nhaehnle

89 ms·

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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I would argue that the rules of Bitcoin are not very useful for economic development. Perhaps the most important lesson in the history of money is that the amount of money needs to flexibly adjust to economic circumstances. The existing fia
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
On the other hand, all of your examples could easily be addressed if there was sufficient demand for it. So Bitcoin could be valuable in disrupting payment systems: Step 1: Bitcoin becomes superior to traditional payment systems. Step
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I agree that the physical use of gold does not explain its price by itself. Two things though: First of all, the physical use of gold is undeniable, and it's plausible that a sort of "bubble" -- perhaps not quite the right te
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Demand for trade is the only difference between bitcoin and a hot potato stock in a company with 0 earnings and 0 capital. In other words, in the long run, absolutely essential. I would say that political ideology is another big differenc
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Thank you for answering dualogy's remark pretty well. There is another reason why Bitcoin is in a weird spot, though. Bitcoin is neither anybody's IOU nor does it have an intrinsic, physically-based value similar to gold. It is pe
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
It is notable that this project, which is advertised as something related to Bitcoin, introduces itself on the Wiki with the concept of money-as-IOU. There is a serious clash of underlying philosophies of money here. On the one hand, you ha
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Most of your points are valid, and I also found the article to be rather weak. With that said... The serpentine bank transfer system that skims transaction fees on a huge number of transactions can be avoided. ... and is replaced by a di
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I didn't do the math (not even back of the envelope) but my sense tells me it'll be less footprint than the current mega banks. True, but Bitcoin also does less than those banks. It's not really an apples-to-apples comparis
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
How you think about the cost of Bitcoin mining strongly depends on what you think the point of Bitcoin is. If you believe that Bitcoin will "take over the world" (metaphorically speaking) purely based on its merit as an electronic
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
The more I save the more bank deposits are available for banks to lend and spur further growth. This is false, but it's an easy mistake to make because it's such a common misconception about how banking works. Banks do not lend
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
You're running into a textbook case of the Fallacy of Composition. The essence is that the economy is full of feedback cycles. Your savings and spending decisions affect the size of the economy. Now, from an individual household perspe
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Exactly. And even with printed money, one could reasonably argue that the fact that money is printed centrally is irrelevant for the behavior of the economy. After all, central banks typically just react to the demand for physical money tha
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Even that is a problematic take on it, because you ignore savings and what MVPQ people call the "velocity of money". When firms like Apple sit on hoards of cash, the amount of currency can grow quite a bit faster than the economy
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
the creation of money in existing currencies is centrally controlled This is a common misunderstanding. For typical fiat currencies, money creation is highly decentralized in the banking system. Most money creation happens when banks gi
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Here's the thing about calculation in particular: Yes, if your ultimate goal is to perform the calculation and nothing more, you'll be able to use a tool for the job in the real world. However, many times the calculation is just
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
It starts out that way. But then it turns out that to achieve equality, you mostly need to improve women's position in society. And then people only remember the second part and forget about the equality thing. And finally, this happen
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
They won't be allowed to use terms like 'purchase' and 'buy' without a specific legal consequence (like the right of resale). I really like this idea. Make sure that words that if you want to claim to 'sell&#
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I think the even more interesting question would be: * Might any of these questions be answered in such a way that the answer ought to influence our future behaviour? If the answer to that particular question is No, then why bother with the
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I think the point is that if Alice hopes to hide her tweets from Eve by blocking Eve, then Eve can always log out of Twitter to see those tweets again. Conclusion: Blocking users cannot ever be a privacy feature. You cannot prevent a specif
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Actually, I would say it's the other way around. A bank loan is like "anti-money": it is created at the same time as the new money, and when the money and the loan a.k.a. "anti-money" meet again, both are destroyed.
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I agree that central banks also create money, but I'm afraid I can't agree with how you frame the rest of your reply. Let's look at it from a balance sheet perspective. When a bank creates a loan, it adds an asset and a liabi
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
On top of that, other currencies have flexible supply as well. Banks create and destroy money based on demand, because bank loans are essentially newly created money (and paying back a bank loan means that the money is destroyed). So the si
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
You're not legally obligated, no. It would be a pretty damn good idea though if you wanted to be a positive force for society and mutual understanding.
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Looking at the action critically, what is to be gained by calling attention to Google, Facebook, and others providing their own bus fleets? A bus fleet that works for everybody? You know, the kind of public transportation that is common i
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Question 1: Do you think the underlying complaints of the protests, which are presumably about problems like gentrification, are valid? Question 2: If so, what do you propose the people do? As to one of your questions: Presumably, the prote
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
When a new branch is found, the CPU will predict it based on some simple and documented heuristics. It's been a while since I checked, but IIRC it boils down to: backward jumps are predicted to be taken (think loops) while forward jump
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Being a rentier means having income without working. Traditionally, this was because you inherited wealth, e.g. in the form of land. Most people's sense of distributive justice has some aspects of desert theory, i.e. people tend to bel
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
You only really have that problem when you want to start with a currency out of nothing. In that context, it might be interesting to study Hut Taxes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hut_tax It is a fascinating problem tho
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Economics is not a morality play, and connecting money to gold has nothing whatsoever to do with honesty. Look, the most important point of money is to facilitate economic exchange. Yes, rentiers want to store their savings somehow, but the
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Correction: The price volatility of gold has a lot to say about contemporary belief in the stability of fiat currencies.

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