[WSMDiscuss] Revisting bitcoin and cryptocurrencies | naked capitalism

Sun Jun 27 21:51:02 CEST 2021

Let me first list the pejoratives in this article.  Shellacks?  Nothing to
like? No holds barred? (Taleb is) far from the only expert (who hates
Bitcoin)?  Fanboys?  Poseurs? Suffering no fools? Paranoid antigovernment
individuals and others distrustful of institutions? naïve-libertarian
illusion? getting ideologues wound up?  ---  Really, why are the critics so
insecure?

The main thing I got from this article was a good laugh. The author takes a
chainsaw to a random set of trees while showing remarkable ignorance of the
forest. The bitcoin project is young and has remarkable achievements for
only 11 years of existence. It has had some of the actually smartest people
(who is the poseur?) working on it and has, somehow, magically created more
than $1 trillion of value.

Rather than engage with the author’s 20 random points, I will simply ask:
Why are dozens of countries including the US and China struggling to create
digital versions of their currencies?  How can anyone claim to know
anything about Bitcoin without accounting for the Lightning Network.

Who on this list trusts the government and other capitalist institutions to
preserve the value of their currencies, to not use monetary policy to
starve millions?  Who on this list cannot be curious about a cryptographic
and mathematical Internet money that has never been hacked, is independent
of governments and central banks, and that forces rich and poor to follow
the same protocol?

On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 8:52 AM Brian <brian at radicalroad.com> wrote:

> Those on this list who engaged in the long recent thread on bitcoin et
> alia may find this interesting….
>
> ~ Brian
> *******************
>
>
> https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/06/nassim-nicholas-taleb-shellacks-bitcoin-and-cryptocurrencies.html
>
> Nassim Nicholas Taleb Shellacks Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies
> Yves Smith <https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/author/yves-smith>June 23,
> 2021   | *naked capitalism*
>
> Nassim Nicholas Taleb has weighed in on Bitcoin and its brethren in a new
> paper for New York University, *Bitcoin, Currencies, and Bubbles
> <https://nassimtaleb.org/2021/06/bitcoin-currencies-bubbles/>, *and finds
> nothing to like. We’ve embedded his analysis below and encourage you to
> read it in full. [See attachment to this email]
>
> Taleb is far from the only expert in finance to pen a wide-ranging and
> overwhelmingly negative assessment of Bitcoin and other crypto (which for
> convenience we will refer to as Bitcoin). Nouriel Roubini published a no-holds
> barred takedown in the Financial Times in February
> <https://www.ft.com/content/9be5ad05-b17a-4449-807b-5dbcb5ef8170>.
> Roubini called out its lack of fundamental value, environmental toll,
> volatility, high transaction costs, and very slow processing.
>
> Taleb’s critique is even more fundamental. We joked early on that
> blockchain was a technology looking for an application. Taleb confirms that
> that is still true. From Taleb’s conclusion:
>
> We presented the attributes of the blockchain in general and bitcoin in
> particular. The customary standard argument is “bitcoin has its flaws but
> we are getting a great technology, we will do wonders with the blockchain”.
> No, there is no evidence that we are getting a great technology —unless
> “great technology” doesn’t mean “useful”. And we have done —at the time of
> writing —in spite of all the fanfare, still close to nothing with the
> blockchain.
>
> Bitcoin fanboys may have tried to shrug off Roubini as a mere
> doom-oriented economist. They’ll have a much more difficult time dismissing
> Taleb. Taleb is a quant’s quant and has no patience with poseurs. He starts
> with a brief overview of the technologies that underpin Bitcoin and
> includes observations about Bitcoin that derive from currency risk hedging,
> but it’s not essential to parse them to get the drift of his gist. Even
> though he is not a computer scientist, he held senior positions in
> derivatives trading at top tier market participants, and particularly in
> the 1980s and 1990s, competitiveness in options and derivatives trading was
> very much dependent on fast IT development and implementation, so the
> senior traders would often work closely with the developers on the rollout
> of new trading models and tools. So his asides about IT are not to be
> dismissed either.
>
> However, Taleb is also famous for suffering no fools, and so calls on
> readers to step up their game to follow his argument rather than making his
> arguments op-ed-level layperson friendly. However, the finance-literate
> will find this paper to be accessible as well as occasionally acid.
>
> Taleb’s overarching complaint is that Bitcoin accomplished none of its
> supposed aims, including facilitating crime. Its volatility and speculative
> use makes it unworkable as a currency. One of the comments the paper
> highlights:
>
> There is a conflation of “accepting bitcoin for payments” and pricing
> goods in bitcoin. For that the price in bitcoin must be fixed, with the
> conversion into fiat floating, rather than the reverse.
>
> It isn’t a store of value, an inflation hedge or a safe haven either. It
> isn’t just that Bitcoin did poorly in the Covid panic of March 2000; it’s
> also not a techno answer to a bank account in a secrecy jurisdiction like
> Panama or the Isle of Man. From the article:
>
> To many paranoid antigovernment individuals and others distrustful of
> institutions, bitcoin has been marketed as safe haven — also with the open
> invitation to fall for the fallacy that a volatile electronic token on a
> public setting is a place for your hidden treasure.
>
> By its very nature, bitcoin is open for all to see. The belief in one’s
> ability to hide one’s assets from the government with a public blockchain
> easily triangularizable at endpoints and not just read by the FBI but by
> people in their living room also requires a certain lack of financial
> seasoning and statistical understanding – perhaps even simple common sense.
> For instance a Wolfram Research specialist was able to statistically detect
> and triangularize “anonymous” ransom payments made by Colonial Pipeline on
> May 8 in 2021 [18] —and it did not take long for the FBI to hack the
> account and restitute the funds.
>
> Government structures and computational power will remain stronger than
> those of distributed operators who, while distrusting one another, can fall
> prey to simple hoaxes.
>
> In the cyber world, connections are with people one has never met in real
> life; infiltration by government agents are extremely easy. By comparison,
> the mafia required a Sicilian lineage for “friends of ours” so they could
> do their own security clearance type of check. One never knows the degree
> of governmental surveillance and real capabilities.
>
> Taleb makes much of the fact that the value of Bitcoin depends on having
> miners “in perpetuity”. He points out that other historical currencies,
> such as gold and silver, even if they had lost their luster and no longer
> function as inflation hedge or reliable stores of value, still have some
> fundamental worth due to their use in industry and jewelry. No such
> possible floor exists for Bitcoin. It similarly can’t be considered to be
> an asset because it can never generate income. Taleb puts aside
> collectables since they have what amounts to consumption value, as in
> enjoyment of their aesthetic qualities.
>
> Let us go deeper into how a currency can come about. No transaction is
> analytically pairwise in an open economy. The root of the confusion lies in
> the prevalent naïve-libertarian illusion that a transaction between two
> consenting adults, when devoid of coercion, is effectively just a
> transaction between two consenting adults and can be isolated and discussed
> as such, pairwise. One must consider the ensemble of transactions and the
> interactions between agents: people happen to engage in contractual
> agreements with others; for them a given transaction is just a piece. To be
> able to regularly buy goods denominated in bitcoin (that is, fixed in
> bitcoin, floating in U.S.$ or some other fiat currency), one must have an
> income that is fixed in bitcoin. Such an income must come from somewhere,
> say, an employer. For an employer to pay a salary fixed in bitcoin, she or
> he must be getting revenues fixed in bitcoin. Furthermore, for the vendor
> to offer a can of beer in fixed bitcoins, she or he must be paying for the
> raw material, and have the overhead fixed in bitcoin. The same with a
> mismatch of assets and obligations on a balance sheet. All this requires a
> parity bitcoin-USD of low enough volatility to be tolerable and for
> variations to remain inconsequential.
>
> There are also arbitrage bounds present in any sufficiently efficient
> economy with relatively free markets.
>
> Furthermore, if a vendor prices goods in bitcoin, and the value fluctuates
> from the initial fixing, the price will be directly or indirectly
> arbitraged: when the conversion rate to fiat is favorable, customers will
> buy from the bitcoiner; when unfavorable they will either buy elsewhere
> (indirect arbitrage), or if possible, return previous goods (direct
> arbitrage). For the price to not be arbitrageable requires the good to be
> unique and unavailable elsewhere at a fixed price in another currency – in
> this case it becomes, simply, a proxy to bitcoin. The only items that
> currently appear to be somewhat priced in bitcoin are other
> cryptocurrencies, even then.
>
> Taleb does not invoke the MMT/chartalist view that the acceptance of a
> currency depends on the necessity of acquiring it to make tax payments. But
> he gets to similar place:
>
> In 2021, the governments (central and local) share of GDP in Western
> economies is around 30-60%, one order of magnitude higher than it was in
> the 1900s. Government employees and contractors get paid in fiat; taxes are
> collected in fiat.
>
> Taleb, as did Roubini, calls out the fiction that Bitcoin is somehow
> democratic:
>
> One would have the illusion that, by being distributed, Bitcoin would be
> democratic and reduce the agency problem perceived to be present among
> civil servants and banks. Unfortunately, there appears to be a worse agency
> problem: a collection of insiders holding on to what they think will be the
> world currency, so others would have to go to them later on for supply.
> They would be cumulatively earning trillions, with many billionaire
> “Hodlers”; compare with civil servants making lower middle class wages. It
> is a wealth transfer to the cartel of early bitcoin adopters.
>
> If you get as much of a charge as I do from getting ideologues wound up, I
> hope you’ll send this article on to your Bitcoin true believers and watch
> them go on tilt.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Visit:  https://murphyslog.ca
> Twitter:  @BrianKMurphy2
>
>
>
>
>
> Visit:  https://murphyslog.ca
> Twitter:  @BrianKMurphy2
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> ** Inspired by the World Social Forum, WSMDiscuss – the successor to a
> list named ‘WSFDiscuss’ started in 2005 - is an open, unmoderated, and
> self-organising forum for the exchange of information and views on the
> experience, practice, and theory of social and political movement at any
> level (local, national, regional, and global), including the World Social
> Forum.  Join in ! **
> _______________________________________________
> World Social Movement Discuss mailing list
> POST to LIST : Send email to wsm-discuss at lists.openspaceforum.net
> SUBSCRIBE : Send empty email to
> wsm-discuss-subscribe at lists.openspaceforum.net
> UNSUBSCRIBE : Send empty email to
> wsm-discuss-unsubscribe at lists.openspaceforum.net
> LIST ARCHIVES : https://lists.openspaceforum.net/pipermail/wsm-discuss/
> LIST INFORMATION :
> https://lists.openspaceforum.net/mailman/listinfo/wsm-discuss
> POSTING GUIDELINES :
> http://openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=Mailing+List+Posting+Guidelines
> Old / previous WSFDiscuss List Archives :
> http://openspaceforum.net/pipermail/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspaceforum.net/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.openspaceforum.net/pipermail/wsm-discuss/attachments/20210627/f73d41de/attachment.htm>