-
@ Daniel Wigton
2025-05-24 22:03:03
Reasonable is good, I like reasonable. But I do think we can do better. We can do unreasonable.
The problem is that reasonable solutions in IT keep breaking, because they accept some flawed premise that is "good enough", everyone has a good time, lots of cool stuff gets built, spammers and rent-seekers move in exploiting to flawed premises, filters are put in place to limit bad actors, bad actors have more incentive and time, filtering is outsourced to silos that have enough insight into the whole network to be effective, small players get cut out, everyone gripes about the good old days when it was the land of the free.
Perfect may be impossible, but we can at least avoid the mistakes we see coming. That isn't to say every eventuality needs to be addressed right now, but we can build in the ability to adapt.
I think it is possible to have a natural money supply. Just give everyone who joins the network permission to issue X number of schrutebucks. Then ignore them and don't accept their crapcoin unless they are a trusted contact. Instead create a mechanism for currency exchange. If I want to pay you and we are both friends of Alice. Then I buy Alice coin from her and use it to pay you. It does somewhat limit how rich you can become based on who your friends are. But if lots of people want to pay you it will create demand for your and your friend's personal currencies.
Those currencies will eventually devalue to 0 and cease circulation as people retire and die.
Needs lots of work though. I am not sure how to show prices with a zillion wildly fluctuating coins. But I've a feeling the answer is hiding in gauge theory and physics.