[ExI] De-Orbiting Gold

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 6:40 PM, Brent Allsop
<brent.allsop at canonizer.com> wrote:
> 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.

This makes very little sense to me Brent. You want cheap worthless
money? Or you want no money at all? Money is simply "frozen desire",
that is a form that acts as an intermediate holder of value so that I
don't have to barter directly for what I want. Control of the money
supply is of course important to avoid inflation or deflation, but if
you are mining gold and other minerals from outer space, you are
literally creating new value, and that kind of increase in the money
supply is almost always good because it's the root of our economy.

There are only a few truly basic creative actions at the roots of our
civilization. Farming, mining, hunting, fishing, lumber harvesting,
etc. and everything else is just transforming these raw materials into
goods that the rest of us use or service.

> 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.

Again, this is rambling that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What
is more flexible as money than gold? Everyone will take it as money,
and it's NEVER gone out of style in thousands of years. It won't go
out of style even after the singularity. It's one of the few things
you can really say will survive through the singulary, imho. Unless
they figure out how to turn lead into gold in an economic fashion...
then there is NOTHING of value, save matter itself.

> 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.

This I understand, AND I completely disagree with you. Government
shenanigans is one of the most common sources of bubbles these days!
The housing crisis and bubble, government caused. The Internet bubble,
maybe not so much.

> 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".

Good lord. What the Fed is doing now is only pushing the inevitable
day of reckoning out further and making the eventual landing harder.
OK, they did have to do something on September 18, 2008 to keep the
world from collapsing, but why was the world in danger of collapsing
in the first place?

> 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'.

I'm very sorry Brent, but the canonizer isn't the solution to every
problem on the planet. We need free money, a free market, independent
of government hooligans. And it isn't just the ones in Washington.
Bejing is playing fast and loose with their money policy too, and some
day, we're all going to pay for it, big time.

> 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.

What millennium are you referring to Brent? You haven't gotten all
religious on us have you?

> 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.

Look, there are people doing work on the brain... but it is pointless
to invest too much there prior to having the basic technologies
available to do something with that knowledge. Even if we knew how the
brain worked today, it seems doubtful that we would have the
computational power to upload anyone.

> 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?

Probably, because if you don't live while you are alive, then what's
the point of living longer?

> 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.

Immortality first, everything else can wait? Well, that's a good
slogan, but how do you know what technology will lead to the
breakthrough necessary to achieve it? The NASA space program gave us a
lot of the basic technologies we have today, computers, disposable
diapers, pens that can write upside down... so how can you say what to
work on and what not to work on when we don't know the direction that
the real break through to immortality will come from?

I don't want to pry or offend, I like you Brent, but you seem a little
edgy lately... everything OK?

-Kelly