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Will Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Support Cryptocurrency In Greece?
giulioprisco writes New Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, former Economist-in-Residence at game developer Valve Corporation, sees something like Bitcoin — or, more likely, a state-controlled "Fedcoin" — possibly playing a role in the (necessarily creative) rescue of the Greek economy. "The technology of Bitcoin, if suitably adapted, can be employed profitably in the Eurozone," he said.
Does anyone care what Minister Varoufakis thinks?
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Will Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Support Cryptocurrency In Greece?
No
As obvious as the question is stupid.....
Yes, they will. Good for them. I'd rather see a nation state profit from financial fraud than the usual consortium of bankers.
Iceland seems to be doing just fine, despite not honoring their debts.
Greece doesn't need a currency, it needs liquidity - a crypto currency won't bring that. The entire current issue is not about which currency to go for, its how Greece keeps paying its creditors - if they can't service their current debts, their ability to borrow goes through the floor, and a crypto currency isn't going to reverse that. Greece can't back its own crypto currency with anything it has a monopoly on either because it doesn't have anything that valuable.
The government of this game developer wants to re-employ many of the laid off people so fixing the tax system is probably the only option they have left to keep the country from again falling over.
And such a currency can include many safeguards to ensure taxes are going to be paid.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
They can of course do whatever they like once they default and are forced to go off on their own to protect the rest of the Eurozone. I'm sure having a currency of their own again may sound tempting considering their current predicament.
But current cryptocurrencies are popular only because of the promise of easy wealth to early adopters. The concept of taking control away from established capital and the concept of states is only interesting as long as such adopters have not yet become established themselves. A state backed cryptocurrency will not have that dodgy get rick quick appeal so it's hard to see who will benefit from this.
There is a long, long history of States forcing people to use bad currencies (i.e. those being used to transfer wealth from people to the State by printing money).
This is why for example Zimbabwe uses the US dollar now, instead of its own.
If a State run cryptocurrency turns up, either it will be sound - the State cannot print money, nor try to mandate an exchange rate - or it will not.
If it is sound, people may use it.
If it is not sound, people will only use it if they are forced to do so, i.e. if bitcoin (and all alternatives) are banned.
We note of course China has banned bitcoin, and has extremely tight restrictions on the exchange of the Yuan, and its investment - all examples of States forcing people to use bad currencies (so the State can by printing money obtain their wealth).
I just hope they hold up and tell the banks and Germany to go to hell. That is what they were elected for. Now, if they do, there could very easily be another military coup ordered by those banks. Unfortunately, it looks like compromise for the benefit of financial institutions is still the only thing on the menu. This 'crypto-currency' thing looks like a diversion.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'm pretty sure the River Styx freezing with Aphrodite and Helen of Troy ice skating naked while Dionysus hands out brews and bags of trainwreck is less mythological than the possibility that Greece's economy will start looking up with the current megasocialist nanny state political mindset going on over there. "Crypto" currency is right, like...literally.
For the same reason that it wouldn't work in Argentina. Any successful cryptocurrency gets its tradable value from the perception that the money supply is strictly limited, as in the days when currencies were based on the issuing country's gold reserve. For a cryptocurrencies,money supply is limited by some publicly available and testable mathematical formula.
For any government whose dreams exceed its revenue, this means instant and long-lasting austerity. It would be like the Euro, but even stricter.
Greece will base it's economy on hats.
And say if you continue saying crap like that they might reconsider allowing you to pile up debt...
Prediction is Greece will exit the EU because of inefficient use of all forms of resources. They have been pseudo-socialist giveaway state for so long w/1 in 3 workers working for the state's institutions, they've collectively forgotten market economics is what runs countries effectively.
Venezuela is the prime example of wasteful redistribution policies by a government which collapse a society (military takeover is next.)
Greece will change fairly soon and it will be somewhat painful or they will deteriorate toward Venezuela's position, in which case it will impoverish Greece's working class.
As it will be worth less than the paper it is printed on if they default on their debt which they plan on doing.
http://saveie6.com/
"A continuing flow of paper is sufficient to continue the flow of paper. -- Dyer"
you risk getting repossessed. Which islands is Greece prepared to loose? There are a few Greek mediterranean jewels worth owning and it would be a valuable lesson to other debtors.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
I helped cleanup & docs on a GPL project called Integral Community Exchange System (ICES) just approved as full drupal.org project module suite https://www.drupal.org/project... . It is already used by Ecoxarxes (econetworks) around Spain specifically Catalonia to provide timebanking/time credit and needs/offers listings. It feature-replaces closed source CES software used in places like South Africa and Australia.
I think that getting basic needs connected and covered for people and enhancing trust among a web of people, without need for deflated (or low velocity /liquidity fiat currencies like Euro in depressed Spain or Greece), with either timebanking or basic services listed, already helping a lot of people. Exchanges: https://www.integralces.net/ce... developer docs https://docs.integralces.net/ Thanks for considering something practical. No fancy blockchains, but an OAuth / OpenTransaction implementation to exchange crossovers is working in dev. If anyone would like to plugin or translate please check it out...
--hongpong.com
You've read too much propaganda.
The crisis in Greece has many reasons. Inefficiency is a problem, but not a crisis cause. The fact that the country had a strongly interconnected (not to say, inbred) web of corruption between politics, administration and business is much more likely to have been a leading cause.
The greek "giveaway state" is such a cheap myth. They don't even have social welfare the way that those who cry loudest (e.g. Germany) have.
The real problem is that Greece was heavily in debt to foreign banks. Instead of giving them a way out, the governments of the countries of those banks pressured them into paying their debts and interests, and cutting spending. When your economy is in a crisis, every economist who's not a total idiot knows that cutting government spending will deepen the crisis. What a surprise, that's exactly what happened.
And now comes the magic trick: The amount of debt that the EU, European Central Bank and IWF consider "acceptable" is calculated based on a countries GDP. Greece actually cut spending a lot and last year ran on a balanced budget, something that our own Mrs. Merkel didn't manage to do with our country. Greece debt has actually decreased. However, due to the magic trick, Greece debt ratio has become worse, not because of more debt, but because of less GDP.
It's like telling you that because you're in debt, you need to sell your car to pay me. And after you've done so, telling you that because your net worth has now declined, you've now got a different credit rating and owe me more money for the higher risk.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Like that happened by itself, or like the fact that banks had bought the government bonds somehow makes the situation more troublesome than if individuals had bought the bonds.
It does, because banks are big players and can trick or coerce governments into deals that are bad for them. There's a reason many governments are buying back properties they privatized in the 80s and 90s when corrupt consultants convinced them that selling state property was a cute idea.
There are long articles by actual economists on this topic, but the basic idea is that for any debt crisis, you need not only an irresponsible borrower, but also an irresponsible lender.
Oh, now it's Greece's achievement that the reforms which were demanded of them actually worked?
Are you fucking kidding me? They balanced their budget, by crashing their economy. Your definition of "worked" is far out there.
For the getting-the-money-back part, the balanced budget is happening soon.
One way for us to balance our budget could be to sell all those people who are so willing to give away our money to prop up other nations who hate us for it.
You mean our banks? I'm against selling them into slavery, they belong into jails.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
How Hitler Defied The Bankers?
http://open.salon.com/blog/gor...
Casteism
For the record, a Cryptocurrency isn't called so because it's hidden (indeed it's not).
It's called so because is relies a lot on *Cryptography*: digital signature, public keys, message authentication, etc. All these are necessary for the distributed nature of cryptocurrencies to work reliably.
As for "state controler Fedcoin": Sorry, no. It doesn't work that way. The whole point of cryptocoins is to be distributed accross the network, so that there isn't a signle entity that has single hand control over everything else. That's *why* they rely on a transaction ledger (Blockchain) distributed accross the whole network. State control is impossible this way.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]