Eth: 0x00cce8E2e56a543abc084920eee3f88eFD0921ea

Monday, February 15, 2016

Geeks benefit long-term from cypto adoption

US, lawmakers are debating how to create backdoors into cell phones for law enforcement. This discussion will extend to crypto currency due to the ease of transferring assets without legal purview (ref p7). The geek class stands to benefit the most during the transition period from fiat to crypto, as new wealth-preservation options open up. This comes at the expense of shifting the debt burden to non-geek taxpayers.

Extracting Value:
Debt fueled democracies seek to grow short-term spending at the expense of future generations (ref pg579). They appear to grow to consume as much resources as possible, limited only by the following abilities: taxation, debt issuance, debt avoidance (haircut), and currency issuance (inflation). A decrease in any of these stats will shrink the government over the long-term. Crypto currencies are a direct threat to taxation and currency issuance abilities. Without a healthy tax base, debt issuance capabilities also decrease. While legislators may want to regulate and tax crypto, their ability to implement anything workable without international community consent is doubtful. This brings a new meaning to "...deriving their powers from the consent of the governed." 

Current Tax Implementation:
Taxation in the US is nominally progressive, because the rules say: 'as you make more, you are taxed at a higher percentage'. This differs from the actual implementation where the wealthy can afford tax experts that use complex rules in the tax code to squirrel money away and pass it down to heirs (ref). This leaves the middle class paying the highest percentage of tax and the poor receive more value than they paid in through subsidy programs.

Wealth Preservation:
Crypto will enable the geek class to effect similar tax avoidance strategies without paying for high-priced tax advisers. Some of these strategies such as 'buy crypto and hold' until bequest to heirs, may even be legal! The advent of smart contracts will enable smooth wealth transitions between generations. The prospect of being able to pass wealth down uninterrupted to heirs in the same manner as the 'one percent' will create a generation of little wealthy geeks.

Growing Inequities:
Sadly, this type of wealth preservation will initially only be accessible to the minority of citizens that makeup the geek class. And thus, like schemes that disproportionately help certain classes build wealth in yester years (ref), our society will be left with additional growing inequalities. This will be further exacerbated by the need to repay or discharge the government debt. The price of paying these loans will disproportionately fall on those that have kept their money within reach of the government by not divested into cyrpto.

Last Thoughts:
The geek class stands to benefit disproportionately through cyrpto-currency investments because such investments create facilities of long-term wealth preservation that are immune to government efforts to extract wealth, thus leaving a larger burden for the rest of society to eventually repay. 

2 comments:

BV said...

The problem is that the big players (I'm looking at http://bit.do/Coinbase) are made up of the banker class and political class. They hire out of Goldman and out of the White House.

Eliot said...

I agree. But they always had a leg up. Now we have a leg up too.