On 04.11.2012 00:53, StealthMonger wrote:

Bitcoin prevents inflation and helps tax evation [sic] (the system itself is hard to regulate) [3]

Bitcoin is not unique at being useful for tax evasion, in fact it's not even popular among large scale tax evaders, who have better means. In any case, the majority of producers will not be evading taxes, especially significant producers. We can not eliminate the State-based tax system by evading it, only by replacing the socially necessary functions it performs with actually-existing non-state forms, an unwillingness to understand and come to terms with this is what makes so many revolutionaries, ancaps especially, continue to be baffled by the continued existence of the State, or even actively support a "night-watchman state" with the State reduced to being nothing more that a brutal enforcer of property rights, since deep down they must realized that private property itself is a social construction, and worry that in a truly free society their property privileged would surely vanish. One of the main components of the delusion that tax evasion is somehow a threat to the State is the false belief that States require taxation to spend. States do not spend taxes, rather they simply spend money into existence. Taxes are used to manage demand, and sometimes to create incentives, their primary function is to manage prices. Tax obligations also create the base demand for government money or securities. This has been the case even before fiat money, see for instance the history of split tally sticks in the UK.

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Under US law, for example, Barter in Bitcoins is just as taxable as ...

States describe their pronouncements as "law" in an effort make them respectable.

Once again, you are unwilling to distinguish between form and function. laws are agreements among people, and as such, are socially necessary, States make laws that enforce the interests of the ruling class, because the State is the instrument of the ruling class.

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Many Bitcoin users I know are kind and thoughtful people and all of the developers I know are.

Are you suggesting that there is something unkind or thoughtless about promoting a free market?

It's not a suggestion, it's a fact. The "free market" is a psychopathic ideology, there is zero doubt about this, except among cultists. As Robert Shiller argued, the efficient market hypothesis is "one of the most remarkable errors in the history of economic thought." Humans are not utility maximizing, dis-utility minimizing "hedonistic calculators" (to use Veblen's term), the behavioral assumptions of market fundamentalism are well know to be untenable. Also well know is the fact that there is such a thing as "market power," that results from inequality of distribution and advantage among market participants. Market mechanisms do not protect against misallocation of productive resources, and certainly do not guarantee justice. Markets have a place in society, they allow social production on a larger scale than gift or communal economies, but they are not some sort of ideal, and can only exist when supported and managed by social institutions that are not "markets." Particularly markets that use money, because transactions that are based on a commodity-money-commodity circuit effective money supply is affected by economic cycles and sectoral balances, and thus needs to be actively adjusted to prevent crisis and glut. This is well studied and understood in monetary economics, and not even your fellow cultists like David Friedman would not deny it, for instance, in a 2002 article for The Los Angeles Times, Friedman wrote "Until U.S. economic growth is more balanced and its emerging public finance challenge more manageable, it's likely that our economic prospects will fail to fire investors' and consumers' enthusiasm. An expanding public sector may be necessary at a time of global terrorism." To get beyond authoritarian, centralized State forms, we need to develop alternatives. We can only develop alternatives by recognizing that the current forms came to exist and continue to exist because, no matter how badly, they do perform socially necessary functions, and thus any new forms can only come to exist when they can perform these functions in better ways.

Resource starvation? Anonymous markets have thrived throughout history, and probably before.

Do you care to inform us of any period of history where markets thrived while not supported and managed by non-market social institutions? Best, -- Dmytri Kleiner Venture Communist -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE