(A post in the meta-experiment series of the Broken Money book club, part 5)
We've talked before (here, here, here) about one of Lyn's most remarkable claims, about the technological determinism of bitcoin. We've spent less time on the determinism of fiat, but this idea is just as important. Lyn proposes that when advances in telecom made it possible to communicate at the speed of light, that this introduced an irresistable force on the monetary system: you couldn't have sound-money final settlement at the speed of light, so money became principally an expression of credit.
If I were to describe in one paragraph why money has been broken around the world for so long while almost everything else has improved substantially (energy abundance, technology abundance, and so forth), it’s due to this gap between transaction and settlement speeds that the telecommunication era created. (p. 301)
In other words, the determinative force is a kind of impedence mismatch between one important thing (our ability to communicate), and a related thing (settling transactions). For much of human history the distance between those two things was small; suddenly, it was vast, and fiat was born out of that vastness, to great consequence.
The more time that passes, the more I think this is the most profound thought in the book. And it reminds me of another profound thought that I encountered a few years ago:
The divorce between ownership and the real responsibility of management is serious within a country, when, as a result of joint stock enterprise, ownership is broken up among innumerable individuals who buy their interest to-day and sell it tomorrow and lack altogether both knowledge and responsibility towards what they momentarily own. But when the same principle is applied internationally, it is, in times of stress, intolerable--I am irresponsible towards what I own and those who operate what I own are irresponsible towards me. There may be some financial calculation which shows it to be advantageous that my savings should be invested in whatever quarter of the habitable globe shows the greatest marginal efficiency of capital or the highest rate of interest. But experience is accumulating that remoteness between ownership and operation is an evil in the relations among men, likely or certain in the long run to set up strains and enmities which will bring to nought the financial calculation.
More succinctly: when new affordances (this time, legal and logistical affordances) allow a person to "own" a piece of a company, but that ownership is abstract, incremental, and operates in a temporally remote fashion over great distances, and you don't have any real experience with the thing you own anymore, or the people involved, or the consequences of that ownership --
in such a circumstance, weird things happen. Empirically, a lot of bad things happen.
So it appears to me now that we can talk in a general way about what comes when you 'split the atom' in this way. If we seperate transaction from settlement, we get X; if we seperate ownership from the visceral results of ownership, we get Y.
As bitcoiners, we're very used to talking about the evils of X. Are they related, somehow, to the evils of Y? Both things resemble a kind of goblin mode artifact, a cousin of high-time preference, throw-away culture.
I'm not sure where to take the idea, but it seems important.
(player names, game shape). Whatever index I have where game shape is first indexed is probably more sparse than I'd like.