Erik: your article is chessmate for Dmytri's.  Well done.

Agreed.

You know, it's hard to combat mythologies like these, because the inventors of these myths often aren't the ones doing the brunt of the effort of propagating them -- that would be the useful idiots like Dmytri who believe what they are told blindly.

Take ΅the origin of money is tribute" as an example.  This truth-bearing statement is very much obviously a lie (and also a myth because people like Dmitry believe in it without any valid evidence to support his belief).  At some point, when Dmitry was told this lie, he just believed this lie at face value and incorporated it into his belief system.  At no point in time did he bother to question or fact-check the lie against any number of facts already widely available.

The result of this pattern of ingestion of lies: when people like Dmitry talk about any subject, they explicitly (or, worse, implicitly) fill in lies as established premises in their arguments, therefore coloring and sabotaging every single possible thought they could experience about reality and share with others.  Furthermore, the very confidence with which they express their unsubstantiated and false premises as unquestionable truths acts as reinforcement.  Sort of how "which president is the 'good' one?" implicitly establishes the unsubstantiated premise that "having a president is good mandatory inevitable" without actually saying it.

The result of that link in the chain of lies: people who consume this kind of superstitious garbage read arguments like Dmitry's and bellyfeel "well, perhaps something in the argument might be questionable, but surely the initial premises must be correct", reinforcing the myths as time goes by.

This is convenient for the liars who make up these myths, because the useful idiots genuinely believe the lies and repeat them to one another, which makes them that much more convincing when they spread the lies, and that much more difficult to accuse them of corruption and venality.

All of this reminds me of how people remember they learned about their pet lies.  They remember the lies as truths that somehow must be true because everybody around them has heard of them and pretty much accepts them.  What they don't remember is that teachers (or other authority figures like priests) told them these lies when they were children, and threatened them with punishment if they refused to believe them.  Since their brains weren't fully developed, they can't remember the threats attached to the lies -- they only remember the lies as truths.  This is the tried-and-true process mechanism that all religions (including statism) have used to spread their poison, it's very effective, and it's still going on.

Our job is so much harder than theirs.  They get to use threats to "convince" children to believe in lies ("God/vernment loves you", "when God/vernment forces you to give them money that's charity", "when you don't obey or give money to God/vernment you are being a bad boy", "God/vernment is good when they smite people who refuse to pay and obey").  We're limited to using reason and evidence to try and extirpate these cancers rooted in adults carrying them decades ago.

Very well said Rudd-O

What a pile of nonsense, typical european waffle. Tributes can be paid in many ways besides money - in goats, in military service, in free labor (as in Dmitry's motherland) etc

Thank you very much, guys.  I welcome your appreciation.

"Thousands of bitcoins for cryptosecurity, but not one damn satoshi for tribute!"

And after all that, Dmytri is still correct. If you think bitcoin is going to replace govt currencies then you are so far out to left field you dont need to reply. This place is just like Apple forums. Fanboys. You do raise some good points though.

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More to the point, does Bitcoin even need to replace government currencies?  Who cares, right?  Bitcoin is sound money, superior to government currencies, so it'll replace the currency used in the market, or most of it, or only a significant chunk of it.  This will be the first case of good money displacing bad money :-)

The world is fucked up because of coercion, not because the coercion isn't efficient enough.

There is no such thing as a better tax model that will result in improved common action, because pointing guns at people and ordering them around is the exact opposite of common action.

When taxation becomes impossible, and the institutions which subsist on it collapse, then the opportunity for common action will start.

It won't work.

There's a form of EROEI that applies to taxation. Governments have a exponentially-increasing need for taxation to bribe the dependent classes, pay public sector pensions, and to make legislators rich by diverting money to their cronies in the "private" sector.

Eventually the need for taxation will exceed the available productivity and the state will collapse just like it did in Rome, Weimar Germany, the USSR, and many others. That point comes much faster when the enforcement cost rises. If the government has to spend $0.01 per dollar of revenue in enforcement costs the game can go on a lot longer than if it has to pay $0.10 per dollar of revenue.

If taxes must be attached to tangible property and collected directly from individual taxpayers the "return on investment" from the perspective of the government drops catastrophically.