[118277] in Cypherpunks
Re: A question about b-money... (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Choate)
Thu Sep 23 19:08:58 1999
From: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>
Message-Id: <199909232253.RAA20924@einstein.ssz.com>
To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 17:53:34 -0500 (CDT)
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Reply-To: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>
> Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 12:40:03 -0700 (PDT)
> From: BPM Mixmaster Remailer <remailer@bpm.ai>
> Subject: CDR: Re: A question about b-money...
> a couple thoughts come to mind:
> 1) if for the average person the cheapest way to get b-money was to calculate
> it, why would anyone hold a 'real' job?
Because they have to purchase the hardware and software in order to do the
calculation in the first place. This *isn't* a chicken-and-egg problem. Even
if they build it themselves they still have to pay for the house, the lot,
the food, the clothes, etc.
> 2) how much a % of your cpu time cost for your personal machine is the
> electric bill? pretty small
Oh, so what you're going to do is inflate the value of the token even more
than 200% then. In addition if we allow this sort of non-unity mapping of
W-s's across entities what keeps somebody from spending $0.10 of real effort
to generate a $1E6 token? Nothing. The inflation rate with this approach is
effective infinity and will guarantee that nobody will trust the b-money
token.
> 3) what does the (lack of) ability of a small scale operation to produce a
> commodity cost effectively have to do with the global 'inflation rate' in
> that commodity for the entire world?
Because if my dollar doesn't equal your dollar then both are worthless.
> bottom line:a basic requirement of any money system is that the profit
> margin on being a mint is small enough that you can still convince people
> to farm, raise livestock,sell gas, etc instead of starting up their own
> mints.an important corrolary is that the idle cpu time accessible to the
> average person must have value arbitrarily close to 0.
Bottem line is there can be NO profit margin on a mint. A mint can't
participate in the economy in the same way that a user of the specie
participates.
And just exactly how do you propose they pay for the materials needed to
raise those livestock, etc.?
Idle cpu time is irrelevant. The bottem line is a consumer wants something,
they need to spend so many W-s's at a given technology level to generate a
sufficient token, then they have to distribute the token *and* pay for the
energy needed to generate it. If the cost of a W-s from the electric company
is less than the cost of a W-s after generating a token you've injected
inflation into the economy.
> suggested reading: Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
> trilogy. be sure to read the fourth book,which i believe includes a detailed
> discussion of a woodland society which adopted the leaf as the currency unit.
The best defence you can come up with is a sci-fi book? Geesh.
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The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate
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