[ExI] lotta splainin to do

[Mike Dougherty]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 11:14 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Oh I have become so cynical I just hate myself!  Or not, but if someone can
> talk me out of that dark line of reasoning, I am all eyes.
>

You really shouldn't give anyone your wallet.   Even with fiat currency,
you are participating in a mass hallucination for how money works.  Your
"dark line of reasoning" is a matter of spin.  I don't have a problem with
spin, it's pretty useful if/when you understand it.  (and yeah, i mean
figurative and also the literal physics property... which maybe is easier
to understand because it's more fundamentally consistent than the
figurative kind)

So I have a stack of paper that I can exchange with merchants for actual
stuff (fuel for my body, fuel for my car, other zero-sum resources, kk?)
and when I have too big of a stack of paper I am worried that someone could
bonk me on the head and take my stack.  Banks are ostensibly more
bonk-resistant, so I give them my stack with the understanding that they
will give it back when I request it.  There is already so much inherently
wrong with the assumptions in that transaction that some have sought to
right the wrong via cryptocurrency - mostly by assuming nothing, improving
transparency, and employing crowd-source authentication of transactions
(that's what mining actually is, yeah?)

Since I was ok [sic] with the bank holding my money, I am less likely to
get bonked by a bad-guy (though fees and such are small bonks from the bank
itself, but what'r gonna do?)  I am ok [sic] with, for example, paypal
holding a wallet with a few cryptocoins.  I was already relying on paypal
to do transactions with web merchants, with the expectation that they would
act as another layer of security between the unknown level of trust that is
the merchant and direct access to the stack of money that i keep at the
bank.  I accept the risk of paypal stealing my crypto along with the risk
of paypal stealing the stack of fiat right out my bank.  For that matter, I
also accept the risk of my bank also refusing to return my money.

I also have to understand the risk associated with even having the stuff
that money buys. We have a whole system of checks and balances to keep
civilization from collapsing into a primitive fang & claw competition for
stuff.  Those known as "preppers" assert that collapse is imminent.  I
appreciate the sentiment but continue to (in this case) literally buy-into
the mass hallucination of an economic watering hole that is stable enough
to predict and anticipate.  I guess what I'm suggesting here is that if we
aren't going to accept the terms and conditions of the social contract for
civilization, we have more difficult problems to DIY solve (without any of
the economy of scale that a group's convention would afford)

My main concern for a crypto-backed credit card mechanism is that the
volatility of 'value' means I will have to pay too much attention to the
currency of currency.  It's bad enough that I still have in mind what a
pizza "should" cost as of 20 years ago and haven't really caught up my
mental model with recent increases in costs and inflation.  Imagine that a
pizza today is 1 pizzacoin.  Due to a shift in supply/demand, the same meal
is 2 pizzacoin.  I had budgeted 1 pizzacoin per day and thanks to the
variable store of value, I can no longer afford the remainder of the week's
meals.  Maybe Elon will tweet an offer to exchange powerbricks for
pizzacoin and they'll adjust relative to pizza that 1 meal will cost only
0.5 pizzacoin.  In that case, should I purchase a week's worth of pizza
before the pizzacoin bubble bursts again?  Is the pizzacoin itself a better
store of value than the pizza itself?  If I can predict the rate of change,
I can win on pizza futures.  The biggest problem here is the instability of
the coin - for the whales like Elon have too much influence on the exchange
rate.  Perhaps this is a new problem to solve?  We could design a coin with
a very low volatility, but then it would not offer the opportunity to 'get
rich' by exploiting that volatility.

I guess we have to decide what kind of coins we want to control us.
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