Regarding Bitcoins

Regarding yesterday’s note on comparing Bitcoin with low-inflation fiat, I received a detailed response. In short, it postulates the importance of stable prices when using a currency as a medium of exchange. To ensure this, a decentralized cryptocurrency fiat is proposed: a crypto whose emission parameters are set by a vote of the currency holders.

To this, I can briefly respond: if anything is a fundamental property of prices, it is their variability. Price carries information about the relative need for goods for specific buyers at a specific moment. If you want the price of a specific good, expressed in a specific currency, to remain unchanged, your only option is to peg the exchange rate of that currency to the value of that good—effectively backing the currency with the commodity. There is no problem with creating a Bitcoin sidechain, freezing a certain amount of Bitcoins, and pegging the tokens issued against them, for example, to oil. That’s it; now one barrel of, say, Brent costs one token. Always. You just have to monitor the collateral size, because if oil becomes significantly more expensive in Bitcoins, the collateral will have to be increased. At the same time, when buying some aluminum or grain with “oilcoins,” you will inevitably encounter price changes.

But all of this has nothing to do with direct democracy, because you can never predict in advance what emission parameters the holders of your crypto-fiat will set. Perhaps they won’t want stable prices for some basket of consumer goods, but will simply take advantage of the fact that the emitter always profits from emission—and issue more tokens to quickly buy up Bitcoins with them. Or do you intend to build a managed democracy and prevent holders from acting so unsightly?

Regarding Self-Ownership and the NAP

The channel Prometheus, whose programmatic article I recently analyzed, decided to return the favor and began analyzing an overview article on libertarianism from the LPR website. In the first part of the analysis, they touched upon the principles of self-ownership and non-aggression.

After logically poking at the boundary conditions of the two principles (if a person belongs to themselves, they should be entitled to sell themselves, and may also be stripped of themselves by court decision; as for the application of the non-aggression principle, everything boils down to the definition of aggression, which is subjective, and one cannot build stable orders on such a shaky foundation), they point out that left-anarchism has a solution. As a solution, that same direct democracy is proposed: all orders are established by all members of society.

Here I can only point out that a society of total direct democracy would require some criteria for who to include in the set of voters for each specific issue. Where is the line that, once crossed, a person loses the right to vote on a certain topic because it does not concern them? If there is no such line, we get a society where everyone is obliged to ask everyone’s permission for everything—a legal absurdity worse than the city of Morlow from Interstate 60. I hope to see an answer in the following parts of the review (in the article I analyzed, there is no such answer).