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eah13on Bitcoin rises

You're right that I conflated the two above but the relevant feature of each is that they're a form of money creation. With a fractional reserve, the amount of money created (through leveraging the reserve) is inversely related to the size of the reserve. With fiat currency the 'reserve' the government has is nonexistent, allowing for unlimited money creation. The government or a bank's ability to engage in money creation are both limited by the certainty that those using the currency have in its future value. If a bank loses it, we get a run. If a government loses it, we get hyperinflation.

Thanks for the distinction between the two concepts though. You're exactly right and gave a great explanation of them. I'll take a look at the free banking period. It does sound very interesting. Talking about the money and valuation sometimes it seems like all we have to measure things with is a rubber ruler, especially when the amount and value of currencies can be manipulated.

eah13on Bitcoin rises

The interesting thing to me is currency's role in providing certainty. In this case, about the total amount of something, and whether what you're encountering is a valid instance of it. Check out some examples and how Bitcoin compares:

Gold has chemical properties that ensure its finite scarcity (though supplies can fluctuate) and allow you to identify it as ture gold (through, e.g. density measurements). Gold-backed paper currency has a scarcity determined by the trustworthiness of its issuer and a validity linked to the difficulty of its reproduction. Fiat paper currency has a feature of allowing a fractional reserve system, which allows a central body to control its scarcity (and perceptions thereof), with validity again linked to difficulty of reproduction. Open-source cryptographic currencies have a well-defined scarcity and easily verifiable validity.

Cryptography provides certainty better than a physical alternative like gold or paper, but governments traditionally have had control over currency and don't have control over Bitcoin. I think it's unlikely they'll give this up without a fight. I'm not sure that the token system you propose really gives them back that control unless it supports fiat: the arbitrary issuance or discontinuation of currency. But, the idea of Bitcoin as specie is a great one. If it is adopted it as such it becomes open to confiscation like FDR did with gold in 1933, which is an interesting prospect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

I wonder confiscation is even possible? If it's not this is a seriously revolutionary tech: property without government.

eah13on Pedestal: An open source tool set for building web applications in Clojure

Excited to see what the Relevance team and others roll out with this. Clojure could really come into its own if a tool set like this picks up steam.

eah13on Google Drive was down

Maybe someone did ~/Google Drive/Google Drive and created a rift in the space time continuum.

eah13on “Docracy” Opens Up Document Genome Project: Compare/Contrast Contracts & Patents

This is a really promising avenue. I can see how bioinformatics techniques could be used to identify passages as if they were genes. So some of the hard problems are solved. But the kind of knowledge that bioinformatics produces is highly statistical and one of the biggest challenges will be reducing the results of, for instance, combinatorial pattern matching. It seems like they're taking the right approach in identifying which phrases are common, essentially building the Genbank of legalese.

eah13on Google Drive appears to be down :(

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/drive.google.com

Down for everyone it seems

eah13on Datomic for Five Year Olds

This is a nice interview. I attended a one day workshop on Datomic taught by Stu Halloway this summer, which was great, but a post like this is prolly a better intro to the main concepts.

The way that Datomic is accretive over time is the key data model decision, and it lets each temporal state of the DB be a value. From the article:

"The most novel thing here is "retrieves the database". In Datomic, you have the concept of the "value of the database" - the database as a whole, as a data structure. The Peer Library is responsible for pulling as much of that data structure into memory as necessary to satisfy your queries.

In this way, your queries run largely in your application rather than in a central database server, allowing for easy read scalability. It gives more power to your application rather than keeping all the power in a central server, where you have to worry about bottlenecks.

Finally, Datomic does not implement its own storage solution but instead relies on storage as a service, allowing you to choose which storage backend you use. Right now, the following backends are supported:

The filesystem DynamoDB Riak Couchbase Infinispan SQL database"