Interestingly, bitcoin is being seriously looked at by existing financial institutions which could use it for verifying and confirming interbank transactions. So blockchain technology looks more like, say, a nuclear reactor - there's definitely an argument for them if you're a large highly-regulated institution, but if you think ordinary people should all have one then you are freaking high.
I was concerned at first, but at this point I think its "mostly harmless," largely how little its actually being used. It keeps libertarians occupied, while there are serious flaws behind the technology that will prevent its broader use. Maybe if they keep tinkering at it someone will eventually come up with some nugget of broader utility based on the blockchain stuff, but it hasn't happened yet.
Yes, the short version is that bitcoin per se, as originally implemented will probably have a limited future at best, because human nature. On the other hand blockchain technology is regarded as having a lot of potential by itself in areas such as the traditional financial sector and Estonia.
Bitcoin: stupid, possibly evil.
Blockchain: interesting technology, still attracts an awful lot of the stupid bitcoinmania. You can't swing a cat in the finance world without hitting some startup touting a blockchain solution to something that clearly doesn't need a distributed ledger.
Yes, blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the field of being a notary.
Other than that, most of the ideas proposed for it are ones where a slow, expensive, public database isn't obviously better than existing options.
Endorsed. There's all sorts of things where the blockchain seems smart and interesting, but real-time commerce isn't one of them, even putting aside the "Chinese pools won control" issues.
I'm pretty certain it was here that I first saw someone use the term 'Dunning-Krugerrands' and now that's the only thing I can think whenever bitcoins show up in the news. It's a perfect enough encapsulation of the whole thing that they might as well call them that.
I like that someone invented a way for libertarians to go off somewhere and discover for themselves what happens when they try the stuff they've been aggressively insisting on without actually doing much harm to anyone else. Trying to explain what those results would be has a pretty poor record of success, after all. Now if only there were a way to set up some kind of bitenvironmentalprotectionlaw or bitworkplacesafetyregulations we'd really be set.
I myself don't really understand either but I have seen a lot of resources here and out there about how it's supposed to work... would very much love to learn something new about BitCoin though...
I'm assuming "Buffet Caterers" means something really pervy in British slang.
I may have used bitcoin in the past to engage in nefarious activities on the dark net. It's very convenient and works well for surreptitious purchases. I would be very sad to see it go. It really sounds like the anti-growth faction have their head stuffed pretty far up their asses. There has to be a solution that doesn't involve expanding the blockchain to a size where only the biggest corporations can handle it on the one hand, and leaving it in it's current fragile state on the other. Unfortunately in my dealings with techno-glibertarians I've found that compromise is not something they are good at, as they tend towards a quasi-religious self righteousness.
Pretty much any subgroup with that many people wearing beards goes that way.
Wow, that must be some weird spam algorithm.
Its cute that the spam bot has been customized to make lame bitcoin comments.
Interesting that no one makes the obvious deduction that there are people who have a lot of money invested in Bitcoin-as-it-is, who are worried that any change might cause the value of their holdings or their mining operation to go down, and that those people might be behind the DoS attacks, death threats, etc.
12. ISIS?
This definitely reminds me of how easy it is to see flaws in someone else's social milieu. Bitcoin has always seemed like loony tech-libertarian foolery to me, right from the get-go, and yet recently I have been absolutely blindsided by some very strange goings-on amongst local anarchists. Looking back, I can see that there were lots of warning signs, but I did not heed them - nosirree bob. I figured that surely right-thinking, intelligent people in their late twenties and thirties with some knowledge of activist history would not [do the particularly stupid and infuriating thing which would take too long to explain].
Maybe what we need is cross-ideological project review - get some communists to review anarchist project proposals, get some socialist social worker types to review tech libertarian projects, etc. That's not to say that we would never have stupid or terrible projects again, but it might at least cut into the "people like me are too right-minded to fall into predictable patterns of stupidity" thing.
15 - The first OP link does discuss that: a whole sector of startups afraid of scaring their investors.
I figured that surely right-thinking, intelligent people in their late twenties and thirties with some knowledge of activist history would not [do the particularly stupid and infuriating thing which would take too long to explain]
"Good news, everyone! I invested the strike fund in BitCoin!"
17. I guess that makes sense, but even having read Bleeding Edge it's hard to make the leap to startups launching DoS attacks and such. Maybe it's their VCs...
That first article was pretty good as a weird window into the world of people different from me. My favorite part was:
How many people would think bitcoins are worth hundreds of dollars each when you soon won't be able to use them in actual shops?
I used bitcoin one time to buy asthma meds via a shady pharmacy I found on Silk Road. I was able to get what I needed at a reasonable price, and, importantly, without having to schlep to a doctor to get a prescription. Bitcoin was great for that, and I had one left over, which I sold at a 700% profit during that ridiculous price spike it had a few years back. I used the proceeds to buy a 3D printer, which turned out to be a huge disappointment.
Maybe what we need is cross-ideological project review - get some communists to review anarchist project proposals, get some socialist social worker types to review tech libertarian projects, etc.
We've come up with a decentralised, app-operated system of forced labour camps for our political enemies. We call it "Goober".
16 - I think the divide isn't between ideologies but rather between ideologues (of whatever persuasion) and everyone else. The failings in the bitcoin community look much the same as those among communist revolutionaries or fundamentalist christians or the current GOP. Once you believe there is one right answer things start spiralling.
This quote for the link in 3 is cute:
"We have made a deal with Estonia, and the ultimate goal is to gain recognition for Bitnation as a sovereign entity, thus creating a precedent for open source protocol to be considered as sovereign jurisdictions."
23: It's not, per se, ideological, but ideology blinds you to the failings of your peers and/or the ways that your project assumes that people of a certain type will not have a particular variant of a common moral failing.
A fairly innocent one: the assumption that if you have a lending library at the anarchist center, the majority of people who borrow books will return them without prompting and without any enforcement structure because of course we all act on our values of sharing, not prioritizing owning property, etc. I mean, I saw that one coming because I have terrible trouble returning library books even with the threat of fines, but there were many young enthusiasts who did not. (We now call people when their books are overdue - shaming tends to resolve things.)
And of course, anyone who didn't believe that anarchists are pure in heart and true, and anarchist principles alone will be enough to get the library books back could have predicted the outcome.
Now, you're probably saying "but that's anarchists, amirite, they're just a bunch of dumb kids and/or immature older people", but I've observed the same degree of misplaced faith in a belief system on faculty committees. No one listens to me, of course, because I'm a secretary, but I recently watched the final failure and formal end of a project for the exact reasons that I had discreetly suggested that it might fail three years ago. At the time, I was pooh-poohed because I just didn't understand faculty culture and how this would override the large obvious flaw in the plan.
Ha. Headlines from my email inbox in the last 20 minutes alone:
When could blockchain become reality for finance?
Goldman Sachs backs Blythe Masters blockchain startup
19 - From the first link:
Chinese miners are able to -- just about -- maintain their connection to the global internet [through the very slow Great Firewall] and claim the 25 BTC reward ($11,000) that each block they create gives them. But if the Bitcoin network got more popular, they fear taking part would get too difficult and they'd lose their income stream.Plenty of motive for DOS attacks right there. Some them apparently coordinated by Russian mercenary hackers. Free market FTW!
Now, you're probably saying "but that's anarchists, amirite, they're just a bunch of dumb kids and/or immature older people", but I've observed the same degree of misplaced faith in a belief system on faculty committees.
Lots of times it seems like I'm placing faith in some group that can't possibly succeed, but what I'm actually doing is calculating whether I give a shit enough to point out a flaw and risk being asked to do something effortful. I don't know if this applies to faculty committees or not, but it seems likely.
25.2 is basically "as an anarchist, I find it exceptionally annoying that my fellow anarchists always seem to assume that institutions based on anarchist principles and values will work properly, because of course they should know perfectly well that they won't!"
Sounds like the sort of thing that might make me stop being an anarchist.
I don't understand anarchism or libertarianism, but I can tell you lots about not saying anything because the only possible outcomes of speaking up are either: 1) nobody listens, 2) everybody expects your speaking up means you're willing to help fix something.
16,25:
See 12. How many of the local anarchists had beards?
The presumption you're making is that institutions based on anarchist principles work worse than anything else. Depending on the specific institution, I wouldn't be surprised if they're imperfect, but about as successful as the competing options.
Even if Bitcoin goes kerblooey, it's one of the greatest stories ever. Some anonymous person or team invents a new concept of money, which in less than 10 years generates a financial market bubble. There's a Bitcoin account that is probably Satoshi's that was worth 400 million dollars at one point, but has never been used. Presumably this is because using it would allow identifying Satoshi.
It's not, per se, ideological
True. Maybe self-righteousness or smugness more broadly.
29: Well, I'm not surprised that you'd think that. But I think that the problem is not one of actual how-do-we-organize-material-things but a problem about assuming that if we believe the correct things, then it doesn't matter if material things are badly organized.
For instance, I've been involved with three or four anarchist community spaces over the years, and the difference among them has been determined much more by sensible planning about staffing and careful selection of space than anything else. Shockingly, t turns out that people are much more likely to work their shifts when the space is easily accessible by transit, that people are much more likely to complete their projects when all the necessary materials are readily available and neatly stored, that emergencies are easier to deal with when you have a list of emergency contacts who live nearby, etc. None of these things are unique to anarchism; all of them make the difference in how successful a volunteer-run, collectively operated space works, and how diverse a clientele and staff you can attract. But in the worst spaces and projects, people tend to assume that belief alone will move people to overcome material problems.
Not unlike expecting faculty to be total self-starters when you make the process of accessing [desirable but not required thing] contingent upon completing a time-consuming, fiddly process because it's important "not to over-support". Especially when the successful previous version of this project worked because of having a structured process and a way to access support. It was easy for me to see that support was needed, because I had no reason to believe that the faculty ethos would get people to work through bad material arrangements.
Bolsheviks can storm all fortresses! But they can't complete fiddly time-consuming processes. Or stop Moby from shirking.
I'm not shirking. It's just that I have more work than I can possibly do and I've learned to prioritize based on an effort-reward calculation.
I mean, I'm not shirking from the point of view of people who actually pay me.
35 reminded me of a couplet I memorized inadvertently
Of forms of government let fools contest
That government administered best is best.
But in the worst spaces and projects, people tend to assume that belief alone will move people to overcome material problems.
Now this, on the other hand, sounds extremely familiar. Especially in the sort of organisation (like an NGO) where motivation really is a very important factor, there tends to be a belief that you can do anything as long as you believe hard enough. "The Marine Corps has done so much with so little for so long that we are now expected to do everything with nothing forever".
Belatedly, the second link in 3 is amusing:
We're truly living in exciting times when nation states and virtual nations compete and collaborate with each other on an international market, to provide better governance services.
So, when your house is on fire, the virtual nation will send virtual firefighters.
Which, I know, strawman. But seriously, even if you limit your virtual 'governance services' to money stuff the virtual nation has no sanction other than presumably blocking the bad actor after the fact. It's as if they don't realize that humans live in physical space.
Never send a strawman to put out a fire.
AISTRMHB The Shit /r/Bitcoin says twitter account is worth a few laughs
https://twitter.com/shit_rbtc_says
I could use more Moby wisdom and self-restraint at work.
41: in context, though, the "governance services" they're talking about are public record services like notarising contracts. If someone ignores your blockchain-notarised contract, you can take them to a physical court and sue them. That sort of thing does sound within the ambit of a virtual nation.
I like the new "action movie" peep. Is that the line right before you knock out the stupid FBI bureaucrat who hasn't been letting you do your job and turn your flamethrower on the terrorist drug dealers who killed your sister?
If there's a physical court enforcing the virtual contract, the notarising agency is just providing a service in the jurisdiction of a physical nation. There is no virtual nation.
I agree the tech could be useful, but actual sovereignty remains in the physical world.
46: yes, that's correct.
Is that the line right before you knock out the stupid FBI bureaucrat who hasn't been letting you do your job and turn your flamethrower on the terrorist drug dealers who killed your sister?
No, that would be Moby's "I'm not shirking from the point of view of people who actually pay me."
Especially in the sort of organisation (like an NGO) where motivation really is a very important factor, there tends to be a belief that you can do anything as long as you believe hard enough.
Yup. I see that all the time. I'm on the receiving end of it all of the time. Where more or less any attempt to refuse work, or reject a project because of insufficient resources is just seen as a failure of will.
Yeah, using bit-pogs put a Stamp of Notorized Authority on a document isn't worth much without a legal framework that actually recognizes it as such.
Further to 46: there are examples in commercial law of stuff like this working in a virtual-nation sense. Most shipping law contracts include "London arbitration" as boilerplate - i.e. you have to agree that any arguments are settled in London under English law, even if none of the actual events took place there. And, crucially, courts elsewhere will enforce London arbitration decisions under things like the New York Convention. If you, a Ghanaian, have an argument with a Ghanaian shipowner over his Ghanaian-flagged ship that was carrying your Ghanaian cocoa beans out of Ghana when it hit a passing truffle barge and sank just outside Accra, then a London court might decide in your favour, and the Ghanaian court system and police would make sure that the other Ghanaian chap paid up, even if neither you nor anyone else involved had never seen London in your lives and were only hazily aware of where it was.
London itself could be entirely virtualised and still provide that sort of governance service.
43 has some real gems. Apparently cultural Marxists are going to subvert Bitcoin. Oh Noes!
The Clash should have put that kind of stuff in "London Calling."
52 to 43? To 52? To 51?
To the growing list of inadvertent action movie lines typed by Moby?
"Lots of times it seems like I'm placing faith in some group that can't possibly succeed, but what I'm actually doing is calculating whether I give a shit." (takes draw on cigar, narrows eyes, raises rocket launcher to shoulder)
The only way to truly understand comment 50 is that ajay really wants J. Ot/to P/ohl to start commenting over here.
54: nah, I'm doing a jobshare scheme. He's over at Crooked Timber right now wittering on about ekranoplans.
That might actually make CT comments worth reading again.
ghana ghana ghana ghana ghana. Let's see if it works.
Also, who here remembers Bitcoin Day in Domenica? That was great, I think from Spike.
I think you have to mention Ghana and complain about academia.
I guess it's "Dominica." Whatever, stupid country that has the same name as another bigger country that is right near it.
When I buy the artificial island for housing my nation-free libertarian paradise, I'll definitely pay for it in Bitcoin.
50 - interesting. That implies there's an opportunity for some enterprising nation state to devise a relatively cheap and efficient legal code and hawk itself as arbitrage location. Has anyone done that?
London itself could be entirely virtualised
YES!!!! What a wonderful idea!
63: Delaware and South Dakota. Kind of.
63: well, yes (I think you mean arbitration rather than arbitrage btw). That's what London is.
Or the London lawyers could all move to South Dakota, reducing rent for everyone else.
Ghana Ghana Ghana Ghana Ghana Ghameleon,
You come and gho,
You come and gho-o-o-oh!
66 - I was thinking of the 'relatively cheap' part. I'm guessing London doesn't fit that bill. (Though relatively can do a lot of work.) And yes, arbitration.
As is well known, South Dakota is inhabited solely by Mount Rushmore.
The physical location doesn't matter much, it's the substantive body of law. You can have a dispute in a contract between two parties under English law resolved in an arbitration (or for that matter an actual litigated Court case) anywhere in the US. International arbitrations under whatever substantive law and with whatever panels they require, can be, and are, held all over the world, not just London.
Over 15% of my high school class now lives in South Dakota.
That's actually fewer people than carved on Mouth Rushmore.
Does London get anything out of this arrangement?
72 - Fascinating. So are there US judges who specialize in English law?
73: They all live on Teddy Roosevelt's mustache.
72: good point. There really is no need at all for London to have any physical existence at this point. I mean, except that it's where ttaM and Alex and I keep our record collections and spare guitars and so on.
They used to live on Lincoln's mustache, but they had growing families that got too heavy and it fell off. Rather than fix the carving, they just changed all the other pictures and statues of Lincoln.
77, surely, to 76.
And they live a life of ease,
Every one of them has all he needs,
Mountain air, and able staff,
On Teddy Roosevelt's moustache...
They all live on Teddy Roosevelt's moustache
On Roosevelt's moustache,
On Roosevelt's moustache,
They all live on Teddy Roosevelt's moustache
On Roosevelt's moustache,
On Roosevelt's moustache.
Of course the best way to handle contract disputes is to specify Sharia law be used. I'm not sure how that impacts outcomes, but it gives the right a conniption and I'm all about that.
68 should clearly be "Red, gold and greeeeeen". Why are you ignoring Boy George's pan-Africanist iconography?
I don't see how that kind "virtual law" works in the absence of nation-states with territorial sovereignty that can choose what body of law to follow.
76 -- no, but courts in, for example, New York or Los Angeles are fairly often called on to rule on English-law principles. Comes up particularly often in insurance issues.
All you really need is a well-recognized body of commercial law and some body committed to enforce it. The law and the forum deciding how to enforce the law don't have to be, and often aren't, connected in any jurisdictional way. And the law itself can be more or less totally privatized, and in fact was for a good chunk of English history (look up the "Law Merchant"). But parties doing a deal you need and want to know that the contract will be enforced according to some known and established set of commercial and contract principles, so places with well-developed law (London, Delaware, New York, California) are common and there's not really an obvious need for a change.
London itself could be entirely virtualised and still provide that sort of governance service.
Well, yes, but it has a legal framework and a judicial system, unlike /r/Bitcoin.
The physical location doesn't matter much, it's the substantive body of law. You can have a dispute in a contract between two parties under English law resolved in an arbitration (or for that matter an actual litigated Court case) anywhere in the US. International arbitrations under whatever substantive law and with whatever panels they require, can be, and are, held all over the world, not just London.
True, though London markets itself as a physical jurisdiction too, with stuff like the new Financial List. You see a lot of language about competing for international dispute resolution business.
E.g., regardless of the virtuality of London or alternatives to it, this system doesn't work if the Ghanaian coffee wholesaler has the right to choose a different body of law than the Ghanaian shipowner.
89: but he doesn't have that right, because they've signed a contract that says "all disputes over this contract will be settled by London arbitration". And the physical jurisdiction he's in, i.e. Ghana, will enforce that.
83 -- you're joking, but our firm had a case involving a contract that said just that -- amusingly, a case involving the movie business. Sharia law disputes for big money are not uncommon in the oil industry b/c Saudi Arabia. There's a small industry of Saudi or Arab lawyers who work with anglo-american lawyers to help them understand Sharia commercial terms when those issues come up in business disputes in US or English courts or international arbitrations. I'd bet Carp has had at least one case that substantively involved Sharia law.
Well, it's the contracting parties that choose the body of law, but, yes, it ultimately relies on other jurisdictions recognising that choice of governing law in their own contract jurisprudence.
There's a small industry of Saudi or Arab lawyers who work with anglo-american lawyers to help them understand Sharia commercial terms when those issues come up in business disputes in US or English courts or international arbitrations
I was just asked to research one of those lawyers.
"The Sharia-lawyer is a loud, hirsute, omnivorous mammal."
Interesting case involving a payday loan company that requires all arbitrations to take place on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota, using a non-existent body of Indian Law and arbitration rules that don't seem to exist. Nice try guys!
http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Published/151170.P.pdf
92 gets it right. And, for arbitration agreements, the home jurisdiction needs to recognize an agreement to arbitrate under certain rules (whatever those rules are, and wherever the arbitration is) as enforceable and the arbitration as binding. But in commercial contexts involving disputes between large businesses, pretty much all jurisdictions where anyone does business around the world will do this, and enforce agreements to apply foreign-law substantive rules to the interpretation of a contract, and arbitration agreements that require disputes to be resolved by international arbitration under the substantive law of another country.
95 is so awesome. That was some next-level bold draftsmanship. Maybe the Supreme Court will let us!
I don't know if it's been linked in thread yet, but I liked this essay by Henry Farrell on bitcoin and state-making as organized crime.
95. It's like they know us. If the reservation could just extent its boundaries down to the Black Hills, it would be perfect.
Goldman Sachs backs Blythe Masters blockchain startup
Shit, and I'd just poured my savings into Blazé Conquerors.
Also, the virtualized London of comment 50 sounds very Snow Crash.
I had a case once (which settled quickly for other reasons, so the issue never came up) where one of the contracts at issue said (paraphrase) that it would be governed by California substantive law "except that, to the extent the law of Denmark regulating boxing matches conflicts with California law, the law of Denmark shall apply." OK then! Whatever you say! Time to google "Danish boxing lawyer" and "boxing lawyer Denmark" and "Danish boxing law."
For unrelated reasons, I happen to know that you should do the middle one with "safe search" on if you are at the office.
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87, 88 - Lengthy incoherent tangent:
1. I recently read The Empire Project which argues that one of the pillars of the British Empire was the City of London, which became the world center for finance through agglomeration around the shipping industry - presumably London arbitration came out of the same process.
2. I've seen it claimed that the heart of Thatcherism was an the recreation of a Britain centered on the City, at the expense of everything else. GY's link struck me as looking like part of a similar effort; an economy drawing on the legacy of empire rather than something directly productive.
(Like I said, incoherent.)
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Schadenfreude isn't a long or magnificent enough word to describe my reaction to reading this. It's pretty obvious that internet libertarians would be the first against the wall in a real libertarian world, but it turns out the same is true in a virtual libertarian system too. Ha Ha!
They smell worse than the aristocrats.
We have descended from MacLeod and Stross plots to Stephenson ones.
I loathe bitcoin-mining because it destroys scarce resources in the real world for advantage in its artificial scarcity. Any currency does, maybe, but bitcoiners are so blind and smug about it. The better notary services and identity services (eg Estonian virtual citizenship) I like, though; the US government and the credit agencies sure didn't step up.
87, 88 - Lengthy incoherent tangent:
1. I recently read The Empire Project which argues that one of the pillars of the British Empire was the City of London, which became the world center for finance through agglomeration around the shipping industry - presumably London arbitration came out of the same process.
It's called the Admiralty & Commercial Court for a reason.
I loathe bitcoin-mining because it destroys scarce resources in the real world for advantage in its artificial scarcity.
OH YEAH WELL HOW MUCH ELECTRICITY DOES IT TAKE TO RUN THE COMPUTERS AT VISA HUH SMART GUY?
Rot-13 isn't computationally intensive.
I've seen stuff about using the blockchain to authenticate records but I haven't read most of the links I've saved about it and the ones I've read don't make much of a case for it. It has the feel of a fad fascination that came about when bitcoin was cool.
Gah, I read the whole way through the thread only to find that nosflow had pwned the joke I wanted to make, right at 99!
You could try for a similar joke about the Blythe Intaglios.
I recently read The Empire Project which argues that one of the pillars of the British Empire was the City of London, which became the world center for finance through agglomeration around the shipping industry
This... doesn't seem like a particularly contentious argument.
The world's worst database:
Uses approximately the same amount of electricity as could power an average American household for a day per transaction
Supports 3 transactions / second across a global network with millions of CPUs/purpose-built ASICs
Takes over 10 minutes to "commit" a transaction
Doesn't acknowledge accepted writes: requires you read your writes, but at any given time you may be on a blockchain fork, meaning your write might not actually make it into the "winning" fork of the blockchain (and no, just making it into the mempool doesn't count). In other words: "blockchain technology" cannot by definition tell you if a given write is ever accepted/committed except by reading it out of the blockchain itself (and even then)
Can only be used as a transaction ledger denominated in a single currency, or to store/timestamp a maximum of 80 bytes per transaction
I kind of want Aphyr Kyle to do one of his savage rip posts on Bitcoin, but he's probably too smart to waste his time on it at this stage.
Tom Morris makes the obvious, but nontrivial, point that it's not necessarily a feature that you can't reverse a committed write to it later...
117: I found his point a bizarre non sequitur. The whole point of the blockchain is to be a public record of property transactions. It makes as much sense complaining about the privacy implications here as it does complaining about the privacy implications of being about to find out who owns your next-door neighbor's property.
114 - Contentious, no, but I'd never appreciated how true it was. And I'm the semi-informed target audience.
You might enjoy Peter Padfield's "Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind" in that case. Paints a very clear picture of the virtuous circle that the Netherlands and later Britain managed to get into; an advanced financial sector means you can raise money by issuing government debt; that means you can afford an oceanic navy; that gives you trade; which means that your financial sector flourishes...
I had no idea Padfield had ever written anything so sophisticated. I knew him slightly- he played bridge with my parents- nice enough guy, but as far as they and I were aware he made his living turning out popular biographies of Nazis.
"Maritime Supremacy" isn't weapons-grade academic history by any means, but it's generally well spoken of.
Thanks ajay, I'll put it on the list. Alex's link in 115 is good.
Nazi biographies in the streets, Dutch East India Company in the sheets.
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I don't go there, but I do lurk, and I noticed ajay pushing back on Loomis on the Livingston article
Marxist History of the World Part 61 is a decent summation of part of Marxist thought on 1873-1894, which is very different from 1895-1913, whatever the "Gilded Age" might be.
"This meant that the Long Depression - in contrast to the Great Depression of the 1930s - was relatively slow and shallow. Many firms prospered, and many workers, partly because wages did not fall in line with prices, experienced a rise in living-standards." ...Neil Faulkner
Ernest Mandel says similar things in Late Capitalism and Hilferding, Luxemberg, and Lenin as to the necessity and causes of imperialism. If you want numbers, you can find them in the Mandel, around page 100 I think
I have encounter Livingston before, not a fan, but I think he does uses uncredited Marxist analysis.
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Loomis also thinks it's "ridiculous" to set a turning point in 1894-95 for the end of the "Gilded Age." Well, "Gilded Age" has to do with capitalist consumption and labor repression, and real Left economists don't think that way. The book of Marx is not entitled "Workers"
From the Mandel
The logical outcome was a change in the main thrust of the capitalist drive for expansion: no longer export of consumer goods to pre-capitalist areas, but export of capitals (and of goods bought with these capitals, principally railway lines, locomotives, and port facilities, i.e., infrastructural facilities to simplify and cheapen the export of raw materials produced with metropolitan capital). Together with the growing concentration of capital, this was the decisive reason for the emergence of the new, imperialist structure of the capitalist world economy.This change in the operation of the capitalist mode of production, or in the proportions between the major independent variables of this mode of production, also explains the transition from freely competitive to monopoly capitalism.
Japan and the East came a little later, but the comparable move from producing and exporting textiles to achieving the capital concentration to making and selling machinery, steel, chemicals (and importing raw materials and intermediates) was achieved with the profits from WWI, and created an Imperialist Republic.
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Hey! I as well don't exactly understand how the bitcoin ecosystem works. But i found some good refs about it here:
https://www.coinstaker.com/bitcoin-hyip/
https://www.coinstaker.com/bitcoin-faucet/
https://www.coinstaker.com/cloud-mining-monitor/
https://www.coinstaker.com/bitcoin-cloud-mining/