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https://twitter.com/celestialweasel/status/440629519192305665 https://twitter.com/celestialweasel/status/44062951919230566...

ikeboy 11y ago
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-grows-up http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-gr...
- cloudjacker 11y ago
  tl;dr
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    "Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do instead is sail 250 miles to an island called Palau, where there’s a particular kind of limestone not available on their home island. They quarry the limestone, and then shape it into circular wheel-like forms with a hole in the middle, called fei. Some of these fei stones are absolutely huge, fully 12 feet across. Then they sail the fei back to Yap, where they’re used as money. The great advantage of the fei being made from this particular stone is that they’re impossible to counterfeit, because there’s none of the limestone on Yap. The fei are rare and difficult to get by definition, so they hold their value well. You can’t fake a fei. Just as you have to work to get money in a developed economy – so the money constitutes a record of labour – the fei are an unfakeable record of the labour that went into their creation. In addition, the big ones have the advantage that they’re impossible to steal. By the same token, though, they’re impossible to move, so what happens is that if you want to spend some of the money, you just agree that somebody else now owns the coin. A coin sitting outside somebody’s house can be transferred backwards and forwards as part of a series of transactions, and all that actually happens is that people change their minds about who now owns it. Everyone agrees that the money has been transferred. The real money isn’t the fei, but the idea of who owns the fei. The register of ownership, held in the community memory, is the money." The larger point is that money has always required waste to create. Gold was valuable because it was scarce, fiat money was valuable because it was backed by gold. Eventually fiat money went off the gold standard, but it couldn't have started like that.
    - shalmanese 11y ago
      "In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination."
- infinity0 11y ago
  > Behind the user-friendly façade of chip and pin are cryptographic techniques of industrial strength. oh dear... the rest of the article was good, though.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    They also claimed that all crypto is based on prime numbers, while bitcoin is actually not, and called hashes "encryption". They sound like they sort of know what they're talking about, but jump to conclusions and assume their educated guesses are correct without looking them up.

ikeboy 11y ago

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-grows-up http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-gr...

cloudjacker 11y ago
tl;dr
- ikeboy 11y ago
  "Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do instead is sail 250 miles to an island called Palau, where there’s a particular kind of limestone not available on their home island. They quarry the limestone, and then shape it into circular wheel-like forms with a hole in the middle, called fei. Some of these fei stones are absolutely huge, fully 12 feet across. Then they sail the fei back to Yap, where they’re used as money. The great advantage of the fei being made from this particular stone is that they’re impossible to counterfeit, because there’s none of the limestone on Yap. The fei are rare and difficult to get by definition, so they hold their value well. You can’t fake a fei. Just as you have to work to get money in a developed economy – so the money constitutes a record of labour – the fei are an unfakeable record of the labour that went into their creation. In addition, the big ones have the advantage that they’re impossible to steal. By the same token, though, they’re impossible to move, so what happens is that if you want to spend some of the money, you just agree that somebody else now owns the coin. A coin sitting outside somebody’s house can be transferred backwards and forwards as part of a series of transactions, and all that actually happens is that people change their minds about who now owns it. Everyone agrees that the money has been transferred. The real money isn’t the fei, but the idea of who owns the fei. The register of ownership, held in the community memory, is the money." The larger point is that money has always required waste to create. Gold was valuable because it was scarce, fiat money was valuable because it was backed by gold. Eventually fiat money went off the gold standard, but it couldn't have started like that.
  - shalmanese 11y ago
    "In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination."
infinity0 11y ago
> Behind the user-friendly façade of chip and pin are cryptographic techniques of industrial strength. oh dear... the rest of the article was good, though.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  They also claimed that all crypto is based on prime numbers, while bitcoin is actually not, and called hashes "encryption". They sound like they sort of know what they're talking about, but jump to conclusions and assume their educated guesses are correct without looking them up.