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805 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury OP 4 Oct 2023 \ on: Lyn Alden book club part I bitcoin
Lyn gives a great accounting of my favorite monetary unit aside from btc: rai stones. The construct is so weird that I wouldn't believe the story if I read it in a sci-fi novel. But rai stones are also a pure example of a hot-button issue in the btc universe.
Rai stones operate purely on the social ledger: everyone in the community agrees that I am the owner of the big stone over by Tim's hut. In no way have I taken physical possession of it, and my agreed-upon ownership doesn't keep anyone else from looking at the stone or having a picnic on it or sitting in its shade. In fact, I have so little rights over the stone that it would be hard, from an outsider's point of view, to determine the functional difference between a person who owned a particular stone and a person who did not.
This situation seems identical to what's going on w/ NFTs / ordinals. Everyone has so much fun dunking on how dumb it is that Tim "owns" this monkey jpeg, that everyone who isn't Tim can just right-click-save it, etc. But that jpeg is owned in the same way that a rai stone is owned: the community who cares about those jpegs agrees, amongst itself, that Tim owns it.
It is purely a manner of convention. And yet everything is a manner of convention! Rai stones are the real-world equivalent of right-click-saving. Apparently that was enough for a society to use them as money.
I think even NFT critics would agree that NFTs derive value from convention.
right-click-save is also just a troll, right? We all know that NFT people know people can right-click-save.afaict NFT investors are banking on the utility value or monetary premium of NFTs which much like the value of Rai stones depend on more than just convention. Conventions themselves depend on a set of circumstances. When circumstances change enough, conventions break as was the case with Rai stones.
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Perhaps you've seen more sophisticated NFT critics than I have. The ones I mostly run into act as if there is fundamentally some difference-in-kind btwn what NFTs are doing and what btc is doing, or rather, the psychological tools it is doing it with. Although admitting that the construct of money is psychological at all would be a great leap forward for many.
afaict NFT investors are banking on the utility value or monetary premium of NFTs which much like the value of Rai stones depend on more than just convention.
You lost me on this point. What, more than convention, do rai stones and NFTs depend on? You say "circumstances" but the circumstances are realized through conventions, are they not? Circumstances change, and our agreements about what is reasonable or desirable -- our conventions about those things -- change in consequence. But it's still convention. What more could it be than that?
Or have I missed a nuance of your point?
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Or have I missed a nuance of your point?
I'm not sure. By circumstances, I meant assumptions about the conditions of the system Rai stones will exist in, eg there will never be technologically superior visitors who interfere with our ledger.
Conventions are made/formed/whatever assuming some set of circumstances and sure those circumstances are sometimes conventions themselves, but the quantity of gold present on earth isn't a convention, is it?
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Someone posted a SN submission on Galaxy's latest report on ordinals -- haven't read it, but looks loaded w/ data.
(Probably not talking about the economic theory behind them, I suspect.)
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