Tootfinder

Despite much opinion to the contrary, the government money we use is crappy.
I'm at bitfest in Manchester to find out if Bitcoin could be a better money.
It could hardly be worse.
The mood is still good, people are joking about recent devaluation rather than crying. Those who aren't all in are trying to buy more at the discount.
After an introduction by Mad Bitcoins, Joe Bryan explains the problem with government money.
He imagines an island on which two types of money are tried, with a dividing wall between them.
When economic problems hit, government can just print more money on the fiat side. Everyone now using money which is worth less. Distorting prices, inflating asset prices, making the rich (who hold assets) richer and the poor (who have to pay inflated prices) poorer. Driving wealth inequality.
On the hard money side, government must tax properly. Take in more from the rich rather than inflating to take it from the poor. Reducing wealth inequality.
On the government money side, the wealthy monitize houses, stocks, resources. Saving in money is impossible, its inflated away. So they save in assets and hording resources. Capital is misallocated. The youth can't afford houses. Poverty traps are caused. The only way out is printing more for benefits. Making it all worse. More economic crises, more printing. More government debt.
Eventually, the wall is broken. Government money people can save in the hard money instead. It reduces the value of government money further. More printing. More inflation.
Eventually, war. Funded by printed money.
The dollar is the best of a bad bunch all other government money is falling in value even faster.
I wonder, is bitcoin really this better money though? It's limited, hard, and can't be printed without energy investment.
I'm still unsure that fixing money fixes the world.
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Note: "crypto" is mostly more like government money than bitcoin. It can be printed indefinitely by it's makers, does not cost it's makers to print. Crypto is usually just a scam people to get more bitcoin. Bitcoin is not crypto.
#bitfest #bitcoin

A panel of people from a few different countries.
The UK, where the event is, and the US currently have money which perhaps is good enough that the people there don't see much need to replace the money. Running global reserve currency helps exploit other poorer countries. The problems are fairly invisible.
But in other countries, poorer countries with even worse money, countries more exploited by debasement of the global reserve currencies, the problems with government money are more evident. They see the need for an alternative more strongly.
Adoption is important though. Money is only money if it's widely accepted. So given the choice of more users or higher price, the panel would all pick more users.
#bitfest #bitcoin

Meanwhile in the other room, Derrick from Shakespeare is giving a demonstration of live vibe coding. Building a gift exchange website.
His prompts build a website quickly and the monitoring agent spots bugs in it's own code, v asking to fix them.
It's all running locally, with only the ai requests going to the llm APIs. With a powerful enough GPU you could run open models locally instead.
It's handling source control management, committing to a guy repo, and deploying to the web.
It's certainly made a website faster than I would do as a dev, at least if I did do from scratch rather than a template. Would have to examine the code to check if it's got any big flaws that the agent checking for bugs missed.
Ai coding isn't strictly bitcoin related but there does seem to be a big cross over in people interested in both.
#bitfest #vibeCoding

Britain is broken, in various ways. Could adopting bitcoin help it bounce back?
Renegade Investor thinks so.
Central banks printing money causes government debt and artificially low interest rates. Their monetary policy is political and done for bankers not for people.
Bitcoin monitory policy is fixed.
Lockdown during pandemic was funded by money printing, and caused a big inflation pump and government debt increase. It caused the current cost of living crisis.
Lockdown could have been impossible under a bitcoin standard.
In pounds the cost of living has gone up lots over the last decade. But in bitcoin it's gone down massively.
He thinks wealth redistribution is taking money from productive people and giving it to those who aren't increasing the country wealth. Here I disagree entirely. Wealth is reality being taken from the workers and given to the capital owners. We are redistributing wealth towards the rich currently. Taking the wealth created by workers to give to idle owners.
I also wonder, would limited government power be good? Did the lockdown save lives? Would it do do under a worse pandemic? Limited government power may be double edged.
Not sure why he thinks immigration is funded by government, rather than immigrants increasing the country wealth. Seems to think bitcoin could reduce immigration, which I find unbelievable and undesirable.
This talk I disagree with quite a lot.
#bitcoin #bitfest #britain