Banishing people to barter is an effective disincentive.

How? Make money decay back to those that spend it through the accounts of those they spent it with so that they are rewarded more if they spend their money with 'good actors' that constantly increase the value they provide.

Read more at http://catallax.info

I'm not going to do some pyschoanalytical research on the guy who is making my sandwich at subway as well as dig around for the company's (probably bad and definitely unavailable) track record of food wastage and then decide whether or not to pay him and the company for my sandwich.

Also, the current monetary system already has the idea of "decay" built in due to the Fed targeting a 2% rate of inflation every year.

Also, not being able to trade "prefs" strikes me as a silly idea; one that you can't enforce and that a black market would form around relatively quickly.

Exactly! You don't know. But you don't know now either. In the future the market will know. And why should the subway shop that the polluter bought a sandwich from be punished after the fact when we find out he is a polluter. Instead, throw the guy in jail and fold the blockchain over him so that the sandwich shop is connected to the original person that unknowingly paid the polluter. You can't know, but you can guess. It isn't even that hard. And while you are trying to guess all the sandwich shops are showing you why they are the most profitable and why they can deliver you the most value.

>Also, the current monetary system already has the idea of "decay" built in due to the Fed targeting a 2% rate of inflation every year.

Inflation is unpredictable and under less control than now appears. See 1970s. Predetermined decay is a carrying cost. Unexpected inflation is a theft.

>Also, not being able to trade "prefs" strikes me as a silly idea; one that you can't enforce and that a black market would form around relatively quickly.

This is just a technical issue that building on a blockchain solves. Post transaction data analysis can find collusions.

Though, it does become a giant money laundering problem. When Russian oligarchs who obtained their money through destroying their own country and killing their own people invest in YC, then YC funds startups, then startups pay employees, how "dirty" is the money when it reaches the employee?

First, ideal money has a neutral origin. Money isn't a physical thing at its core. It is a shared ledger. Gold is a shared ledger. Bitcoin and all crypto-currencies are a shared ledger. The currency of a country is a shared ledger (albeit with more infrastructure and less guarantee of the total). So 'coloring' is extending the idea that money is physical into a place where it doesn't work. The Russian oligarchs didn't create the money they have, they had it transferred to them by others. Maybe they forced citizens by violence, but then again, maybe they sold oil and natural gas to China. Who is 'guilty' now and of what?

The second fallacy plays in to the first. Money is not law. Building law into money has been an excessively dangerous idea throughout history that to no one's surprise favors those who create and enforce the laws. Often those people are the ones with the most money. It isn't a leap to see that this is a cycle that reinforces itself.

The current leading implementation is "ethereum"

Smart contracts are further uses of the immutable shared ledger.

The mixing of law and money I was talking about is what we have now.

The end result is that people won't choose that money. The idea of what people 'should' use or 'the money that would be best for everyone' is shaky - people will use what serves their purposes the best.

For the first time people have real choice in the money they use, and they aren't going to choose something with regard to the greater good, it never works like that in a system of people with competing incentives except through violence.

The same idea coincides with inflation. People say 'a deflationary currency won't work'. The truth is, it will work at some point because it must - no one given a choice would choose an inflationary currency all else being equal. While all else is certainly not equal, people for the first time have that choice. The same applies to colored coins.

That's exactly backwards, if one has to choose between the two, both being available, everyone chooses to spend inflationary currency; it should be obvious why and it's a well known truism even: bad money drives out good money.

Quite simply, money that retains or increases in value doesn't serve the purpose of money very well and will always lose to money that decreases in value. The purpose of money is to spend it, not save it, it's for trade, not storing as an asset, and money that decreases in value has a built in incentive to be spent and thus better serves its purpose.

> bad money drives out good money

It does not. More ideal money drives out less ideal money. If you knew that one form of money would inflate and another would not, would you transfer to the non-inflationary money or would you spend every last cent of your current money?

You don't have to look far to see that what you are saying is ridiculous. Argentina, Venezuela, Zimbabwe etc. are recent examples of national currencies being less than ideal. The only thing preventing Argentina and Venezuela from using US dollars is violence. Zimbabwe eventually converted to US dollars.

At the same time, if you took a long view and were going to put away $100,000 in US dollars or $100,000 in gold and you would come back in 100 years to get it, which would you do?

A tautology.

> It does not. More ideal money drives out less ideal money.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

> You don't have to look far to see that what you are saying is ridiculous. Argentina, Venezuela, Zimbabwe

You're confusing inflation with hyper inflation, a common mistake.

> At the same time, if you took a long view and were going to put away $100,000 in US dollars or $100,000 in gold and you would come back in 100 years to get it, which would you do?

As I already told you the purpose of money is not to save it, I would not store 100k liquid as cash; cash does not exist to save, it exists to trade. Save assets, not money. Money is a tool, inflation only bothers those who don't understand how the tool works and try and use it inappropriately.

This isn't about making a choice for the greater good. Choosing a currency that lets you decide who to reward gives you power. People like power. They will grab it.

Choosing who to reward is a power money already gives you.

Cross reference the companies you find to be the worst in the world with their stock prices to see if your theories hold up.

With that said, everyone's going to be better off if we only punish transgressions that occur after merit capitalism is in place. Our monetary system has driven people to do crazy things, but we should just fix that, forgive them, and move on.

For me, that's an easy decision: privacy. Every time. And twice on Sunday.

And here's the thing. I have as much objective basis for my position as you have for yours. In both cases, that is pretty much "nil".

And that cuts to the bottom of pretty much all political / ideological debates if you dig deep enough. At some point you simply come to a conflict in fundamental values and principles... a situation for which there is no real resolution.

I disagree - unless you actually treat privacy as irreducible, God-given value that needs to be protected; at that point there is no help. But I suspect you have practical reasons for your views, and those we can reduce and discuss based on facts and rational thinking until we figure out a common view.

Personally, I am not holding a political opinion on this topic, but a practical one. Dynamic, real-time optimization on the level of society, a city or a country requires the data privacy advocates fight to hide. To optimize traffic flow we need to track how and where everyone is driving. To optimize power distribution we need to know how much and when a person uses electricity. To simulate disease spread effectively we could use real-life movement patterns. Etc. Yes, you can do a lot of this using aggregate, anonymized datasets, but real-time non-anonymized stream would certainly be qualitatively better.

There are lots of things we should do to move forward as a society that go directly against privacy of individuals. Those things are not even discussed! Everyone is focusing on possibility of government abuse and the potential benefits offsetting those costs aren't usually mentioned.

And that's all still high-level problems. There's another, more low-level issue. New technology keeps reducing the amount of privacy available. 30 years ago it was very hard to keep someone under constant surveillance. Today, with technology in everyone's smartphone, it's trivial. So what are we supposed to do to protect our privacy? Halt all new technology development? Roll back the industrial evolution? Progress of technology is empowering individuals, that's the whole point - but it also means those individuals will be gaining abilities to reduce the privacy of otheres. Are we really willing to halt progress in order to accommodate privacy needs?

We have little privacy, and have had less every generation. Its a matter of social mores, at least for public/social interaction. Say I can find out who you're staying with at the no-tell motel every Thursday. If its taboo to mention it, then you still have 'privacy'. Its the same as, no polite person mentions the sounds coming through the bathroom door - folks all know, but pretend they don't. Lots of things work this way, already.

I know, the govt knowing is different - that info will be used as leverage, every time, without mercy. Because the govt is an institution, and institutions have no morals.

I disagree with "and have had less [privacy] every generation". I think for the last hundred or so years we've been having unprecedented amounts of privacy thanks to urbanization and the anonymity that stems from it. In villages, where most people lived throughout history, there is no such thing as privacy.

I guess the primary place where our times are different is when it's you vs. a faceless Organization - a company or a government, where they can use your data against you while you have no target to retaliate against. In this way you may also say that we have less of that privacy with each generation, but that's because Organizations are quite recent things - your average villager of the past had neither need nor way to interact with their government the way we do today, and companies like we have now didn't even exist.

That last paragraph is probably the first time I thought that particular thought explicitly. At this point I'm not sure whether it's me conceding the point of continued loss of privacy in meaningful areas of life, or observing a strong correlation between diminishing privacy and progress of society, that may or may not turn out to be a causation of the "privacy vs. progress of mankind - pick one" form.

;).

(The real reason I'm not sharing it is because after browsing I realized I would have to edit out the names of people I've payed back or that payed back me - they may not be willing to have their information revealed - and that seems like a lot of work to defend a point I honestly think I've already mostly lost.)