120 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 5 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Lyn Alden book club part I bitcoin
Lyn weaves in so much insight you kind of miss how much you're gaining.
My memory of her treatment on this is we had unscalable trade partners because credit requires trust requires long term relationships (or well connected graphs of long term relationships). Enter a generic form of credit you can spend without any pre-existing relationship.
My first exposure this perspective was Debt: The First 5000 Years but 5000 exposures wouldn't be enough. It's The Thing to know about money that we're never taught.
It's may be a stretch but CrowdHealth started as a bitcoin company. It's moved away from the bitcoin focus because the model proved successful even without bitcoin, but I feel like bitcoin somehow exposed the coordination desire.
I haven't spent enough time thinking about it but maybe undebasable social credit changes the way we think about social credit.
The more I read through this book, the more astounded I am at the breadth of scholarship. It's really fucking impressive; and her ability to synthesize it and then communicate it in a straightforward way is remarkable. What a gift to have her in the space.
The Graeber book made an impact on me, too. Well worth reading, if only as a corrective to the normal "diet" you get as a typical bitcoiner. I like how it takes you really deep into the sociality of it all. Very much non-correlated information, which is my crack.
I haven't spent enough time thinking about it but maybe undebasable social credit changes the way we think about social credit.
What would "debaseable social credit" look like? I can parse the words, of course, but wonder what was in your mind when you wrote it?
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What would "debaseable social credit" look like?
Fiat. When you only have access to a leaky bucket, there's not much point in filling it. (I'm jumping around a bit mentally ... I'm all beads sea shells and no string ... short on sleep.)
I can parse the words, of course, but wonder what was in your mind when you wrote it?
A riff on what I think money is - vouchers for favors. If I can't store favors, I'll never intentionally overproduce them.
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It's an interesting way to think about it -- you may have heard of Dunbar's number which is basically the limit number of people that you can keep good track of socially. People argue about what this exactly is, and what 'keep good track' means, but whatever, the point is there's a limit, and it has a lot to do with neural limitations in pre-frontal cortex (principally), and it's not that high, ~150 or so.
I'm thinking about your "leaky bucket" analogy here -- when community gets beyond that size, there's kind of a "fuck it" effect, as investments in those social encounters won't pay off in the same way. A kind of social fiat without introducing money into the equation at all. But subject to some of the same limitations, maybe? Like, social life gets more fiat the bigger it gets ...
Need to ponder. Thanks for the prompt. Get some sleep, brother :)
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I dig it. Dunbar's number could probably be seen as the number of ledger entries the human mind can hold.
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That's perfect, and v insightful actually -- you should mention it to Lyn, if you know her! The second edition of Broken Money w/ k00b in the credits :)
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Only if my reference contains a reference to you because I was only summarizing you.
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