4 ms·
Traditional money makes certain features of the economic system tractable, but it masks other important relationships that constraint its behavior. The question
by djestrada 13y ago
Traditional 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.