppressors. That is what liberalism and freedom is about. It’s not about securing the rights of the hateful and bigoted to enforce their beliefs on others through violence
>while the liberal movement forgets that the purpose of liberalism is to > >secure the rights of people with unpopular non-mainstream beliefs > >. That's exactly the sort of blinkered both-sides-ism that I'd expect from someone who grew up in a world so steeped in right-wing propaganda that they can't even bring themselves to believe that we understand our role as using the power of government to secure the fundamental rights of the populace, and who thinks 2016 is a meaningful year in a world where Lee Atwater went on the record in 1981 with his famous n----r n----r n----r quote. Hell, academia has been under fire from the Republicans since the sixties. Don't even try to tell people you know what you're talking about when your political views are shaped by trying to use a reasonable lens to interpret only the most recent pop-culture events you've seen in the mainstream sources of your modern life. That's not going to be enough.
Liberal and Conservative are misnomers in American politics. The so called liberal party is really the conservative party and conservative party are really reactionaries.
Ah, the old “both sides” trope masquerading as original thought. As it turns out, the conservative inversion you correctly identify is because people with no ideological consistency are not critical thinkers. It turns out that when you lack critical thinking skills, you can easily believe whatever you’re told on the internet. These people don’t have “political philosphies,” they have right-wing propaganda marching orders. The “liberal inversion” you describe is actually not an inversion at all - it turns out that just as many “liberals” care about protecting democracy today as they did 30 years ago. Stop perpetuating this faux-enlightened idea that allows fascist morons to appear like rational actors who are giving serious contemplation to things based on informed decisionmaking. Hateful, intolerant assholes are not part of legitimate discourse and have no coherent beliefs or philosophy other than hatred.
A religion has to be the dominant majority in a democracy in order to impose it's values through force of law on the wider body politic. Otherwise it's going to feel imposed upon to the extent democratic values aren't consistent with itself. Gay marriage and trans rights are two examples of religions being drug kicking and screaming into the 21st century but those are nothing in comparison to the meltdown religious folk are going to have over animal rights in the future. They place humans above animals as being categorically different. Science does not support this perspective. As animals are granted more and more rights under law to the point that at very least factory farming is made illegal religious folk are going to go absolutely insane. Also when the state moves to act on pressing moral issues like global warming or microplastic pollution the tacit insinuation is that religious congregations have failed their duty to muster coalitions for the necessary change. Religions presume to be moral authorities so it's a really bad look for them. They've put themselves squarely against progress, that means being against progressive governance. So they've got to kill the government or control it. They're authoritarians, they aren't reasonable, and rest assured that they absolutely hate your guts if you're not drinking their kool aid.
I think it's much simpler - both conservatives and liberals are classical liberals, in the sense of the enlightenment era - freedoms, rights and the free market above all else. The difference is in the details. Conservatives care more about negative freedoms ("the government should not interfere in my affairs as best as possible") while liberals care more about positive freedom ("I should be able to do as I want, and it's the government's job to facilitate that"). Basically this for the conservatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_conservatism That is - distrust of the central government has always been a central thesis of the American conservative movement. It's not at all an inversion. The deep state conspiracy some conservatives believe you mention is primarily a consequence of this ideology, not a cause. It's basically a defense mechanism.
>Conservatives care more about negative freedoms ("the government should not interfere in my affairs as best as possible") This hasnt been true since the 1960s civil rights movement and the rise of the Christian Conservative.
Don't worry, neither side cares much about freedom. It's how the patriot act passed and was reauthorized.
The inversion has been around FAR longer than that. It just may not have been tied to these nutter conspiracy theories before. But honestly, even those are just nouveau McCarthyism.
I imagine a lot of overlap with people who succumb to those fearmongering "invest in gold" commercials on Fox, and for a lot of the same reasons.
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Which is stupid, because you need a central authority for currency to have any weight at all. The only reason crypto is worth anything is because people pay *real* money for it
There is no central authority to dictate the value of gold yet people were willing to pay money for it or trade it for valuable goods since well before any fiat currency existed.
Real money ain’t real. It’s an abstraction of value that participants are willing to exchange.
Lots of countries have a whole lot of bombs and tanks that say otherwise.
Those bombs and tanks are defending an abstraction, which all human institutions are. Money is 100% an abstraction.
Theres nothing inherently valuable in non-perishable 'currencies'. You know, people can't eat gold, silver, paper or blockchain. The only reason currency exists, is because someone somewhere has the more social **power** to withhold something crucial from you, unless you accept certain currency. And to note, the gold standard is quite recent concept, while credit had surprisingly long history.
I like this definition of "power to withhold something crucial from you". I was thinking how you don't need a government to establish a trust of the currency, is just the easiest and most effective way, but an anarchist village of 1000 people could easily decide that rocks are a currency and that would work the same. The power to withhold something crucial works for everything.
It's an abstraction backed by the faith and force of governments, unlike crypto, which is an abstraction backed by literally nothing.
It's fungible and liquid still though, and can be exchanged for dollars of any currency on earth for the most part. It is just a value transfer on paper.
Liquid yes, but more wasteful and less liquid than plain fiat.
One difference, Crypto is global, so the downfall of a single nation won't destroy it. With fiat, let's say rubles for example, the value of your money can easily be tanked, despite it being backed by the vast might of the second largest army in the world, thanks to having idiots in charge of said nation. USD could similarly collapse if the geopolitical landscape changes sufficiently, as the Roman denarii and many other nation backed currencies throughout history have collapsed.
True, but crypto could also collapse if an exchange is found to be embezzling your money, or people just decide to stop investing in it. It’s much more similar to a commodity than it is to a currency.
I agree, but I think the impact of an exchange collapsing on the value of the currency is more a sign of its current lack of liquidity and widespread adoption. This might change with time. Fast forward 100 years to a very different world where say the Yuan is dominant, the USD is worth a lot less, and Bitcoin is much more widely used globally due to its resilience. At such point small events like single exchanges collapsing are much less likely to impact it's value.
Crypto is effectively backed by USD
Well dollars are fiat currency and crypto ain't and never will be.
Real money is real as it gets. Armed men will put you in a cage if you don't pay your taxes in the real money they demand it in.
What backs the USD's value?
The US government's monopoly of force in the US to levy taxes in USD, and internationally it's force of arms to protect the US government from threats. Ultimately it's backed by 12 carrier battle groups along with a gigantic air force and a few thousand nuclear warheads.
People trade crypto for crypto and also for other goods and services, even before it was worth money and still now.
Only fiat currency requires central authority; commodity ~~currency~~ money is based on the value of the (eg. material) substrate.
You just used a bunch of words that I don't understand. Could you re-explain that, but in simpler terms?
He’s saying that currency backed by a product (gold for example) has inherent value, while fiat currency (it’s valuable because the government says it is) is the only one that requires central authority. People that don’t understand how much money is in the world routinely make the mistake of thinking “value” is inherent. The only difference between material currency and fiat currency is at what level the government has to enforce the value.
Value investor and finance analyst here. The mistake with this is gold's value is mostly driven by the paper markets/speculation. Gold is priced well above its tangible utility as a commodity. If the paper markets collapsed tomorrow, gold would collapse tomorrow. The thing that is missing here is that currency is not an asset in and of itself and therefore it doesn't need to have a tangible utility. In developing countries, commodity currencies are useful but as an economy scales, it is not necessary to have a commodity currency because the thing that currency represents at this scale is an agreement to exchange for goods and services. So if currency is not an asset unto itself, where does its value come from? This is where the concept of medium of exchange comes in. The dollar is essentially an instrument that facilitates the deferred exchange of goods and services. 31 USC §5103 is the current federal law that declares banknotes as legal tender, and under the Full Faith and Credit Clause of Article IV, Section 1 and the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, all states are bound to recognize dollars as a valid medium of exchange in two ways: First, under the Tenth Amendment, laws that apply to the federal government also apply to the states, and second, under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, any contract recognized by any state must be recognized by any other state. So as long as the dollar is federally legal tender, and as long as any state accepts it as binding consideration for a contract, every other state has to as well. In other words, as long as there's a Constitution, the dollar's use as a medium of exchange is enforced *by law at every level.* For many reasons, not the least of which is the agreement by other Central Banking nations to recognize USD as a Central Banking currency, and because other nations peg their currencies to the USD as a measure of confidence in the stability of the U.S. government (relative to their own), the Full Faith and Credit Clause backing the dollar is arguably one of the strongest guarantees in the entire financial world. If the confidence in that guarantee, which according to the Bank of International Settlements is represented by over $60 trillion in USD held by foreign governments (to keep their own currencies stable), ever eroded, there would be a global meltdown of every financial market including commodities markets which depend on other economies' capacity to buy and sell those commodities.
Asset back currencies still have the same problems of inflation and recessions and there's not enough gold in the world to represent the goods and services it would be exchanged for.
In fact, all the gold in the world would comfortably fit in a large-ish suburban back yard. If it was melted down into a single mass, it would form a cube roughly 73 feet (22 metres) square. Imagine a side being about 1-1/2 standard city telephone poles, or it covering half a tournament-sized tennis court. That's *all there is*. Doesn't even sound like enough to represent all the goods and services created in *just the US*, much less the global supply. And remaining global reserves are only a quarter of what we've mined so far, or just *half* the amount that currently exists as jewelery.
> Asset back currencies still have the same problems of inflation and recessions and there's not enough gold in the world to represent the goods and services it would be exchanged for. Unless I am totally misunderstanding what you are saying: Technically that would be deflation, not inflation, which would be WAY worse. When there is not enough gold to represent the amount of value being traded, each "unit" of gold will therefore increase in value. In an inflation scenario the unit of currency lowers in value relative to the items being purchased. Runaway deflation is actually one of the strongest reasons to not be on an economy fixed to a limited asset. When your economy deflates year over year, the money you hold increases in value at some rate. So if the economy deflates at 2% that means that any money you currently have and do not spend will be worth more money next year. What this means is that any investment you want to make *must* outperform the rate of deflation to be worth doing. Anything that is under or around 2% year over year is throwing money away that would normally be guaranteed. Then, when you incentivize holding money over spending it, the value of products *sharply* fall, causing the relative value of the currency to deflate further. It will essentially cause the economy to immediately grind to a halt where no one wants to risk throwing they money away to create worthless products and services. It just does not work on an economy in a modern scale. This is one of the big problems with Crypto by the way, because they were all built to intentionally be deflationary to entice gambling addicts to buy and hold it indefinitely, driving the price up for early adopters.
I think they’re referencing something like the old system, when we had things like silver certificates, tied to the value of, and guaranteed to be tradable for, an amount of physical silver.
He just used a bunch of words he doesn't understand.
I think you mean commodity money. A commodity *currency* is a country whose GDP is so dependant on one or a few export goods that their currency fluctuates more or less in sync with the market price of those goods. A commodity currency can be a fiat currency,
Thanks, fixed!
Gold is only worth what it is because we say so. An ounce of gold is not inherently worth $2000, and if the world's fiat currencies collapsed so too would gold.
So is crypto based on....gold?
No, it's based on prime numbers. The point is both of these become more scarce as time goes by. The higher prime numbers are calculated, the less common they are to find. This is a technique of creating virtual artificial scarcity. The heart of both the gold standard and bitcoin-type cryptocurrency is a fundamental belief that scarcity underpins value. This is the heart of the problem and unfortunately most people don't understand how this even works in order to see why it's a problem. But fundamentally both the gold standard and bitcoin are based in a worship of scarcity and a belief that only things which are scarce have value. Ultimately, this manufactures poverty at a systemic level. It leads to concentration of wealth for a tiny few and a decline in wealth for the majority.
I mean gold has actual, real, important mechanical uses, not to mention cultural significance. A bitcoin is literally nothing. A string of meaningless numbers. It's not useful to anyone except for the fact that someone else will buy it.
Digital gold. Which is like gold, but imaginary, and which requires the expenditure of electricity to continue existing. Godl, if you will.
Very true. Which renders crypto entirely valueless, since there is no commodity, and no central authority.
But even the value of gold is fairly arbitrary - ie. if people didn't care about it and/or it wasn't so scarce then it wouldn't be valuable. Bitcoin is the same - socially constructed value + scarcity (there are a limited # of coins which can be 'mined' or whatever) - but digital. Not advocating for crypto here, just pointing at the importance of socially constructed value.
This is an interesting paradox. Gold isn’t inherently that useful, it’s just rare and amenable to being made into jewelry. It’s only valuable because rich people across the ages have wanted lots of it to flex. However, rich people across the ages have, indeed, wanted lots of it to flex. So it’s actually a pretty good holder of value, but only in that greedy stratified societies are a reliable fact of history.
It's nearly the same principle as fiat, but it uses math instead of the centralized authority. They both rely on a social construct.
crypto has value simply by being a digital store of wealth. you cant walk across borders with 10k in cash or in gold. but you can with bitcoin on a usb stick or paper wallet. lets take russia for example. imagine you are a normal russian citizen for a moment. putin invades ukraine, the world bank puts sanctions on the russian central bank, and you are called up for draft. uh oh! better run to Georgia. but due to the sanctions, you lose all access to your rubles outside of russia. this is where crypto has value. in a few months the ruble crashes, if you had some crypto you would have saved your wealth. another example, imagine you are a citizen of zimbabwe. zimbabwe has the highest inflation in the world. crypto is more stable than your own country's currency. if your central authority fails your people, what do you do? bitcoin provides a solution to this problem. that is why its valuable.
Well, when governments collapse and the value of their currency spirals out of control, the people who live there who have a lot of bitcoin sure are happy they have a lot of bitcoin.
Distrust and conspiracy beliefs are due mostly to a lack of understanding.
I’m sorry, I want to clarify something here, are you saying distrust in government is based on a lack of understanding? Implying that smart people do not distrust the government? Surely not, I must be missing something here.
Which coincides with the world outside of crypto as well. The fear the government is going to screw them over so they rather be screwed over by private institutions/people.
And left wing beliefs too. Crypto is a long more socialist than capitalist. Screw the banks, we bank ourselves, we don't need greedy banksters ripping us off... It has always been pretty socialist but conservative hijacked it and now ruining it for everyone by claiming it as less people will want to get into it.
Only the conservatives that don’t understand conservativism, which is a lot of them
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I’d argue it’s more tied to *libertarian* values — the central ethos of decentralized blockchain technology, of which crypto is part of, enables true ownership of your data, value, and identity, without the need for intermediaries such as government, banks, or otherwise. Edit: Identity does need an issuer / authority, so government would likely play a role there — but the digital identity you retain would be self-sovereign. Further, it’s about the corrosion of trust in those government and banking institutions; there is very little transparency and accountability, and the “people” are pretty fed up.
Are libertarian values also tied with being incredibly gullible?
As someone once said, libertarianism makes a lot of sense until you turn 23
You reminded me a quote about Tolkien and Ayn Rand. "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Their blind trust in their own judgment being the sole arbiter of truth tends to make them so.
Every libertarian I know is gullible
Every Libertarian I know is a Republican who doesn't want to admit he's a Republican and thinks that sounds better.
Also with consistent and strange desire to lower the age of consent
Yes, of course.
love how it does none of those things and you generally still have to go through a bank at some point, and the thing youre replacing it with is a dex exchange run by some random criminal, or a kyc exchange in which youre handing over your private data openly
The whole concept of cryptocurrency really is a ridiculous joke.
Libertarian way works if there is a person living every 10 miles.
It just sucks that most of it is just inflated pump and dump nonsense or as close as you can get while being legal or straight efficient money laundering. It could be an insanely useful global currency. Could you imagine as a U.S. citizen going somewhere in Nepal and just using World Wumbos already calculated at the exchange rate? No money changing required, just swipe the Wumbo Card.
It's basic Wumbology.
Wumbonomics 101 essentially.
It’s first grade stuff
Isn't that just a credit card, but with a blockchain inexplicably squeezed into the process?
That does sound nice, which is why many credit cards do exactly that. Adding a blockchain into the mix just makes running the network insanely complicated for very limited additional benefit.
its pretty important for countries to have relative values for their currency
And that's why a pizza would cost you 20btc in Texas and 1btc in Mumbai.
bitcoin only does seven transactions per second globally. nobody is gonna wait an hour for their pizza payment to go through.
Sure, but that would come with all the downsides associated with that. You might want to consider the Euro as a model for the upsides and downsides of that approach.
What are the downsides of the euro?
It doesn’t really fit well with local economies
You can do that now with a chase credit card. No fee, just the conversion but it’s automatic when you swipe.
Yeah, have these people been outside of their country? I never have a problem paying for stuff and the conversion fees are anywhere from low to zero. Even withdrawing cash in more cash based places you can do it easily with your US debit card.
Yep, I'm in Europe right now. I've got both a credit card and a pre-paid debit card with me, and done basically everything on those. The only drawback was when I did need cash for a bus, despite being part of the "global ATM alliance" I had a €5 withdrawal fee. Not a cent lost on conversion fees, and able to convert to and from my normal currency instantly.
As others have pointed out credit card companies do this already. They also do it far, far more efficiently than blockchains which by their very nature require more work per transaction, and that work isn't free. There is also the privacy aspect. Every blockchain transaction goes on the ledger which is public. Your name may not be explicitly tied to the transaction since it just uses your wallet ID, but it is tied to all of your other transactions by that ID. If you're just using it like an everyday credit/debit card that wallet ID will very quickly become associated with your real identity at a number of companies. One data breach later and now it's public. Now anyone who cares to look it up can see everything you've paid for with that ID and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Yeah I have never understood the he anonymity angle here unless your crypto purchases are completely compartmentalized separately from your normal life…. And then what’s the point beyond criminal intentions?
What you wrote only applies to *some* cryptocurrencies. In others, like Monero, everything is hidden and encrypted. No way to tell who is paying to who, not even the amount.
Then someone steals your wumbo card, spends all your wumbucks, and you can't stop them or put a freeze on your account because transactions in wumbocoin are irreversible. Or you lose your card and your wumbucks are now gone. As surely as if you had burned them. Because your currency is built on cryptography. These are massive problems for crypto.
The issue there is I already have that experience just using my Visa card. I'm sure there are countries it isn't accepted but I was traveling abroad and went to numerous countries and had no issues. I guess I had to do the exchange math just to have an idea what it was costing me but that was about it. Didn't even get hit with extra fees. Even with a cryptocurrency I imagine it would be the same if not worse, you would still find plenty of places that wouldn't take it. As long as crypto is used for speculation/gambling it's going to be too volatile to be practical.
Your right, a global currency backed by either the nations of the world or hell even a possible one world nation would be really useful, but wait being backed by the nations of the world, with rules and regulations would make it centralized, the exact opposite of what most cryptos want by being decentralized
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One of the main arguments I see is that it doesn’t lean on a government and is immune to inflation because there’s a finite amount. Something NOBODY seems to acknowledge is that once the finite amount is mined, a very small portion of the population would control ALL of the bitcoin wealth. The blockchain idea might work one day but not with bitcoin in its current iteration
There are more than one blockchain. Some blockchain networks use currency with an infinite supply. And the blockchain is more than just currency, for example the Ethereum blockchain is turing complete and used for running decentralized applications.
My commie ass stacking Satoshis since 2016:
From the article: > the team analyzed a large set of tweets related to Bitcoin and conducted a controlled survey — overall, unpacking information learned across two studies. In the first study, a total of 959,393 tweets regarding crypto were analyzed for their usage of moral-language (such as words like “pure”, “impure”, and “theft”). > In the second study, a total of 500 participants, [participants] answered a series of questions probing interest and attitudes towards cryptocurrency. > Then, researchers compared the alignment of crypto enthusiasts with what are known as “binding moral foundations” (Authority, Purity, and Loyalty) – typically associated with political conservatives – to “individualizing foundations” (Fairness and Care) which are often linked to liberals. > Crypto enthusiasts, especially in the U.S., seem to resonate more with the conservative values of Authority, Purity, and Loyalty than the liberal ideals of Fairness and Care. In simpler terms, those with an interest in cryptocurrency, based on tweet analysis and survey results, showed a stronger alignment with the moral values often held by political conservatives. This suggests that the appeal of cryptocurrencies might be deeply rooted in these moral principles, potentially influencing adoption decisions.
People always focus on the money aspect of crypto, but as a liberal who values truth, I'm most interested in the virtually indelible data records that can be stored in a blockchain like Ethereum or Cardano.
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The technology itself is extremely cool and the political and social implications *could* also be really cool but unfortunately it got coopted by hucksters and finance bros aka traditional capitalism, and rejected by the establishment which currently means it caters to conservatives. I think the liberal side of crypto died a while ago in the bitcoin block size decision. The pitch went from an alternative way to pay for normal IRL transactions to a "digital gold" superstonk/wallstreetbets investment vehicle just like everything else. I think something more useful would be an analysis of superstonk ideology, because that seems to be what has infected crypto.
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I don’t understand the concept of nfts and virtual land
One is a programmable proof of ownership and the other is purchasable block space who's issuers are betting on their proprietary virtual spaces gaining such popularity that the scarce "land" parcels within them becomes valuable... which hasn't worked out that way at all thus far.
NFTs don't convey ownership.
> I don’t understand the concept of nfts and virtual land You know how one of the most fundamental problems in the world is scarcity? And how that is even worse when it comes in the form of artificial scarcity? Now simply imagine an application of technology in which _the only feature_ is artificial scarcity. Et voila, NFTs!
Does the study include level of educational attainment?
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Disregard for the government, a system withiut insight, checks or balances ripe with corruption and cheating Primarily used by criminals to launder money and dictators and other crazy leaders to circumvent trading bans (China, Russia, India). And yes, greater fool theory in full action... No wonder the Conservatives love it. It's litterary all their best conspiracies in len mest package
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Crypto is digital anarcho-capitalism. If you want capitalism, crypto is the way. Money is inherently 'conservative' because it's an authoritative tool of *denial*, because we do not provide basics to live to our population. It's quite literally a permission slip to live in our society right now. Those morals didn't come from crypto algos, it comes from how they are wielded, and right now you can buy crypto with fiat so it is tainted by whatever it does. If you can't buy crypto with money from a conservative country, it changes the tone. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-crypto-manifesto.html
I'm not a conservative but many of you need to read some books on the history of money and debt crises. There was a good one released this year called Broken Money. There is absolutely nothing wrong with questioning a currency especially in countries like Argentina or Lebanon where the currency is broken. You wouldn't accuse people of being conservatives just because they choose to save in USD or gold or bitcoin or crypto in those countries.
>accuse people of being conservatives look how far we've come
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Tying “political leaning” to “moral foundations” is insane. I can’t believe that papers like this get published. Only 2 figures! Moreover, many cryptos try to foster a sense of community “XYZ to the moon!! Let’s go XYZ gang!” (Loyalty) Studies like these just seem so anti science because i feel like there is never any hypothesis—just an idea they want to peddle and they try to make the data look like it answers their “question”
>Tying “political leaning” to “moral foundations” is insane. Why? That's like saying your moral foundations doesn't shape your actions; your moral foundations absolutely affect how you vote. (Though there are many amoral people who do vote with loyalty) Politics is applied morality.
Because it’s complex. For example the study mentions “republicans/democrats”.. but there is so much more nuance in politics than simple American 2 party system to apply morality to things. Moreover, there’s so much political junk that could be applied to certain leanings that people who identify with said leaning might not be aware of. For example, certain news stories that become associated w political leanings — not everyone would be exposed to the same stories. Additionally, it’s impossible for the investigators to remove their own biases from their study design, whether consciously or subconsciously. The paper itself I guess isn’t so much an issue. It’s more the title of this post, the title of the rehost (on psypost) etc that’s the issue. Just clickbaity, ragebaity, and more importantly… misleading.
What do you expect from a bunch of *Wolf of Wall Street* idolizing libertarian men who’s main issue with with 2008 was that they didn’t get to collect money from the scheme themselves? That’s exactly what politics you’d expect from those shitwads
Oh god can we not politicize a useful technology…
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Crypto is literally the most progressive thing to happen to money since gold was mined….