You'll find it's useful to admit the obvious. It enables you to go forward and make progress, better than simply denying clear facts based on considerations of small ego (such as reputation or authority).
You'll also find that a square is a rectangle. It is a quadrilateral with only right angles, therefore a rectangle. You can't really deny that can you. Perhaps you don't like the implications. "But Mr. Dwarf, so many rectangles I'm familiar with are long and skinny. Your square isn't long and skinny. Therefore your square isn't a rectangle".
No, that's not how it works. Your other rectangles are not squares, because squares have all sides of equal length, and your other rectangles don't. My square however is also a rectangle, because rectangles are quadrilaterals with only right angles. Incidentally, my square is a quadrilateral. Your rhombus is also a quadrilateral. Yet your rhombus is not a square.
Got it? Good, this basic exercise in categories of basic geometry will come in handy for understanding and moving forward from the clear unarguable fact that bitcoin is a socialist system.
"But Mr. Dwarf, the Nazis were socialist. The United Snakes are socialist. My Marxist utopia is socialist. X,Y and Z are socialist. Bitcoin is none of those things. Also somebody I met who has a lot of facebook likes says bitcoin isn't socialist". Sure, those things may be true. But all the same, bitcoin is a socialist system.
In fact all exchange commodities are inherently socialist. Lets back up a bit and be 100% clear on the terms as I use them. By "commodity" I mean something which can be traded. Trades occur wherever it is that they occur, and this place is called a "marketplace". By "exchange commodity" I mean anything tradeable which becomes useful to you as a medium of exchange, so useful that it now has more value that it might have had if you had the item while alone on a desert island or in a monastery. Exchange commodities can be anything; the most common example is gold. Dollars and bitcoins are a couple other examples. Their exchange value becomes larger than their use value. We could formalize these terms rigorously with mathematics but we'll avoid that for now assuming you know what I'm talking about already.
Exchange commodities have value because you believe others will value them, others in a SOCIETY. We come together with such SOCIAL SYSTEMS readily because we are SOCIAL animals. Gold isn't going to do much good for a hermit or a rugged individualist, other than as a malleable and long-lasting shiny conductive metal. It's when you are a SOCIALIST that you value gold and dollars and bitcoin. You are putting your faith in a SOCIAL SYSTEM.
If you hold gold, dollars, or bitcoin (GDB), you are assuming that others exist who are in this respect EQUAL to you. They also hold GDB and value it - and your assumption that you will be able to get something in exchange for these exchange tokens is also an assumption that others are EQUAL to you, at least in the sense that they also will value the tokens.
In some sense exchange commodities are socialist organizational tokens. This is what gives them their added value. Possession or use of them implicitly makes you a socialist. What kind exactly? Well that's when things start getting interesting. Hopefully we'll have time for that next week. For now it's enough to have made the step of recognizing the obvious as obvious, and then we can go back and rebuild all the rest of it later - this time on solid ground.
For now, welcome to the socialist club. You'll find there's already a card in your wallet.
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