Exactly. :–)
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I have to admit, I am a novice and have been spending much time learning about blockchain and holochain. I understand the limitations and issues with blockchain which holochain endeavors to mitigate and replace blockchain, where holochain technology will make way more sense as a technology platform. However, reading A Mans comments does give one pause as to the eventual value of holofuel and likewise the current value of $Hot. What more though, is reading your article on Medium titled Holofuel The Worlds Stable First Stable Digital asset where you present a very convincing argument of the ponzi scheme that is blockchain crpto, (I agree and don’t buy crypto), but then you follow with the a lengthy talk where you adulate HoloFuel as truly viable “asset” because its based on Holochain and wax Holofuel as the greatest future asset as if its already a sure thing, and nary a mention that there are serious possibly fatal flaws that have yet to be worked out to really make it all work as true asset, as A Man has postulated. As an outsider, and part of the the 99% of the population that agrees with you that blockchain isn’t the future, your going to have to do more to prove HoloFuel is worth more than any other fantasy cryto, as you refer to blockchain crypto in your medium article. Truly that article was written to sell your story to the crypto gamblers or as it seems to me, as it talks all holofuel adulation and mentions no flaws. I certainly am not here to bash anyones integrity, I am just calling it as I see it as an outsider. Lastly, @artbrock, the tip off for suspicion, again as an outsider, was this:
Your creating the holy grail of technology platforms and hard selling HoloFuel as the “next Bitcoin” except a real future asset, yet you present here a total fabrication of how banking works? Are you serious? Bankers are the elite that get to create money from nothing, charging interest and transferring massive amounts of wealth to themselves?? You obviously do not really mean what your saying, or you have no idea how banking works. I’m truly afraid that its the latter because you don’t seem to know that long term loans do not pay all interest up front, quite the opposite its paid on an amortization schedule with mostly principal paid up at first and the principal in turn in most cases pays back the institution that the bank is borrowing from at a lower interest rate, almost always government funds. What makes this very scary for me is that someone that is hard selling the future uber asset in forums and on medium doesn’t seem to have a clue how banking and for that matter capital monetary systems work. Again, @artbrock, nothing personal meant by my comments, and I would very much love a response or an article to address my (and A Man’s) concerns on a layman’s level, but your own medium article does use similar rhetoric against ponzi scheme blockchain cryto companies fooling the 1% of blockchain believers, I would like to understand how it is that without directly addressing the current non solved problems but still pushing holofuel, you are any different from the blockchain companies that know their platform is crap but are still selling it anyway. Again no harm intended, I truly want to believe in holofuel. I look forward to your reply.
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One more thing; as I am very convinced that holochain technology is the future, how about offering a way to invest in the company itself or better yet, tell the public that $hot will become warrants to buy shares at a certain date down the road (if thats legal).
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Exactly! That’s what I’d like them to do as well! 
Correction (“I was tired when i wrote this forgive that it went astray”); amortizing payments for loans does have more interest being paid upfront but that’s only because its purpose is to provide stable payments throughout the loan. By simple math one must pay more interest when the loan is a higher denomination than when it shrinks. So the amortization table allows for the payment of principal in a smaller way upfront, added to the actual interest payment and as the loan shrinks more principal is added. That’s because there is more room in the stable payment amount for more principle because the interest payment is lower when the principal is less with each and every payment. As far as money lending by banks in the US; banks rarely every hold the loans at all they sell them after the loan is made. It begins with funds provided by the government at a discounted interest rate to the banks. The banks make loans at the prevailing market rate to the public and close the loan. If they decide to hold the loan they service it and make profit on the spread. However, most institutions sell their loans either to Fannie Mae, or to wall street firms that bulk loans and securitize them where the public can invest in mortgage backed securities and other real estate asset backed securities. Again, anyone planning to change the work of money who doesn’t understand simple banking or have a deep understanding of economics is extremely myopic in the best case and in the worst case, doing exactly what he claims the ponzi schemers are doing with blockchain. Again, Art, I do not know you, but you seem to be very genuine and I hope the former is the case, but some of the things I’ve read from you seem to be panting a different picture. I would love a comprehensive reply that addresses all these concerns with real world solutions. Thanks
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The Death of Gold
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_6GV5mKoA1nbJ-3N-3psMoiXB9lnsvca/view?usp=sharing
A no-nonsense article I wrote on the future of crypto.
Readtime: 3 minutes
I hope you find it interesting…
[Also, after having sorted out all my non-programming vocations, I’m back on a coding spree (finally). Hence, won’t be available for length discussions… Apologies if I don’t respond.]
I want to be respectful. The first sentence of your white paper is grammatically incorrect.
As an animal society matures, it gives birth to “specialization”.
The period should be within the quotation mark. It’s minor, but we are speaking of a space with exacting expectations. I will continue to read.
In the days when printing used raised bits of metal, “.” and “,” were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above) if they had a ‘"’ on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the convention arose of always using ‘."’ and ‘,"’ rather than ‘".’ and ‘",’, regardless of logic." This seems to be an argument to return to something more logical, but there is little impetus to do so within the United States."
My preference to resort to programming-style syntax with respect to the linguistic English grammar was deliberate. The ." syntax is just too dirty for me… I hope my programming-syntax-style ". (in contexts like the one you highlighted) becomes your convention as well… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The programming style grammar syntax makes extensive use of nested quotations, nested brackets, and even discriminates between the different types of braces (the brackets [], the braces {}, the parentheses ()). Often it uses single inverted commas (or just plain commas) to separate a phrase from another. For instance, consider this sentence: Sarah gave a bath to her dog wearing a pink t-shirt. It’s an ambiguous sentence. The programming syntax (for substituting grammar) is often a great aid, especially for those who are accustomed to writing long complex sentences. For instance, “Sarah gave a bath to her ‘dog wearing a pink t-shirt’.”, vs “Sarah gave a bath to her dog, wearing a pink t-shirt.”. In academics, especially, there seems to be a growing adoption. For instance, just when I saw the above messages, I was reading this document: https://www.math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS/MYPAPERS/AW09/AW09.pdf. And coincidently, the sentence I was on said:
Universality, or, how do we resolve P versus NP?
Let us consider another question, “Trunk Packing”.
Question 4
Given the dimensions of a set of suitcases, and of the trunk of our car,
find a way to pack them all in the trunk, if possible.
Looks like there’s hope for the new syntax at least in academics…
Then I recommend reading the latest article on the subject; it’s spot on! I’d be open to any comments on what that the article mentioned…
Roughly speaking, “The Death of Gold” is “The Birth of Vril”. It should suffice as a good overview of the Vril system of value exchange; in fact, the article was written precisely for economists and professionals discovering this space, unlike the (I admit) “silly” original document on the subject (which was written for myself and other prospective co-programmers so as to serve as an official specification for any concrete implementation of the said protocol).
Precious metals were deemed as more marketable goods because of their characteristic features, mainly their divisibility, storability (or non-perishability, as they don’t decay with time), and rarity (i.e., limited supply). These features were absent from other commodities. However, the last few advancements in computer science, mainly public key encryption and the advent of the internet, mean that most goods, if not all, can be made just as marketable as Gold, if not more.
Vril is nothing but a “soon-to-be-coming” framework (more specifically, a Holochain p2p (h)app) over which to do the same.
Thanks for the reply. I’m not a programmer and my editors expect conventional punctuation.
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Vril is a platform (much like the ERC20 standard) where anyone can create “tokens” (or “promises”, as used in the technical document), own them, value them (subjectively, that too in the denominations of other such tokens that one trusts), transfer them (to those who “accept” them, i.e., trust the promise, or have faith in the undoubted solvency of the issuer), and have them converted into other tokens. It differs from ERC20 in that last part. ERC is just a specification; Vril is a full-fledged exchange system. Specifically speaking, it achieves the last part via a Ripple-like mechanism: bartering one token for another until you end up with that which you wanted (be it for holding or for transferring it to someone who would only accept that token which you apparently don’t possess but can exchange with those who do, or with those who possess another token which can further be exchanged for the token you want, and so on, up to any finite level (roughly speaking)). The argument goes that, thanks to this virtual bartering that information technology enables today, we no longer need something like Gold (the role that Ether serves in the ERC20 economy).
I hope it’s short enough…
Again, I’m a layperson in crypto, blockchain, et al., but I understand generally. How is Vril different from other platforms or exchanges where one can trade tokens?
You don’t just trade tokens on Vril, you create them and value them there itself. You hold them there, you transact them there… It’s like the digital counterpart of the real world economy.
Let’s say you issue three tokens A, B and C. I personally don’t think the C tokens are legitimate or trustworthy, for one reason or another… So I choose to “trust” (and yes, there literally is a function by that name in the implementation) only A and B. Then I get to say, “look, I value 1 A to be equal to 5 B”. That’s it! That’s all I do on my part. Supposing I own 100 A tokens, then all day long, my node (my wallet, my account, call it whatever) would keep fluctuating from owning 100 A units, to 500 B units, to any combination in between (that adds up perfectly to my net-worth in any and all such denominations).
Basically, that’s how I set up my value judgements. Others do so too, and that’s what plays a key role when one goes to barter tokens (as described above).
I hope it makes sense…
I understand until you get to:
The thing is, your (and everyone’s) value-judgements (as described above) is what powers the exchange system (remember that there’s no universal denomination in Vril). So I (or rather, my node), even when sitting idle, is being used to power someone else’s transactions, and in doing so, my wallet’s holdings are bound to change.
For example, if Bella possesses A but wants B (to make a payment to Tom), she can come to me and I’d be more than happy to give her B tokens in exchange for A tokens (5 B tokens for every 1 A tokens, to be precise). Also, note that all this happens virtually over the network.
It simply was not possible in pre-historic times… If I have 20 eggs (which, as a vegan, I’d never have, but suppose I do) and the tailor wanted breads, it simply was not feasible by any standards for me to somehow magically convert 10 of my eggs into 1 loaf of bread. However, things have changed, thanks to computers and the internet.
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When payments exceed income it is called a trade deficit. I don’t know how you can say there is no such scenario.
Yes my brain often confuses left-right, imports/exports, credit/debit, buying/selling, especially I’m writing fast. I wonder if it is some kind of disability but it doesn’t indicate that I’m speaking nonsense, which, along with other words like ‘spewing’ and ‘incoherent’, and references to totalitarian arithmetic, seems more befitting of twitter than a civilised discussion.
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Hi A-Man I haven’t read the whole thread, but I thought I could helpfully chip in. You are clearly processing and progressing a lot in your thinking as documented here, but sometimes your self-confidence seems misplaced. The deeper I got into this subject the more problems I found with the meaning of words, exactly in the way that you saw fit to redefine ‘backing’. Historically backing refers to the redeemability of paper money for metal, which was the standard of value and which was stored in a known quantity in a vault by a trusted authority. Any other use of the term is IMO metaphorical, and potentially misleading. A clearer framing of the same question is why people accept money and value it. So please be more aware that other people understand the same words very differently.
Also you use the term mutual credit in a way that I dispute, and authoritatively contradict thomas greco when you assert that mutual credit is somehow different to credit clearing.
Another over-confident and borderline offensive remark was
I’d love it if [@artbrock] makes Holo give up the pretense that it can create a truly stable currency. Price is a function of supply and demand. You may control supply, but you cannot control demand. Even supply too you can only control in one direction.
Austrians who view money as a commodity would say that price is a function of supply and demand but there other determinants for example prices can be set by law. Also there are many ways to influence demand depending on where you are in the ecosystem, and if you can control supply you can control the difference between supply and demand, which is the price. Also when you are redeeming money you can constrict supply by simply not issuing and continuing to redeem.
So I suggest you balance your Austrian commodity money perspective with the credit theory of money which is its perfect opposite, and together they point to a deeper truth. Practical and theoretical problems of commodity money are perfectly solved with credit money and vice versa. There can be no perfect money because the very idea of money contains paradoxes. So don’t let me catch you arguing just one side again.
With Vril you seem to be trying to do something original. This is a great thought experiment but I would like to assure you that you are as unlikely to find something original in monetary science as to find an original sexual position or chess opening. There are only a handful of interesting design parameters in monetary theory; the real design and novelty (if any) comes in implementation, where the theory meets the the particular market, the particular technology and the particular power politics.
The kind of thinking you are doing will I hope lead you to a similar conclusion. Mesh credit systems are great mental constructs but I’ve never seen one working, pathfinding is very hard to decentralise efficiently (ripple counts as centralised afaik) and they only work with a sufficiently dense network of relationships. Furthermore, at least in modern culture, there is a kind of taboo on lending money socially, and many people prefer to get credit from sanctioned institutions than from each other. These reasons plus the fact that ripple contains neither a means of final settlement, nor a means to manage trade imbalances (which would make final settlement unnecessary) means that personally I don’t see much scope for mesh credit systems at this moment in history.
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@resilience-me, to provide a bit of context, yesterday I decided to reply to no-clue, and so as to avoid garnering unwanted attention I posted my reply as an edit on post 96. Here I’ve copy-pasted the same:
I’d say that all currencies are backed by something, i.e., all currencies are backed-currencies . In fact the very word ‘currency’ means a token of something (or at least that’s how one should think of it). Fiat is backed by power/authority , Gold is backed by faith/fear , token based backed currencies are backed by the thing they tokenize, mutual-credits (and loan-based currencies) are backed by the future , Vril is backed by exactly what it says it’s backed by (the Vow ), and so on… This definition of currencies makes them a unit of ‘promissory-note’; in fact that was the central idea behind Vril’s design. Don’t you agree?
EDIT (May 2021):
Was re-reading through the posts to reply to @noclue who’s waited a month (my reminder just went off)… Wanted to add that I no longer ascribe to the above statements… Hell, I no longer use the word ‘currency’ anymore; the word is just plain silly! ‘Money’ would be a much more precise term. Money is a commonly accepted medium of exchange. Note that a medium of exchange is a good (a good, commodity, or a service) just like any other; it’s just that this commonly accepted medium of exchange is more marketable (unperishable, easily storable, etc) than others. Money Substitutes (digital numbers) can be fully backed one-to-one with the Money they substitute, or partially (in which case it is called a fiduciary media). Money Substitutes issued by a bank or some other entity about whose solvency there exists no doubt can be used as Money (despite part of the Substitutes issued being unbacked, or fiduciary). Hence, credit money is qualifiable as Money. The tokens that mutual-credit systems represent are qualifiable as Money. Regarding which I must add that I have neither the energy nor the spirit to update the original document to reflect my new terminology; sorry Michael; I’d really love to update the doc to reflect my new Austrian thinking around the argument, to discuss a couple of setups in which Vril can be used (hint: reserve (commodity) tokens, credit-tokens, “thank-you” tokens, derivate tokens (what Art calls Computed Tokens)), to update the section on mutual-credit, and discuss the effects (and signals) of the issuance of all 4 of them, and finally differentiate between Wealth and Money, and also remove all the rubbish from the document that @matslats rightfully pointed (though I’d like to add that Matt’s joke about the homo-economicus certainly applies to all economists but not to the Austrian ones; we start from only one ‘given’: that man acts, deriving all our conclusions logically from this one axiom, meanwhile proving the case for liberty, all while sitting in one dark room. To deny our conclusions would be to deny thyself. Note that I’m no professional Austrian yet… Still learning my way through…). Let alone the best-practices document on writing Vril Contracts (especially for those contracts the tokens of which would act as Resources in some REA network)… Have picked up work on a minimalist (h)app as of now; won’t abandon it until complete…
Art Brock is right in his decision of backing HoloFuel with hosting power. Money-Substitutes (what you call currencies) not backed with real goods or services (i.e., what I described above as in Money Substitutes backed by “fear”, “authority”, etc) are not Money! It was plain silly to declare them Money, I admit. Didn’t know enough back then or was confused… Moreover, the word “currency” sounds like Money could be neutral, that it could just as well be plain numbers on a computer. That “medium of exchange” could just as well be replaced with a “system of exchange”. Again, the Austrians have already established that in this ever-changing world, Money can neither be neutral nor stable. Art Brock is right in insisting that all sound Money be backed by something equally sound (i.e., backed by consumable/vendible goods, commodities, or services that can be reasonably backed by). I don’t think hosting (as a service) is a service that can be reasonably backed by. If it is me issuing the promissory tokens that say “1 unit buys you 1 hour of hosting time” knowing that I indeed do have a nice working CPU, then given I issue a reasonable amount of tokens, I’d be able to guarantee that the tokens issued are fully backed 1-to-1. If I were the CEO of a big corporation with millions of such machines in its data centers, I’d be able to issue many more tokens and still be fully sure of my corporation’s solvency. However, if I have no idea how much “capacity” I have, I’m left in the dark. I won’t be able to safely calculate what amount of tokens would be okay to be issued. Or as Michael Burry would say, if you don’t know the amount of leverage involved, you don’t know enough (to make a move). It makes total sense for Holo to be a corporation in itself (like the AWS, Azure, etc) and do utmost KYC of its hosts (its employees, that is). Again, Art Brock is right with that regard too. Finally, one last question remains: that of stability. I’d love it if @artbrock makes Holo give up the pretense that it can create a truly stable currency. All mentions of the word ‘stability’ should be removed from its design papers. Price is a function of supply and demand. You may control supply, but you cannot control demand. Even supply too you can only control in one direction. Basically, the way I see it, ‘stability’ is a very nice excuse to engage in price manipulation. Hell, stable against what? Stable against the unstable Dollar? Stable against your so-called unstable Bitcoin? It’s gonna have to be stable against the currencies you’ve dubbed unstable and hence unworthy! That’s not all. The design of HoloFuel is full of inconsistencies! The latest medium article on HoloFuel reads like a joke! Not to mention that the video on it got taken private… And there has never been anyone to respond to the responses the article has received. Trust me, hiding under a blanket doesn’t help anyone. But wait, there’s more. It’s true that I WAS wrong about “backed currencies”, but you guys (the Holo team) ARE STILL WRONG about it, and that too in a lot more profound way! 1 HoloFuel isn’t backed against 1 clearly defined unit of hosting! When they say that HoloFuel is backed by hosting power, that’s not what they mean. Rather, what they mean is that the total amount (nothing to do with marginal utility) of HoloFuel buys you the total hosting capacity. There is a hosting price (denominated in HFs per unit-of-hosting) besides the HoloFuel price. And the hosting price is, by definition, subject to change. Plus the hosts decide the HoloFuel’s floor price; the whole attempt is “to reduces the volatility of HoloFuel prices, which makes it easier for our ecosystem to make long term plans”! Utter nonsense! I’ve never seen anything like it before; it’s worse than fiat! There is no such thing as a “currency designer” (something that they take pride in calling themselves); calling yourself a “currency designer” is calling yourself a conman! Those looking for sane money must look elsewhere. Their words are inconsistent; they say they do not wish to compete with Bitcoin or become a world currency (a competing money, that is), yet they go on to build a whole new currency for use in their hosting service. If they were true to their words, they’d have rather decided to use one of the existing ones to power their network, or created a derivative token on Holochain backed 1-to-1 to the reserve currency(‘ies’, in which case the LIFO mechanism would come in handy to manage the price relations between those multiple currencies). For instance, Ethereum Swarm doesn’t have its own brand new “revolutionary” currency; it simply uses Ether to compensate its hosts. At best, it would have made sense for Holo to create a “layer 2” lightning network on Holochain for Bitcoin and use those tokens to compensate whoever (in whichever (h)app) needs compensating, or in other words, a bullion bank that stores Bitcoins and offers HoloBits, a promissory token that says “I’m fully backed by 1 Bitcoin”, a token that takes full advantage of Holochain’s (or perhaps, Vril’s) technological superiority when it comes to creating, anonymizing, transacting, and translating (converting one token/claim into another) such tokens. In fact, that’s one of the first tokens that I expect to be created on the Vril network. Plus it would have made perfect sense for such a HoloBank to charge a wee bit amount from its customers for keeping the reserve safe (basically the private key(s) of the bank’s accounts on those traditional crypto networks) just like Bullion Banks charge from its customers for keeping their Gold secure. This revenue could very well have funded the continued development of Holochain. A distributed, decentralized, global, open-to-join (h)app that offered hosting-service would never be in a position to issue hosting-backed tokens since (and as I’ve said already) it would not be able to ensure that the tokens it issues are backed by its reserve (its total hosting capacity) without extensive KYC (which destroys openness), but it could very well have structured itself such that it wounds up not needing to issue its own tokens. For a simple Swarm On Holochain (h)app that offers storage service to store encrypted files on its great-many hosts’ devices, the (h)app would act as a marketplace cum match-maker for customers and hosts; hosts list the ‘maximum amount due’ that they’d tolerate (before deleting the user’s data from their device) and the price per GB per day that they’d charge, the customer uploads his data to the (h)app (automatically selecting the cheapest hosts, thus fuelling competition between hosts). The customer pays periodically so as to never let that maximum be reached. The unit of those payments being someone else’s token on Vril, be it a Precious Metal Backed Tokens issued by a Bullion Bank, be it an Index Token (a Derivative Token, that is; what Art calls a computed token) that indexes top corporate stocks (all issued as independent Vril tokens in and of themselves), be that a Ripple-style token that can be translated from and to tokens of users who belong in that little isolated independent shard of the web of Vril Tokens’ Trust Network, or something else. Simple! Basically, the point is that the design-decision of creating a dedicated token (the HoloFuel Token) that (as is evident, falsely) backs hosting was a choice, a choice that could very well have been avoided entirely just by flipping the design.
@noclue, another clue would be https://www.artbrock.com/threebles/strategy. Clearly, anyone who advocates for using Triple Bottom Line as a prospective (let alone effective) strategy to fight climate change is either genuinely unaware of the ludicrousness of the scheme (and thus unaware of sane economics) or is aiming at image-improving! Radical privatization and radically accessible tort law infrastructure is THE ONLY rational way to allocate our natural resources appropriately whereby the market is let to decide on their rational (over)usage. Art B., check out this article (https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-environmentalist-commonwealth) where Art C. (Art Cardon) addresses this issue; what a coincidence, no?
Let’s stay positive, though. I have got a hunch that they’re secretly up to something… Last time, it was RSM (Refactored State Model) for Holo chain , and it was awesome! Let’s hope that this time the refactoring ends up looking equally awesome (and equally hot! ;–)
Yet, https://open.coop/collaborate/mutual-credit/
To summarize,
I’ve defined what sane money is; it’s a medium of exchange (and not a system of exchange).
Digital tokens of such Money count as Money Substitutes, hence good enough.
Credit Money arose out of the use of Money Substitutes; under specific conditions, it’s good enough.
Mutual Credit (and the truly p2p multi-hop Mutual Credit that Ripple is) is good enough.
Mutual Credit is good enough as long as it is clearly specified what 1 credit token entails, and as long as the solvency of the debtors is undoubted. You can’t say “1 unit buys whatever sells for 1 unit”. It has to be explicitly stated as to what 1 unit entails. That’s the one thing I don’t like about Ripple…
You (@artbrock) can reject the Austrian definition of Money altogether and vouch in favor of the ridiculous-sounding “neutrality of Money”, in which case I’d be at a loss to argue any further…
If HoloFuel’s design does away with the internal hosting-price mechanism and rather makes 1 HoloFuel be strictly backed by 1 unit of hosting (you’re free to define what that 1 unit might be), I’d be happily able to say that HoloFuel is also “good enough”. Until then, HoloFuel, in my opinion (i.e., seen from the Austrian lens, the only lens that can show reality) is perhaps a currency, a current-sea (whatever), but not sane money.
I hope this clarifies that which I don’t like about HoloFuel, @noclue. You didn’t get a response for 30 days, so I felt like responding myself. I’d love it if you could share the link to the medium article that talks about banking (or blockchain, whichever it was) being a Ponzi scheme! You may call blockchain a speculative bubble, but a Ponzi scheme? That doesn’t make much sense. As for banking, though I don’t understand the intricacies, my general understanding is that the modern banking system is qualitatively different from the Fractional Reserve Banking that existed in the times of the Gold Standard. The bank you serve is a product of forced coercion on the citizens and of unjustifiable discrimination against private banking (and the issuance of private currencies). Not only is it immoral from a Libertarian perspective, but even from a Utilitarian perspective, a society that adopts Free Banking prevents resource misallocation by virtue of keeping a check on inflation, thanks to the fact that under Free Banking the limit to the issuance of Fiduciary Media is much narrower than it is when there exists only one “monopolistic” Bank, let alone when the bank doesn’t even promise to be backing every note with the said commodity (Gold or whatever) as is the case when the bank has ties with the military! [I think @MaxxD will agree…] I don’t see how you may ever attempt to justify the existence of such a bank (the FED as it exists today); that is unless you’re a Keynesian, in which case you’re just as hopeless! Anyway, you’re right that Holochain is the future. Holochain is a priceless piece of art, the epitome of perfection! Those behind it (Art, Eric, David, et al.) are geniuses beyond doubt. It’s understandable to have high expectations from its other projects too. It’s up to Holochain (or rather, it’s our (Holochain’s) moral obligation) to realize the dreams that Blockchain showed us but could never realize by itself. The way to do it is via radical scrutiny where necessary. Anyway, gonna go back to learning & coding… I’d shut up for now. I hope you appreciate the reply; took hours to get it right and tame it down…
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My fault… Totally admit… But it’s not me using the word ‘backing’ metaphorically anymore, it’s @artbrock and Holo as in when they say their HoloFuel is backed by hosting.
It’s not me who’s saying mutual credit is decoupled from credit clearing; it’s @artbrock who asserted that. I’m against that assertion too. To them (Holo), just the fact that there are positive balances and negative balances should be enough to call something mutual credit. In my opinion, mutual credit systems are systems in which one group (the -ve balance group) owes to the other group (the positive balance group). Moreover, what they owe is and MUST always be something concrete and explicitly defined. Furthermore, everyone in the system is, by the very fact of choosing to be in the system, sure of the solvency (the ability to repay the debt) of the debtors.
As an example, if owing 1 unit implies owing 1 boomerang, and it’s fairly easy to assess how many boomerangs one might craft in a day (by looking at their height, health, gender, etc), then if I owe 100 units, I owe 100 boomerangs. Such a credit system is in a sense backed with commodities (real wealth); the credit money that arises in such a system is defined in commodity money; such a credit money is reasonably safe from runaway inflation; such a money is “good enough”, the highest title I’m capable of giving to any money! Haha!
I think you’d greatly benefit from reading my 3-minute article on my fresh understanding of the subject.
Sorry… My apologies… Just wanted to express my undiluted opinion… Don’t know (yet) as to how to reformulate sentences so as to make them sound more friendly…
I hope that was just an example. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ridiculous! By the way, that’s what Holo says, and that makes perfect sense in and of itself. However, stable against what? Price is always denominated in the units of “something else”, as in “4 apples a Dollar” or “2 Dollars a Euro”. That which they (Holo) attempt to keep its price stable with is itself fluctuating in its own price, i.e., is itself unstable! Price stability is a pipe dream. Sure, there are relatively stable monies and relatively unstable monies, but those stable monies are a product of the dispersed decisions of the various actors involved in the market dealings (making the buy and sell orders). Sure, one can say I’m being a perfectionist while they’re not; that they only wish to keep it relatively more stable, even if by just a wee bit, however, any attempt to do so would count as price manipulation, be it “in the name of stability” or “in the name of God”! If they back HoloFuel with Hosting, it would by definition be stable in terms of hosting-units, as in “1 hour of hosting per HoloFuel”. Hosting would get cheaper with time. They don’t do it because they want HoloFuel to appraise in value slowly over time. I want HoloFuel to be a genuine money. I’d rather have it be “good enough money” and depreciate with innovations in hardware tech than have it be a current-sea that appreciates in value. Anyway, who cares!
Totally agree. A few things to emphasize here. I’m no pro-return-to-gold-standard Austrian. In my opinion, one should be a Utilitarian first Libertarian next. Under free banking, commodity monies would automatically become the dominant ones. I don’t believe in a strict 1-to-1 backing of all Money Substitutes with the commodity they substitute. The merits and emergence of credit money can be found in the Utilitarian philosophy on the subject. Credit money arises out of the use of Money Substitutes (paper notes, etc). Under free banking, banks (and in Vril that includes people like you and me and mostly big reputed organizations) get to be free to issue fiduciary tokens but within strictly narrow limits; there’s a responsibility thrust upon the issuance of credit money; creditors are forced to be prudent in lending credit. The issuance of credit money causes wealth transfer. What commodity money does is it prevents the kind of inflation (and wealth transfer and misallocation) we see today by keeping a check on the issuance of credit money. All I’m saying is that in mutual credit systems, debts should look like “2 units owed, meaning two 2 hours of hosting owed”, and not “2 units owed, meaning 2 units worth of services owed”. That too purely for a utilitarian purpose; debts that look like the former are sane money. Debts that look like the latter (i.e., fiat money, Ripple money that’s denominated in fiat, HoloFuel, et al.) make me nervous because they have not as tight a check on inflation as is present in the former.
Yeah, you’re right. It’s just a thought experiment. There’s nothing original about it. As I said, money is a medium of exchange. In a market society, goods and services are traded; the media of exchanges can only be some of those goods and services (those which are more marketable than the rest). Barter can be called a System of Exchange. Barter is not Money, it’s (some of the) the goods that are bartered that are Money. Similarly, Vril is a digital system of bartering digital Money Substitutes; Vril is not Money, it’s (some of) the tokens represented in Vril that can be called Money Substitutes. Vril is like a huge building where you can bring in tokens of one kind and have them converted into tokens of another kind (for use in another platform or whatever); just that. Like how in Ripple I can pay even a distant person with whom I’ve got very little to share with…
That’s my worst fear by the way… I don’t think it would be hard to decentralize, though I fear finding the right path might be computationally too challenging and time-consuming…
Anyway, thanks for the response.