Re: <nettime> Never Mind the Bitcoin?

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

In uncertain times, traditional investments bring in far less returns 
than speculative ones. Of course the risks of default are higher, but 
then it's borrowed money anyway, or held by very deep pockets players 
who behave as venture capitalists: 1 smashing investment makes for 9 
dudd ones.

People, in I am sorry to say, 'Anglo', and now 'Global' thinking, have 
always been the weakest link in the chain, to be eliminated as much as 
possible - re-read Manuel De Landa. So no wonder fin/tech elites are so 
enamoured with machines, and wants them to replace ... you.

Taxing all that flush money out of existence? Impossible, since it's 
totally virtual, that is you can't 'realize' it (reason why saying that 
20 corporate people or entities own half the world's wealth (owtte) is 
very pleasing rhetorically, but makes no sense: if they had to sell out 
- to pay a punitive wealth tax for instance - only a fraction of the 
numbers would actually show up)
But there is another possible way: wholesale monetary reform, as 
happened in many European countries after WWII. One of the consequences, 
if not one of the aims, of neo-liberalism was to prevent governments 
ever being able to do that again.

Things going to be interesting when/as non-fiat moneys come in big time, 
and outfits which are not supposed (and perceived) to be financial 
institutions (think GAFA, and big telecoms), turn out to be exactly that 
in practice, and will 'own' what pass for a monetary system before soon.

War? Yeah, that's always an option, and some powerful idiots believe in 
it. We could always try to think like the graffito:  "Stell Dir vor: es 
gibt Krieg, und Keiner geht hin ...

Cheers, p+7D!


On 2017-12-14 10:20, Felix Stalder wrote:
> Bitcoin seems, to me, to indicate how much criminal, speculative money
> there is out there, seeking risk worth taking, rather than "investing"
> in a traditional sense. There is simply too much money held by too few
> people who now trade it among themselves, rather than seeking to 
> extract
> surplus value from labor. There are only so many apartments one can buy
> in Dubai and all that money needs to go somewhere.
>
> Take the bitcoin exchange rate of the last three years as a fractal
> image of the income/wealth distribution of the last thirty years.
> Exponential acceleration within exponential acceleration.
>
> That vehicle that this money latched onto is about the utopia of 
> machine
> peerage, tells us something about the state of the world, in which
> technical thinking dominates and people simply don't count and, as long
> as they remain necessary, most of them are forcefully written out of 
> the
> story. For a micro-account how invisibility is created/enforced, see
> Andrew Wilson's great work "Workers Leaving the Googleplex"
>
> https://vimeo.com/15852288
>
> Machines, as Morlock pointed out, are simply more efficient at
> everything (often in practice, but particularly in theory), in part
> because we defined the world -- and ourselves -- in machine terms, by
> accepting information theory as communication theory.
>
> Back to the excess money. The sane option would be to tax that money,
> but doesn't look likely in the US/EU, so the other option to break that
> extremely unstable distribution of income and wealth become more 
> likely:
> war. Historically, this is how I understand Piketty, there have only
> been these two options.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 2017-12-13 20:41, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> > Bitcoin successfully hijacked a sizable amount of public belief, which
> > underwrites any fiat currency, and it doesn't get more fiat than 
> > Bitcoin.
>
> <...>
>
>
>
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> #  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: