Centralized anything always becomes a tool for mischief. All you have to do is compare America's founding father 's vision for a constitutional republic with what we have now.
I'm really confused by this. The words decentralization/decentralized appear no fewer than five times. This would be WAY more decentralized than the US dollar (as world reserve currency) and the Euro as a regional currency. I mean, this entire Substack is dedicated mostly to decentralization. That is why I suggested that replacing the ICU with a distributed ledger and a multi-sig DAO structure might just work. I also write that I like the idea of competing currencies a la Hayek, but that this might be a compromise needed to create an international standard with decentralized governance.
The United States was supposed to be a union of autonomous nations. What Keynes imagined would not have been implemented as conceived, and even if it had, its architecture would not have remained intact for very long. You can say the word ‘decentralized’ all you want. Manifest an idea upon which all people are vested, and a way will be found to remove all people from its governance.
I am fully aware of the vision of the American Founders, before and after the Constitution, which opened the door to centralization, despite the intentions for its design (and criticisms from figures like Brutus (Robert Yates)). Furthermore, I am certainly aware of the risks of attempting to develop a system that is difficult to game. And I said so. What I did not do was drop the word decentralization without reflection. I offered actual existing technological means to develop a concept, which I borrowed from Keynes and attempted to improve upon with technologies that are designed to be censorship-resistant and to disintermediate. Could this be something to compete with BRICS? Could there be other, better competitors? Perhaps. I also acknowledge that a fully free market in private, competing currencies with a thousand different properties might be better than a bancor+. But in the interests of imagining what an international, post-dollar reserve currency might look like, I took a stab. So I'm not sure what it is that *you* are proposing to replace the corrupted dollar, except to warn vaguely about the founders and make vague mention of centralization. That said, I am open to your ideas. *Criticize by creating* is a favorite mantra of mine.
So gold is deflationary because there isn’t enough of it (and it has other uses). But there are lots of other metals and other things of varying degrees of scarcity. Why couldn’t a currency be a combination of different things? One is redeemable for an ounce of gold, another copper, another palladium, etc. and people accept them all because they all have value…
America's founders couldn't have possibly foreseen the scope of what 250 years have brought. Somehow money is to be removed from the individual citizen's control. If it's gold or cash, it will be stolen. If it's the mumbo-jumbo of the computer world, it will be locked away. NO ONE helps you financially but they either want a cut or are part of the nefarious system that pushes us towards socialism's slavery. There will be violence and death before all this is settled, even for a short time. Globalization will make things even worse.
I have no doubt this is the future! If the hegemons can and will move over to it easily, that remains to be seen. I'm sensing the vibe here, as it's a good idea, but cynicism by all of us makes it hard for us to imagine this actually becoming a reality because it would be difficult to game.
I also think one area that would be interesting as part of the peg is to include some metric of human labor as part of the "basket" of value. Perhaps this is better for local currencies and more peer-to-peer monetary theory.
I know many people who have attempted to launch local currencies based on the value of human labor. The trouble with many of these attempts is that they, perhaps unwittingly, try to smuggle a labor theory of value into the system. But they forget that all value is subjective, so the price of anyone's labor is determined intersubjectively the moment the worker and the payer strike an agreement. So whose labor would one be talking about? I don't need to tell you this, of course, as you run a business and hire people. But I've seen systems people dream up where they want to say that their token unit is predicated on an hour's worth of *labor* in the abstract.
Yes, you're right, but aren't all commodities relative, labor being one of them? I think it could still be valuable to determine an average and include it in the "basket." It could be considered as a ratio, like a gold-to-labor ratio; it would showcase if a country's labor costs are too high compared to the rate in the "peg". We in this country don't seem to consider it, at least at a ground level. Labor just always wants more until they price themselves out of business, assuming the market can afford it, it's a kind of tragedy of the commons kind of thing. Also, it's not just labor itself but the ancillaries, such as healthcare and insurance, that drive up these costs too.
I don't know whether one could determine a currency's value with such a ratio, say by using the mean US wage. But with commodities like gold, silver, or oil, you can at least theoretically convert your notes/digits to the commodity. How does one convert notes to labor? To whose? How is it redeemable? I acknowledge that such an idea might just be over my head. Maybe there is something to the concept of tying currency value to wages. I just can't get my head around it.
This is really interesting. Thank you for writing it!
Centralized anything always becomes a tool for mischief. All you have to do is compare America's founding father 's vision for a constitutional republic with what we have now.
I'm really confused by this. The words decentralization/decentralized appear no fewer than five times. This would be WAY more decentralized than the US dollar (as world reserve currency) and the Euro as a regional currency. I mean, this entire Substack is dedicated mostly to decentralization. That is why I suggested that replacing the ICU with a distributed ledger and a multi-sig DAO structure might just work. I also write that I like the idea of competing currencies a la Hayek, but that this might be a compromise needed to create an international standard with decentralized governance.
The United States was supposed to be a union of autonomous nations. What Keynes imagined would not have been implemented as conceived, and even if it had, its architecture would not have remained intact for very long. You can say the word ‘decentralized’ all you want. Manifest an idea upon which all people are vested, and a way will be found to remove all people from its governance.
I am fully aware of the vision of the American Founders, before and after the Constitution, which opened the door to centralization, despite the intentions for its design (and criticisms from figures like Brutus (Robert Yates)). Furthermore, I am certainly aware of the risks of attempting to develop a system that is difficult to game. And I said so. What I did not do was drop the word decentralization without reflection. I offered actual existing technological means to develop a concept, which I borrowed from Keynes and attempted to improve upon with technologies that are designed to be censorship-resistant and to disintermediate. Could this be something to compete with BRICS? Could there be other, better competitors? Perhaps. I also acknowledge that a fully free market in private, competing currencies with a thousand different properties might be better than a bancor+. But in the interests of imagining what an international, post-dollar reserve currency might look like, I took a stab. So I'm not sure what it is that *you* are proposing to replace the corrupted dollar, except to warn vaguely about the founders and make vague mention of centralization. That said, I am open to your ideas. *Criticize by creating* is a favorite mantra of mine.
So gold is deflationary because there isn’t enough of it (and it has other uses). But there are lots of other metals and other things of varying degrees of scarcity. Why couldn’t a currency be a combination of different things? One is redeemable for an ounce of gold, another copper, another palladium, etc. and people accept them all because they all have value…
America's founders couldn't have possibly foreseen the scope of what 250 years have brought. Somehow money is to be removed from the individual citizen's control. If it's gold or cash, it will be stolen. If it's the mumbo-jumbo of the computer world, it will be locked away. NO ONE helps you financially but they either want a cut or are part of the nefarious system that pushes us towards socialism's slavery. There will be violence and death before all this is settled, even for a short time. Globalization will make things even worse.
I have no doubt this is the future! If the hegemons can and will move over to it easily, that remains to be seen. I'm sensing the vibe here, as it's a good idea, but cynicism by all of us makes it hard for us to imagine this actually becoming a reality because it would be difficult to game.
I also think one area that would be interesting as part of the peg is to include some metric of human labor as part of the "basket" of value. Perhaps this is better for local currencies and more peer-to-peer monetary theory.
I know many people who have attempted to launch local currencies based on the value of human labor. The trouble with many of these attempts is that they, perhaps unwittingly, try to smuggle a labor theory of value into the system. But they forget that all value is subjective, so the price of anyone's labor is determined intersubjectively the moment the worker and the payer strike an agreement. So whose labor would one be talking about? I don't need to tell you this, of course, as you run a business and hire people. But I've seen systems people dream up where they want to say that their token unit is predicated on an hour's worth of *labor* in the abstract.
Yes, you're right, but aren't all commodities relative, labor being one of them? I think it could still be valuable to determine an average and include it in the "basket." It could be considered as a ratio, like a gold-to-labor ratio; it would showcase if a country's labor costs are too high compared to the rate in the "peg". We in this country don't seem to consider it, at least at a ground level. Labor just always wants more until they price themselves out of business, assuming the market can afford it, it's a kind of tragedy of the commons kind of thing. Also, it's not just labor itself but the ancillaries, such as healthcare and insurance, that drive up these costs too.
I don't know whether one could determine a currency's value with such a ratio, say by using the mean US wage. But with commodities like gold, silver, or oil, you can at least theoretically convert your notes/digits to the commodity. How does one convert notes to labor? To whose? How is it redeemable? I acknowledge that such an idea might just be over my head. Maybe there is something to the concept of tying currency value to wages. I just can't get my head around it.
Don't we routinely exchange or "convert" labor for currency/notes? It's right under our proverbial noses.
Sounds like the Euro, which doesn't seem to be working all that well.
In what way, precisely? The Euro depends on an activist central bank, fiat printing, and is arguably more vulnerable to politics.