The quickest route to profitability had something to do with solving problems in ways that--by happenstance--let them stay solved. This is relevant since profitability is how banks decide whether to grant a loan, and loans are what cause USD to enter the system. Previously, we mostly had good reason to want people's ventures to succeed.

But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures that have more to do with capturing a share of some fixed resource (attention/influence mostly), or building something that helps some of us at the expense of others (missiles, datacenters, planned obsolescence, surveillance, etc). It's no longer clear whether we're better off with the success or failure of a randomly chosen business venture. Maybe that venture seeks to harm us.

The quickest route to profitability has changed. Now it's about making things worse for the many while benefiting the few (since it's the few who have all the money). Yet we're still treating dollars as valuable despite the fact that they're issued on the basis of profitability, a property that no longer has much to do with making our lives better.

So I think we need a system that understands consent. When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor I need to be able to look at it and decide whether accpepting it helps people who are helping me, or whether it helps people who want to poison my drinking water for their mining endeavor. Dollars don't carry enough information to enable me to make that decision, and so far neither does crypto.

We don't have to banish scarcity entirely before building monetary systems that are not based on it. Once we figure out the better way, it'll likely be crypto-shaped, except it won't ask you to buy it, it'll just ask you to use it. It'll be a rejection of the old ideas about value.

That abstraction is simple debt. Your employer is, in exchange for what you've given them, promising to return to you something of value (food, shelter, entertainment, etc.) in the future. Money is the account of the promise made. The alternative is to forgo the debt and trade something of equal value at the time of the transaction. However, any negative externalities associated with you choosing what item of value you want to trade exists whether you demand it immediately or defer acceptance until some time in the future. Trying to find a new way to practice accounting isn't going to change anything.

> alternative is to forgo the debt and trade something of equal value

"equal value" is only a well defined concept when we have shared interests. But when half of us are trying to go to Mars and the other half is trying to prevent the first half from going to Mars so we can instead dedicate those resources to healthcare... when we're fighting over the steering wheel rather than fighting against a common enemy... then we can't usefully coordinate around a single untyped notion of "value". We're just running in circles negating each other's efforts. Our current economy is mostly waste.

New ways of accounting that don't obfuscate conflicts of interest the way that simple debt does will indeed change things.

It may be, but it is one you, the employer, can easily ask during the interview. If a prospective employee doesn't align with your values, you don't have to hire them, and thus won't have to make them any promises to deliver anything that you don't feel comfortable with. This isn't only theoretical. "Cultural fit" is considered by a large swath of employers to be one of the most important aspects of hiring.

I know the typical HN account loves to over-engineer solutions to mundane things, but you really don't have to invent some new type of accounting for this. All you have to do is talk to the people in your life.

That said, banks do provide a useful service for many people. However, that service doesn't magically happen. One has to choose the bank they are comfortable employing. Which, again, requires an interview before accepting a bank to work for you. That is where you can make sure the bank you choose to utilize the services of aligns with your "cultural fit".

Talking to the people in your life is all you need here.

But it requires types of debt which are not exchangable for one another. Whether it's working to take us to Mars or it's working to provide healthcare to our neighbors is something that debt should declare directly, it should not require a duplicate investigation at each transaction.

They got it by you accepting their promise to deliver something of value in the future. If nobody out there is willing to accept their promise of delivering future value, they don't have anything. That's the whole abstraction. It is materialized out of thin air when you agree to accept the promise.

Some new kind of hypothetical accounting system cannot possibly change anything. It will always be a hindsight account of the promise that was made. The only possible change is for you to tackle the promises themselves. Which requires talking to people. That is where the promises are made.

Something like Amazon is a partnership between the capital class and, to zeroth-order, everybody else, to screw over a small slice of the proletariat (their own employees and retail / warehouse workers) and the bourgeoisie (brick-and-mortar store owners).

It sucks when the capitalist Eye of Sauron focuses on however you make your living as a thing-to-make-more-efficient but when it lands on how someone else makes their living shit gets cheaper.

That's an enormous claim and I really doubt it.

The exceptions to this pattern that I've come across don't have enough money to be hiring people.

Maybe I've just been unlucky.

Do you mean, in general, as a society/culture, or are you just having an incredible run of jobs where each time that business is the problem?

So I've been taking classes with the idea that maybe I'll change careers, an I talk with people in the new industry, and I'm learning that they feel the same way about their jobs.

And I ask all of my friends and family about it and either they're true believers in something that it's clear to the rest of us is a problem, or they're clear-eyed about the fact that deep down their employer is quite shady.

There doesn't appear to be any money in anything that people actually want to happen. All of the investment appears to be in places that common folk are uncomfortable with (weapons, propaganda, financial abstraction, etc). Of course this perception is colored by my personal experiences, I can't exactly step outside of them. So to answer your question: it's both.

It can't always have been this way. There are so many good things left over from the past economy. It's like we were once speeding along towards a place we all wanted to go and then somewhere around the time I entered the workforce (2005) we realized that the steering wheel doesn't work and the car we're in isn't actually going where we want it to go. Record highs in the stock market, but to what end? Who cares about a car that goes very fast if it just takes you to an arbitrary place in the distance which has nothing to do with your needs?

Did you ever get a chance to turn it into something worth sharing? I'd be interested in an account along the lines of: "here are the decisions I made at the time, and now, with a decade of hindsight here's the ones I like and the ones I'd change if I were to try again."

I found this: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/document-coin/ which I guess addresses the first part of my curiosity.

What kind of harm do you have in mind here?

And if they only gave me $60 or so, and I made $10, I find it extremely unlikely the amount of harm tied back to musk is also in the range of $10.

Also sorry to be blunt but in the vaccine situation I almost entirely blame the person directly in charge of your niece's vaccinations.

What?? Where did this come from??

> you have to sell stuff to people who

I'm selling pizzas or something. I'm already willing to sell to basically anyone. Why would he have to order me to sell the things I'm selling?

If I buy a twitter check I'm contributing meaningfully to musk. If I just participate in society then the amount my transactions enrich musk might not be 0 but it's pretty close to 0. Me doing an ordinary sale at my unrelated business where I make $10 is not enabling anywhere near $10 of harm to me from musk. Nor $10 of harm to people in general from musk.

The lives of many people who have never given Elon Musk a dime have been materially worsened by the fact that he has a bunch of money, since that money bought political power and he used it in a way that was very destructive to a lot of people across the globe.

Happy for you that you weren't impacted, but a lot of people were and still will be.

You are if you've got a 401(k), just not voluntarily.

The SpaceX IPO is basically a scam designed to force pension funds to buy in before the stock price falls to where it should be.

The twisted perversion of Capitalism that is in effect today is dramatically dissociated from the idea of currency as a stable means of, yes, measuring participation.

Perverting the value of participation and economic contribution is, perhaps, what the cancerous elite can be mostly said to have done to destroy the true purpose of an economy.

The entire field of crypto was an attempt to create scarcity where none existed, by turning scarce electricity into special numbers.

Come on dude

like that was the point, now you're not talking to banks and paying taxes and following regulations; it's why Monero is still a thing

You can do whatever you want, you just have to worry about the IRS punishing you for it after the fact. Piss off the wrong people and you'll have your accounts frozen. Do favors for the right people and taxpayer money will be diverted to bail you out. Have the wrong kind of business and no bank will touch you.

Sure, there are rules written down somewhere, but it's an out-of-band thing to be enforced by whoever cares enough and has a big enough stick. Exceptions will be made to boost or suppress your activity based on whether you're friend or foe to those in certain powerful positions. Like when congress forgave all of the covid loans they had taken out , or when they shut down wikileaks donations, or the bank bailout in 2008 that motivated bitcoin in the first place.

There's a bunch of awful stuff in crypto, plenty of cases where hard forks are used to break the rules that are baked into the protocol. But none of that changes the fact that baking the rules into the protocol so they're followed by default is a good idea, and that enforcing them in the ad-hoc way that the traditional system does is incredibly wasteful.

In circles the agreement is that trust creates a 1:1 value ratio. I value the tokens you mint periodically as equal to my own, and this influences the number of tokens I give you in exchange for a loaf of bread or something. If I value the bread at 6 of my own tokens, that's the price I change you: 6.

But maybe we value each other's contributions to society differently, perhaps we consult the graph and end up with a 2:3 ratio where I trust you more than you trust me. This ratio influences prices. That loaf which I value at 6 of my tokens (times two, divided by three) I offer to you at a price of 4.

Or maybe you're working to cause me trouble, damming the river I drink from or somesuch, so the trust graph gives us a 5:1 trust ratio. In this case I'm going to need 30 of your tokens in exchange for this bread because I'm aware that by feeding you, I'm giving you energy that you'll spend harming me.

After exchange, the tokens get wrapped in a layer that indicates me as well. Since the next person to accept it will be benefiting both you and me by doing so (contributing to a system that supports our various activities), they'll have to consider the trust ratio between themselves and both of us in order to determine whether to value it. This creates a risk on my part: maybe I'll accept your token and be unable to find anybody who will subsequently accept it from me because everybody I associate finds your activities problematic. (These dynamics are all implementation details, humans just scan a QR code and see a price that was determined by the weighted trust graph).

You don't encounter tokens with problematically large stacks of wrappers because demurrage counteracts inflation. We're constantly minting new tokens for ourselves, and the value of existing tokens are constantly degrading so nobody has a token that's 100 years old. That is to say, they have a half life, they decay out of existence eventually, so there's an incentive to continue to be trustworthy and useful, rather than just hoarding enough that you can then opt out of being trustworthy for the rest of your life.

> I (an important person who is very loved and trusted by thousands of people)

The ratio we end up will not be a function of how many people trust you, or how many people trust me, it'll only consider cases where I've trusted somebody who trusts you, or where you've trusted somebody that trusts me. We opt-in to the asymmetry by using variable degrees of trust to enable or prevent the activities of our peers. It restores balance to the "vote with your wallet" situation. Currently, the only way to vote with your wallet is to vote yes or to abstain. This lets you vote no.

For a first pass I'm considering using https://github.com/cblgh/appleseed-metric for the trust graph. But I don't intend to start by making apps like the one I've described here--nothing so politically charged as money. I figure I'll get the protocol working with things that are low stakes and easy to get on board with and try my hand at making something money shaped only once it's performing well for other stuff.

Circles trust isn't about how much I actually trust you to deliver the product I bought and not harm me - it's about how much I trust you to not be a Sybil clone. But if Musk is harming me then I'll not trust his coins and people will have to find someone else to pay through.

You also have to make sure your intended outcome is a Nash equilibrium. In your system it sounds like I can set up a relay that pays out 1:1 (or 1+fee:1) without wrappers, which will quickly become a requirement, making the system harder to use, capturing a financial fee from normal system users, and unsolving the problem you wanted to solve.

All or nothing means that we have to chose between excluding outsiders entirely, or treating them as equals. A rich outsider shouldn't be able to use a pile of money that the locals don't have a say in and act like a king, but on the other hand there should be a gradual path to gaining the trust of the locals which has to do with whether you're helping or harming them.

I'll have to think about Nash equilibria. As for making the system harder to use... I guess there will always be the problem of displaying different prices to different people based on how trusted there are, but I think it's a small price to pay compared with avoiding the exploitation that rich foreigners visit upon poor nations: exploitation mediated by the fungibility of money. As for the other complexities of use, that's just software implementation details.

Why wouldn't it lead to a bid war bringing exchange ratios arbitrarily close to 1? You may take a 70% cut of any transaction does with you, but Alice figures out if she charges a 50% cut, she gets to keep 50% and you keep nothing of that same transaction. Then Bob figures he can undercut Alice by charging only 30%...

While this is occurring, anybody who is doing business with Elon is doing so at 1:1 rates, so nobody is being rewarded for taking the risk of getting to know him. And on the flip side of that, suppose we were wrong about him and he's actually a big problem for everybody around him... people have to either fully embrace his economic impact, or insulate against it all at once. It takes what could otherwise be a small mistake and forces you to make instead the big mistake. I think it's important to let people express their half-sure stance within the protocol rather than forcing them to put it all on the line.

As for the bidding war... imagine there's a mining company that has just showed up in town. Two grocery stores exist, one gives the miners a rate of 2:1 and the other gives them a rate of 3:1, because both stores don't trust them, but they have different tolerance for risk.

The 3:1 store has the opportunity to undercut the 2:1 store by switching to 1:1, and then the'll end up with all of the miner tokens. But then they have to spend that money somehow--probably by buying food from local farmers. Well if the mining operation ends up poisoning the aquifer and killing the crops, then the farmers are unlikely to accept that money, so it ends up only being useful for doing business with other miners, which isn't likely to be useful for the grocer because how much yttrium does a grocery store need anyhow.

Elsewhere in this thread somebody was arguing that I didn't need a new accounting system, I just need to talk to the people around me and only do business with the trustworthy ones. By encoding into prices the perceived risk that the other party might be a bad citizen in the future (thereby creating a liquidity problem for whoever holds their tokens) we create an incentive to actually have that conversation an act on what is learned from it. And that creates an incentive for that party to not be a bad citizen in the future.

Come to think of it, it might even enlist locals who have decided to take a risk on feeding the miners to take on a bit of a policing role. They now have a financial incentive to prevent the potential bad behavior. Circles has that dynamic too, but requiring somebody to be all in to even dabble makes it less likely to happen.

I remember here on HN 10 years ago everybody wanted to put everything on a blockchain. Some were betting on the collapse of the financial system.

None of those things happened but ethereum created a neutral, stable, secure cheap and transparent programmable financial platform.

Because it is neutral a lot of people ported the bad things happening in the traditional financial system to crypto: the scams, debt, speculation, etc.

And then most people started to hate it.

I guess 20 years ago most porn was hosted on Apache web servers, now it would be nginx. Should we hate nginx because of porn?

I'm not really excited about blockchains at all actually. They put you in the wrong sector of the design space that falls out of the CAP theorem. CRDT's and partition tolerance however, I think there's something useful in there.