Though it makes some valid points, this Bitcoin-boosting video is marred with non-sequiturs and question-begging claims.
The non-sequiturs: (1) Advanced societies use a lot of energy; (2) therefore the more energy a technology employs, the greater its contribution to progress; (3) Bitcoin uses a lot of energy; (4) Ergo, Bitcoin makes us all better off.
The principal fallacy here is a version of the labor theory of value. It's true that the energy required to produce commodity monies, including "synthetic" ones like Bitcoin, makes them inherently scarce and as such unlikely to be supplied in inflationary quantities.
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding Kardashev's claim that "A civilization's level of technological advancement can be measured by the amount of energy is is able to harvest and use," such money's contribution to society isn't measured by the energy that goes into making them."
Ironically, though he did subscribe to a labor theory of value, the great Adam Smith, who understood the advantages of achieving efficient exchange using as few resources, including energy, as possible. "The gold and silver money which circulates in any country," he wrote,
"may very properly be compared to a highway,which, while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and corn of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either. The judicious operations of banking, by providing...
"a sort of waggon-way through the air,enable the country to convert, as it were, a great part of its highways into good pastures and corn-fields, and thereby to increase very considerably the annual produce of its land and labour."
Smith was not apologizing for fiat money. But he was recognizing the fact that one could do better--far better--than rely solely on expensive commodity money, instead of supplementing it with ("2nd layer") bank money.
There's a palpable contradiction between the video's celebration of "clean" sources of power (around 21:00) that use fewer resources and its vaunting of energy-intensive Bitcoin mining. If hydro > fossil because it uses fewer resources, why isn't fiduciary money > gold or BTC?
And how to respond to a claim such as: "In contrast with gold, the search for which leads to more dirty, wasteful mines, the search for Bitcoin, appears to lean to greener and more efficient energy production"? Let me try: C-H-I-N-A.
The idea that Bitcoin mining actually "cleans" the environment--that Bitcoin is a "greening machine"-- because Bitcoin miners seek the cheapest sorts of energy, which _sometimes_ turns out to be clean, is the worst sort of meretricious _agitprop_.
Bitcoin has its merits. But its more enthusiastic advocates don't do it any favor by supplementing them with a bunch of balderdash.
Shame on @zeithistoriker for distorting Mises's writings to suggest that his writings sowed the seeds of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's racist beliefs, and on @ContEuroHistory for publishing the resulting hatchet jobs. And thanks to @PhilWMagness for exposing their wrongdoings.
Of course it's true that Hoppe is a fan of Mises. But it hardly follows that Hoppe's racist views have their roots in Mises's writings. Prof. Slobodian apparently saw an opportunity to make Mises a victim of guilt by association...
and to make liberalism, of which Mises was a famous exponent, and which is evidently Slobodian's real bête noire, guilty in turn by its association with Mises.
.@rohangrey's suggestion that the Fed's unwillingness to grant a master account to TNB ("The Narrow Bank") means that it is just as unlikely to grant such accounts to Avanti and other fintechs seems mistaken to me. blockworks.co/legal-expert-a…
The Fed has reasons for refusing Master Accounts to TNB and other "Pass Through Investment Entities" (PTIEs) that don't apply to other fintechs seeking such accounts. In particular, it wishes to preserve the differential rates it offers to banks and MMFs and other counterparties.
The sole raison d'etre of PTIEs like TNB is to eliminate that differential--the IOR-ON-RRP spread--by allowing non-bank ON-RRP counterparties to earn the IOR rate. (For this reason, allowing them master accounts that pay only the ON-RRP rate or less would be = no accounts.)
Apologists for the forced currency component (Article 7) of El Salvador's Bitcoin Law like to note that Article 12 of the same exempts "Those who, by evident and notorious fact, do not have access to the technologies that allow them to carry out transactions in bitcoin."
That clause, however, continues with "The State will promote the necessary training and mechanisms so that the population can access bitcoin transactions." The government's @chivowallet is the main such "mechanism." cryptoticker.io/en/know-bitcoi…
Those who download the wallet will earn $30 worth of BTC, which they can spend, but not cash. The two catches are, first, that the Chivo Wallet isn't decentralized; as one blogger has put it, Salvadorans can "Say good bye to privacy with Chivo app." read.cash/@francis105d1/…
Thread: Brad @delong's portrayal of Powell as a hawk and Republican party stooge "not even remotely aligned with those of the Democratic near-consensus" is perverse.
DeLong himself acknowledged that Powell "has spent the past four years following interest-rate and QE policies that do accord with the prevailing Democratic view." But he suggests this has only been so for two reasons.
Namely (1) "the soft-money knee jerk instincts of Trump the real-estate developer, for whom money can never be too cheap," and (2) Lael Brainard's having persuasively argued against post-COVID tightening.
Thread: Actually, there is something worse than even the most naive loanable funds intermediary view of what ordinary banks are about, to wit: still more naive Post-Keynesian and MMT alternatives.
Commercial banks fund their loans and investments in one of two ways: using their own capital, or using funds borrowed from others. To the extent that they reply on borrowed funds, they are in fact credit (loanable funds) intermediaries.
Now for the provisos: the funds relied upon needn't consist of primary (that is, non-borrowed) deposits. They can consist of wholesale funds, funds borrowed from a central bank, or funds secured from other sources.
Not 'til January 2019 did it officially decide to make the switch permanent. I critically assessed the Fed's reasoning then.alt-m.org/2019/01/31/the…
In fact I predicted that decision, and a corresponding, early abandonment of the Fed's promised balance sheet normalization, back in September 2017: alt-m.org/2017/09/26/nor…