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What is the motivation for this? The big advantage of money is as a communication mechanism: An increase of demand of pencils, though price chnges, can increas
by hibikir 13y ago
What is the motivation for this?
The big advantage of money is as a communication mechanism: An increase of demand of pencils, though price chnges, can increase the demand for burgers in a town where the wood for said pencils is made, even though the purchasers have absolutely no idea, and no control, over the results of their actions.
Sending positive and negative feedback to transactions has the opposite effect: It avoids the information hiding that is the key to making the economy tractable, and makes what are simple decisions much more complicated, but I suddenly have to care about what people think about the suppliers of my suppliers.
I suspect a economy running on this strangecoin would be less effective than one running on a regular currency, just like it's much harder to be gay in a tiny homophobic town than in a large, relatively anonymous big city.
- djestrada 13y agoTraditional money makes certain features of the economic system tractable, but it masks other important relationships that constraint its behavior. The question isn't whether or not the the transactions should be shaped by feedback from the network; the question instead is which features of the economic network do we want to make salient to agents in that network. You might think of Strangecoin as a way of making features of the interdependence of economic relationships salient in each transaction. In the parlance of STDs, I'm not just trading with you, I'm trading with everyone else you are trading with. I'm not sure I understand your analogy to small homophobic towns, but I suppose you mean that people with less economic support will have less representation in Strangecoin. It's true that Strangecoin will be disposed to preferential attachment, but I'm not sure any economic system wouldn't. It's a feature of the system that it makes these attachment relations explicit, a feature of the existing economy that is completely masked over with traditional money.
- jchrisa 13y agoI think Strangecoin is super interesting. I think his analogy was that with a coin where relationships matter, you have to care how a person is connected, when you deal with them. I think it could be a feature, not a bug, even if it makes things less efficient.
- djestrada 13y agoEfficiency isn't some absolute value. Efficiency is always relative to the goals we have.
- lovemenot 13y agoWell, it can be either depending on the perspective you are using at the time: objective or subjective. Some kinds of efficiency hew more to the former and some to the latter. In the last few thousand years money has done more than perhaps anything else to generate macro-economic efficiencies. So much so that it's hard to now imagine that it might be time for alternatives.