> “Walt never worried about money. To him, it was just something you could spend to do things you wanted to,” says Solomon.
Then I wonder what Walt Disney would have to say today about the company bearing his name...
Then I wonder what Walt Disney would have to say today about the company bearing his name...
Sometimes this works well: for example, pretty much everybody thinks Toy Story is a great movie, and Lasseter and Pixar were rewarded handsomely for it. Sometimes it doesn't work so well: for example, Wall Street thinks money is great, so they spend a lot of time and energy figuring out ways to extract more money from people.
Why is this more objective than other metrics? The fact you can easily put a number on it doesn't make it objective.
It's a definite indicator of wealth, but surely greatness is a different thing?
I hope we can come up with something better in the next few hundred years. The main problem of money lies exactly in its simplicity, i.e. everything becomes fungible, which in reality many things just aren't. To work around this we needed to invent stuff like taxation and legal persons. A mind-boggingly huge part of government and thus man-power is set aside to work around the problems that the fungibility of money creates. I am pretty sure there are superior technological solutions, where the rules/laws don't have to work-around ever more clever ways that cooperations and rich people use to work-around the limits we try to set for the fungibility of money.
Even if we just focus on popularity (i.e., first-order preference satisfaction), money is a very rough proxy for it:
1. Lots of profitable activities, once you price-in their externalised social costs, are net negative. Given the scale of the climate and ecological crisis, that is very far from a marginal phenomenon. Ecological economists like Herman Daly argue that once ecological costs are included in the national accounts, we are running a GDP loss.
2. Some commodities are instrumentally necessary but intrinsically negative. Many people acknowledge that social media is a net negative, but use it anyway because it helps build their profile and career. Market dynamics often transform intrinsically positive activities into merely instrumentally necessary activities, e.g., the marketisation of academia means researchers spend their whole career optimising for maximum articles and grants, not great work.
3. Market demand reflects the stratified incomes of people around the world. Markets are therefore heavily skewed in favour of the interests of the rich.
4. Market exchanges which are mutually beneficial for the transacting parties often have unintended effects in the aggregate, sometimes negative, e.g., no one wants Facebook to be a monopoly, and no individual makes it so, but it is the aggregate consequence of people joining Facebook.
There are two things that IMO Disney does far more than most other animation studios; First being sequel churn (the general pacing of MCU releases, the pacing on the last SW trilogy and sidecar movies,) But the bigger one being Toyetics. [0]
Neither of those things are particularly 'innovative', and the latter of the two is a semi-exploitative practice of child psychology.
Even in theory, it only works in some contexts, though, namely in exchanges between individuals. Because there's a strong reliance that neighbors in the path trust each other and leaves them responsible for settling exchanges to mutual satisfaction. All this proposal adds to direct barter is long-distance authenticity guarantees.
[1] https://www.offsetcredit.org/
[2] https://docs.offsetcredit.org/en/latest/intro/economic.html
IOU works well on small scales. It has often worked locally or within small communities[1]. LETS[2], babysitting vouchers, friends who value and track favours and keep the scales balanced.
Make the FOSS infrastructure as easily deployable as wordpress.
IOUs with a PGP signed chain of trust is brilliant and it could be a killer app for PGP adoption.
Who of us doesn't owe Stallman and Torvalds at least a favour ? But never got their key-signed ?
Widespread PGP adoption means lots of people would have their own crypto so privacy and trust could be run over any insecure transport medium.
Maybe there could be a FIDOnet type central glue and exchange protocols so money could travel further than local.
Local non-currency ledgers on a eco-friendly blockchain.
Money is human glue. It represents creativity and potential energy.
It is democratic to have lots of types of small monies so no-one has to be excluded. Small things often work well. National monies fail for a lot of people and cryptos current success model is to be worth something - and so are stuck being tied to national monies so the excluded are still excluded.
Make it easy to make an altcoin, so anyone can and the goal can be stimulating a local economy rather than being tied back into the main one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Exchange_System [2] https://www.lowimpact.org/lets-origins-michael-linton-letsys...
In this proposal, we don't even need consensus. The only thing that matters is human trust between individuals.
That said, it is definitely worse than money if you want to make an exchange with someone more than a degree or two distant from you.
Anyway, right now it's just a thought experiment. I think the critical feedback is sufficient motivation to just make the thing and see how it works or doesn't in practice.
I don’t think this claim makes sense. Fungible value is only “centralized” in that it creates a virtual fully connected node in the market graph. This is a strictly good thing, decreasing maximum market hop distance to a constant.
Yeah, I'd agree with this.
> This is a strictly good thing, decreasing maximum market hop distance to a constant.
I think I see your point here, but I disagree. I will agree it's more convenient than the alternative (and exponentially so at longer distances), but I'm not sure it's strictly better. The trouble I see is that authority then always accumulates to that node. With something like Offset, which is mechanically highly decentralized but measures value in USD despite actual USD never needing to change hands, the value of a unit there is still tied to American financial policy because that influences people's perception of the value of USD. But of course if we changed it to some other real currency like the Euro, that would just shift the authority to a different government. And if we shifted to a completely imaginary currency, then we'd need consensus on the value of that currency, and whatever form of consensus was used would then have authority over the whole network.
So I arrive at non-fungible value as the only way to avoid this situation.
That said, for most modern use cases where you're dealing with untrusted individuals (and thus this proposal doesn't work), money is better, yes. The intended use case for this proposal would be for "local" things like co-ops where there's already trust among the members and they can then benefit from cutting out transaction costs (and relative to Offset, which offers zero transaction costs between trusted members, also provides insulation from third-party financial policy by not measuring value in any fiat currency).
This is why you want the node to be purely abstract and outside of anyone’s control.
> the value of a unit there is still tied to American financial policy
Indeed. This is why you don’t want something backed by USD.
> And if we shifted to a completely imaginary currency, then we'd need consensus on the value of that currency, and whatever form of consensus was used would then have authority over the whole network.
I don’t think this claim makes sense. The consensus for a pure asset like bitcoin comes from marketwide supply and demand. This doesn’t create “authority” over the network any more than physics creates “authority” over the strength of gravity.
> The consensus for a pure asset like bitcoin comes from marketwide supply and demand.
That's where the trouble lies, though, as various entities are doing their best to manipulate marketwide supply and demand all the time (advertising/PR/tariffs/sanctions/etc), and generally the more powerful said entity already is, the easier time they have of it. The laws of physics, thankfully, are immune to human manipulation.
By contrast, a transaction backed by the trust between two individuals is harder to manipulate at scale. Laws still apply, but nobody's going to run global ad/PR campaigns about the value of your neighbor Bob's lawn mowing skills. That's between you and Bob.
It all makes sense when you dig down.