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100 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury OP 19 Oct 2023 \ on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 2 bitcoin
In part 2, Lyn digs into the speed differences of transaction and final settlement. In the era of fiat, the speed with which it could be transacted vastly outstripped gold. With btc, this speed difference has eroded, and perhaps even reversed. What practical difference does it make, though? As machine intelligence explodes, how do these speed limits change the value proposition of btc?
As machine intelligence explodes, how do these speed limits change the value proposition of btc?
I love what this question gets at. If telecommunications raised the bar of transaction speed, will technology raise the bar again?
Fiat is already transacting at the speed of telecommunications, so I don't think bitcoin wins on transaction speed. But, does AI raise another bar, demand another property of money, that fiat can't (yet) compete on like faster settlement?
You shared the table during part 1.
Are (semi)autonomous machines going to demand more scarcity, durability, or censorship resistance? Like speed and portability, could there be a sub-property of censorship resistance that makes a practical difference to a machine?
It's too early to say what autonomous machines might want, but if they have long lifecycles I can imagine them wanting durability and scarcity.
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In my mind, this question is intimately tied up with the one about technological determinism you commented on, below. What [semi]-autonomous machines will want from money is (I think) the same thing humans want, which is the ability to reliably coordinate their activities in a way that cannot be perverted for anyone's advantage. When we're talking about machines smarter than we are, the anti-perversion mechanism becomes really important.
One of the metaphors I like for btc, and for this idea of coordination, is certain hormones. Since hormones are for signaling, to some extent, their absolute levels don't matter. If you had twice as much dopamine floating around, after an adjustment period, nothing much would change. The "hormone printing press" has about the same effects that the real printing press does -- some local Cantillon effects, and then general systemic adjustment as "inflation" takes its course. [1]
My knowledge of physiology is not sophisticated enough to go too much further into this metaphor, but it's enough to get the idea. AIs will need an un-forgeable coordination mechanism between themselves. They'll need it to be robust to bullshit and manipulation, which is where grounding into the physical reality via PoW should be a crucial constraint. It doesn't how smart they are, they aren't changing physics. Constraints of that kind seem crucial when we're talking about entities whose capacities will eventually be beyond our ability to reason about.
All of that is sort of a function of velocity, but after a point you reach a terminus here, too, I think. But, as above, and as you proposed, maybe there's something that can't be anticipated that will nonetheless prove relevant.
[1] This isn't the case for all hormones. Take twice as much testosterone and different things will happen.
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When we're talking about machines smarter than we are, the anti-perversion mechanism becomes really important.
Nice. Smarter -> larger chess board.
One of the metaphors I like for btc, and for this idea of coordination, is certain hormones. Since hormones are for signaling, to some extent, their absolute levels don't matter. If you had twice as much dopamine floating around, after an adjustment period, nothing much would change. The "hormone printing press" has about the same effects that the real printing press does -- some local Cantillon effects, and then general systemic adjustment as "inflation" takes its course.
This is all to say, the "hormone printing press" being un-forgeable is important to machines too, right? Because they are, like us, hormone receptors.
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Exactly. I'm assuming that our AI overlords want to be able to coordinate interactions and resources with each other without concern that they will be diluted through some kind of arms race, or something external the system (e.g., fiat) messing up their relative relations with each other.
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