[ExI] De-Orbiting Gold

[Brent Allsop]

On 5/20/2012 4:44 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On 20/05/2012 23:00, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>> Who thinks my idea of orbiting money is ridiculous?
>
> Well, given the success of Rai stones even dropped into the lagoon as 
> currency on Yap, orbiting money is probably not that bad.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yap#Stone_money
>
> However, the real problem is of course that all the value lies in the 
> perception of value. Bitcoin is very volatile because it is a small 
> currency. A currency better be either large or backed by some stable 
> institution to remain stable.
>

All forms of money that are expensive are crap, from Gold, to coins, and 
especially if it is up in space.  The only problem with money, is the 
inability to control how much of it there is, in any given society.  
Making it more expensive, or more rare, makes things far worse, and 
likely to be more volatile.

Also, money needs to be VERY flexible.  the herd goes in waves, where 
during boom times, everyone thinks they have far more wealth, than they 
really have, so this drives things, in a compounding way, to be even 
more bubbly.  And when the bubble pops, the herd swings way to the far 
other extreme, thinking they are far more poor than they really are, 
becoming a self fulfilling prophesy.  Being on a "gold standard" can 
really work in the opposite way that it needs to, depending on how much 
we find, and how much is being consumed, at any given time.

You desperately need to have a controlling institution, that can be very 
flexible, and create money very cheaply, to fund governmental like 
projects to help when this happens, and do the opposite when bubbles are 
forming.

Right now, we have a reasonably good way of doing this, (at least better 
than the gold standard, or any other more primitive method used in the 
past) via the Federal reserve, under the direction of someone like 
Bernanke.  In my opinion, Bernanke, and his flooding the system with 
money, is what kept us from making the same mistake of the last 
generation, and why today we only have "the great rescission" when the 
last generation had "the great depression".

Now, if we could have something way more intelligent and trustworthy, 
than Bernanke, perhaps an amplification of the wisdom of the expert 
crowd survey system, like canonizer.com, we could implement a completely 
free monetary system - with completely freely created money, enabling us 
to get to the millennium that much faster.  And we wouldn't need  a 
government or any other big institution to 'back it up'.

And as far as anything in space, like what is the maximum size of 
something in space we could de-orbit, all of that is moot, and all of it 
is dangerous.  Anything we put in orbit, money or whatever, could come 
crashing down, and it's only a matter of time before yet another person 
is doomed to eternally rotting in the grave, when they could potentially 
make it to the millennium.

Again, instead of focusing on space, we should be focusing on the brain, 
so we can have sooner have backups and uploads of everyone.  Then we can 
de-orbat anything we want.  If we goof, we just restore everyone from 
backups, no big deal.

Does anyone think Elon is ever going to go up in one of his rockets, and 
risk a chance at making it to the millennium?  Would any similarly rich 
trans-humanist ever risk that, especially the closer we get to the 
millennium?

You've got to do first things first.  Everything else just condemns that 
many more people to eternally rotting in the hell that is the grave, or 
worse, complete obliteration in space.

Brent Allsop