Earlier this summer, The Telegraph ran a very long and extremely interesting piece by Matthew Sparkes: The coming digital anarchy »
If you didn’t read it, please do. If you did, read it again. It points out a concept that the general public knows practically nothing about, that might change society and our lives in a dramatic way: blockchain.
Already a blockchain based digital currency, Bitcoin, is making payments on the internet (and in the real world) easy, fast and cheap. We might not need banks in the future. And if you think that is a game changer, consider what will happen when governments no longer are in control of money — with no possibility to inflate it and with limited ways to confiscate it or enforce taxation.
Sparkes gives us many other examples on the use of blockhain based processes. To take just a few examples, it might be used for safe cloud services or to distribute the voters democratic mandate to more than just one political candidate. The possibilities seems to be endless.
Now, to get to my point…
Technology solutions such as blockchain will re-distribute and decentralize power in society in a spontaneous and disruptive way.
Big Government and Big Business will not be amused.
The copyright wars, the fight over mass surveillance and the forceful pushing of a square plug into a round hole during the €uro crisis… All of that will be nothing compared to what will take place when the ruling classes realize that they are losing their grip, losing their power over others and that their models for how to do things are to be obsolete.
Some of these dinosaurs will not even understand what’s going to hit them. Or that it is happening right now.
The only way for them to save status quo might be to severely restrict the free flow of information on the Internet.
On top of this we should keep in mind that the ruling classes have their own armed wing with the right to use force to uphold Order–the police.
So finally, we might actually find out what will happen when an unstoppable force meets an gigantic immovable object.
/ HAX
This calls for Natural Law.
http://freedom.lege.net/doc/Natural_Law__Yggdrasil__ver_B.pdf
I think that’s overreaching. Because in the end ordinary people also want order. I do appreciate that there are people who like this sort of anonymous non-traceable systems, but that which is their core feature is also the greatest weakness. You can’t “set things right”. And that people will expect, or they will turn away from such systems.
So I think bitcoins are a lost cause. Its certainly going to be around, but it’s not the revolution that is going to do away with all banks and distract governments.
It’s true that technology is an enabler, but history is also full of failed technologies that simply didn’t rise. Somethings that are outlawed, technology has enabled people to do anyway and there we need to reevaluate our reasoning. But some other thing will remain. I suspect the government demanding taxes is one of those things.
That a system uses a blockchain does not imply that it is anonymous, technology. If you look at bitcoin as an example, the blockchain is like a ledger with all transaction recorded in the open for everyone to look at. This means the transactions forms a web between persons/orgs(in public, in one way this is NSA/IRS eq, wet dream come true), that web could be followed step by step to the account you would like to identify. At some steps you might need a rubber-hose or a 5$ whrench to get to next step.
It’s thinks like:
– stopping ones abilitiy to receive funds/money, like they did with wikileaks.
– changing history, still possible but requires more work(more on that later)
– No big leaching middle-man on transactions, many small instead, could be you.
– Goverment cant grow the supply because the feel like it.
that bitcoin makes impossible.
– Changing history cont.
“Accountants do not use erasers” – they make another transaction in the opposite direction, this is possible in bitcoin to. And that means it’s is possible to “set things right”, in exactly the same way it should be done in “flesh world”. In bitcoin it’s the only way.
Yes taxes will still exists, but maybe in a little different way, and the anonymous property is not 100% So crimes can still be investigated, it will only put a tax 🙂 on doing it. The police will have to ask it self is it really worth hitting X people with rubber-hoses to get to that one they want. The rubber-hose could be a law like the one in england that compels you to give up your encryption-keys when asked for them, or face 2 years in jail.
bitcoin was the prof-of-concept. Looking at NXT we are starting to get things like smart-contracts that are enforced by the network, and a assets exchange that will let you exchange things like stocks without middle-men leaching, and other fun stuff.
nxt: http://www.nxtcommunity.org/
Isn’t this bad news, even from a libertarian perspective? Even a small state needs to be able to tax its citizens.
He did not say it would be impossible, in some way it would be even simplier. the transaction log is public, the problem is that there is no account holder information bound to the log. but that information could be gathered in some other way.
And taxing other stuff like owning a physical property would still be possible in the same way as before, until we move that record to a blockchain, and in that case it could still be taxed, just need to find the owner of the account, that’s the tricky part. but as explained in previous post it could be done because you cant be part of a economy without doing transaction in it and having relations with other known parties. and even without knowning the owner they could still take the physical property, until the taxes are paid.
I do not get how bitcoin should make taxation impossible, taxation functioned well back when everybody used untraceable cash.