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Post by JP (admin) on Nov 8, 2017 3:46:22 GMT
What would people like me to write about on my blog? Any strange monetary phenomena that needs explaining? All ideas and suggestions welcome. If I don't take your idea, that doesn't mean it was a bad suggestion. It probably just isn't in my wheelhouse.  |
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Post by Dan Hoglund on Dec 17, 2017 11:42:50 GMT
Hi JP, first of all I want to say that your blog is a great read and I always find your style of writing clear. I love everything Bitcoin/Crypto/Alt-coin related. I know you've already written a lot about it and I've read it all, I think. But I also think there are many more stones to turn and will be going forward. We could be witnessing a monetary revolution of huge proportions, I think it's worth a lot of focus.
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Post by Roger Sparks on Dec 29, 2017 19:09:06 GMT
You are probably watching the Venezuela cryptocurrency roll out. I guess if private parties can do it, governments can too.
I sent you a couple of pizzas via bitcoin. Nice to be able to say thanks for many past posts and get some experience with cryptocurrency at the same time.
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Post by JP (admin) on Dec 30, 2017 3:06:05 GMT
You are probably watching the Venezuela cryptocurrency roll out. I guess if private parties can do it, governments can too. I sent you a couple of pizzas via bitcoin. Nice to be able to say thanks for many past posts and get some experience with cryptocurrency at the same time. Aha, that was you. Thanks! |
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Post by David on Feb 10, 2018 22:02:11 GMT
My idea is about private, non-blockchain, digital currency. I have never understood the reason for the design of blockchain or Bitcoin. It is poorly designed. A deflationary currency is just as bad as an inflationary one. I understand the need to reslove the issues created by fiat govt currencies.
99% of the value of all transactions are already digital. Visa credit card is digital. Your bank's debit card is digital. Blockchain did not invent "digitalness".
The problems that blockchain and Bitcoin attempt, admiringly, to solve are the problems created by fiat govt monopoly currencies, which are already mostly digital. Unfortunately blockchain creates more problems than it solves. What is needed is a banking system parallel to the sovereign one and made up of private, digital proprietary, non-sovereign currencies being issued by private banks. Up until now banks issue the country's sovereign currency and, digital or not, this is the problem. The solution is to for private banks to issue their own proprietary digital currency. There is lot more to this than just that alone, but this isn't the forum to explain in full, only to initiate the discussion.
The task is to get people like you and blockchain enthusiasts and anti-central banking types to see the merits of this solution. The key is to design a system that resolves each of the issues created by fiat currency central banking. A few are: monopoly, legal tender, value and inflation, fractional banking of non-proprietary currency and asset-based, redeemable currency and NOT with solely gold backing. Gold backing does not really resolve this issue of valuation and is itself deflationary.
Thoughts?
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Post by Jason Treit on Feb 26, 2018 21:21:27 GMT
Here's an idea for an economic history post. Some Austrians argue that fractional reserve banking is an ongoing fraud because nobody (at least nobody in the first instance) would willingly hold a demandable IOU for their own property if they knew the issuer might take it out of storage and use it for other business operations. According to this intuition, printing up a banknote or adding to a deposit account balance should not be acts of money creation. Nobody agreed to that scheme. Banks should be like money warehouses and banknotes should be warehouse tickets.
This exact claim doesn't interest me because the historical and theoretical reasons to dismiss it have been laid out elsewhere, but it makes me wonder if you can think of any modern economic practices that *did* derive from an act of fraud, misdirection, creative rulebreaking, or the like.
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Post by Roger Sparks on May 7, 2018 15:36:53 GMT
Maybe a new topic idea? A national currency as an instrument of <b> economic isolation </b> .
I usually think of economics in terms of better integration of people and resources, the goal being to all live better lives.
But what if the goal is to improve only YOUR life? Perhaps you (and your fellow citizens) want to monopolize a scarce resource. Such isolation is difficult if everyone uses a common currency. It seems to me that isolation would improve dramatically if the monopolizing group gained control of a region and instituted it's own unique currency. Once that happened, the immediate question would be "What is the relative value of the new currency?".
The problem would be similar to establishing value for a crypto-currency. There would be very few points of intersection that could be used to find common points of relative value.
My understanding of today's real world currency markets is that an auction system is used to compare currency values. So, if one wants to trade currencies, one just makes an offer. If the offer is accepted, a point of intersection has been established and the two currencies trade. Simple but incredibly arbitrary. And potentially unstable.
SO, AND TO MAKE A POINT, if two currencies are in use with a goal of maximum economic isolation, what would be the best path if those two economies wanted to merge? Of course, the EURO is a real life example but was that the best path?
My own thinking takes me to conclude: It is easy to separate economies. It is much harder to reintegrate economies and currencies because of embedded distortions that develop during isolation.
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