The issue of male sperm count decline and it's causes. The feminization of men through chemical contaminants. Two of the other important aspects that need sunlight.
Good essay I appreciate you expanding on your theories at some length, and am now contemplating the biological 'ovarian' response and what it means with regards to the male/female dynamics.
> If you think there’s a 50% chance the internet is going down along with the energy grid, you best have 50% of your savings in chickens, lead bullets and perhaps gold (although food would be better).
This is very spreadsheet-brained. If you think there's a 50% chance of the technological world collapsing in your lifetime, and:
- you're a billionaire: you do not need 500 million worth of bullets and chickens
- you're broke: you do not need 50c worth of bullets and chickens, just one bullet will do
Regardless of your personal wealth, if you think collapse is a very real possibility and surviving it is your top priority, all of your disposable income should go into securing at least minimal, sustainable subsistence first. Anything less than that and you will not survive your scenario. Anything more than that is comfort and luxury, which is great to a point. Beyond that you can speculate on whatever in case you're wrong.
If surviving is not your top priority, and you're not doing what you need to make it (according to what you think is gonna happen), you're LARPing. Everyone needs a hobby so that's cool.
But if you're doing some spreadsheet brained bullshit like allocating it based on probabilities you made up, you're wasting 100% of your investment. Stop thinking like this.
You need a team, since lone wolves & individuals won’t “make it.”
And by team I don’t mean “consensus” … but rather de-census, since there are multiple unknown ways of “making it back to base camp” as opposed to a single correct “solution.”
Consensus is a way to keep the ledger accurate in Bitcoin.
COMPLETELY unrelated to this discussion.
What you're saying above, is accurate. I 100% agree. Lone-wolfing is moronic. You need a team. Whether shit hits the fan or not, the micro-collective wins.
'Collapse' can also be a continuous process, where things get incrementally worse around you, your community, your nation, etc. In this scenario, you cannot simply give a flat probability to things because what you have is a rolling, Negative Sum World.
In such a world.. People & relationships are key. Food, Water, shelter, etc, are great to have... but ultimately, it comes down to practical skills, which (in tandem with community) you can use to navigate the world around you continually.
Human beings are the most generalist of Allah Most High's Creation. We are much more hardy than rats & cockroaches. Even in the case of a Solar flare or something similar, many millions of us will 'make it,' so long as we are adequately skilled & trained on all the areas of importance, & we have the relevant teams of people assisting us.
All you have to do is take a walk outside and talk to people.
🇬🇧 produces less electricity today than it did in 1985. Similar situations are happening world wide *right now*
People have already “gone far back”… they simply haven’t admitted to themselves and others yet that progress is dead & the “pie” is shrinking… hence, the negative sum world.
No doubt we've taken steps back. No doubt the real pie has shrunk. I don't disagree.
But,,,What I disagree with you on is humanity's ability to figure it out. Problems are opportunities. Odds are to be beaten. All the numbers in the world cannot account for the human will and spirit.
Great things can only truly be accomplished when the odds are stacked against you. That is the moment where true greatness arises.
I don't say this out of a blind polly-ann optimism. I know things are bad. I've been talking about for a long enough time myself. I just refuse to be a defeatist. I choose to DO something about it. I may not shift the course for all of humanity, but I will make a dent in my corner of the universe.
I firmly also believe that if more people adopt that attitude, things will move in a better direction. We'll all make our own dents where it matters. That's how you win.
The WILL to do it, despite the odds & shitty stats. That's what has and will forever make Western Man the apex being.
I intend to choose that version of life, whether I see victory in my lifetime, or not.
If you want to rail against enlightenment values, then don't take enlightenment views of money - which is exactly what you're doing in this post. You're strawmanning and hand waving away a nuanced position.
Saying that the value of things is based upon labor is NOT saying that the market cannot, or does not, have a say in things. However, the telos or natural end of work is to be able to provide a living for the people doing the work. Therefore every job has to provide a living for the people doing it. An entry level position still needs to provide a living for the people doing it - a living wage. It has to have career opportunities and advancement for those people to be able to provide for families as they advance through the natural stages of life; getting married and having children. It has to provide for the normal things that happen to people - time off for getting sick, having children, vacations, etc.
In other words, things have to be priced according to the human condition. According to the labor spent on them.
Now, the market saying that it doesn't want to spend that much on them simply means that the market is saying that these things shouldn't exist. That's fine.
When I say that Jobs like McDonalds and Panda Express shouldn't exist, it's because the food is so awful, cheap, and can't possibly afford to convince people to pay living wages to the workers that are employed. That the whole business model would have to be upended. Which it should be, or go out of business. It should stop giving us cancers, obesity, and anti-social behaviors through not actually sitting down to have a meal together.
But you can take these concepts and apply them to everything from the raw goods to the finished products. You can include higher wages for those that have spent more of their lives acquiring specialized skills and services, more specialized tools, more capital on infrastructure, etc.
In other words - you are throwing out thousands of years of economic history, from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, from the Greeks, the Romans, the Medeivals and Scholastics, etc - to grasp onto an Enlightenment, capitalist mentality of how money and property works. You're ignoring numerous historical stances on inherent values vs trade values, the differences therein and the social differences that happen when a society becomes a trade based society (which we are!), the views of usury, and numerous other subjects.
Ah but it gets more nuanced when you consider about how Adam Smith and David Ricardo (enlightenment era economists) formalized the labor theory of value.
Conversely, Aquinas and the Spanish Scholastics arguably had sympathies for a more subjective theory of value.
"The price of things salable does not depend on their degree of nature, since at times a horse fetches a higher price than a slave; but it depends on their usefulness to man. Hence it is not necessary for the seller or buyer to be cognizant of the hidden qualities of the thing sold, but only of such as render the thing adapted to man's use, for instance, that the horse be strong, run well and so forth. Such qualities the seller and buyer can easily discover." — Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 77, Art. 2, ad 3.
Dude, your quote is so sleazy. You're quoting completely out of context in such a way that it says exactly the opposite of what Aquinas is trying to say - which is that there are objective values to the goods being bought and sold. That it is sinful to sell things if the seller is aware of them. Or, if he misrepresented them he has a duty to make it known to the buyer. Also, that if the buyer has knowledge of it, and the seller does not, the buyer has to make the seller aware of it. The same is true if it becomes known after the fact.
Nor does Thomas Aquinas, in other articles, deny that items can be bought and sold above or below such just prices if someone is in dire need either to sell or to buy. Acknowledging that something has a just price - but that I don't want to sell it at that price because it is useful to me for more than that, or that it has sentimental value, whatever, does not mean that someone cannot offer more and it still be a licit sale. Or, if I desperately need money, I can try and sell something quickly. St Thomas says in another article that it is sinful to attempt to use a desperate situation to drive the price lower than already offered, but that it is not sinful to buy at a price already offered.
So no, your ability to quote St Thomas out of context does not prove your point. Here's his full statement on how things have objective value in the same article you quoted.
ON THE CONTRARY, Ambrose says (de Offic. iii, 11): It is manifestly a rule of justice that a good man should not depart from the truth, nor inflict an unjust injury on anyone, nor have any connection with fraud.
I ANSWER THAT, A threefold fault may be found pertaining to the thing which is sold. One, in respect of the thing's substance: and if the seller be aware of a fault in the thing he is selling, he is guilty of a fraudulent sale, so that the sale is rendered unlawful. Hence we find it written against certain people (isa 1:22), "Thy silver is turned into dross, thy wine is mingled with water" because that which is mixed is defective in its substance.
Another defect is in respect of quantity which is known by being measured: wherefore if anyone knowingly make use of a faulty measure in selling he is guilty of fraud, and the sale is illicit. Hence it is written (Duet 25:13,14) "Thou shalt not have diverse weights in thy bag, a greater and a less: neither shall there be in they house a greater bushel and a less," and further on (Duet 25:16), "For the Lord... abhorreth him that doth these things, and He hateth all injustice."
A third defect is on the part of the quality, for instance, if a man sell an unhealthy animal as being a healthy one: and if anyone do this knowingly he is guilty of a fraudulent sale, and the sale, in consequence, is illicit.
In all these cases not only is the man guilty of a fraudulent sale, but he is also bound to restitution. But if any of the foregoing defests be in the thing sold, and he knows nothing about this, the seller does not sin, because he does that which is unjust materially, nor is is deed unjust, as shown above (Q 59 A 2). Nevertheless he is bound to compensate the buyer, when the defect comes to his knowledge. Moreover what has been said of the seller applies equally to the buyer. Fore sometimes it happens that the seller thinks his goods to be specifically of lower value, as when a man sells gold instead of copper, and then if the buyer be aware of this, he buys it unjustly and is bound to restitution: and the same applies to a defect in quantity as to a defect in quality.
There. That's what Thomas Aquinas was talking about.
Where's your labor in making it valuable? What of YOUR labor does it represent that makes it worth 100k? What of YOUR labor do you do to keep the tides of entropy from eating away at it's value? To make it's value go up? How is it tied to a human community of your neighbors? How can you use it as a means of exchange for everyday purchases? To go to the store? Buy a candy bar?
Money is inherently deflationary. It always loses value over time, unless you put labor into it.
Even Gold and Silver.
People have to get over the idea that there is any ridiculous perfect money, or even anything close. It's all entropy, all the way down.
For thousands of Years, Economic thinking has recognized the inherent zero to negative sum nature of transactions *in general* meaning that Money has always been viewed as something that requires continuous upkeep & maintenance... Labour was the chief way in which this was accomplished in many societies.
Today's Fossil Fuel Economies are positive-sum & are a brief, 3 century anomaly in the last hundreds of thousands of years of human history. The Money they have concocted (be it the USD, Bitcoin, etc) is fundamentally unmoored to this relationship, & has commodified the whole world in a delusional manner, bereft of this understanding that everything around us ages, decays & eventually dies.
Even 'the circular flow' models that most economists use to show the relationship between businesses & households are fundamentally flawed since they assume that households exist *as such* alongside businesses, entirely omitting Nature & the Environment, which these guys think is 'Complementary/Free.'
Some friendly criticism: Bitcoin is better than than most, if not all, competing forms of money but touting it as a solution to the cost-of-living (diminishing output) problem is wrongheaded. Money isn’t wealth. It’s a claim on wealth. Everybody getting into Bitcoin doesn’t create more physical goods and services, it just drives up the price of Bitcoin. Cost of living becoming cheaper and thereby encouraging family formation means economies must output more goods and services per unit of labor and material input. The master input to all labor and materials is energy, so the key metric to understanding the cost of living problem is EROI! Looking at what that’s been doing since the 1970s explains things much better.
Also, technically Bitcoin isn’t sound money (but it’s still sounder than fiat). It has a fixed terminal supply and the rate of new money production slows over time. This means it is actually inherently deflationary. Sound money would match its supply to the quantity of physical goods and services produced in the real economy (rising during expansions, shrinking itself during contractions), thereby protecting against both inflation and deflation.
You're right about everything you said. Although I disagree on the elasticity. When you fix the supply, the purchasing power is the variable in the equation. Purchasing power will rise as real wealth increases, and fall when real wealth / productivity fall. That's a good thing. The money becomes a bit like an "ETF on human productivity and wealth creation" while at the same time incentivising savings (instead of blind investment).
What you get as a result is less speculation in the markets (less financialisation) and a higher bar for the quality of things being built, produced and created.
I believe that the quality of output is more important than the quantity, and this is the axis Bitcoin affects. And I also think that is a key component to the solution of diminishing output (but of course as you said, far from the only factor).
>> Worth (or value) is determined by whether it meets someone else’s demand, not the amount of work you put in. <<
This is an Enlightenment-centric definition. The problem with it is that it is entirely Subjective.
Human Beings VALUE all sorts of things, many of which are antithetical to what is Objectively Good for one's flourishing. Toxic 'fast food' comes to mind.
Demand & Supply do not slope the way you think they do. Steve Keen, Heterodox economist extraordinaire... showed decisively in his book 'A New Economic Manifesto' that Downward sloping Demand & Upward Sloping Supply... that's Superstition.
Infact, Demand & supply can slope in all sorts of ways among all sorts of *rational* actors.
What this means is that the 'sum total of human persons buying & selling goods & services to one another' (i.e. the Market) is not a Sound determinant for VALUE.
'Meeting Demand' thus doesn't work here.
VALUE ties back to Materials, Energy, etc. Objective features of the world. It doesn't tie back to something which (to put it politely) can take all sorts of peculiar shapes depending on one's whims & desires, & when taken together in a Crowd setting.
Bitcoin is clever. It’s the best digital currency yet devised (given the choice of problems it chooses to optimise for). But it’s an algorithm away from collapse, an engineering innovation away from collapse. Any advance in factoring will cause an immediate drop in value of bitcoin that is at least linear, more likely catastrophic.
Sell bitcoin. Buy land. (Or do you really think Bill Gates is stupid as well as evil?)
Bitcoin is immune to engineering innovations and algorithm advancements because the consensus is not technological. It is limited by work (energy) and human consensus. In other words, the best and most powerful hashing algorithm could be released tomorrow, and the ONLY thing that would happen is the increase in hash-rate and the strengthening of the mining network, followed by the difficulty adjustment which would then re-stabilise the blocks to a 10min interval once more.
Any technological innovation is irrelevant too because that's not what matters for the consensus of the base chain. In fact, engineering advancements will all be built ON TOP of Bitcoin, because bitcoin's edge or advantage doesn't come from the fact that it is changeable and adaptable. In fact, it's the very opposite. Bitcoin is the ONLY technology which does NOT change. That's its promise. That's why people will build ATOP it. It's digital granite. It's digital land. It's more resilient than physical land, because it's literally information. Information is both physical and ephemeral. As such, this thing is never going away and can never be shut down.
>> It is limited by work (energy) and human consensus. <<
Hard Disagree. To put it politely:
Consensus implies Telos. Markets are not Teleological, they are EMOTIVE.
When people do margin calls on something, that's not them 'engaging in Consensus.'
Similarly, when people Buy & sell Bitcoin, that's a combination of Rational Self-Interest (at the micro, individual level) coupled with macro concerns such as 'FOMO' (i.e. Fear of Missing Out).
As for 'Work' ... All Human Work comes from food & fuels, which ultimately goes back to energy. When you chart out the relationship between Bitcoin & Global Oil Production (for instance) you don't get a very high variance.
The R^2 is nowhere near 0.9+, which is what Statisticians use to say 'These two variables are STRONG correlates of one another.'
Does Bitcoin have Limits? No Doubt! But it's not Human Work & Consensus.
Rather, it is Rational Self-Interest, FOMO & ... a weak partial relationship to burning energy (which we don't have an unlimited supply of) in order to secrete chemicals in one's brain to feel good about oneself.
Bitcoin's unlock is that we have nodes who don NOT know each either, running the same copy of the constitution and ledger, worldwide, and are own sync (consensus) every ten minutes.
It's basically taken what a small, local, collective would do, and scaled it up to something that can operate at a global scale.
This is bitcoin mythology and cope. If you are personally invested in bitcoin that’s psychologically hard to hear. But you said it yourself. The value in bitcoin is work / energy. If either of those inputs become easier in a step-change way, bitcoin’s rational value collapses. And since it has most (not all) of the features of a currency, if its rational value collapses then there will be an irrational but predictable collapse in value.
Bitcoin is not precious metal. You can grant it’s (almost) a currency but you can’t have it both ways: if it’s a currency then it’s subject to sentiment collapse like any other currency.
Well ok we are approaching common ground. In the event of an algorithmic or engineering breakthrough related to the underlying math of the work, I peg sentiment collapse at 99.99%
The issue of male sperm count decline and it's causes. The feminization of men through chemical contaminants. Two of the other important aspects that need sunlight.
Also very true
It is hard to take seriously those who believe that the value of money comes from labor. No non-Marxist economist has believed that since the 1870s.
Good essay I appreciate you expanding on your theories at some length, and am now contemplating the biological 'ovarian' response and what it means with regards to the male/female dynamics.
🤝🤝
Herr Svetski
Tusen Takk for posting my comment
In my view(I am a grey beard grandfather)
Families are a form of (Bitcoin wealth)
Our evolved communication at the cellular level passes on that DNA to future generations
It can be read backwards to all our ancestors as it travels through the present forwards
Stores
Exchanges
Measures
similar to the attributes of Bitcoin
Tusen Takk igen
Jon
It really is. That's a very beautiful way to look at it.
Tusen Takk
> If you think there’s a 50% chance the internet is going down along with the energy grid, you best have 50% of your savings in chickens, lead bullets and perhaps gold (although food would be better).
This is very spreadsheet-brained. If you think there's a 50% chance of the technological world collapsing in your lifetime, and:
- you're a billionaire: you do not need 500 million worth of bullets and chickens
- you're broke: you do not need 50c worth of bullets and chickens, just one bullet will do
Regardless of your personal wealth, if you think collapse is a very real possibility and surviving it is your top priority, all of your disposable income should go into securing at least minimal, sustainable subsistence first. Anything less than that and you will not survive your scenario. Anything more than that is comfort and luxury, which is great to a point. Beyond that you can speculate on whatever in case you're wrong.
If surviving is not your top priority, and you're not doing what you need to make it (according to what you think is gonna happen), you're LARPing. Everyone needs a hobby so that's cool.
But if you're doing some spreadsheet brained bullshit like allocating it based on probabilities you made up, you're wasting 100% of your investment. Stop thinking like this.
That's a fair criticism. I think your approach is much better.
My point still stands anyway. Determine what you think is going to happen, and then act accordingly.
It’s not as simple as that.
You need a team, since lone wolves & individuals won’t “make it.”
And by team I don’t mean “consensus” … but rather de-census, since there are multiple unknown ways of “making it back to base camp” as opposed to a single correct “solution.”
I never mentioned consensus here.
Consensus is a way to keep the ledger accurate in Bitcoin.
COMPLETELY unrelated to this discussion.
What you're saying above, is accurate. I 100% agree. Lone-wolfing is moronic. You need a team. Whether shit hits the fan or not, the micro-collective wins.
We're on the same page here.
Something to also consider:
'Collapse' can also be a continuous process, where things get incrementally worse around you, your community, your nation, etc. In this scenario, you cannot simply give a flat probability to things because what you have is a rolling, Negative Sum World.
In such a world.. People & relationships are key. Food, Water, shelter, etc, are great to have... but ultimately, it comes down to practical skills, which (in tandem with community) you can use to navigate the world around you continually.
Human beings are the most generalist of Allah Most High's Creation. We are much more hardy than rats & cockroaches. Even in the case of a Solar flare or something similar, many millions of us will 'make it,' so long as we are adequately skilled & trained on all the areas of importance, & we have the relevant teams of people assisting us.
I can certainly agree with this approach too.
I'm just not convinced we're in a negative sum world, or even if we are, such things are temporary.
All you have to do is take a walk outside and talk to people.
🇬🇧 produces less electricity today than it did in 1985. Similar situations are happening world wide *right now*
People have already “gone far back”… they simply haven’t admitted to themselves and others yet that progress is dead & the “pie” is shrinking… hence, the negative sum world.
No doubt we've taken steps back. No doubt the real pie has shrunk. I don't disagree.
But,,,What I disagree with you on is humanity's ability to figure it out. Problems are opportunities. Odds are to be beaten. All the numbers in the world cannot account for the human will and spirit.
Great things can only truly be accomplished when the odds are stacked against you. That is the moment where true greatness arises.
I don't say this out of a blind polly-ann optimism. I know things are bad. I've been talking about for a long enough time myself. I just refuse to be a defeatist. I choose to DO something about it. I may not shift the course for all of humanity, but I will make a dent in my corner of the universe.
I firmly also believe that if more people adopt that attitude, things will move in a better direction. We'll all make our own dents where it matters. That's how you win.
The WILL to do it, despite the odds & shitty stats. That's what has and will forever make Western Man the apex being.
I intend to choose that version of life, whether I see victory in my lifetime, or not.
If you want to rail against enlightenment values, then don't take enlightenment views of money - which is exactly what you're doing in this post. You're strawmanning and hand waving away a nuanced position.
Saying that the value of things is based upon labor is NOT saying that the market cannot, or does not, have a say in things. However, the telos or natural end of work is to be able to provide a living for the people doing the work. Therefore every job has to provide a living for the people doing it. An entry level position still needs to provide a living for the people doing it - a living wage. It has to have career opportunities and advancement for those people to be able to provide for families as they advance through the natural stages of life; getting married and having children. It has to provide for the normal things that happen to people - time off for getting sick, having children, vacations, etc.
In other words, things have to be priced according to the human condition. According to the labor spent on them.
Now, the market saying that it doesn't want to spend that much on them simply means that the market is saying that these things shouldn't exist. That's fine.
When I say that Jobs like McDonalds and Panda Express shouldn't exist, it's because the food is so awful, cheap, and can't possibly afford to convince people to pay living wages to the workers that are employed. That the whole business model would have to be upended. Which it should be, or go out of business. It should stop giving us cancers, obesity, and anti-social behaviors through not actually sitting down to have a meal together.
But you can take these concepts and apply them to everything from the raw goods to the finished products. You can include higher wages for those that have spent more of their lives acquiring specialized skills and services, more specialized tools, more capital on infrastructure, etc.
In other words - you are throwing out thousands of years of economic history, from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, from the Greeks, the Romans, the Medeivals and Scholastics, etc - to grasp onto an Enlightenment, capitalist mentality of how money and property works. You're ignoring numerous historical stances on inherent values vs trade values, the differences therein and the social differences that happen when a society becomes a trade based society (which we are!), the views of usury, and numerous other subjects.
Ah but it gets more nuanced when you consider about how Adam Smith and David Ricardo (enlightenment era economists) formalized the labor theory of value.
Conversely, Aquinas and the Spanish Scholastics arguably had sympathies for a more subjective theory of value.
"The price of things salable does not depend on their degree of nature, since at times a horse fetches a higher price than a slave; but it depends on their usefulness to man. Hence it is not necessary for the seller or buyer to be cognizant of the hidden qualities of the thing sold, but only of such as render the thing adapted to man's use, for instance, that the horse be strong, run well and so forth. Such qualities the seller and buyer can easily discover." — Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 77, Art. 2, ad 3.
Dude, your quote is so sleazy. You're quoting completely out of context in such a way that it says exactly the opposite of what Aquinas is trying to say - which is that there are objective values to the goods being bought and sold. That it is sinful to sell things if the seller is aware of them. Or, if he misrepresented them he has a duty to make it known to the buyer. Also, that if the buyer has knowledge of it, and the seller does not, the buyer has to make the seller aware of it. The same is true if it becomes known after the fact.
Nor does Thomas Aquinas, in other articles, deny that items can be bought and sold above or below such just prices if someone is in dire need either to sell or to buy. Acknowledging that something has a just price - but that I don't want to sell it at that price because it is useful to me for more than that, or that it has sentimental value, whatever, does not mean that someone cannot offer more and it still be a licit sale. Or, if I desperately need money, I can try and sell something quickly. St Thomas says in another article that it is sinful to attempt to use a desperate situation to drive the price lower than already offered, but that it is not sinful to buy at a price already offered.
So no, your ability to quote St Thomas out of context does not prove your point. Here's his full statement on how things have objective value in the same article you quoted.
ON THE CONTRARY, Ambrose says (de Offic. iii, 11): It is manifestly a rule of justice that a good man should not depart from the truth, nor inflict an unjust injury on anyone, nor have any connection with fraud.
I ANSWER THAT, A threefold fault may be found pertaining to the thing which is sold. One, in respect of the thing's substance: and if the seller be aware of a fault in the thing he is selling, he is guilty of a fraudulent sale, so that the sale is rendered unlawful. Hence we find it written against certain people (isa 1:22), "Thy silver is turned into dross, thy wine is mingled with water" because that which is mixed is defective in its substance.
Another defect is in respect of quantity which is known by being measured: wherefore if anyone knowingly make use of a faulty measure in selling he is guilty of fraud, and the sale is illicit. Hence it is written (Duet 25:13,14) "Thou shalt not have diverse weights in thy bag, a greater and a less: neither shall there be in they house a greater bushel and a less," and further on (Duet 25:16), "For the Lord... abhorreth him that doth these things, and He hateth all injustice."
A third defect is on the part of the quality, for instance, if a man sell an unhealthy animal as being a healthy one: and if anyone do this knowingly he is guilty of a fraudulent sale, and the sale, in consequence, is illicit.
In all these cases not only is the man guilty of a fraudulent sale, but he is also bound to restitution. But if any of the foregoing defests be in the thing sold, and he knows nothing about this, the seller does not sin, because he does that which is unjust materially, nor is is deed unjust, as shown above (Q 59 A 2). Nevertheless he is bound to compensate the buyer, when the defect comes to his knowledge. Moreover what has been said of the seller applies equally to the buyer. Fore sometimes it happens that the seller thinks his goods to be specifically of lower value, as when a man sells gold instead of copper, and then if the buyer be aware of this, he buys it unjustly and is bound to restitution: and the same applies to a defect in quantity as to a defect in quality.
There. That's what Thomas Aquinas was talking about.
Freaking sleazeball.
Bitcoin / sound money is about as traditionalist as it gets. It’s as far from enlightenment-values money as possible.
I will have to do a fuller post on this when I have time
Are you joking?
Where's your labor in making it valuable? What of YOUR labor does it represent that makes it worth 100k? What of YOUR labor do you do to keep the tides of entropy from eating away at it's value? To make it's value go up? How is it tied to a human community of your neighbors? How can you use it as a means of exchange for everyday purchases? To go to the store? Buy a candy bar?
Money is inherently deflationary. It always loses value over time, unless you put labor into it.
Even Gold and Silver.
People have to get over the idea that there is any ridiculous perfect money, or even anything close. It's all entropy, all the way down.
Something else to also consider:
For thousands of Years, Economic thinking has recognized the inherent zero to negative sum nature of transactions *in general* meaning that Money has always been viewed as something that requires continuous upkeep & maintenance... Labour was the chief way in which this was accomplished in many societies.
Today's Fossil Fuel Economies are positive-sum & are a brief, 3 century anomaly in the last hundreds of thousands of years of human history. The Money they have concocted (be it the USD, Bitcoin, etc) is fundamentally unmoored to this relationship, & has commodified the whole world in a delusional manner, bereft of this understanding that everything around us ages, decays & eventually dies.
Even 'the circular flow' models that most economists use to show the relationship between businesses & households are fundamentally flawed since they assume that households exist *as such* alongside businesses, entirely omitting Nature & the Environment, which these guys think is 'Complementary/Free.'
Some friendly criticism: Bitcoin is better than than most, if not all, competing forms of money but touting it as a solution to the cost-of-living (diminishing output) problem is wrongheaded. Money isn’t wealth. It’s a claim on wealth. Everybody getting into Bitcoin doesn’t create more physical goods and services, it just drives up the price of Bitcoin. Cost of living becoming cheaper and thereby encouraging family formation means economies must output more goods and services per unit of labor and material input. The master input to all labor and materials is energy, so the key metric to understanding the cost of living problem is EROI! Looking at what that’s been doing since the 1970s explains things much better.
Also, technically Bitcoin isn’t sound money (but it’s still sounder than fiat). It has a fixed terminal supply and the rate of new money production slows over time. This means it is actually inherently deflationary. Sound money would match its supply to the quantity of physical goods and services produced in the real economy (rising during expansions, shrinking itself during contractions), thereby protecting against both inflation and deflation.
You're right about everything you said. Although I disagree on the elasticity. When you fix the supply, the purchasing power is the variable in the equation. Purchasing power will rise as real wealth increases, and fall when real wealth / productivity fall. That's a good thing. The money becomes a bit like an "ETF on human productivity and wealth creation" while at the same time incentivising savings (instead of blind investment).
What you get as a result is less speculation in the markets (less financialisation) and a higher bar for the quality of things being built, produced and created.
I believe that the quality of output is more important than the quantity, and this is the axis Bitcoin affects. And I also think that is a key component to the solution of diminishing output (but of course as you said, far from the only factor).
>> Worth (or value) is determined by whether it meets someone else’s demand, not the amount of work you put in. <<
This is an Enlightenment-centric definition. The problem with it is that it is entirely Subjective.
Human Beings VALUE all sorts of things, many of which are antithetical to what is Objectively Good for one's flourishing. Toxic 'fast food' comes to mind.
Demand & Supply do not slope the way you think they do. Steve Keen, Heterodox economist extraordinaire... showed decisively in his book 'A New Economic Manifesto' that Downward sloping Demand & Upward Sloping Supply... that's Superstition.
Infact, Demand & supply can slope in all sorts of ways among all sorts of *rational* actors.
What this means is that the 'sum total of human persons buying & selling goods & services to one another' (i.e. the Market) is not a Sound determinant for VALUE.
'Meeting Demand' thus doesn't work here.
VALUE ties back to Materials, Energy, etc. Objective features of the world. It doesn't tie back to something which (to put it politely) can take all sorts of peculiar shapes depending on one's whims & desires, & when taken together in a Crowd setting.
Bitcoin is clever. It’s the best digital currency yet devised (given the choice of problems it chooses to optimise for). But it’s an algorithm away from collapse, an engineering innovation away from collapse. Any advance in factoring will cause an immediate drop in value of bitcoin that is at least linear, more likely catastrophic.
Sell bitcoin. Buy land. (Or do you really think Bill Gates is stupid as well as evil?)
Bitcoin is immune to engineering innovations and algorithm advancements because the consensus is not technological. It is limited by work (energy) and human consensus. In other words, the best and most powerful hashing algorithm could be released tomorrow, and the ONLY thing that would happen is the increase in hash-rate and the strengthening of the mining network, followed by the difficulty adjustment which would then re-stabilise the blocks to a 10min interval once more.
Any technological innovation is irrelevant too because that's not what matters for the consensus of the base chain. In fact, engineering advancements will all be built ON TOP of Bitcoin, because bitcoin's edge or advantage doesn't come from the fact that it is changeable and adaptable. In fact, it's the very opposite. Bitcoin is the ONLY technology which does NOT change. That's its promise. That's why people will build ATOP it. It's digital granite. It's digital land. It's more resilient than physical land, because it's literally information. Information is both physical and ephemeral. As such, this thing is never going away and can never be shut down.
I can send you some more resources, but in the meantime, I strongly recommend this one: https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-times/bitcoins-eternal-struggle-2c197f1bafd8
>> It is limited by work (energy) and human consensus. <<
Hard Disagree. To put it politely:
Consensus implies Telos. Markets are not Teleological, they are EMOTIVE.
When people do margin calls on something, that's not them 'engaging in Consensus.'
Similarly, when people Buy & sell Bitcoin, that's a combination of Rational Self-Interest (at the micro, individual level) coupled with macro concerns such as 'FOMO' (i.e. Fear of Missing Out).
As for 'Work' ... All Human Work comes from food & fuels, which ultimately goes back to energy. When you chart out the relationship between Bitcoin & Global Oil Production (for instance) you don't get a very high variance.
The R^2 is nowhere near 0.9+, which is what Statisticians use to say 'These two variables are STRONG correlates of one another.'
Does Bitcoin have Limits? No Doubt! But it's not Human Work & Consensus.
Rather, it is Rational Self-Interest, FOMO & ... a weak partial relationship to burning energy (which we don't have an unlimited supply of) in order to secrete chemicals in one's brain to feel good about oneself.
Im not talking about Bitcoin's price guys. Jesus.
The consensus is NOT about its Fiat price!!
Bitcoin's unlock is that we have nodes who don NOT know each either, running the same copy of the constitution and ledger, worldwide, and are own sync (consensus) every ten minutes.
It's basically taken what a small, local, collective would do, and scaled it up to something that can operate at a global scale.
How can you not see that?
This is bitcoin mythology and cope. If you are personally invested in bitcoin that’s psychologically hard to hear. But you said it yourself. The value in bitcoin is work / energy. If either of those inputs become easier in a step-change way, bitcoin’s rational value collapses. And since it has most (not all) of the features of a currency, if its rational value collapses then there will be an irrational but predictable collapse in value.
Bitcoin is not precious metal. You can grant it’s (almost) a currency but you can’t have it both ways: if it’s a currency then it’s subject to sentiment collapse like any other currency.
of course it's subject to sentiment collapse. Anything is. I just place the probabilities of such a sentiment collapse at 0.00000000000001%
If that sentiment was going to collapse, it would have done so 5 or 10 years ago. Bitcoin's proved its resilience.
Land is great. Insofar as some authority grants you the right to keep it. You're at the mercy of another authority.
Bitcoin...I actually own it. It's the ultimate bearer instrument. Which makes it a better MONEY to acquire land with later, when I need to.
He doesn't want to hear it's a Tulip Bulb.
A beautiful, electronic, Tulip Bulb.
Well ok we are approaching common ground. In the event of an algorithmic or engineering breakthrough related to the underlying math of the work, I peg sentiment collapse at 99.99%