Michael Rodriguez
James Maughn
English 1A
20 May 2015 bitcoin fantasy
The Nation.
ARE DIGITAL
CURRENCIES
THE FUTURETHE FUTURE
OF MONEY?
BY DOUG
HENWOOD
What’s being touted in some circles as the future of money looks hardly more peaceful than its past. Bitcoin, a formerly obscure cybercurrency, is now all over the headlines with reports of bankruptcies, thefts and FBI lockdowns.
If our fate is to buy and sell in bitcoins, this instability is troubling. But despite the headlines, the triumph of
Bitcoin and related cyber-currencies is a lot less likely than recent commentary would suggest. One cause of all this
May 19, 2014 13 DAN REISMAN hype? The number of people who understand what
Bitcoin is seems almost immeasurably small—and that probably
Introduce
regulators and insurance schemes, though, and
Bitcoin will lose all its anarcho-charm.
Keynes once called gold “part of the apparatus of conservatism” for its appeal to rentiers who loved austerity because it preserved the value of their assets.
Bitcoin serves a similarly totemic purpose for today’s cyber-libertarians, who love not only the statelessness of it as money, but also its power to subject the institutional banking system to “disruption” (one of the favorite words of that set). And like gold, Bitcoin is defl ationary. There’s a limit on how many bitcoins can be produced, and it gets more diffi cult to produce them over time until that limit is reached. Of course, new cryptocurrencies could arise. But the existence of the limit refl ects the defl ationary sympathies of the libertarian mind—in a Bitcoin economy, creating money to ease an economic depression would be impossible. Which is not to say that only libertarians love Bitcoin.
To catch a glimpse of cyber-libertarianism in its natural habitat, I ventured to a December
19 holiday party organized by Cryptos
.com, a business incubator for Bitcoin
Many had day jobs in tech or fi nance. It was mostly male (but not overwhelmingly so) and mostly white. Only one person was wearing Google Glass. From national surveys of unproved rigor, your typical Bitcoin enthusiast is a 30- ish libertarian white male—though the same survey fi nds 39 percent of the fan base leftish in some sense.
The group at the holiday party, probably because of its business-y skew, was somewhat more diverse.
Cryptos.com founder Nick Spanos worked two cellphones. When I introduced myself and turned on my iPhone voice recorder, Spanos was not cooperative:
“I don’t talk to reporters I don’t know. Turn the thing off.” After I did, he told me the place was fi lled with Bitcoin millionaires—ten of them under 21.
When I asked what kinds of businesses they were in, he replied: “All kinds.” That was the end of the interview— a cryptopromoter for a cryptocurrency.
Another partier, Marshall Swatt, the chief technology offi cer at Coinsetter, a Bitcoin trading platform for institutional investors, was more helpful. Swatt told me that, after building trading platforms for established
Wall Street institutions, he was looking for something more entrepreneurial. When I asked him whether
Millions of Americans work full-time, day in and day out, making near and sometimes just minimum wage. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them in part by the welfare claim, which promises that any job equals a better life. Barbara wondered how anyone can survive, let alone prosper, on $6-$7 an hour. Barbara moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, working in the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon realizes that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts and in most cases more than one job was needed to make ends meet. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all of its glory, consisting of
Money makes exchange much easier, because people can trade their goods for money and use the money to buy other things. In the Bible money was silver or gold, a precious metal, and America was on a gold standard throughout most of her history. In 1933 we shifted to a silver standard and in 1968 our silver certificates were replaced with Federal Reserve Notes (Remy, 2008). Today’s paper money is not backed by anything except the government’s promise that it is good. Money with no precious metal backing allows the central government to spend more than it collects in taxes, because the Federal Reserve Board can print new money, thus increasing the money supply, anytime there is a need. This is what causes inflation and is one way that the Federal Reserve Board has overstepped Biblical principles in economic policy. Greg Anthony writes that “one of the Biblical signs of a nation backsliding is the condition of its currency and the degree of honesty in its weights and measures” (Anthony, 1988, p. 28). When the money supply is increased, either through printing more money or credit-expansion, the purchasing power of the dollar falls, and businesses must increase the prices they charge to keep up with their own higher costs. Inflation encourages debt, deceives people about pay increases and future wealth accumulations, is a hidden theft tax, and decreases capital available for
Zetter, Kim. "FBI Fears Bitcoin's Popularity with Criminals." Wired. Conde Nast, 9 May 2012. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
“The Economist Explains, How Does Bitcoin Work?” The Economist (2013): n. pag. Web. 08 Apr. 2014.
For years the United States of America has been waging a war against drugs. The U.S federal government has spent well over fifteen billion dollars annually on combating illegal drugs. Marijuana in this day and age seems to be one of the most controversial drugs, and is at the forefront of the discussion boards on whether or not one should legalize the drug. Marijuana should be legalized not only because the government could tax it while reducing the national deficit, but also because some patients need it for medicinal purposes, and this will lead to a reduction in the crime rate by removing the taboo from the drug itself.
Iv'e been a semi-professional musician for over a decade now, but have yet to trash a hotel room, snort drugs from a strippers behind or destroy a television in a fit of adrenaline fuelled madness. So basically, the movies lied to me. Of course, even those amongst us who've never dreamed of picking up a musical instrument have probably wondered what it would be like to go all rock and roll on an old CRT television because not only does it seem like an incredibly cathartic exercise, it just looks so damn cool! And there's nothing worth watching these days that you can't get online anyway. So the new “Rebellion in your Pocket” campaign by AllTogetherNow for Virgin Money really hit a nerve with me, because it largely consists of TV's being destroyed in spectacular fashion.
Even before the creation of the Federal Reserve, banks were used by the public just as we use them today. Deposits were made into savings accounts. Loans were taken out to mortgage a home or finance a new business. Banknotes were issued and spent when the public borrowed from the banks. Borrowers spent these banknotes just as paper money is spent today. These bank notes were valued as money since they were backed by the promise that they would be exchanged on demand for either gold or silver.
The greatest question many have sought to answer is the creation vs. evolution debate. How did we get here? Were we created or did we evolve randomly? Are we the product of purposeful intelligence or are we the result of countless mistakes? Does it even matter? The story of money is similar to the story of humanity. Was money created or did it evolve. If it was created we can assume it will die. If money evolved then we can assume the future is unknown. In his book, The Ascent of Money a financial history of the world, Neil Ferguson historic analysis of money answers many of these questions. Ferguson believes money essentially mirrors mankind, magnifying back to us our progress, failures, values and weaknesses.” (The Ascent of Money, 358) The history of money shares many similarities to the history of man; Ferguson parallels between finance and Darwinism, illustrating the natural mechanism of our financial ecosystem that evolves, creates, competes, and dies.
Banking on Bitcoin acknowledges these opposing arguments throughout the film but negates them with many different rhetorical elements. The opposing argument does not stop this documentary from being effective in persuading people to use Bitcoin. Cannucciari has supplied sufficient evidence and logic along with rhetorical elements to persuade one into using Bitcoin. The concepts in this documentary support themselves and are still growing today. It would be no surprise to find that this documentary helped the growth of Bitcoin over the last
"Regulation of money supply needs to be depoliticized... especially as it applies to virtual currencies" - Al Gore
What makes a good person good? According to WikiHow, "We should learn to define our own morals ourselves. One of the simplest ways to do so is to love others, and treat them as you would like to be treated. Try to think of others before yourself. Even doing small things daily will greatly enrich and improve your life, and the lives of others around you." This quote shows us what we need to do in order to be what society thinks as, “good". In order to be a good person, you have to do good and moral things in your society consistently. However people might think that by doing one good thing once in a while will automatically make you a “good person”, but in reality it doesn’t.
The invention of money was a major improvement in peoples’ lives. In the past, people usually had to travel all day to find the person who is willing to exchange their goods. In addition, the goods people want to exchange did not have the standard value of measurement. This led to unequal exchanges. Furthermore, it is not convenient to carry heavy goods from one place to another for an exchange. To solve these issues, money will be the only solution. Later, people tend to develop money from cowry shells to credit cards for the convenience and to improve their society.
The invention of money is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of human civilization. From the very beginning of society, people have used money to circumvent the difficulties of bartering and to foster trade and commerce. Since then, money has come a long way. No longer do we need to rely on silver coins, cocoa beans, or even anything of intrinsic value to conduct our business; today, we use paper currency, which is convenient and easy to carry around. But slowly, we are moving into the digital age of money, an age in which less of our money is actually tangible and more of it is just data on a computer server.
No economic systems can regulate the production or value of the currency, the system that crypto-currencies are based upon was created by Satoshi Nakamoto - purposely creating Bitcoin which the practise of fractional reserve banking would be virtually impossible. Bitcoin is currently the most successful crypto-currency to date - created in 2009, this anonymous decentralized digital currency has been the target of several raids and hacking sprees; the media are contemplating the significance of Bitcoin in our current worlds economy. Whether it has potential of overruling fiat-currencies or if it’s just a puerile project created by the aberrant Satoshi Nakamoto. Global Perspective Since its creation in the ‘60s, the Internet has paved the way for numerous phenomenons that have affected the way that we live, the way we communicate and that have affected the worlds economy.
A cashless society will further improve the globalisation that characterise our present time. The computerised systems can be used to decrease the quantity of paper trail therefore substituting paper cash with cashless credits or electronic money transfers. However, in a cashless economy, this will change with certain crimes almost eradicated. It will also be faster to generate electronic payments than cash as Near Field Communications (NFC) chips make their way into more payments cards and mobile handsets as well providing protection not applicable to purchases made using cash. This technology is simple with low power wireless link evolved from radio-frequency identification (RFID) tech that can transfer small amounts of data between two devices identifying us and our bank account to a computer. Another benefit of drawing nearer to a cashless society is that other companies are providing pioneering cash-free solutions to the payment related problems we come across. For example, WisePay, a provider of e-payments services, is deploying technologies that ensure parents no longer have to worry about sending their children to school with cash to pay for meals, excursions and other fees that will eliminate the likelihood of being caught short for cash or children misplacing money. The Government also has valuable explanations why they may deem to turn away from cash. Due the main factor of printing and distributing cash, not to mention ensuring the economy is free from forgeries which are all costly endeavours estimating that the cost to society of using cash is between 0.5 and 1.5% of GDP annually. In addition, there are many technological innovations that propose there is a real enthusiasm for an alternative to cash with the upsurge...