Hence the saying "Not your keys, not your coins".

The SEC already approved bitcoin futures ETFs, while continuing to refuse spot ETFs.

The SEC already approved bitcoin future ETFs, while continuing to refuse spot ETFs.

I think the claim that "IBM ... trying to avoid politics" is a premature conclusion. Support for authoritarianism was popular even in the US during the great depression.

In the 1930s, support for authoritarian rule and suppression of individualism was the norm, even in the US. One could argue that IBM aligned itself with popular political positions, rather than taking an apolitical stance. I personally don't know which one it was (I suspect it was a mix), I'm just playing the devil's advocate.

You don't need a blockchain for that, you can use multiparty computation algorithms without a blockchain to split trust, or a federated setup of traditional PKI, or other methods.

You don't need a blockchain to have tamper protection. You can also have traditional signatures with a CA, and the signing can be done by an oracle, an enclave or HSM. You can do that with a SQL database with a trigger. You can further combine it with a public timestamping service. The difference is the level of centralisation required for the design of such system.

The transparency of Bitcoin is a consequence of the data being publicly readable, not a consequence of being a blockchain. There are other transparent data sources which aren't blockchains, and there are opaque blockchains.

Well, if you want to be exact, then this is more of a quantitative than qualitative distinction. You can already exit an existing state, or create a new one, it's just very costly (as you have to physically move yourself, your family and all your property, redo all existing contracts or move them to other providers) and/or there is a violent opposition.

I also think that systems bigger than Dunbar's number need to be either (hierarchical) planning or markets in order to work. And, once you have hierarchies, their primary goal becomes to perpetuate the hierarchy and to silence opposition (through propaganda and, if necessary, violence). So I don't really understand how collectivist anarchism is supposed to work. Unless there is no interaction beyond the scale of the local community, and I find it unlikely that apart from a bunch of wierdoes or psychopaths anyone would want that.

It's not really accurate. It's more accurate to say that anarchism tends to oppose hierarchies, but that's not fully accurate either, because anarchocapitalists are usually ok with hierarchically operated companies, and conservative anarchists tend to have conservative positions on family.

I must admit though that it's not clear to me how you can have collectives that work beyond the scale of Dunbar's number.

> Austrian religion (it's not a "school"), as usual does not make predictions. It doesn't use models so it can't do that.
Austrian approach does not view economics as science, rather as a deductive study. So it cannot make predictions. This is why it clashes with mainstream economics, which attempts to be a science. I will leave open the question whether economics can or cannot be a science, rather I'll point out that I often see ideological assumptions (in particular the belief in central planning) bundled into what purports to be science.

> According to mainstream economy, deflation happens because consumers DO NOT HAVE MONEY to spend. So the producers have to cut prices to sell at least _something_. This in turn leads to wage decreases and layoffs. And this in turn leads to consumers having less money. Rinse, wash, repeat.
You probably wanted to say "recessions happen because customers do not have money". Deflations (in the sense of falling price levels) occur in other situations too (for example increases in productivity that outpace the increase in the money supply) and don't necessarily have the effects associated with recession.

The Austrian approach (see http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Aus... ) to the business cycle is based on three issues: cluster of entrepreneurial errors, capital goods prices fluctuating more than those of consumer goods, and why the cycle tends to happen around changes in the money supply.

Let's take your argument, the customers losing money. Why are there whole sectors of economy that are unable to foresee this? If they foresaw it, they would have adjusted their production structure to the falling price level. But it comes unexpected to whole sectors rather than merely individual businesses. Your proposition does not explain why. The Austrians argue that this is due to faulty price signals caused by the changes in the money supply.

> Reality is often a little bit messier - wages rarely fall in nominal values, they tend to stick at zero growth. So nominal deflation doesn't appear, instead no-flation (1% inflation) happens. See: "European Union", "Japan".
This does not explain, among other things, why:
1. There are situations where a falling price level does not cause a recession (say in the consumer electronics sector, or the examples from the Atkeson/Kehoe paper I linked)?
2. Whole sectors cannot foresee this and adjust in advance?

This post mixes several phenomena and omits other factors relevant for the positions. For example, "Once people start to understand what's happening, they stop buying things.". There are situations where a falling price level and a drop in consumer expenditures correlated positively, but there are also situations where they correlate negatively. I for example tend to behave exactly the opposite way as you describe: when the price of bitcoin is falling, I tend to cut my expenditures, and when it's rising, I tend to increase the expenditures. It's not the only factor influencing my decisions of course.

A while ago, two economists working at the Minneapolis Fed published a paper: https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/... where they analyse the empirical link between deflation (i.e. a falling price level) and depression, and find that outside of the Great Depression in the 1930s they can't find such a connection. They write: "A broad historical look finds many more periods of deflation with reasonable growth than with depression and many more periods of depression with inflation than with deflation."

As the Austrian school explains, the business cycle is caused by fractional reserve banking, and the recession is a necessary consequence of the misallocations that happen during the boom preceding the recession. But since mainstream economic schools lack a theory of capital, instead they view the business cycle through aggregate values, they can't assess the argument this way.

Well I'm a different guy but I also mostly live on crypto.

> Where do you spend your bitcoin for day to day living kind of stuff?
If I need to pay for something and the recipient doesn't have a facility to process bitcoins, I use one of the payment processors to do the transaction on my behalf or trade bitcoins for fiat myself and then pay with fiat.

> How do you avoid problems with significant value swings that the market experiences since almost no one denominates their goods in bitcoins as the primary price.
I don't care about the fluctuations. I view bitcoin as a superiour source of liquidity and that's more important to me than day-to-day pricing accuracy.

These are not true. You don't need to have historical data to detect a double spend, and the bitcoin blockchain isn't 100+ gigs yet, it's more like 60.

How did you come to the conclusion that bitcoin was a pyramid scheme, and why do you use the past tense? It isn't a pyramid scheme anymore?