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JohnRo wrote: »

democratically distributed crypto ledgers

bitcoin (and similar systems) are not democratic. they are systems in which there is a new elite, which is mostly the early adopters, who have become rich.

a few of those new rich have done something constructive to get there (e.g. coming up with the idea of bitcoin - it is fascinating, even if it's not clear yet what it will lead to). some have low cunning. some are just lucky. the level of reward has very little relation to any plausible notion of deserts. so that's much like any group of newly rich people.

the distributed ledger is designed to evade control by any central authority, including governments. so that includes evading control by bankster-captured governments. but also by democratic governments. that makes bitcoin anti-democratic. it puts power in the hands of the new elite, instead of in the hands of governments.

clearly bitcoiners are not very powerful yet, compared to existing elites. but it wouldn't be progress for them to become a lot more powerful. we are currently suffering from policies designed to favour a super-rich elite, which hides its wealth, doesn't pay its taxes (in full), and shows loyalty to no country. which is in several ways similar to the kind of elite bitcoiners would be, if they became more powerful! and in fact we now have the tools which could be used to blow apart most of the secrecy of the wealth of the superrich (viz. automatic disclose of information, disclosure of beneficial ownership, country-by-country reporting) - that's to say: we have the tools, though they aren't being used properly yet: the remaining problem is political; but of course these tools can't be applied to bitcoin.

JohnRo wrote: »

When you have the likes of Jamie Dimon calling bitcoin a fraud, aside from the utter hypocrisy, it's a sure sign it's on the right path

unfortunately, you can't work out the best way to run a financial system by just doing the opposite of what jamie dimon says (however seductive that idea may appear ).

bitcoin would be dreadful as a currency (which doesn't mean it's a bad idea: it already has some uses, and there are probably more uses we haven't figured out yet), for the same reason that gold or silver were bad: it takes away governments' power to spend enough to get us out of recessions/depressions, to achieve full employment at a living wage, and to make the necessary investments in homes, clean energy, infrastructure, and so on.

the fact that governments have mostly failed to do those things since the GFC, and have instead inflated asset prices and kept household debt a high level, doesn't change this. we may have governments captured by banksters, but the way forward is to take democratic control of our governments, not to hand over power to a new crypto-elite

JohnRo wrote: »

Fiat doesn't maintain it's purchasing power, it cannot maintain it's purchasing power, suggesting otherwise is silly. Wealthy people hold assets.

wealthy people also hold lots of fiat, and fiat-denominated debt. (with only slight over-simplification,) household debt is owed by the 99% to the 1% .

positive real interest rates is a policy which favours the rich. perhaps the least bad way to defuse the high-house-prices, high-household-debt (mostly mortgages) time-bomb would be to keep house prices flat in nominal pounds, while having a moderate inflation (so house prices fall in real terms), and keeping interest rate (on mortgages) below inflation (so the debt burden reduces).

JohnRo wrote: »

Of course it's democratic, you don't need anyone's permission to participate or use the system.

tax evasion is not democratic. we make a democratic decision to levy taxes. evading those taxes is anti-democratic.

the same goes for evading other kinds regulation which have been democratically decided upon.

bitcoin can be used (among other things) to evade taxes and other regulations.

now, you can certainly criticize how the supposedly democratic political process decides to impose some regulations (or fails to impose others). but there is very broad public support for the principle that everybody should pay their taxes.

You're conflating the speculative value and those early adopters who've benefited from that with any control they have over what happens next.

well, apart from the issue of evading laws, wealth is a form of power. if you have a lot of it, you have the power to make a lot of other people do what you want. you can divert scarce human and physical resources to your choice of project.

The banks via their central banking network are not acting in anyone's interest but their own.

to a large extent, i agree. (though central banking is still in some ways an improvement on the pre-central-banking system, in which (for instance) there was no FSCS protection for small deposits.)

my point is that we can democratically take over the central banking systems and use it in the interests of society as a whole. this is not entirely theoretical: the banking system was used more effectively in the public interest in the 1945-1971 (keynesian) period. though some things need to be done differently this time. we need to take more account of environmental limits, which were largely ignored in the keynesian period. and we need to do something now to reduce the excessive level of household debt (which has built up over the last 40 years).

that's the change we should be aiming for. not switching to a gold-backed currency, or to a crypto-currency. either of which would be disastrous. crypto-currency has its uses, but not as a replacement for fiat.

JohnRo wrote: »

In theory it's a simple problem to solve, strict rules governing behaviour and lengthy prison sentences for those that break them, in practice ...

yes: the solution is technically simple, but politically difficult. (that's the nature of politics: nothing fundamentally new happens; it's a matter having to fight repeatedly for the same things.)

From that a desire to do things in a more equitable and accessible way was been developed that by design avoids all the inevitable corruption and crime associated with control by any one privileged individual or small group of individuals controlling an entire 'industry' that is in essence, if not entirely in practice, nothing but a gang of omnipotent crooks empowered by subordinate governments to administer and profit from an astronomically lucrative fraud on the people.

well, if that's what crypto-currencies are trying to do, then they're solving the wrong problem. the distributed ledger solves the problem of not trusting anybody to keep a central ledger accurately. but that's not a kind of corruption that banks engage in - they don't tell people with positive balances in their accounts: "what account? you've never had an account with us!" and the like. there are various ways in which banks have been crooks, but they are OK as simple ledger keepers.

Arguments about how effective or otherwise crypto has been or is going to be in disrupting the banking cesspit or in achieving anything it's intended to are a little premature as it's uses and adoption are still very much in the experimental and ongoing development stages.

i agree that more uses for crypto-currencies are likely to emerge.

so far, i don't see any sign that they will help with the problems of a corrupt banking system, for which we already have a technical solution, i.e. it's "just" a political problem.

techies tend to be keen on coming up with a technical solution to every problem. (and the same often goes for other kinds of specialists.) sometimes, that's not what's needed.