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The Libertarian (Comedy) Gold Standard: Bitcoins, Silver Circle, and More
Schrodinger
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
It looks like we haven't had a libertarian/Ron Paul thread in a while. Here is the thread where we look at the latest attempts to undermine the US Monetary system.
What are Austrian Economics?
Austrian Economics is the total rejection of things like math, research, empirical data, and historical evidence. Libertarians like to pride themselves on their objectivity, where as facts tend to have a liberal bias.
What’s wrong with the money we have now?
Our current monetary system is based around the Federal Reserve. The libertarian argument against the Federal Reserve can be summed up in the following video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGk5ioEXlIM
If you don’t have time to watch the entire 30 minutes, here’s the cliff notes version: “Jewish bankers are ruining your life. Also, the capital gains tax is theft and slavery.” I'm sure the frequent comparisons that libertarians make to Weimar Germany are entirely coincidental.
Gold Standard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNIOGQveWmE
Expert opinion on the gold standard tends to range from “disagree” to “strongly disagree.” Ron Paul argues that returning to the gold standard would have ended the oil crisis, because a gallon of gas would only cost a single silver dime. Which is great, since banks hand out silver dimes very freely. For everyone else, you can listen to Glenn Beck and invest in Goldline.
Silver Circle
Silver Circle is an upcoming film that plans to do to the Federal Reserve what “Reefer Madness” did to the Marijuana industry. The story centers around a group of brave rebels who courageously print their own dimes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DkQQ4MLasgs
Synopsis: “At the center of corruption is the Federal Reserve who has gained enormous amounts of control over America's economy, with disastrous effects beginning to show. Standing opposite, is the band of Rebels who have vowed to take back the freedom they once knew...and they won't go down without a fight. Monetary mayhem. Explosions. Romance. Silver Circle plans to take liberty filmmaking to a whole other level”
Bitcoins
Bitcoins are digital baseball cards that treated as digital dollar bills. It's electronic money stored as a computer file, so if the file gets hacked or deleted, then your money is gone forever. If you're looking to buy child pornography and hard drugs off silk roads, then bitcoins are the currency of choice. Other people hoard bitcoins for speculation purposes, similar to the housing bubble, only without the utility value. For everyone else, you’re better off using regular cash.
The idea is so dumb that it literally causes brain damage. Here is a basic timeline of Bitcoin history from somethingawful.com, posted in Sept. 2011:
Update: Bitcoins are currently trading at $41, up from $30 a week ago. Clearly, this is the time to buy, buy, buy!
What are Austrian Economics?
As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources. -Ludwig Von Mises from “Epistemological Problems of Economics"
Austrian Economics is the total rejection of things like math, research, empirical data, and historical evidence. Libertarians like to pride themselves on their objectivity, where as facts tend to have a liberal bias.
What’s wrong with the money we have now?
Our current monetary system is based around the Federal Reserve. The libertarian argument against the Federal Reserve can be summed up in the following video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGk5ioEXlIMIf you don’t have time to watch the entire 30 minutes, here’s the cliff notes version: “Jewish bankers are ruining your life. Also, the capital gains tax is theft and slavery.” I'm sure the frequent comparisons that libertarians make to Weimar Germany are entirely coincidental.
Gold Standard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNIOGQveWmEExpert opinion on the gold standard tends to range from “disagree” to “strongly disagree.” Ron Paul argues that returning to the gold standard would have ended the oil crisis, because a gallon of gas would only cost a single silver dime. Which is great, since banks hand out silver dimes very freely. For everyone else, you can listen to Glenn Beck and invest in Goldline.
Silver Circle
Silver Circle is an upcoming film that plans to do to the Federal Reserve what “Reefer Madness” did to the Marijuana industry. The story centers around a group of brave rebels who courageously print their own dimes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DkQQ4MLasgs
Synopsis: “At the center of corruption is the Federal Reserve who has gained enormous amounts of control over America's economy, with disastrous effects beginning to show. Standing opposite, is the band of Rebels who have vowed to take back the freedom they once knew...and they won't go down without a fight. Monetary mayhem. Explosions. Romance. Silver Circle plans to take liberty filmmaking to a whole other level”
Bitcoins
Bitcoins are digital baseball cards that treated as digital dollar bills. It's electronic money stored as a computer file, so if the file gets hacked or deleted, then your money is gone forever. If you're looking to buy child pornography and hard drugs off silk roads, then bitcoins are the currency of choice. Other people hoard bitcoins for speculation purposes, similar to the housing bubble, only without the utility value. For everyone else, you’re better off using regular cash.
The idea is so dumb that it literally causes brain damage. Here is a basic timeline of Bitcoin history from somethingawful.com, posted in Sept. 2011:
Early 2009 - Bitcoin was created.
May 22, 2010 - Evidently, the first purchase of pizza with bitcoins. 10k BTC for about $25.
April 21, 2011 - The first episode of The Bitcoin Show.
May 1 - According to buttcoin's charts, this is about the point bitcoins started up beyond simply $1-2.
June 1 - Gawker publishes article about Silk Road and Bitcoin.
June 9ish - Bitcoins balloon in price $31. This doesn't last long. At all.
June 18 and 19 - Mt. Gox was hacked. Bitcoin price drops to $0.01 briefly. A table of usernames emails, and password hashes is released. This password list lead to some people's accounts on MyBitcoin being stolen (used the same usernames).
Week of August 6 - Several things happpen:
- Dwolla does chargbacks, causing Tradehill and possibly Mt. Gox to lose an awful lot of money as people got both the bitcoins and the cash.
- MyBitcoin vanishes from the face of the universe. Bruce Wagner claims to have lost 25k BTC (250k USD).
- A Polish bitcoin exchange, Bitomat, hosted on an Amazon server without persistant storage, accidentally restarts the instance, wiping over 17,000 bitcoins from existence in a single move.
August 19 - Bitcoin Conference is held in New York City from 19th to 21st. Live stream hijacked by Bill Cosby, CosbyCoin becomes known. Laptops were stolen.
Sometime before/around August 30 - Bruce becomes adamant on the next Bitcoin Conference in Pattaya, Thailand. Something Awful users investigate Bruce's past and discover his morgage fraud company.
September 9 - Large bitcoin selloff causes BTC to dip below $5. BitcoinTalk forums hacked with more CosbyCoin.
Update: Bitcoins are currently trading at $41, up from $30 a week ago. Clearly, this is the time to buy, buy, buy!
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I ain't no nothin' about fiat currency, but I know an Oscar when I see one.
Apparently they're taking donations of worthless fiat dollars.