Austrian economics and the safe network

I’ve been reading about economics for a couple of years now. What I’ve found is that there’s a lot of pseudo knowledge. There’s also one overlooked, old, sensible school of thought called Austrian economics (because it was founded by Austrians on the late 19th and early 20th century). This school understands, explains and promotes the expansion of liberty in economics.

I’m wondering if anyone else here is familiar with this? I think that every economic consideration with regards to safecoin should be inspected through the lens of Austrian economics.

A few things that Austrians advocate: abolishing central banking, an end to government intervention in economic affairs, competing free market currencies.

The Austrians have been much maligned because they wouldn’t accommodate their views to special interests and stick to their rational understanding of the market, which unlike mainstream economics is not hidden behind mathematical formulas.
To me this seems like the perfect fit.

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I became well versed with Austrian economics during the great recession and it lead me towards my voluntarist position I now hold. It is definitely a big reason why I support the safe net and the Safecoin which binds it.

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Well, Bitcoin put a dent in their explanation of the origin of money.

I used consider myself a libertarian but I could never quite accept the so-called zero aggression principle, and also it seems to me that actual libertarians are usually either “liberals” or “conservatives” who wish to have a fashionable justification for their beliefs. The only “real” libertarians are academics and neckbeards with their heads lodged permanently where the sun doesn’t shine.

We won’t know exactly what sort of a world will emerge from this technology until we get there. Sober preparation involves making ones situation stormproof and putting in tools and supplies to cover a range of contingencies.

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Well, Bitcoin put a dent in their explanation of the origin of money.

Not quite, I would say. Some Austrians argue that Bitcoin does meet all the criteria for hard money as defined by Rothbard.
But the jury is still out, I think, and although I have a small percentage of savings in BTC and other crypt, I continue to hoard PMs.

@safer, you’re on the right (and righteous) path.

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Yes, I know that. At a certain point it’s angels on the heads of pins (although, contrary to popular opinion, the medieval scholars used hypothetical angels and pins as tools for practicing the use of logic, and not, like their modern counterparts, as things to passionately defend.).

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Well some are possibly prejudiced. And even though one side is wrong, what all agree is there should be no restrictions on its use.

The clueless bunch, namely CBs and the Keynesians, is far more interesting because they are completely lost in all this and all they can put together is the same tyrannical mantra about KYC, tax, and legislation. As long as they can’t censor cryptocurrencies, there is no way they can win this war.

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What’s that? …,…20chr

I’d say he meant precious metals.

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Mises regression theorem.

Bitcoin as it stands and many other crypto’s violate this – basically the commodity has to have some value as a commodity before it is accepted as money.

Bitcoin clearly isn’t widely accepted as money. People are using it to speculate, as an entry point to buy other crypto’s, to hide their transactions, and just to be ‘cool’.

Safecoin on the other hand doesn’t appear to violate Mises regression theorem as it is has value from the start as a means to ‘Put’ data on the network.

We will see what happens.

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It is accepted as money: it is used for various online purchases as well as point-of-sale; it is used as a store of value; and, on darknet markets, it is used as a unit of account. That’s the three uses of money.

It is also somewhat clunky and therefore is not widely used as money.

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That’s what I said …

basically though, I was trying to say that the reason it is used as money is to deal with particular concerns regarding existing money - e.g. to hide transactions. Generally it’s harder to use bitcoin unless you earn bitcoin as you have to convert your earned money at a loss to use it …

Mises theorem basically indicates that it needs value from the beginning to get people to start trading with it for reasons other than as a form of money … and then over time, if it functions well with respect to other conditions that facilitate it being money … it then becomes money. Bitcoin was designed to be a form of money, but it doesn’t meet the first condition of being a commodity in the first place … it has only become a commodity because of speculation and perhaps that won’t be good enough to compete against other crypto’s like SAFEcoin and Ethereum which have a value component (that is unrelated to speculation regarding it being ‘money’) from the start.

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This is what you said:

You were appealing to popularity (a fallacy) as an argument that it isn’t money, and you reinforced that that was what you were saying by giving a supposedly exclusive list of its uses. But that is only some of its uses, as I showed. By the way, fiat currency is used for those things you mention, as well (indisputably money).

I was not intending to give an ‘exclusive’ list of uses, you just interpreted it that way. I was merely stating the fact that it clearly isn’t widely used as money.

Fiat currencies by and large are demanded as a means of payment for taxes … so they don’t violate mises regression theorem.

I didn’t come here to debate what is and what isn’t money in any case - you seem to assume that I have - I came to more clearly explain what Mises stated on the matter - that’s not to say I agree with it. Do not conflate these two things.

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Money is the most marketable commodity. Bitcoin clearly doesn’t fit that definition, since it is very limited in what you can do with it. Most normal people have no idea what it is. A bunch of geeks use it. 99.9999% of the population pay their rent and home loans and insurance and bread with fiat.

I think safecoin might really be the path out of government controlled money and central banking will end up in the dustbin of history as the transition from the gold standard to some crypto (maybe safecoin) standard once it brings more advantages than fiat and allowing the black market to grow.

Maybe one day it won’t be possible to collect taxes because the government can’t prove how much money you’re making since it can’t snoop into your bank account. A transition to a simple head tax might be conceivable then.

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If I was to deep dive, it would firstly be via Carl Menger (the founder of Austrian economics) and then on to Professor A.Fekete (via Menger) who explains interest, discount, self liquidating credit, real bills doctrine etc

I think this playlist contains an excellent background on the above topics…and if you substituted Safecoin, wherever Gold is mentioned and had a basic understanding of what Structured Data/ Programmable Safecoin offers…it’s exciting. There’s a reason why it was easier to run your own business before the first world war, we got cheated big time :slight_smile:

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Quick poll for those interested in this thread:

Would an episode of Technology and Choice podcast dealing with economics (focusing on Austrian, of course) be of broad interest?

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I can tell you that it would be of interest to me!

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It would be great. Make sure to use the words Austrian Economics in the title - then I can share it with others in the Austrian Econ community (and the AnCap community) that I know and they’ll pay attention.

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Could be a world of hurt. Be sure to thoroughly research the different schools of Austrian Economics because as the Prof points out there is a gulf between them.

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Going to pick up watching him later, around video #7. Which school of thought stands for liberty?

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