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Bitcoin hits record high as Trump vows to end crypto crackdown
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Every time the price spikes I get the feeling its large holders cashing out while they can and the liquid from newcomers is available. Which would make it mostly a scam, kinda like the stock market but even more shallow somehow, as if the stock market wasn't unrelated enough to actual production and very esoteric.
It's basically the same thing. People cry about crypto being a pyramid scheme without talking about how pyramid schemes are a major foundation of the whole economy. People cry about how crypto isn't a worthwhile currency while the dollar (ie. paper covered with pictures of slave masters) is constantly losing value.
It really depends on the community you're talking with. In the Bitcoin community that would not surprise me in the least if it's just big holders dumping on little holders to cash out for fiat. In the Monero community however that's totally different because they want to use it as actual money. They, and I include myself in this category, believe that the government should absolutely not have control of our money supply that they can manipulate at any time for any reason or no reason at all and make everyone less wealthy, with the exception of those who they choose to give "government contracts", "incentives" or "subsidies". This is why the libertarians say that taxation is theft because they tax you on your productive hours of your life and call it an income tax and then they give it to the people who they choose to flatter and leave you homeless and shit.
Income taxes go back into services that help society. How do you expect a government to fund any of the infrastructure and services that you take for granted around you without it?
First off, we have to agree that we need the government in order to fund infrastructure. If we make that assumption, then sales tax on anything other than food and base essentials.
Lower income people spend - as a proportion of their income - far more of their income than higher income people. This makes the "nothing but sales taxes" approach much more regressive than it initially seems, despite often being touted by economists as a progressive approach to taxation.
Right, but a lot of lower-income people also spend a lot more of their income that they do get on base essentials, such as food, clothing, and housing, which would be considered base essentials and therefore not have sales tax. So your box of pasta would not have sales tax, but your new flat screen TV would. Reason being, the box of pasta will let you survive. But you cannot eat your flat screen TV.
You're missing the fact that a flatscreen TV will still often represent - as a portion of someone's wealth - a far greater cost than a private jet would to a billionaire. Consider that most low income people are getting their cell phones on payment plans, whereas a multimillionaire can afford to buy a Lamborghini Gellardo out of pocket. On top of that, high end purchases like cars, yachts, houses, fine art, etc, often retain a lot of their resale value, turning them into investments in many cases, often reselling for more than their purchase price. So yes, I absolutely did account for the tax exemptions on "essentials", and even when you factor those your sales tax only model still ends up being less onerous the more wealthy someone is.
I also want to call out the unspoken implication that is often present with these theories - not accusing you of doing this, but it needs to be said - that items like phones, computers and TVs are extraneous luxuries that no poor person should ever own, as if enjoying a fulfilling life or engaging in relaxation are things that only the wealthy should be allowed to have access to.
Thanks for pointing that out. I am definitely not saying that poor people should not have access to flat screen TVs and phones, etc. Because, especially with computing hardware, those kinds of things can very easily lift somebody out of poverty due to greater access to information and opportunities. However, I often see people struggling to afford basic necessities, and yet they have the newest iPhone every year or every other year, which is incredibly financially irresponsible.
some areas do fine without income taxes. plenty of other types of taxes.
Name one
Cayman Islands, UAE, Bahamas, Monaco, Bermuda, Qatar, Bahrain, Brunei, Oman, Kuwait, British Virgin Islands, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Anguilla, Somalia... There's more, but you only asked for one. I will admit that doing fine is a relative term and probably doesn't apply to all these places. ๐
Not exactly the places you would go for living a free life...
I'm sorry, no. The point when you find yourself relating to libertarians is the time you should really ask yourself two simple questions
1 - Am I a dumbass?
2 - Why am I trying to herd myself in with a group of dumbasses?
And that's why we are different people. I have my opinion and you have yours. You're not going to change my mind and I'm not going to change yours and we both already know that.
Went ahead and filled in that questionnaire for you.
Why is this so heavily downvoted? Holy shit people, talk about a hivemind/'group of dumbasses'..
ok but why not gold or silver then? also obviously without currency controls all modern countries would have drastically smaller economies.
The settlement time. Gold and silver don't work well as currency if you need to settle over long distances quickly. So like I cannot send Amazon and ounce of silver to buy a product easily. But I can send them Monero with a few clicks of my keyboard. Almost instantaneously. Lynn Alden, who is an economist, basically says that the invention of the telegraph broke gold and silver as money, because transactions could happen at the speed of light, but settlement could still take weeks, especially if, say, the United States was paying, I don't know, the UK or something.
You can believe that all you want, but this is an even nutter dream than achieving effective gun control in the US (one of my nutty dreams). Why in the world would the government ever give up control of the "money supply"? That's not going to happen.
Oh, they're absolutely not going to give it up. That's for sure. But as a citizen, you can just stop using it as much as you can in your day-to-day life. You can't avoid using it entirely in most cases, but you can tone down how much you use it pretty significantly. And that they cannot control.
Governments have shown in the past they will indeed never give up their money printer. That's a key reason crypto was created. You seem to think governments are willingly allowing crypto to exist and have the ability to shut it down. Centralised e-cash has been tried (and quickly squashed). P2P crypto is immutable and exists to preserve the freedom of users.
They have the ability to shut it down for all practical purposes by simply banning its use for transaction by legitimate companies in their country.
That would just suppress the price in the short term and leave that country behind in the digital currency revolution. Everyone has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Politicians can legislate all they want, but crypto will keep humming along.