Re: [GNU/consensus] ZCash (lupa)

[carlo von lynX]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 10:50:38AM +0100, Michael Rogers wrote:
> On 01/09/16 09:27, carlo von lynX wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 08:17:27AM +0200, carlo von lynX wrote:
> >> Yes, and making a cash system that bypasses the tax system means
> >> that capitalism will be much harsher with zcash as it empowers the
> >> rich to hide their riches and become richer and richer while the
> >> poor just get a tool for exchanging digital value they don't have.
> > 
> > Maybe I can find more accessible words:
> 
> In my opinion your original words were great!

Thank you. Honoured to hear such words from you.

> > Markets are a natural part of human societies. Wherever people meet,
> > even when there is no police and no justice system in sight, they
> > will trade goods and establish social norms. I've seen it in the
> > outer edges of Indonesia, it's anarchy in the good sense of the word.
> > 
> > Well, some lucky people will come up with something to sell that
> > everybody else wants. Take Michele Ferrero who invented the Nutella
> > for example. The normal tendency in an unregulated market for such
> > a person is to get richer and richer.
> 
> I think we should be careful not to equate an unregulated market where
> individuals buy and sell their personal possessions with the sort of
> "unregulated" market where an inventor becomes a billionaire. Free
> market ideology equates the two but they're actually polar opposites.

All the markets need to be "free" in the sense that people figure out
themselves where to buy and who to sell to to be efficient, but I think
in essence it is still the same problem, that an unregulated market will
not scale up well and introduce social injustice, so when I say "regulated"
I mostly mean social redistribution.

> The market that allows an inventor to become a billionaire is entirely a
> legal construct - it couldn't exist without regulation.

But as absolutely correctly point out, there can also be regulation
with the opposite effect of creating even more inequality. That is
one of the challenges of democracy, getting regulation right. I'm
only saying that without regulation we're even worse off - because
even the most basic social justice depends on it.

That's why I participate in "research" for better democracy.

> First of all it depends on property rights, in the Marxian sense of
> property - that is to say, not property meaning my toothbrush that
> nobody else is allowed to use, or my farm where I work to grow food that
> I sell, but property meaning my factory where others work on the
> condition that whatever they produce belongs to me. Naturalising this
> second type of property and confusing it with the first type is one of
> capitalism's greatest ideological achievements.

Yes, and blockchain won't solve that. Political misguidances need to be
fixed by political will - by the democratic coalition of the indebted -
and the problem the Internet has introduced is that opposition is no
longer capable to coalesce freely under the five eyes of big brother.
So the precondition for democracy as defined by the philosophers of
Illumination has been undermined since 1995. If they say this isn't
democracy we are living in, we should think of how to restore democracy.

> Second, the billionaire's market depends on intellectual property. You
> can't build a fortune from an invention unless others are prevented from
> copying it (copyright), or forced to give you a share of their profits
> if they do so (patents), or forced to use a different name for their
> version (trademarks). Personally I think trademarks provide significant
> benefits to society - capitalism would be even worse without them - but
> there's no denying that they're a form of regulation.

The problem isn't society agreeing on certain norms aka regulation.
The problem is the corrupt process that it's not really society
making up regulation. I obviously agree with the points from the
Pirate manifesto you just listed.  ;)

> So I don't think we should treat the unlimited accumulation of wealth
> via markets as a natural phenomenon or a human universal. Markets exist
> everywhere, but not all markets are alike, and a truly unregulated
> market would look nothing like the legal constructs that enable
> capitalist accumulation.

Well then let's take Faceboogle as an example. They can impose
their monopoly because everybody is already using them, because
the code people are addicted to like Nutella is not free but
either in binary form, or even better, out of reach on cloud
servers. They need none of those legal constructs to subjugate
humanity and cause immense inequality of wealth, right?

Or let's think of rural island markets where government is
mostly absent. Someone figures out how to grow more food and
gets richer. In theory others could try to steal his method,
but let's assume they don't understand how it works and so
this subject gets richer and richer and can afford to pay a
little army of thugs. They can now protect the space where
the food is grown, take over more space and start bullying
their neighbours. Ultimately they become the ruler of the
island. That's roughly how things go, if you let them go
unregulated. It has happened millions of times in human
history, I would assume.

> > I think no person on Earth should have more than a hundred times
> > what the poorest person has. My ethical vision however does not
> > become reality merely by talking about it. It has to be democratically 
> > decided and imposed by a government-like authority,* which you could say
> > is also a gesture of anarchism if an anarchist assembly decides to do
> > so, but that would mean that democracy is simply an evolution of anarchy,
> > which I presume it is.
> 
> I see it the other way round - anarchism is (or would be) an evolution
> of democracy. But evolution has no up or down, so maybe we're saying the
> same thing.

To me anarchism is what humans do if you remove all the rules and the
government. Some people would like to think that anarchism is also a
set of cultural values and behavioural norms, but I reject that as it
is a deviation from human nature. Humans will not accept values and
norms just because somebody thinks they should. That has already failed
with socialism, and will fail again. If humans agree on values and
norms to the point that it becomes culture, then it is a sociological
premise that somebody has the role of making sure the norms are
respected. My essential takeaway from Ostrom's wisdoms is that an
anarchic assembly can only make meaningful decisions if it also empowers
somebody to ensure they will be respected and implemented. To me that
also means that Separation of Powers according to Montesquieu is the
least bad system of justice philosophers could come up with.

> > So Michele deserves to be among the richest people on Earth, but we
> > need to take excessive amounts of money away from him and redistribute
> > to the poor that deserve a right to exist.
> 
> Property rights plus intellectual property rights plus taxation is one
> possible set of legal constructs, but let's not forget that there are
> infinitely many other possibilities, most of which it's hard for us even
> to imagine from our current position.

So in the case of the thug army on the island, when there is no
regulation at all we will see that intellectual property or such
would simply be imposed by physical strength.

So I agree that we have to fix regulation regarding many things,
but it is completely wrong to think anything can function entirely
without regulation. And no, I highly doubt there are infinitely 
many other possibilities. Especially regarding deregulated anarchy
or capitalism, the resulting effects we see are always the same.

> > This kind of redistribution cannot be implemented if the cash system
> > is completely unaccountable to society.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > *) See also the works of Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom.
> >    She found out that a Commons can only succeed if somebody
> >    ensures the rules are respected. A kind of (self-)government.
> 
> A commons can exist on a small scale without regulation, just like

On a small scale means small enough that no individual was motivated
to figure out a way to sabotage the project, because if they try and
no measures of prevention have been taken, they will succeed.
Every time. I could mention Tor, but I imagine you can come up with
half a dozen examples yourself.

> markets can. The question for anarchists is either how to make such
> structures scale without authority, or how to do away with the need to
> scale.

That is the problem they have failed to solve in past millennia.
But of course you can always spend more time trying. From my
understanding of centuries of philosophy is that such a solution
is not in sight.

The second option is certainly impossible. We live on a finite planet
which is in the process of collapsing. We need the ability of scaling
up humanity's common will, or the next generations will inhabit a
profoundly broken planet.

So the first option remains, Ostrom thinks authority cannot be done
away with. I think the best answer that philosophers found is to 
decentralize the powers of "authority" and have them control each
other. Montesquieu. Seperation of Powers.

The problem of checks & balances is the way it is combined with
representative democracy which implies potential for corruption.

The problem is not authority. It is the corrupt representative system.

So the only concept and technology that I know, that really
addresses the problems we are confronted with is liquid democracy.
It scales up, it empowers the many and it is resistant to corruption.
It produces an authority of the collective, and it needs officers
to execute its will, but they take no decisions, so they are easier
to keep in check.

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