4 ms·

Energy price's are highly volatile because you cannot control the supply in a timely fashion nor store energy for later usage (in amounts that matters anyway),

Energy price's are highly volatile because you cannot control the supply in a timely fashion nor store energy for later usage (in amounts that matters anyway), i.e it would be a worse currency. Scarcity is a good attribute for a currency. Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns. Which is what was used during the 2007 crisis. People do not realize how much worse the 2007 crisis would have been without the measures taken by the Federal Reserve. IMO, the attractiveness of bitcoin is about being a secure decentralized payment system everything else is fluff. Such a system takes some energy to work what a surprise... Do you guys think that all the financial institutions combined use less energy than bitcoin ? Bitcoin is probably using a lot less energy...

idibidiartists 9y ago
Renewable energy is not an asset. It's energy. It's the basis of all life. It is infinitely abundant (until our Sun dies and the winds stop blowing) Unlike currency, energy has an intrinsic value as a unit of work (the 'joule' being that unit) Energy as a currency would get its value not from artificial scarcity but from its rate of flow in a surplus energy p2p exchange network. Satoshi himself mentioned this line of thinking back in 2009 [1] when I wrote about a hypothetical p2p energy economy, but he thought the Blockchain could power such an energy-as-currency-based economy, and he's actually right. You need to think of the Blockchain as the low level API and write high level currency schemes on top of it. I haven't given it much thought since then. 1. http://archive.is/5CbYM http://archive.is/5CbYM
- jcoffland 9y ago
  > It is infinitely abundant It's not. One immediate limit is ground space.
  - idibidiartists 9y ago
    Haven't tou heard of civilization types? I think type 3 (or 5?) is one where they have harness the energy of their sun(s) in an optimal wag. They gather solar energy in space and beam it to their planet, moon(s$ and their space colonies.
    - idibidiartists 9y ago
      here: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-iii-civilization.html https://phys.org/news/2016-07-iii-civilization.html
eru 9y ago
> Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns. I shared your concern until recently. But then I learned more about fractional reserve banking: with suitable (lack of) regulations banks can and will create just the right amount of extra bank money to satisfy extra demands from the general population for holding extra money. Historically, just conditions have held in eg the free banking episodes in Scotland, Canada, France, Australia. (I think in the Song dynasty in China, too.) https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-free-banking-history/ https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-... has a bit of background on history. And George Selgin has a bunch of paper really delving into the automatic adjustments that profit seeking banks will produce on their own accord.
- notahacker 9y ago
  Australia's free banking period ended up with a property bubble and banks going bust, causing the country's worst ever financial crisis. Instead of "creating just the right amount of extra money", other banks suspended trading. But free banking is much closer to the way major currencies actually operate today (which also involves money supply determined primarily by banks' willingness to extend credit and fluctuating from day to day) than the concept behind Bitcoin or indeed the gold standard (supplies of a particular currency should be limited by [proof of] specific type of work and only able to grow, and very slowly)
  - eru 9y ago
    For comparison, https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-free-banking-history/ https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-... : > Australia. Operating with few restrictions, Australian banks were large, widely branched, and competitive, and they practiced mutual par acceptance, making the system resemble Scotland’s. The Australian episode is of special interest for suffering the worst financial crisis known under a free-banking system. After a decade-long real estate boom came to an end in 1891, some building societies and land banks failed, after which 13 of 26 trading banks suspended payments in early 1893. George Selgin (1992a) finds that the banks’ reserve ratios do not indicate any overexpansion of bank liabilities during the boom, though some banks clearly made bad loans. The boom was rather financed by British capital inflows, which suddenly stopped after the Baring crisis of 1890. Kevin Dowd (1992) adds that the banks were not undercapitalized. He argues that “misguided government intervention” in the first failed institutions “needlessly undermined public confidence” in other banks, while other interventions boosted the number of suspensions (all but one of the suspended banks soon reopened) by providing favorable reorganization terms for banks in suspension. (For a different view, see Turner and Hickson (2002). I don't understand your second paragraph. You can have free banking in a gold standard or in a fiat regime. The historic free banking episodes regularly cited were in a gold standard setting. (But perhaps the confusion comes from 'Internet-Austrians' common insistence on 100% reserve banking as a mandatory feature of what they'd call a gold standard?) (Bitcoin in its current parameters is more or less trying to imitate a gold standard.)

idibidiartists 9y ago

Renewable energy is not an asset. It's energy. It's the basis of all life. It is infinitely abundant (until our Sun dies and the winds stop blowing) Unlike currency, energy has an intrinsic value as a unit of work (the 'joule' being that unit) Energy as a currency would get its value not from artificial scarcity but from its rate of flow in a surplus energy p2p exchange network. Satoshi himself mentioned this line of thinking back in 2009 [1] when I wrote about a hypothetical p2p energy economy, but he thought the Blockchain could power such an energy-as-currency-based economy, and he's actually right. You need to think of the Blockchain as the low level API and write high level currency schemes on top of it. I haven't given it much thought since then. 1. http://archive.is/5CbYM http://archive.is/5CbYM

jcoffland 9y ago
> It is infinitely abundant It's not. One immediate limit is ground space.
- idibidiartists 9y ago
  Haven't tou heard of civilization types? I think type 3 (or 5?) is one where they have harness the energy of their sun(s) in an optimal wag. They gather solar energy in space and beam it to their planet, moon(s$ and their space colonies.
  - idibidiartists 9y ago
    here: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-iii-civilization.html https://phys.org/news/2016-07-iii-civilization.html

eru 9y ago

> Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns. I shared your concern until recently. But then I learned more about fractional reserve banking: with suitable (lack of) regulations banks can and will create just the right amount of extra bank money to satisfy extra demands from the general population for holding extra money. Historically, just conditions have held in eg the free banking episodes in Scotland, Canada, France, Australia. (I think in the Song dynasty in China, too.) https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-free-banking-history/ https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-... has a bit of background on history. And George Selgin has a bunch of paper really delving into the automatic adjustments that profit seeking banks will produce on their own accord.

notahacker 9y ago
Australia's free banking period ended up with a property bubble and banks going bust, causing the country's worst ever financial crisis. Instead of "creating just the right amount of extra money", other banks suspended trading. But free banking is much closer to the way major currencies actually operate today (which also involves money supply determined primarily by banks' willingness to extend credit and fluctuating from day to day) than the concept behind Bitcoin or indeed the gold standard (supplies of a particular currency should be limited by [proof of] specific type of work and only able to grow, and very slowly)
- eru 9y ago
  For comparison, https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-free-banking-history/ https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-... : > Australia. Operating with few restrictions, Australian banks were large, widely branched, and competitive, and they practiced mutual par acceptance, making the system resemble Scotland’s. The Australian episode is of special interest for suffering the worst financial crisis known under a free-banking system. After a decade-long real estate boom came to an end in 1891, some building societies and land banks failed, after which 13 of 26 trading banks suspended payments in early 1893. George Selgin (1992a) finds that the banks’ reserve ratios do not indicate any overexpansion of bank liabilities during the boom, though some banks clearly made bad loans. The boom was rather financed by British capital inflows, which suddenly stopped after the Baring crisis of 1890. Kevin Dowd (1992) adds that the banks were not undercapitalized. He argues that “misguided government intervention” in the first failed institutions “needlessly undermined public confidence” in other banks, while other interventions boosted the number of suspensions (all but one of the suspended banks soon reopened) by providing favorable reorganization terms for banks in suspension. (For a different view, see Turner and Hickson (2002). I don't understand your second paragraph. You can have free banking in a gold standard or in a fiat regime. The historic free banking episodes regularly cited were in a gold standard setting. (But perhaps the confusion comes from 'Internet-Austrians' common insistence on 100% reserve banking as a mandatory feature of what they'd call a gold standard?) (Bitcoin in its current parameters is more or less trying to imitate a gold standard.)