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A $100k Prize for a Decentralized Inflation Dashboard

102 points by exolymph 5y ago

wrs 5y ago
OK, blockchain fans, I’m genuinely confused as usual… Can someone explain what the point is of collecting price data and then putting it on the chain with a smart contract to do calculations on it? If “censorship” is a problem, why not just broadcast/mirror the signed data? If the calculation is untrusted, why not just publish the source code and let people run it on the published data? What is the blockchain accomplishing here?
- gruez 5y ago
  Probably so it can tie in with some smart contract that's based off the CPI (eg. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities). As for why that's useful, I'm not sure. At the end you'll still need a trusted oracle for the scraped prices.
  - bko 5y ago
    It would be very useful for on-chain financial derivatives based off a more accurate inflation gauge. I don't trust the official CPI numbers and don't see them as accurately reflecting my cost of living increases over the years. Couple in the fact that there are literally trillions in pension benefits tied to CPI, so the incentive to manipulate these numbers is huge. It's already very opaque. If you look at the constituents [0], housing, education and health care make up around 60%, so it makes no sense that inflation has been flat for the last ten years. The prices would ideally come from a large number of sources and some averaging would take place. [0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/07/14/inflation-the-components https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/07/1...
    - lend000 5y ago
      The CPI basically measures the median American's budget. So if wealth inequality is unchanging, then it's a decent measure of economy-wide inflation. Otherwise, it measures inflation x delta wealth inequality.
      - paulryanrogers 5y ago
        What if those budgets have significantly less buying power? Especially in critical areas like housing, healthcare, and education?
        lend000 5y ago
        Then people will tend to buy less of them to fit their budget. Here is the most telling chart: inflation-adjusted wages in the US [0]. They never change, because the CPI uses a survey to determine what the average American is buying, and how much it costs, then they adjust weights based on how much they spend on it (which cancels out the cost because people change their buying preferences based on current prices) and leaves you with the median American's total expenditure. Yeah, that's really how they do it. And that's why CPI is a joke. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
        paulryanrogers 5y ago
        Is it possible people are buying less by volume, even if amounts spent level off? For example smaller homes, less healthcare, getting less educational value per (adjusted) dollar spent?
        lend000 5y ago
        Yes, that's exactly it. Such changes are not well reflected in the CPI model.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >I don't trust the official CPI numbers and don't see them as accurately reflecting my cost of living increases over the years. What makes you think a NGO would do a better job? On one hand they might not have the same incentive to manipulate the numbers in the same way that the government would, but that would be replaced with an incentive to come up with whatever numbers that their donor base would like to see (see also: media companies adjusting their coverage to retain subscribers). >If you look at the constituents [0], housing, education and health care make up around 60%, so it makes no sense that inflation has been flat for the last ten years. Are you missing a part of your argument here? You just say that a few categories make up 60% of the CPI, then immediately conclude that "it makes no sense that inflation has been flat". >The prices would ideally come from a large number of sources and some averaging would take place. The problem is that you need to do various subjective adjustments (eg. the controversial "hedonistic adjustments") for the numbers to make sense.
      - bko 5y ago
        > What makes you think a NGO would do a better job? Maybe they wouldn't do better, but they wouldn't have a trillion dollar incentive and ideally there'd be competing metrics. > Are you missing a part of your argument here? You just say that a few categories make up 60% of the CPI, then immediately conclude that "it makes no sense that inflation has been flat". In the US, over the last 10 years housing, education and health care have grown by a lot while official inflation has been historically very flat (0 - 2%). Health care: On a per capita basis, health spending has increased over 31-fold in the last four decades, from $353 per person in 1970 to $11,582 in 2019. [0] Housing: Median home price was around ~210k in today's dollars ten years ago and is now ~314k [1] Education: The cost of college increased by more than 25% in the last 10 years [2] > The problem is that you need to do various subjective adjustments Sure, but again, I don't trust the officials to do this given the trillion dollar incentive to fudge the numbers. [0] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spending-healthcare-changed-time/#:~:text=On%20a%20per%20capita%20basis%2C%20health%20spending%20has%20increased%20over,1970%20to%20%2411%2C582%20in%202019 https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe.... [1] https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/cost-of-college-increased-by-more-than-25percent-in-the-last-10-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/cost-of-college-increased-by...
- lottin 5y ago
  These are people who think the government wants to censor their prices database... so not exactly geniuses.
  - nuclearnice1 5y ago
    Take a look at Argentina 2007-2016 [1,2,3] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project [2] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54491 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54491 [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Fernández_de_Kirchner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Fernández_de_Kirchn...
    - lottin 5y ago
      What happened in Argentina 2007-2016 that would suggest censorship-resistance in a prices database is a feature that makes sense?
      - nuclearnice1 5y ago
        The government misreported inflation figures. (According to the people who made the price database)
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  If all you have is a hammer…
- Cantinflas 5y ago
  I think you are right, this can be done without a blockchain. Once done, it could be useful to make an oracle with it and put it on ethereum so it can be used by other smart contracts. But not the calculation itself nor the original data points
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  For about the same reason that you should use blockchain for inventory management.
- anythingdude321 5y ago
  Including the computation and data on-chain enables other parties to use it trustlessly and verifiably. If you, for example, wanted to make an algorithmic central bank that reacted to inflation numbers you would need on-chain CPI in order to do that. Similarly you may want to index your interest rate to the CPI in some way (like LIBOR). It becomes a lot more useful when on-chain than in a central database
  - wrs 5y ago
    It’s not trustless, because you’re trusting the scraping NGO to put the correct price data on the chain. You can verify that it came from the NGO with a simple signature; you don’t need the chain for that.
    - anythingdude321 5y ago
      nah fam that won't likely be the final topology of the network. you can have oracles all the way down and a slashing risk for those that deviate significantly from the consensus prices and CPI numbers. so you're trusting the economic design of the system to appropriately incentivize the participants to give honest data
- MaysonL 5y ago
  Mining fees?
echelon 5y ago
This was neat until it asked you to put the data on the blockchain. Might as well be asking to distribute the network packets over pigeons. What a totally orthogonal, shoehorned objective.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  "How can we promote our crypto pyramid scheme?"
- wmf 5y ago
  A CPI oracle on the blockchain would be nice to have (e.g. you could (try to) peg to CPI) but it does seem orthogonal from the data gathering and calculation part.
vasilipupkin 5y ago
not a bad idea, but the way to do it is probably to come up with a certain basket and then actually have people physically go into stores and record prices in those stores and then reward them with a crypto token for contributing ( kinda like the mystery shopper industry ).
- gruez 5y ago
  What's preventing people from making up the prices?
  - vasilipupkin 5y ago
    you can have them submit it by taking a photo of the price, or even by taking a photo of their receipt after they check out. you can run sanity checks to clean the data, for example, if someone says eggs cost 50 bucks, throw away their submission, etc.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >or even by taking a photo of their receipt after they check out. Sounds like it'll be cheaper to buy the data off one of those receipt scanning apps. Better reach, and you don't need to make your own data acquisition/validation pipeline.
      - vasilipupkin 5y ago
        well, the beauty of paying with crypto token is you pay with the token you yourself minted out of nothing, so initially it costs nothing to use it to pay people and then if enough people make enough submissions to this dashboard and you design token to be useful in some kind of defi like thing, it will go to the moon for the same reason they all do.
  - paulgb 5y ago
    This becomes especially important if these oracles become used in smart contracts. As we learned from LIBOR, even the traditional finance industry can't resist the urge to nudge a benchmark in their preferred direction. At least in that case, the parties were not anonymous.
deleted 5y ago
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gruez 5y ago
$100k seems laughably low, when you consider that it buys less than 4 months of dev time (assuming a $200/hr consulting rate).
- usmannk 5y ago
  Technically it says "We'll invest $100k in the best entrant if you end up starting a company". I guess not bad if you're already working on this?
  - gruez 5y ago
    >if you end up starting a company How can you monetize this? The whole point is that the data is public for everyone to see?
    - sparkling 5y ago
      Just to throw a few ideas in the room: * offer integrations into various relevant systems * ability to build custom baskets and/or change the weighting of different categories
      - gruez 5y ago
        >* offer integrations into various relevant systems What's your moat here? What's preventing a competitor from using the blockchain data you published to make their own product? >* ability to build custom baskets and/or change the weighting of different categories Considering that the data is public, that seems easy to do. See also: above comment about moats.
        sparkling 5y ago
        If it has a good enough UI, people will pay, just like anything else. Not everybody wants to build their own scripts around the data, even if its free. Obviously this is not a billion dollar idea, but it sure could bring in some $ to pay for a full-time developer or two and still make a little profit.
kevmo 5y ago
1. What is the point of the blockchain here? 2. This seems worth way more than 100k & they just want multiple teams working on it (competing), so they can then invest 100k in a company? This seems incredibly underfunded.
tunesmith 5y ago
Does something already exist that allows person from country A to find out in which country B their home currency goes the furthest? Sort of a combination of bundle of goods and exchange rate? I've thought it something that could be plugged into a charity finder.
- sparkling 5y ago
  A USD-denominated cost of living database? Plenty of sites out there doing that.
tehjoker 5y ago
Inflation can be good. It causes the value of debts to decrease. However, sharp inflation in consumer prices without corresponding wage increases can precipitate a humanitarian crisis.
- javert 5y ago
  Since inflation can cause the value of debts to decrease, it's more expensive to borrow money. All monetary distortion (including inflation) translates into economic distortion (suboptimal allocation and waste).
- qeternity 5y ago
  Inflation is neither good nor bad. It is merely a measure. People mistake cause and effect in economics all the time. Inflation can be a good proxy for money velocity. But it can also just be a proxy for growth of money supply. In the former, it’s often a sign of economic activity/growth. In the latter, it’s often a sign of stagflation. The US seems closer to stagflation at the moment. The Fed have an opportunity to nip this in the bud and deflate their balance sheet, but they won’t.
BenoitP 5y ago
What I'd really like to see is a multi-dimensional inflation vector that would also be future-proof. People really need diverse items: they need food, but also real estate, the prices of which are going through the roof currently, and that's a form of inflation. Also, there are many profiles of consumption. People have different needs. I'd say that it could be a 100 floating point vector; with the first 40 values arranged by increasing importance on Maslow's pyramid of human needs; 20 for consumption pattern diversity; and 40 for future consumption needs, initially set to 0, to be added at the rate of 1 every 5 years.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Also, there are many profiles of consumption. People have different needs. How do you get people to agree on which profile? I have a feeling it'll end up like the various unemployment statistics U-1 through U-6, ie. "you're a fool if you believe unemployment is at x% (U-3), the real unemployment rate is y% (your choice of U1/2/4/5/6, depending on the picture you want to paint)"
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I don't think they necessarily need to agree. "How expensive is stuff getting these days?" is a broad, multidimensional question, and I think looking for a single numerical answer tends to confuse people more than it clarifies. (Even today, we have "core CPI" and "median CPI" and "chained urban CPI" and so on.)
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  I'll start off with saying: Good luck to anyone trying to create a truly comprehensive historical price database. Take these examples: - The housing market is extremely diverse in certain countries, where some cities have experience price increases the past decades, some have been stagnating, and some have seen price decreases. - Same goes for salaries. In extremely centralized cities, there's likely been above inflation rise, while in extremely decentralized cities, salaries have been stagnating, sometimes just standing still. - Fuel prices can depend on local policies and taxation laws. - Foods etc. can depend on how far away the places are in the logistical chain, how many competitors there are in the area, how the stores and chains are organized, etc. - Travel (airfare, trains, etc.) can depend on location. Some larger hubs have experienced airfare that's become cheaper and cheaper with years, while rural places have seen the same going up. Just in my country (Norway), there are hundreds of towns and villages with prices that are all over the place, and you'd need to scrape thousands of websites. Some of the data would be more or less impossible to get, due to the data never being digitized to begin with. Of course, I would love to have such a database ready. I'd love to be able to run a query on my home town, and see what the prices for top 10 items were, say, 45 years ago. And compare that to the national inflation, as well as local prices of the more expensive cities. So I think that whomever is going to work on this, probably just need to take the very rough and general (historical) inflation rates, which most government websites offer. To make a DB which accounts for all the micro- and macro changes would just be too consuming for any small team. You'd basically need a Wikipedia-esque team of individual contributors to cover all the prices.
SantalBlush 5y ago
>If enough of the right people believe that inflation is going to happen, it will. As such, when inflation is happening, there is often a push to censor discussion of inflation itself, under the grounds that discussing the problem actually causes it in the first place. The flip side to this notion is that if someone stands to profit from inflation, they're incentivized to promote discussion of inflation with the hope of increasing it. Would anyone in the blockchain space stand to profit from the US dollar's demise?
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Yeah I'd have to set some actual evidence of censorship, rather then just asserting it. Unless by censorship they really mean people arguing against them. There seems to be a thing now in some circles where any disagreement is considered censorship.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
throwawaygh 5y ago
> Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, a function of money printing Is it, though? Are hotels and used cars more expensive this year because of money printing?
- _jsdw 5y ago
  Indeed! If somebody was able to print a trillion dollars and stash it away in their bank account, I don't see why any observable inflation would occur.
  - human 5y ago
    Inflation is actually money supply times velocity of money. In your example the velocity would be zero, so no inflation.
- wmf 5y ago
  "Inflation is a monetary phenomenon" is a quote from economist Milton Friedman but most economists disagree.
- anythingdude321 5y ago
  this is a reference to a famous Milton Friedman quote "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" — of course this is a tautology, but he didn't mean the trivial version when he said it, but rather he was making an empirical claim. in this piece it looks like the author is making the tautological version of the claim, by following up and describing it as "a function of money printing" — which is obviously true it is a function of money printing and several other things
  - lottin 5y ago
    To be clear, inflation is not a function of money printing. For example, under metallic standards (so no money printing), countries would experience inflation or deflation as a result of trade imbalances (because a trade deficit leads to a net outflow of precious metals, and vice-versa).
killion 5y ago
I distrust any website who prevents me from using the back button to leave their site. Browsers should prevent pushing to history if I haven’t clicked.
- geoah 5y ago
  I think it's a bug with the way they've embedded the google form, it seems do something weird with the window controls here (firefox, macos)
almost_usual 5y ago
This feels like a blockchain rube goldberg machine.
coding123 5y ago
Why would we have an inflation dashboard if the theory is that seeing the inflation causes it? I don't get it, why cause inflation purposely? That said, I'm all for this because it would be cool.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ineptech 5y ago
Isn't this asking for a solution to the oracle problem? i.e., is there a working way to get any real world data on to the blockchain that isn't manual/censorable? I mean, once that's solved, there'll be a lot more interest in stock prices and sports scores and such than CPI data, right?
gorgoiler 5y ago
Unrelated, but regarding the domain name for this site: The nth taxicab number, also called the nth Hardy–Ramanujan number, is the smallest integer that can be expressed as a sum of two positive integer cubes in n distinct ways. The most famous taxicab number is 1729. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number
Geee 5y ago
Real inflation is very hard to measure, because it's not only prices that change - more often the product loses quality while price stays the same. Either way, you are getting less for what you pay for, but only the price change is measured as inflation. In addition, people switch over to cheaper alternatives when products get more expensive - meat is replaced with vegetables for example. This changes the average basket of goods, and again doesn't affect inflation. There are also government programs and subsidies which are designed to alter the basket of goods or the prices of those goods. Taking everything into account it seems that real inflation is higher than reported, and it might not be possible to measure it correctly by just tracking prices.
- RobRivera 5y ago
  yup, a great starting point would be commodity based. Even then those can be controlled, ie. public transport cost can be subsidized to keep that price point low for consumers, but subsidy is indirectly reflected by increased taxes...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rhacker 5y ago
  You measure it with things that are identical. Futures markets are a good example, steel, lumber, cattle, etc...
  - voakbasda 5y ago
    As someone that raises grass-fed beef, I can tell you with certainty that not all cattle are identical. Commodity prices give you commodity quality.
  - cdiddy2 5y ago
    even lumber isnt identical. old lumber was made from older trees that were generally more dense and a harder wood. http://www.historicdoors.co.uk/blog/old-growth-wood-better-new-growth-wood/ http://www.historicdoors.co.uk/blog/old-growth-wood-better-n...
RobRivera 5y ago
>Additionally, if the best dashboard uses Chainlink's crypto oracle technology to get the relevant data on-chain, they'll be eligible to receive an additional $100k grant in LINK tokens. Ill pass on that shoehorned scope
- gregoryl 5y ago
  A slight reword would get a better gut reaction from me. Additionally, Chainlink has offered an additional $100k grant in LINK tokens if the best dashboard uses their crypto oracle technology.
imapeopleperson 5y ago
> Investor after conducting further due diligence is not obligated by these Official Rules to make an investment in the Winner of any dollar amount. No thanks
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
This is just an ad for Chainlink's oracle tech.
human 5y ago
This endeavor is impossible. The prize should be 100M$. I think a better system would be simply to survey people and ask them to assess their perceived purchasing power.
treeman79 5y ago
The Big Mac index. https://www.altoonamirror.com/opinion/2021/07/big-mac-inflation-differs-from-cpi/ https://www.altoonamirror.com/opinion/2021/07/big-mac-inflat...
boublepop 5y ago
this sounds like the typical scam where they already have someone in their circle working on exactly this, and they’re just announcing a competition to get media attention before they end up picking that team as the “natural” winners.
TroisM 5y ago
camelcamelcamel would probably be helpful for this

102 points by exolymph 5y ago

wrs 5y ago

OK, blockchain fans, I’m genuinely confused as usual… Can someone explain what the point is of collecting price data and then putting it on the chain with a smart contract to do calculations on it? If “censorship” is a problem, why not just broadcast/mirror the signed data? If the calculation is untrusted, why not just publish the source code and let people run it on the published data? What is the blockchain accomplishing here?

gruez 5y ago
Probably so it can tie in with some smart contract that's based off the CPI (eg. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities). As for why that's useful, I'm not sure. At the end you'll still need a trusted oracle for the scraped prices.
- bko 5y ago
  It would be very useful for on-chain financial derivatives based off a more accurate inflation gauge. I don't trust the official CPI numbers and don't see them as accurately reflecting my cost of living increases over the years. Couple in the fact that there are literally trillions in pension benefits tied to CPI, so the incentive to manipulate these numbers is huge. It's already very opaque. If you look at the constituents [0], housing, education and health care make up around 60%, so it makes no sense that inflation has been flat for the last ten years. The prices would ideally come from a large number of sources and some averaging would take place. [0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/07/14/inflation-the-components https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/07/1...
  - lend000 5y ago
    The CPI basically measures the median American's budget. So if wealth inequality is unchanging, then it's a decent measure of economy-wide inflation. Otherwise, it measures inflation x delta wealth inequality.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      What if those budgets have significantly less buying power? Especially in critical areas like housing, healthcare, and education?
      - lend000 5y ago
        Then people will tend to buy less of them to fit their budget. Here is the most telling chart: inflation-adjusted wages in the US [0]. They never change, because the CPI uses a survey to determine what the average American is buying, and how much it costs, then they adjust weights based on how much they spend on it (which cancels out the cost because people change their buying preferences based on current prices) and leaves you with the median American's total expenditure. Yeah, that's really how they do it. And that's why CPI is a joke. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
        paulryanrogers 5y ago
        Is it possible people are buying less by volume, even if amounts spent level off? For example smaller homes, less healthcare, getting less educational value per (adjusted) dollar spent?
        lend000 5y ago
        Yes, that's exactly it. Such changes are not well reflected in the CPI model.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >I don't trust the official CPI numbers and don't see them as accurately reflecting my cost of living increases over the years. What makes you think a NGO would do a better job? On one hand they might not have the same incentive to manipulate the numbers in the same way that the government would, but that would be replaced with an incentive to come up with whatever numbers that their donor base would like to see (see also: media companies adjusting their coverage to retain subscribers). >If you look at the constituents [0], housing, education and health care make up around 60%, so it makes no sense that inflation has been flat for the last ten years. Are you missing a part of your argument here? You just say that a few categories make up 60% of the CPI, then immediately conclude that "it makes no sense that inflation has been flat". >The prices would ideally come from a large number of sources and some averaging would take place. The problem is that you need to do various subjective adjustments (eg. the controversial "hedonistic adjustments") for the numbers to make sense.
    - bko 5y ago
      > What makes you think a NGO would do a better job? Maybe they wouldn't do better, but they wouldn't have a trillion dollar incentive and ideally there'd be competing metrics. > Are you missing a part of your argument here? You just say that a few categories make up 60% of the CPI, then immediately conclude that "it makes no sense that inflation has been flat". In the US, over the last 10 years housing, education and health care have grown by a lot while official inflation has been historically very flat (0 - 2%). Health care: On a per capita basis, health spending has increased over 31-fold in the last four decades, from $353 per person in 1970 to $11,582 in 2019. [0] Housing: Median home price was around ~210k in today's dollars ten years ago and is now ~314k [1] Education: The cost of college increased by more than 25% in the last 10 years [2] > The problem is that you need to do various subjective adjustments Sure, but again, I don't trust the officials to do this given the trillion dollar incentive to fudge the numbers. [0] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spending-healthcare-changed-time/#:~:text=On%20a%20per%20capita%20basis%2C%20health%20spending%20has%20increased%20over,1970%20to%20%2411%2C582%20in%202019 https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe.... [1] https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/cost-of-college-increased-by-more-than-25percent-in-the-last-10-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/cost-of-college-increased-by...
lottin 5y ago
These are people who think the government wants to censor their prices database... so not exactly geniuses.
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  Take a look at Argentina 2007-2016 [1,2,3] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project [2] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54491 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54491 [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Fernández_de_Kirchner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Fernández_de_Kirchn...
  - lottin 5y ago
    What happened in Argentina 2007-2016 that would suggest censorship-resistance in a prices database is a feature that makes sense?
    - nuclearnice1 5y ago
      The government misreported inflation figures. (According to the people who made the price database)
ashtonkem 5y ago
If all you have is a hammer…
Cantinflas 5y ago
I think you are right, this can be done without a blockchain. Once done, it could be useful to make an oracle with it and put it on ethereum so it can be used by other smart contracts. But not the calculation itself nor the original data points
throwawaygh 5y ago
For about the same reason that you should use blockchain for inventory management.
anythingdude321 5y ago
Including the computation and data on-chain enables other parties to use it trustlessly and verifiably. If you, for example, wanted to make an algorithmic central bank that reacted to inflation numbers you would need on-chain CPI in order to do that. Similarly you may want to index your interest rate to the CPI in some way (like LIBOR). It becomes a lot more useful when on-chain than in a central database
- wrs 5y ago
  It’s not trustless, because you’re trusting the scraping NGO to put the correct price data on the chain. You can verify that it came from the NGO with a simple signature; you don’t need the chain for that.
  - anythingdude321 5y ago
    nah fam that won't likely be the final topology of the network. you can have oracles all the way down and a slashing risk for those that deviate significantly from the consensus prices and CPI numbers. so you're trusting the economic design of the system to appropriately incentivize the participants to give honest data
MaysonL 5y ago
Mining fees?

echelon 5y ago

This was neat until it asked you to put the data on the blockchain. Might as well be asking to distribute the network packets over pigeons. What a totally orthogonal, shoehorned objective.

IshKebab 5y ago
"How can we promote our crypto pyramid scheme?"
wmf 5y ago
A CPI oracle on the blockchain would be nice to have (e.g. you could (try to) peg to CPI) but it does seem orthogonal from the data gathering and calculation part.

vasilipupkin 5y ago

not a bad idea, but the way to do it is probably to come up with a certain basket and then actually have people physically go into stores and record prices in those stores and then reward them with a crypto token for contributing ( kinda like the mystery shopper industry ).

gruez 5y ago
What's preventing people from making up the prices?
- vasilipupkin 5y ago
  you can have them submit it by taking a photo of the price, or even by taking a photo of their receipt after they check out. you can run sanity checks to clean the data, for example, if someone says eggs cost 50 bucks, throw away their submission, etc.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >or even by taking a photo of their receipt after they check out. Sounds like it'll be cheaper to buy the data off one of those receipt scanning apps. Better reach, and you don't need to make your own data acquisition/validation pipeline.
    - vasilipupkin 5y ago
      well, the beauty of paying with crypto token is you pay with the token you yourself minted out of nothing, so initially it costs nothing to use it to pay people and then if enough people make enough submissions to this dashboard and you design token to be useful in some kind of defi like thing, it will go to the moon for the same reason they all do.
- paulgb 5y ago
  This becomes especially important if these oracles become used in smart contracts. As we learned from LIBOR, even the traditional finance industry can't resist the urge to nudge a benchmark in their preferred direction. At least in that case, the parties were not anonymous.

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gruez 5y ago

$100k seems laughably low, when you consider that it buys less than 4 months of dev time (assuming a $200/hr consulting rate).

usmannk 5y ago
Technically it says "We'll invest $100k in the best entrant if you end up starting a company". I guess not bad if you're already working on this?
- gruez 5y ago
  >if you end up starting a company How can you monetize this? The whole point is that the data is public for everyone to see?
  - sparkling 5y ago
    Just to throw a few ideas in the room: * offer integrations into various relevant systems * ability to build custom baskets and/or change the weighting of different categories
    - gruez 5y ago
      >* offer integrations into various relevant systems What's your moat here? What's preventing a competitor from using the blockchain data you published to make their own product? >* ability to build custom baskets and/or change the weighting of different categories Considering that the data is public, that seems easy to do. See also: above comment about moats.
      - sparkling 5y ago
        If it has a good enough UI, people will pay, just like anything else. Not everybody wants to build their own scripts around the data, even if its free. Obviously this is not a billion dollar idea, but it sure could bring in some $ to pay for a full-time developer or two and still make a little profit.

kevmo 5y ago

1. What is the point of the blockchain here? 2. This seems worth way more than 100k & they just want multiple teams working on it (competing), so they can then invest 100k in a company? This seems incredibly underfunded.

tunesmith 5y ago

Does something already exist that allows person from country A to find out in which country B their home currency goes the furthest? Sort of a combination of bundle of goods and exchange rate? I've thought it something that could be plugged into a charity finder.

sparkling 5y ago
A USD-denominated cost of living database? Plenty of sites out there doing that.

tehjoker 5y ago

Inflation can be good. It causes the value of debts to decrease. However, sharp inflation in consumer prices without corresponding wage increases can precipitate a humanitarian crisis.

javert 5y ago
Since inflation can cause the value of debts to decrease, it's more expensive to borrow money. All monetary distortion (including inflation) translates into economic distortion (suboptimal allocation and waste).
qeternity 5y ago
Inflation is neither good nor bad. It is merely a measure. People mistake cause and effect in economics all the time. Inflation can be a good proxy for money velocity. But it can also just be a proxy for growth of money supply. In the former, it’s often a sign of economic activity/growth. In the latter, it’s often a sign of stagflation. The US seems closer to stagflation at the moment. The Fed have an opportunity to nip this in the bud and deflate their balance sheet, but they won’t.

BenoitP 5y ago

What I'd really like to see is a multi-dimensional inflation vector that would also be future-proof. People really need diverse items: they need food, but also real estate, the prices of which are going through the roof currently, and that's a form of inflation. Also, there are many profiles of consumption. People have different needs. I'd say that it could be a 100 floating point vector; with the first 40 values arranged by increasing importance on Maslow's pyramid of human needs; 20 for consumption pattern diversity; and 40 for future consumption needs, initially set to 0, to be added at the rate of 1 every 5 years.

gruez 5y ago
>Also, there are many profiles of consumption. People have different needs. How do you get people to agree on which profile? I have a feeling it'll end up like the various unemployment statistics U-1 through U-6, ie. "you're a fool if you believe unemployment is at x% (U-3), the real unemployment rate is y% (your choice of U1/2/4/5/6, depending on the picture you want to paint)"
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I don't think they necessarily need to agree. "How expensive is stuff getting these days?" is a broad, multidimensional question, and I think looking for a single numerical answer tends to confuse people more than it clarifies. (Even today, we have "core CPI" and "median CPI" and "chained urban CPI" and so on.)
TrackerFF 5y ago
I'll start off with saying: Good luck to anyone trying to create a truly comprehensive historical price database. Take these examples: - The housing market is extremely diverse in certain countries, where some cities have experience price increases the past decades, some have been stagnating, and some have seen price decreases. - Same goes for salaries. In extremely centralized cities, there's likely been above inflation rise, while in extremely decentralized cities, salaries have been stagnating, sometimes just standing still. - Fuel prices can depend on local policies and taxation laws. - Foods etc. can depend on how far away the places are in the logistical chain, how many competitors there are in the area, how the stores and chains are organized, etc. - Travel (airfare, trains, etc.) can depend on location. Some larger hubs have experienced airfare that's become cheaper and cheaper with years, while rural places have seen the same going up. Just in my country (Norway), there are hundreds of towns and villages with prices that are all over the place, and you'd need to scrape thousands of websites. Some of the data would be more or less impossible to get, due to the data never being digitized to begin with. Of course, I would love to have such a database ready. I'd love to be able to run a query on my home town, and see what the prices for top 10 items were, say, 45 years ago. And compare that to the national inflation, as well as local prices of the more expensive cities. So I think that whomever is going to work on this, probably just need to take the very rough and general (historical) inflation rates, which most government websites offer. To make a DB which accounts for all the micro- and macro changes would just be too consuming for any small team. You'd basically need a Wikipedia-esque team of individual contributors to cover all the prices.

SantalBlush 5y ago

>If enough of the right people believe that inflation is going to happen, it will. As such, when inflation is happening, there is often a push to censor discussion of inflation itself, under the grounds that discussing the problem actually causes it in the first place. The flip side to this notion is that if someone stands to profit from inflation, they're incentivized to promote discussion of inflation with the hope of increasing it. Would anyone in the blockchain space stand to profit from the US dollar's demise?

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Yeah I'd have to set some actual evidence of censorship, rather then just asserting it. Unless by censorship they really mean people arguing against them. There seems to be a thing now in some circles where any disagreement is considered censorship.
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throwawaygh 5y ago

> Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, a function of money printing Is it, though? Are hotels and used cars more expensive this year because of money printing?

_jsdw 5y ago
Indeed! If somebody was able to print a trillion dollars and stash it away in their bank account, I don't see why any observable inflation would occur.
- human 5y ago
  Inflation is actually money supply times velocity of money. In your example the velocity would be zero, so no inflation.
wmf 5y ago
"Inflation is a monetary phenomenon" is a quote from economist Milton Friedman but most economists disagree.
anythingdude321 5y ago
this is a reference to a famous Milton Friedman quote "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" — of course this is a tautology, but he didn't mean the trivial version when he said it, but rather he was making an empirical claim. in this piece it looks like the author is making the tautological version of the claim, by following up and describing it as "a function of money printing" — which is obviously true it is a function of money printing and several other things
- lottin 5y ago
  To be clear, inflation is not a function of money printing. For example, under metallic standards (so no money printing), countries would experience inflation or deflation as a result of trade imbalances (because a trade deficit leads to a net outflow of precious metals, and vice-versa).

killion 5y ago

I distrust any website who prevents me from using the back button to leave their site. Browsers should prevent pushing to history if I haven’t clicked.

geoah 5y ago
I think it's a bug with the way they've embedded the google form, it seems do something weird with the window controls here (firefox, macos)

almost_usual 5y ago

This feels like a blockchain rube goldberg machine.

coding123 5y ago

Why would we have an inflation dashboard if the theory is that seeing the inflation causes it? I don't get it, why cause inflation purposely? That said, I'm all for this because it would be cool.

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ineptech 5y ago

Isn't this asking for a solution to the oracle problem? i.e., is there a working way to get any real world data on to the blockchain that isn't manual/censorable? I mean, once that's solved, there'll be a lot more interest in stock prices and sports scores and such than CPI data, right?

gorgoiler 5y ago

Unrelated, but regarding the domain name for this site: The nth taxicab number, also called the nth Hardy–Ramanujan number, is the smallest integer that can be expressed as a sum of two positive integer cubes in n distinct ways. The most famous taxicab number is 1729. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number

Geee 5y ago

Real inflation is very hard to measure, because it's not only prices that change - more often the product loses quality while price stays the same. Either way, you are getting less for what you pay for, but only the price change is measured as inflation. In addition, people switch over to cheaper alternatives when products get more expensive - meat is replaced with vegetables for example. This changes the average basket of goods, and again doesn't affect inflation. There are also government programs and subsidies which are designed to alter the basket of goods or the prices of those goods. Taking everything into account it seems that real inflation is higher than reported, and it might not be possible to measure it correctly by just tracking prices.

RobRivera 5y ago
yup, a great starting point would be commodity based. Even then those can be controlled, ie. public transport cost can be subsidized to keep that price point low for consumers, but subsidy is indirectly reflected by increased taxes...
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rhacker 5y ago
You measure it with things that are identical. Futures markets are a good example, steel, lumber, cattle, etc...
- voakbasda 5y ago
  As someone that raises grass-fed beef, I can tell you with certainty that not all cattle are identical. Commodity prices give you commodity quality.
- cdiddy2 5y ago
  even lumber isnt identical. old lumber was made from older trees that were generally more dense and a harder wood. http://www.historicdoors.co.uk/blog/old-growth-wood-better-new-growth-wood/ http://www.historicdoors.co.uk/blog/old-growth-wood-better-n...

RobRivera 5y ago

>Additionally, if the best dashboard uses Chainlink's crypto oracle technology to get the relevant data on-chain, they'll be eligible to receive an additional $100k grant in LINK tokens. Ill pass on that shoehorned scope

gregoryl 5y ago
A slight reword would get a better gut reaction from me. Additionally, Chainlink has offered an additional $100k grant in LINK tokens if the best dashboard uses their crypto oracle technology.

imapeopleperson 5y ago

> Investor after conducting further due diligence is not obligated by these Official Rules to make an investment in the Winner of any dollar amount. No thanks

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

This is just an ad for Chainlink's oracle tech.

human 5y ago

This endeavor is impossible. The prize should be 100M$. I think a better system would be simply to survey people and ask them to assess their perceived purchasing power.

treeman79 5y ago

The Big Mac index. https://www.altoonamirror.com/opinion/2021/07/big-mac-inflation-differs-from-cpi/ https://www.altoonamirror.com/opinion/2021/07/big-mac-inflat...

boublepop 5y ago

this sounds like the typical scam where they already have someone in their circle working on exactly this, and they’re just announcing a competition to get media attention before they end up picking that team as the “natural” winners.

TroisM 5y ago

camelcamelcamel would probably be helpful for this