Bitcoin : the epitome of capitalist degeneracy

Here is the future of mankind, retards dumping ever more money into their magic make-believe currency with little to no regard towards any productive contribution to society, common good or even basic human decency. Greed crystallized in a completely fetichist fake currency.

Other urls found in this thread:

blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
therealmovement.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/a-brief-note-on-bitcoin-and-labor-theory/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake
motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change
spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/blockchains-how-they-work-and-why-theyll-change-the-world
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Euros and dollars only have value if you believe they do, just like bitcoin retarded OP

doubt.png

euros and dollars are enforced to be accepted. You can actually buy a food for them.

Bitcoin is the perfect example of what Nick Land was talking about, a runaway process that grows in order to grow, with no other purpose except its nihilist self-expansion.

I wouldn't think of bitcoin being a currency more than anything. The closest I could pin it to is the virtual equivalent of gold.

I think you mean late stage capitalism

To be fair, it's still make believe currency. That's the whole point of currency.

Not that I want to defend cryptocurrencies in any way, it just seems stupid to me. In my experience there's two types of people into cryptocurrencies: sly cappy types that know this isn't going to last and are just squeezing it until they have the chance to, and your run of the mill dummy who thinks this is totally the future, man, and farms bitcoin with his shitty pc by night. It's just a meme.
also
pls

I haven't read up on this because I never bothered due to how stupid it seemed. Ok…

yes, but it's easier to believe in currency if I know that merchant who do not want to take my coins can be forced to do so by police

I buy bitcoins because i live in a small town on the countryside and i'm an autistic friendless douchebag who don't know anyone, so i get my weed from the darknet. I never acumulated bitcoin tho…i always buy the exact quantity i need and i use it right away.

There is a third type, dark money. Chinese and Arabian billionaires hiding money from the government, tax evaders, and criminal money launderers love this shit. And a small part of the illegal economy like . This shit will only last so long as the various governments don't get together to crack down on it all.

you have to log your pc to some site where it's given an amount of equations to solve. as it solves them, a quantity of currency is deposited in your account.
it isn't, evidently
you can buy almost anything on the dark web, even legal stuff. also i'm pretty sure there's websites on the "regular" web that accept cryptocurrencies.


well cheers then lad, I guess it's not completely useless after all.


yeah, i thought so, i counted them as the first type.

Generally speaking you trade your buttcoins for realcoins after sitting on them for x number of years. If you were going to mine them you were doing that 15 years ago. It's like forex for poor kids.

My favorite thing about Bitcoin is how when the network gets congested like it is now you literally have to outbid other people to ensure your transaction gets processed or else it gets stuck in limbo indefinitely.

Currently at 170,000 unconfirmed transactions. Could easily hit 200k before Monday.
blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

The difference is that "real" currencies can actually be used on the market because they're infite. Bitcoin is finite and can thus never be more than a ponzi scheme. And yes currencies are usable because we all accept them as valud measurements of good's values compared to each other, bitcoin is unusable because most people don't accept it as a valid currency.

Leftists hate bitcoin because it spits in the face of LTV.

How?

Bitcoin is technically infinite anyway, 1 Bitcoin can be subdivided into tiny fractions of one. There are an infinite amount of decimals between 0 and 1.

Bitcoin is valuable because of its scarcity and its utility, not the effort it takes to mine them.

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Bitcoin is no more "fake" than USD or gold or pretty clam shells or pearls or even labor vouchers

Read basic economics:^)

I'm feeling lazy.
therealmovement.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/a-brief-note-on-bitcoin-and-labor-theory/

the arbitrary energy exerted to create regular money is near zero. you push a button, it's done.
bitcoin turns it into a 'scarce' resource for little good reason. (i think one or two of them do tie it to something useful, so you're paid for gene sequencing or something.)

I guess if you ignore the fact that its intangible while you can hold all those others in your hand.

bitcoin use value is null

I can "hold" my paper bitcoin wallet in my hand too

Don't be silly bitcoin is no less tangible than a fucking debit card at this point

Debit cards arnt currency so I don't see your point here

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Isn't Bitcoin a step backwards in history? I mean it's basically like going back to using gold as currency.

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yeah but lots of cranks like gold so see that as a good thing.

try mining the same amount of bitcoin a 12 server bitcoin farm makes with your shitty laptops and then make this argument again.

shutup OP

paper and metal don't fall from the sky

The effort it takes to mine bitcoin is a reflection of price, not a driver of price.

Are you unfamiliar with fractional reserve banking?

Learn the difference between use value and exchange value.
Bitcoin still has value outside of it's use value because it requires energy to run the calculations and the transactions themselves.

Forgive me Fuhrer.

physical cash has almost no relevance to the total amount of money in the economy
the vast majority of money, well over 90%, exists only in digital form on balance sheets.

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stupid post dripping with american ideology believing their savings mean anything and will help them advance.
inflation is low by historical standards and the biggest problem with central banks is that their current policy mandate is only to control inflation, not ensure full employment.

with dumb shit like bitcoin or gold there's the risk of deflation. now sure, your twenty cent savings account becomes worth a bit more in real terms - but who benefits the most from all their money suddenly becoming more valuable? (and who can afford to sit on money and wait, rather than spending it now because they live hand-to-mouth and need to eat?) surprise surprise it's the people with lots of money already. that's not to mention the risk of a deflationary spiral where you'd better hope you've got a lot of savings because lmao nobody's buying any of the products or services you're employed to provide because they know they can wait and get more for their money later, meaning you can fuck off because porky isn't paying you to stand around waiting.

with inflation, all you have to do is ensure that wages keep pace which is stupidly easy if you've also got full or near full employment, and bordering impossible to fail at if you've got that plus strong unions.

Inflation is pretty low right now. You sound like a Boomer.

Mein gott. Do you even understand what you're talking about?
The amount of energy it takes to 'mine' bitcoin is going up because the difficulty of the proof keeps increasing. Meaning it takes more processing power (and - as it stands - by extension hardware and electricity) to 'mine' the same amount of 'coins' as time goes on.
This is independent of the exchange value of bitcoins for existing fiat currencies or other commodities.


I'd be more concerned about not being able to guarantee my life necessities on my own. The biggest factor enslaving workers the world over is wage labor, not inflation.

Bitcoins only use is to buy drugs or to make money by sitting on them

Not exactly.
The difficulty of the bitcoin equation increases as bitcoins are mined. If bitcoin mining miraculously halted, the equations wouldn't get more difficult until it resumed.

If bitcoins had no value, they would not be mined at an industrial scale, and the equations involved would be much easier.

Bitcoins are mined because they have exchange value. They're commodities. Produced for profit.

Resuming the mining would still take energy. But the bitcoins already mined wouldn't suddenly be "free". They too took energy to produce.
Again. Note the difference between use value, exchange value and value. The latter is based on the amount of labor (in LTV) or energy (in Energy Theory of Value) it takes to produce the good.
Bitcoin also has a use value on top of it's exchange value, namely the ability to facilitate anonymous transactions.

BTC will have value so long as chinks have money to launder and americans have drugs to buy.

Does the FBI still have control over a large portion of the supply? What would happen if they dumped them?

Read Cockshott lads. His whole deal is explaining production processes in terms of information/entropy, which is basically what bitcoin is in its purest form.

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money laundering? illegal drug purchases? It has tons of utility.

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Lol, keep deluding yourself bitcuck.

Notably missing: Transaction fees costing more than your groceries.

Also missing: The increasing difficulty in getting 1BTC

that pic

bitcoin shows precisely the problem with deflation though.
congratulations, your 20 cents of bitcoin is now worth 2k.
but that guy who had 2k of bitcoin now has 20 million.

and god forbid if you withdrew any when you had $200 of bitcoin because you needed to fucking eat and don't have much cash
those with capital see their capital multiply, those who sell wage labour are fucked.

in general, real terms wages keep pace with or rise faster than inflation. even since the 1970s, for most people wages have stagnated, not fallen.

Yes. Also if your money keeps increasing in value, people will hoard it and thus demand for goods and services and investment decreases drastically, causing a giant crash.
Inflation is bad, sure, but deflation is a fucking disaster.

t. ancrap

what the fuck even are you

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake

Just more proof that bitcoin madness is a symptom of worsening conditions for the petite bourgeoisie.

motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change
spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/blockchains-how-they-work-and-why-theyll-change-the-world

What's this image referring to?

I don't know where you're getting this bullshit, but I'd like a source.

t. retarded utopian

Well, they don't just turn it into heat. Under capitalism this makes perfect sense. You could, in theory, do the same thing by hand, but you probably won't have a good time of it. So really I wouldn't worry a bout it. If anything, this is a sign that we're just that much closer to Capitalism's inevitable collapse. Just be sure to survive.

Fake commodity, you mean. Currency's main feature is stability, and lmao at AssPennies in that regard.

latter figure is also the UK, but provides the best visual example.

the blue bars are above the red line nearly every year until 2007-8.
(which is actually quite spectacular, because throughout the 70s there were attempts to constrain inflation by suppressing wages to break the perceived inflationary spiral - but with exception to the period from say late 1976 to 1978 where earnings were below inflation, for most of the decade the increase was higher, despite the policy.)

oh yeah first figure is from LSE.

Is "deflation is good, fellow workers!" right up there with "eliminating income tax brackets will magically cause the tax code to shrink" and "net neutrality is the government meddling in the capping and deep packet inspectiondiversity of the free market" among the most blatant classcuck "arguments"?

You're forgetting one other thing, which is that there is zero inherent connection between nominal prices and real wages. Even under a deflationary currency like gold, real wages can still go down if employers collectively choose them to, which they absolutely did.

The one and only inherent difference between a deflationary currency and an inflationary one, is that it forces porkies to invest their money instead of masturbating on piles of it.