reply on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 4 \ stacker news ~bitcoin

100 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury OP 15 Nov 2023 \ on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 4 bitcoin

Lyn talks about the pernicious effects of easy money:

“Weak money encourages people to constantly borrow and invest rather than to save, whether that borrowing and investing make sense or not.” (p. 249)

Venkatesh Rao wrote an article that visits this idea from a more personal direction. Bitcoiners will recognize it as a vivid type of high time-preference living:

Viewed through this lens of ownership, use, and maintenance being mutually alienated, goblin mode is that condition of the human self with respect to itself. You treat yourself as the property of a neglectful absentee landlord, you rent yourself out to users who neglect you as well, and when you break down, you hand yourself over to professional maintainers — the healthcare system — who try to restore you to “like new” state like you’re an insured car.

If easy money / goblin-mode erodes culture and sovereignty as we have discussed, then surely hard money produces a vitalizing effect? Lyn writes:

“Hard money encourages people to save, and to only borrow or invest when it seems like it really makes sense.” (p. 249)

but Venkat suggests that this mode may also not be without consequence:

I suspect there is such a thing as degenerate gnome mode too — a condition of stagnation, slow degrowth, high-inertia traditionalism, lack of innovation, claustrophobic connectedness with people you can’t get away from, things being nurtured to live on long past the point where they ought to be recycled, and so on. Uncritical gnome mode seems like a naturally reactionary condition to me, just as uncritical goblin mode seems like a naturally high-modernist condition.

Is it possible that some of the virtues bitcoiners advocate so forcefully will produce their own equivalent pathologies? What might perverse effects of a hard money standard be? How could it go wrong?

304 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 16 Nov 2023

If modern humans are naturally more goblin-like, then retarding goblin-like behavior with gnome-like money might lead to net-fewer pathologies.

I get the sense that humans are normally more gnome-like but turn goblin-like when populations are dense (or hyperconnected) - much like grasshoppers that swarm.

At the very least, we seem to have been more goblin-like over the last few decades which correlates to pronounced abuse of fiat ledgers. Goldilocks wouldn't choose the goblin or the gnome so hopefully Satoshi hasn't either.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 17 Nov 2023

There's a "cycles of history" argument to be made about this -- that gnome > goblin > gnome transitions are functions of generations and demography. I'm still forming up my take on this branch of work, which I find mostly sloppy and ascientific; but there's something plausible in it even if it's oversold

304 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 17 Nov 2023

We're probably drawn to thinking in cycles because it's the laziest way to predict the future. Cycles have even more lazy powers than plain old historical determinism because the predictions extend to infinity.

there's something plausible in it even if it's oversold

Agreed. There have to exist natural games whose final state is nearly the initial state. Fiat money certainly seems to play out this way.

428 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 17 Nov 2023

And there really are cycles that act on the world with inexorable force. Since the dawn of time the seasons have induced rhythms that cannot be resisted that everyone in a giant geography deals with simultaneously. The consequences propagate like falling dominoes. Higher frequency tidal and waking / sleeping cycles are so real and powerful that we don't even think about them.

But what if you added them all together? Of course that's going to manifest in a bunch of ways, at every level. I don't think it's impossible to get at some of the principal components, even if you can't parse out their emergent consequences. But, as you say, most thinking about it is too lazy to bother.

304 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 17 Nov 2023

But what if you added them all together?

Yes! The 2D version of this is really simple, but when you're predicting things like cultural norms there are so many more dimensions.