The preface to this is I have been reading a lot of Austrian economics, not as a total believer, but as a curious person. It has adherents in Bitcoin space obviously. A lot of it makes sense. All of the texts talk about a slow creep of centralization and intervention and fiat, and they're largely critiques of those things.
The assumption they make is that the individual supply/demand/price impulses cannot be computed or known. But now we have a large world of state and corporate surveillance. Add ML/AI. The staunch assertion that an economy cannot be centrally planned and function has been taken for granted. But what if it's now not only probable, but already existing?
Have I smoked too much weed?
It is clearly already existing, to what extent, who knows - but does it seem to be working well to you? I think the Austrian Economists are talking about changing the system from a centrally planned debt-backed fiat system to a decentralized, sound money standard.
In both systems there is planning. On a bitcoin standard, the base financial layer is the bitcoin protocol which is unchanging and finite. A solid foundation to plan on top of.
In the current system, the base layer is planned, shifted, adjusted, and tweaked constantly, leading to a shifting, eroding, and tumultuous economy that is always in dire need of "financial policy" and "fiscal managing".
Bitcoin doesn't care about corporate surveillance, or a housing recession, or a global market crash. It does not care who demands what supply of what good for what price. Tick-tock, next block. Like a clock.
If I'm responding to the right thing, or if I'm wildly off here, let me know.
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Thank you for responding the way you did. It helps me clarify my own thinking. The reason I brought it up as "Austrian economics" is they were the only ones in my mind who still had some sense of complexity. I'm not married to to their analysis. But the main thesis is "human action" and the complexity thereof.
And my OP was about... given how surveilled we are, how profiled we are... do we not already have a centrally planned economy with various fiat currencies? I know what I'm saying sounds either "retarded" or obtuse, but how would we know the difference?
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We do already have a centrally planned economy, yes. We are all surveilled in some way or another, but even so, you cannot accurately predict what is going on inside a person's head. Even if you have all of their search history, data, etc - the human mind is random and surprising in its choices day-to-day.
We know the difference between a centrally planned economy and a decentralized one by verifying:
Bitcoin is verifiably decentralized - anyone can broadcast a transaction to the public ledger without anyone else's permission, and anyone can look up and see where all the money is going.
Fiat is verifiably centralized - it is printed digitally and physically in one place by one group of people in each country. Its exact location is obfuscated and the system is opaque by design.
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I mean we already live in a world of shifting currency rates associated to very little, and an encroaching worldwide surveillance.
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There's a pretty easy answer to this, actually.
Even in your hypothetical world of hyper-accurate AI/ML (which I have to say is an exaggeration of our capabilities today), the AI/ML algorithms rely on data generated by consumer behavior in a market system.
In a society absolutely devoid of markets and interpersonal trade, there wouldn't be even the data for the algorithms to determine how people value things, because what people get is what the government determines. The AI would simply replicate the government's decision function.
This actually happened in the Soviet Union, where in order to determine how much of things to produce, they'd rely on market prices from western economies to get an estimate of relative value. See Joseph Salerno's YouTube lecture on Calculation.
That's the cool technical answer I guess. Of course, the simplest answer is that you wouldn't be able to trust central planners to be benevolent, versus privileging themselves over everyone else.
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That's not what we're talking here. I'm saying assume the capability to surveil enough of a population to get data. The much stronger version is assume "we" can track and compute information about individual purchases/transactions. "We".
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In a mixed economy it is as you say. We can use market data to learn about peoples' preferences and then we can make policy based on that. This is actually what the government does. It's what businesses do too. As ML gets smarter, and surveillance more widespread, planners can get better at implementing their objectives... in a way that people might not even realized they're being manipulated.
Which, in my opinion, is a scary thought.
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Yes, you smoked too much weed.
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Pay me no sats, I'm willing to disperse sats ppl, I honestly want to know what you think.
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