News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by CyberDildonics on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @02:51PM (#10341377)
There are a number of fallacies in this.

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.

Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by jipsom on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @03:11PM (#10341531)
Nick Szabo is the person peoples most think programmed bitcoin. 20 years ago he developed smart contracts, which is basically programmable money that uses law as the analogue for its implementation. This is because this is essentially what is happening the mergence of software, programming, money, law, economics. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/smart_contracts_idea.html

The current leading implementation is "ethereum"

Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by CyberDildonics on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @04:22PM (#10342059)
Smart contract are a great idea, but they aren't exactly what you are describing and are orthogonal to the original thread.

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.

Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by jipsom on Thursday October 08, 2015 @11:37AM (#10353437)
I am not sure what you are pointing to or if we disagree. I mean to say the relationship between money and law is that of the moon and its reflection. Not separable but in this way.
Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by natrius on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @03:13PM (#10341548)
No one said anything about building law into money, nor about making digital money more like physical money. We're just adding information about who is being rewarded. That's it. Individuals can use that information to make decisions about who to reward, and that's what money is for.
Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by CyberDildonics on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @04:19PM (#10342030)
But that's not all. If anyone does anything with the information then the money diverges from ideal money because it is no longer as fungible. The usability becomes crippled and more complex in the best case, while completely unusable in the worst case.

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.

Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by gnaritas on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @10:37AM (#10346250)
> 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.

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.

Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by CyberDildonics on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @02:06PM (#10347752)
What you are saying only holds up until about 40 years ago. The 2500 years before that contradicts what you are saying.

> 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?

Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by gnaritas on Friday October 09, 2015 @12:08AM (#10358096)
> What you are saying only holds up until about 40 years ago. The 2500 years before that contradicts what you are saying.

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.

Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by natrius on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @04:32PM (#10342150)
You're overestimating the loss of fungibility. When someone decides to stop rewarding a polluter, they'll broadcast that fact to the public. They can limit that to future rewards rather than past rewards. It would be rare for money you hold to suddenly become worthless. I agree that no one wants that, which is why I don't think large swathes of society would do something they don't want. It could happen, though.

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.

Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot... by CyberDildonics on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @08:53PM (#10343495)
You don't know this, because no one really does. Plenty of people are trying to predict the future of crypto-currencies like they know without a doubt what will happen.

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.