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Am I correct in my interpretation that this bit from the op:quote: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. means that StrangeCoins would be literally without value because not having any didn't mean that you didn't get to spend any? The only way I can possibly interpret this is "if you have zero StrangeCoins, you don't pay for anything, they just give it to you." If I can say "I'll give you a million SC [that I don't actually have but you'll still actually get] for that burger," what incentive does either party have for not taking part in that? And if that transaction DOES happen, then why would anyone ever seek out an income ever? How is this not markedly worse than communism?
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Apr 1, 2014 02:59
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Hey guys, just wanted to swing by again to remind you that absolutely everything to do with Strangecoin is absolutely meaningless because if the following is true:RealityApologist posted:Similarly, if B = 0, then the user receives a penalty where expenses are forfeit until income brings the balance above 0. then once you are broke then the system just pays for everything on your behalf, and so there is literally no reason to ever pursue any form of income. Anyway, I'm sure there's some easy handwave solution for that, so uh, carry on.
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Apr 4, 2014 01:39
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Why do any of you give a poo poo what this chucklefuck "thinks" about any of these subjects? So much effort has been put into disillusioning an individual with the logical capacity of an ornery toddler to literally no end, over and over and over again. Please, for your own goods, find something better to do with yourselves. Just Stop Posting. [i repent, i am become The Problem] Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 1, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 04:35
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RealityApologist posted:No, but I'm also not engaging with professional philosophers here, and I'm regularly accused over overly intellectual verbosity, so I'm trying to find a happy medium. Friend, your verbosity is not over-intellectual, it's over-academic, and those are emphatically not the same thing. Nobody would ever, ever accuse you of being over-intellectual.
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Apr 6, 2014 01:00
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RealityApologist posted:Not at all. But I think most of you are groupthink idiots who haven't demonstrated a basic comprehension of anything going on in this thread If this is really a concern of yours, you might go back to any of the repeated requests from Jawn, Obdi, Sedan et al to provide specific concrete examples. People are not comprehending because the concept you are proposing is not one which it is possible to comprehend, and it is clearly not one that you yourself comprehend well enough to explain. Like, the basic issue here is that, unless it was buried in one of your 1500-word diatribes, you still have yet to describe a set of human interactions and how strangecoin would affect them. The basic fundamentals have been completely bypassed in favor of wild philosophy with its own undefined lexicon, supplemented by high-handed generalizations and an incredibly ironic disdain for the audience. e: if you truly want to be comprehended, I think the best (and probably only effective) thing you could do would be to take a step back, focus on revising and increasing the specificity of your proposal in the OP. The fact that people are unable to keep track of what's going on in the densest thread in D&D shouldn't come as a surprise, and the onus is on you, the proprietor of the idea, to present it in a legible format and keep the changing proposal maintained to reflect your own changes of heart. Believe it or not, communication is not a one-way street. As for personal attacks: this is the something awful forums, dude. Grow a thick enough skin to deal, or actually make an effort to change what is being criticized. Think before you post. Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Apr 9, 2014 |
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Apr 9, 2014 17:04
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RealityApologist posted:I'm not saying the theory is complete, but there's nevertheless a clear gap between the material I've laid out and the thread's comprehension of that material. I know I know it's incoherent and incomprehensible; all I'm saying is that it helps when sone of the constructive thread content is coming from other people.  Again: the best thing you can do is condense all of the criticisms you have absorbed Borg-style into the spec and keep an updated version of it somewhere, so that questions like "hey so if I can pay one billion trillion Strange Coins to you Tuesday for a hamburger today, why do endorsements matter in the slightest" can be answered by looking at a reference instead of trawling the short novel that is this thread. Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Apr 9, 2014 |
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Apr 9, 2014 17:19
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RealityApologist posted:I'm not bothered by it, or I wouldn't be here. But it makes the conversation much more difficult than it would be otherwise, and the standards demanded of my posting are that much higher. The issue is that you are "considering ideas" in the same way that a blind man might consider colors, except that you're not blind, you just haven't opened your eyes. You don't seem to have any actual grounding in the subject matter, but instead of finding that grounding, are trying to have a "conversation" about it. Do you see how that does not add any value to anyone, including yourself, as you don't even have enough knowledge to understand the ways in which you are fundamentally wrong?
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Apr 9, 2014 18:10
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evilweasel posted:I'm saying that you chose to insinuate racism and misfired because you didn't even read what was going on. You didn't understand what was going on, and rather than realize you were wrong have chosen to try to draw bullshit distinctions to avoid admitting you were wrong. The correct response would have been something along the lines of "whoops, my mistake". Isn't this level of cruelty to the handicapped barred by law?
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Apr 9, 2014 21:08
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I award this thread four attention demerits for wasting my time, and I'll be seeking to penalize Eripsa and Bernie before the High Attention Court (in a secret bid to earn yet more StrangeTtention Coins for myself). Consider my quality vote reduced from four to three, and if all you dumb bullies that keep responding to people's posts don't want me to withdraw my 1% support joinders then you'd better 
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Apr 10, 2014 05:25
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ProfessorProf posted:In case it wasn't clear, for the record, I actually do want to hear RealityApologist's response on this point. I don't have any sense of what a mundane day-to-day transaction looks like from the actor's perspective in this economy/thought experiment/whatever Strangecoin is, but I'd like to. My understanding, if such a thing can be said to stem from an Eripsa post, is that he is going to go back and rewrite the spec. This is the best thing for everyone involved because there will be an up-to-date iteration of what the Strangeposal looks like to defend/assault/augment/"discuss"/hurl barbs over.
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Apr 10, 2014 19:57
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RealityApologist posted:I'm assuming all the agents in the network are persons, and my most recent post is essentially the claim that corporations are persons. I don't mean this to be a substantive claim beyond the ontology of the strangecoin network. So the process of creating a corporate agent would be analogous to creating an account for your child: you are essentially just adding a note to the network. In the case of corporations, there would probably be some restrictions on the configurations of support etc that would be allowed in the creation of a corporate agent, which would have to be spelled out in the procedure for corporate creation, but that's something that can be done entirely independent of the proposal on the table. So what I'm getting out of this is that shell corporations and money laundering schemes will be employed to completely negate any tracking functions whatsoever.
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Apr 11, 2014 15:49
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Forums Barber posted:My primarily expenses are to Bob's Hardcore Porn and Highway Infrastructure. I promise I only support them for the road access. No, your primary, secondary and tertiary expenses are to Little Rick's Finance Emporium, the service that sprung up to pay all other services for a mere 1% support fee, and is connected to everything from Bob's Hardcore Porn and Highway Infrastructure to the Red Cross. They've got twelve billion corporate and personal couplings, so good luck drawing any information whatsoever out of that morass.
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Apr 11, 2014 17:15
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 A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO ENDORSEMENTQuestion: Is there any aspect of StrangeCoin that is not fundamentally and irreversibly broken? Observations: 1. Any amount leaving your StrangeButt account is an expense. 2. If your account balance is zero, TUA foots the bill for your expense. 3. Endorsements are one of the ways that amounts can leave your StrangeButt account, meaning that it's an expense and thereby backed by TUA. Hypothesis: This is an incredibly bad idea, and fundamentally broken. Experiment: I have no money whatsoever because I am a leech, a despicable Randian untermensch living in some festering sewer. I endorse literally every human on the planet for 100% for the next 100 years. Result: You buy a hotdog for 1.35, and, because of my endorsement, the sausagemeister receives 2.70: half from your balance, half from "me" (but drawn from TUA). This process repeats for every one of the trillion transactions that occur every single day. 4chan notices this and, 4 the lulz, every poster on /b/ does exactly the same thing. Now, when you buy a hotdog for 1.35, the sausagemeister's account is immediately brought to the balance cap, with a thousand percent extra cycling straight back into TUA. She's now literally unable to make more money that day, so she closes up shop after vending one steaming dog and goes home to play Skyrim and eat her extra hotdogs. Society collapses into ruinous shambles. Analysis:
Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 19:20
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RealityApologist posted:Tua transactions are unmodified; this was in the original spec and hasn't changed. Only bare payments are backed by tua; if you are drawing from tua your endorsements mean poo poo. The actual transactions being made to the hotdogmonger aren't TUA transactions, they are "bare payments." The buyer has the 1.35, and thereby are conducting /b/'s sweet sweet endorsement cash. The original spec does not say that endorsement payments cannot come from TUA, and does in fact refer to them as an expense in the context of i/e ratio balancing: RealityApologist posted:If X has sufficiently large income, they must take on equally sizable expenses to avoid balance penalties. These expenses can come in the form of support and endorsements for other members of the network X wishes to support and endorse, effectively growing the network on the basis of their prosperity. Before speculating further about the implications of non-TUA-backed expenses, I'll wait for an updated version of the spec. I'm intrigued to hear what you have to say about "the issue of gaming." e: additionally, TUA can make a payment only in the following situations: posted:X's account balance = 0 at t. Any additional transactions outgoing from X at t are drawn from TUA. Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 19:53
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My name's Wendy, and I am a professional TUA miner for my own personal corporation, WendyWallet. I do one thing, and I do it well: I make zero-balance, unmodified TUA-backed transactions from my completely empty personal account to WendyWallet, which then makes payments to Rick's Finance Emporium, who makes transactions to my clients. I put three degrees of separation and one impenetrable curtain between you and the filthy, degrading, instant-pariah-status activity of getting coins out of TUA. Do you need to buy a boat for 27,500 from Enrique's Softcore Furry Foot Piss Videographers and Boat Megastore, but you don't have that 27,500? Don't worry, just contact WendyWallet. I'll pull that 27,500 straight out of TUA, send it to Rick, and he'll send it to you. That means that you've now got the money you need, and can make a transaction with all the benefits of the fine folks making endorsements at /b/, or any other people who might have endorsed you. All the benefits of being a vile, depraved TUA leech, and none of the drawbacks. In exchange, all you have to do is support and endorse my girlfriend, Alice, at rates of 0.1% each. Alice has a perfect history of making reasonable payments, because she's just a regular lady: and besides, she's got so many supporters and endorsers from WendyWallet, she has no incentive to go hog wild: merchants are going hog wild for her. And what's in it for me, Wendy? Nobody'd do business with me—I'm the lowest of the low—but that doesn't matter at all. After all, Alice, with all her endorsers, is a hot commodity in the customer relations world: every business on Main Street invites her in, her endorsement levels are so high, and give her huge discounts—after all, they're still coming out ahead. So she buys anything and everything I need for me. The best part? Alice has no network connection at all to WendyWallet: she's never made a transaction of any kind with me or my business. And this is a computer-networked finance system / currency / regulatory structure combo, not some Orwellian hellscape, so nobody knows that I benefit from her purchases in the slightest. Or—er, wait, are we still assuming that there is a literal omniscient AI behind Strangecoin with smell detectors hooked up to every hock of meat at the black market underground butcher's for the purpose of monitoring the quality of meat inspection? Ah, gently caress it then. This would NEVER work if there was an omniscient computer that ran the justice system and tracked all barter transactions in play!!!! Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 21:47
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ProfessorCurly posted:I can't keep track of this, but to keep things simple and ideal let me say that in Strangeland M and Q will naturally rise together in such a way that there is no natural inflation or deflation. All new goods are immediately matched by rises in the money supply, and the same will happen in reverse when productivity falls. The whole system is still in danger of hyper-inflating itself to death. Taking this part of your post on its own: the supply of Strangecoin and the supply of goods are completely unrelated. If I have no money, I can say to you, "Hey, would you like to perform a transaction with me where I give you the maximum amount of SC it's possible for you to hold?" and if you say "Yes," then it's drawn out of the ether and everyone thinks I Am A Bad Person for some inexplicable reason. The thing about Strangecoin that Eripsa has pontificated on least, but seems to be the most central thing, is that he does not view wealth as the end goal of people in Stragecoin, but "income" or "impact on the network." This has never been quantified, and it's never been explained why anyone would value this, how it would be measured, and how it would differ from either 1) having loads of money or 2) making loads of transactions or 3) both. Something something you can buy goods by paying a mystery amount equal to 1% of the other guy's expenditures for the next month something something something. Why do you want that? Hold on I'm being trolled and bullied, I don't have time to answer that. Note that this is not some intrinsic property of Strangecoin, this is right up there with "all-seeing AI" as far as hoping that the world inexplicably transforms in such a way that any of this would be even marginally feasible.
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Apr 12, 2014 14:43
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Did you really just write twelve hundred words to say "nuh uh, nobody will even want to cheat, and even if they did it wouldn't matter much because professional starcraft is a thing"?
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Apr 12, 2014 23:37
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You know what sort of incentive somebody has to cheat at Starcraft? Not any tangible goods; not their livelihood; not their entire future; not even getting a creditor off their backs, not even the sadistic delight of knowing that they, a sociopath, have just destroyed someone else's life: just some stupid internet numbers. So yeah, I take it back, that's a pretty spot-on metaphor for StrangeCoin.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:25
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RealityApologist posted:// If the above is useful perhaps I'll start presenting my arguments in that format. Everyone already understood everything you said in this post. The problem here is not that we misunderstand your position, it's that your position is wrong, and restating it in a painfully drawn-out format does not actually change the fact that the world is not analogous to Starcraft. You've got this Bitcoinerish attitude of "well, if they disagree, they must just misunderstand, better clear that up because how could anyone disagree with this idea." Which is funny, because you don't appear to be reading even the posts you respond directly to. It's truly amazing. This is all completely counter to the point though, and I don't see what any of this discussion on the philosophy of "gaming" has to do with Strangecoin. If you think the system should be balanced, then don't wave your magic wand around saying it will be so. Balance it, and stop wasting everyone's time in the meantime making massively redundant and painfully obtuse posts. Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 14:55
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RealityApologist posted:I mean, I'm sure some people did but the thread definitely didn't. Obdicut, Ratoslov, and GulMadred are all citing instances of imbalanced systems as if that somehow constitutes an objection to my view. But nothing I've said rules out the possibility of imbalanced systems. I've explicitly claimed that some systems are imbalanced, and gaming those systems produce undesireable results. So examples of imbalanced systems that produce bad results is not an objection or criticism of my view, in any way shape or form. If anything, it's an elaboration of my claims. one of those posts are mounting an objection or even a criticism, they are saying things that are entirely compatible with my claims, but they are framing it as if I've demonstrated some fundamental conceptual error and a deep ignorance of the subject. They are citing imbalanced systems because your claim is not just that balanced systems are good, but that Strangecoin can be just such a balanced system. It's the second part of this statement that they, and I, find to be suspiciously unfounded. Zodium posted:Edit: Not directed at you, but it doesn't help that various people keep using "finish the spec" like a sharp stick when RA clearly doesn't have the necessary skills to do so. He'll write something up, and people will rip it apart without him really learning anything, and then we'll start over. Pressuring people to do tasks they are wildly underqualified for doesn't help them learn anything, it makes them feel awful and burn out. The "new spec" is the only way to pin anything down for sure. It's next to impossible to tell what, if anything, has changed from the original because despite all of this chatter, RA has admitted remarkably little and given ground on even less. Ideally the spec is not "new" so much as frequently updated to reflect RA's evolving (or not evolving) viewpoints on, say, why the gently caress anyone would have any incentive to use SC instead of anything else.
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Apr 15, 2014 03:59
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Zodium posted:If the last 52 pages pointing this out didn't do the trick, more of the same certainly won't make RA "admit" or "give ground" on anything. We won't know if the last 52 pages ~did the trick~ till the spec is updated, because it is impossible to tell from RA's posts what has and has not penetrated. That is the point.
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Apr 15, 2014 14:57
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Captain_Maclaine posted:What the...I am staggeringly embarrassed I never even noticed that. Just wait till you hear about "racecar."
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Apr 16, 2014 17:34
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Krotera posted:Write a program that explains the whole thing. Check out JawnV6's post history in this thread to see how that went down when attempted by a professional. Don't be surprised when the requisite specificity to do anything coherent does not materialize.
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Apr 20, 2014 14:53
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I haven only skimmed the posts since the new spec (though I know what I'm doing later  (e:  ), but having read the spec, I see that this extremely confusing presumption still exists unjustified:RealityApologist posted:In the Strangecoin network, access to apparently limitless funds and universal balance caps means that wealth and influence is not measured in terms of the Strangecoins one has acquired, but rather in terms of centrality in the network and overall throughput of coin. Someone is "rich" in a Strangecoin world if they have a central role in communities of high economic activity, and "poor" if they are relatively isolated from the economic network. I say this is confusing because it's never elaborated upon, and is not much taken into account in the examples at the end of the spec. Influence is meant to be the end judge of wealth, but it is not actually treated as such in the examples: a high balance is. Having a high number of endorsees is supposed to be good, but the reason it's supposed to be good is that it increases a merchant's profit—you know, that stuff that's tangential at best to wealth. If, for the sake of argument, we assume that wealth (being infinite) is worthless... then why would endorsement have value? Strangecoin is infinitely and trivially available, therefore the coins are valueless. But if I have a high number of endorsees, and am therefore able to transmit a greater quantity of coins to you than someone with only their own account... that is supposed to make me an attractive customer? Air is infinitely and trivially available, and is therefore valueless. But if I have a leafblower and can distribute air to you much more quickly than can the next person, who is using only their lungs, that doesn't make me an attractive customer. e: RealityApologist posted:What matters for Y instead is that her transaction with you (or I) balances with her other economic commitments. It might be that you are vastly more popular than me, and so your payments are typically modified to be much larger than the requested amount, say 20 times my own endorsements. But that might create an imbalance with Y's expenses. Maybe she wants to increase her expenses, but maybe she doesn't; in any case, the difference gives her reason to discriminate in the transactions between us even though we could both max her account. Why is any of this the case? How is impact on the network quantified, and what is the incentive to gauge it? If it's important, then why are all transactions delineated in terms of change-in-balance, rather than some quantification of network impact? Also it sounds like we need the  in here ASAP.
Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Apr 28, 2014 |
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Apr 28, 2014 17:09
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ProfessorCurly posted:Really, you don't want an economy. You don't want a currency. What you want is a Linked-Face-agram constantly keeping track of everyone and giving the information to everyone else so that we can decide who to do business with and how to exclude ~those people~ whoever they happen to be at the time. While this may be true, ProfessorCurly posted:The Strangecoins themselves serve absolutely no purpose, because they have no value. All you have is a popularity contest where the only people who will ever be serviced will be the popular kids with a million endorses for whatever. This is what I'd really like to get at. Why would anyone engage in this popularity contest? What benefit do you envision any of this ever having to a user, if we assume that they don't want these outcomes (many coins, many endorsers, w/e) just for their own sake?
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Apr 28, 2014 20:05
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RealityApologist posted: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. RealityApologist posted:Strangecoin is not a replacement for the economy. It is not a replacement for money. Strangecoin is a game. This game is played by trading around worthless coins. That's the only similarity to money or economics. We've come full circle, folks. We've always been at war with Eastasia. We've won the victory over ourselves. It's time to love Big Brother.
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Apr 28, 2014 20:46
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Obdicut posted:^^^^^^^ I think we can all aspirE to Eripsa. I would love to sit in at E's upcoming dissertation defense. At the first question, the entire thing shifts and morphs in some macabre performance art.
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Apr 28, 2014 23:59
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Xelkelvos posted:You changed it without actually saying that you changed it. You just suddenly said it was a game with no preface as to why it suddenly became a game. It is at best a completely meaning semantic framework. "It's not meant to alter human behavior in REAL economies, it's just a game that alters human behavior within its own faux-economic confines, because"
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Apr 29, 2014 00:40
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Xelkelvos posted:There was a comment applying it as a game as an example. However, his sudden change to that frame had no reference to this until after he was called out on it and he becomes defensive because people apparently misunderstood him (which is at least 40% of our arguments against him). But phrasing it as a game instead of a currency is literally meaningless inasmuch as the validity of the content of the concept—it would be a game about currency. That's like saying we're not talking about Eripsa's concepts, just the posts describing his concepts: they are the same exact thing reframed. The only thing this could possibly get out of is the ethical questions, which to be honest are the very least of Strangebutts' concerns.
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Apr 29, 2014 03:11
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Tokamak posted:^^^ Yes. Exactly. All I'm saying is that every single one of the fundamental problems is still present, most significantly "what is anyone's motivation to take any action at all, and why?"
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Apr 29, 2014 06:55
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RealityApologist posted:The question "why should anyone give a poo poo" can be used to cripple just about any project of passion a person can have. But that is not the criticism. The criticism is that the indigenes of SC-topia, be they virtual or biological, would have zero incentive to use SC in the manner you describe. "Network impact." You assert that this is an incentive, but you have yet to actually substantiate it. What is 'network impact?' How is it quantified? And why does a person want to have a given network impact? There is no intrinsic value to impacting a network, but rather from other effects derived from that impact, so how does this nebulous metric lead to an actual value for the user? I don't want to go down the SedanChair route (he is eminently qualified to do that himself), but I think you need to take several steps back, ask yourself "what behavior(s) do I want to examine/encourage/whatever," and then "is StrangeCoin even remotely suited to this task?" Because right now, you've completely lost the thread of what you'd hoped this would become, and if you're going to actually do something serious with all of this, you're going to have to be able to clearly formulate your ideas, and the reasoning and justification behind why you think they are worthwhile. Until you can succinctly say in one sentence, "This is what StrangeCoin hopes to achieve, and this is why you should care about it," you do not have the foundations to be wrangling these deep details. These details might be (hint: they almost certainly are) completely counter to what you hope to achieve.
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Apr 29, 2014 18:03
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RealityApologist posted:Strangecoin is a currency where trades are modified to reflect aspects of the network structure and not merely the goods being traded. What does the economy look like if currencies operate in this way? How does that change the incentive structure of the agents in that economic system? Are there any benefits of such a framework relative to traditional currencies? These are all questions I don't know the answer to. The proposal describes a model that can be built to test these kinds of questions. I was going to elaborate on how incredibly, awfully backwards this is, but then again: RealityApologist posted:I think the scope of the question is relatively modest RealityApologist posted:Traditional economics is like alchemy, and I'm like one of the early chemists before the periodic table 
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Apr 29, 2014 20:15
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RealityApologist posted:Proposing a multiagent system that applies network bonuses to transactions is not an idea as radical as communism. An economic system in which wealth and value are derived from a non-monetary metric is, in fact, as radical as one with no monetary metric at all.
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Apr 29, 2014 21:25
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The reason that I and others keep hammering away at the foundations of this concept is that there are no foundations. You CLAIM that people would care about the "health" of TUA, or prefer highly-endorsed individuals over unendorsed ones, or even that people would endorse one another at all. But you make all of these claims WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION, including value judgements like "health." But you also don't just not understand the incentives or impacts of your system: you fundamentally do not even understand what you yourself are trying to do with it. If you are trying to create a system where relationships, and not currency, are what is important and measured, then WHY ARE YOU CREATING A CURRENCY? Every time you say that it's not actual wealth that's important, but impact on the network, you miss that the only positive effects of impact on the network are... generation of wealth. There are a number of these zero-level contradictions that completely hamstring the system, and make it work against what you are apparently hoping it will achieve. The fact that a couple of shmucks in the Dungeons and Dragons forum can point out a dozen ways in which everything you've written is broken is not necessarily bad: all ideas start off incomplete. But the fact that the very purpose of support and endorsement have been in question since page one, and that you have written hundreds of thousands of self-pitying, whiny, condescending words without addressing these concerns is worrying indeed. Pesmerga posted:I don't know why everyone is continuing to engage with someone who is being so disingenuous. Not everything in life needs to have a purpose. Arguing with Eripsa is like trying to fight a puddle: it just slips right around your attempts and goes back to the way it was before. There's something infuriatingly beautiful in his density.
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Apr 30, 2014 20:51
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RealityApologist posted:Again, the density isn't just mine, it's all of ours. I've just had four different demands for foundation theories, for different conceptions of "fundamental". Some people are still asking why I'm proposing a currency, which I assume only means they've not read anything for the last 40 pages. Some people are asking for foundations from the perspective of scientific methodology, and others from the perspectives of the particular special sciences: the justifications from economic theory, or sociology, or political theory, or game theory. That's because you vacillate fluidly between all of these disciplines. quote:Still others are talking about fundamentals of communication, motivation, and audience targeting. These are all distinct demands, and responding to one will leave the others with the impression that they've been ignored. I'm doing the best I can. I'm not pretending that it's enough. And yet, the magnitude of your incorrectness and the dramatic incompleteness of your own conception of your idea does not dissuade you from failing to improve it in any way. quote:The theoretical background for Strangecoin has to do with digital theory and attention economy, which I haven't really elaborated in these threads beyond some basic outlines. I've clearly established some theoretical commitments (to philosophical naturalism and mainstream science), and I've cited infleunces (like Quine, Turing, and Dennett) that place me fairly clearly within a certain theoretical purview and literature. I've proposed dropping Strangecoin entirely and just talking about the digital philosophy as a theory, but since no one actually bothers to engage my substantive claims in an effort to attack my character and style, the suggestion was entirely over looked. You yourself did not act on this. Can't blame the passengers for the driver's misdirection. quote:My point in treating the Strangecoin example is in order to work out aspects of the theory; I've not tried to bring the project beyond this level of basic theory (steps 0-2 of Zodium's list). Nor have I assumed any particular emergent behavior will result from Strangecoin. The proposal defines certain constraints on behaviors (like balance caps and TUA penalties), and I've only talked about these in terms of how they might make some transactions more attractive than others. The proposal also defies certain network structures that are salient in the transactions. I've explained, theoretically, how this corresponds to issues of the organization of complex systems, but that's something quite different than saying "I predict the system will work in this or that way." In what way is a value judgement like "the health of TUA," and the implication that anyone would care about that "health," not a descriptor of assumed emergent behavior? quote:At most, I've said that existing problems with our economic and political systems generate at least some reason to seek alternatives, and I've explained how the modifications in Strangecoin are qualitatively different from the kinds of alternatives being proposed in the altcurrency community. Again, I'm asking the question "what happens in an economic system if transactions are modified by the network structure?" That seems like an eminently reasonable question to ask, and it's one that I've not found an available answer to, and talking about Strangecoin casually on an internet forum is a completely reasonable way to pursue the project as a hobby as a layperson. No, you're asking "what happens in THIS SPECIFIC economic system in which THESE SPECIFIC MODIFICATIONS are applied to transactions." That is not a comparable question at all, in the same way that "How do you build a house?" and "Is this pile of brambles and broken glass a suitable house, I think it's a great house" are not comparable.
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Apr 30, 2014 21:21
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"But listen—what if people KNEW you were a capitalist overlord, not because of the clothes you wear, car you drive, or plastic surgery you can afford, but because there were some sort of, I don't know, signifiers of some kind that could tell them that! Can you imagine if people knew that Nikes were made in sweat shops??? They'd go out of business immediately!!" -posted from my child labor-free, environmentally friendly iPhone
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Apr 30, 2014 21:41
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Cantorsdust posted:Eripsa, please read and focus on this post. It very clearly communicates many of the problems posters in this thread have had with you. It is a Good Post.
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May 1, 2014 01:11
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It's a shame you guys just aren't smart enough to synthesize my fevered, bipolar ramblings into a genius concept that does exactly what I want. I gave you the seed—"what if the network effect, inexorable god of all effects, something something
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May 1, 2014 06:51
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RealityApologist posted:Which leads to another incentive question: what incentive to players have to gain influence in the network? The answer is that they don't have any incentive, really, except that power is among the things people tend to desire. The more connections I have across the network, the more my decisions impact the accounts of others, and the potential for their decisions to impact me. Gaining influence in the system gives me leverage to better capitalize on advantages and compensate for disadvantages as they arise. Someone with little influence in the network has less flexibility in their possibilities. Some people might be comfortable with that, and others wont be, and Strangecoin makes no presumptions about what kinds of networks users will want to form. The idea is only that these differences of influence can be balanced with issues of basic economic access, so that even if there are winners and losers no one is fundamentally incapable of participating in the system. How does "influence" allow you to capitalize on advantages, or give you flexibility? It's been demonstrated numerous times that wealth is infinite and infinitely accessible in SC. But you've claimed that "influence" is important anyway, somehow. Given that, how does being able to distribute more of it come to mean anything at all? How does anything denominated in an infinite, valueless commodity somehow bestow power or weakness on others? Do you see how the leap between "There are four kinds of transactions and a universal account" and "there are winners of type A and losers of type B for all these reasons" involves assuming deeper incentives and assumptions that you are not making explicit (likely because they are fundamentally flawed)?
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May 1, 2014 17:30
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Cantorsdust posted:[Seller receives] = Price and [Buyer pays] = Price / ( [Buyer's purchasing modifiers] * [Seller's selling modifiers] ) I'm going the Eripsa route and just quoting this one line, but it's a response to your whole post. The thing is, while this all may seem correct, within the Strangecoinverse it's actually almost completely meaningless. Eripsa is espousing a complete paradigm shift where the question of a businessman is not "how much did I pay for hamburgers last week," but rather "how much impact did I have on the network by paying for hamburgers last week," which is apparently a both quantitatively and qualitatively different question. What that entails, what the ramifications of this are, because Eripsa hasn't actually given any information about how any of this is intrinsically valuable, except by translating it back into increased profit / decreased expense (in, again, limitless and valueless coins). Impact on the economy is supposed to be the end, intrinsic goal of a transaction, the way that an individual or business maximizes their utility, NOT accumulation or distribution of wealth. Somehow. Good Citizen posted:I liked someones analogy from earlier where strange coin is essentially an economy based on air where some people have hand fans and other people have leaf blowers. Hey, that was my analogy too, glad you liked it  Shame Eripsa still hasn't decided to address this absolutely basic flaw in the system in any meaningful or descriptive way! --- Eripsa IIRC you like sirens seriously, the fundamental issue here is that somehow units of exchange aren't how users maximize their utility, network impact is. But how network impact is achieved in a system where units of currency are without value has not even been approached, much less established. Absolutely all other speculation is pretty much meaningless until this point gets addressed, because it's the basic use case and it has zero elaboration. Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 18:51 on May 1, 2014 |
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May 1, 2014 18:46
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