Can Bitcoin be used to promote capitalism? I think this is a natural fit. At its core, Bitcoin is just simulated gold. Most of the good aspects of gold are virtualized while most of the bad aspects are not. Both Bitcoin and gold are a good fit for capitalism. But Bitcoin even more so.
These stores of value can be leveraged by capitalism. If someone wants to place a higher value on future holdings, they can obtain a higher balance at a better price today, then hold it (or "hoard," if you disapprove of this practice) until they eventually decide to release some of their holdings. That's all capitalism is: having different time horizons on stores of value (or lack thereof, if you don't have a future time horizon).
But can Bitcoin be used to promote socialism? I suppose it's possible but much less natural. In fact, Richard Wolff, a trained marxists, saw Bitcoin as merely a gamble, at least in 2018.
(start at: 3:14)
I know it might be weird to show an old video about what some random guy thought about Bitcoin in 2018, but his thoughts are material to my point. Wolff really is a marxist. And he really did/does think Bitcoin is just a gamble. And he really has no alternative but to stick to the establishment's 401k plan, rather than dive into the technology.
So if I were to extrapolate, a socialism implementation of Bitcoin would have some kind of co-op element, a system Wolff promotes in other interviews. It would also have a cap on ownership so no single person could have a disproportionate amount.
Caps like that, in the current technological landscape, requires KYC to implement, otherwise, it would suffer from sybil attack. But let's imagine that a new technology is developed to offer sybil protection without KYC.
Everyone would have a maximum balance. And if you spend all of your socialism coins, presumably on your basic needs, your balance is replenished so you can continue to live off of this basic income, so that nobody has an unfair upper-hand.
More importantly, nobody can hoard. Nobody can save "too much" today in order to gain an advantage for tomorrow. If someone reaches their maximum balance, any attempt to obtain more is cryptographically impossible, by design.
There are many people who would love this. Not me, personally. But I can see why they'd love it, especially if this was the only option. Imagine everyone having the same balance. Nobody could lord their balance over you. Nobody is a whale because everyone is.
I suspect that in reality, a system like this would mean that capital exists off-chain. Perhaps it would all be under the table. Instead of a store of value, you would trade in influence alone. Somehow, someone would figure out a way, or several ways, to implement capitalism.
That's why I like Bitcoin the way it is. It's all on-chain, for the most part. Influence is pseudo-anonymous instead of under the table. That means there's something to track.
Also see: Basic Income's Bad, Umkay?, wherein I critique Dan's hypothetical currency idea.
