Author

Topic: Economic Devastation - page 128. (Read 504776 times)

member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 01:01:31 PM
You are all politics and no substance. Your ego is so hurt because I (unintentionally) humiliated your idol aminorex. In fact, you made it worse by forcing me to admit that I did. I wasn't going to rub his face in it, but you did!

iCEBREAKER is trying to obfuscate (hide) the slamdunk point that 0% cost of time is insanity.

LOL, demurrage.  BRB, got to load up on Freicoin, the preferred currency of Occutards everwhere!   Roll Eyes

As AnonyMint I regularly criticized Freicoin (and Inflatacoin) in this forum. There are numerous problems. And their philosophy is Communist. You are too far from the details to understand that debasement does not come in just one flavor.

But I don't really care what any readers here think, because the only way I see to make a crypto-currency scale will involve never selling it to you and your ilk who are just in to profit on the greater fool theory of investing. It will involve a totally different strategy and design that is so far from anything you have even conceived of, that I am just laughing at you.

Seriously get off my lawn! You are an annoying idiot.

I didn't address the "0% cost of time" (whatever that means), but merely pointed out your most glaringly obvious logical fallacies.

You didn't understand anything. Thus you didn't point out anything.

I'm sure aminorex will feel bad about losing to your superior command of economics, as he runs his successful business and sips some $500/bottle Bordeaux in his multimillion dollar penthouse.

Am I supposed to be jealous? Obviously you are jealous of aminorex. If I were him, your feeble patronization would make me puke and want to cast you away from me.

I don't even drink. I have absolutely no interest in cigars, mansions, expensive bottles of liquor, rolls royces, etc.. I understand your point is that he has excess monetary capital to optimize his work environment (although I fail to see how being drunk will help him be healthy and be more productive, I'd rather just go run the mountain which is nearly free).

But that is irrelevant. It doesn't make him omniscient. He has been more productive than me since 2002 when I stopped programming. I basically haven't worked since 2002, until just recently trying to crank the gears back to on, but not so easy given I got used to not working.

I am not claiming aminorex is not smart. It is obvious that he is erudite. But that doesn't always substitute for a strongly reductionist visual IQ that I have. I am not so erudite, I am a sloppy writer, etc.. You won't easily detect my intellect. God seems to have given me the attributes that my intellect is easily obfuscated. Maybe it is a figment of my imagination too eh?  Lips sealed

Point is, I am just here discussing an issue with aminorex. I wasn't trying to frame the discussion as an IQ contest. You did. I just wanted to address whether 0% time cost is insane or not.

Why am I not surprised you have history with Jason Hommel, another fundamentalist D00MER nutjob who makes us silver bugs look so bad it's almost as if he was doing it on purpose?

It's like you guys are twins!   Cheesy

Because you don't understand that I am Hommel's first and #1 critic. And I disagreed with him about almost everything. Yet I also am honest about when I learn something so fundamentally genuis from a man who didn't even himself understand the all the implications of what he taught me (and thus made many mistakes himself). Hommel has weaknesses (as we all do), but he also had a few generative essence insights which were astounding.

I guess you didn't realize that rpietila was also formerly weakly associated with Jason Hommel too. I met him on Hommel's forum, which BTW I had suggested Hommel create. If Hommel had listened to me and allowed more user comments, he could have been the first ZeroHedge. If he had not locked down the forum, it could have been the first bitcointalk. We were out in the front with my usual lead. But he couldn't understand hitech.
legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1072
Crypto is the separation of Power and State.
January 06, 2015, 12:43:28 PM
iCEBREAKER is trying to obfuscate (hide) the slamdunk point that 0% cost of time is insanity.

LOL, demurrage.  BRB, got to load up on Freicoin, the preferred currency of Occutards everwhere!   Roll Eyes

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/freicoin-global-community-currency-from-the-occupy-movement

I didn't address the "0% cost of time" (whatever that means), but merely pointed out your most glaringly obvious logical fallacies.

Have fun declaring yourself the winner.  I'm sure aminorex will feel bad about losing to your superior command of economics, as he runs his successful business and sips some $500/bottle Bordeaux in his multimillion dollar penthouse.

Why am I not surprised you have history with Jason Hommel, another fundamentalist D00MER nutjob who makes us silver bugs look so bad it's almost as if he was doing it on purpose?

It's like you guys are twins!   Cheesy
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 12:25:07 PM
iCEBREAKER is trying to obfuscate (hide) the slamdunk point that 0% cost of time is insanity.

Of course it is. In legacy capital preservation terms, we are already negative (your point). In time preference of "new economy" capital, projects with 200%+ EAPR exist, and (lack of) time of the key actors is that there's not many more of them.

It seems then that your rationale for 0% debasement was it was the only way to attract the adopters of the currency. Satoshi did prove that mentioning gold in the whitepaper has attracted that initial burst of adoption from those goldbugs who are also technically inclined. Clever marketing as better gold, because even gold has 1 - 2% debasement.

But I don't (yet) submit to the conclusion of it is the only way. I have ideas to experiment with (first).
donator
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1036
January 06, 2015, 12:19:14 PM
iCEBREAKER is trying to obfuscate (hide) the slamdunk point that 0% cost of time is insanity.

Of course it is. In legacy capital preservation terms, we are already negative (your point). In time preference of "new economy" capital, projects with 200%+ EAPR exist, and (lack of) time of the key actors is that there's not many more of them.
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 12:16:01 PM
iCEBREAKER is trying to obfuscate (hide) the slamdunk point that 0% cost of time is insanity.
legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1072
Crypto is the separation of Power and State.
January 06, 2015, 12:08:34 PM
AM has been educated in economics far beyond his abilities, while aminorex has not.

That's why AM is poor and amino is rich.   Cool

Despite his singular gift for math, AM is remarkably susceptible to indulging in lazy logical fallacies:

* silver
* Bitcoin
* Monero

All collapsing or in Monero's case going no where fast.

As M. Andreessen just reminded us, "As a general rule, arguments that rely on cherry-picking specific date windows are not very good arguments."

AM loves the Texas Sharpshooter so much, I think he should marry him.  But he'll have to get in line behind Martinfoilhat Armstwrong!   Grin

You aren't a programmer in the sense of understanding my point, until you've written an application with 10,000 lines of code.

If you disagree with AM, you are definitely No True Scotsman!

You apparently view the world as Cathedrals. The world is a Bazaar.

The world exists in the gamut between those two abstract extremes.

AM's artificial dichotomy is a false dilemma.

Nevertheless, I thank him for prompting aminorex to write some magnificent educational material.  AM makes a fine irritant for his oyster, producing pearls of wisdom.
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 11:59:00 AM
Devastating intelligence  Huh

That wasn't a debate...

Correct. It was an ass whipping. Not that I intended it to be so humiliating, but it is not my fault if the other side is so weak.

...aminorex's devastating intelligence.

Got to love aminorex's 0% cost of time, as if we live forever, opportunity cost has no time component, time is perpetually free, and perpetual motion machines exist.

Definitely genius.  Roll Eyes  Cry

I guess it takes one to know on eh?  Wink You two can be peas in a pod.

Btw, in case any one didn't get the point upthread.

Money is claims on real capital. If claims on real capital are withheld from the market when money is stored rather than invested/spent, then some real capital has been delayed. If that delay was wise, then society benefits, but if it was mistaken then society suffers. But no one can know a priori (in advance) the outcome of decision to delay. If we allow delays to be unbounded in time without any cost, then the potential cost to society is infinite, while the incentives placed on the investor are misaligned, because the investor doesn't factor in any time cost.

Study the game theory of that, and you will note it diverges into the antithesis of prosperity. Real world historical examples include hoarding gold plummeting the velocity of money into a Dark Age. The velocity of money is already down -30% in the past 16 years.

The holder of monetary capital (a.k.a. investor) must have some time cost to his delayed deployment, otherwise he can not rationally weigh the costs that society pays for his delay in the case he is wrong about his preference.
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 10:49:22 AM
Thanks for the link,

Yw.

I fail to see the mechanism that could - absent coercion - assign much any value to a monetary stock that is constantly too much debased.

The catch-22 dilemma for upstart crypto-currency is that the early adopters are speculators whose reason for adoption is appreciation of the purchasing power of the currency. They are not adopting it because it has the widest use as a currency. Yet (in terms of rate of scaling given by the Metcalf squaring law of network effects) the population-at-large adopts a currency for the latter reason. Thus crypto-currency has stagnated. There is a chasm between the two modes and incremental approaches will not cross the chasm before outside forces overtake the slow moving morass (there is that non-0% time cost again), e.g. Coinbase and Paypal will basterdize Bitcoin into an off-chain fractional reserve system given they will have most of the "mom-and-pop" (and grandma) speculation "monkey see, monkey do" (stupid jealously) adopters on the next bubble uptrend (after 2015.75). Speculation adoption (greater fool theory mass mania) markets are fundamentally different than currency adoption (mass rationality of trading through a common fungible language) markets.

I have an idea how to solve this dilemma. I shared it with smooth in PM a couple of months ago. You can ask him.

Please note I am not coding an altcoin at the moment. Since November I have been coding an Android app (currently at the equivalent to 5000 lines of Java code milepost) which is yet unreleased.

And the more I talk in forums, the more coding I don't do.

So hopefully I made my philosophies clear enough by now and can go back to being a coder and not teacher and debater. I love teaching and sharing ideas, because it helps me learn and refine them. But I also love being a coder. The two disciplines are incongruent simultaneously, in terms of excellence at either one, because they both require enormous dedication of time (heck I was writing in these forums for 18 hours nonstop yesterday!). Excellence requires focus. I have become an excellent forum debater and idea promulgator (although still not an excellent writer), but this has come at the cost of losing my excellence (focus) as a coder.

I think it is time to flip the switch back.

Anything critically important we need to discuss?
donator
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1036
January 06, 2015, 10:28:03 AM
Thanks for the link,

I fail to see the mechanism that could - absent coercion - assign much any value to a monetary stock that is constantly too much debased.
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 08:55:49 AM
I think it is really crucial to note that aminorex and I are not debating whether some are better leaders and organizers than others, but rather whether time preference can be predicted perfectly (i.e. without friction a.k.a. with a priori omniscience).

So I am not envisioning a world where every person is their own boss. No. I am envisioning a world where leaders have to weigh the cost of time into their time preference decisions.

I am talking about reality. Aminorex is talking about delusions (e.g. Communism) where something (e.g. diversity) that isn't free of cost is assumed to be free of cost.

One thing Jason Hommel taught me is you can't give away for free that which is not free.
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 06:53:33 AM
We have to wonder why you are so against for example a 5% per annum debasement rate, when in fact that has been the reality since Mesopotamia. Is it because you are insecure without the motivation to enslave others? But don't worry, even in the Knowledge Age there will still be a power law distribution of capital (you still have the motivation to compete to be at the top of the social totem pole), but the capital will be stored in constant knowledge generation, not in stored digits for old misers to leech and enslave the youth with.

Old man (as I am too), if you can't continue producing then go silently into the night instead of stomping all over those in your wake.

Your delusion of a frictionless time preference is insanity.

Money that has been stored for a decade instead of being invested in creating more (knowledge) production, is no longer creating capital thus shouldn't be valued as capital.

The ability to transmit capital through time is no less important than the ability to transmit it through space.

Indeed and the key word is "capital" and not money. You continue to conflate the two.

I quote myself:

Some will create more knowledge value than others, and thus relatively be able to trade for more knowledge.

They will use fungible money to trade with, because it is more efficient than barter. But they don't need that money to retain its undebased value for decades. They will turn that money over as fast as possible to accelerate their own knowledge production. To the extent they can't, then it is best to debase that money, because they are no longer efficient with that much monetary capital. Thus it logically follows that if we don't want monetary capital to diverge from knowledge capital, then we must debase the monetary.

...

P.S. I do agree that there will still be some top-down organization, but it will become more localized (i.e. decentralized instances of localized top-down structures) and thus long-term stored money will wane.

The entire point is that money should be a fungible energy pump for moving non-fungible production through the economy. The money is constantly recycled, so that it remains congruent with the capital it represents. The more capital you can constantly create (surely your ROI can far exceed the debasement rate), the more money you can hold short-term. Thus the debasement rate is just a minimum ROI that must be attained. It is a filter on laziness or overconcentration of capital (because we know the more concentrated capital is, at some point it becomes less efficient).

Society will choose the money which accomplishes that goal. Even at 5% debasement, if you buried the money in a hole, it will still be worth 64% of its non-debased value after 8.6 years. And that doesn't even factor in all the increases in productivity due to rapid cycling (velocity) of money driven by the debasement, thus if productivity doubles in 8.6 years, you still increased your purchasing power by +29% for doing nothing other than burying your money in a hole.

And if you instead put your money to work in some activity that has a ROI > 5%, then your stored money doesn't even decrease in real purchasing power, even if productivity increases are at a standstill.


 
Quote
The entire point is that money should be a fungible energy pump for moving non-fungible production through the economy.

An enormous part of the economy is in the future.

Indeed but how far into the future? If I had the idea to create an Android app and waited 8.6 years before starting it and burying my money in the ground, by the time I started it, the market will very likely have changed and my app will no longer be needed.

You are conflating unproductive consumption with productive investment. Yes it is good to delay unproductive consumption, but that doesn't mean it is good to bury capital (as money) in a hole nor to deposit your money in a bank so it can lend money for unproductive consumption. A debasement rate makes it more difficult for lending to be profitable, and acts as filter on unproductive activities. It doesn't inhibit capitalism nor prevent one from aggregating more capital if they are more productive.

You arbitrarily pick 0% debasement out of a hat and declare it to be most ethical and optimum, but you have no logic which can support that arbitrary selection. Whereas, I am presenting logic for why 0% is not optimum, for it enables unproductive consumption and saving in banks.

The way to squelch usury and debt as a paradigm is to decentralize the debasement with PoW so the banksters can't capture the debasement. Then they have to actually compete to make high ROI investments instead of charging their losses to the public.

Quote
The money is constantly recycled, so that it remains congruent with the capital it represents.

When you create a reserve of liquidity, none of the real capital leaves the economy.  All you do is make all the float more valuable.  The real (social) capital remains in the network.  By removing excess accumulation from one point in time and airdropping it back in at another point in time, you are able to create some serious waves, inject energy into the system, and compound value through (token) capital formation.  Itś all just symbol pushing, programming.  Rob me of the ability to compound entropy in this way, and you destroy uncountable degrees of freedom.

I can't fathom how you can conflate so much. I thought you were a high IQ guy. Why can't you see that you are creating a strawman false dichotomy?  Never did debasement take away (or even diminish) any of those things you enumerate as important, unless you conflate "capital" with "money". It was the capture of debasement by the central banks that is negative, not debasement. Debasement is positive, because frictionless systems don't exist.

Quote
The more capital you can constantly create (surely your ROI can far exceed the debasement rate), the more money you can hold short-term. Thus the debasement rate is just a minimum ROI that must be attained. It is a filter on laziness or overconcentration of capital (because we know the more concentrated capital is, at some point it becomes less efficient).

Lazy people don't do capital formation.

Depends what you mean by "capital". If you mean money, then hell they do! Who the fuck are the banksters.

If you mean knowledge production, then correct.

Any minimum ROI required to stay in the game just means I need to concentrate a larger hoard in order to transmit value into the future.  You make that endeavor exponentially more difficult with a linear increase in debasement.  That sucks.  Very poor trade-off:  Linear benefit, exponential loss.


Complete nonsense. Come on man, if you aren't even going to think, then you are just wasting my effort and time.

Quote
And it shouldn't. The debased money drives the non-debased money out-of-circulation, as it should.

Only as long as the state forces them to take it.  Remove coercion, and no one will accept your will-o-wisps.  It's more like Gresham's dictat than law.  If you remember the law, you must surely remember why it was true.  Take away those conditions, and it is no longer true.

Nonsense again. You need to actually understand Gresham's Law[1]. People will chose the currency which has the most trade, because they need to be able to trade their money for things they need and want. Misers can choose physical gold over dollars today, and that has nothing to do with State coercion, rather market reality. Nobody wants to trade gold coins for Starbucks. Sorry man, you are delusional.

You argue with reality. No money has ever any money existed that wasn't debased. Why is that? Why didn't the population chose the non-debased gold coins? Because of the State was standing at every vendor with a gun to his head! Hell no. Delusional goldbug miser nonsense!

It is precisely this goldbug delusional nonsense which retarding the adoption of cryptocurrency[1]. But don't worry, I will fix that soon!

[1]https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9894744 (see linked research paper)
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9803201
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9801828
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9851482
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9862898
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9884655

Quote
The problem with debasement in the past is it ended up in the central banks control.

Disagree: The problem with debasement is that it destroys the freedom to program.  It places bounds on entropy.

More delusional nonsense.

Oh, and I have written 1000 lines of code in a day, on many occasions (much to the detriment of my health at the time).  I've written about a dozen >>10kloc apps, and spent years working on a system over a million lines, ultimately leading the effort for a while.  Which could never have been accomplished without a whole lot of capital formation.

You mean stored money capital, not knowledge capital. I programmed million user applications all by myself with no money upfront. Just me in a Nipa Hut in the Philippines with my computer and internet connection. And health willing, I will do it again soon (I am busy on it now).

And finally we get to the crux of your need for stored monetary slavery. It is because you get sick when you work too much, so you want to be able to parasite on those who work too much.

Learn how to have a healthy environment when you code. Exercise more. Have a nice view to relax your eyes. Get out in fresh air every day. Etc..

I am currently working on a project which requires a greater degree of capital formation than has ever been achieved in human history.  If successful, it will benefit many many millions of people in the first generation, and hopefully those benefits will compound to the whole species in future generations.

How many million user programs have you written? Talk is cheap, show me the code. You attribute an erroneous value on yourself (and your fellow stored money top-down capitalists). How do you know a priori that you are more wise than the person who invested his capital immediately instead of burying it in a hole to express a time preference? You can't know. Some percent will fail. That is why assigning 0% cost to time is very costly to the economy! Duh! At the asymptote of infinite time for capital to buried in a hole, the detrimental cost rises to infinity! Even a 15 year old could probably understand that simple equation.

You want to wish away friction from the time domain, but that is insane, because it never was in reality and there is no such thing as a frictionless system. You just transfer the frictional costs else where at great detriment to the economy and society.
Duh!

The reason projects had to be so big and thus you need employees instead of active owners is because software production has not been remunerated in modules up to now[2].

[2] https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9972003



programming machines will be obsoleted one day.  machines will program the machines.  we will create our competition.  and we will lose that round.

Utter nonsense and propaganda. I refuted Kurzweil[3].

[3] http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Algorithm_!=_Entropy



That's why you should stop thinking about money as a commodity.

I wasn't.

It's a symbol used to program society.

Exactly.



But if their capital is knowledge, and it can't be created with money (because creativity doesn't respond to money, it responds only to the heart and desire and serendipity), then how can I induce them with money?

That's a conceivable end-state to a lengthy process.  Several forks in the path are possible, and that particular end-state may be very long indeed in coming.  Please remember that we are not there yet.  

A symbol is not knowledge, but the transition from commodity to knowledge must necessarily involve a transition from material to symbolic, if it is to be incremental.

However, knowledge is not fungible.  Knowledge cannot be money per se.  It can conceivably supplant money, but that requires vast degrees of social reorganization and at least one generational change.  (Think Arthur C. Clarke.)  You want to immanentize that eschaton, and I can respect that.  Given a notion of inevitability (pace Marx) I can't fault you for trying to advance that clock.

Meanwhile, there is work to be done, and God willing I am going about doing it.

The transition is well underway under your radar. You shouldn't place so much value on yourself being omniscient and thus valuing your stored money at 0% friction for perpetuity.

Can't you grasp that an entire generation of developing world knowledge workers has grown up without prioritizing materialism? Wait I will go find a survey on their priorities which I saw recently...(couldn't find it, but here are some I found[4])

We can argue about how long it will take for the waterfall transition to ensue, but there is no argument about it being inevitable.

You go on thinking you can get maximum motivation from programmers by offering them money, while I will push on with my theory that they will be most motivated by owning their own creations and really appreciation (both in ROI and social feedback loops).

[4]I think this is the source for the article I had seen:

http://www.bcg.com/media/PressReleaseDetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-172942

Quote
One of the more significant findings in Decoding Global Talent has to do with what makes people feel motivated in the workplace—not just those willing to work abroad, but people everywhere. While money still matters, the survey provides strong evidence that intrinsic rewards have pushed past strictly financial considerations as the most important determinant of workplace satisfaction. Survey takers as a whole cite appreciation for their work as their number-one priority. Two other “soft” factors—good relationships with colleagues and good work-life balance—come in second and third.

“The economic struggles of many countries since 2008 have prompted many people to focus on the inherent satisfactions of work, rather than on things that may depend on what’s happening in the larger economy,” says Andrea Strohmayr, international operations manager at The Network and a report coauthor. “That said, the shift toward workplaces that have a more collegial atmosphere and an expectation of positive feedback has some deeper root causes and is likely to be with us for a long time.”

https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/human_resources_leadership_decoding_global_talent/?chapter=4#chapter4
https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/human_resources_leadership_decoding_global_talent/?chapter=5

What I see in the above surveys is that the global knowledge workforce is becoming less materially focused and thus can't be bought only with money. They are ripe for the Knowledge Age waterfall transition wherein they will get all those non-monetary preferences they want!

https://about.yammer.com/yammer-blog/survey-of-10000-yammer-users-reveals-benefits-of-enterprise-social-networking/
http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/blog/2013/04/25/5-characteristics/
legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1030
Sine secretum non libertas
January 06, 2015, 04:05:02 AM
programming machines will be obsoleted one day.  machines will program the machines.  we will create our competition.  and we will lose that round.
legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1030
Sine secretum non libertas
January 06, 2015, 03:49:24 AM
You apparently view the world as Cathedrals. The world is a Bazaar.

Please.  I was all bazaar-ified before ESR ever wrote about it.  Long before I got my autographed copy of the hacker's dictionary.  The world is neither.  The world is as we find it.  We organize it as a bazaar where we want to make a bazaar.  We organize it as a cathedral where we want to make a cathedral.  Both are valuable and good to those who build them and to those who enjoy them.  I am glad of both Chartres and Djemma al-Fna.  
legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1030
Sine secretum non libertas
January 06, 2015, 03:23:05 AM
Aminorex, if someone handed me a $billion but I found I couldn't buy what I wanted with it, what would be the value of those $billion digits? In fact, the $billionaires can't buy what they really want. There are only so many possessions you can buy, before you've bought duplicates of everything. This is why they look for overpriced symbols of wealth to purchase so they can feel they haven't run out things to buy.

That's why you should stop thinking about money as a commodity.  It's a symbol used to program society.

Quote
But if their capital is knowledge, and it can't be created with money (because creativity doesn't respond to money, it responds only to the heart and desire and serendipity), then how can I induce them with money?

That's a conceivable end-state to a lengthy process.  Several forks in the path are possible, and that particular end-state may be very long indeed in coming.  Please remember that we are not there yet.  

A symbol is not knowledge, but the transition from commodity to knowledge must necessarily involve a transition from material to symbolic, if it is to be incremental.

However, knowledge is not fungible.  Knowledge cannot be money per se.  It can conceivably supplant money, but that requires vast degrees of social reorganization and at least one generational change.  (Think Arthur C. Clarke.)  You want to immanentize that eschaton, and I can respect that.  Given a notion of inevitability (pace Marx) I can't fault you for trying to advance that clock.

Meanwhile, there is work to be done, and God willing I am going about doing it.

Quote
I understand human nature will try to create artificial scarcity to try to have power, e.g. wars can create physical scarcity. But they never succeed long-term.

Having power is good.  Without it, no work is done (in time).  There is a lot of work to be done (and precious little time).  Yes, power is the means by which evil is accomplished.  Conversion to a non-scarcity knowledge economy will not stop power, desire, evil or good.  It won't even stop war, in and of itself.  It can bring the species to a more expansive and sustainable homeostasis, for a while, but it is not the apocalypse.
legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1030
Sine secretum non libertas
January 06, 2015, 03:09:30 AM
Money that has been stored for a decade instead of being invested in creating more (knowledge) production, is no longer creating capital thus shouldn't be valued as capital.

The ability to transmit capital through time is no less important than the ability to transmit it through space. 

If a crypto could only function on the surface of the earth it would be slightly less utile than one which could be transmitted to orbit and back -- only because there are few humans in orbit.  But, God willing, there are plenty of humans in the future.

Quote
The entire point is that money should be a fungible energy pump for moving non-fungible production through the economy.

An enormous part of the economy is in the future.

Quote
The money is constantly recycled, so that it remains congruent with the capital it represents.

When you create a reserve of liquidity, none of the real capital leaves the economy.  All you do is make all the float more valuable.  The real (social) capital remains in the network.  By removing excess accumulation from one point in time and airdropping it back in at another point in time, you are able to create some serious waves, inject energy into the system, and compound value through (token) capital formation.  Itś all just symbol pushing, programming.  Rob me of the ability to compound entropy in this way, and you destroy uncountable degrees of freedom.

Quote
The more capital you can constantly create (surely your ROI can far exceed the debasement rate), the more money you can hold short-term. Thus the debasement rate is just a minimum ROI that must be attained. It is a filter on laziness or overconcentration of capital (because we know the more concentrated capital is, at some point it becomes less efficient).

Lazy people don't do capital formation.  Any minimum ROI required to stay in the game just means I need to concentrate a larger hoard in order to transmit value into the future.  You make that endeavor exponentially more difficult with a linear increase in debasement.  That sucks.  Very poor trade-off:  Linear benefit, exponential loss.

Quote
This is why all money is debased since Mesopotamia and that will never change.

Mesopotamians were just saving in the wrong commodities.  If they had been hoarding cultural goods as assiduously as they hoarded wheat and gold, they could have transmitted far more wealth into the future than they could physically accumulate.

And man would never fly, according to the best minds of the late 19th century.

Mesopotamians could not conceive of a knowledge age.  We are standing on the shoulders (and stomping on the faces) of giants now.  We can invent uses of social capital which can achieve things no Assyrian despot could ever have conceived.

Quote
And it shouldn't. The debased money drives the non-debased money out-of-circulation, as it should.

Only as long as the state forces them to take it.  Remove coercion, and no one will accept your will-o-wisps.  It's more like Gresham's dictat than law.  If you remember the law, you must surely remember why it was true.  Take away those conditions, and it is no longer true.

Quote
The problem with debasement in the past is it ended up in the central banks control.

Disagree: The problem with debasement is that it destroys the freedom to program.  It places bounds on entropy.

Quote
But PoW solves that, and we need to fund PoW anyway. And tx fees are anti-scale and anti-commerce.

Really I don't know why it took you so long to realize this!

I realized it long ago.  Long before I stopped fighting it.  Because it is worthwhile to fight it up to the limits of its necessity -- and no further.

Oh, and I have written 1000 lines of code in a day, on many occasions (much to the detriment of my health at the time).  I've written about a dozen >>10kloc apps, and spent years working on a system over a million lines, ultimately leading the effort for a while.  Which could never have been accomplished without a whole lot of capital formation.

I am currently working on a project which requires a greater degree of capital formation than has ever been achieved in human history.  If successful, it will benefit many many millions of people in the first generation, and hopefully those benefits will compound to the whole species in future generations.  But it requires the transmission of large amounts of capital through time.  Just because no one has done it before does not mean that it can not or should not be done.  (Because it is unprecedented, it is incredibly unlikely to be successful, but the benefits are great enough so that I am willing to expend my life on it.)

That's why I strongly disagree about debasement.  Debasement threatens this project, and makes it much more difficult (and no less worthwhile).  If I can conceive it, and potentially accomplish it, then others may as well.  Some will have bad ideas.  Some will have good ideas.  That's how freedom rolls.

member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 01:28:16 AM
I can make my argument to aminorex more succinct as follows.

Money that has been stored for a decade instead of being invested in creating more (knowledge) production, is no longer creating capital thus shouldn't be (fully) valued as capital.

The entire point is that money should be a fungible energy pump for moving non-fungible production through the economy. The money is constantly recycled, so that it remains congruent with the capital it represents. The more capital you can constantly create (surely your ROI can far exceed the debasement rate), the more money you can hold short-term. Thus the debasement rate is just a minimum ROI that must be attained. It is a filter on laziness or overconcentration of capital (because we know the more concentrated capital is, at some point it becomes less efficient).

This is why all money is debased since Mesopotamia and that will never change. And it shouldn't. The debased money drives the non-debased money out-of-circulation, as it should.

The problem with debasement in the past is it ended up in the central banks control. But PoW solves that, and we need to fund PoW anyway. And tx fees are anti-scale and anti-commerce.

Really I don't know why it took you so long to realize this!
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 12:24:20 AM
Post-scarcity, Post-Industrial World

Aminorex, if someone handed me a $billion but I found I couldn't buy what I wanted with it, what would be the value of those $billion digits? In fact, the $billionaires can't buy what they really want. There are only so many possessions you can buy, before you've bought duplicates of everything. This is why they look for overpriced symbols of wealth to purchase so they can feel they haven't run out things to buy.

Needs and desires drive the economy.

If I don't want "one size fits all" software and manufactured items, but I rather want them highly diversified (far beyond the diversity that a factory or top-down command economy can produce), then I have no choice but to pay the producers of software and 3D printer designs in the form of money that they find most capitalistic (i.e. the one they can use to build their capital).

But if their capital is knowledge, and it can't be created with money (because creativity doesn't respond to money, it responds only to the heart and desire and serendipity), then how can I induce them with money?

Your theories derive from physical resource scarcity wherein people need significant money (i.e. 30 - 50% of their income) just to survive or for basic needs, but there is no resource scarcity. Programmers are just fine with Jolt cola, pizza, and a desk to sleep under. We are not lacking physical resources.

What motivates us is knowledge exchange and seeing our work being used and appreciated.

We only need money as a way to make our knowledge exchange more fungible. We don't need money as a long-term store of oppressive destruction of our capital by top-down outsiders who aren't contributing any capital in kind.

This is why rpietila and I no longer understand each other. We understood each other only when I was temporarily deluded as silver bug from 2007 to 2010.

I understand human nature will try to create artificial scarcity to try to have power, e.g. wars can create physical scarcity. But they never succeed long-term.
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 06, 2015, 12:04:10 AM
You can't touch the anonymous programmer you resent.

You can't out compete him with your money, because the programmer you hire just wants your money only.

Competition doesn't exist for a programmer, because he is the only one who knows his code as well as he does. There are more opportunities for programmers than there are programmers and that will never change.

Sorry your model of the Knowledge Age is uninformed, probably because you are not a programmer and you don't understand that software is not engineering (bounded entropy), rather it is an art form (unbounded entropy) and will always be[1].

[1]http://elegantcode.com/2011/06/22/why-software-development-will-never-be-engineering/#comment-234616581
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6065144
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3345

I am, in fact, a programmer.  (I wrote ~200 lines of C++, 75 lines of python, 50 lines of shell, and 12 lines of matlab today.) So is any CEO worth his salt.  He's just programming the organization, rather than a dumb automaton.  His unbounded entropic art form is essential to achieving human potential. Moreover, 90% of all humans should never write a line of code that anyone else is going to depend upon.  99% should never write a line of code that a human life may depend upon.  Yet they are almost all useful for some constructive purpose, when suitably guided.  Which requires capital formation.

You aren't a programmer in the sense of understanding my point, until you've written an application with 10,000 lines of code. Then you start to appreciate the point that no one can compete with what you did. Programming is individuality. The capital is the formation of that individual expression, i.e. the knowledge itself not the monetary.

Everyone will be trading their knowledge creations. I have no idea why you think only a few percent would. People (consumers) are diverse with diverse desires, situations, and needs. One size fits all sucks. Have you tried the one size fits all shoes lately?

Some will create more knowledge value than others, and thus relatively be able to trade for more knowledge.

They will use fungible money to trade with, because it is more efficient than barter. But they don't need that money to retain its undebased value for decades. They will turn that money over as fast as possible to accelerate their own knowledge production. To the extent they can't, then it is best to debase that money, because they are no longer efficient with that much monetary capital. Thus it logically follows that if we don't want monetary capital to diverge from knowledge capital, then we must debase the monetary.

You apparently view the world as Cathedrals. The world is a Bazaar.

Suggested reading material:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9940008
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron-5.html


P.S. I do agree that there will still be some top-down organization, but it will become more localized (i.e. decentralized instances of localized top-down structures) and thus long-term stored money will wane.
legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1030
Sine secretum non libertas
January 06, 2015, 12:01:43 AM
You can't touch the anonymous programmer you resent.

You can't out compete him with your money, because the programmer you hire just wants your money only.

Competition doesn't exist for a programmer, because he is the only one who knows his code as well as he does. There are more opportunities for programmers than there are programmers and that will never change.

Sorry your model of the Knowledge Age is uninformed, probably because you are not a programmer and you don't understand that software is not engineering (bounded entropy), rather it is an art form (unbounded entropy) and will always be[1].

[1]http://elegantcode.com/2011/06/22/why-software-development-will-never-be-engineering/#comment-234616581
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6065144
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3345

I am, in fact, a programmer.  (I wrote ~200 lines of C++, 75 lines of python, 50 lines of shell, and 12 lines of matlab today.) So is any CEO worth his salt.  He's just programming the organization, rather than a dumb automaton.  His unbounded entropic art form is essential to achieving human potential. Moreover, 90% of all humans should never write a line of code that anyone else is going to depend upon.  99% should never write a line of code that a human life may depend upon.  Yet they are almost all useful for some constructive purpose, when suitably guided.  Which requires capital formation.

member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
January 05, 2015, 11:52:02 PM

You can't touch the anonymous programmer you resent. You can do like they did in Vietnam massacre an entire village hoping one of the many you kill is the enemy. I do expect the socialism to kill itself this way.

You can't out compete him with your money, because the programmer you hire just wants your money only.

Competition doesn't exist for a programmer, because he is the only one who knows his code as well as he does. There are more opportunities for programmers than there are programmers and that will never change.

Sorry your model of the Knowledge Age is uninformed, because probably you are not a programmer and you (apparently) don't understand that software is not engineering (bounded entropy), rather it is an art form (unbounded entropy) and will always be[1].

Your model is also failing to understand that the programmers (hackers) don't need you. They can survive on Jolt cola and pizza and coding. The rest of the world could do what ever it wants and it doesn't matter to us. But you need us for everything. Your world doesn't survive without our code. Fact is that knowledge now makes the world go around. And knowledge is all that really matters now. Human nature will ascribe to what matters economically, always has. Just as you can't tell human nature that financing Model Ts is a productive activity because it employed more people than today's car factories. You can't stop the progression of technology, because economic paradigm shifts hand victory to all those who don't try to dig trenches with spoons.

[1]http://elegantcode.com/2011/06/22/why-software-development-will-never-be-engineering/#comment-234616581
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6065144
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3345
Jump to: