With bitcoin, for quite some time, you will hear it said that it has no intrinsic value and therefore cannot compete with gold or a commodity based money. This speaks to the idea that a good money medium will necessarily have a non-monetary use-case that provides a floor from the value of it falling to zero.
Semantically speaking this is wrong from the Austrian or Libertarian Bitcoiner’s point of view because there is no such thing as intrinsic value in their school of economic thought. …
The best known form of money among the native Americans north of Mexico was wampum, made out of the shells of a type of clam. However its use was not confined to the coastal states but spread far inland, e.g. the powerful Iroquois amassed large quantities by way of tribute. Wampum’s use as money undoubtedly came about as an extension of its desirability for ornamentation. Beads of it were strung together in short lengths of about 18 inches or much longer ones of about 6 feet.
Wampum came to be used extensively for trade by the colonists as well as…
The ultimately launched concept of “ideal Money” became possible when I conceived of a practical basis of a standardization of the comparison of the value of the currency with an appropriate standard of ideal.
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…a modern alternative is possible, one that would provide a good standard independent of state pardoners. This idea occurred to me fairly.~Ideal Money
In 2002 John Nash published a paper in the Southern Economic Journal entitled “Ideal Money” in which he proposed an ideal basis for the global economy as an alternative to the gold standard.
The concept, which he called an ICPI, was a…
In his work The Theory of Free Banking George Selgin describes how a banking system would evolve in a hypothetical land Ruritania. The inquiry is based on an assumption of an “unregulated society” such that there doesn’t initially exist a monopoly on the issuance of the money supply:
Another approach, which also helps in interpreting historical evidence, is to base assumptions on a logical (but also conjectural) story of the evolution of a “typical” free banking system, as it might occur in an imaginary, unregulated society called Ruritania.
At first glance the story of Ruritania and the banking system that…
Menger Origins of Money
It is not impossible for media of exchange, serving as they do the commonweal in the most emphatic sense of the word, to be instituted also by way of legislation, like other social institutions. But this is neither the only, nor the primary mode in which money has taken its origin.
However, there is no praxeological difference between a medium of exchange and money. For the difference here boils down merely to one of how one defines the word “money,” and to what extent the medium in question is accepted in the market in order…
Another approach, which also helps in interpreting historical evidence, is to base assumptions on a logical (but also conjectural) story of the evolution of a “typical” free banking system, as it might occur in an imaginary, unregulated society called Ruritania. The story can be supported along the way by illustrations from actual history. But it only accounts for features of past banking systems that were predictable (though perhaps unintended) consequences of self interested, individual acts, uninfluenced by legislation.
Our story involves four stages: First, the warehousing or bailment of idle commodity money; second, the transition of money custodians from bailees…
Extending a coincidental consideration (and) in regard to the recent Covid pandemic I have had a curious thought about a perspective that could be taken. I think it might be reasonable or helpful to think of our response to the pandemic rather as a natural response to a deflationary event that started to happen around the time the pandemic went (social media and media) viral.
It seems like a perfect response to a contracting global economy with competing nations to have their citizens spend less, do less, work less, produce less etc (as well as money excessive money printing and…
“ In a Sybil attack, the attacker subverts the reputation system of a network service by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence.”
The internet is a great tool that changed the landscape of how we interact with others and use and share information. But this new frontier came with a weakness that on any platform there is the need to guard from the possibility of creating new and multiple identities.
In real life we each have one identity and if you die your identity’s capabilities cease (not sure I worded…
I’ve been thinking about the concept of rheomodes that were introduced by Dr. David bohm. A new mode for words (ie verb, noun, adverb, “rheo-mode) that allows us to express a concept that can’t otherwise be expressed because of the limitations of our current use of language.
Bohm suggested rheomodes can be denoted by the use of a hyphen. “Resolution” becomes “re-solution” and thus such an evolution of the word allows for the expression of a higher order type of thinking.
I think it would be useful to have a way to denote rheomodes in speech and so I’m suggesting that “re-” that is used to denoted rheomodes be pronounced “ray-yuh”.
Interesting to think that if rheomodes caught on that there could be different translations and cultural nuances to their spelling and pronunciation (as well as the evolution of these).
