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woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

Do I get to ask why? I promise I'm not being mean Eripsa, but if the money jumps up and down and all over the place based on "its creator sat down and did math until he thought the math meant Justice" why do I want any of it? Because it sounds cool?

(Note: this is not an admission that strangecoin sounds cool)

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Orange Devil
Oct 1, 2010

Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

CheesyDog posted:

2 questions:

1. Have you ever had a job?
2. Have you ever bought anything with money you didn't get from your parents?

Allow him to tell you how he worked at a hotel where he exchanged thoughts with all of the worlds leading thinkers (read: TED-talkers) who just so happened to be staying there.

Or was that the other guy?


Also I stopped reading at the first paragraph because it was dead wrong, then I find out later you admit this in the third paragraph but honestly I can't be bothered anymore. Try a writing class?

R. Mute
Jul 27, 2011

SedanChair posted:

Do I get to ask why? I promise I'm not being mean Eripsa, but if the money jumps up and down and all over the place based on "its creator sat down and did math until he thought the math meant Justice" why do I want any of it? Because it sounds cool?

(Note: this is not an admission that strangecoin sounds cool)
Careful, OP, this guy might be trying to troll a good answer out of you.

Stanos
Sep 22, 2009

The best 57 in hockey.
Please seek help.

fade5
May 31, 2012

by exmarx

CommieGIR posted:

Oh good, Buttcoin is back.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

BitCoin, as we've seen time and time again, was a terrible idea and every "well it's like BitCoin but different" currency that comes out is just as dumb.

Cryptocurrency is not the future. Let it die.
Yeah, OP, in seriousness, you're not going to get any serious discussion about your new "coin" because the flaws in Bitcoin and its clones have already been repeatedly documented.

This simplest question for a new coin is "why should we adopt it?" and/or "why should we replace the US Dollar with it?" The answer is, bluntly, there is no reason to replace the US dollar, it's good as is. Now, if you're talking about the the distribution of the US Dollar, then yeah, that's got a lot of problems, but the US Dollar itself as a currency is sound, all complaining to the contrary. So, in other words, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose
Why would anyone possible think this is a good idea, Eripsa?

I'm not trolling, I honestly want to know. How is this at all an improvement over existing currency systems? If it is better, is it really so much of an improvement that it's worth the costs involved in scrapping every type of currency in use and switch over?

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich
I think you have to have a lot of faith in the assumption that technology solves more problems than it creates.

Phobeste
Apr 9, 2006

never, like, count out Touchdown Tom, man

Popular Thug Drink posted:

I think you have to have a lot of faith in the assumption that technology solves more problems than it creates.

Expanding on this, this whole thing seems like it's an attempt to do two things: 1) force rich people to actually spend money 2) codify social transactions in a money system run by a computer. The first one is something that can be accomplished just fine in real currency instead of moon units, it's a social problem that it's not. If we upped capital gains and death taxes you'd see many of these problems go away while being in plain ol USD. As for the second problem that's just sort of normal for you, I guess. The three latter types of payments are either stupid attempts to force names on things or you doing a very bad job describing what they mean. Every economic transaction is already an exchange of currency for goods. Sometimes the goods are non obvious and not physical and this is not a bug it's just how humans work, trying to squash it won't happen.

fake edit: also you're so so so bad at writing "science" for laypeople to understand. You just namedrop terms that you think are cool-sounding and link to Wikipedia when people call you on it.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich
Yeah, when Eripsa was listing the different features of strangecoin it occurred to me that all of these transaction types already exist in one form or another, they're just not baked into the protocol of currency and exist as add-on functions of banking. The question there is why these things need to be packaged with currency in the first place unless you start with the idea that monetary systems work much better from a computer science perspective than an economic perspective.

So basically OP unless you can demonstrate why treating money as packets instead of dollars and tracking transaction metadata intrinsically is a good thing you won't get much traction outside of cryptonerd circles.

RealityApologist
Mar 29, 2011

ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS :fuckoff:
I've said this in other threads but I suppose it bears repeating: I have no interest bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, either from an academic perspective or for the sake of my own financial interests. I'm not invested in any cryptocurrency and I have no plans on doing so. I'm very sympathetic to the skepticism of bitcoin, and basically every other coin is varying degrees of magnitude more shady and hilarious as the next.

My only interest here is in the dynamics of social organization, and at an abstract enough level that starts to look a lot like economics and game theory. The prevalence of cryptocurrencies provides a convenient enough framework in which to model the kind of economic network I'm describing, and presents it in a way that speaks to people interested in alternative economic frameworks, but none of that is particularly relevant to the project. Like I said, I was talking about this before anyone knew what bitcoins were; that's why the original discussion was in terms of marbles. Strangecoin is less insane than the marble network, simply as a matter of presentation. In other words, I'm trying to write better. Writing is really hard. The math is easier.

Very similar models of the attention economy have been constructed by legitimate, published scientists to study the dynamics of memes and virality, using tweets as nodes or facebook posts as nodes and retweets, shares, and likes as transactions. These models not only provide explanations for dynamics of collective behavior in social networks, but are also predictive and can anticipate emergent social phenomenon. Models of these kinds have anticipated everything from American Idol results to food riots and political unrest. But these models are limited to a very narrow range of activity within a very narrow social network like Twitter. There's lots of social organizing behavior that these models simply can't capture.

The global financial economy is also social network, and also has dynamics and structure that both explains its behavior and will predict its activity in the future. But if you've been paying attention for the last 40 years or so, you'll have noticed that we're really quite awful at managing the economy. Which is not to say that there aren't winners and losers, but that's certainly not a sign that it's being managed, or that it's stable, or that it's healthy.

So here's a few claims I'm happy to defend in detail if necessary, but I take as a starting point for discussion:

1. Our economy (in the broadest sense of the term) is not well managed.
2. It's possible to do a better job at managing the economy (that is, I fundamentally disagree with Hayek and the libertarians)
3. We don't have the tools available to manage the economy better.

That last point isn't just an economics point, but it's also a political point. If the problem is with the Fed, or the regulatory structure, or whatever, and we can't secure the political means to enforce the appropriate changes because of corruption or political gridlock or whatever, then that's as much a problem for our economy as it is for our politics. These relations can't be pulled apart cleanly, so there are no purely economic problems that will resolve the political tangles that prevent the economic problems. My claim is not that strangecoin does anything like that.

All I'm saying is:

A. Strangecoin models genuine aspects of our economic network: the organizations, both formal and informal, that we associate with. These are real patterns of activity, and they have a real impact on the global economy in the normal sense of the term.
B. These patterns are either entirely obfuscated, or at least dramatically obscured, with the financial tools we currently have available. In particular, money fails to represent at least some real value in our transactions. (These are sometimes called "externalities").
C. Providing users immediate, personal feedback on the global economic state, by making the structure of economic relations salient in their transactions, can provide sufficient feedback for users to conduct behavior in light of the global economic situation. In other words, the currency incentivizes cooperative economic practices. It doesn't guarantee justice, but it provides the feedback necessary for justice to be possible at all.

So let me clarify, by way of some more comments left in the HN thread, that I mean this to be an empirical proposition:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498231

quote:

We're talking about values, but I think these are ultimately empirical questions about which system performs better under certain constraints. I think these empirical questions can be resolved prior to implementation, by modeling the incentive structure of employees operating under traditional payment schemes, and employees operating under coupling transactions under Strangecoin, and then running simulations of the two models. I suspect traditional currencies will perform well under certain assumptions, but also that Strangecoin will perform well under similar assumptions, and may even outperform traditional currencies. In particular, I suspect that an employee with a coupled Scoin transaction with a business will have a closer relationship with that business, partly because the transaction has direct consequences on every other transaction the user engages in, and (by extension) has a closer association with that employee's identity than another business offering only a weekly paycheck. Businesses spend lots of money cultivating employee cultures so that they identify with the business, and these aspects of the culture can be more influential on employee motivation and job satisfaction than financial compensation. Strangecoin builds these relationships directly into the transaction, so we might expect it to have similar consequences.

But as I said, I think these are empirical questions that can only be solved from the armchair if that armchair is in front of a computer model simulation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496949

quote:

Other comments suggest that this can be implemented with existing tools, which I take as a virtue of the proposal.
In any case, John von Neumann proved a long time ago that any nonzero sum game with n players can be modeled as a zero sum game with n+1 players, where the n+1 player represents the global state. TUA is simply an implementation of this proof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game#Extensions

I give an an analogy in the proposal of the popularity of a celebrity couple being a nonlinear relationship to the popularity of each celebrity individually. I think our intuitive understanding of our social relationships is nonlinear in this way generally, and I think Strangecoin can model those nonlinear relationships well.

So, for instance, I'm imagining a family, spouses, close friends, and so on entering into extended coupling transactions, so that as a community their prosperity rises and falls together. I might also enter into such transactions with certain business with whom I want to couple my activities, and these coupling transactions might serve in lieu of direct billing or payment. A coupling relationship with a business is effectively a contract, but with traditional currency you need the whole legal framework of contracts to support the transaction, and with Strangecoin the transaction is built directly into the currency, and the interface looks almost exactly like a point-of-sale cash transaction.

And I can enter into less serious relationships of varying degrees with other parties. The effect is a way of managing not just financial transactions, but also reputation, investment, and other dynamics social constraints on the economy via the currency itself. Money is memory (http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf), but our existing currencies only represent some aspects of our economic activity, and therefore put limits on the memory stored in the economy. A nonlinear coin like Strangecoin can embed that social knowledge in the currency itself, providing a more robust memory framework on which we can conduct our economic transactions.

I only hint at this in the proposal, but I suspect a system like this is required to resolve the twisted legal artifice the corporate veil, because it quantifies explicitly the role individuals have in collective economic activity, and thereby gives a method for explicitly holding persons proportionally responsible (in both credit and blame) for their contributions to that activity.

But I think that's a much more radical proposal than the one I've offered for Strangecoin, and I should probably only be defending that here. =)

I'm not asking for everyone to immediately jump on board. But the proposal here isn't for some altcurrency to replace money; the point is for a model for understanding, explaining, and predicting our complex economic behavior.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe
Eripsa "presentation" is not what makes something insane or not.

RealityApologist
Mar 29, 2011

ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS :fuckoff:

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Yeah, when Eripsa was listing the different features of strangecoin it occurred to me that all of these transaction types already exist in one form or another, they're just not baked into the protocol of currency and exist as add-on functions of banking. The question there is why these things need to be packaged with currency in the first place unless you start with the idea that monetary systems work much better from a computer science perspective than an economic perspective.

So basically OP unless you can demonstrate why treating money as packets instead of dollars and tracking transaction metadata intrinsically is a good thing you won't get much traction outside of cryptonerd circles.

The point is that it provides feedback on aspects of the economic situation that aren't salient when using money.

Think of money like a compression algorithm on value, condensing widely distributed information about the economic situation into a simple number you can write on a check.

I'm arguing that traditional currencies are a lossy compression algorithm; the economic turbulence we experience is partly caused by artifacts of the compression process: distortions, missing data, and so one. It's enough to run economies at small enough scale, but at global scales it's become completely unmanagable. It's like watching stuttering porn on a 56k modem. It might get the job done, but it's not pretty.

I'm not saying that Strangecoin is HD video on demand, but I'm saying it's a different kind of compression, with possibly different results.

RealityApologist
Mar 29, 2011

ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS :fuckoff:

SedanChair posted:

Eripsa "presentation" is not what makes something insane or not.

I'm getting bitched at because it's not in 5 paragraph composition format.

Contra Duck
Nov 4, 2004

#1 DAD
So if I link myself to a partner at a billion to one ratio for a short time and then get a third party to pay my partner a dollar, the 'universal account' will give me a billion dollars? Sounds cool, let's do it.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

RealityApologist posted:

The point is that it provides feedback on aspects of the economic situation that aren't salient when using money.

Think of money like a compression algorithm on value, condensing widely distributed information about the economic situation into a simple number you can write on a check.

I'm arguing that traditional currencies are a lossy compression algorithm; the economic turbulence we experience is partly caused by artifacts of the compression process: distortions, missing data, and so one. It's enough to run economies at small enough scale, but at global scales it's become completely unmanagable. It's like watching stuttering porn on a 56k modem. It might get the job done, but it's not pretty.

I'm not saying that Strangecoin is HD video on demand, but I'm saying it's a different kind of compression, with possibly different results.

Why? Why model high granularity individual transactions when these things are easily abstractible?

It feels like you're trying to shoehorn social networking into currency to solve problems that don't exist.

I'm highly suspicious of such things because web 2.0 nonsense is a playground for hucksters and scammers.

Captain_Maclaine
Sep 30, 2001

Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

I'm getting bitched at because it's not in 5 paragraph composition format.

That, and because you're an insane techno-fetishist with a history of denying he's an insane techno-fetishist while advocating insane techno-fetishism.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

RealityApologist posted:

I'm getting bitched at because it's not in 5 paragraph composition format.

No it's probably because this is e-marbles in cosbycoin drag.

OJ MIST 2 THE DICK
Sep 11, 2008

Anytime I need to see your face I just close my eyes
And I am taken to a place
Where your crystal minds and magenta feelings
Take up shelter in the base of my spine
Sweet like a chica cherry cola

-Cheap Trick

Nap Ghost

Captain_Maclaine posted:

That, and because you're an insane techno-fetishist with a history of denying he's an insane techno-fetishist while advocating insane techno-fetishism.

Just because someone feels that cyborg discrimination should be treated the same as discrimination against sexuality and race does not make someone an insane techno-fetishist.

Ormi
Feb 7, 2005

B-E-H-A-V-E
Arrest us!
Your idea isn't going to make externalities any more visible or empower people negatively affected by them. But at least it would protect us from the #1 cause of wealth inequality in America, which is Scrooge McDuck-style money pools. :shepface:

RealityApologist
Mar 29, 2011

ASK me how NETWORKS algorithms NETWORKS will save humanity. WHY ARE YOU NOT THINKING MY THESIS THROUGH FOR ME HEATHENS did I mention I just unified all sciences because NETWORKS :fuckoff:

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Why? Why model high granularity individual transactions when these things are easily abstractible?

It feels like you're trying to shoehorn social networking into currency to solve problems that don't exist.

I'm highly suspicious of such things because web 2.0 nonsense is a playground for hucksters and scammers.

Your suspicions are completely legitimate. I'm not trying to sell you anything or sign you up for anything. I've never done anything like that in this three years I've been talking about this here, and I'm not about to start.

I'm trying to talk about the nature of our economic relations. My claim is that the tools we use for managing those relationships (namely, traditional money) are really poorly suited to the task. Money is a poor method of economic compression, and there are alternative compression schemes that will work better for the economy overall and from the perspective of its users. I'm proposing Strangecoin to suggest an alternative way of making economic relations salient, and for providing users the right sort of feedback for making good economic decisions both in light of their own activity and in light of the global economic situation.

Some of these tools are available in other abstract forms in economic analysis (although some aren't; externalities are difficult to account for, and I'm not claiming Strangecoin captures them all), but very few of them are available to the user of money as direct feedback. For most users, money is paychecks, bills, prices, and taxes, and that's really a very perspective on their relation to the larger economy.

I'm suggesting Strangecoin not to compete with bitcoin or the other altcoins, but to show how they are all minor variations on the same basic compression scheme that traditional currency. Strangecoin is an alternative scheme altogether, that represents quantitatively different facts about our economic relationships. Although some of this information can be recovered from the traditional economy, but not in the way that Strangecoin facilitates.

RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Mar 31, 2014

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


RealityApologist posted:

I'm getting bitched at because it's not in 5 paragraph composition format.

You're getting bitched at because you're loving insane

SedanChair posted:

No it's probably because this is e-marbles in cosbycoin drag.

much better put

Rob Ford
Aug 12, 2013

by XyloJW
:yosbutt:

Cowman
Feb 14, 2006

Beware the Cow





But seriously, does an attention economy require you to pay attention to the economy? I got a lot of other poo poo to pay attention to so I can't focus on the economy as well and I don't want to be poor because of that.

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



How many strange coins does a loaf of bread cost and how do I pay for it and how many strange coins would I earn per month and would I still have to pay rent or what?

Yiggy
Sep 12, 2004

"Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."

eXXon posted:

How many strange coins does a loaf of bread cost and how do I pay for it and how many strange coins would I earn per month and would I still have to pay rent or what?

Well you see its non-linear and complex so when you buy a loaf of bread you just might earn money at the same time as the vendor loses it. Because complexity.

Rob Ford
Aug 12, 2013

by XyloJW
This poo poo anti-fragile, OP?

eggyolk
Nov 8, 2007


It seems like a side effect of your new currency would be an acute acceleration of wealth consolidation at the top.

Good Citizen
Aug 12, 2008

trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump
God help me, I read the entire thing. Originally I was just going to scan it and type 'lol you crazy' or something, but through sheer morbid curiosity I made it through. First, just to demonstrate that I'm not a complete idiot on this subject, I'm pretty much done with my Master's of Accounting, almost finished a minor in Econ, teach undergrad accounting, am nearing CPA completion, and have a job lined up with one of the Big 4 public accounting firms in one of the biggest markets in the US. So I'm far from running the Fed or Morgan Stanley but I know a few things about how money and the economics of free trade work. With that out of the way, here I go.

Your 'idea' is completely devoid of any ideas. You're just using overly-complex explanations to describe pretty basic concepts that aren't new or interesting as a way to stroke yourself off on the internet. Like, seriously, look at this poo poo:

quote:

The Strangecoin network is a directed graph with users as nodes and some time-dependent transactions as edges between them. Transactions describes how Strangecoin trade between users at each time step. Let S be our unit of Strangecoin, and let t be our basic unit of time.

A Strangecoin user is:

An account balance B in S
Income I in S/t, the sum of all incoming transactions.
Expenses E in S/t, the sum of all outgoing transactions.
So dB/dt = I - E
An account balance cap C in S that represents the upper limit of Strangecoins in a user's balance.


Balance Penalties:

If B = C, then the user receives a penalty where income is forfeit until expenses reduce the balance below C. Income might gradually decay as B approaches C to postpone hitting the limit. Similarly, if B = 0, then the user receives a penalty where expenses are forfeit until income brings the balance above 0. Expenses might gradually decay as B approaches 0 to postpone hitting the limit. To avoid penalties, users must keep their balance 0 < B < C. In other words, users have an incentive to keep dB/dt near zero, so that total income balances with total expenses.
Do you want to talk to people about money? Then say "Accounts have a max balance and any money put in over that balance is lost". If I tried to hand what you just typed up here to a manager he would throw it in my god drat face, and rightly so.

And you know what, I think you know this. I think you're typing poo poo like this because if you expressed your ideas plainly then someone other than an accounting nerd might read it, understand it, and instantly go to the obvious questions that you're incapable of answering like..... what if someone had more than one account? Jesus, I mean anyone over a certain level of wealth has teams of people splitting money between trusts and dependents and offshore accounts and mutual funds etc etc. And really this is just the tip of the huge god drat ice berg of problems your non-idea idea contains.

Which leads me to the more fun part

quote:

There's more work required to put flesh on the bones of this idea. There are many conversations to have about the dynamics of the network and the particular constraints it should operate within, both as a matter of practical operation and as a matter of sensible public policy.

I'd like to have those conversations with you.

No. No you don't. You don't have the training or experience to have this conversation with me or anyone else who can decipher your maze of self-aggrandizing jargon. You're the equivalent of a guy who's stoned out of his mind somehow grabbing the mic at a theoretical physics conference and asking if maybe none of us really exist, maaaaaaaaan. You're an idiot who knows too many wikipedia words and desperately wants to be told how smart he is and it's pretty loving sad. Grow the gently caress up

GulMadred
Oct 20, 2005

I don't understand how you can be so mistaken.

Yiggy posted:

Well you see its non-linear and complex so when you buy a loaf of bread you just might earn money at the same time as the vendor loses it. Because complexity.
Also - it's impossible for people to outbid each other when attempting to buy things, because even someone with a zero account balance is capable of spending as much as he wants (unless the Universal Account is depleted, in which case we're probably eating the dead). But this is no barrier to regular commerce - even though I could sell my loaf of bread to anyone for equal profit, I'll actually sell it to the customer with the biggest social media reputation transaction velocity. Because that transaction might increase my social media reputation transaction velocity. Assuming, of course, that I can convince the rich customer to upvote like Endorse my account.

eggyolk posted:

It seems like a side effect of your new currency would be an acute acceleration of wealth consolidation at the top.
Yes, but the Strangecoin-rich will be forced to divide their wealth into a closely-bound network of several accounts, instead of one big account. Each of the linked accounts will have high transaction velocity, and therefore high clout. The additional workload/complexity is irrelevant because the whole thing will be run by a computer (or an entire team of professional wealth managers). But this isn't a problem because there's a nominal wealth cap and therefore all problems have been solved forever.

Big Hubris
Mar 8, 2011


RA, your ideas are only entertaining to the uneducated for a brief time before the knowledgehavers show up and reveal your trickery.

Also, Assumption 3 is so wrong that I caught it.

ErIog
Jul 11, 2001

:nsacloud:

Rob Ford posted:

This poo poo anti-fragile, OP?

This is a pretty masterful burn, but I can't tell if it's more an indictment of Nassim Taleb or Eripsa.

Good Citizen posted:

You're the equivalent of a guy who's stoned out of his mind somehow grabbing the mic at a theoretical physics conference and asking if maybe none of us really exist, maaaaaaaaan.

That's Eripsa's entire thing. It's like he read a Malcolm Gladwell book and thought, "Hey! I can write like that too!" but manages to approach his topics with somehow even less rigor than Gladwell. Then when people tell him they haven't the foggiest idea what the gently caress he's going on about he thinks it's like proof that what he's writing must be so complex and brilliant.

ErIog fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Mar 31, 2014

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012

RealityApologist posted:

I'm getting bitched at because it's not in 5 paragraph composition format.

No, it's because you're as succinct and direct as an Ayn Rand novel. If you want people interested, don't make their eyes glaze over before you've even gotten to the meat of your point. If you just want to jack off to your own ideas, start a blog.

A Fancy 400 lbs
Jul 24, 2008

quote:

I've only started thinking through the idea, and implementing it would take more technical expertise than I have alone. For instance, I'm not sure if Strangecoin can be implemented as an extension of the bitcoin protocol, or if some fundamentally new technology is required. If you know something about the technical details, I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you might know how to implement something like this, I'd love to help you try.

Since other people are focusing on the rest so well, this is what I want to nitpick. If you don't even have the slightest clue how to implement your idea, your idea is loving worthless. Anyone can say "poo poo man, what if we had carts that pulled themselves?" but it still took the human race thousands of years to make cars. I mean, it's one thing to have an incomplete idea of how something could work, but you don't even have that. All you have is "I'm sure computers can do it, someone wanna get on that for me?". And the answer is no, because you're a raving loony.

Rob Ford
Aug 12, 2013

by XyloJW
Haha, I actually read some of the OP:

quote:

Background and Motivation

If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process. What I've lost you've gained and vice versa, so that the total value between us has not changed after the exchange is over.

Today is the day you learn that you are literally dumber than a brick of poo poo.

Orange Sunshine
May 10, 2011

by FactsAreUseless

RealityApologist posted:

I was digging through the SomethingAwful archives and found my first essay on the attention economy, written on April 5th, 2011. At the time, Bitcoin had yet to experience it's first bubble and was still trading below a dollar, and Occupy Wall Street was still five months in the future. If you don't have access to the archives, the thread which prompted this first write up was titled "No More Bitchin: Let's actually create solutions to society's problems!" Despite my reputation on this forum, I'm not interested in pop speculative futurism or idle technoidealism. I don't think there's an easy technological fix for our many difficult problems. But I do think that our technological circumstances have a dramatic impact on our social, political, and economic organizations, and that we can design technologies to cultivate human communities that are healthy, stable, and cooperative. The political and economic infrastructure we have for managing collective human action was developed at a time when individual rational agency formed the basis of all political theory, and in a networked digital age we can do much better. An attention economy doesn't solve all the problems, but it provides tools for addressing problems that simply aren't available with the infrastructure we have available today. My discussion of the attention economy was aimed at discussing social organization at this level of abstraction, with the hopes that taking this networked perspective on social action would reveal some of the tools necessary for addressing our problems. .

In the three years and multiple threads since that initial post, I've done research into the dynamics and organization of complex systems and taught myself some of the math and theory necessary for making the idea explicit and communicable. And in that time the field of data science has grown astronomically, making a variety of tools and theoretical resources available for modelling and predicting the dynamics of complex networks. In general, the public discourse has become much more comfortable thinking about attention and network dynamics and its implications. Some of that discussion is gross hype and misrepresentation, but some of it is really giving us unprecedented pictures of our collective behavior at large scales. And for this reason, more people have been articulating proposals that look quite a lot like the attention economy I've been describing. I'm not saying this vindicates my theory, but it suggests a possible convergence in in the direction I've been pointing.

In any case, if I was going to make a new thread I didn't want to just vomit out some more impotent rhetoric. Instead, I wanted to give a specific, proposal of limited scope that can be addressed on is own merits independent of whatever reputation I've developed. So I wrote up a proposal for a new digital currency.


I posted this on my blog yesterday, and it's received a fair bit of attention since then, largely driven by a fantastic discussion on Hacker News that gets a lot of the up-front reaction and criticism out of the way. There is also a less active thread on /r/BasicIncome that has a few interesting comments, and several comments on my blog. There's also been at least one scammer attempting to profit off the idea already.

The idea isn't complete and there are obvious problems that need to be worked out. But given the reaction I've been seeing, the idea seems to be genuinely novel (something that surprised me, given the insane activity in the bitcoin world), and seems to be stimulating people's thinking in some interesting directions. The proposal is already more successful than I would have anticipated. So I'm pretty interested to see what this thread might do with it.

RealityApologist, I tried reading through your message a couple times, and I still have no idea what you're talking about. I have no idea what Strangecoin is (other than that it's probably something like Bitcoin), how it's different from conventional currency or bitcoins, or why you think it might be a good idea.

If you can rewrite all of that in simple english, or otherwise sum up what you're trying to say in a comprehensible way, I'll respond to it.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

Rob Ford posted:

Haha, I actually read some of the OP:


Today is the day you learn that you are literally dumber than a brick of poo poo.

He really does point out that value is created a little further down. It's actually a fun way to tell who read the whole thing or not.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

SedanChair posted:

He really does point out that value is created a little further down. It's actually a fun way to tell who read the whole thing or not.

I quit reading when I realized the point was more or less "this is like BitCoin only it will work and not be stupid because..."

A Fancy 400 lbs
Jul 24, 2008

ToxicSlurpee posted:

I quit reading when I realized the point was more or less "this is like BitCoin only it will work and not be stupid because..."

No, keep reading, it's actually MUCH stupider than even bitcoin.

Rob Ford
Aug 12, 2013

by XyloJW

SedanChair posted:

He really does point out that value is created a little further down. It's actually a fun way to tell who read the whole thing or not.

And thus ends my excursion into D&D.

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Good Citizen
Aug 12, 2008

trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump

SedanChair posted:

He really does point out that value is created a little further down. It's actually a fun way to tell who read the whole thing or not.

Yep

quote:

Of course, when I give you a dollar for a burger that's not really a zero sum transaction, because otherwise we wouldn't be motivated to enter into the transaction in the first place. I give you a dollar because I want the burger more than I want the dollar, and if you accept the trade it's because you want the dollar more than you want the burger, so in a fair exchange we both feel like we've come out ahead. In other words, there is some additional value in our fair exchange that is not accounted for in the burgers and the dollars alone. But if our bookkeeping method only counts burgers and dollars, then it's not accounting for the value that accrues in our transactions.

I like how he uses the words accounting and bookkeeping several times while bemoaning his perception that no one is recording the value added in these transactions. He's got a point. It's not like there are any major intellectual disciplines or multi billion dollar industries designed to accurately measure and time the value of those transactions from every angle.

So yeah, he does address it but doesn't know a drat thing about what he's trying to address

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