Avik Roy: America Would Be Better Off If Bitcoin Became the World's Reserve Currency.
It would force us to "live within our means," says the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.
HD DownloadCan bitcoin really become the world's reserve currency if it doesn't displace the dollar, the euro, or the yuan as an everyday medium of exchange? Why isn't its price increasing as inflation rises to levels not seen in 40 years? What sorts of regulations—if any—would best facilitate the wide-scale adoption of bitcoin not just among the wealthy but the unbanked of the world?
Avik Roy is the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Texas-based think tank that focuses on economic growth and mobility. He says that bitcoin improves on the ability of gold as a non-state-backed store of value and has shown itself to be effectively uncensorable—qualities that will allow it to act as a game-changing restraint on the worst actions of governments and central banks.
Reason spoke with him at the 2022 Bitcoin conference in Miami in April.
Produced by Nick Gillespie; edited by Adam Czarnecki; open edited by John Osterhoudt
Photos: Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy/Flickr/Creative Commons
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They chose wisely to be a Foundation and not an Organization.
I knew a black guy who was so uniquely independent in his thinking that his friends called him a Mint Oreo -- Martian on the inside.
We could make Gold the world's reserve currency.
Read this opening sentence, and tell me how utterly psychotic this court decision is.
That can't possibly be constitutional.
Neither can qualified immunity or asset forfeiture without a conviction.
So what's your point?
They just made it legal or illegal based on skin color.
If all extra-conviction seizures are unconstitutional, you at least have the fig leave of legitimacy under the ideal of equality under the law. Everyone is potentially subjected to an unconstitutional seizure.
But when you come right out and say, "we'll be violating the constitution based on skin color" you're wrong behind the starting line, not just when you get to the finish line.
This must be that Jim Eagle a certain presidential candidate was talking about
No, there's is literally no condition in the solar system in which it would be. You're white? That seizure is legal. You're black? That seizure was illegal.
I disagree.
If there are 3 seizures from white people and 3000 seizures from black people, that information would be relevant to determining whether the black seizures were unwarranted.
As a basis for further investigation, yes. This is especially true if the officer has a history of disproportionate policing. However, it should not by itself be a determining factor in the legality.
Exactly this. Was defendant in violation of the law?
Yes.
Question which can be asked by policy makers after the case. Why are so many black defendants being arrested for this crime when almost no white defendants are coming before the court?
This is a chilling way of determining guilt or innocence? This is the ultimate application of equity.
No. That's not how the justice system works. Each case is held in a vacuum. You cannot look at a case where Treyvonn was the subject of a seizure, but hey, last week Leqwan was a subject of a seizure, so now the Treyvonn seizure is suspect.
If the justice system notes that there are 3000 seizures from black people and only 3 seizures involving whites, then perhaps an investigation into the policing procedures can be investigated. But you cannot decide that seizure 2149 was illegal because it was the 2149th seizure. The facts of the case may ONLY pertain to the facts of the case before the judge.
This is utilizing "equity" in deciding if you're innocent, or more importantly, guilty.
Now do black-on-black crime, including murder.
This is a joke, right?
No, it's a point worth debating. But yes, it's both the wrong way of looking at it and it has chilling implications.
"disparate impact" is not proof of racism. It's merely "something to look at". The Wa supreme court has literally declared that disparate impact is "proof of racism" so we fix "guilty or innocent" based on skin color.
The Washington SC can fall back on it's black enclaves for protection once this shit hits general practice.
But, in fact, statistics show the opposite: cops are less likely to act when faced with black crime than with white crime. It just happens to be the case that blacks commit disproportionately many crimes.
While I agree with your concern, the actual legal standard is not quite the way you portray it. You are "arrested" (that is, seized) if (among other things) a reasonable person in your position would not feel free to leave after the cop pulls you aside. This is important because some questions can be legal if asked by the cops before you are "arrested" but excluded if asked after.
Therefore, whether you have been "arrested" is, in part, a subjective assessment. A charitable interpretation of the court is that it's at least plausible that there is a situation where a reasonable white person would feel free to leave (therefore is not yet arrested so the question was allowable) while a reasonable black person would not feel free to leave (therefore is arrested so the question must be excluded).
the idea that the courts are determining what a "reasonable person with a particular amount of melanin in the skin" would do is so awful, I'm having trouble finding words to describe it.
Not "would do" but "would think".
It may still be morally wrong but it's important to describe the court's ruling accurately.
"it's at least plausible that there is a situation where a reasonable white person would feel free to leave (therefore is not yet arrested so the question was allowable) while a reasonable black person would not feel free to leave"
No.
That can't possibly be constitutional.
That can't possibly matter to them.
More like a point of pride.
It's not, but the horror is they ruled that way DESPITE knowing it's unconstitutional. They did it for politics not justice.
^^THIS!!!^^ The court integrity is morphing into the same toilet paper construction they are turning the constitution into.
I think that actually will be declared unconstitutional under the 14th amendment if they move on that for real.
This is actually the role of judges during sentencing more than about the legality. Though, I suppose prosecutors can also just choose not to prosecute folks. But, hopefully Seattle has the wherewithal to not look at San Francisco and say "Damn it, getting rid of Boudin was foolish!"
Your asking people that believe "Socialism hasn't worked because we haven't done it right yet" to be logical?
All illegal, because SUM was a bipoc. Literally.
The ACLU and most of America seems to have "blinded themselves" to POC having a 3000+ year history of enslaving others and still enslave 2 million today.
While this asinine court made this decision POC hold 2 million other POC as slaves.
The Chinese have millions as slaves.
The Russians have Gulags.
The North Koreans have camps AND starve millions of their own people.
Muslims have slaves today and have been masters of the slave trade since Mohammed, another slave master.
America had under 200 years of slavery and it was the WEST that ended the practice.
Blacks appear to actually love it.
Africans enslaved upwards of a million Europeans.
I made the point before that integration was a mistake. I meant it. And it seems proggies agree.
What do you mean by this?
Given the rapid backslide into re-seperating the races, it seems to me that we wasted our time bothering.
Goddamn, we really need to get rid of the west side democrats.
Just identify as a BIPOC. Problem solved.
The court will not allow your self-identification to stand. If it did, the whole thing, whether you agree with it or not would be moot.
This is straight out of the "Critical legal theories" playbook, which was the precursor to all the other "critical theories" that came after it. It takes past cases and trends to determine a legal outcome... past cases that are not related to the case before the court.
Q: How do you get a crunchy, progressive, left wing Seattle Times columnist to sound like Tucker Carlson?
A: Give him everything he votes for.
People can want more police officers, rejecting defund the police. The same people can want drug offenders to get treatment, not jail — which is a core plank of the defund movement.
This Obama-type nuance is what new Seattle Mayor Harrell was channeling in his inaugural address when he kept repeating “Yes, and.” Yes, shelter the homeless and keep parks clear of encampments; yes, demand fair policing and go hard after gun crime.
He's probably correct in calling that nuanced to many people, but it makes me sad that the level of subtlety that they can police homeless camps without beating them to death is considered a nuanced position.
Sorry, that second paragraph of "This OBama-type nuance..." should also have been italicized. That is not my line, it's from the article.
That's the Shellenberger schtick on what he described as the 'two-way-street' on the Harm Reduction position.
You'll get treatment instead of jail.
You'll get narcan instead of death.
You'll get shelter instead of an underpass.
But you have to engage in treatment to not get jail. And you have to stop assaulting people and stealing stuff.
You'll have to make an attempt to be successful at treatment when we bring you back from the dead from a narcan shot.
You can't rape and kill people-- or sell or shoot up heroin inside the shelter while you're here. And if you don't want to agree with those conditions, we're removing your squalid tent encampment
from the city park and you'll have to find another city like Austin.
Agreed. The problem is that doing this highlights a very, very real problem that becomes apparent when you actually require homeless people to take on some responsibility. Homelessness is rarely an issue of resources, we're actually really good in the US at dealing with people who lost their job and couldn't pay rent, or beaten wives fleeing a bad situation with her kids, the veteran whose down on his luck but otherwise clean. We should all have sympathy for them, please go donate time at a homeless shelter.
There's at least two other major groups though, and I believe they're mostly the problem here. The mentally ill, and the people who just like doing drugs and being homeless isn't that big a deal for them.
Out of those two, I have a huge amount of compassion for the mentally ill, and I have a hard time reconciling my thoughts on it. Invols are clearly not libertarian, but I don't know a better solution. I really don't have a good idea.
The latter group can fuck off though. Kick them out and tell them to get a job or fuck off.
And I saw A LOT of that last group when I was in Seattle. People who even with an ever expansive definition of what it means to be mentally ill are clearly just the PNW version of a beach bum. And many of them are not nice people, and they do drugs, and they fuck with people on the streets.
and they fuck with people on the streets.
Don't I know it. I carry a gun. However, I have a very strict philosophy about carrying: Don't go anywhere with a gun when you think you might need it.
So I don't go many places these days.
And it's the mentally ill who suffer the most from the harm reduction ideology. They're edged out by drug addicts who are otherwise "high functioning" who can navigate the system and extract as much as they can from it, while the seriously mentally ill are often victimized or taken advantage of by the addicts who actually consider homelessness a "lifestyle choice".
After all the malignant addicts I’ve had to deal with, I hav no more empathy for these people. If they don’t want to get clean, then they can die. I’m tired of my tax dollars being used to protect and enable their bad behavior.
Fuck the addicts.
Lulz
Not only give him everything he votes for, but make sure his life in mired in the resulting shitshow. Time to build some more walls, like the Soviets did, to keep the comrades from escaping their socialist paradise.
Well, let's see:
Both bitcoin and the dollar are based on nothing but belief in value.
But there are no transaction fees for using dollars, so no.
no transaction fees for using dollars
True, but you pay a pretty steep interest rate for holding them.
Surely no one holds them. That would be madness.
Spend them at once.
Paul Krugman approves this message.
And spend the ones you dont have, too!
No. That would offend my dear departed grandmother.
Her financial world revolved around one truth; "If you can't pay cash, you can't afford it.
re: "But there are no transaction fees for using dollars"
Not really true (though they are more properly called transaction costs). Consider for any situation requiring more than a few hundred dollars:
- You have to go to the bank to get the cash (time and maybe a withdrawal fee)
- You have to carry the cash around (workable if you want to buy a car, a full briefcase to buy a house, not really workable when you want to buy a company or finance your government's debt)
- You have to protect that cash from theft while it's in your possession (armored cars, etc)
- You have to count it during the transaction (time)
- The other party now has all the same costs in reverse.
If you're talking about electronic transactions in dollars, those have fees currently smaller than but otherwise identical to the bitcoin transaction fees. They are just hidden from consumers as "merchant" fees.
>blockquote>But there are no transaction fees for using dollars,
Sales Tax has entered the chat
Sales tax applies regardless of how you pay, it is not a function of using cash.
(and get you money back from the coding school)
That's incorrect. The value of both is based on their utility, same way the value of Mastercard and Visa stock is based on the utility of their service. What may be confusing you is that for cash and Bitcoin, the utility turns into value of the payment system itself, rather than shareholders.
Why isn't its price increasing as inflation rises to levels not seen in 40 years?
What does he say to this? Isn't the answer basically that it's because it crashed? Bitcoin is more of an asset class now than a currency, for good or ill.
It's an NFT. I guess. I honestly don't know WHAT bitcoin is anymore.
To be honest, World of Warcraft gold might be a safer investment. At least you can buy something with it
Gold is used as an investment, to pay for stuff, and to make things.
Bitcoin likewise has multiple uses, as a means of payment and as a speculative investment.
Bitcoin would be more of a currency if US and EU regulations didn't make it so damned hard to use it as such.
Gold, incidentally, is also tax-disadvantaged in the US, which is why people don't hold as much of it as other investments.
Reason Magazine: Stop hyping BitCoin. It's pretty obvious that somebody at Reason has a whole lot of BitCoin they are trying to dump.
You just look desperate.
With the sanctions against Russia, it appears the Ruble is a pretty good currency to get into.
Indeed.
Another Biden success story.
I thought they paid Biden on dollars - - - - - -
Or was it IN dollars?
If I had cash, I would buy a new keyboard.
One that types what I mean, regardless of the keys I push.
Yeah, the amount of Bitcoin articles coming out since Bitcoin crashed is pathetic.
Eat shit bagholders. You have no one to blame but yourselves.
I have been told that it's my fault, because I didn't believe in it hard enough.
Crashed to... ::checks price:: roughly $30k each.
Bitcoin has a non-zero chance of actually taking over as the world's main currency.
Somewhere below the chance that Monopoly Money has, sure.
I can burn monopoly money in my fireplace after the zombie apocalypse. Therefore it has intrinsic value.
Now do seashells.
'It would force us to "live within our means," says the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.'
Anyone who seriously believes this has no idea how modern democracy works, and what most politicians and voters think the US mint is for.
I think it's interesting that the president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity assumes drawing a salary as the president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity is in any way exemplary people living within their means.
Bitcoin crowd: "this time it's different"
Morgan Freeman (voice): "But it wasn't different.
Not sure what you mean. Bitcoin is, in fact, genuinely different from all other previous payment systems and currencies, whether privately or publicly issued.