110 sats \ 2 replies \ @carlosfandango 4 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Lyn Alden book club part I bitcoin
I don’t think it particularly change my opinion of BTC but rather reflect on the general nature of value. Perhaps how the social and physical ledger can be so removed from one another; the most valuable members of society may not be represented as the most valued. Not a novel idea but an intriguing way (for me) to view it.
Yeah, that's a really interesting philosophical / ethical point, I think -- the "pure" Austrian view, so far as I can tell from reading Mises and others, is that money is really the world's vote on how much value a person provides to the collective.
It seems glaringly obvious to me that this surface-level read misses a lot of stuff, or at least, requires some deep nuance to make sense of. For one, you have to be very clear on what your terms mean, e.g., what it means to "provide value" -- it's easy to confound that with "being a decent human being" (and now we have to define decent), and those are correlated, but not identical. We all know rich assholes and psychopaths. But there's nothing that says a psychopath couldn't delight hundreds of millions people, e.g., Steve Jobs.
Anyway, it's a worthy thing to wrestle with.
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Value is of course subjective but probably quite predictable. In pre-industrial societies meat maybe more valuable than maize, until there is a limit in meat prior to a hunting party going out etc. and then other staples are valued more highly. Meeting basic human needs;food, shelter, warmth will also be prioritised.
But what is that as societies increase beyond a certain size or collection of kinship/familial groups their is a requirement to verify value rather than trust it.
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