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> No. That is simply not possible with anything resembling today's technology. We'll have flying cars on a Mars city before automated arbitration on real world

> No. That is simply not possible with anything resembling today's technology. We'll have flying cars on a Mars city before automated arbitration on real world matters. I don't disagree about its current feasibility, but I think that's mainly so because of a distortion of incentives and that so many are invested in this model (the few) despite how horrible it is (to the detriment of the many) as so many people are incapable of doing anything else at this point. They would sooner die than consider opting for something that they know will end their way of life if successful and this terrifies them rather than excites them about starting something new in life; the sad reality is the legal system is already getting disrupted as we speak all over the World and it's innovating at the edges, but also manifests as distrust and disillusionment and lost of confidence in even basic things like anti-masker, vaccine conspiracy, and refusing to follow curfew and business closures and can lead to having the National Gaurd in Washington DC due to the storming of the Capital by imbeciles fomented by Trump. All of these are legal matters that are complicated and messy, without a doubt, but the current legal system is to blame for why so many loss confidence as it cannot solve them either, and we can easily be overrun with a 'burning of Alexandria' situation if we don't attempt to solve these problems. And I mean in the next decade given how fast things are escalating not just in the West but in Asia: Thailand, Hong Kong and Mynmar are all in revolt right now for obvious break down in trust with thier systems and legal systems. The CCP is the benefactor from these disolving in the region as they can expand their influence in the turmoil and they simply don't care how corrupt their legal systems are or how they appear to the outside World and will disappear you if you resist which is where I think this is all heading. > Except fixed supply currency is going back in the other direction. And the hard parts about eliminating scarcity have nothing to do with the monetary system. WHAT?!!! This smacks of outright detached privilege only HNers can conjure up from its ivory tower, go to countries that suffer from hyperinflation and still suffer from severe capital controls after that period all of which prevent wealth creation before you make such a claim. Otherwise I cannot take you seriously as your ignorance is almost palpably painful to me... I've lived and worked in Eastern Europe in the last decade and I went to baja before the revaluation of the peso in the 90s quite often as tourists, and the amount of poverty is incredibly sad... it was crazy to see how my single dollar bill bought 1000s worth of X in pesos down there. I honestly would buy absurd stuff like 10kg of packaged laundry detergent because it cost something absurd like 96 cents and I had a story to tell when I got back to school. Ill still remember to this day how upset I felt as a kid using quarters on the arcade machines outside the store instead of going to the counter and exchanging my USD to credits for 'free play' tokens, and then suddenly realizing how spoiled I was and how the $10 I spent in that store after a few hours probably helped feed the owners entire family for a week. It's funny how much those experiences make you grow up, and I fear you cannot relate. What you have just said is just beyond belief and I cannot seriously take what you say serious. I can address lending as that is already a thing, BTC is the collateral and fiat is the lent out. But the short is we just revert to a satoshi standard rather than whole Bitcoin (satoshi is 100 millionth of a Bitcoin)... But I seriously don't feel like I can muster the energy to go into depth as to how that would look like because of how struck I am by that statement. I'm not trying to be a SJW trigger queen, but that is just so painfully ignorant that my head literately hurts now and I have to get offline for a while.

oblio 6y ago
> I don't disagree about its current feasibility, but I think that's mainly so because of a distortion of incentives and that so many are invested in this model (the few) despite how horrible it is (to the detriment of the many) as so many people are incapable of doing anything else at this point. The problem is, at this point it's like arguing for communism. It's an utopia. It could happen but I wouldn't bet money I'd lose sleep over on it. It's probably more likely that an asteroid will hit the planet and we'll all go extinct before you're able to change the minds of most of humanity. Heck, communists even managed to get a hold of a global superpower which actually tried to take over the world and they still lost! Good luck with Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies :-)
imtringued 6y ago
>>This smacks of outright detached privilege only HNers can conjure up from its ivory tower, go to countries that suffer from hyperinflation and still suffer from severe capital controls after that period all of which prevent wealth creation before you make such a claim. Hyperinflation is merely the symptom. If you think you can cure a failed state by treating it's symptoms you are just going to make things worse through ignorance. >What you have just said is just beyond belief and I cannot seriously take what you say serious. The unfortunate reality is that the problems lie much deeper than in just something as irrelevant as the currency. Think about it. If you can buy 10kg of laundry detergent for $1 how come that country didn't simply export its ultra cheap products and grew its economy that way? You know, like China. Why is China different? It's easy. China had competition in Hong Kong and an easy model to copy and most importantly, the government did copy the working model and invested into a capitalist China. Here's the thing. Governments can make and break their countries. A crappy deflationary currency will never achieve anything.
tsimionescu 6y ago
For the first part, I'll just say that you vastly overestimate our technical abilities if you think we could even specify the problem of arbitration in such a way that a computer could solve it, nevermind actually implement the solver. You've chosen a relatively simple case (proof of property) but arbitration in general is much more complex. For hyperinflation, I have been born and continue to live in Romania, a country that went exactly through that in the 90s, to the extent that a loaf of bread that was initially maybe 10-20 ROL would cost 10k ROL. I remember as a child not being able to afford popcorn when going to the park with my grandparents, or my grandfather selling his old car and buying the family's first color TV with the money. I remember living as a family of four in a 2 bedroom apartment (my parents had their bedroom, while my brother and I shared the livingroom until we were in our twenties). But that wasn't the problem of our economy, it was just what kept it (barely) working! If we couldn't go to hyperinflation, we would have simply not payed salaries or other debts. The problem of the economy was that we had sold most of our communist-era industry for parts in a quest for 'privatization' and a 'free market', and were left not being able to produce locally or export almost anything. Even today, we are a temperate, extremely water-rich plains country that imports a good segment of its food - to the absurd degree that we are importing fruit from Holland and Israel among others. Of course, poor governance and corruption played a huge role as well. The government promising ever higher pensions and salaries for state employees, the works. But those problems would not have gone away if people were getting bitcoin instead of Lei. Scarcity is a problem of production, not of money. Money itself is almost immaterial. If we could produce enough food, water, energy, cars, fridges, computers, furniture etc. for every single person on Earth, and all of their children, to have all they need at the same time, we could renounce money entirely, Star Trek style. You have a terrible understanding of economics (and of the plight of people who lived through hyperinflation, like myself) if you think that people in a country experiencing hyperinflation would fare any better if they could trade in BTC instead of the de-valued fiat. The only ones who would be better off are the rich, whose reserves of cash would not suddenly lose their value. But people who live off wages would see pay cuts and eventually just stop getting payed if the currency were forced to a global standard instead of suffering inflation. Note: there may be cases where a country, often a dictatorship, simply prints money out of stupidity, and also forces the population not to trade in foreign money. This is not the most common cause of hyperinflation, and it is significantly better fixed by BTC, since that is more or less as easy or hard to outlaw as the ownership of dollars. Oh, and guess what - the country got richer and better without the currency having to go through deflation! In fact, bread still costs 10-20k ROL, and a PC still costs 40-50 million ROL, we just 're-branded' our currency to RON at a fixed 1:10k RON:ROL exchange rate to make the numbers more manageable. We started having productive industries with products that others wanted to buy, and governance got better (we still have huge problems and some of the poorest regions in the EU, but that is besides the point).

oblio 6y ago

> I don't disagree about its current feasibility, but I think that's mainly so because of a distortion of incentives and that so many are invested in this model (the few) despite how horrible it is (to the detriment of the many) as so many people are incapable of doing anything else at this point. The problem is, at this point it's like arguing for communism. It's an utopia. It could happen but I wouldn't bet money I'd lose sleep over on it. It's probably more likely that an asteroid will hit the planet and we'll all go extinct before you're able to change the minds of most of humanity. Heck, communists even managed to get a hold of a global superpower which actually tried to take over the world and they still lost! Good luck with Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies :-)

imtringued 6y ago

>>This smacks of outright detached privilege only HNers can conjure up from its ivory tower, go to countries that suffer from hyperinflation and still suffer from severe capital controls after that period all of which prevent wealth creation before you make such a claim. Hyperinflation is merely the symptom. If you think you can cure a failed state by treating it's symptoms you are just going to make things worse through ignorance. >What you have just said is just beyond belief and I cannot seriously take what you say serious. The unfortunate reality is that the problems lie much deeper than in just something as irrelevant as the currency. Think about it. If you can buy 10kg of laundry detergent for $1 how come that country didn't simply export its ultra cheap products and grew its economy that way? You know, like China. Why is China different? It's easy. China had competition in Hong Kong and an easy model to copy and most importantly, the government did copy the working model and invested into a capitalist China. Here's the thing. Governments can make and break their countries. A crappy deflationary currency will never achieve anything.

tsimionescu 6y ago

For the first part, I'll just say that you vastly overestimate our technical abilities if you think we could even specify the problem of arbitration in such a way that a computer could solve it, nevermind actually implement the solver. You've chosen a relatively simple case (proof of property) but arbitration in general is much more complex. For hyperinflation, I have been born and continue to live in Romania, a country that went exactly through that in the 90s, to the extent that a loaf of bread that was initially maybe 10-20 ROL would cost 10k ROL. I remember as a child not being able to afford popcorn when going to the park with my grandparents, or my grandfather selling his old car and buying the family's first color TV with the money. I remember living as a family of four in a 2 bedroom apartment (my parents had their bedroom, while my brother and I shared the livingroom until we were in our twenties). But that wasn't the problem of our economy, it was just what kept it (barely) working! If we couldn't go to hyperinflation, we would have simply not payed salaries or other debts. The problem of the economy was that we had sold most of our communist-era industry for parts in a quest for 'privatization' and a 'free market', and were left not being able to produce locally or export almost anything. Even today, we are a temperate, extremely water-rich plains country that imports a good segment of its food - to the absurd degree that we are importing fruit from Holland and Israel among others. Of course, poor governance and corruption played a huge role as well. The government promising ever higher pensions and salaries for state employees, the works. But those problems would not have gone away if people were getting bitcoin instead of Lei. Scarcity is a problem of production, not of money. Money itself is almost immaterial. If we could produce enough food, water, energy, cars, fridges, computers, furniture etc. for every single person on Earth, and all of their children, to have all they need at the same time, we could renounce money entirely, Star Trek style. You have a terrible understanding of economics (and of the plight of people who lived through hyperinflation, like myself) if you think that people in a country experiencing hyperinflation would fare any better if they could trade in BTC instead of the de-valued fiat. The only ones who would be better off are the rich, whose reserves of cash would not suddenly lose their value. But people who live off wages would see pay cuts and eventually just stop getting payed if the currency were forced to a global standard instead of suffering inflation. Note: there may be cases where a country, often a dictatorship, simply prints money out of stupidity, and also forces the population not to trade in foreign money. This is not the most common cause of hyperinflation, and it is significantly better fixed by BTC, since that is more or less as easy or hard to outlaw as the ownership of dollars. Oh, and guess what - the country got richer and better without the currency having to go through deflation! In fact, bread still costs 10-20k ROL, and a PC still costs 40-50 million ROL, we just 're-branded' our currency to RON at a fixed 1:10k RON:ROL exchange rate to make the numbers more manageable. We started having productive industries with products that others wanted to buy, and governance got better (we still have huge problems and some of the poorest regions in the EU, but that is besides the point).