Re: <nettime> Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

Another argument against the governmental monopoly on currency is Bernard Lietaer, “The Future of Money”. But Lietaer does it for a different reason than Hayek. His concern is that speculative transactions have leveraged technology to exponentially increase their volume and presence. In the case of currency exchange, in the 1970’s close to 80% of currency exchange transactions were tied to a ‘real world’ economy of moving goods, services and people across international borders; and 20% was speculation. Now the situation is completely reversed: the speculation figure dominates, and it is estimated that the real economy share has fallen below 1%.

This creates the following problems:

The tail is now wagging the dog. Exchange rates are not tied to the real economy at all.
Since speculation does not like stable rates, there is a systemic interest in instability
People who are tied into the constraints of a localised real economy cannot compete against a globalised system driven by speculation. Firstly, the economies of scale of the speculative system will easily outprice local competitors. And second, your ability to compete is greatly constrained when you can only hedge your risk in a single local currency.
The ability of governments to intervene in the system for a public interest is eliminated. The combined reserves of all the central banks in the world falls far short of half the volume of a single day’s currency trading.
Unlike stocks and shares, where most countries have regulatory limits on the percentage of a stock you can buy without disclosure, there are no such limits in the currency market. While it is too large a market for any single player to influence, a trading system driven by current global communication technologies (with many transactions driven by algorithms) can create waves that can destabilise a currency within hours.
The incentive of banks to underpin the real economy by offering credit is reduced, as they prefer to deploy their funds elsewhere. For many of the major international banks, currency trading is one of the largest sources of revenue.

Lietaer’s solution is not a virtual currency like bitcoin - for that would only offer further opportunity to the speculative system; and the bubble in the increase in value of bitcoin over the last year reinforces that fact. He argues that breaking the governmental monopoly on currency should create the space for highly localised currencies decentralised to the scale of a city or province.

On 05-Jan-2018, at 4:37 AM, Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:

On 12/31/17 8:11 PM, Brian Holmes wrote:
Beyond that, bravo for excavating the Austrian ideology of Bitcoin,
they're all goldbugs and sure looks and acts like synthetic gold to me.

The other part of the Austrian ideology of bitcoin lies, I think, in
appeal that the argument about the "Denationalisation of money", put
forward by Hayek in 1976, still holds. The book can be easily found
online. (Despite their unceasing support of markets and property, they
sure make those texts available easily and freely).

In the introduction (which, I admit, is all I read), Hayek explains the
argument as follows:

"In my despair about the hopelessness of finding a politically feasible
solution to what is technically the simplest possible problem, namely to
stop inflation, I threw out ... a somewhat startling suggestion ... that
government should be deprived of its monopoly of the issue of money.

The task of preventing inflation has always seemed to me to be of the
greatest importance, not only because of the harm and suffering major
inflations cause, but also because I have long been convinced that even
mild inflations ultimately produce the recurring depressions and
unemployment which have been a justified grievance against the free
enterprise system and must be prevented if a free society is to survive.

As soon as one succeeds in freeing oneself of the universally but
tacitly accepted creed that a country must be supplied by its government
with its own distinctive and exclusive currency, all sorts of
interesting questions arise which have never been examined.

The main result at this stage is that the chief blemish of the market
order which has been the cause of well-justified reproaches, its
susceptibility to recurrent periods of depression and unemployment, is a
consequence of the age-old government monopoly of the issue of money. I
have now no doubt whatever that private enterprise, if it had not been
prevented by government, could and would long ago have provided the
public with a choice of currencies, and those that prevailed in the
competition would have been essentially stable in value and would have
prevented both excessive stimulation of investment and the consequent
periods of contraction.

[Because] government more often than any private enterprise had provided
us with the Schwundgeld (shrinking money) that Silvio Gesell had
recommended."

This argument about the beneficial effects of competition among
currencies was very strong in the early days of crypto-currencies. Now,
of course, it's a speculative frenzy, which goes totally against this
theory, but then again, who needs theoretical consistency when you can
make big bucks.

--

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