On a bitcoin standard, there is no government

In a Bitcoin standard, a government will have almost ZERO existence. I would say that will not exist anymore. people should understand that government = slavery and Bitcoin = freedom.

Guys, please stop being so statist minded. If you do not change your mindset WE WILL NEVER HAVE ANY BITCOINIZATION.

It made this promise last year and kept delaying its promise. Seems like funding is a problem; determining who’s eligible n who isn’t is another problem; ensuring that the adoption has been in place so that people can spend their tokens is yet another obstacle.

I guess we can look to Lugano (which has the infrastructure) to carry this out, though Switzerland doesn’t seem likely to dish out handouts anytime soon

I'm not sure how unrealistic to be, in order to entertain your thought experiment. The truth is that they would distribute the bitcoin to their major campaign donors and make sure some scraps trickle down to their voters.

In the near term, they will be able to steal enough to keep the socialism alive. For example they will seize all of Microstrategy's coins, "for the greater good" of course. But once they exhaust all the low hanging fruit like that it will become increasingly difficult. People will become very careful about revealing how much Bitcoin they have, and in the long run government will wither and die.

Taxing land/property. Some kind of Georgism tax combined with UBI and a min government. No one starves, there's police/army and someone fixes the potholes :D

Handouts would largely cease to exist for two reasons:

Most people agree that, if a government must exist at all, it should protect the vulnerable. But Bitcoin eliminates even this relatively uncontroversial raison d'être for a government.

I’d say the best way for a government to do this would be to mine with the excess energy of their grids. With each block found, or at the end of the week, divide and send out the rewards to each person.

Might not be possible over LN itself. Maybe it gets distributed to local government mints who then add credit to their jurisdiction recipients. Then the recipients can use it as they please.

Dividing between millions of people may create very small amounts like 1 or 10 sats, so the value of bitcoin would have to be significantly high than it is now, OR the grid mining farms are winning quite a number of blocks.

Let's entertain this idea. For the intellectual challenge it offers. Let's put aside ideologies. Let's also assume a functioning socialist society where the main idea is to redistribute wealth from the rich to the less fortunate without corruption, deficit or borrowing from future generations. These are the assumptions. I leave aside if any such country exists or is possible.

On a Bitcoin standard, the government would need to be able to levy taxes to achieve this. Bitcoin, by design, makes it harder to track this. But already now, several businesses in the fiat world that accept Bitcoin include their Bitcoin transactions in their end-of-year reports. But a government would probably not want to trust people's good-will to report their Bitcoin transactions. So, I imagine, KYC would become the norm for businesses that want to operate legally, within the rule of law.

In a sense, Bitcoin might even make it easier than harder for governments to track people's earnings and spending. Currently, in Korea, lots of businesses let you pay in cash and give you a discount. This allows them to pay less taxes as cash transactions are less traceable. On a Bitcoin standard, without additional privacy tools, the public ledger would let the government track how much money a business is making by checking their (KYC'd) addresses.

Once taxes are levied, they will be used in the same way taxes are used currently in the hypothetical society from our assumptions. Money gets redistributed by funding healthcare, schools, infrastructure, etc.

In an ideal society, all of the government addresses will also be publicly known. Tools will exist for plebs to track the government spending. No backdoor deals. No corruption.

On a Bitcoin standard, without inflation, each spending will be scrutinized by society. Money will only be spent on things that matter. Pharmaceutical companies won't be able to fuck over private healthcare companies by charging them 10x the price compared to socialist countries where governments have leverage to obtain the best deals as a country.

On a Bitcoin standard, consumption won't be incentivized. People won't need to slave away for a lower and lower pay. They will improve their standard of living. Handouts will be increasingly less required as the income gap will be reduced. Haves will remain haves. Have-nots will gradually become haves. Haves won't be able to leverage their assets to borrow against an inflationary currency anymore, hence the richer will not become ever more rich. Taxes will be used for the betterment of all.

That's for some random thoughts under the assumptions I laid out. Of course, humans are humans. Many successful Bitcoin companies have already shown themselves to be just reinventions of the past fiat companies, with the same incentives to take advantage of others for their own interests. Hence, such ideal socialist societies are unlikely to exist uniformly over the globe, even on a Bitcoin standard. Far from being ideal socialist countries, yet slightly better than the average socialist country, European socialism has benefited from first-mover advantage, years of colonial exploitation, IMF economical abuse of third-world countries, etc.

A perfect Bitcoin standard is unlikely to ever exist. But I'll be happy if it provides just an incremental improvement over the current fiat world. Socialism, paradoxically, has a lot to benefit from such paradigm shift. So does libertarianism. I do not believe either system to be perfect and a combination of both will be required to get the best of both worlds and oppose the crappiness of human nature.

Don't read too much in this rant. I don't have time to structure my thoughts more.

Very interesting concept, I too actually wondered about this. I think you might have people not want to earn SATs in some situations, or just work to live. Or end up setting food banks/charity houses/or running your own to feed those individuals.

Government hand outs?

Are those affordable?

Sound gross.

It would be cool to see people on welfare issued hardware for Bitcoin mining instead.. contribute to hashrate, learn PoW etc.. solar or some sort of renewable energy could be issued with the miner(s)

Handouts are a trap!

There would be less poverty on a bitcoin standard. More hope amongst the people and I think less incentives and need for the types of socialist policies like what we see today.

It’s hard to imagine but I suspect there would be new inventive ways to lift society and help the poorest- a completely new paradigm.

commies would need to pay upfront for the dumb shit they wanna do instead of borrowing from future generations.

and then no one would be up for their dumb shit

The handout situation is a big deal everywhere. They want to make us all believe that their tiny handouts in form of subsidies or ration are worth for eradicating poverty or joblessness. In my country government is distributing ration on a monthly basis to more than 800 million people. I despise this handout because instead of food they should have tried to create earning opportunities which are reducing day by day.

Will be based purely on merit with full transparency.

On bitcoin standard there would be no handouts.

With hard money you need to actually consentually collect money. Goverment would hold on to hard money as hard as possible and would not just give it away. Hard money is too precious to give it away.

Handouts are a thing in a fiat world in which you can print money and extract value without consent. Weak money is something you give out without regrets.

I guess the easiest would be income and consumption tax, so vat on registered businesses, which are effectively moonlight as tax collectors, you can also still have taxes on imports and exports

Anything they can centralise can be taxed, like energy production and consumption,

I think despite the deflationary gains of bitcoin a socialist system can still disrupt price signals and disrupt an economy

I love thought experiments.

First off, 1 Sat will equal 1 Sat. There is no “driving up the price of Bitcoin.”

People that think there will be no government are being naive. That isn’t how human societies function. We need organization. It would be great to have the 3 branches, in a limited form, as the founding fathers of America intended.

With abundance, we would have more care for our neighbor. Handing out Sats wouldn’t be a thing. However, public housing, food, and water would be available. People who want more than basic necessities can find what society needs or wants, figure out what talents they have that overlap, then produce and be rewarded for their efforts.

No handouts on a bitcoin standard

Case closed Mystery solved