I see great potential in Ulex. They’ve inspired from and are using good official standards. [Though they’re bogus when it comes to the tech… Nowhere even close to PAID…; also, their arbitration mechanism is all but naïve.]
But looks like we (Holochain) lost one customer there. There Beta is already out! Let’s hope they redeploy it as a (h)app solution someday… [Holochain, I guess, advertised too much back in the early days when the product was not even ready… It’s understandable that many developer-teams lost hope and patience in the way… Anyway, to each his own…]
Actually, my take on “money” is a bit orthodox… I’m not a great fan of Gold, much like Hayek. [And by Gold, I mean Bitcoin, Eth, and its great many tokens that build value from demand of the “currency”/“money” itself. All the classical Austrians mostly used the term “money”; in fact, Hayek even used the word “monies”; haha! But these days, “currencies” is often used interchangeably…] Anyway, back to the subject. I believe they (Golden “monies”) are surely better than government money, but we can do a lot better than that. In fact, that’s what Hayek wrote extensively about in his later works on Money.
Anyway, Mises, in his monograph “Economic Calculations in a Socialist Commonwealth”, defines money somewhat this way:
… calculation by exchange value makes it
possible to refer values back to a unit. For this purpose,
since goods are mutually substitutable in accordance with
the exchange relations obtaining in the market, any possible
good can be chosen. In a monetary economy it is
money that is so chosen.
The second condition is that there exists in fact a
universally employed medium of exchange—namely,
money—which plays the same part as a medium in the
exchange of production goods also. If this were not the
case, it would not be possible to reduce all exchange-relationships
to a common denominator
Hayek expands on it and concludes that there can and rather must be multiple such denominators, competing with each other, under which condition each has sufficient motives to shield itself from inflating its relative price thereby shielding itself from diminishing its purchasing-power; basically, that even “monies” should be produced on the free market, and that there’s no reason to think why such monies would be any worse than Gold itself!
Anyway, these views are orthodoxical because the mainstream belief on Holochain forum on this subject (mainly, Arthur Brock’s bets regarding money) is that money is ‘currency’, which is something that flows from one participant to another, and that every use-case demands a different currency-design. I call that take absolutely ridiculous!
A “currency” that has a built-in expiry-date, or that has a transaction-cost associated with it, or has some other weird behavior, surely is something, but that something is not “money”! Period! [At least in the ‘economic’ sense of the word.]
Sure, “goods” do carry such weird behaviors, but a representative-money (i.e., a token that represents its underlying asset) cannot have those absurdities; surely, its relative price (i.e., the price of that token or currency) will reflect those underlying issues, but through its relative price alone; no further! But they never seemed to understand that argument…
I have a few issues Firstly I think when it comes to “money”, listening to those who penned their thoughts about it before things like the internet were around is useful however we do have the internet, the world is different, more so than anyone “back in the day” could’ve imagined. It is OK for us to adapt our thoughts based on progress and the changes that have happened.
I don’t think that, I think that Holochain is empowering people to create whatever they want when it comes to money and currency. That’s the impression I have held and to check, I just re-read the source of my thoughts, Art’s article The Holocene Explosion (2.3): Game-Changing Possibilities in a World of Unenclosable Carriers - The NextNet Series Part 2.3 of 3: Creating Financial Systems That Work for Everyone. The talk is about mutual credit, so perhaps the wording is again making you compare the new with the current which is not really comparable. If they were, then we would just be re-creating from within the system that’s causing the problems we are trying to solve. So when you say things like “absolutely ridiculous!” it gives me even more encouragement that we’re on the right track, as that’s what most people say when they don’t really understand what they’re talking about.
Of course we (private markets) could do better than that (fiat).
The thing is… what is better? (entrepeneurial question, not praxeological)
Gold is valuable as a consumer good in terms of ornamentations and jewerly (and many more). It can’t be artificially expanded. Inflation could only be a thing as far as humans finds more of it in the Earth. Many authors have said (Milton Friedman, Juan Ramón Rallo and I think Selgin and White) that Gold is not a good currency because getting Gold or exchanging it is expensive. As Hoppe and Huerta de Soto have said (“The Ethics and Economics of Private Property” and "Money, Credit Bank and Economic Cycles") the cost of this matter is relatively lower in terms of inflation, bureacrauts (“private or public”) and trustability.
Bitcoin is valuable in terms of… descentralization? Sure, It is an advance compared to Fiat but it has no value more than descentralization (there are better ,private, descentralized, projects than Bitcoin such as Monero). But it gets funny when you consider that people are not really buying Bitcoin because it has value as a descentralized currency (that would be dumb) but just because there is Hype about Blockchain and, of course, a boom clearly happening. Now, money supply can’t be centrally expanded (as Gold). The mechanism of Inflation is different compared to Gold. In this issue we could try to argue if it’s better or worse. I personally think it is good as far as there is a burning rate (I think we agree in the benefits of Deflation) in every transaction and PoS (although PoW could be potentially better with Holochain. I’m still a noobie on cryptoworld or Holochain). Let me know what you think.
However, Hoppe says that if the purpose of Money is to facilitate economic calculation by accepting a common medium of exchange… then having many currencies is inneficient and that a Free Market will tend to unify into one or just a few currencies.
Now, given the swapability and liquity provided by, so to speak, Uniswap, people could use (unconsciously) many currencies, but they will consider prices (to do economic calculation) based on one single currency. This is why I think Bitcoin is overpriced. There is no real usage on Bitcoin. There is no real demand of the currency. It’s all based on Speculation (again, I don’t mean speculation in a Praxeological sense). So saying “Bitcoin and Gold” in one phrase it’s quite … I don’t know, I just don’t like it, hehe.
I don’t get it. Maybe it is the word “representative-money” or “absurdities”. Tell me if I didn’t understand your comment, but are you saying that money can’t have transaction costs or burnability?
I mean… that may be a downside for you if you value more inflation than deflation (increase on acquisitive power) but Money is, after all, another economic good. I totally get the part of transaction fees. Thats why I’m intersted (alongside with descentralization) on Holochain. People won’t ever use Cryptos as medium of exchange (independently of their “instrinsic” value, i.e, value obtained as an end or consumer good and not as a mean) if the cost of transaction is high. But that doesn’t mean that there should not be a transaction cost at all (Fiat has no transaction cost. But the cost payed for the user is higher on terms of loss of Liberty and inflation. Gold has storage cost. But the price payed is relatively lower compated to Fiat. I think a better HOLO currency could involve a small fee dedicated to burning (also setting a cap limit on the total supply) so “Miners” (in the HOLO sense) are able to obtain Hot (or HoloFuel?) or servicies from Apps developed under HOLO protocol. Nonetheless, by doing this, major holders or savers would benefit more decreasing their time preference (they would get more for their saving) since 5% on 1BTC is more than 5% on 0.0001BTC. This would also lead to an increase on the productive stages that would end up in even more deflation About the 3 different types of Deflation (although there should be a fourth given Blockchain technology)
Oh, and sorry if I make a lot of mistakes in terms of grammar. I’m still learning English so…
I guess I committed the vice of assuming everyone to be on the same grounds… Anyway, I’ll attempt to re-explain a few things elaborately:
Blockchain is dead! The whole Blockchain experiment was a game-project of a 15-year-old. [Again, don’t misunderstand me; age is, I believe, no significant discriminator between talent and vision. Also, I’m not committing the details; Mr. Vitalik’s endeavors were sponsored by, I guess, Peter Thiel; but the core argument is that their whole method was flawed, and they just kept adding “fixes” ever since; Blockchain + sharding + beacon-chain = a mess! Why not do things the right way? The way they should have been done since the beginning?] [Or as the saying goes: successful people solve hard problems, not np-hard ones! Haha!]
Whereas Holochain is the magnum-opus of Art and Eric, two of the greatest architects (software-and-network-architects, that is to say) who ever lived! Trust me, this is the place to be if you wish to make any significant change in the world for the better… These people are making history every single day, every singe commit; haha!
[Don’t mind my over-exaggeration; I guess I exaggerate to good to the great, and the bad to the worst! Can’t help it though… It’s, as you may recognize, a bodily impulse (hence not under control of my voluntary Human Action; haha!]
Well, as for Gold, I’m pretty sure the whole Holochain community hates it… Basically, their way of saying is that: we ought to better keep our currencies backed by real-world things of value, and not faith, etc; in fact, that’s what HoloFuel is; it’s backed by hosting-power, for example.
As for me, I hate it for partially the same reason. And partially because, just the mere thought that a civilization that never discovered Gold (or any relatively scarce resource) would never be able to establish a uniform discriminator (for exchange of goods) and hence would not be able to establish a market and would hence fail to innovate and invent on the scales that we take for granted, would not be able to become space-faring and would gain no prominence in the grander schemes of things, at best sounds absolutely ridiculous to me! In astrophysics, they have this concept of The Great Barrier (as a solution to the Fermi’s Paradox); but I’m pretty sure that not discovering a relatively scarce resource is not that Great Barrier!
That makes up for only a fraction of its face value; the rest is all driven by its demand as a store-of-value.
The way I see it, Bitcoin & Ethereum are no different from Gold and Silver; just their digital counterparts…
The core prerequisite of Gold (the yellow-metal) as a store-of-value and a subsequent medium-of-exchange relies on, what you called “speculation”! That’s right. And for the yellow-metal, that process took some 2000 years to complete, as a matter of fact. Though for Bitcoin it only took (or will take) two-decades… But the core inefficiency of such monies is outright visible!
Yeah, that’s the single BIGGEST argument against Vril, or any other many-currencies system…
But note that Hoppe’s opinion was about “banks issuing currencies of their own, competing with each other, and keeping their own inflation (and thereby, exchange-rates) in check; winner takes all”. But Holochain-spawned inter-communicating many-currencies systems (and Vril) are more like Barter-on-Steroids! That completely changes the equations… So, it’s not quite comparable with those systems that they described (and criticized).
By representative-money, I meant money (or rather, units of currency) that back (or are backed by) some real-world asset/commodity which itself has some real utility. Or put simply, coupons or vouchers that are redeemable for, I don’t know, cups of coffee, etc. Such currencies are what Holochain wishes to (and is best suited to) power.
My argument was that, since all “money” (or currencies) have the same function (that being, a facilitator of trade, or a denomination for exchange), then the structural-design (i.e., the code-rules) of those currencies should all be the same. It’s like saying, all IOU promises are written on the same kind of paper (derived from Paper-Plant or whatever; who knows where paper comes from, after all! Haha!!!); all IOU promises are written with the same kind of Pencils (made of Graphite); there’s no “functional” (in the programming sense of the word) difference between my IOU and your IOU. All that differs between them is the signee and the handwriting. The core “uniform” function stays the same, that being “issue-ability” and “transferability”.
Anything that differs from this is surely something, but that something does not have the same purpose (or has additional purposes) as what the sole purpose of money is.
The burning, and locking, and air-dropping, are all there to serve some additional “application-specific” use-cases. For example, the traditional Blockchain smart-contracts that you’re well familiar with have those features to serve the specific needs of the smart-contract in question. But a smart-contract is not “money”… I hope it makes sense…
The thing is, those additional reasons why Blockchain-tech employs those measures are easily met by simply designing a good Holochain (h)app. Our (Holochain’s) only requirement for money is to facilitate “external” compensations (for example, when the happ network itself cannot financially reward its participants despite wanting to do so, hence requiring someone to “buy” and someone to “earn”). That, in my opinion, would be the case for most (if not all) serious Holochain economies…
I don’t see how that would translate to “hating” Gold… I would think quite the opposite (since the “method” or value behind the currency is, as gold, a property title) (EDIT: NVM READ THE LAST THING I MENTION)
Wouldn’t that be something against Money in general (as an institution) and not just Gold? XD
Yep, but the foundations are there (valuability as a good/property title). If Money is used as an uncertainity “remedy”, a money based on speculation (not property titles) has to be counterproductive. That’s where I wanted to go… (obviously in the praxeological sense every action and valoration is speculative).
Think I got it right then
I totally agree with you. After all, that’s why Uniswap is (or was?) so important.
Not really the “smart” contract, but the currency that works under those terms (Being the currency a -property title-).
The most obvious representation of this would be PAXG… But maybe I’m missing something and the contracts are smarter than me (lol). As I have said I don’t fully comprehend neither Blockchain nor Holo so if I’m missing something please let me know.
What do you mean by “good Holochain (h)apps”. (h)Apps that use the latter (earn/buy) method of compensation? I would agree if that’s the case. As far as they have some method to prevent inflation.
Talking about Holo (HoloFuel); The problem about power computing as money supply is that this could be easily inflated. If there is no mecanism or code (as burning, cap limit or both) then the currency would be inflationary. I think HOLO team uses “stable-value” term based on an percentage of inflation instead of an inflation on money supply (that leads to relatively loss of acq. power). Not to speak of “currencies” backed by food or coffes which are not property titles (real money!). Here the advantage for gold is clear; it has durability (translating to real fungible property titles). A coin or currency used as promise of future production is just… not a good project. (Is that how Mutual Credit works? If that’s the case damn I’m damn sure it shouldn’t be used as money)
I haven’t researched about Ripple (XRP, right?) so Idk how it works.
I completely get your point. Makes complete sense.
I’d like to add a few dispersed bits of information regarding money.
What this community is trying to achieve is, it’s trying to “do away” with “money as a good in itself” (as a common denominator for aid in calculations) and rather use the consumable goods themselves to fulfill its use.
Sure, this definition invokes debate… One can argue that “money” itself is also a “consumable-good”; and to say that “by consumable-good, it is meant that a good that possesses real ultimate utility in itself” would be wrong too, as a “coffee” is no utility to someone who doesn’t drink coffee, similarly, “money” is no utility to someone who doesn’t trade (indirect trade) or calculates. They’re both “consumable goods”, driven by the subjective value-judgments of the individuals themselves. One could also argue about money being a “production good”. Mises already cleared that debate a century ago; Money is neither a production good nor a consumption good; its supply affects nothing at all… I guess a more precise way to state the above sentence would be “do away with money as the apparatus for trade”. [Note that this has nothing to do with Socialism, though the community is full of them! Haha!]
He goes on to say the same things that you did, of how “the most marketable” money attains the grand throne, ending up becoming the universal medium of exchange; and how just the fact that we need money to facilitate transactions (in a big society) and the fact that without it (money) we’ll all be stuck, is not sufficient to say that individuals will adopt “money” (and indirect trade); that the mere fact that there would be no exchange without indirect trade is not enough to induce individuals to engage in it if it (the money) secured no immediate advantage to them; praxeologically speaking, one’s uneasiness in a given situation and the presence of an alternative is not enough; the individual should be able to (causally) reason that taking an action would shift his condition from uneasiness to ease. Which is why Gold (the metal) won the last war between monies. That’s I guess where Bitcoin differs from Gold (the yellow metal, gold jewelry, gold ring, etc); and that leaves some room to explain its (mysterious & speculative) rise, which is projected to “go to the Moon”, hopefully! Haha!
Mutual credit is a clever way to meet the function/use that “money” serves. It’s a non-monetary market arrangement. [See the last section on Ripple.]
[Well actually, I’m more than thrilled to have a professional Austrian assess mutual-credit and all-things-Holo! Would absolutely LOVE to hear your remarks and conclusions on these things… I mean, such opportunities rarely come; Austrian econ-intellectuals are so rare…]
I’ll drop some links, and I hope you enjoy them… [The market in that video is an example of a “non-monetary-system”, where “money-as-a-good” isn’t used for calculations and trade, rather “credit” is used. The word “credit” may feel like “fiat”, but trust me, as you dig deeper its essence (and advantages) would become clearer. Basically, in Misesian terms, it’s a way to engage in direct-exchange! Yipee! No need to resort to indirect ones, hence no need for “the inefficient & infamous MONEY”! A money-free free-market! Haha!]
Just in case you haven’t seen it, I’ll drop HoloFuel 101 too:
To me, mutual credit is just an accounting system; it’s multi-hop mutual credit that I’m an ardent fan of!
Where blockchain is reinventing money, Holochain is reinventing the market! [As said above]
Yes, you’re right in that mutual-credit is not money, but it doesn’t have to. It solves the problem “one level higher” than the one that Money solves.
See Ripple (the rippling ripple, not XRP, to be precise).
Here are some quick neat videos on the same:
[Besides these, if you have the time, I’d really appreciate it if you leave your review on Commons-based Peer-Production (yes, I know, it sounds like a scam! Which it is! Haha!). All of those developments (FOSS, Wikipedia, etc) can easily be explained by our existing theories. However, Mr. Benkler seems convinced that there’s something more radically novel to be found! Check his book “The Wealth of NETWORKS”! [Million-dollar title, but not a penny in content] His (and Coase’s) transaction-cost theory and the evolution of the firm, markets, and commons in intriguing indeed. But the very honorable mention of Marx in any text prevents me from taking it seriously… Can’t help. Don’t get me wrong, I totally support DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organizations). But commons is a whole different thing. And I don’t think there is any theory to be deduced from the success of Wikipedia.]
[Blatant rants till 28:50; hint: watch at 2X and he’ll seem more tolerable!]
He doesn’t understand that it doesn’t work that way! We don’t deduce theories from empirical data! Sure, our praxeological deductions can explain empirical data; but the inverse is not true; the economical real-world (our only laboratory) is a one-way function. You can’t look at graphs and trends and say “then THIS or THAT must be true”! Anyway, to each his own…]
Looks like this thread has well digressed from its original subject… Who cares! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Citation needed I don’t see this at all, you can totally create money as a good if you want to using Holochain.
What I see is a community who are developing a system that enables and empowers new ways of doing things in order to improve on how they are done right now.
If it ends up that with the use of these new systems the current use of money as a good disappears over time then it will, otherwise it won’t. Much like Free/Libre Open Source Software - if it isn’t of use then it isn’t used and eventually goes stale. If it is of use and used then it persists and grows because it has value.
What I believe you and all the references you refer to allude to is that the value of money is intrinsic in the money itself, but that is not a given, it is just the current situation, and situations change.
So by focusing on building systems that work and growing those instead of saying “well, this is a given”, we do at least try to evolve as humans.
Of course some won’t, they will forever live by what someone else thinks and says. I believe we co-create the future, and if that’s one where money itself doesn’t exist that’s fine, not saying it will or won’t, just keeping my mind open, cos I go by what works and I’ve seen a lot of things that you wouldn’t think would work but do.
That’s why I used the word “community”, not Holochain or Holo!
By community, I meant me myself, okay?; others may or may not share the same opinion.
Yeah, but what’s the point of using Holochain then? I expect most sane people to build mutual-credit currencies, rippling systems, REA resource economies, etc. Not something like, let’s say, (H)appy Coin (a Bitcoin fork for Holochain), etc…
OK, so this is why I said citation needed, I’m trying to establish just what exactly your argument is as it seems you are digging at people who are quite happily building stuff that’s useful and being used yet you’re sitting at your keyboard saying how ridiculous it all is and how it will never work yet it is working and they’re growing it.
So… with that in mind, and your above statement that seems to reverse what you said but let’s go with it anyway, you are saying that when you refer to community you’re actually referring to you, and your position is not that holochain thinks money on its own can have value but it is you who thinks that. Which seems to be the opposite of the argument you’ve been trying to push all this time, but maybe I’ve read wrong which is why I’m asking for clarity.
Well, there wouldn’t necessarily be a specific reason apart from it being on a new system, so when HTML came out it was used for different things not that it was built for it but because people wanted to do X with it so did.
The point I was making there is you seemed to be saying “the community”, as in holochain community, that this was a no-no when it’s a if-you-want-to-then-go-for-it.
So, which is it? Cos all I see is the quietness of people getting on with what they’re doing and an audience member throwing stuff at them from the sidelines.
You misunderstood. I’m not against “doing away with money”; quite the contrary. I fully support it. And that’s what I was trying to explain to an outsider, our new guest, @MaxxD, about why it’s not “socialist” at all to do so. It’s a new way to do exchanges in a market.
I’m correcting myself here as it’s all getting confusing lol - you seem now to be saying it’s not holochain who you’re suggesting is saying money itself cannot be a good but you. Which is the opposite of what you’ve been saying up until now.
Basically I needed to do a s/can/cannot but decided to post another comment instead
OK, well that’s weird because I seem to then have slipped through some kind of quantum dimension as I’m sure you’ve been saying that “it’s ridiculous” to think otherwise.
Arthur Brock and my opinions are the same all through. It’s only at the very end when they diverge…
Basically, when all future Holochain mutual-credit currencies (in Holochain terminology) (and REA Resources) need external currencies (for example, buying HoloFuel with USD, or another of some Holochain currency such as BingoFuel; haha!), and when they all need to speak a common language (UniSwap’s equivalent for our currencies), and when they all need discoverability (so as to be readily convertible to & from each other, sometimes many-levels at a time) then why not go the Vril way! Plus new currencies won’t have to deploy their own network; young networks of your own would not so trustworthy for customers, especially early on when the network is small and prone.
But Arthur believes that the needs and use-cases of every currency are different.
Here’s what Mises has to say:
And that applies to any apparatus (mutual-credit, for instance) that we may invent. Yet, there are diverse views on this subject here in this community… [Not to mention those of the CBPP proponents who want to do away with markets altogether and rather settle payments ad hoc; imagine a HoloTube where if your video gets 1 million views (meaning you’ve contributed a good deal to everyone), then you do not get any financial compensation (however small) for doing so, rather you get the opportunity to get laid by one of your randomly chosen subscribers; haha! They call it “generative” as opposed to “extractive-capitalism”! You’d have to be on Soma to believe that!]
[Note that me saying “ridiculous” might mean a very serious problem to be investigated; but truth be told, it’s a very subtle difference, but a significant one nevertheless. But I’d be okay if the future unfolded his way too…]
Firstly I think when it comes to “money”, listening to those who penned their thoughts about it before things like the internet were around is useful however we do have the internet, the world is different, more so than anyone “back in the day” could’ve imagined. It is OK for us to adapt our thoughts based on progress and the changes that have happened.
