3 ms·

Gold is past. Energy-backed currency would be a better fit for modern world, especially in a situation of the global energy crunch.

by xvilka 3y ago

prepend 3y ago
I think it would be interesting to get a currency that represented energy so you could trade 1 kWh and just use that to represent a real thing but could be used in transactions. Sort of like how Japan used to use representations of rice.
- causality0 3y ago
  I remember a literal version of that being a plot element in a kid's sci-fi book series. The villain was so incredibly rich he could afford to keep his hideout right next to a black hole's event horizon where nobody could afford the energy to arrest him.
- nostrfanboi 3y ago
  Bitcoin is like a digital kilowatt-hour that you can spend anywhere.
  - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
    except it's a digital kilowatt hour that requires wasting a kilowatt hour of energy per transaction to solve imaginary problems
    - lesuorac 3y ago
      > solve imaginary problems Securing a ledger isn't an imaginary problem. Business love to adopt card payments because of how big a pain it is to secure cash. It is not a trivial problem to protect money.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    For the system to work it would require the correct incentives. If we could reconstitute the energy consumed to produce the bitcoin it might work.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I think this is already represented in the futures market but is inefficient. This is pretty interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One I think it represents a time when a KWh is very predictable and stable which implies a tightly regulated energy market. Two the tightly regulated energy market already exists and it seems like the transition to a currency could happen with nobody really noticing.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  The idea of a consumable currancy is really risky. The price of goods will be correlated to the total supply of money, leaving prices unstable as the currency is created and destroyed st different rates. You'd end up with another fractional system to keep it more stable, where the currency isn't actually pegged to a certain amount of power. You could end up with a run on the banks situation, where there are people trying to spend their money to cool their houses in the summer only to find out that more claims on energy (the money) exist than actual power available.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  Interestingly, this is an emergent property of bitcoin, if energy producers begin mining bitcoin (or selling to miners) to maintain base load and recoup losses on otherwise wasted energy. After that, if a purchaser pays less than the profit from mining then energy producers will opt to mine instead. Once that happens, energy producers will de facto be pricing their energy in bitcoin, and from there it's a tiny hop to them trading energy with each other using it.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
I think you're looking for the petrodollar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency

Gold is past. Energy-backed currency would be a better fit for modern world, especially in a situation of the global energy crunch.

by xvilka 3y ago

Gold is past. Energy-backed currency would be a better fit for modern world, especially in a situation of the global energy crunch.

prepend 3y ago

I think it would be interesting to get a currency that represented energy so you could trade 1 kWh and just use that to represent a real thing but could be used in transactions. Sort of like how Japan used to use representations of rice.

causality0 3y ago
I remember a literal version of that being a plot element in a kid's sci-fi book series. The villain was so incredibly rich he could afford to keep his hideout right next to a black hole's event horizon where nobody could afford the energy to arrest him.
nostrfanboi 3y ago
Bitcoin is like a digital kilowatt-hour that you can spend anywhere.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
  except it's a digital kilowatt hour that requires wasting a kilowatt hour of energy per transaction to solve imaginary problems
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    > solve imaginary problems Securing a ledger isn't an imaginary problem. Business love to adopt card payments because of how big a pain it is to secure cash. It is not a trivial problem to protect money.
- detourdog 3y ago
  For the system to work it would require the correct incentives. If we could reconstitute the energy consumed to produce the bitcoin it might work.
detourdog 3y ago
I think this is already represented in the futures market but is inefficient. This is pretty interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One I think it represents a time when a KWh is very predictable and stable which implies a tightly regulated energy market. Two the tightly regulated energy market already exists and it seems like the transition to a currency could happen with nobody really noticing.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
The idea of a consumable currancy is really risky. The price of goods will be correlated to the total supply of money, leaving prices unstable as the currency is created and destroyed st different rates. You'd end up with another fractional system to keep it more stable, where the currency isn't actually pegged to a certain amount of power. You could end up with a run on the banks situation, where there are people trying to spend their money to cool their houses in the summer only to find out that more claims on energy (the money) exist than actual power available.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Interestingly, this is an emergent property of bitcoin, if energy producers begin mining bitcoin (or selling to miners) to maintain base load and recoup losses on otherwise wasted energy. After that, if a purchaser pays less than the profit from mining then energy producers will opt to mine instead. Once that happens, energy producers will de facto be pricing their energy in bitcoin, and from there it's a tiny hop to them trading energy with each other using it.

flagrant_taco 3y ago

I think you're looking for the petrodollar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency