#121
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toyotathon posted:

posting to draw attention to yourself at the expense of an ongoing conversation

i'm on other forums with shitposter problems and it's exhausting.

good faith posts can exist without shitposts but shitposts cannot exist without enough good faith posts to interrupt and mock. imo.


this is the most depressing humourless "kids get off my lawn" post in the history of these forums, like a vast entropic force sucking all the fun out of posting, demanding only po-faced "serious marxist posting" about aliens and eusociality; you are literally saying this forum is no place for jokes; i will never forgive you for this post, sorry

#122
Post rating: +
the bitcoin and aliens threads are tearing our posting relationships apart.
#123
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here's a good faith post: if you ever find yourself unable to understand the context of playful jabs among friends i strongly advise seeking remedial offline socialization immediately. it will be to our mutual benefit.
#124
UNUSUALY COOL
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tears posted:

also i reject this rude accusation, everyones started being rude to each other again, guess were into the rude bit of the rhizzondratieff wave, hell even im being rude, time to own some scrubs



heavy is the head etc

#125
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

swampman posted:

Somefucky didn't win that scholarship to attend The University of the Difference Between Envy and Jealousy



when i was flirting with liberalism during college i started but never finished a thesis promoting demsoc through a gap in Rawlsian political theory where it treats greed as something that should be harnessed by the state for political stability while regarding envy as some sort of error in the margins. the argument was that if the state did a poor job of addressing relative deprivation you ended up with Bolshevism. later i figured out that Bolshevism was Actually good

#126
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Ah yes, Mercury retrograde is Strong this time around. A real doozy
#127
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i don't care for the "collectibles and not commodities" argument on CoCT. in 2140 there will be a shift along those lines, when bitcoin production will no longer possible, but it's not unique among commodities in facing global non-renewable limits; it's just starker because it's shaped by human ideas rather than natural processes. at this moment along its historical process it's undeniably got all the hallmarks of a commodity -- both value and use-value, privately produced for exchange, etc., so the claim seems premature. moreover, the idea that it's produced absent human labor ("the main economic difference is that gold miners are human beings engaged in the production of gold bullion while bitcoin “miners” are machines") is facile in a way I would not have expected from Williams; human time and effort certainly does go into building and maintaining the technical structures that presently yield bitcoin. creating a machine that mines gold for you is still an amount of labor put into mining gold, just with a reorganization of the technical methods of production that shorten the necessary hours, as technical innovation tends to do. The amount of labor embodied in bitcoins is not great, but it's not zero; it's just that they're enormously capital-intensive, with orders of magnitude more labor time embodied in means of production than present in the actual work itself -- which, as we know from value theory, also means that while a market exists for them, they'll have an inherent tendency to sell at a price above value.

of course, the use-value of bitcoin is tenuous compared to other commodities that might serve as money -- it's either tied to cachet in certain subcultures, or just its utility as a novelty or (again) collector's item. If we're willing to allow notionally that the relative ease with which it could serve as means of circulation also contributes to a full picture of its use-value, then there's that too. but for the most part, these utilities are more dependent on individual and group psychology than that of gold, which has such properties and functions as can ensure a constant baseline level of demand. so, in a world where no commodity is completely free of the influence of speculation, bitcoin is far more susceptible its the fickle wiles of the marketplace. but coming at this from Marx, i don't think it's sensible to think of bitcoin as purely a financial instrument or token.

i feel like there was something else i wanted to say, but i've been drawing a blank for like five minutes so i'm just gonna hit the button now

Edited by Constantignoble ()

#128
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interesting, but is bitcoin not infinitly divisable, making it effectivly limitless not a "non-renewable commoodity"?
#129
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#130
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but afaik those bitcoins can be subdivided to 8 decimal places at the moment, with an option to allow further levels of divisibility; and since unlike gold or any other physical commodity, 1/100000 of a bitcoin seems to have no actual difference with 1 bitcoin, because its all...uh...bits...?
#131
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yeah. that arbitrary number does a good job of illustrating the point that ultimately these are about the real relations that go into them. like, why they chose to stop issuing coins at x number instead of 100000000*x is, I imagine, because the folks behind it probably fetishize the old style of deflationary-money prices being nice low numbers and an Almighty Dollar being significant or whatever. of course, since as far as i know bitcoin can potentially be traded in arbitrary fractions, this means instead of paying 2 bitcoins for a pizza you're paying .000000000177 bitcoins for a pizza, which is definitely something that is totally sensible to your average human being. but at the end of the day, we're still talking about a certain total amount of value being commanded by the output of a certain totality of inputs, a certain fraction of which can buy a pizza. where you set the decimal point is pretty much just aesthetics.
#132
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#133
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roseweird posted:

but i don't know why a fraction of a bitcoin would be equal to a bitcoin.


i don't think tears meant that they were numerically equal per se, but like, a fraction of an amount of gold would have a different weight, a different volume, and different issues that may come with this, whereas whatever unit of a bitcoin you're throwing around is basically indistinguishable in terms of packets or the like

#134
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#135
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roseweird posted:

ibitcoins aren't produced by mining. the service performed by "mining" is just the hashing of recent transactions in blocks, and bitcoins are awarded to users whose computers solve blocks.


this suggests that those bitcoins are in someone's possession prior to being "awarded," but as far as i know they're not human accessible at all beforehand

#136
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#137
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#138
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my point was that just because the terms of the process are artificial and the calculations performed locally need to validate against some broader system doesn't mean that we've removed the category of "production." i'd need to perform my calculations swinging a pick in a particular place in spacetime for nature to award me with a bit of gold, etc.

the sudden appearance of the value in a database has the same form as the creation of fiat currency, but not the same content or relations. in the BTC case, everyone is equally beholden to a time-intensive process of private participation that causes a discrete unit of a thing to enter the possession and control of a human actor, to be disposed of as they see fit. satoshi nakamoto can't bypass it (as far as I know) and just drop some in a wallet ex nihilo, ala MMT discussions of federal spending
#139
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#140
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#141
Dont Mess With Sucess
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glomper_stomper posted:

imo, it doesn't really matter if the actual bitcoin has real value imparted into it or if it was the product of any kind of labor. what matters is whether real production can substantiate its imaginary value when its role as a form of money-capital inevitably implodes.

And, on top of that, keep in mind, YOu also have shit like https://news.bitcoin.com/amd-share-price-drops-amidst-expectations-mining-hardware-demand-will-level-off/ which, yknow, it looks to me like someone found a way to make bitcoin funnier

AMD reported that its computing and graphics division generated $819 million in revenue during the third quarter of 2017. The company has stated that the revenue was “primarily driven” by surging demand for its Radeon GPUs and Ryzen desktop processors, which are greatly sought after by many cryptocurrency miners.

#142
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#143
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roseweird again i think you're giving undue importance to the formal or physical aspects of it. like, yeah, the physical structure of a bitcoin is electrons stored in capacitors in certain patterns, that are burped into shape by feeding Correct Numbers into a big digital blob or whatever, but so what? by that same token, what's the physical structure of a massage or a sporting event? are services any less commodities because the "production" of the use-value is performed at a set time and place and consumed on the spot?

the most important thing is not the form it takes or what specific mechanism instantiates a discrete quantity, but the social relations it engenders and embodies

glomper_stomper posted:

imo, it doesn't really matter if the actual bitcoin has real value imparted into it or if it was the product of any kind of labor. what matters is whether real production can substantiate its imaginary value when its role as a form of money-capital inevitably implodes.



i would argue that both matter a lot, for different reasons

#144
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#145
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it's less that the symbolic is absolute and more that at the moment the physical structures behave in a way that fully support the symbolic, as a unified complex. if the blockchain were ever hacked to such a catastrophic extent that the relationship between those strata broke down, it'd be a different story

but i'm not sure how much more i can say about this, so if you're still not convinced i'll just agree to disagree

Edited by Constantignoble ()

#146
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#147
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i'm happy to concede that I may not understand various parts of it, so if there's something you'd like to set me straight on, please do

i was going by this, what with the projections of no further bitcoins being made (or awarded, if you please) past mid-2140. that's all I meant by that phrase. i gather other cryptocurrencies may not do the same thing, but I wasn't so much discussing them. but maybe i'm misunderstanding what you're even objecting to in the phrase, too
#148
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#149
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okay, well then rather than putting the task of formulating what needs to be said and how to say it entirely on you, maybe i can refocus with a question, if you have the time/inclination to field it

roseweird posted:

[bitcoin is] not a commodity or a collectible, but an accounting method.



a method of accounting what specifically?

#150
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#151
Post rating: +
wait are y'all telling me that bitcoin has a policy set to kick in 133 years from now as if it's going to have unchanged continuity of status quo that entire time. that's some new level of huffing your own farts for divine inspiration.
#152
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#153
UNUSUALY COOL
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*clip reel of roseweird from this thread* MATT BARRIE: They heard that one in DYTD. Kevin,
#154
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#155
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#156
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#157
Post rating: +
roseweird, thanks for the response, i understand what you're saying better now. i appreciate the point that i may be taking it too much at face value

there's a point or two i think i want to respond to, but i'm gonna take some time to do some deeper reading to ensure i'm not just rooting around up my own ass
#158
Post rating: +
capitalism will end before they run out of new bitcoins inshallah
#159
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also if a fully utilized blockchain ever becomes an issue they could always fork it to an iteration with an unlimited or increased supply which has already happened to bitcoin to increase security and to ethereum to roll back a hack due to a bug in the core program. it just requires adoption by miners, and users obviously. and nothing prevents people from continuing to use the old iteration i.e. "ethereum classic".

in any case the idea that miners would have no incentive to mine if not rewarded coins by the blockchain isn't entirely true, what would likely happen is the transaction fee for every trade of coins would increase and that would be the solitary reward for solving new blocks.

transaction fees are actually the reason why alt coins are rising in value too, since it costs like $20 to get a transaction confirmed with bitcoin in a block in a timely manner since the system is so congested. coins like litecoin or DASH are designed to have transactions approved much quicker and cost less. which is another reason why people are trying to remarket bitcoin less as a currency and more of a commodity to store value. the whole thing is insane of course.

Edited by aerdil ()

#160
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glomper_stomper posted:

marxists can figure out the underlying contradictions of bitcoin production but can't figure out if it's a beanie baby or not



its definitely a beanie baby. https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/03/people-have-spent-over-1m-buying-virtual-cats-on-the-ethereum-blockchain/