This article portends ordinary people would never prefer to transact in cash when they could instead use “govcoin”. I’m seeing parallels with this idea and the early days of Healthcare.gov — a tech “upgrade” which to this very day fails to deliver affordable access to reasonably decent health insurance for Americans.
Govcoin: Digital, so you have no privacy. Centralized, so your money is subject to inflation and confiscation and can be arbitrarily frozen. Government, because let’s limit this to a region or nationality.
Pitting these clearly inferior govcoins against existing cash instruments let alone fixed-supply global cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is going to be a good old fashioned boondoggle.
FWIW, real world data suggests end users avoid adopting inflationary monies on an open market: “Freicoin”, a cryptocurrency which taxed its holders a small percentage annually via demurrage “for the greater good”, failed to see any level of user adoption, despite having a sufficiently high profile in the cryptocurrency world at the time (c. a decade ago).
In spite of what many people claim, it turns out no one actually wants inflatable money assuming they can easily opt out of it.
> it turns out no one actually wants inflatable money
You aren't supposed to want money. It's a medium for exchanging goods and services. Generally speaking, people's lives get better the more goods and services they exchange. If you have all the goods and services you need, you're supposed to loan or invest your money to someone who has an immediate productive use for these goods and services. Deflation disincentivizes these exchanges, and a fixed supply is even worse. That's why people aren't using Bitcoins any more for commercial transactions than they were 5 years ago.
> Generally speaking, people's lives get better the more goods and services they exchange.
“Goods and services” strikes me as being overly broad. Self-education is increasingly obtainable online, and has had an outsized impact on my quality of life compared to other things I’ve spent money on. Regardless, it’d be putting it mildly to say there’s ample room for interpretation here.
(And this is without getting into all the abstract philosophical concepts that creep their way into any discussion about “life betterment”.)
> If you have all the goods and services you need, you're supposed to loan or invest your money to someone
Particularly if we take an “infinite growth at all costs despite finite physical resources” world view. But if not...
> Deflation disincentivizes these exchanges, and a fixed supply is even worse.
Worse for who? Humans? Humans are already vastly overpopulating this planet. To someone like myself who’d be pleasantly surprised if humankind lasted another three decades here on Earth, I think your system of value is of questionable merit. We need to curb growth, starting today, to avoid an ecological collapse. A deflationary economic system like Bitcoin can help avoid calamity for billions.
Which would be impossible if someone with a lot of money decide to hoard it instead of investing in YouTube.
You can't guarantee that when people spend less money, they'll favor cutting out "bad" things over "good" ones. If something is causing ecological externalities, you can tax always tax it. If something has positive externalities, but you didn't raise enough money in taxes, you can fund it by printing more money.
>Worse for who? Humans?
Half the world lives off less than $5.50 a day. They don't have the luxury of caring about the environment. Madagascar nearly completely deforested, just from burning fuel for heating and cooking, so it's not like it's guaranteed that less economic activity is going to be any better for the environment. Conveniently, poor people are also the ones who have most kids because they are the only source of retirement possible. The only ethical way to curb population growth is to develop the economy in those poorer areas.
> Centralized, so your money is subject to inflation and confiscation and can be arbitrarily frozen.
Yes! I feel like the people who criticize decentralized cryptocurrencies have never had their accounts frozen. Coins like Monero are absolutely needed...
Not sure why you mentioned the coin you did, there. Are you insinuating Bitcoin’s fixed supply nature and long standing track record of security wouldn’t give you all the protection you’d ever need against inflation or asset seizure? Or were you merely making mention of a “coin” in your investment portfolio sans any financial disclosure statement, as is so (insufferably) common?
> Are you insinuating Bitcoin’s fixed supply nature and long standing track record of security wouldn’t give you all the protection you’d ever need against inflation or asset seizure?
Bitcoin does protect against inflation but it's ineffective against government controls because it's not fungible. The government doesn't need to literally seize the coins, it can just blacklist them. This prevents spending and makes them useless.
> Or were you merely making mention of a “coin” in your investment portfolio sans any financial disclosure statement, as is so (insufferably) common?
I mentioned Monero because I thought it was the most relevant coin. I was talking about bank account seizures and freezes, something that actually happened to everyone in my country in the 90s. A huge reason why my family enjoys some degree of prosperity today is we saw it coming and withdrew everything in cash. I believe that as a proven privacy coin Monero is the coin most effective at avoiding that sort of government stupidity.
Govcoin: Digital, so you have no privacy. Centralized, so your money is subject to inflation and confiscation and can be arbitrarily frozen. Government, because let’s limit this to a region or nationality.
Pitting these clearly inferior govcoins against existing cash instruments let alone fixed-supply global cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is going to be a good old fashioned boondoggle.
FWIW, real world data suggests end users avoid adopting inflationary monies on an open market: “Freicoin”, a cryptocurrency which taxed its holders a small percentage annually via demurrage “for the greater good”, failed to see any level of user adoption, despite having a sufficiently high profile in the cryptocurrency world at the time (c. a decade ago).
In spite of what many people claim, it turns out no one actually wants inflatable money assuming they can easily opt out of it.