Comment by invalidbasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by invalidbasis | Hacker News Reader

From an Austrian perspective, your proposal is garbage. Savings create wealth, period. In your proposal, you describe a system that encourages faster consumption (and thus faster depletion of resources, including the earth, people, etc.) and discourages savings entirely. How do you not see the fallacy in your logic? Why are you proposing reaping the planet's resources faster as an ideal way to do business? At least by hoarding, and slowing production, the world is incentivized to act more cautiously before blindly moving forward with its precious resources. I suggest that the system you proposed would result in the creation of a lot of unnecessary widgets, resources, and false markets. A world that would quickly deplete itself. Trying to solve inequality, by promoting more consumption on everyone's part, seems backwards, in my opinion. There is likely a greater moral wrong in using resources, than saving resources for a more legitimate purpose later on.

Your entire premise that we should reform society to favor consumption (even more than it is already favored now) only exacerbates inequalities, because at the end of the day, all you have to do to increase the value of Bitcoin, or similar crypto-currencies, is incapacitate another user and render their wallet outside of the entire money supply; since, it would be cryptographically locked. The argument against Bitcoin, if any, is (that at some point) it's deflationary mechanics will incentivize the elimination of other users so that the remaining currency holders will hold a larger percentage of the pie. If connected to an AI that was simply hellbent on maximizing its percentage of the money supply, you can easily see how a machine could learn bad ethics.

I'm an anti-austrian. I think 'stored value' is the most bizarre concept. All value is future value. From a statistical perspective you can never have full confidence that the thing you are using to 'store value' will actually do so. You can't predict the future. Even gold has its limits. Are we going to load our Space plains with bullion when we fly to mars?

I'm not favoring consumption. This system actually creates a flight to value and sustainable, renewable systems of production. Of course one of the things you can do with your decaying money is spend on consumptions, but you'd be an idiot because you're going to be getting stock in the producer of that thing and if they are strip mining you upper limit of benefit is drastically reduced.

I understand your premise of stored value not being realized until the future. However, it isn't some sort of universal rule. There is value in a lot of things, even in failure, and loss; you are only considering the monetary value in your statement. The possibilities of immeasurable value, that which aren't strictly monetary, is all lost in saying, "stored value is bizarre."

If stored value is truly a bizarre concept, then society should completely reevaluate schools, and learning in general. Even this discussion; because what is the point, or value? Is storing any nuance of thoughts pointless? You have a highly cyclical argument, favoring Singularity, and not allowing for any other perspective.

Your attempt to laud your position and derail Austrian Economics with the "Hauling Gold to Mars" example is insulting and disservices your own ability to make a valid point. Already in place, society has a concept that dismisses your absurdity, I.e., "Contracts;" which fully eliminate the need to haul physical resources or commodity around and merely show them on paper. Not too dissimilar to the blockchain.

From a statistical standpoint, statistics are irrelevant when they are put into practice. For they either ARE or ARE NOT and DO or DO NOT come into effect. They are a summation of the past, not its predictor.

In your very own argument, "You can't predict the future." But then go on to argue people would "be idiots" for investing in "consumption" instead of "productive" things or businesses. In a single paragraph you've argued against your own theory. People can't predict the future, but they can somehow tell what is productive versus not? Hah! I think the last business cycle is evidence enough.

Your idea isn't completely without merit in its attempts to reward persons for making good predictions. But again we already have similar systems for that purpose already in place in the stock markets.

We will have to see. It is a theory and I'm hoping to build some real world and computer model experiments.

A lot of my ideas of what would be good to do are based on Chris Alexander's idea of wholeness in which we actually have a better than 50/50 chance of telling what a 'good' transformation is. If it is less than 50/50 then very little will work.

I don't mean to insult. I need to do more study of what the austrian's really put forward. It is my least favorite of the schools and I haven't spent as much time learning about it as I should.

Fair enough. Peace be with you. And good luck in your work.

Pardon, where in the paper do you see that society should be reformed to favor consumption?

It is also hard to see how a blockchain technology would encourage faster consumption than an inflationary fiat system like that which we have with FRNs, but maybe I missed something in the OP.

The OP is proposing a system where savings decays over time, which creates incentive to spend your money quickly while it has value, hence consumerism. This effect already occurs to an extent via the FED's target inflation rate of 2% per annum. This strategy can also cause malinvestment. A person or company is more likely to make riskier investments rather than a certain loss. These risks often lead to economic bubbles. I see what the OP is trying to accomplish, but it would likely lead to a turbulent economy.

I'll add that by using public ledger and blockchain tech I take a lot of the problems of mal-investment out of the picture because we can collapse holes in the economy when they pop up. The market will take care of this because people will learn that it is far more profitable to avoid holes in the first place, but I also provide an escape hatch.

When the bubble collapses you can just follow the chain, convert the failed companies to pass through entities and move on the next best idea. The money went somewhere after all. Today we can't find it because of complexity theory. With a chain, you can find it. Or at least that is the theory....

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