Absolutely true. I accept I was mistaken about a few things… My earlier posts should be taken as just that, “my earlier learnings”… Also, your rudeness here (if any) is totally justified. I should’ve known better and have resorted to a private exchange on the subject of HF… Sorry… Would mark your post as solution for some time so that future newcomers may be led to the truth…
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Thanks for the time, Art. It’s fully appreciated.
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As for my latest concern,
@artbrock: [extrapolating from your statements…]
Basically, the hosts COLLECTIVELY make all the decisions with the aid of a few smart and distributed ALGORITHMS. In that sense, Holo has little to no control over the variables (such as the total outstanding supply of HoloFuel). Thus, the whole of the Holo system (and HoloFuel) would tend to be stably backed by hosting, and the HoloFuel’s price (in $/HF) and to some extent the hosting price (in hosting/HF) would tend to be the same throughout the lifespan of Holo.
So, despite the fact that an equation like purchasing-power (in hosting-units/$) = HoloFuel price (in HF/$) * Hosting price (in hosting-units/HF) has infinite solutions (even with the total purchasing power, i.e., the total capacity being a given), the system would (thanks to radical decentralization) tend to keep the later two prices relatively stable too, because it would tend to keep the Hosting-Price stable (thanks to competition between hosts). Also, there’s no one “Hosting Price”, just as there’s no one “Hosting Unit”; there are different flavours (or rather, scales or combinations) of each.
That’d suffice for now.
Summary:
HoloFuel is a hosting-backed asset, hence a Money-Substitute of real wealth (i.e., real Money), and is thus good enough (at least as long as the Holo system can keep the purchasing-power of 1 HoloFuel (in terms of Hosting) stable enough). The distributed design of HoloFuel (and Holo) attempts to keep its purchasing power (in terms of holo-hosting) stable over time. The only centralization is at the Reserve level over which Holo gets to have no say; their job is to simply make sure their books (in the reserve) have the sufficient amount of currencies that they’re supposed to have; plus since only HoloFuel earned by hosting is redeemable at the reserve, that further guarantees that HoloFuel be “backed” by hosting. Also, re: Holo cannot dictate HoloFuel Price simply because it cannot dictate the Hosting Price; nor can it manipulate the supply at its whims, only the distributed algorithms can; all it can do is be vigilant in granting to new hosts their initial credit-limits, even which, when done leniently, won’t have that big an effect (due to the above).
That closes the chapter on HoloFuel.
Bye.
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@The-A-Man Thank you for taking the time to read, consider, and learn from our interchanges. I’m glad that HoloFuel is making more sense to you at this point, and I’m sorry you’ve found it frustrating to track down the information you needed to understand it.
Since I’ve been posting corrections, I think there’s just a few more things I’d like to clarify that seem to be loose ends from above.
Credit Clearing vs. Mutual Credit
I agree that many people are sloppy about using these terms interchangeably, but I believe the distinction between them is both useful and simple to understand.
Credit clearing is like the tale of the $100 bill and is about clearing debts owed to specific parties (e.g. where Alice owes Bob, Bob owes Carol, Carol owes David, who owes Alice, so they can all settle debts between themselves without needing to borrow outside money from a bank).
Mutual Credit issuance is about creating money when you spend it such that you end up with a negative balance (which is not owed to any particular party, but essentially a promise to the network that you’ll accept this currency for future value you provide in order to clear your negative balance).
Stable in Contrast to Volatile
When I designed Holo in mid 2017 and wrote the currency white paper in November 2017, the term “stable” had not yet been hijacked by stablecoins to mean pegged to an external value reference. I used the term in contrast to the massive volatility of all the baseless speculative cryptocurrencies which dominate the space.
The price of HoloFuel is stable (anti-volatile) in that it will converge toward the cost of hosts delivering hosting. It is not FIXED. The cost of delivering host will change over time (typically decreasing) with advances in hardware, bandwidth, and renewable energy. That means the buying power of HoloFuel units will slowly / stably increase over time as they can purchase more hosting with the same units of HoloFuel.
Again… it isn’t static or pegged, but correlated to the cost of delivering a real world service, and that cost is not crazy volatile like the roller coaster of speculative markets.
Why not just a Wrapper around BTC or Dollars
As I mentioned a few posts ago, all Ponzi schemes collapse when they reach their limits of growth. I perceive debt issuance of dollars as approaching those growth limits. And I believe that the the performance of Holochain will come to so overshadow blockchain that it will put all global consensus currencies out of business in time (yes, even the original BTC).
So there’s no way that it makes sense to tether our hosting currency to one of those sinking ships. Part of the purpose of the asset-backed currencies I’m working on (backed by hosting, energy, food, transportation, housing, etc.) is to provide the transitional infrastructure that is stable enough to keep civilization going while Industrial Age finances and economies unravel.
It is perfectly adequate to have the value of each of these currencies be correlated to the cost of the goods/services they deliver.
Sybil Attacks and the Challenges of KYC
First, please note that Holo LTD is a regulated entity. We are regulated by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission for compliance with fiduciary standards involved in delivering services connected to a DLT (Decentralized Ledger Technology) and have oversight of our management of assets, company reserves, Reserve Accounts, and ensure we don’t engage in price manipulation or other unsavory activities.
This also means we must comply with AML (Anti-Money Laundering) regulations which include KYC requirements. So whether it is a hard problem or not, we already have to do it with our hosts and customers (app providers). Hosts are the only type of account not managed by Holo and or regulated banking/asset management protocols, who get credit limits. So the main KYC requirements of the regulator seem to focus on them.
Luckily, since the first generation hosts are people we sold HoloPorts to, we already have their name, a verified means of payment (via a bank or credit card who performed KYC), a shipping address, a verified email address, and consistent monitoring of their IP address to be able to route hosting traffic to them. That’s already a pretty high KYC threshold before even doing anything else. So the regulators seem pretty happy with that as a starting point.
But we also are creating relationships with outside KYC service providers who do the weird stuff where you hold your IDs up to the webcam and such. They charge a fee for doing the KYC, so you also look at it as a staking process which involves paying a KYC provider and investing 20ish minutes of time in getting approved. Even just those factors create a significant barrier to Sybil Attacks on HoloFuel. It certainly makes it very hard to manufacture a few hundred accounts to attempt to control the few DHT neighborhoods to attempt to get one bad transaction to look valid even for a few minutes. Luckily DNA sequencing is not required for AML compliance.
We opted to be a regulated entity (instead non-regulated crypto wild west) for a few reasons.
- So our hosting customers would know we can’t just pull up stakes and disappear after they purchase credits (We have to hold 24 months of cash reserves for responsible wind-down and settlement with creditors.)
- So hosts would know we’re in the long game and it’s worth buying hardware that will earn money over time.
- So developers and app providers will know the infrastructure they’re betting on for running their apps is stable and accountable and worth building a business model on.
- So that inexperienced newbies to the cryptocurrency realm would know that HoloFuel is safe and stable (anti-volatile) in case they need an alternative to collapsing national currencies or cryptocurrencies.
Fiat is not Net Zero
No. This is not accurate. Fiat debts cannot be cleared.
First, as even the central bank article admitted: “Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.”
The reason this is “new money” is because the bank was not debited for the funds deposited into the borrowers account. Those funds got created out of thin air, by act of FIAT (speaking into being by an authority) in the same way that Bitcoin mining rewards come into being with a new block and nobody got debited for them.
The weirder part is that because the accounting loophole for banks, BOTH the promissory note AND the funds on deposit are counted as assets, instead of the deposited funds being a liability that they owe you. This is the creepy and weird part of banking that nobody seems to follow, because our common sense says “If the bank transferred funds into our account for a loan, they must have come from the bank’s account” Strangely that isn’t how it works.
Anyway, the reason dollar debts can never be settled is because only the principal gets created, never the interest. In order to repay the interest it must come from someone else’s principal. This is precisely the formula for keeping fiat money scarce even though it can be made from thin air. There is always more owed than exists.
For every dollar created, a dollar plus compounding interest is owed. The interest can’t be cleared because the funds were never issued.
So fiat money supplies actually do exist (Look up M0, M1, M2, M3, etc.) and if issued as debt with interest, they can never be settled because the money supply is always lower than the debt, so the that the money continues to be scarce no matter how much is issued.
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That (explicitly) resolves all my confusion around your usage of the word ‘stable’; I always thought you were attempting to keep HF stable against the Dollar or whatever (which would have been crazy). Thankfully, by ‘stable’ (as opposed to ‘static’ or ‘pegged’) it is meant “stable with regard to its purchasing power in hosting-units”. So, for instance, a paper note issued by a bullion bank might say “redeemable for EXACTLY 1 gm of Gold”, your HoloFuel tokens would say “redeemable for ROUGHLY/STABLY AROUND the same (or more) units of hosting as it would have redeemed you when you first acquired these tokens”. Makes all the sense, especially since “hosting” (a service) is so different from Gold and Silver (naturally scarce commodities)…
I’m against neutral money too! I see real_wealth-backed monies (such as commodity money, and even your one-step-ahead service-backed monies such as hosting-backed money) as the future.
Precisely. [I remember hearing that elsewhere too…] Spooky really… But just the fact that fiat is “pure numeraire” (numbers as money, i.e., neutral money), unbacked with any commodity (or service, for that matter), and (most importantly) requires the suppression of the free market in the sector of banking (i.e., the suppression of free-banking) is enough to prove its inferiority (from a utilitarian perspective)…
Although KYC generally turns me off, I guess for our use-case (of “money-fying” hosting (a service which can’t be stuffed in vaults like Gold bars can be) to be used as a payment/settlement method on the Holo network), it’s pretty understandable that hosts (the existing HoloPort owners (who coincidently already are KYCed; wow)) be thoroughly KYCed, and Holo LTD be certified by well-reputed auditors… Plus,
meaning that not every individual who wishes to be a host would have to be thoroughly KYCed so as to just start hosting! Only when they wish to go in debt (for whatever reasons) do they need to have a history. That’s pretty cool; that’s also the part I got wrong (and went on to say that assessing my credit limit and that of everyone like me would be an NP problem, blablabla). So, yeah, it’s not as challenging as I first thought it to be…
Again, thanks for the intricate details around that. Also, loved your distinction between credit-clearing and mutual-credit; it’s very helpful to have clearly defined and well-established boundaries between such related categorical terms…
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These 6 corrections are the most clear explanation about the topic. It worked well for me. That was the need.
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This thread is why I love this project. <3
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Lot of respect for @artbrock how he was able to handle this. Keeping calm while being tortured.
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As a newbie diving into HOLO since yesterday, this post is one of the clearest and most insightful I’ve come across. I will post some questions in a new thread though about how price stability is maintained in the face of speculative FOMO i.e. I’m assuming you are referring to stability in terms of hosting supply / demand affecting the market price.
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How has Arthur Brock been “tortured”? Multi-hop mutual credit is clearly better than the older ideas of mutual credit. Even if you don’t think so, that I think so isn’t “torture”, I’ve thought so since 2015 when I was inspired by Ethereum to think about a ledger built on it (without majority consensus, so, same idea as Holochain. ) I have mentioned a few times over the years that the Holochain project would probably be better off building on the best solutions, but, not to “torture” anyone. In the Land Before Time, Littlefoot recommends his friends to not walk the wrong way, they do anyway. He wasn’t being mean, he was being kind, he didn’t force his ideas on them, and his friends ended up walking into a complete mess.
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The Oxford comma was ‘formalized’ ca. 1905.
The Oxford Comma: Essential or Inconsequential? - Oxford Royale Academy
The movable-type (Gutenberg) printing press was invented in the 1400s.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Gutenberg
It’s sufficient to declare the Oxford comma a convention, with certain logical reasons in favor of it, and to adopt your convention for your own legitimate reasons, without resorting to mythology.
Hello guys , im new in Holo family and im holder
I have some question about HOT and HOLOFUEL
1-First of all , holofuel when relase ? I heared near 6 month later ! And after that 6 month time to swap 1:1 with HOT ! Its mean seriously holofuel started work in less than 1 year in market
2-holofuel will available in Wallet and exchangers like trust wallet and binance ? For hold and keep and also exchange with USDT
3- available will stable ? Example stable in 1 $ or 0.5 $ or etc… and not going down/up ?
and you think Holofuel stable in which amount? 1 $ or less or more?
4- untill holofuel relase (i mean before HF availabke) HOT will increase price ? After holofuel relase Still HOT can increase price ?
5- HOT price prediction 2021
Thank you so much guys
The amount of brain bending that happened while reading this thread…dang
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First of all, sorry for the delay. I saw the replies some months ago but didn’t have the time to carefully think and answer. Not to speak of the fact that I’m still not an expert at crypto//blockchain world so some of my answers on that regard might be wrong. (Yes, I’m including Holochain as a blockchain project.)
Oh, and I asked you before but I’ll ask it again; if you have an e-mail or any way to send you direct messages, I would be happy to have it.
True. But this affirmation is also true in respect to gold. Many crypto-enthusiasts (although not as many as crypto-haters) are not really into Gold for reasons that won’t explain here (McAfee has pointed out really well some of the reasons). Now, of course there are and will be more people hating crypto or BTC (thanks to governments//mainstream media) than people hating Gold. Nonetheless, people don’t need to hate Gold in order to not value the metal as much as the current market price, In this sense, the value of gold is the same as the one related to Bitcoin; it has value only because other people are willing to pay for it.
Just remember that a) scientific (related to natural science) knowledge is based on external information and b) scarcity is a praxeological term.
It may not be truth in 1, 2 or 100 years given to external information or entrepeneurship.
The drop regarding what?
You better than anyone should know that the next crisis is coming soon (Looks like it may be sooner than expected due to Evergrande) as a result of credit.
If you are talking about the drop of BTC when the crisis or depression hits, well… any company (stocks) or goods depending on long-term investing will be affected. Of course BTC and almost all cryptos will be affected too. But that doesn’t mean that it is BTC fault.
For instance, a few days ago I searched and compared the historical price for Gold and silver within the 2008-2009 crisis, as well as the interest rate. Gold and Silver prices went down too. Nonetheless, in the short-term, prices index (regarding acquisitive power) went down (This should be obvious if you have studied Austrian Business-cycle theory) which means that holding fiat insted of gold would have been better. I think that the only reason Gold doesn’t go down even more (as it should) it’s because the market is highly manipulated by Centralk Banks // Governments (They hold a LOT of Gold into their reserves as a kind of collateral for their shitcoins).
In crisis, markets are looking for liquidity, That liquididy is provided mainly by fiat currency (which is supposed to be “backed” at some extent with gold) making the price of fiat currencies go up as well as gold prices. (Nonetheles, since Gold is also speculative in the long-term, prices still go down!)
Again, those issues regarding price variatiosn due to credit//booms are not fault’s of Gold or BTC.
That’s theoretically impossible. If fiat crashes, the only way BTC price go up is if they keep printing (With printing, I mean creating money/credit in any way, not only printing pieces of paper) enough to go into a stagflation! (depression with inflation!). But still, relatively speaking (to goods) BTC price would go down. I highly encourage you to read JHS.
Yeah. Most of the bitcoiners would happily use gold or silver if that weren’t centralized or easy to seize. Nonetheless, that’s not the case. And I don’t see societies being free in the short-medium or even long-term. Most likely it’s not happening. Oh, and I didn’t get the “times comes”. A medium of exchange being “dominant” is literally the purpose of money; to simplify economic transactios and accountability (But obviously money, as any other good, is also subject to marginal valuations!, meaning that there may be incentives to have two or more “main” currencies).
That example is really cool. But the problem for all currencies, with maybe the exception of Gold and Silver, is acceptability which transfers into liquidity. The thing is that the only way to solve that problem is having people actually using the currency as medium of exchange. Haven’t read the Vril project whitepaper, since I think it’s too technical for me, but as you explained it, I just see it as a project of NFT’s built on Holochain. Correct me if I’m wrong. (DAC has used this “rewards” or “appreciation tokens” with his fans before. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think using NFT’s that way can be done on ERC-20 tokens too).
Now, I’m not saying that BTC, XMR or other Cryptocurrencies are “perfect”, since judging by the 2030 Agenda, the centralization of Internet and the existence of means to perfectly trace people are the big threat to BTC (and Liberty, of course). Call me conspiranoic but there’s a possibility of a big worldwide shutdown on Internet to prove that BTC “represents nothing” and that Government’s are able to ultimtelly kill it. That’s a thread. But it’s a tread that would still exist on any crypto project. I guess I’ll have to read the (Vril) project to see what problems solves that actual crypto projects don’t already solve.
Any citation? Haven’t heard about that
I meant inefficiencies in other terms. I can easily do the math from MXN pesos to USD, since the parity is like 20;1. But if I had to think in terms of 4 coins or currencies, with values of like 14.5, that would be inefficient.
Ok, now I get it. That sound’s interesting. So it’s more like an Automated Swap System (or however it is called)? I have no idea if that already exist but if not, that’s a great idea. I think.
It applies to any economic (scarce)
That’s better XD
The difference is the moment of the cost. Gold miners absorbe 99% of the cost, so to speak. Nonetheless, the cost is there. In order not to confuse terms, we should point out who is taking the cost. BTC has high cost (for miners) because it is profitable, as a consequence of the rise or mainstream adoption. Gold costs (for miners) would also rise if Gold price happened to go up 1000%. Remember, in a dynamic market (or real life!) the price “determines” costs, not the other way around. Now, comparing BTC to HOLO (correct me if I’m wrong), the difference in cost is due to security or amount of nodes or validators. I get that hApps benefit from not going into one big blockchain, but what if a currency built in Holo has A LOT of people using it as medium of exchange. Wouldn’t the cost of electricity of all those people using their PC’s as nodes be equal to the amount of electricity invested by miners? For example, what would be the advantages of a private crypto-currency such as Monero built on Holochain? Would that make a difference at all=
My views regarding this have changed quite a well. I consider having fees of burnability quite, ugh, odd?
I know that there’s no such thing as “neutral money”, I meant deflationary money, not “neutral”.
I don’t think that’s an (entrepeneurial) good idea.
Gold and Silver are considered money because they have charasteristics that make
them worth as medium of exchange. I think I said it before, but a currency that represents a cup of coffe is nothing but a production promise (coffe and many goods are not fungible enough). So yeah, I happen to think it is a bad entrepeneurial decision the use of debt as money (As opposed to Fekete and J.R. Rallo), not only because economically it creates distortions (creating fake liquidity and thus artificially lowering the interest rates) but because I wouldn’t trust “experts” in any realm, not even economy (As much as I love Rothbard, Hoppe and Jesus Huerta de Soto, I still take everything they say with a grain of salt, trying to analyze as critically as possible!)
Oh, and you mentioned that you are vegan. Would you read and give me feedback on an article I wrote about animal rights?
(Oh, and about my views as now; they haven’t changed a lot. I still appreciate Gold, Silver. and Crypto (Mainly XMR and projects like Oxen and SCRT). Considering I live in a third world country, Gold is too expensive for me, so I’m more of a silver guy now, at least until market collapses (to start investing on projects again) I just happen to appreciate a little bit more cryptos for what they represent as well as their truly good aspects (compared to gold) such as anonimity, reliability and transportability. I wanted to research more about DeFi and more projects, but have been quite busy on other things)
Twitter’s recent practices of suspending people’s accounts are shameful. Thereafter, I consider it morally wrong to buy/use its services, just as it is morally wrong to buy real leather shoes (for vegans). Hopefully, whenever it comes, I’d love to build and advertise my social presence on a Holochain-based neutral social p2p platform. Till then, Gmail looks like a good last resort.
Over the past year, my views have been constantly been bouncing back and forth from pro-crypto to pro-gold. I think my problem is I’m an idealist, but things in the real world tend to be anything but ideal. Anyway, my reason for disliking bitcoin is that it is neutral money. Coincidently, my reason for disliking Gold is also that it is neutral money. Here were my thoughts about Gold some time ago (copy-pasting from another discussion medium):
Basically, it is true that BTC will crash one day, as it is a neutral money (i.e., backed by nothing), but it will probably be one of the last things to crash. However, unlike most Austrians, I believe even Gold is a neutral money: it never had any functional or aesthetic utility, to begin with. Any aesthetic utility it has today it has precisely because it is expensive. Proud-to-be-affluent women wear Gold, not beautiful ones! As for me, I find anything yellow utterly disgusting! As for industrial use, Gold has none (or negligible); if Gold weren’t there, there would still be iPhones, cars, satellites, etc. If Gold weren’t being used as a Money (a medium of exchange), it would be substituting, I don’t know, Platinum (etc) in satellites, refrigerators, etc, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be deemed as any more beautiful than other inert metals. No price can be justified for Gold, just as no price can be justified for BTC. Their prices are simply a function of supply and demand; their prices are simply indicative of how much people want to not invest, how much they wanna shield themselves from the volatility of goods whose prices can indeed be justified/predicted more easily (the kind of goods that sane investors (like Burry) can confidently leverage, short and long). The prices of Gold, Silver, and Bitcoin follow Mises’ Regression Theorem, and they only go down in good times (which I don’t think are anywhere near). As for Gold vs BTC, Mises said and I quote “if we trace to its deepest springs, first the subjective and then the objective exchange-value of commodities, we find that in the last resort it is still the subjective use-value of things that determines the esteem in which they are held”. My understanding is that back then (back a few thousand years), Gold was deemed more favorably because it was imperishable and pretty easy to store and transfer. Today, as of this point in time, BTC has those properties (i.e., way easier to store, way more imperishable, way lot easier to transfer (even anonymously)), plus has a first-mover advantage, not to mention a decade long buildup of its regressional price. In the war between inert metals, Gold won; if we are to be moving towards another new medium of exchange, the winner has got to be BTC (or some other computationally superior Money Substitute of BTC that backs BTC 1-to-1 under-the-hood)). Anyway, markets are inefficient; anything could happen in the short term…
Back then when we humans started digging for Gold, there was no industrial revolution, let alone electronics!
Most people seek Gold jewelry not because Gold looks beautiful, but because Gold is EXPENSIVE; it’s not the other way around. Al least that’s what my “understanding” is (as in historical understanding vs praxeology).
As for research:
Aluminium doesn’t rust either. And Aluminium jewelry looks much more beautiful (at least to me). Yet Aluminium is way way cheaper than Gold (even after you factor in the difference in the total quantity of both). This is because Aluminium isn’t the world’s medium of exchange. [Mises’ law of regression at action here]
Also, there’s 10 times more Silver than Gold here; and Gold is 70 times more expensive than Silver. [Comparing total quantity of both is a terrible idea by the way; the Marginal Utility revolution settled that debate for good.] Just saying.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Bitcoin jewellery becomes a thing!
As of now, I agree with Michael Burry that “if one doesn’t know how much leverage there is, one doesn’t know enough”. Best to stay away from both BTC and Gold, but then again, ain’t the market overvalued? Personally, I (am forced to) stick with BTC, because, like you said, coming from a third-world country, there ain’t much of an exposure for one to buy precious metals in small quantities. In fact, that’s what got me into economics. With a little bit of money held in BTC form, I grew paranoid of losing its worth and ended up reading a couple of books by Mises until I was satisfied. Still am paranoid, but at least now I know a bit or two.
Holy cow!
Interesting. Also, I’d recommend you read this excellent article on the unfolding future:
Part of the reason (for today) would be the central banks buying all Gold because they are not fools, because they know they’d have to switch back to a Gold-backed dollar sooner or later. I mean, already people have started spotting fraud in their balance sheets! Just how low could one sink…
Ain’t it how fiat crashes?
Goods like Gold and BTC, generally speaking, would always preserve their purchasing power. All ups and downs are short-term irregularities. Personally, I’d buy the dip when it comes to Gold and BTC.
Me neither. In the early days, I was very excited when I read Mises’ insightful revelations. Even before, I was already always thinking about the things that Mises talks about in his magnum opus Human Action. That is, I believe, the one book that one should take with oneself when heading in a nuclear bunker escaping a cataclysmic end of civilization, because, with Human Action in mind, a society can always build itself back up to the point where it has all the amenities that we take for granted: electricity, medicine, internet, cars, etc. However, I don’t think that any of the Austrian revelations would ever make a difference in the choices of the general public. I’m against protests, because, quite simply, they never work. The economics don’t match up. One can get all the benefit of the protests without taking part in them, however, the ones to take part in them are sure to be doomed. Look at China; a protest-led liberation there is impossible. There’s an evident market-failure with protests. I believe (or rather, I used to believe) that the only way to have a utilitarian revolution can happen is by defunding the government: by evading taxes and charging one’s customers in cryptos and paying for every service in cryptos. When done properly, it’s the opposite of a market failure; people would see that X is not paying taxes when they are having to, so more and more people would want to evade taxes, and boom! Life, love and liberty! The free market takes over all that the government used to provide (or rather, should have limited itself to provide): security, law and justice. Spontaneously pops up societies each with its own laws. For instance, I would choose to live in a vegan society where fishing, hunting and even hurting animals is a crime that begets the wrong-doer the agreed-upon punishment. All human exchanges become contractual, interpersonal exchanges. No place for mafia (i.e., democracy). In fact, these societies (which, by the way, would be profit making companies that provide basic security services and law to their members and are owned by shareholders whose best interest is to attrack more customers by making better laws and reducing fees) would buy so-called mafia-insurance, the continuous revenue from which will be used to make sure that no such society or even a nearby democratic country takes back their liberty. I mean, if you think about it, that’s what democracy does: the majority of poor and needy people vote for candidates that guarantee to steal from the rich minority and hand it to them. Disgusting. However, I don’t think this utopia will ever happen. McAffee didn’t set a good example. Furthermore, I’ve researched and realized that it’s dangerous to evade taxes: in the US, for example, the IRS is equipt with guns; they spy on your transactions (and will even more); they put you in prison for years if you evade taxes. Essentially, they’d rather that you not make any money than that you make it and not give it to them. Seriously, anyone who thinks their country serves them is smoking something bad. As for Plan A: explaining to the masses the superiority of libertarian anarcho-capitalism over the welfare state (the mafia-democracy) that they have is an unrealistic fantasy. Rand Paul has no chance whatsoever of ever becoming the president. [Most people think libertarins are for open-borders; that’s ridiculous! Most libertarians aren’t even Austrain. I think America needs a new party, a Utilitarian Party to distance themselves from liberals.] Most people have a kind of reasoning that goes like this: there is no anarcho-capitalist haven in the world, so that must mean that such a system doesn’t work. But that’s not true. Imagine explaining the inferiority of expansionary policies to the kings and queens of the past era and them saying that “look, everybody is fighting battles, meaning your peaceful system that guarantees abundance is fictitious, that one has to fight for wealth”. It was only from Adam Smith’s insights (in his On the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations) that the world changed. Another such a change is due, but I think that change would not come. Neither from bottom to top(Plan A: evading taxes, defunding the state), not from top to bottom (Plan A: utilitarians all over the world run for presidents and change their countries’ constitution and dissolve the state and strategically make way for the unrestrained free-market to unleash its merits). The problem is, in a democratic state, stupid people’s decisions affect what gets done to me. I’ve tried my best to change their thinking, to change their choices, to change their votes, but it doesn’t work. People never change, people never will. We hardcore liberals (who find it morally wrong to pay taxes, who consider it morally wrong to get a vaccine because the state is providing it and the state is BAD, that it should have been Amazon selling vaccines and a private Audit company (like WHO) to give them ratings (in my idealistc dream world), who consider it morally wrong to get a driver’s license because the state grants it and the state is BAD. etc, etc) are pretty much hopeless. I hope that after the world ends in fire, the new civilization gets built by people who have read Human Action.
That’s all I have to say, really… Would have loved to respond to your other comments, but they are references to my remarks so old I’m not even sure I even hold to them as of today…
As for Vril, I’m currently beautifying my upcoming and first happ: Mercury, a Mind Mapping App. I pray I finish it this month. [I’d ping you to test it! Hope you don’t mind.] Actually, they were taking so long with counter-signing that I picked up Mercury and began work on it. 20 days ago, they shipped counter-signing, but sadly, I can’t just quit an ongoing and incomplete project and switch to Vril. Hopefully, partially because Vril is less daunting than Mercury and partially because by then I’d have prior experience in making happs, I should be able to complete Vril by the end of October. It’s a nice fun project, and hopefully, someone will find it useful when issuing a thank-you token style NFT, or a corporate stock, or coffee tokens, all of which are nice candidates for Vril.
I was looking for the intersection of Austrian thought (Mises’ utilitarianism) and veganism. Found Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics, only to later learn that it is flawed. Mises’ Utilitarianism cannot be challenged. Besides that, Hoppe is a great man. As always, people hate him for many reasons. Personally, I think he’s the last libertarian standing. Though I don’t think he would ever make any difference. The world is a hell, as I said earlier, and people like him are insignificant, sadly.
Not really, I’m just as evil as the rest of humanity. Just recently, I had to resort to using electric mosquito repellants for personal safety (and, I’ve observed, they actually kill them). As for animal rights, I think there are none! Just as there are no human rights. What humans have is a voice, with which they fight for (and ultimately do secure) what they believe their rights are. As for animals, well, they have no voice. And no one can fight for another’s liberty. Those who do (especially those famous climate and animal activists who demand the government to do something) are a bunch of fools. Anyone who asks the government to do anything is a fool. Anyway, as of now, animals enjoy the same position that children do: they are their parents’ (or rather, their owner’s) private property. Mises calls them hegemonic bonds (as opposed to contractual bonds). With children, they grow up and escape the hegemony to become independent human actors and thereafter engage in contractual bonds (marriage being one of them). That never happens with animals. Even that aside, one can simply not dictate how another fellow human actor deals with the animals on his private property (his house, farm, whatever), except when such a dictation is contractual. Which, as I said, I’d definitely love to live in a vegan ancap society where everyone, by contract, is bound to treat animals with grace and respect. With things like 3D printed meat, etc, I think more and more societies would tend to go vegan because that’s what the population wants. As for why we love animals is purely evolutionary. We were hardcoded to love faces that have a different aspect ratio than an adult person’s face because that’s how we were made to love our children and raise them to become reproductively successful adults. [Read The Mortal Animal, it’s an excellent book on evolutionary psychology, the only sane interpretation of psychology that exists. Freud, Jung were fools (Freud especially).] Personally, I’m very excited about the upcoming brain-machine interfaces and their use-cases for animals. A few centuries into the future, I’m hoping animals will be able to communicate fluently with humans (if not with each other; only social animals communicate extensively with each other, though, thanks to ricardian law (what Mises calls the law of association) and division of labour, social animals are far far more likely to become as intelligent as we have become. That’s partially why, I think, octopuses don’t have spaceships yet, because they are solitary creatures (and partially because of their short lifespans; octopus moms sort of have to die after birth). After such neural links implanted in their brains, they’d be able to add willfully to the labour force. Some rats would willfully take part in science experiments to make some easy money, others may choose a career in acting. Cats would be all over social media, making millions through merchandising and sponsoring sponsors. Like the end of slavery (thanks to the superior economics that specialization through free choice is), animals would be liberated once and for all. Mother dogs would take their puppies to the vet to get them the magical neural transplants! How cool!
As for morality, the is-ought dichotomy can never be resolved. To prefer empathy over psychopathy is a purely subjective and baseless value judgement (and that’s the one thing that Schopenhauer didn’t understand). Evolutionarily speaking, the former is better in the long run while the latter is better in the short term. Moreover, we all owe our lives to the psychopaths who, in bottleneck times when the human population was at the brink of extinction and food scarce, choose to become cannibals and eat their friends. All moral value judgements are subjective, and we can never have a resolvable discourse about them. Empathy is just as equal of a mental disorder as psychopathy is. Though that still shouldn’t (or rather, CANNOT) prevent us from standing for who we are: however ironical it may sound, a vegan would still kill the butcher who slays the pigs. The fact that one cannot logically justify doing something does not (and should not) prevent one from doing it. So yeah, keep fighting for animal rights. I’d love to read your article; is there a link to it?
And yeah, sorry for the lengthy reply. Because our time-zomes differ, saying all at once seems like a more economical strategy!
Oh and by the way, I just researched on Fekete, so basically,
Fekete saw the huge contradiction in his advocacy of Adam Smith’s so-called real bills doctrine, which views gold-backed bills as a legitimate form of monetary expansion as they are in line with the market and self-adjusting. Those who interpret the theory of money more strictly, such as Mises’s most prominent American student, Murray N. Rothbard, saw here a gateway to the arbitrary creation of money. Can these exchange banks be trusted? Would they in turn engage in political lobbying with any seigniorage profits and thus gradually—as a protected cartel—push through the increasingly generous creation of money? Can only the strictest money supply restrictions, which do not allow lending beyond the sum of deposits, avoid these incentives for the creeping dispossession of the population? Neither Fekete nor Rothbard can conclusively answer this type of question. But we should be grateful to thinkers of this caliber that they did not shy away from clarity of speech, did not seek false harmony, but arguably stood up for the pursuit of the true and good.
To which, again, Mises, the last and the greatest economist (oh and by the way, you know, there was a saying: “who could do anything after Beethoven”; and so yeah, in economics, who can do anything after Mises. I mean, there’s nothing new to discover in economics anymore; Mises has done it all. I wonder why people become economists these days…) has answers for your worries too.
https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/786
Thanks.
From what I know, they are pretty much the same. Gmail (google) collects your IP (if you don’t have any VPN or XMPP server) and uses your phone number as verification. But yeah, last time I checked twitter was when the CEO of twitter shared “Anatomy of the State” by Rothbard. Nonetheless, I still use Facebook. I’m also working into transitioning to other services (I used Minds for quite some time), social media platforms and, of course, OS.
[Why don’t we have both?]
That’s interesting.
Although I think that instead of going back to Gold governments will move into CBDC’s (perhaps after a big shutdown or “hacking”) in order to convince people that regular internet is insecure and government provided sites//content are more “reliable”. Although I hope to be wrong, of course.
As I have said, Huerta de Soto “treatise” or book explains this topic really well.
But, in resume, yeah. Nonetheless, governments can delay the bust process or enhance it creating even more credit//money, up until you have hyperinflation.
If this process of monetary expansion happens before the bust, then it delays the process (enhancing the market adjustments or the “recession”) of the “depression”. -this is what happened in 2020 and 2021 -
But if the creation of credit//money goes directly to consumption (after the bust), then you’ll end up with an economy in recession (adjusting resources to match the real level of time preference) WITH inflation (or hyperinflation) on prices.
Under the latter scenario,the crash of BTC and then FIAT currency is possible.
Otherwise, we could have both.
(I say both and not only BTC because it is not -mainly- used as a medium of exchange, but as an investment in the long-term. After the readjustment of the interest rate (preference rate), the capitalization of BTC will, no doubt, decrease - lowering it’s value-.)
Now, I may be wrong. Maybe people are really using crypto as a medium of exchange, making the it more “liquid” in regards to other goods. I just don’t think this is the case. Judge by yourslef.
That’s the definition of a wet dream. LOL.
I mean, we have gone quite philosophical here but I’m just happy to know I stand for Liberty.
I don’t care if it all goes to hell. I mean. I don’t want everything going to hell. But it will happen.
Perhaps a “new world” won’t ever be achieved, considering that governments could delete, kill or brainwash (1984 reference) dissidents. (Achieving their most wet dreams of total control.)
But still, I’ll be happy. I don’t know if there is a God. I don’t know if there’s “another” life.
But if something like that happens to exist, I want to be proud of what I did while I was here.
That’s all.
Sure! you can send me an e-mail too.
This is quite funny.
It kind of reaches the same conclusions I did and not really at the same time.
I’ll send you my article by e-mail.
No offense, but I don’t really see the point of saying that.
a) I didn’t ask if you were evil or not.
b) You know that agression as a mean to protect yourself from others is ethically justified, so to speak. (The proportion may not be the appropiate, which I totally understand, but as well as flies, there is apparently no other way to stop them!)
c) Even if it was a matter of degree, you know you are less “evil” than a socialist (99% of mankind).
d) You kinda look like those pretty girls uploading photos saying “I’m ugly!” just because they want men to tell them that they are not!
There are really good economic theory books released after Mises. Maybe not with the same amount of knowledge, but still great books that further the explanations and fix some mistakes Mises did (or things that he didn’t see).
As an update (and personal note-keeping; sorry if it’s annoying to note-keep by posting on a public forum), here are my freshest conclusions I’ve reached on the subject (partly inspired by this excellent quora post: https://qr.ae/pGqeUS).
Decentralized community-developed trustless (not to mention, free) technologies and the services they provide will always be inferior to traditional privately-provided ones. That does not mean that distributed systems are technologically inferior; like in MMO gaming, content distribution, etc, distributed systems can be superior, latency and speed-wise; what that means is that successful distributed systems will be privately provided. Like in even traditional games like Fortnite, voice chats are routed directly to the other user, bypassing their centralized servers; yet facilitated by that private company at least in code. Heck, even BitTorrent is a private company (BitTorrent Inc) that relies on donations, etc, as an income stream! Basically, companies will always outcompete DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organizations).
In relation to the industry of social media, decentralized/distributed apps run by “communities” especially do not stand any chance (at least in an ideal world with no government intervention; more on that later). With social media, there’s even a more crucial need for a centralized broker: filtering (or censoring) and AI-powered recommendation feeds, both of which one would have a very hard time providing in any other ingenious way. And for absolutely uncensored social apps, even those would better be provided privately. [In fact, why not consider private companies as decentralized too; I mean, if something happens to one, another dozen would spawn in no time, much like the nodes in a distributed system…] So yeah, I do not expect Holochain-made social apps developed “by the community, for the community” to succeed. At best, all we can hope for is for private companies to adopt Holochain as part of their technology stack and infrastructure with which to serve their customers (though I wonder why that might be the case).
Now the nuance: government interventions. In the face of government regulations, certain services can not be provided in the traditional manner. In the ideal world, everything would be provided privately. But in a world where internet companies can be forced to close by force by the powers that be, even in such a world, ‘anonymous’ private companies will provide superior services than DAOs. Then there are services that cannot be provided in that manner; for example, a real estate or construction company cannot operate anonymously, obviously. For those industries, the services would tend to be inferior. But make no mistake; even the anonymous private companies providing social/online services are inferior to their hypothetical no-government-intervention counterparts (the only reason for the former’s existence being the latter’s absence in a world with intervention).
The same is with money.
Distributed/decentralized money can only successfully exist in a world with intervention. In a world without any (of which we are so unaccustomed that it’s hard to even imagine it), there would only be privately issued monies (tokens, currencies, whatever) backed by REAL things. In fact, I just googled “private currency” on Youtube and was pretty amazed to find this (uploaded 2 weeks ago):
[Like for instance, being paid by a company in the token issued by that very company and redeemable for the service the company provides is nothing new; I did not know that back when I wrote that Vril document…]
Also,
So yeah, the vision of an ideal world with no government intervention in which private companies issue their own money is at least theoretically feasible (if not practically so; I mean, the state has existed for a long long time; I don’t see it disappearing anytime soon, well, unless there’s a revolution. And I don’t see any revolution coming anytime soon either, let alone a lassiz-faire libertarian revolution of the enlightened masses; that’s never gonna happen, we can be dead sure of that. Mises said that interventionism would always end in socialism (which is evident, at least in the west), so no, no hope in practical terms).
Vril as a common platform for all such companies to issue their tokens on was, now I realize, a far cry. It’s more realistic to expect them to deploy their tokens whichever way they choose, with however much redundancy/decentralization their requirements beget. Rather than this one-network-to-rule-them-all scenario of Vril, what will be a way better way to serve the society is to run a private exchange and through it do as much multi-hop Vril-style transaction processing internally as my heart desires; all a user (or rather, a customer now) would have to do is to create an account on such an exchange and deposit some money (of whatever issuance) and have it be converted to any other kind in a second. Kinda like a brokerage firm that processes many serial transactions internally in order to process just one transaction for the end customer/client. But then again, such an intervention-free world ain’t erupting anytime soon; it is and probably will be a pipe-dream for many centuries to come (at the pace the world, or rather, the masses, are developing ideologically)…
Sorry for the long post; it shall probably be my last on this subject.
Like his theory of disutility of labour. It’s not like a bit mistake; I guess he wasn’t being as precise with that one as people have grown accustomed to seeing him being… Got fixed here: The Disutility of Labor | Mises Institute
Hey, while researching some months ago after reading one of your failure cases of the Ricardian law, I came across a paper on the Misesian interpretation of the Malthusian law; would mail you. Hope you find it interesting.
And Yiruma and Max Richter…
Hash tables are pretty efficient if you know what you’re looking for. And then the question arises, is the Lookup available in your personal DHT. In which case it is near instantaneous by neuron standard’s. I think there is a complicated order to nailing the software requirements of the economy you describe, I am actually reading the remaining available posts you’ve made, but I appreciate your point of view. When you talk about creating an app to unveil certain User available features and have rules built to cornerstone your economic system driving these user available features stay genius benevolent sir.
Thanks for the interest. I’m glad you found it worth your time.
As for the current status of Vril, I’ve kinda given up on the idea. Vril was supposed to be a Ripple like multi-currency system where private companies might issue their private monies (plural of money; LOL). I’ve realized that it’s too childish to hope that companies would choose Vril to issue their tokens. They can just as well spin up their own networks or, even better, spin up none and choose to issue centralized private money. The thing is, it’s not technical inexpertise that’s preventing private companies to do so, but rather a political one. The state can close Amazon’s headquarters at its will should Amazon issue a private currency; the same holds true should they issue a Vril currency. The problem is political/ideological, not technical. A technical solution would be no help.
But hey, I learned quite a bunch of economics during the process (besides technical stuff); not all costs were sunk. So yeah, the adventure was quite worth it. : - )
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Hey if you like adventures and conversation at Relic#8541. If you’ve got technical expertise I’ve got the next market ready for marketing. Just need to know where we stand. My language is of people. My thoughts are outstanding. And I like intelligent people 
but we could do work for local businesses abroad.