4 ms·

Crypto was initially interesting to me because scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives. But so far, nearly ever

Crypto was initially interesting to me because scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives. But so far, nearly everything we've built with it has just been a clone of some scarcity-based thing that already exists outside of crypto. Since then I've come to the conclusion that it's never worthwhile to buy crypto with fiat. Any scheme which asks that of its users creates too much continuity between the old way and the new way--it allows the illegitimately rich to continue to be illegitimately rich even after switching to the new system. Anything with that property doesn't deserve to be the new system. What we need is a discontinuity. A system that wants not your money, but your participation, and which doesn't acknowledge the value of your old money. Today's crypto isn't it.

bigfishrunning 4mo ago
Isn't the whole point of an economy a method of resolving scarcity? Money is a proxy for participation; it keeps me from having to agree to paint the miller's fence in exchange for some flour.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
  That's the perspective that our current systems are based on. And back when the majority of the problems that people were up against had to do with there being not enough of something to go around--when it took half of us working in the fields just to feed the rest of us--then the system worked relatively well. 9 times out of 10, when somebody got a loan (which is the event that injects dollars into the system) it had something to do with alleviating the not-enough-stuff problems that we faced. The quickest route to profitability had something to do with solving problems in ways that--by happenstance--let them stay solved. This is relevant since profitability is how banks decide whether to grant a loan, and loans are what cause USD to enter the system. Previously, we mostly had good reason to want people's ventures to succeed. But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures that have more to do with capturing a share of some fixed resource (attention/influence mostly), or building something that helps some of us at the expense of others (missiles, datacenters, planned obsolescence, surveillance, etc). It's no longer clear whether we're better off with the success or failure of a randomly chosen business venture. Maybe that venture seeks to harm us. The quickest route to profitability has changed. Now it's about making things worse for the many while benefiting the few (since it's the few who have all the money). Yet we're still treating dollars as valuable despite the fact that they're issued on the basis of profitability, a property that no longer has much to do with making our lives better. So I think we need a system that understands consent. When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor I need to be able to look at it and decide whether accpepting it helps people who are helping me, or whether it helps people who want to poison my drinking water for their mining endeavor. Dollars don't carry enough information to enable me to make that decision, and so far neither does crypto. We don't have to banish scarcity entirely before building monetary systems that are not based on it. Once we figure out the better way, it'll likely be crypto-shaped, except it won't ask you to buy it, it'll just ask you to use it. It'll be a rejection of the old ideas about value.
  - win311fwg 4mo ago
    > When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor That abstraction is simple debt. Your employer is, in exchange for what you've given them, promising to return to you something of value (food, shelter, entertainment, etc.) in the future. Money is the account of the promise made. The alternative is to forgo the debt and trade something of equal value at the time of the transaction. However, any negative externalities associated with you choosing what item of value you want to trade for exists whether you demand it immediately or defer acceptance until some time in the future. Trying to find a new way to practice accounting isn't going to change anything.
    - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
      Simple debt isn't cutting it anymore. The "Debt to whom, and what outcomes does that person value?" question is important. Ignoring it and continuing to buy and sell simple debt traps people in situations where their economic way forward involves contributing to outcomes that makes their material situation worse. It's time bomb, each generation has diminishing incentives to participate. > alternative is to forgo the debt and trade something of equal value "equal value" is only a well defined concept when we have shared interests. But when half of us are trying to go to Mars and the other half is trying to prevent the first half from going to Mars so we can instead dedicate those resources to healthcare... when we're fighting over the steering wheel rather than fighting against a common enemy... then we can't usefully coordinate around a single untyped notion of "value". We're just running in circles negating each other's efforts. Our current economy is mostly waste. New ways of accounting that don't obfuscate conflicts of interest the way that simple debt does will indeed change things.
      - win311fwg 4mo ago
        > The "Debt to whom, and what outcomes does that person value?" question is important. It may be, but it is one you, the employer, can easily ask during the interview. If a prospective employee doesn't align with your values, you don't have to hire them, and thus won't have to make them any promises to deliver anything that you don't feel comfortable with. This isn't only theoretical. "Cultural fit" is considered by a large swath of employers to be one of the most important aspects of hiring. I know the typical HN account loves to over-engineer solutions to mundane things, but you really don't have to invent some new type of accounting for this. All you have to do is talk to the people in your life.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Used to be, but now it's agree to paint Musk's fence in exchange for nothing, or else you aren't even allowed to exist, because the system has been thoroughly gamed. Usually when a metric becomes too gamed it's imperative that we stop using it as a metric (Goodhart's law) or else very bad things happen.
  - bigfishrunning 4mo ago
    I live a perfectly fine, productive life not contributing to musk's empire. Are y'all really buying Teslas and blue twitter checks? The fact that he has a bunch of money really has no bearing on me.
    - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
      Somebody sells a tesla and then buys something from you with that money... and now you're contributing to musk's empire. Our money is set up so that you're not in a position to consent to it or even be aware of it.
      - bigfishrunning 4mo ago
        Sounds like I sold something and therefore made money! glad to hear my business is doing well.
        __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
        Sure, but at what cost? Maybe you made $10, by doing so did you enable musk to do $9 of harm to you, or was it $11?
        Dylan16807 4mo ago
        Almost certainly less than $1. What kind of harm do you have in mind here?
        4mo ago
- port11 4mo ago
  A lot of people seem to conflate currency with The Economy. These are not the same at all, but plenty of comments don’t make that distinction. The twisted perversion of Capitalism that is in effect today is dramatically dissociated from the idea of currency as a stable means of, yes, measuring participation. Perverting the value of participation and economic contribution is, perhaps, what the cancerous elite can be mostly said to have done to destroy the true purpose of an economy.
inigyou 4mo ago
https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper/blob/master/README.... seemed interesting because it uses a different model that's not interchangeable with any current system. It died in 2024 however.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
  Yeah, that was my favorite one so far. Although I didn't much like the pact that if we're friends we assert that each other's tokens are equal in value. I know that's in the spirit of UBI but if you're building a web of trust then it seems like a missed opportunity to create incentives around being so damn useful to your community that people treat your tokens as more valuable than somebody who is less useful. To make position, and not amount, the desirable thing. To make trustworthiness profitable.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    How would that work? I (an important person who is very loved and trusted by thousands of people) agree to give you (a nobody) 0.20 of my tokens for every 1 of your tokens? That smells like financialization, I'd effectively profit 80% on all of your transactions through me.
    - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
      Well, if I had it fully worked out I'd be telling people to try using my system. But vaguely... In circles the agreement is that trust creates a 1:1 value ratio. I value the tokens you mint periodically as equal to my own, and this influences the number of tokens I give you in exchange for a loaf of bread or something. If I value the bread at 6 of my own tokens, that's the price I change you: 6. But maybe we value each other's contributions to society differently, perhaps we consult the graph and end up with a 2:3 ratio where I trust you more than you trust me. This ratio influences prices. That loaf which I value at 6 of my tokens (times two, divided by three) I offer to you at a price of 4. Or maybe you're working to cause me trouble, damming the river I drink from or somesuch, so the trust graph gives us a 5:1 trust ratio. In this case I'm going to need 30 of your tokens in exchange for this bread because I'm aware that by feeding you, I'm giving you energy that you'll spend harming me. After exchange, the tokens get wrapped in a layer that indicates me as well. Since the next person to accept it will be benefiting both you and me by doing so (contributing to a system that supports our various activities), they'll have to consider the trust ratio between themselves and both of us in order to determine whether to value it. This creates a risk on my part: maybe I'll accept your token and be unable to find anybody who will subsequently accept it from me because everybody I associate finds your activities problematic. (These dynamics are all implementation details, humans just scan a QR code and see a price that was determined by the weighted trust graph). You don't encounter tokens with problematically large stacks of wrappers because demurrage counteracts inflation. We're constantly minting new tokens for ourselves, and the value of existing tokens are constantly degrading so nobody has a token that's 100 years old. That is to say, they have a half life, they decay out of existence eventually, so there's an incentive to continue to be trustworthy and useful, rather than just hoarding enough that you can then opt out of being trustworthy for the rest of your life. > I (an important person who is very loved and trusted by thousands of people) The ratio we end up will not be a function of how many people trust you, or how many people trust me, it'll only consider cases where I've trusted somebody who trusts you, or where you've trusted somebody that trusts me. We opt-in to the asymmetry by using variable degrees of trust to enable or prevent the activities of our peers. It restores balance to the "vote with your wallet" situation. Currently, the only way to vote with your wallet is to vote yes or to abstain. This lets you vote no. For a first pass I'm considering using https://github.com/cblgh/appleseed-metric https://github.com/cblgh/appleseed-metric for the trust graph. But I don't intend to start by making apps like the one I've described here--nothing so politically charged as money. I figure I'll get the protocol working with things that are low stakes and easy to get on board with and try my hand at making something money shaped only once it's performing well for other stuff.
pjc50 4mo ago
> scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives The entire field of crypto was an attempt to create scarcity where none existed, by turning scarce electricity into special numbers.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
  It was about creating a rules based monetary system. It made engineering sense to start with a mimic of a system that was already known to be consistent (gold), but the feeling I got was that it was much more about letting the people choose which rules they wanted to follow, and less about favoring any particular ruleset (i.e. ones that create scarcity).
  - slopinthebag 4mo ago
    By that logic, Musk breaths air which probably eventually mixes with the air you breath, thus there is no escaping him. Come on dude
    - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
      I don't know what you're talking about. We build society either out of rules or out of threats and favors. Preferring innovation on the rules side has nothing to do with who breathes whose air, unless you want to make a rule about that and enforce it with software--which you probably shouldn't, because it's dumb.
      - slopinthebag 4mo ago
        My comment got attached to the wrong thread…nvrmnd
  - red-iron-pine 4mo ago
    rules based? arguably the entire point is to break the existing rules based, heavily-regulated monetary system. like that was the point, now you're not talking to banks and paying taxes and following regulations; it's why Monero is still a thing
sunshine-o 4mo ago
My guess is a lot of people had too much expectations for blockchain and crypto. I remember here on HN 10 years ago everybody wanted to put everything on a blockchain. Some were betting on the collapse of the financial system. None of those things happened but ethereum created a neutral, stable, secure cheap and transparent programmable financial platform. Because it is neutral a lot of people ported the bad things happening in the traditional financial system to crypto: the scams, debt, speculation, etc. And then most people started to hate it. I guess 20 years ago most porn was hosted on Apache web servers, now it would be nginx. Should we hate nginx because of porn?
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
  I have mixed feelings there. I agree that crypto has inherited a lot of troublesome behavior from the traditional system which may not have been, at the outset, crypto's fault. But on the other hand, presumably we built a new one because we thought it could be better than its predecessor, and it still isn't. At some point we've got to acknowledge that the culture that springs up around a system, wherever the people were previously, is a consequence of the merits and flaws of that system.
DANmode 4mo ago
So, Eyeball Coin?
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
  Oh hell no. Biometrics on a blockchain are a terrible idea. But web of trust stuff along the same lines as https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper, figuring out where PGP went wrong and getting it right, yeah. I'm not really excited about blockchains at all actually. They put you in the wrong sector of the design space that falls out of the CAP theorem. CRDT's and partition tolerance however, I think there's something useful in there.

bigfishrunning 4mo ago

Isn't the whole point of an economy a method of resolving scarcity? Money is a proxy for participation; it keeps me from having to agree to paint the miller's fence in exchange for some flour.

__MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
That's the perspective that our current systems are based on. And back when the majority of the problems that people were up against had to do with there being not enough of something to go around--when it took half of us working in the fields just to feed the rest of us--then the system worked relatively well. 9 times out of 10, when somebody got a loan (which is the event that injects dollars into the system) it had something to do with alleviating the not-enough-stuff problems that we faced. The quickest route to profitability had something to do with solving problems in ways that--by happenstance--let them stay solved. This is relevant since profitability is how banks decide whether to grant a loan, and loans are what cause USD to enter the system. Previously, we mostly had good reason to want people's ventures to succeed. But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures that have more to do with capturing a share of some fixed resource (attention/influence mostly), or building something that helps some of us at the expense of others (missiles, datacenters, planned obsolescence, surveillance, etc). It's no longer clear whether we're better off with the success or failure of a randomly chosen business venture. Maybe that venture seeks to harm us. The quickest route to profitability has changed. Now it's about making things worse for the many while benefiting the few (since it's the few who have all the money). Yet we're still treating dollars as valuable despite the fact that they're issued on the basis of profitability, a property that no longer has much to do with making our lives better. So I think we need a system that understands consent. When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor I need to be able to look at it and decide whether accpepting it helps people who are helping me, or whether it helps people who want to poison my drinking water for their mining endeavor. Dollars don't carry enough information to enable me to make that decision, and so far neither does crypto. We don't have to banish scarcity entirely before building monetary systems that are not based on it. Once we figure out the better way, it'll likely be crypto-shaped, except it won't ask you to buy it, it'll just ask you to use it. It'll be a rejection of the old ideas about value.
- win311fwg 4mo ago
  > When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor That abstraction is simple debt. Your employer is, in exchange for what you've given them, promising to return to you something of value (food, shelter, entertainment, etc.) in the future. Money is the account of the promise made. The alternative is to forgo the debt and trade something of equal value at the time of the transaction. However, any negative externalities associated with you choosing what item of value you want to trade for exists whether you demand it immediately or defer acceptance until some time in the future. Trying to find a new way to practice accounting isn't going to change anything.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
    Simple debt isn't cutting it anymore. The "Debt to whom, and what outcomes does that person value?" question is important. Ignoring it and continuing to buy and sell simple debt traps people in situations where their economic way forward involves contributing to outcomes that makes their material situation worse. It's time bomb, each generation has diminishing incentives to participate. > alternative is to forgo the debt and trade something of equal value "equal value" is only a well defined concept when we have shared interests. But when half of us are trying to go to Mars and the other half is trying to prevent the first half from going to Mars so we can instead dedicate those resources to healthcare... when we're fighting over the steering wheel rather than fighting against a common enemy... then we can't usefully coordinate around a single untyped notion of "value". We're just running in circles negating each other's efforts. Our current economy is mostly waste. New ways of accounting that don't obfuscate conflicts of interest the way that simple debt does will indeed change things.
    - win311fwg 4mo ago
      > The "Debt to whom, and what outcomes does that person value?" question is important. It may be, but it is one you, the employer, can easily ask during the interview. If a prospective employee doesn't align with your values, you don't have to hire them, and thus won't have to make them any promises to deliver anything that you don't feel comfortable with. This isn't only theoretical. "Cultural fit" is considered by a large swath of employers to be one of the most important aspects of hiring. I know the typical HN account loves to over-engineer solutions to mundane things, but you really don't have to invent some new type of accounting for this. All you have to do is talk to the people in your life.
inigyou 4mo ago
Used to be, but now it's agree to paint Musk's fence in exchange for nothing, or else you aren't even allowed to exist, because the system has been thoroughly gamed. Usually when a metric becomes too gamed it's imperative that we stop using it as a metric (Goodhart's law) or else very bad things happen.
- bigfishrunning 4mo ago
  I live a perfectly fine, productive life not contributing to musk's empire. Are y'all really buying Teslas and blue twitter checks? The fact that he has a bunch of money really has no bearing on me.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
    Somebody sells a tesla and then buys something from you with that money... and now you're contributing to musk's empire. Our money is set up so that you're not in a position to consent to it or even be aware of it.
    - bigfishrunning 4mo ago
      Sounds like I sold something and therefore made money! glad to hear my business is doing well.
      - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
        Sure, but at what cost? Maybe you made $10, by doing so did you enable musk to do $9 of harm to you, or was it $11?
        Dylan16807 4mo ago
        Almost certainly less than $1. What kind of harm do you have in mind here?
        4mo ago
port11 4mo ago
A lot of people seem to conflate currency with The Economy. These are not the same at all, but plenty of comments don’t make that distinction. The twisted perversion of Capitalism that is in effect today is dramatically dissociated from the idea of currency as a stable means of, yes, measuring participation. Perverting the value of participation and economic contribution is, perhaps, what the cancerous elite can be mostly said to have done to destroy the true purpose of an economy.

inigyou 4mo ago

https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper/blob/master/README.... seemed interesting because it uses a different model that's not interchangeable with any current system. It died in 2024 however.

__MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
Yeah, that was my favorite one so far. Although I didn't much like the pact that if we're friends we assert that each other's tokens are equal in value. I know that's in the spirit of UBI but if you're building a web of trust then it seems like a missed opportunity to create incentives around being so damn useful to your community that people treat your tokens as more valuable than somebody who is less useful. To make position, and not amount, the desirable thing. To make trustworthiness profitable.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  How would that work? I (an important person who is very loved and trusted by thousands of people) agree to give you (a nobody) 0.20 of my tokens for every 1 of your tokens? That smells like financialization, I'd effectively profit 80% on all of your transactions through me.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
    Well, if I had it fully worked out I'd be telling people to try using my system. But vaguely... In circles the agreement is that trust creates a 1:1 value ratio. I value the tokens you mint periodically as equal to my own, and this influences the number of tokens I give you in exchange for a loaf of bread or something. If I value the bread at 6 of my own tokens, that's the price I change you: 6. But maybe we value each other's contributions to society differently, perhaps we consult the graph and end up with a 2:3 ratio where I trust you more than you trust me. This ratio influences prices. That loaf which I value at 6 of my tokens (times two, divided by three) I offer to you at a price of 4. Or maybe you're working to cause me trouble, damming the river I drink from or somesuch, so the trust graph gives us a 5:1 trust ratio. In this case I'm going to need 30 of your tokens in exchange for this bread because I'm aware that by feeding you, I'm giving you energy that you'll spend harming me. After exchange, the tokens get wrapped in a layer that indicates me as well. Since the next person to accept it will be benefiting both you and me by doing so (contributing to a system that supports our various activities), they'll have to consider the trust ratio between themselves and both of us in order to determine whether to value it. This creates a risk on my part: maybe I'll accept your token and be unable to find anybody who will subsequently accept it from me because everybody I associate finds your activities problematic. (These dynamics are all implementation details, humans just scan a QR code and see a price that was determined by the weighted trust graph). You don't encounter tokens with problematically large stacks of wrappers because demurrage counteracts inflation. We're constantly minting new tokens for ourselves, and the value of existing tokens are constantly degrading so nobody has a token that's 100 years old. That is to say, they have a half life, they decay out of existence eventually, so there's an incentive to continue to be trustworthy and useful, rather than just hoarding enough that you can then opt out of being trustworthy for the rest of your life. > I (an important person who is very loved and trusted by thousands of people) The ratio we end up will not be a function of how many people trust you, or how many people trust me, it'll only consider cases where I've trusted somebody who trusts you, or where you've trusted somebody that trusts me. We opt-in to the asymmetry by using variable degrees of trust to enable or prevent the activities of our peers. It restores balance to the "vote with your wallet" situation. Currently, the only way to vote with your wallet is to vote yes or to abstain. This lets you vote no. For a first pass I'm considering using https://github.com/cblgh/appleseed-metric https://github.com/cblgh/appleseed-metric for the trust graph. But I don't intend to start by making apps like the one I've described here--nothing so politically charged as money. I figure I'll get the protocol working with things that are low stakes and easy to get on board with and try my hand at making something money shaped only once it's performing well for other stuff.

pjc50 4mo ago

> scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives The entire field of crypto was an attempt to create scarcity where none existed, by turning scarce electricity into special numbers.

__MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
It was about creating a rules based monetary system. It made engineering sense to start with a mimic of a system that was already known to be consistent (gold), but the feeling I got was that it was much more about letting the people choose which rules they wanted to follow, and less about favoring any particular ruleset (i.e. ones that create scarcity).
- slopinthebag 4mo ago
  By that logic, Musk breaths air which probably eventually mixes with the air you breath, thus there is no escaping him. Come on dude
  - __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
    I don't know what you're talking about. We build society either out of rules or out of threats and favors. Preferring innovation on the rules side has nothing to do with who breathes whose air, unless you want to make a rule about that and enforce it with software--which you probably shouldn't, because it's dumb.
    - slopinthebag 4mo ago
      My comment got attached to the wrong thread…nvrmnd
- red-iron-pine 4mo ago
  rules based? arguably the entire point is to break the existing rules based, heavily-regulated monetary system. like that was the point, now you're not talking to banks and paying taxes and following regulations; it's why Monero is still a thing

sunshine-o 4mo ago

My guess is a lot of people had too much expectations for blockchain and crypto. I remember here on HN 10 years ago everybody wanted to put everything on a blockchain. Some were betting on the collapse of the financial system. None of those things happened but ethereum created a neutral, stable, secure cheap and transparent programmable financial platform. Because it is neutral a lot of people ported the bad things happening in the traditional financial system to crypto: the scams, debt, speculation, etc. And then most people started to hate it. I guess 20 years ago most porn was hosted on Apache web servers, now it would be nginx. Should we hate nginx because of porn?

__MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
I have mixed feelings there. I agree that crypto has inherited a lot of troublesome behavior from the traditional system which may not have been, at the outset, crypto's fault. But on the other hand, presumably we built a new one because we thought it could be better than its predecessor, and it still isn't. At some point we've got to acknowledge that the culture that springs up around a system, wherever the people were previously, is a consequence of the merits and flaws of that system.

DANmode 4mo ago

So, Eyeball Coin?

__MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
Oh hell no. Biometrics on a blockchain are a terrible idea. But web of trust stuff along the same lines as https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper, figuring out where PGP went wrong and getting it right, yeah. I'm not really excited about blockchains at all actually. They put you in the wrong sector of the design space that falls out of the CAP theorem. CRDT's and partition tolerance however, I think there's something useful in there.