I don’t think you seem to be critical of Ryan’s ideas. And they aren’t mine, I was living my own life until 2012 when a Miles Hingston that I connected with over the P2P Foundation forum told me about them. I know since before that Michael Linton is critical of Ryan’s legacy. I know of Michael’s public person from the attribution Ryan gave, and I see Ryan’s work as the continuation of the pretty long legacy of thinking around mutual credit. My own ideas is Resilience, my old idea for a wealth redistribution system on top of multi-hop mutual credit. It is why I’m invested emotionally in Ryan’s legacy.
oh, heh, often I think I’m being super-critical and then I find out people have no clue what I’m getting all worried about. Uber-Canadian here 
1 Like
You haven’t seemed critical of Ryan’s ideas. Don’t think we’ve talked about Resilience much. Haven’t got impression that Canadians were critical, seem pretty chill, lots of snow, mooses, and stuff. Besides now in the past year with the extreme covid1984 from that Trudeau but life is long and that has not even been a year.
Sorry for being critical or anything, but truth be told, wealth redistribution is a dangerous idea! It kills the very incentive of why we (as a species) have chosen to have a wealth-system in place.
The future we’re (or at least I’m) heading to is best described by these keywords: distributed, decentralized, anonymous, uncensorable, surveillance-free, and most importantly free-to-choose, meaning people would be free to choose whatever system they wanna live in. And I doubt they would choose to live in a monetary system that has wealth-redistribution functionality built-in. Moreover, the very concept of wealth-redistribution requires that it be supervised by some higher authority (the state), which is itself at odds with the notion of decentralized, anti-state “grassroots” control structures…
If I understand correctly, any wealth redistribution system aims to lift the extremely poor from abject poverty to mere subsistence from which they may build the foundation for their bright future. A very noble cause indeed… However, note that the same cause can also be fulfilled via. private-charity. Moreover, when a person personally helps another needy person, the help is not just monetary but psychological too. And often it’s the psychological help, intellectual advice, inspiration, or reassurance they need beyond just money, all of which a wealth-redistribution welfare system can never ever even dream to provide. Humans today have lost all touch with humans… A person financially helped via. the welfare system remains spiritually poor; where a person helped via. private-charity forever stays emotionally obliged to his helpers and does all he can in return for their kindness towards him, a person helped via. the welfare-system thanks none except the ruthless, authoritative cruel characterless state for having provided the help that he wholeheartedly believes was his birth-right in the first place; where a person helped via. private-charity amends to be just as kind, helpful, and nurturing as his saviors were to him, a person helped via. wealth-redistribution votes for more welfare, more control, and more coercion. Love and kindness are all but gone from a welfare-society, and are rather replaced with hatred towards the rich and the evil! The welfare system is nothing but socialism in disguise; and the wealth-redistribution system, therefore, is nothing but the road to serfdom!
As an ancap, I would recommend you look at this article: https://mises.org/library/starving-man-free.
It’s hard to change someone’s mind, especially if they’ve held their notions for decades… I was reluctant too… It’s hard for our reason-seeking minds to accept an idea as counter-intuitive as that; I mean how on earth could something done out of good intentions ever lead to bad results, right? But that’s exactly the case with the problem of lifting people from poverty; only passive solutions stand a chance, the active ones like the one you propose only lead to all being equally poor and equally helpless! I hope that makes sense…
2 Likes
In fact that’s what I was planning to develop as my first (h)app on Holochain: a private-charity app for connecting the needy with those willing to help (was gonna call it The GoodWill Happ)… However, the central obstacle was what the hell would people help the needy with? With Bitcoin? With Holo fuel? No chance! And so I realized we needed a value-exchange system in place before developing anything over the Holochain ecosystem… I hope Vril is the answer to that…
However, truth be told I’m not that proficient in developing stuff on Holochain… Moreover, I’m just a community member, so I don’t get told any of their internal plans for future features, and implementation-hacks, and stuff like that (neither do my github-issues get resolved as timely as theirs)… It’s like the dichotomy that Belinda Noakes was talking about in her “Low Code Zone”: those with economical, literary, theoretical and intellectual interests lack the skills needed to make their ideal monetary-systems come true, and those with the skills lack all understanding of even the basics of economical system-design!
Vril suffers from what some call the public goods problem. That is to say that there’s little to no incentive for anyone to invest their effort and time developing this simple (h)app… It would be best if a foundational (h)app like this (the persona/profile (h)app being another foundational (h)app) is developed by the official team itself… Moreover, neither do I (nor the other community members willing to collaborate) have access to the large pool of testers that Holochain has (as a matter of fact, I test in prod; hahaha).
If only they like the proposal of doing Holo-fuel the Vril way…
:–|
1 Like
[I’m assuming that by open-ledger mutual credit systems, you mean systems that, unlike Ripple, are structured such that all negative balance account holders owe (or are indebted to) to all the positive balance account holders, without anyone being specifically indebted to anyone else. Under this definition, both Holofuel and L.E.T.S. qualify as such systems (although Holofuel should rather be called a private currency and not a mutual-credit economic system, as even @art on one instance agreed to, Questions about DHT, cryptography, and security). Correct me if I’m wrong in my assumption.]
You’re right. Absolutely right. However, this luxury that you address comes at a great cost. It requires us to have access to a benevolent God that grants just and appropriate credit-ratings to individuals in such an economy. Knowing that “God is Dead”, we are left to put this responsibility onto powerful individuals of the society, which, as a libertarian, I see as a nightmare scenario! Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely! The powerful ones (the maintainers of the LETS systems) can and will issue as much credit-worthiness as possible for themselves (and their friends) while in return doing as little contribution to the economy as possible (i.e., defaulting on their debt), causing frequent depressions. The naive solution that such systems take to avoid such problems is to keep the ledger publicly open to all the members (enabling the members to perform audits on the system should they so desire; LETS, unlike Holofuel takes that route; both are equally worse though).
Moreover, as an economist, you gotta be careful about the incentives that you create for the constituent members of the economic system, for that affects the overall outcome of the system. There’s very little incentive for a member of an open-and-publicly-accessible-ledger mutual credit (LETS-like) system to perform thorough extensive inspections (or audits) on the system before staking (i.e., participating) in the system, and any benefits of doing so are far too distributed (the public-goods problem of externalities), neither is there any incentive for the official maintainers (the powerful ones) to be vigilant in assessing the credit-worthiness of the individuals on behalf of the members of the system, quite the contrary. And, on the other hand, the participants are incentivized to go into as much debt as possible (because why not!). All this adds up to imply that such systems are anything but scalable. Even empirical evidence states that such systems did not and can not scale beyond closely-knit community families! And I guess you (@pauldaoust) agree, when hinting,
Regarding such generalized mutual-credit systems,
would be disastrous! So I guess LETS is out of question. @mwl, feel free to present your defences, if any (don’t be offended, please)… I’m just reviewing all the money-related systems in the town…
Holo-fuel is the weird kid in the town; in fact, it’s that yet-to-be-born baby whose male parent is unknown and hasn’t yet been determined despite all attempts! Hell, even the DNA testing has been of no help! [LOL! Joke of the year!] Is it a mutual-credit system… Is it a private currency… Either one or the other, please. It can’t be both! [LMAO]
A mutual credit system is one in which the participants mutually owe each other for the favors they did to one another. Someone may do some childcare for x hours and make their balance positive. They may take a cab and make their balance go back to zero. They may further take another cab and make their balance go negative. In this +ve/-ve dichotomy, both LETS and Ripple (although very differently; in fact it only meets some of the preconditions needed to be called so) are mutual-credit systems. But note that Holo-fuel can’t be, as in Holofuel you just can’t do anything and go negative balance; you have to provide hosting-power and hosting-power alone; conversely, your credit-worthiness is determined only by your ability to provide hosting on Holo fuel, effectively making it a private currency with which to buy server-power.
Well said. I’m absolutely in favor.
The only sensible argument I’ve ever heard against Ripple-like systems (the “grassroots”, “ground-up” systems that some of us are in unconditional love with) was from @matslats that had something to do with the algorithmic complexity of the extensive path-finding that Ripple relies upon, that it would take too long and too many hoops to make everyday transactions, and that this drawback would render Rippling systems unusable… But I think computers are good enough for things like that. Moreover, the Vril implementation of rippling money does all this path-finding on the DHT (as opposed to p2p Ripple’s node-to-node call-forwarding), vastly improving the time-complexity.
Sometime back in 1995, it was said that every link on the web was just 19 clicks away from every other link! And even then the number of webpages was far more than today’s population! So I guess that shouldn’t be a problem… By the way, just to be safe, how long can a DHT lookup take? Any experts around???
1 Like
No problem, I think the human condition is pretty critical by nature. Change always has to be evaluated. I think the narrative that wealth redistribution is per definition bad, is tied to the assumption that wealth redistribution is coerced onto a population. Much like the notion that the State is per definition violence. It isn’t, only a State enforced by violence is. There are alternative non-coerced States, I think Ethereum is the beginning of a paradigm for truly opt-in State.
In Resilience, the higher authority is, actually, each individual. And so it satisfies all properties of a voluntary system. It is unique. Nothing similar has ever been described. I invented it 8 years ago. That said, the higher authority, the State, can also be used as an intermediary to organize consent-based wealth redistribution, this is perfectly possible. But that is another topic from my system Resilience.
1 Like
Don’t you think? I doubt people are that altruistic these days… However, I can be wrong… Maybe my worldview is a bit too gloomy and negative…
If you search paths in two directions, bidirectional, you lower nodes queried with sqrt. If each person does their own bookkeeping, each computer only has to think about their direct connections (very few) and the questions from their connections (also few).
1 Like
I think you equate wealth redistribution with violence, because you have imitated people that promote that association as “obligate”. There can be non-coerced wealth redistribution. The brain likes to simplify things, and if people feel like the State is fucking with them (which it is if it is coercive), they decide all States will always behave that way. Prejudice.
1 Like
Just like if a male with a beard abused a dog, that dog will always be afraid of all males with beards…
1 Like
I yet have to see any benevolent state… Know any examples??? You see, there’re none.
A person with a gun cannot be benevolent!
Ethereum is a non-coerced state. If you combine Ethereum with my population registry, and one-person-one-vote Nakamoto consensus, you have more immutability and still non-coerced. Etc.
Well then the old argument persists: that if people have the choice, why would they want to lose their wealth to the unknown (or the not so needy)? Wouldn’t they want to do any charitable work by will (i.e., via personal private-charity)?
That is not the old argument. The old argument is wealth redistribution == coercion and therefore bad. Based on that argument, people derive other arguments that are informed, emotionally, from the root argument that is false.
1 Like
A person with a gun can be benevolent, sure. As can a person with fists. Or, access to bioweapons technology which all people will have now in the “genetic engineering age” because it is so extremely simple now, relatively.
It was a rhetoric. It meant that if there’s a right and there’s a wrong, and you get punished for doing the wrong, neither is the average man virtuous in doing the right (as he has no choice but to do the right) nor is the enforcer virtuous or benevolent, obviously (ends do not justify the means)… Hope that makes sense…
FTR I don’t recall saying that ripple had a problem with processor power. However it does (considered in isolation) provide no way to resolve collective trade imbalances.
http://matslats.net/ripple-reciprocation-credit-commons
I read your document.
Pet Peeve: When you say value exchange its not clear if you refer to the money or the goods and services being exchanged. The whole document is about the former yet you say that money is not valuable.
subjective, biased and selfish individuals that we are.
Don’t make the mistake of homo economicus in which the assumptions produce system produces the individuals. Also don’t assume the worst about me, your reader, if you want me on-side. Human systems need to appeal to the best in us while protecting against the worst.
possibility to create and record value.
Creating value is usually a very different thing to exchanging it. Again, since all we’re talking about is a ledger, you seem to be saying that money is valuable.
open borders would triple the world’s output
This will upset the degrowthers. Furthermore you neglect that open borders means no protections of the weak from the strong. It is the strong, the trade surplus countries demand open borders, so they can absorb the demand of weaker countries who as a result never get off the ground. Also this argument for specialisation implies that stupid black people should grow bananas and be forever poor, and clever white people can have their food grown for them and enjoy high tech goods.
One account’s balance goes up, another’s goes down.
That happens in pretty much all accounting 
The key is that in mutual credit that it is a closed system, no ‘money’ goes in or out. every positive balance is correlated by a negative balance on the same ledger.
players, only to open doors to Sybil attacks,
Mutual credit nor indeed ANY credit systems are open to sybil attacks because you can’t give any kind of credit to an anonymous person, because you have no-one to claim it against. Even KYC doesn’t help if you don’t have the ability to collect.
in trusting that a communist regime won’t rise to power and expropriate your private property
Probably best not reveal such political biases in such a document. BTW China claims to be communist and allows private property.
What’s important is that the individual be free to choose in establishing trust
That’s a much better statement. Puts you more in line with the anarchists.
Anyone can mint vril-onus pairs.
This statement is out of order since you’ve not explained vril, onus, or pairs
Ok leaving it there for now…
3 Likes